Ever heard a safe-sex promo sung in multipart harmony? Have a listen to the “condom a cappella” ringtone. Just launched in India — where approximately 2.5 million people are living with HIV — it’s part of a three-year ad offensive aimed at making condom use there more socially acceptable. And it’s actually quite catchy.

The ringtone marks the latest phase in the mass-media campaign, which has placed ads on television, radio, and film, and in print and outdoor media. Ultimately, the HIV-prevention messages are expected to reach an estimated 52 million men.

According to international charity BBC World Service Trust, which is producing the ads, the idea behind the condom ringtone is “jo samjha wohi sikander” (”the one who understands is a winner”). To wit: an ad promoting the new ringtone depicts a wedding, where a mobile ringtone buzzes with a loud “condom! condom!” Embarrassing for the man holding the phone? Not even. The reaction of those around the red-faced guy is to see him as smart and responsible.

“Ringtones have become such personal statements that a specially created condom ringtone seemed just the right way of combining a practical message with a fun approach,” said Radharani Mitra, creative director of the BBC World Service Trust India.

The campaign is funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The National AIDS Control Organization is also using the ads to support its condom promotion efforts.

The ringtone, which can be downloaded both via SMS or the Web site www.condomcondom.org, has reportedly been downloaded more than 60,000 times in the last 12 days. And trust us, it’s much better than that other safe-sex ringtone: “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off.”

Simply chewing gum after colon surgery can reduce recovery time and shorten hospital stays, a review of research shows.

It could also save more than $100 million in health care spending annually, according to findings from one study.

In the U.S. alone, postoperative ileus — the medical term for the inability of the bowels to function normally following surgery — has been estimated to cost the health care system up to $1 billion each year.

“Postoperative ileus remains the single greatest barrier to [hospital] discharge in otherwise uncomplicated colorectal surgery,” colorectal surgeon Joshua Katz, MD, tells WebMD. “If this relatively easy, safe and cheap intervention can help, it is certainly something worth trying.”

Gum Chewing May Speed Recovery

The newly published analysis included five studies reported since July 2006 involving a total of 158 patients.

Gum chewing was found to speed up the time it took the intestines to begin working again after surgical removal of all or part of the colon.

In each of the studies, some patients chewed no gum and others chewed sugarless gum three times a day after surgery for five to 45 minutes.

When the all study results were analyzed together, the patients who didn’t chew gum were found to have taken an average of two-thirds of a day longer to pass gas and just over one day longer than the chewers to have a bowel movement — both signs of intestinal recovery.

In the four studies that assessed length of hospital stay, the gum chewers were discharged, on average, about a day earlier, although this was not statistically significant.

Researcher Sanjay Purkayastha, BSc and colleagues from St. Mary’s Hospital in London, hypothesize that gum chewing stimulates bowel recovery in the same way that eating does, by triggering the release of gastrointestinal hormones and increasing the production of saliva and secretions from the pancreas.

Their analysis appears in the August issue of Archives of Surgery.

“We feel that the current evidence suggests that gum chewing following abdominal surgery offers significant benefits in reducing the time to resolution of ileus; however, the studies are insufficiently powered to identify a significant benefit in length of [hospital] stay.”

Colon Surgery and Hospital Stays

The researchers call for larger, randomized studies designed specifically to show that postsurgical gum chewing reduces hospital stays following abdominal surgery.
In a 2006 study, which was included in the analysis, researchers from Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital estimated that adding postsurgical gum chewing to the colon surgery regimen could save $118 million a year in the U.S.

In this small study, involving 17 patients who chewed gum and 17 others who didn’t, the average hospital stay was 4.3 days for gum chewers — 2.5 days less than for the patients who did not chew gum.

Katz tells WebMD that the typical length of a hospital stay is around five days following colon surgery. The director of colorectal surgery for Montgomery Surgery Center in Rockville, Md., Katz says gum chewing may have a slight impact on this, but not a huge one.

“This doesn’t mean that if you give someone chewing gum they will just jump out of bed and feel good enough to go home,” he says. “This is major surgery.”

But the surgery has also changed drastically over the last decade, and those changes have resulted in average hospital stays that are half as long as they once were, he says.

“Chewing gum is just one piece of the puzzle,” he says.

Remember Harry and Louise?

They were television icons back in the 1990s - a fictional couple starring not in a sitcom, but in political ads that transformed a very real national debate, reports CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews.

