Pap smears involve the collection of cells around the cervix and are used to detect irregularities that may indicate cervical cancer. Mammograms find breast abnormalities that may be cancerous by taking an X-ray of the breast. According to medical guidelines, Pap smears should be performed annually in sexually active women or in women age 18 or older, and mammograms should be performed yearly in women over the age of 40. Both screening methods can detect cancers at an early, more treatable stage.

Previous studies have also shown that obese women receive fewer medical services to prevent disease than do non-obese women.

78% of obese and overweight women aged 17 to 74 reported having had a Pap smear in the previous 3 years, compared with 84 percent of normal-weight women of the same ages. In women aged 50 to 75, 64 percent of overweight women and 62 percent of obese women had received mammograms in the previous 2 years. In contrast, 68 percent of normal-weight women in this age group reported having been screened for mammograms.

Compared to women who are not overweight, obese women face higher rates of death from breast and cervical cancer. Obesity is also associated with an increased risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, including heart disease and stroke.

“It’s my feeling that women who are overweight and obese have lower self-esteem and poor self-image, which may influence their decisions,” said the study’s lead author, Christina C. Wee, M.D., M.P.H.

Wee suggested that these factors might make women more reluctant to undergo screening procedures. Wee also hypothesized that the constraints of the current healthcare system may limit the time doctors can spend counseling patients on the importance of breast and cervical cancer screening.

“I hope that as the results of this study are publicized and as awareness about this disparity is raised,” Wee said, “physicians will spend more time making sure that women, especially overweight women, are informed about the benefits of screening.”

An editorial accompanying Wee’s report expressed some criticism of the study and cautioned against over-interpreting the findings.

“The study by Wee and colleagues must be confirmed in other patient groups by using methods other than self-report,” said Dr. Russell Harris, M.D., M.P.H. of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. He emphasized the need for effective communication between patients and their physicians.

Thank to wide range of safe, cheap drugs online, you are likely to obtain exactly what you are looking for in healthcare products.

While Enercise offers a similar range of products as other companies, from the basic wireless FM transmitter and receiver to the personal viewing screen, the company has two new innovations. Before any products were manufactured, the company solicited opinions from club owners and members. The feedback Enercise received led to the development of two new technologies.

The first of these is the Enercise xTV wireless broadcast system, with a patent-pending Quick-Change headphone jack on the receiver. Should the jack malfunction, the new design allows anyone on the club’s staff to replace it in under 60 seconds, without removing the entire unit. Since the jack is a completely separate piece, no internal electronics are affected by replacing it. The jack is intended to be user-friendly and robust. Garcia explains that this product does not touch any electrical wires at all. This is achieved by using the same technology as a cellphone battery — tiny pins make the connection.

The second innovation from Enercise is the Ultra Seal Power Connector, designed for the power source connection area. This provides a custom, water-tightmoisture barrier to protect the productfrom cleaning fluids and perspiration, preventing rust, corrosion and equipment failure.

Enercise also offers individual entertainment delivered via a personal viewing screen –Enercise iTV. This system features an optional CD/DVD player.

Another feature that was requested by the users Enercise interviewedis an EQ/tone control, whichlets people adjust the sound to their own preference.

The iTV system also comes equipped with the Quick-Change headphone jack and the Ultra Seal Power Connector.

Enercise pricing. The basic wireless FM system costs from $349 to $399. The xTV transmitters sell for $399 and the receivers are $139 each. The iTV personal viewing screen system costs $1,200 each and the optional CD/DVD player is $399.

One place of business, two men exposed to an extremely rare strain of anthrax. Do those numbers add up to terrorism? The world of medical science may only be able to provide part of the answer.

The disease itself doesn’t leave a telephone card to let doctors know where it came from, said Dr. Martin Hugh-Jones, a professor at Louisiana State University and a leading anthrax expert. Instead, the clues lie in the circumstances.

“Basically, what gives these things away is the wrong thing happening in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Hugh-Jones said.

