Iramb Zusha

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 ...

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 Hil...

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 ...

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 t...