Fifteen years ago, when President Clinton was proposing universal health coverage and First Lady Hillary Clinton was selling it to Congress, the Harry and Louise ads instantly unified the opposition by labeling the Clinton plan a government takeover.

“The government picks health plans, then we have to pick a plan from their list,” Louise used to complain to her husband.

Now, fifteen years later, some patient rights and hospital groups are borrowing Harry and Louise. And in this new ad, the couple changes sides in support of health care reform, saying things like, “Too many people are falling through the cracks.”

But a lot more has changed besides Harry and Louise, starting with big business. At a recent press conference, the same health insurance lobby that paid out $17 million for Harry and Louise to defeat the Clinton plan now says it supports the idea of universal coverage and likes the new ad campaign.

“It’s a different time,” said Karen Ignagni, president of American Health Insurance Plans. “Our community believes it’s very important to move on an agenda of health care reform.”

“I think it shows that the American people are coming together,” said Ron Pollack, executive director for Families USA Patient Advocate Group. “Those who were opposed to health care reform in the past now know it’s critically important.”

Version two of Harry and Louise, by the way, features the very same actors, but the starting budget is around one tenth of the original, sources say.

The groups behind this campaign also won’t touch the tough question of which candidate, Barack Obama or John McCain, has the better health care ideas. Their angle is to generate so much public and industry-backed pressure that health care reform is accomplished regardless of who’s elected president.

Grapefruit, orange, and apple juices block drugs commonly used to treat infections, allergy, transplant rejection, cancer, and high blood pressure.

In 1991, David G. Bailey, PhD, and colleagues found that grapefruit juice increased blood concentrations of the blood pressure drug Plendil to possibly dangerous levels. Grapefruit juice, they later learned, slows down a key liver enzyme that clears Plendil - and about 40 other drugs - from the body.

Now Bailey reports that grapefruit, orange, and apple juices decrease the absorption of several important medications:

Eighteen hospitals in California were fined for state health code violations in which patients received shoddy care that in some cases led to deaths.

Violations included an improperly inserted catheter, a ventilator that was not turned on and surgical tools left inside patients after operations.

The fines made public Monday stem from investigations by the California Department of Public Health.

The hospitals were fined $25,000 for each violation - the latest of dozens of penalties the state has issued in recent years to more than 40 hospitals.

“The number of penalties will decrease and the quality of care will dramatically improve as hospitals take action to improve,” said Kathleen Billingsley, director of the health department’s Center for Healthcare Quality. “The entire intent of these fines is to improve the overall quality of care in California.”

The report detailed a death at a La Mesa hospital in which a worker failed to turn on a ventilator for a patient who was being transferred. Another patient in Los Alamitos died after falling from a wheelchair with no seat belt on, and a Santa Ana hospital lost a patient from a medication overdose.

At Doctors Medical Center in San Pablo, a registered nurse improperly inserted a catheter into a patient’s neck vein on Sept. 1, and the patient died as a result of an air bubble from the tube. The report found the nurse had not completed a required anatomy class or the hospital’s training on protocol.

Defending himself in the report, the unidentified male nurse told investigators, “I am the pro of the hospital. The other nurses call me to put in IVs that they cannot get in.”

A message seeking comment from the medical center was not returned Monday.

In other cases, patients had surgical instruments or sponges left inside their bodies during surgery, requiring a second surgery to retrieve the items. The report also found some patients experienced surgical awareness during their procedures due to improper anesthesia.

The state has issued 61 such penalties to 42 hospitals, Billingsley said.

Federal inspectors at U.S. border crossings repeatedly turned back filthy, disease-ridden shipments of peppers from Mexico in the months before a salmonella outbreak that sickened 1,400 people was finally traced to Mexican chilies.

Yet no larger action was taken. Food and Drug Administration officials insisted as recently as last week that they were surprised by the outbreak because Mexican peppers had not been spotted as a problem before.

But an Associated Press analysis of FDA records found that peppers and chilies were consistently the top Mexican crop rejected by border inspectors for the last year.

Since January alone, 88 shipments of fresh and dried chilies were turned away. Ten percent were contaminated with salmonella. In the last year, 8 percent of the 158 intercepted shipments of fresh and dried chilies had salmonella.

On Friday, Dr. David Acheson, the FDA’s food safety chief, told reporters peppers were not a cause for concern before they were implicated in the salmonella outbreak.

