Health Highlights: Aug. 31, 2008
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Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by editors ofHealthDay:
Alcohol to Blame for 12% of Native Americans' Deaths: Report
An estimated 12 percent of the deaths among American Indians and Alaska Natives are due to alcohol, a figure that's more than three times higher than for the general population.
That's the conclusion of a federal report released this week that found that 11.7 percent of deaths among American Indians and Alaska Natives between 2001 and 2005 were alcohol-related, compared with 3.3 percent for the population as a whole, theAssociated Pressreported.
Dwayne Jarman, one of the study authors and an epidemiologist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the report was the first national survey to measure the alcohol-related death rate among American Indians. And, he said, it should serve as a "call to action" for federal, state, local and tribal governments to combat the problem.
The two leading causes of alcohol-related deaths among Indians were traffic accidents and alcoholic liver disease; each caused more than 25 percent of the 1,514 alcohol-related deaths recorded over the study's four-year period.
The report also listed homicide to blame for 6.6 percent of alcohol-related deaths; suicide, 5.2 percent; and injuries due to falls, 2.2 percent, theAPsaid.
Sixty-eight percent of the victims were men, and 66 percent were people younger than 50 years old; 7 percent were less than 20 years old, the report found.
And the situation may be even more dire because the report didn't count deaths related to some diseases for which alcohol is believed to be a risk factor, such as tuberculosis, pneumonia and colon cancer, theAPsaid.
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Feds Can Bar Mad Cow Tests: Court
The U.S. government has the authority to bar meat companies from testing their animals for mad cow disease, a federal appeals court has ruled.
