Change Islands Health Break

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CHANGE ISLANDS If you have your health you have everything is more than an old adage.

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Central Regional Wellness Coalition members who presented Change Islands Health Break included Early Youth Outreach worker Cheryl Cassell, Change Islands regional nurse Chantal Parsons, Community Development Public Health nurse Jessica Boyd, Primary Health Care facilitator Allison Scott and clerical support, Change Islands Suzanne Porter.

It is a commonly held truth and to that end the Central Regional Wellness Coalition sponsored a meet and greet style series of information sessions recently on Change Islands.

On March 11 a day of information on healthy living programs, resources and options was held at the town office. Representatives from Central Health travelled to the community to discuss programs that could be brought to Change Islands, healthy living options and other topics that impact wellness.

Billed as the Change Islands Health Break, both residents and presenters said they were happy to have had good conversations about healthy living and wellness while enjoying refreshments.

As part of the event information was provided on healthy eating, managing chronic conditions, youth programs, cervical screening and multiple other topics related to wellness and health.

This was also an opportunity for the community to meet members of the health care team including Chantal Parsons who is the frontline health care provider and new regional nurse on Change Islands.

The Change Islands Health Break presenters also included Early Youth Outreach worker Cheryl Cassel, Community Development Public Health nurse Jessica Boyd, Primary Health Care facilitator Allison Scott and clerical support Suzanne Porter from the Change Islands clinic.

Further wellness initiatives are planned for the community. If anyone has suggestions or ideas for future topics or any questions on this initiative they are welcome to call Allison Scott at 884-4245.

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Change Islands Health Break

Consolidated Water Co. Ltd. Announces Contracts With the Water Authority-Cayman

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GEORGE TOWN, GRAND CAYMAN, CAYMAN ISLANDS--(Marketwired - Apr 9, 2014) - Consolidated Water Co. Ltd. (NASDAQ: CWCO) ("Consolidated Water" or "the Company"), which develops and operates seawater desalination plants and water distribution systems in areas of the world where naturally occurring supplies of potable water are scarce or nonexistent, today announced the receipt of a new contract to refurbish the Lower Valley desalination plant and the extension of an existing contract to operate the North Sound desalination plant.Both contracts are with the Water Authority-Cayman ("WAC"), the water utility owned by the Cayman Islands Government, and each of the plants is located on the island of Grand Cayman.

Following a competitive tender process, the WAC has awarded to Consolidated Water a contract to refurbish its 800,000 US gallons per day (USgpd) Lower Valley desalination plant.The refurbishment includes complete replacement of the high pressure pumps; the first and second pass membrane racks, including membranes, pressure vessels and piping; the energy recovery systems; the controls systems; and associated electrical power systems.The WAC will demolish the existing Lower Valley Plant equipment to be replaced under the contract and prepare the existing plant building for installation of the new equipment.The contract requires completion of the refurbishment work within 250 days following the contract's execution date.

Following the commissioning of the refurbished plant, Consolidated Water will operate the plant for a period of three months and comply with certain performance criteria before transferring the plant to the WAC.The refurbished plant will have a rated water production capacity of 800,000 USgpd.

Consolidated Water constructed and commissioned the Lower Valley desalination plant in 1997 for the WAC and operated the plant under contract until 2013.The Company expanded and refurbished the plant during this period under various contracts and contract extensions.The WAC took over operations and maintenance responsibilities involving the plant in January 2013.

The Company also announced a 12-month extension of its contract to operate the WAC's 1.6 million USgpd North Sound seawater desalination plant.Consolidated Water constructed and commissioned the North Sound plant in 2002 for the WAC, expanded its production capacity in 2007 from 800,000 USgpd to 1.6 million USgpd, and has satisfactorily operated the plant under contract since commissioning.The operations contract was originally scheduled to expire on April 1, 2014.The WAC has extended the contract for 12 months, with certain adjustments to the terms of the contract as agreed between the WAC and the Company and approved by the Central Tenders Committee of the Cayman Islands Government.

The 12-month extension period will allow the WAC sufficient time to arrange the public tender process for a new operations contract for the plant, as required under the Cayman Islands Public Management and Finance Law.Consolidated Water intends to participate in this tender process.

CWCO-G

About Consolidated Water Co. Ltd.

Consolidated Water Co. Ltd. develops and operates seawater desalination plants and water distribution systems in areas of the world where naturally occurring supplies of potable water are scarce or nonexistent. The Company operates water production and/or distribution facilities in the Cayman Islands, Belize, the British Virgin Islands, The Commonwealth of The Bahamas, and Bali, Indonesia.

Consolidated Water is headquartered in George Town, Grand Cayman, in the Cayman Islands.The Company's ordinary (common) stock is traded on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol "CWCO".Additional information on the Company is available on its website at http://www.cwco.com.