Until last week, only 18 cases of inhaled anthrax had been diagnosed in the country in the last 100 years, most recently in 1976. But now — less than a month after the Sept. 11 attacks — one man is dead from inhaled anthrax and anthrax bacteria has been found in the nasal passages of one of his co-workers and in the Florida newspaper building where they both worked.

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft announced today that the FBI is investigating the incidents to see if terrorism was behind them.

The Sun, became ill from an inhaled strain of anthrax. He died on Friday.

At the time, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the case could simply be an isolated incident. But health officials announced today that they had detected anthrax in another Sun employee.

The co-worker, who had been hospitalized for pneumonia, apparently hasn’t developed the disease. According to news reports, he is 73 and expected to survive.

A company official told the Associated Press that the latest victim worked in the company mailroom.

Officials also found anthrax bacteria on a computer keyboard in the tabloid newspaper’s building in Boca Raton.

The anthrax cases are unprecedented, and the investigation will be too, experts said. One of the first steps will be to determine what the two victims have in common.

“You take these clues, and you track like mad,” said Dr. Philip Brachman, a professor at Emory University. “You [test] those environmental areas where these two people would have had contact with each other. I’m sure they’re looking at the office where they worked very carefully.”

Although the strain of anthrax in question is inhaled, it is not considered to be contagious, said Brachman, who helped develop an anthrax vaccine in the 1950s and 1960s. The anthrax bacteria bypass the lungs — meaning they cannot be exhaled through respiration or coughing — and instead attack the lymph nodes around the lungs, Brachman said.

Victims of inhaled anthrax develop the disease within days or weeks of infection. Then, within a day or two after developing initial symptoms, they may begin to have breathing problems and bleeding. The death rate is unclear but was very high in the days before antibiotics were common. In 1979, 79 people inhaled the bacteria in an accident at a Soviet military facility, and 68 died.

Normally, tests for anthrax are fairly quick and take only six to eight hours, said Hugh-Jones. The U.S. Navy has developed a test that is even faster; it takes just five minutes, he said.

If investigators do determine that humans are behind the anthrax outbreak, they will have to consider possibilities other than international terrorism, experts said.

“Is there someone else with a motive to contaminate them or the building? It doesn’t have to come from Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein,” said Samuel Watson, director of the BioMedical Security Institute at the University of Pittsburgh and a former national security official in the vice presidential administration of George H.W. Bush, the president’s father.

Watson said he also wondered why a terrorist would choose South Florida for an attack instead of New York City or Washington, D.C. “It could be someone developed this stuff and wanted to see if what they have grown actually worked. It’s just a real mystery.”

Although the past will be helpful in determining the cause of the anthrax cases, the future may settle the issue for good.

“If it’s terrorism, one would think that there’d be more cases,” Brachman said.

Likewise, few insurance companies are offering health club/exercise benefits. We are certainly not at the point of benefiting from discounts for regular exercise (like smoking vs. nonsmoking rates).

Few clubs have definitive relationships with assisted living centers and retirement communities.

The home fitness connection is still a challenge, as technology has not yet bridged the gap to help individuals “keep score,” whether they exercise at home or at the club.

Finally, few facilities have figured out how to attract the family as a unit, so parents and children can really participate in simultaneous activities at a club or — better yet — participate in joint activities together. This is even a failing of the YMCA.

While some club professionals might be concerned that using high-tech equipment in a club setting might eliminate the human interaction with staff, it should be noted that equipment not supported by “high touch” interaction with staff is usually unsuccessful with members. Members want interaction, support, encouragement and compliments. They also want accurate, usable information. High tech does not have to be exclusive of high touch.

High-tech equipment should provide reports that are easily understood by members, and should also provide information that is meaningful and comparative. This must be followed with an understandable explanation by staff members that responds to what members want to know.

If this information and an explanation are not available, high-tech devices might gain initial interest from a member because they are new, but that interest will be short-lived.