“We have not typically seen problems with peppers,” Acheson said. “Our import sampling is typically focused on areas where we know we’ve got problems or we’ve seen problems in the past, which is why we’re now increasing our sampling for peppers.”

On Monday, the FDA said Acheson’s comment was in relation to outbreaks or illness associated with Mexican peppers, not the rejection of pepper shipments at the borders. Calls to the FDA seeking elaboration were not immediately returned.

Still, food-safety advocates question why the agency did not pay more attention to the peppers being stopped at the border and why it took the nation’s largest foodborne illness outbreak for the agency to ratchet up its screening of companies known for shipping dirty chilies.

“If the fact that they were showing up on problem lists for a year doesn’t make them high-risk, I don’t know what does,” said Ami Gadhia, policy counsel with Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine. “If it’s across the board, then that’s a systemic problem that FDA needs to be able to nimbly respond to.”

The agency initially suspected that fresh tomatoes had caused the outbreak. Then officials determined in mid-July that jalapenos could also be sickening people and eventually traced implicated pepper shipments all the way back to two farms in Mexico.

The agency doesn’t keep count of what percentage of the nearly 491,200 metric tons of Mexican peppers imported last year were turned away at the U.S. border. In general, the federal government inspects less than 1 percent of all foreign food entering the country.

According to the Department of Agriculture, 84 percent of all fresh peppers eaten in the U.S. come from Mexico.

In the last year, the agency’s data shows that dozens of cases were turned back due to filth, illegal pesticides and in one case, something poisonous.

Bob Buchanan, a former senior science adviser at FDA, said part of the problem may be that the agency sets its priorities for the food it considers to be high-risk years in advance.

Dried peppers and other imported spices were considered sufficiently risky to be mentioned on a 2006 FDA manual instructing inspectors on which high-risk foods deserved a more careful check.

The agency has long considered salmonella to be a risk in dried chilies, since foreign spice traders often leave peppers to dry in the sun where they’re vulnerable to contamination from birds and other animals, Buchanan said.

Inspectors might have looked over the odd box of fresh Mexican chilies, but no one paid raw peppers much attention since they were not mentioned as a high-risk crop, he said.

“Somebody could have picked up a box and looked at peppers if they wanted to, but I’m not sure that would have been a high priority,” Buchanan said. “It would require a big leap to think that salmonella in dried peppers could be related to problems in fresh chilies.”

Since the salmonella outbreak began in April, 1,423 people have fallen ill and the produce industry has lost more than $200 million as consumers have shied away from buying fresh produce.

Federal investigators are now focusing their probe on fresh hot peppers from Mexico - jalapenos and serranos - but still suspect that tainted tomatoes were initially involved.

This month, the agency put a dozen Mexican growers or distributors on its “import alert” list for tougher border screening.

On Friday, Acheson said the agency had stepped up testing of certain Mexican produce and uncovered more cases of salmonella contamination - just not the same strain that caused this particular outbreak - in jalapenos, basil and cilantro.

In July, six separate shipments of fresh jalapenos and serranos were stopped after inspectors found they were contaminated with salmonella, FDA data shows.

One crate detained on July 29 came from Agricola Zaragoza, a Mexican packinghouse that handled produce from two farms where chilies linked to the outbreak were traced.

“If so many of the peppers we eat in the U.S. come in from Mexico, you’d think we would want to pay more attention,” said Mike Doyle, director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety, which works with industry to improve growing and packing practices. “Something isn’t working.”

If you make it to your 92nd birthday, your odds of staying spry as you head toward the century mark may be better than you expect.

That news comes from a study of 2,262 Danish adults starting at age 92. Everyone born in 1905 in Denmark and still living there was invited to participate, whether they lived at home or in an institution and needed someone to help them take part in the study. They were followed until they reached 100.

The study was all about seeing whether exceptional longevity came with high levels of disability. The short answer: It didn’t. Extreme age didn’t bring extreme disability, overall.

The elders did have a slight decline in their ability to perform routine activities, mental skills test scores, grip strength, and other measures, and fewer were independent at 100 than at 92.

“Nonetheless, our finding also suggests that individuals who survive into the highest ages have a health profile that is similar in many aspects to that of individuals who are seven or eight years younger,” write the researchers, who included Kaare Christensen, MD, PhD, DMSc, of the Danish Aging Research Center at the University of Southern Denmark.

It’s not that no one got sick, slowed down, or died — only 166 people were still enrolled in the study at age 100. It’s more that they didn’t linger in what the researchers call a “frail… vegetative state.”