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Consolidated Water Co. Ltd. Announces Contracts With the Water Authority-Cayman

Biomarkers and ageing: The clock-watcher

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Brad Swonetz/Redux/Eyevine

As a teenager in Germany, Steve Horvath, his identical twin Markus and their friend Jrg Zimmermann formed 'the Gilgamesh project', which involved regular meetings where the three discussed mathematics, physics and philosophy. The inspiration for the name, Horvath says, was the ancient Sumerian epic in which a king of Uruk searches for a plant that can restore youth. Fittingly, talk at the meetings often turned to ideas for how science might extend lifespan.

At their final meeting in 1989, the trio made a solemn pact: to dedicate their careers to pursuing science that could prolong healthy human life. Jrg set his eye on computer science and artificial intelligence, Markus on biochemistry and genetics, and Steve says that he planned to use mathematical modelling and gene networks to understand how to extend life. Jrg did end up working in artificial intelligence, as a computer scientist at the University of Bonn in Germany, but Markus fell off the wagon, his brother says, and became a psychiatrist.

Steve, now a human geneticist and biostatistician at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), says that he finally feels poised to make good on the promise. Through a hard-fought project that involved years of solo work, multiple rejections by editors and reviewers and battling through the loss of a child, he has gathered and analysed data on more than 13,000 human tissue samples1. The result is a cellular biological clock that has impressed researchers with its accuracy, how easy it is to read and the fact that it ticks at the same rate in many parts of the body with some intriguing exceptions that might provide clues to the nature of ageing and its maladies.

Horvath's clock emerges from epigenetics, the study of chemical and structural modifications made to the genome that do not alter the DNA sequence but that are passed along as cells divide and can influence how genes are expressed. As cells age, the pattern of epigenetic alterations shifts, and some of the changes seem to mark time. To determine a person's age, Horvath explores data for hundreds of far-flung positions on DNA from a sample of cells and notes how often those positions are methylated that is, have a methyl group attached.

He has discovered an algorithm, based on the methylation status of a set of these genomic positions, that provides a remarkably accurate age estimate not of the cells, but of the person the cells inhabit. White blood cells, for example, which may be just a few days or weeks old, will carry the signature of the 50-year-old donor they came from, plus or minus a few years. The same is true for DNA extracted from a cheek swab, the brain, the colon and numerous other organs. This sets the method apart from tests that rely on biomarkers of age that work in only one or two tissues, including the gold-standard dating procedure, aspartic acid racemization, which analyses proteins that are locked away for a lifetime in tooth or bone.

I wanted to develop a method that would work in many or most tissues. It was a very risky project, Horvath says. But now the gamble seems to be paying off. By the time his findings were finally published last year1, the clock's median error was 3.6 years, meaning that it could guess the age of half the donors to within 43 months for a broad selection of tissues. That accuracy improves to 2.7 years for saliva alone, 1.9 years for certain types of white blood cell and 1.5 years for the brain cortex. The clock shows stem cells removed from embryos to be extremely young and the brains of centenarians to be about 100.

Such tight correlations suggest there is something seemingly immutable going on in cells, says Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, who won a Nobel prize for her research on telomeres caps on the ends of chromosomes that shorten with age. It could be a clue to undiscovered biology, she suggests. And there may be medical implications in cases in which epigenetic estimates do not match a person's birth certificate.

In the months since Horvath's paper appeared, other researchers have replicated and extended the results. The study has stirred up excitement about potential applications, but also debate about the underlying biology at work.

It's something new, says Peter Visscher, chair of quantitative genetics at the University of Queensland in Australia. If he's right that there is something like an inherently epigenetic clock at work in ageing, that is very interesting. It must be important.

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Biomarkers and ageing: The clock-watcher

Neanderthals Interbred With Humans? New Method Closes A Hole In Evolution Argument

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A new genome analysis method has confirmed that Neanderthals interbred with ancestors of Eurasians, a new study reports.

The findings, published in the April 2014 issue of the journal Genetics, explains how Neanderthals most likely interbred with modern humans after they migrated out of Africa. The new technique ruled out the other popular theory that humans who left Africa evolved from the same ancestral subpopulation where Neanderthals evolved from.

"Our approach can distinguish between two subtly different scenarios that could explain the genetic similarities shared by Neanderthals and modern humans from Europe and Asia," Konrad Lohse, study co-author and population geneticist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland,said in a statement.

The method differs from others in that it used one genome from Neanderthals, Eurasians, Africans and chimpanzees rather than comparing genomes from many modern humans. The same method will have other uses to, especially in studies of suspected interbreeding where limited samples are available.

We did a bunch of math to compute the likelihood of two different scenarios," Laurent Frantz, study co-author and evolutionary biologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands,told The Verge. "We were able to do that by dividing the genome in small blocks of equal lengths from which we inferred genealogy."