High-tech asset

Clubs of the 21st century will increasingly include high-tech equipment that allows and enhances high-tech support from trained staff. Additionally, compact, user-friendly equipment that provides accurate information will be an asset to clubs. Technology that relates to member performance and progression will be paramount to a club’s success. Health club owners and managers should embrace technology that will help them to meet their members’ needs.

In the new reality of the Internet, being unilingual can be frustrating. Certainly the Internet is global and English predominates, just as it does in the business world. But in this global village, you must learn to deal with multiple languages.

There are many ways of doing that on-line.

One of the most useful tools is Babelfish, currently part of the Altavista search engine system (http://www.babelfish.altavista.com). You can find similar services at the search engine Go.com (http://translator.go.com) or at Lernout & Hauspie, a company specializing in worldwide document and translation services (http://www.lhsl.com/itranslator/demo).

These services are extremely easy to use, offering a variety of instant, on-the-fly translations.

Let’s say you receive an e-mail message in French, and need a quick translation. Simply copy it from your e-mail message, choose the translation type, and you’ll get a quick English version.

What if you come across a Web site in another language that looks intriguing? Visit Babelfish, type in the Web address, and you’ll get a version that you can understand.

Of course, the translation is often marginal at best, and anyone familiar with both languages will cringe at the quality. No doubt, language purists will attack such on-line efforts, since the result may be worse than what might even be imagined. But if you need to get a quick sense of a foreign language Web page or e-mail, these sites will do the trick.

There’s another area where the Internet excels in helping companies and individuals deal with multiple languages: You can use it to find a large number of professional translation services.

Visit the Translation category in Yahoo (http://dir.yahoo.com/business and search under Business to Business and then Translation Services), where you’ll discover an extensive list of companies and individuals offering services in different languages.

The Internet is a natural place for professional translators to offer their services, since it is easy to send someone in a faraway location an electronic copy of the document or information that you need translated.

Another extremely important point on the language issue: Even though English is dominant on-line, we live in a multilingual world. Corporations and governments are increasingly discovering that customers and citizens are demanding services in the language of their choice.

That’s why last week the Bank of Montreal launched a Chinese-language version of its Web site (http://www.bmo.com/chinese), a response to the growing importance of this market in Canada. It isn’t the first; Toronto-Dominion Bank has been offering a similar version of its Web site for years to support Chinese users in the Canadian market.

Yet the Internet is supposed to allow companies to expand their markets around the world. If your company hopes to do so, you might find that offering an all-English Web site simply won’t cut it.

Indeed over time, corporations that plan to do business worldwide will find they need multiple versions of their Web site. For an example of what major companies are doing, look at Microsoft, which has done a tremendous job at providing “localized” Web sites. (Visit Belgium and its neighbours at http://www.microsoft.com/benelux for an example.)

If you consider the issue of multiple languages, you will probably begin to wonder how your browser can deal with Chinese or other language characters. No problem. Microsoft has built various “language packs” into the Internet Explorer Web browser architecture.

The issue of how to install support for different language character sets is a bit beyond the scope of this column. Suffice to say it can be fairly easy. Just click on “View,” then “Encoding,” and you’ll be led through a process by which you can install what is needed.

If you wrap all of these issues together and consider the potential for the Internet to develop a world marketplace, you’ll soon realize that the business of on-line translation will probably be one of the fastest growing aspects of the Internet well into the future.

There are numerous significant purposes wherefore a buyer need to purchase a cheap phone cards and the most important and most frequent reason is that they economizes money.

(Just now, should I have not capitalized “Dude?” It’s not really a proper noun, but then again, it’s being used as a name. I tried to look up “Dude etiquette” in my Chicago Manual of Style but it wasn’t addressed. I think I’ll not capitalize it from now on. There is only one time it should be capitalized and that is when I discuss my aunt who is actually called Dude. I’ve never heard her real name and I couldn’t tell you what it is. All I know is that when she was little, my mother and her sisters called her “Doodle-bug” and the nickname just shortened over time to “Dude.” So, yes folks, it’s true. I have an aunt named Dude and although this caused a bit of confusion while growing up as to what a dude really is, I’m quite proud of this fun Rob-family fact.)