“Even though individuals in this age range have an increased risk of disability for each additional year of life, the frailest and most disabled members of the cohort are those who are most likely to die at any given age,” explain Christensen and colleagues.

Their bottom line: “Most individuals can expect to experience physical decline before they die, but the postponement of this individual decline makes it possible for us to live into a fourth age” stretching toward 100.

The study appears in this week’s online early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The world’s poorest countries have one thing in ever greater abundance: people.

“Nearly all of world population growth is now concentrated in the world’s poorer countries,” said Bill Butz, president of the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington-based independent research organization.

Currently 1.2 billion people live in countries classified as developed by the United Nations, compared with 5.5 billion in less developed regions, PRB said in its annual Population Data Sheet, released Monday.

There is little growth in the richer countries and even declines in some.

“And by 2050, global population is projected to rise to 9.3 billion. Between now and mid-century, these diverging growth patterns will boost the population share living in today’s less-developed countries from 82 percent to 86 percent,” PRB demographer Carl Haub said.

Other findings from the data sheet:

More American women in their early 40s are childless, and those who are having children are having fewer than ever before, the Census Bureau said Monday.

In the last 30 years, the number of women age 40 to 44 with no children has doubled, from 10 percent to 20 percent. And those who are mothers have an average of 1.9 children each, more than one child fewer than women of the same age in 1976.

The report, Fertility of American Women: 2006, is the first from the Census Bureau to use data from an annual survey of 76 million women, ages 15 to 50, allowing a state-by-state comparison of fertility patterns.

About 4.2 million women participating in the survey (which was conducted from January through December 2006) had had a child in the previous year.

The statistics could be used by state agencies to provide maternal care services, the report said.

The survey found that in 2006 women with graduate or professional degrees recorded the most births of all educational levels. About 36 percent of women who gave birth in the previous 12 months were separated, divorced, widowed or unmarried.

Unemployed women had about twice as many babies as working women, although women in the labor force accounted for the majority - 57 percent - of recent births. Only a quarter of all women who had a child over the past year were living below the poverty level.

Coupled with fertility data collected biannually, the report also revealed longer term trends, including how second-generation Hispanic women are having fewer babies than their foreign-born grandmothers and first-generation American mothers.

Differences among states also emerged. California, Nevada, Texas, Arizona, Florida, Illinois, New York and New Jersey had a greater percentage of foreign-born women who became mothers in 2006. A bigger share of women in the Southeast and Southwest who gave birth in the year prior to the survey did so in poverty.

Blame it on the hair force.

Bad hair days grow out of interactions between individual hairs as they fly in a breeze or squish under your hat or on your pillow.

These hair-to-hair meetings result in “subtle forces” — chemical, electrical, and mechanical energies — that make your hair rough and unmanageable, notes Eva Max, a chemistry doctoral student at the University of Bayreuth, Germany.

Max and colleagues at BASF Care Chemicals Division aren’t taking bad hair lying down. They’ve invented “single hair force spectroscopy,” using electron microscopy to analyze nanoscale hair behavior.

“The system will allow scientists to explore how different hair-care products affect hair-to-hair interactions so that these products can be optimized in a more systematic fashion,” Max says in a news release.

Despite the $60 billion spent worldwide on hair-care products, researchers still don’t fully understand why hair conditioners give hair that smooth and silky feel — and why they don’t always help hair that’s been tortured to force it into fashionable colors and shapes.

Using their new technique, Max and colleagues looked at hair samples from volunteers whose hair had been bleached blond. They found two reasons why hair becomes rough and unmanageable.

They found that mechanical damage to hair raises scaly projections on individual hairs. These scales jut out sideways from the hairs, creating friction as they slide past other hairs. The result: hair that’s rough to the touch and hard to comb.

To cut back this problem, they say, hair products must contain ingredients that smooth out the scales.

The researchers also found that when hair fibers interact, they build up negative electrical charges. Same charges repel one another, making hair literally repulsive. Again friction results, making hair rough and hard to comb.

Rinsing out this problem will mean adding positively charged polymers to hair products to neutralize the negative charges.

But BASF scientist Claudia Wood, PhD, says it’s not going to be easy to solve the bad-hair-day problem. Lots of other things contribute to hair problems, including humidity, the water content of each hair, and hair stickiness.

Max presented the findings at the American Chemical Society’s 236th National Meeting, held Aug. 17-21 in Philadelphia.