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Wednesday, October 13, 2004
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 FDA CLEARS VERICHIP™ FOR MEDICAL APPLICATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES
This is the 11-millimeter RFID capsule meant to carry medical information that is implanted in the fatty tissue below the right tricep.
SmartMoney describes how it's supposed to work:
In theory, doctors treating a patient implanted with the chip could with the wave of a scanner gain access to a person's medical history, including blood type, drug allergies and pre-existing conditions. That could prove useful in emergency-room situations, in particular, when a patient isn't responsive. The information isn't stored on the chip itself; rather, the verification number on the chip is linked to a database that's accessed via encrypted Internet access.
Previous to this, it was announced that the Mexican government would be using this device for security purposes:
Palm Beach technology company Applied Digital Solutions said its VeriChip subsidiary had signed a $9 million distribution deal with Mexican private security firm Sistemas de Proteccion Integral de Mexico.
CNET has a report citing that no hospitals have place orders for these chips so far. In an effort to promote their use, Applied Digital will be providing the scanners, normally costing $650 each, for free to 200 trauma centers. CNET has another report discussing the ethical issues surrounding its use.
11:04:03 PM 
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Mobile phone use and acoustic neuroma
Eurekalert covers study from the Institute of Environmental Medicine (IMM) at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, which found that 10 or more years of mobile phone use increase the risk of acoustic neuroma. The increased risk was confined to the side of the user's head where the phone was typically held. The study only looked at analog phones.
This is the first report from the Swedish part of the so called INTERPHONE study, an international collaboration coordinated by WHO's cancer research institute, IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer). The Swedish results need to be confirmed in additional studies before firm conclusions can be drawn. Other centers within the INTERPHONE study where a sufficient number of long term mobile phone users can be included – primarily the Nordic – will contribute valuable data. This Swedish study, and eventually other INTERPHONE reports, will be reviewed by the scientific community and a coherent evaluation will gradually emerge. It can also be expected that these results will stimulate experimental research which will also contribute information of importance for the interpretation of the findings.
As far as I know, this is the first positive result for this series of studies. The abstract:
Mobile Phone Use and the Risk of Acoustic Neuroma.
Epidemiology. 15(6):653-659, November 2004.
Lonn, Stefan *; Ahlbom, Anders *; Hall, Per +; Feychting, Maria *
Abstract:
Background: Radiofrequency exposure from mobile phones is concentrated to the tissue closest to the handset, which includes the auditory nerve. If this type of exposure increases tumor risk, acoustic neuroma would be a potential concern.
Methods: In this population-based case-control study we identified all cases age 20 to 69 years diagnosed with acoustic neuroma during 1999 to 2002 in certain parts of Sweden. Controls were randomly selected from the study base, stratified on age, sex, and residential area. Detailed information about mobile phone use and other environmental exposures was collected from 148 (93%) cases and 604 (72%) controls.
Results: The overall odds ratio for acoustic neuroma associated with regular mobile phone use was 1.0 (95% confidence interval = 0.6-1.5). Ten years after the start of mobile phone use the estimates relative risk increased to 1.9 (0.9-4.1); when restricting to tumors on the same side of the head as the phone was normally used, the relative risk was 3.9 (1.6-9.5).
Conclusions: Our findings do not indicate an increased risk of acoustic neuroma related to short-term mobile phone use after a short latency period. However, our data suggest an increased risk of acoustic neuroma associated with mobile phone use of at least 10 years' duration.
While acoustic neuromas are typically slow-growing, referring to these neoplasms as "benign" misses the compression effects they may have on other structures including the 5th and 7th cranial nerves, even impinging on the brain stem in severe cases.
1:46:52 PM
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Monitoring the Health of Paid Content for Physicians
After reporting on one piece in a paid subscriber online publication, I now see that the NEJM is taking this model and considering the physicians with wireless handhelds (someone should tell them about smartphones), for journal articles and CME.
NEJM recognizes the PDA is taking the place of the "fat little notebook" in the coat pockets of many physicians. A subscriber can use a wired or wireless PDA, or other handheld devices, to access full texts of the current NEJM plus the archive of all articles back to 1996, arranged in 51 topics. A subscriber can also use a PDA to request a PDF of an article (including medical imagery) be e-mailed to his PC.
"Our PDA services are a little different than the usual," Anderson explained. "No syncing tables of contents or the like. We have a version of each article created from our XML that creates a device-agnostic version for download. Users can use any number of readers to read the resulting text. We've had about 95,000 articles downloaded since this debuted about two years ago. Users like our review articles and tend to refer to them multiple times after downloading them."
They couldn't mention RSS?
From their director of product development:
"I'm very enthused about the future of electronic media in communicating medical research results and educating physicians and trainees," Anderson said. "The rate at which de facto standards like PowerPoint [ugh], digital video, and MP3 are propagating themselves hints at new forms of editorial expression emerging and being easily adopted. It's the best way to communicate rapidly with a large and growing audience.
At least he didn't say "podcasting."
12:30:45 PM
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Nick Denton, The Wall Street Journal and the Business of Unruliness (subscription required)
[I guess this falls under the category of blogging about blogs.]
From today's Media & Marketing section:
WSJ: Blogs are often unruly, unfiltered, uncensored and unpredictable. Why would an advertiser place a message in an environment that is often beyond its control?
Mr. Denton: It's the unruliness of Weblogs that has made them so popular. I think a lot of readers are pretty bored by mainstream media and just as people are increasingly swinging away from network television for more exciting fare on Comedy Central, so they are also gravitating toward Weblogs, because there is a sense that Weblogs are more authentic. The voice is truer, and so advertisers that want to reach that increasingly jaded audience pretty much have got to follow them to Weblogs.
This is from a section in the WSJ entitled The Advertising Report. Could it be that viewers, jaded or not, turned away from mainstream media because of the encroachment of advertising?
UPDATE: This was Nick's response when I posed the question to him:
Well, we're running about as much advertising as we're ever going to.
So no popunders, screen takeovers. Unless we get really really desperate.
You have to recognize that there are limits, and you're especially vulnerable if you're relying on subscriptions to push feeds. It all comes down to how consistently you can deliver interesting and reliable content. The Web advertising venue is proving itself by this story: Yahoo's 3Q Profit Nearly Quadruples.
8:41:03 AM
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© Copyright
2004
Bill Koslosky, MD.
Last update:
11/10/2004; 7:33:29 AM.
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