The mayor of a Brazilian town has provoked complaints after he installed cameras in a health centre to monitor the quality of service to the public.

The cameras send images and sound from the reception and a pharmacy directly to the offices of the mayor of Foz do Iguacu and other senior officials.

He said it was to improve efficiency, and he wanted to extend the scheme to 28 other sites.

But some staff and residents said the project is a breach of patient privacy.

Employees of the health centre have signed a petition complaining about the intense level of scrutiny, while opinion among patients appears to be divided.

However, Mayor Paulo MacDonald told Brazil’s TV Globo he wanted to see the scheme extended to all 28 local health centres, to help prevent problems encountered in the past.

“We have received many complaints about poor service, sometimes rudeness by the public with staff, sometimes about people waiting while members of staff were doing less important things,” he said.

But the local health department said that to monitor the work of medical professionals, and to do this in an area where patients can be gravely ill, sometimes with psychiatric problems, was an invasion of privacy and illegal.

It has called on the mayor to remove the equipment immediately and said it may pursue legal action as well.

Source: BBC

The U.S. military denied Monday it has allowed soldiers to try to convert Afghans to Christianity, after a television network showed pictures of soldiers with bibles translated into local languages.

General Order Number 1 from the U.S. military’s Central Command forbids active duty troops — including all those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan — from trying to convert people to their religion, considered a crime in many Muslim countries.

Qatar-based Al Jazeera television showed footage of a church service at Bagram, the main U.S. base north of the Afghan capital Kabul, in which soldiers had a stack of bibles in the local languages, Pashtu and Dari.

A military chaplain was shown delivering a sermon to other soldiers, saying: “The special forces guys — they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down.”

But a U.S. military spokeswoman, Major Jennifer Willis, said the comments from the sermon were taken out of context and chaplains were told to make clear to soldiers that they could not proselytize while serving.

She said the bibles had been mailed to a soldier by a church back home in the United States and were never distributed.

“That specific case involved a soldier who brought in a donation of translated bibles that were sent to his personal address by his home church. He showed them to the group and the chaplain explained that he cannot distribute them,” she said.

“The translated bibles were never distributed as far as we know, because the soldier understood that if he distributed them he would be in violation of general order 1, and he would be subject to punishment.”

She said she was aware of at least one case of a soldier who had been punished for giving out coins that had biblical inscriptions on them.

Trying to convert Muslims to any other faith is a crime in Afghanistan. An Afghan man who converted to Christianity was sentenced to death for apostasy in 2006 but was allowed to leave the country after an international uproar.

Source: Reuters

A Democratic U.S. senator proposed on Friday setting up a free nationwide voluntary flu vaccination program to fend off future outbreaks of dangerous strains.

With the United States on alert for more cases of the new H1N1 swine flu virus, Iowa Senator Tom Harkin said the government should include funding for free vaccines for all Americans in the supplemental spending bill now moving through Congress.

“The harsh reality is that we have repeatedly experienced devastating flu pandemics,” Harkin said in a statement.

“Strictly as a matter of prudent prevention, it is desirable to maximize the number of Americans who are vaccinated each year,” Harkin said. President Barack Obama has requested $1.5 billion from Congress to address the ongoing swine flu outbreak.

Seasonal flu kills more than 30,000 Americans each year and costs the economy more than $90 billion.

New strains such as H1N1, which has infected 331 people in 13 countries including more than 100 in the United States, are potentially even more dangerous as it takes time to develop vaccines against them.

Harkin, who chairs the Senate appropriations subcommittee on health, said his bill would help build vaccine-manufacturing capacity and prevent production capacity from becoming idle.

“By offering annual free vaccines to all 304 million people in the United States, our vaccine-production capacity will be up and running and ready to shift, when necessary, to mass production of vaccines to fight a future outbreak or pandemic,” Harkin’s statement said.

He said intended to incorporate the measure into broader health reform legislation that Democrats want to pass later this year.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that children aged between 5-18 be vaccinated against seasonal influenza and already pays for many under a government program which provides about 43 percent of all recommended childhood vaccines in the United States.

At least 20 companies make flu vaccines, including Sanofi-Aventis (SASY.PA), GlaxoSmithKline (GSK.L), Novartis (NOVN.VX), Baxter International (BAX.N), Australia’s CSL (CSL.AX) and nasal spray maker MedImmune, now part of AstraZeneca (AZN.L).

Source: Reuters

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is funding a study that seeks to discover a link between drinking and having sex among homosexuals in Argentina.

The study will send researchers to six bars in Buenos Aires to interview both patrons and proprietors in an effort to discover what it is about those bars that may encourage the risky behavior.

The study began on Sept. 30, 2008, and runs through Aug. 31, 2010. It already has cost taxpayers $198,776. By the time the project ends, it will have cost $403,902, according to NIH.

The grant, awarded to the New York State Psychiatric Institute, was provided by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), the division of NIH that studies the effects of alcohol and alcoholism.

The study’s primary focus is to determine the relationship among drinking, bars frequented by homosexuals, and risky sexual behavior to see if certain bars in Argentina might be good targets for HIV-prevention campaigns.

“Targeting public venues in Buenos Aires where men meet, alcohol is consumed, and sexual behavior occurs, the goal of this two-year exploratory study is to understand the various factors that contribute to the creation of a high-risk sexual space,” the study’s abstract explains.

“To that end, the study seeks to describe the relative contribution of physical characteristics of the place, patron characteristics, type and level of alcohol consumption, and social dynamics that are at play and potentiate each other to result in sexual risk behavior.”

The study has six goals, including the collection of information on six specific bars in Buenos Aires; the appearance, of those bars, alcohol availability, patrons, and types of sexual behavior taking place. The study also seeks to identify which factors contribute to alcohol consumption and sexual behavior in the bars.

“The specific aims of this study are to … 2) identify factors that contribute to alcohol use and high-risk sexual behavior in the venues,” says the abstract.

Researchers will interview 48 of the men who patronize the bars, as well as the bar staff to gather information on the types of alcohol consumed and sexual behavior engaged in.

“Venue patrons will also undergo a brief quantitative assessment to gather descriptive data on sexual behavior and substance use.”

After discovering why men who drink in these bars have homosexual sex, researchers will then try to discover whether it is possible to conduct anti-HIV interventions and how to conduct those interventions.

The study will “4) assess willingness of venue owners/personnel to partner with HIV prevention organizations in reducing HIV risk in these settings and [what] types of prevention programs they find acceptable.”

While the study is being conducted in Argentina, it is being funded with U.S. tax dollars.  The grant recipients–who could not be reached for comment–say in the abstract that information gathered in the bars in Argentina might help inform similar efforts in America.

“We expect findings to be useful in informing venue-based interventions for these types of venues in other countries.”

The study is among a number funded by the NIAAA to examine the relationship between drinking and the spread of HIV, including a study of tourism, prostitution, and HIV in the Dominican Republic and another study examining drinking and HIV among prostitutes in China.

Source: CNSNews