Your Friday morning health roundup:
Diabetes deaths: One
key to surviving with type 2 diabetes is avoiding kidney disease. A new
study shows just how important that is: Ten-year death rates were 31%
for people with both type 2 diabetes and kidney disease, compared with
12% for people with just diabetes and 8% for those with neither
condition in the study of 15,000 people. The best way to protect
kidneys: controlling blood sugar. (HealthDay)
Tomato sauce recall: Check
your cupboards for cans of Hunt's Tomato Sauce. Cans sold in 12 states
are being recalled because of faulty linings that pose no health risk
but can cause cans to swell and spurt sauce when opened. The Food and
Drug Administration has more details on the voluntary recall from ConAgra Foods, Inc. (Food Safety News)
No-name disease: The
complex women's hormonal disorder long known as polycystic ovary
syndrome, or PCOS, needs a new name, researchers and patient advocates
agree. But no new name has yet been chosen for the condition, which can
cause menstrual irregularities, cysts on the ovaries, acne, weight gain
and difficulty getting pregnant. (MyHealthNewsDaily via NBC News)
Today's talker:
Try searching #flu on Twitter these days and you'll understand why more
than one set of researchers is looking at the social networking site as
a tool for tracking the flu and other diseases. Researchers at Johns
Hopkins University are finding that Twitter mentions of flu track well
with case reports coming in from government health officials, Reuters reports. And researchers from Brigham Young University tell Mashable that the fact that 15% of Tweets carry location information makes them ideal for tracking real-time spread of an outbreak.
Kim Painter, Special for USA TODAY