Once again, I just entirely love Shii Ann’s words, “Robb, idiot that he is, he talks so much. There is no way a logical thought goes through his brain, ’cause his mouth is always flapping.”

Robb continues his rant as Erin and several others look at him like he’s that embarrassing uncle at a wedding, “We got beat today, dude. But it wasn’t by somebody better than us. Ok, I’m not going to be a sore loser. We lost, dude. We lost by a bunch of rules. You know what, though, who gives a sh**. Because I got a good shot at old homeboy from the backwoods and big Teddy wasn’t so big. That’s what I’m saying.”

There are so many things in this one little paragraph to comment about! In the same breath, he mentioned that he wasn’t going to be a sore loser and that they lost only by a bunch of rules. I guess that maybe he was hoping that his team could stand anywhere and push people off while the other team was allowed only to do it in the small attack zone. Damn those rules. Just like football and baseball. People should be allowed to just run all over the field and score touchdowns in either end zone and hit home runs from anywhere they wanted.

And then he had to somehow turn it around so that in his mind he won. “I lost the challenge but I pushed off a little guy a foot shorter than me and even though Ted flipped me 3-feet into the air, he wasn’t so big. That’s what I’m saying.”

But it didn’t end there. He played down the reward, like it wasn’t really anything he would’ve wanted. “I was a little bit disappointed when I saw what the reward was. I mean it could’ve been useful for the Red Berets maybe help us with our shelter. But otherwise, I was hoping it would be like a big turkey or something.”

It’s so easy to make fun of Robb. And what makes it so easy is that I don’t have to do anything except print what he says.

By the way, the “dude” count is at least 3 in this episode alone, not counting any that spewed forth during the challenge. I imagine fraternities have already devised a drinking game based on Dude Spewage.

There is a six-lane, 25-yard lap pool that is used for individual exercise and youth and master team competitions. Akron General also lets the local high school swim team use the pool for practices and meets. A separate therapy pool is used for warm-water exercise classes and the Aqua Arthritis program. The center’s gymnasium hosts basketball and volleyball tournaments and is used by cardio therapy patients. Gym facilities include a 15,000-square-foot fitness floor with 200 pieces of cardiovascular and resistance-training machines, and a separate 2,000-square-foot free-weight area. The two aerobics studios have suspended flooring and are used for 70 classes each week, including high- and low-impact aerobics, yoga, tai chi, extreme cycling and boxercise. Additional features include a three-lane indoor track, sauna, steam rooms and locker rooms. KidStyles, a children’s fitness program, and babysitting services are provided as well.

This special combination of medically-based programs and superior physical design has been very popular. After less than two years of operation, LifeStyles has more than 6,000 members, including many couples and families.

This is due in part to a highly successful pre-sale campaign that offered discounts on the center’s one-time enrollment fee, which helps pay for a health screening and a meeting with an exercise physiologist.

LifeStyles has been able to positively impact the lives of many mature and formerly sedentary people in the Akron area. In fact, its attrition rate is only 16 percent compared to an industry average of 45 percent. The center’s unique building design provides a physical and visual flow that connects activities and creates a supportive community environment for all of its members. When you add in the highly qualified staff and the hospital’s standards for cleanliness, it’s no wonder that LifeStyles has become Fitness Management’s award-winning facility design this year

But, before vilifying a potential cause for precocious puberty, we must be sure that the phenomenon exists. In order for researchers to show an earlier onset of puberty, they must get reliable developmental data pertaining to girls in the present and past.

Herman-Giddens measured sexual characteristics in modern girls. Her subjects, however, all visited participating pediatric practices and thus did not constitute a random sample. Likewise, the data from the past come from Marshall and Tanner’s research, which examined only girls at a British orphanage. Their data were not derived from a random sample either and thus cannot be used as a reliable norm reference to Herman-Giddens study.