Scientists developed the method after studying the history of insect populations in Europe and rare pig species in Southeast Asia.

"This work is important because it closes a hole in the argument about whether Neanderthals interbred with humans. And the method can be applied to understanding the evolutionary history of other organisms, including endangered species," Mark Johnston, editor-in-chief of the journal Genetics, said.

Frantz thinks the study may also change the way evolution is perceived.

"There have been a lot of arguments about what happened to these species," he said. "Some think that we outcompeted [other hominins] or that they were killed by humans, but now we can see that it's not that simple."

Neanderthals may have been recruited into certain human populations that they may have been in contact with on a daily basis. This goes against a commonly held perception of evolution where species struggled to survive.

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Neanderthals Interbred With Humans? New Method Closes A Hole In Evolution Argument

Health Care Ethics Internship: Why Should Students Participate? Briana Britton Reflects – Video

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Health Care Ethics Internship: Why Should Students Participate? Briana Britton Reflects
Briana Britton, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics Health Care Ethics Intern 2012-13, reflects on her experiences as an intern, in light of Santa Clara Unive...

By: Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University

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Health Care Ethics Internship: Why Should Students Participate? Briana Britton Reflects - Video

Special Treatment: The President’s Unlawful Health Care Handout to Congress – Video

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Special Treatment: The President #39;s Unlawful Health Care Handout to Congress
Due to the hurried nature of its drafting and passage, Obamacare contains a number of provisions which -- had Congress read the bill more carefully -- might have been rejected. For example,...

By: The Heritage Foundation

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Special Treatment: The President's Unlawful Health Care Handout to Congress - Video

Ministry intensifies Patients First program

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Government hospitals have been urged to improve patient care, particularly through regular feedback from in-house patients. The request was made at a workshop on management skills for hospital directors, concluded in Riyadh on Sunday. Some 26 hospital directors from 12 health regions attended the workshop, held at the Institute of Public Administration. Abdulaziz Al-Humeithi, undersecretary to the Ministry of Health for Hospital Affairs, said hospital staff are responsible for implementing the Patients First program, introduced last year by Health Minister Abdullah Al-Rabeeah. Al-Humeithi said the workshop was being conducted to increase awareness among health officials on their obligations toward their patients. We are expected to be friendly with patients and treat them with warmth and generosity, he said. The training program is being implemented in line with the ministry, whose services are focused on offering the best healthcare services across the Kingdom. The focus of the Health Ministry is patient-centric, he said. Our programs are aimed at ensuring the patients satisfaction. A central department was formed to achieve the ministrys objective, which is linked to the highest authority at the ministry. The department had previously been tasked with communicating with patients, but has since taken on the responsibility of ensuring their rights, he said. Health services in Saudi Arabia are provided at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels both in government and private sectors.

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Ministry intensifies Patients First program

Genetic trigger found for RSV-induced infant hospitalizations

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Researchers at UNC School of Medicine have pinpointed a viral protein that plays a major role in making respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) the most common cause of hospitalization in children under one year of age.

The discovery, published April 8 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, is the first step toward identifying better diagnostics and potential treatments for an infection that strikes nearly all children before they reach the age of three and causing severe disease in 3 percent of infected children. RSV infection leads to the hospitalization of between 75,000 and 125,000 babies under one year of age in the United States every year; globally, RSV is the second-leading cause of infant mortality due to infectious disease behind only malaria.

Weve known for a long time that RSV has an increased propensity, compared to other respiratory viruses, for causing obstruction and inflammation in the narrowest airways of the infant lung, leading to severe bronchiolitis, said Raymond Pickles, PhD, associate professor of microbiology and immunology and senior author of the JCI paper. But what weve now shown is that RSV has an increased ability to cause airway obstruction because, during an RSV infection, the virus expresses a specific RSV-encoded non-structural protein, or NS2, in epithelial cells, causing the cells to shed from the airway lining and into the airway lumen. This leads to obstruction of airflow in the small airways and overwhelming inflammation.

According to this study, its this NS2 protein and its effect on epithelial-cell shedding that makes RSV by far the most common cause of bronchiolitis in otherwise healthy young children. The finding was years in the making.

It was a real struggle to put our finger on differences between RSV and other common respiratory viruses that might account for the increased disease caused by RSV, Pickles said. We compared the ability of RSV and parainfluenza virus (PIV3) another common virus in children that causes much less severe airway disease to infect and cause inflammatory responses in a cell culture model of human epithelial cells, which compose the lining of the lung airway. But comparing these consequences of infection did not provide hints as to why RSV and PIV3 produced such differences in disease severity. We did notice, though, that the epithelial cells infected by RSV looked very different during infection compared to those infected by PIV3.

