Conjoined Bhutanese twins separated by surgery in Australia

MELBOURNE: Australian surgeons on Friday successfully separated 15-month-old Bhutanese twins, Nima and Dawa, who had been joined at the torso.

The team of more than 20 doctors and nurses spent six hours operating on the pair, who shared a liver but no other major organs, to the relief of the surgeons.

“We didn’t find surprises,” said Joe Crameri, who led the surgery at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne.

“We are here earlier because there weren’t any things inside the girls’ tummies that we weren’t really prepared for,” he told reporters.

“We saw two young girls who were very ready for their surgery, who were able to cope very well with the surgery and are currently in our recovery doing very well,” he told reporters.

He said the next 24 to 48 hours would be critical to their recovery, but was optimistic about the outcome.

Nima and Dawa, and their mother Bhumchu Zangmo, arrived in Australia a month ago with the help of an Australian charity, but doctors had delayed the surgery until Friday to ensure the twins were well-enough nourished to support the operation.

The girls were known to share a liver, but it was not known before Friday whether they also shared part of the bowel, which would have complicated the surgery.

Crameri said the girls’ bowels were a bit intertwined they were not connected “in any major way”.

A photograph released by the hospital showed four surgeons carefully lifting one of the twins away from the other on the operating table as the pair began their independent lives.

The girls and their mother spent the past month at a retreat outside Melbourne run by the Children First Foundation, which raised money to bring the family to Australia for the surgery.

“It will be really interesting to see what will happen once the girls are separated,” Lodge said, adding that the twins were “good mates”.

Bhutan is a poor Himalayan kingdom where doctors did not have the expertise to separate the girls, who were joined from the chest to the waist.

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WHO uncovers big national variations in antibiotics consumption

GENEVA: Antibiotics are used far more in some countries than in others, a survey by the World Health Organization (WHO) showed on Monday, suggesting that urgent action was needed to slash unnecessary consumption of the medicines.

The “WHO Report on Surveillance of Antibiotic Consumption” looked at antibiotic use in 65 countries and found the Netherlands used 9.78 defined daily doses (DDD) per 1,000 people, while Britain used twice as much and Turkey almost twice as much again, at 38.18 DDD per 1,000 inhabitants.

Iran’s consumption was similar to Turkey’s, while Mongolia’s was the highest of all among the countries surveyed, at 64.41 DDD per 1,000 people.

Collecting the data is vital for tackling antimicrobial resistance, the extremely worrying trend of bacterial infections becoming immune to antibiotics, the report said.

“Findings from this report confirm the need to take urgent action, such as enforcing prescription-only policies, to reduce unnecessary use of antibiotics,” Suzanne Hill, director of the Department of Essential Medicines and Health Products at the WHO, said in a statement.

The lowest score was for Burundi, with just 4.44 DDD/1,000 people, which the WHO said reflected limited data. A low score could also suggest that consumption is too low, leaving the population at risk of infectious diseases.

The survey also looked at which types of antibiotics were being used, and showed some countries – Italy, Spain and Japan – were relatively heavy users of the most precious drugs that the WHO says need to be kept in reserve.

The WHO introduced a classification system last year, saying penicillin-type drugs were recommended as the first line of defense, and that other drugs, on the “reserve” list, were a last resort and only for use when absolutely necessary.

In Italy, 2.0 percent of daily antibiotics consumption was in the “reserve” category, four times the rate in Germany and more than six times that of Britain, where only 0.3 percent of drugs were those earmarked for use in the last resort.

Japan’s overall consumption of antibiotics, at 14.19 DDD per 1,000 inhabitants, was about half that of South Korea, but 1.1 percent of Japanese consumption was in the “reserve” category, far more than 0.2 percent in South Korea, the report showed.

The United States, China and India, were not among the countries in the survey.

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Eleventh child dies from viral outbreak at New Jersey facility

NEW JERSEY: An 11th child has died in less than four weeks at a New Jersey rehabilitation center, one of 34 young patients with compromised immune systems to have been infected by a viral outbreak, state health officials said on Friday.

The child, who died late Thursday, and the others at the Wanaque Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation in the town of Haskell, became ill with adenovirus between Sept. 26 and Nov. 12, the state’s Department of Health said in a statement.

The deaths of the first six children at the facility’s pediatric center were announced by health officials on Oct. 23.

Adenoviruses frequently cause mild to severe illness with cold-like symptoms, particularly in young children. The infection can cause other illnesses, including pneumonia, diarrhea and bronchitis.

The strain of adenovirus affecting the facility is associated with communal living arrangements, the health department said.

State health officials, after prohibiting new admissions to the facility, said they put out a call for volunteer medical professionals on Thursday to help separate ill children at the facility from those without symptoms by Nov. 21.

In previous inspections since the outbreak, officials found some hand-washing deficiencies at the Wanaque Center, and were working with the facility on infection-control issues, the health department said.

New Jersey Health Commissioner Dr. Shereef Elnahal said last month that a team of infection control experts and epidemiologists would visit several long-term pediatric healthcare facilities to assess their infection-control procedures and train the Wanaque staff.

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Meditation helps conflict veterans with PTSD: study

They found that 60 percent of veterans who did 20 minutes of quiet meditation every day showed significant improvement in their symptoms, and more completed the study than those given exposure therapy. 

“Over the past 50 years, PTSD has expanded to become a significant public health problem,” Sanford Nidich, of the Maharishi University of Management Research Institute, told AFP.

“Due to the increasing need to address the PTSD public health care problem in the US, UK and worldwide, there is a compelling need to implement governmental policy to include alternative therapies such as transcendental meditation as an option for treating veterans with PTSD.”

Transcendental meditation involves effortlessly thinking of an idea or mantra to produce a settled, calmer state of mind — scientists call it “restful alertness”.

Unlike exposure therapy, meditation can be practised at home, takes up relatively little time, and researchers say it would be significantly cheaper than current treatment techniques.

It also avoids forcing combat veterans to relive their trauma in a bid to get better.

“Transcendental meditation is self-empowering, and can be practised just about anywhere at any time, without the need for specialised equipment or ongoing personnel support,” said Nidich, who was the lead author of the study published in The Lancet Psychiatry journal.

– ‘Gave me my life back’ –

The main problem with existing PTSD treatment, according to Nidich, is that forcing veterans to relive their trauma means many never finish the courses.

Exposure therapy, although officially approved as a treatment by the US Veterans’ Association, is ineffective in up to 50 percent of patients and drop-out rates range from 30-45 percent.

“New treatments, including options not involving exposure to the traumatic experience, are needed for veterans who do not respond to treatment or drop-out due to discomfort,” said Nidich.

One study participant, a 32-year-old navy veteran whom authors identified only as Ms. K, said learning the meditation technique had “given me my life back.”

After being diagnosed as having suffered sexual trauma while on military service, her symptoms worsened until she drank to excess every night and sought to avoid human interaction.

After the transcendental meditation course, “I began to come out of my nightmares and face the battle I had ahead,” she said.

She added she had since applied for a job in a hospital.

Researchers said further studies were needed to see if meditation could be a long-term aid for PTSD sufferers.

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