THURSDAY, March 18, 2021 (HealthDay News) — Calls to U.S. poison centers about incidents involving children and high-powered magnets surged more than 400% after a court overturned a ban on the magnets, a new study finds.

“Regulations on these products were effective, and the dramatic increase in the number of high-powered magnet related injuries since the ban was lifted – even compared to pre-ban numbers – is alarming,” said Dr. Leah Middelberg. She’s lead author of the study and emergency medicine physician at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, in Columbus, Ohio.

The small magnets began showing up in toys in the early 2000s and have caused thousands of injuries. They’re considered among the most dangerous ingestion hazards in kids, because when more than one is swallowed, the magnets attract to each other across tissue, cutting off blood supply to the bowel and causing obstructions, tissue death, sepsis and even death, according to Nationwide Children’s.

In 2012, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) halted sale of high-powered magnet sets and ordered a recall. Then it introduced a rule that effectively eliminated their sale, but the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned the rule in December 2016.

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In this study, researchers analyzed calls to U.S. poison centers from 2008 through October 2019 for magnet exposures in children aged 19 years and younger. The average annual number of cases fell 33% between 2012 to 2017 due to the ban, but rose 444% after it was lifted.

There was also a 355% increase in the number of cases that were serious enough to require hospital treatment. Cases from 2018 and 2019 increased in all age groups and accounted for 39% of magnet cases since 2008.

“Regulations on these products were effective, and the dramatic increase in the number of high-powered magnet-related injuries since the ban was lifted — even compared to pre-ban numbers — is alarming,” Middelberg said in a hospital news release.

In all, there were over 5,700 magnet exposures during the nearly 12-year study period. Most calls involved boys (55%); kids under age 6 (62%); and unintentional injury (84%).

Having hip pain as you age is more common than you think. About 50% of older adults say they have hip or knee pain. Luckily, there are things you can do to feel better.

What Causes Hip Pain?

Hip pain can be caused by arthritis, injuries, pinched nerves, or other causes, like cancer. Where you’re having hip pain can help pinpoint the cause. Chances are, you’ll feel it in the inside of your hip or your groin. If you have pain near your upper thigh, the outside of your hip, or the outer part of your buttocks, the pain is probably because of another issue within the ligaments, muscles, tendons, or other tissues near your hip.

Roy I. Davidovitch, MD, the Julia Koch associate professor of orthopedic surgery at NYU Langone Health, says inflammation around the hip isn’t uncommon. It often has to do with “altered gait mechanics,” or how you move.

“The most common thing that happens when you get older is you can get inflamed bursa,” Davidovitch says. If you have inflammation in your hip’s bursae, you’ll probably feel it when you move.

“When they start to walk, it could irritate the bursa because of that imbalance, and that’s usually the type of hip pain that’s tender to the touch,” he says. “People feel that when they’re walking, but also, they can push on the pain, and it’s right on the side of the hip. It’s actually the bump on the side of the hip that most people call my hip.”

Davidovitch said hip joint pain is usually in the groin, the place where your lower abdomen and your upper thigh meet. Although there are plenty of reasons your hip might be hurting, osteoarthritis of the hip could be the answer. It’s pretty common as you age.

“It can hurt with sitting, sleeping, walking, and it’s not the kind of pain that you can push on or touch. It’s deeper inside. I’ve heard my patients describe it as like a toothache,” he says.

March 18, 2021 — Xavier Becerra was confirmed as secretary of health and human services by the U.S. Senate on Thursday.

The vote was 50 to 49, and Senator Susan Collins of Maine was the only Republican to support his confirmation, The New York Times reported.

Becerra is a son of Mexican immigrants who became a member of Congress and California’s attorney general.

He’ll become the first Latino to oversee the HHS, and takes charge as the Biden administration leads the nation out of the coronavirus pandemic, which has already caused more than half a million deaths and has hit people of color particularly hard, the Times reported.

FRIDAY, March 19, 2021 (HealthDay News) — Fewer than 1 in 10 people in Wuhan carried COVID-19 antibodies in their bloodstream four months after the coronavirus outbreak in the Chinese city that served as a harbinger of a global pandemic, a new study shows.

Further, only about 40% of those people tested positive for the sort of neutralizing antibodies needed to stave off a future infection, according to the report, published March 18 in The Lancet journal.

These data show that a large proportion of the population in Wuhan remained uninfected months after the outbreak there, and therefore mass vaccination will be needed to reach herd immunity, the Chinese researchers argued.

“Even at the epicenter of the pandemic, with more than 50,000 confirmed cases as of April 8, 2020, the estimated seroprevalence [bloodborne evidence of infection] in Wuhan remains low,” suggesting that vaccinations will be required to promote herd immunity, study author Dr. Chen Wang said in a journal news release. He is president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College.

But one U.S. expert offered a caveat to the findings.

The spread of COVID-19 in Wuhan was impeded by harsh government-imposed lockdown measures, noted Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore.

Because of that, it’s hard to compare Wuhan’s experience to that of U.S. cities with less restrictive lockdown measures and higher infection rates, he said.

“In cities that had aggressive measures in place akin to Wuhan, vaccination would remain the solution to protecting the population from a resurgence of cases,” Adalja said. “The low prevalence in Wuhan is not applicable to other cities which have reported much higher seroprevalence.”

The survey of more than 9,000 Wuhan residents revealed that just under 7% of the city’s population carried COVID-19 antibodies by April 2020, the researchers reported.

About 40% of those had neutralizing antibodies to COVID, and follow-up blood sampling found that these antibodies remained at stable levels for at least nine months, the study found.

FRIDAY, March 19, 2021 (HealthDay News) — At Eating Recovery Center, which offers treatment and services for people who have eating disorders, intensive outpatient and partial hospitalization programs were switched to virtual when the pandemic began.

But that didn’t sit well with people who were working on their recovery.

“Our patients said, ‘You can’t do this. This is not enough support for us,'” said Ellen Astrachan-Fletcher, a certified eating disorder specialist and regional clinical director at the Eating Recovery Center in Chicago. “And within a week, we brought partial hospitalization back on site because we realized that the risk to them not getting treatment on site was worse than the risk to them coming out in public.”

Among those who are facing fear, isolation and loss during the pandemic are people who experience eating disorders, such as anorexia, bulimia and binge eating, according to recent research from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England.

“It’s been well-documented that people with eating disorders control their eating in a negative way, because they feel that they have control over that behavior and there are other areas of their life that they don’t have control in,” said study author Mike Trott, a PhD researcher at Anglia Ruskin University.

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Researchers from the university reconnected with participants from a 2019 study on body dysmorphia, exercise addiction and eating disorders, to find out how COVID-19 restrictions in 2020 may have impacted their eating disorders. The 319 participants were health club members with an average age of 37.

Participants answered questions in response to statements that included: ‘I am terrified about being overweight,’ ‘I have the impulse to vomit after meals,’ and ‘I feel extremely guilty after eating,’ which are part of the eating attitudes test, called EAT-26.

The EAT-26 scores significantly increased in 2020, post-lockdown, compared to 2019. This suggested higher levels of eating behaviors such as anorexia and bulimia, according to the study authors.

The findings were published in the April issue of the journal Psychiatry Research.

Social isolation can exacerbate eating disorders