While the PIV-infected epithelial cells retained their natural elongated, columnar shape, the same cells infected with RSV balled up and puffed out of the airway epithelium, causing the infected cells to accumulate in the lumen of the airway. We hypothesized that since RSV and PIV3 are very similar viruses these different effects must be due to differences in the types of genes that RSV expresses, Pickles said.

There arent many genes in RSV, and by generating mutant viruses in the laboratory, Pickles team found that a specific RSV gene the NS2 gene was responsible for the balling up of RSV-infected airway cells. In experiments led by UNC graduate student Rachael Liesman, the researchers decided to engineer PIV3 to express the RSV NS2 gene. When Liesman infected human airway cells in the lab with this re-engineered virus, she saw infected cells ball up and puff out of the airway epithelium. The cells infected by PIV3 expressing the NS2 gene of RSV looked exactly like RSV-infected cells, Liesman said.

Pickles and Liesman then used their reengineered PIV expressing RSV NS2 in animal models to provide more clinical relevance for their findings. They found that infection of the narrowest airways of the lung by PIV3 alone caused moderate levels of inflammation, but after infection by PIV3 expressing RSV NS2, the epithelial cells lining the narrow airways were shed rapidly into the airway lumen. The shedding occurred at such a great rate that the shed cells obstructed the airway lumen, resulting and caused excessive inflammation.

Pickles said that these findings in animal models were almost identical to what has been found in human infants who had died because of RSV infection. Pickles said, Im convinced that the RSV NS2 gene is a major driver for the well-recognized increased ability of RSV to cause lung disease, especially in the extremely narrow small airways of human infants.

Pickles is now on the trail of a human biomarker that would tell doctors if an RSV-infected infant is at greater risk of developing severe lung disease. A biomarker would be key in the development of a needed diagnostic tool and would aid clinical trials that aim to develop anti-RSV therapeutics.

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Genetic trigger found for RSV-induced infant hospitalizations

Future Trends Demand 20/20 Vision: Futurist Jack Uldrich to Keynote the Chu Vision Annual Conference

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Minneapolis, MN (PRWEB) April 09, 2014

Jack Uldrich, global futurist and bestselling author has been selected to deliver the keynote at the Chu Vision Foundation Optometric Clinical Update 2014 in Minneapolis, MN.

Chu Vision Institute is a state-of-the-art ophthalmology practice dedicated to utilizing the most advanced technologies and treatments to improve quality of life for patients. Their clinic subspecialties include cataract, refractive, corneal surgery, glaucoma and oculoplastics. At the conference Uldrich will address the new trends that are fast approaching in the ophthalmology industry. (A sample of his writing on the future of ophthalmology can be viewed in this article: The Future of Ophthalmology: 10 Trends Transforming Tomorrow.)

Jack Uldrich is a renowned global futurist, independent scholar, sought-after business speaker, and bestselling author. Uldrich, who has been a keynote speaker for the American Medical Association, United Healthcare, Fairview Hospitals, and St. Jude Medical is noted for his ability to deliver stimulating, new perspectives on competitive advantage, organizational change, and transformational leadership, while helping businesses to adapt.

His keynotes on topics such as future trends, emerging technologies, innovations, change management, leadership and unlearning are captivating and thought provoking. He is highly regarded for his unique ability to present multifaceted information in an entertaining and understandable manner that leave his audiences reflecting on his topics long afterwards.

In addition to health care, Uldrich is considered to be an expert futurist in a variety of areas. He has served as an advisor to Fortune 1000 companies and has spoken to hundreds of businesses and organizations, including General Electric, General Mills, the Young Presidents Organization (YPO), Pfizer, Fiatech, Invitrogen, The Million Dollar Round Table, AG Schering, Imation,Touchstone Energy, the Insurance Service Organization, the National Kitchen & Bath Association, the National Paint & Coatings Association and the European Association for International Education in Istanbul.

Jack Uldrichs bestselling and award-winning books include, Unlearning 101: 101 Lessons in Thinking Inside-Out the Box, Higher Unlearning: 39 Post-Requisite Lessons for Achieving a Successful Future, The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business, and Jump the Curve: 50 Essential Strategies to Help Your Company Stay Ahead of Emerging Technologies. He is also the author of Green Investing: A Guide to Making Money through Environment-Friendly Stocks. An excerpt from his most recent work Foresight 20/20: A Futurist Explores the Transformational Trends of Tomorrow can be found here.

Parties interested in learning more about Jack Uldrich, his books, his daily blog or his speaking availability are encouraged to visit his website at: http://www.jumpthecurve.net. Media wishing to know more about the event or interviewing Jack can contact Amy Tomczyk at (651) 343.0660.

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Future Trends Demand 20/20 Vision: Futurist Jack Uldrich to Keynote the Chu Vision Annual Conference