Further, according to Herman-Giddens, while some secondary sexual characteristics — namely pubic hair and breast development — occur earlier in girls, the age of menarche (the first menstrual period) has remained constant for the past 40 years in white girls and has decreased by only a year in black girls. This data suggests that puberty is becoming a longer process that starts — but is not completed — earlier.

Despite a lack of certainty behind the occurrence of precocious puberty in girls, activists point disapproving fingers at a number of chemical and environmental factors they claim are likely causes of the hormonal abnormalities responsible for premature sexual development. In fact, last week Environmental Media Services (EMS) hosted a conference in Washington, D.C., searching for causes of early puberty. Speakers at the conference identified possible causes ranging from obesity to number of males in a household.

Not surprisingly, at the top of conference’s list of probable causes were environmental chemicals called phthalates. Phthalates have long offended the ideologies of many environmentalists. Associating phthalates with precocious puberty appears to be the latest attempt of activists to force unnecessary regulations on safe and beneficial chemicals. Phthalates are used as softeners in plastics allowing for the production of products ranging from medical devices to nail polish.

EMS speakers label phthalates as “endocrine disruptors,” exogenous chemicals that interfere with the synthesis or function of hormones. However, epidemiological data fail to support phthalates’ supposed adverse effects in humans. While some assert that “endocrine disruptors” act as estrogenic mimics to promote earlier development, there is no evidence to support this theory.

If puberty in girls is in fact starting earlier than in the past, the cause is likely a combination of biological, psychological and environmental factors. Obesity is the most significant factor in the opinion of most scientists because heavier girls usually reach puberty earlier than smaller girls. Since obesity in young girls is on the rise in the United States, it should receive the bulk of our attention, rather than chemicals with contrived associations with precocious puberty.

Until further research shows a causal relationship to sexual development, nothing is gained by avoiding chemicals and products otherwise known to be safe and, in the case of phthalates, beneficial. Anguishing over putative environmental chemical effects points concerned parents in the wrong direction. They would do their daughters more good by helping them stay active and slim.

Early ejaculation is a issue which plagues a lot of couples. Happily, there is info out there that can help you to end you premature ejaculation illness.

The 55,000-square-foot Life-Styles is an integral part of the 198,000-square-foot Akron General Health and Wellness Center. Located in a western suburb of the Akron metropolitan area, the Wellness Center contains a wide range of services. These include the Women’s Center (devoted to health education for women), Reflections (a specialized facility for breast health), the Consumer Medical Resource Library, a restaurant, spa, conference center and 37,000 square feet of office space for physicians. Also provided are complete diagnostic programs and facilities for sports medicine, physical therapy, cardiopulmonary rehabilitation and outpatient surgery. What makes the Wellness Center unique is that all of these facilities utilize the same staff and fitness equipment. Rather than putting independent services side by side, everyone uses the resources of the LifeStyles and benefits from the same team of specialized experts. The end result is a highly successful and profitable facility that gives new meaning to the term comprehensive care.

This combination of services has provided a continuum of care that benefits members and management alike. Usually, once hospital patients finish their reimbursable therapy, they are on their own. There is no connection with the health maintenance and disease prevention programs that can keep patients healthy in the long term.

“At LifeStyles, members continue to receive services from the staff that helped them get well in the first place,” notes Douglas Ribley, director of fitness and wellness for Akron General. “Also, if a member develops muscular or skeletal problems while at LifeStyles, physical therapists and other professionals are here to help.”

This has proven to be an important benefit for members, the majority of whom had never before belonged to a health club. With an average age of 49, many members had been sedentary for more than half of their lives. In fact, some 60 percent of the center’s membership is considered to be “high risk” and suffers from high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, arthritis, or other joint and muscular/skeletal problems. These individuals are usually more comfortable exercising at a medically supervised facility, and many even had their babies at Akron General or had gone there when they were sick. They welcome the opportunity to continue their association with the hospital, finding value in the LifeStyles’ service and its focus on safety and cleanliness. The use of shared space, equipment and personnel has enabled the facility to deliver a high-end product at an affordable price.