Congratulations to Somerville, Massachusetts, Washington DC and 7 other cities!

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation identified them as national innovators in the fight against childhood obesity. The honor comes with a cash payout from RWJF’s $44 million Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities program which hopes to spread fat-busting social innovations to 70 more communities.

Somerville attacked the scourge on many fronts. The city repainted crosswalks and added bike lanes. Public schools shelved deep fryers and replaced canned fruits with fresh produce. Elementary school kids maintained vegetable gardens on school grounds, and the Rec. Department offered low-cost dance classes.

As a result, Somerville 8-year olds gained one pound less than children in a control group over the course of a school year, according to Tufts nutritionist Christina Economos.

That’s not bad in a community where 44% of the kids are overweight or at risk to become so, and public health officials believe the gains will increase over time.

Since 66% of Somerville students hail from low-income families and half do not speak English in the home, there is hope the innovations can be reproduced in other locations that have been hit hard by the epidemic.

In the nation’s capital, the Summit Health Institute for Research and Education, along with 6 local agencies and community groups will receive $400,000 from RWJF to focus their battle against childhood obesity in Wards 7 and 8.

According to the RWJF Web site, Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities is a national program whose goal is to “implement healthy eating and active living policy- and environmental-change initiatives that can support healthier communities” across the US.

The program emphasizes reaching “children who are at highest risk for obesity on the basis of race/ethnicity, income and/or geographic location.”

If small gangs of cybercriminals can outwit computer makers and antivirus vendors while raking in $100 billion per year in credit card theft and bank fraud, what’s to stop well-funded governments from conducting more sophisticated attacks like shutting down power plants or disrupting Internet traffic?

Not much, it turns out.

Russia proved that last summer. While its army was slicing and dicing Georgia, the Bear launched a distributed-denial-of-service attack on Georgian government Web sites that knocked out email service and public information access for days.

A year earlier, Russia launched a similar attack on Estonia disrupting among other things phone access to emergency services.

OK maybe these countries don’t have the latest, greatest security programs, but now the US Army has been hit. A piece of malware called Agent.btz has infected tens of thousands of thumb drives and memory cards throughout the Army.

Agent.btz is a worm that infects computers after the portable memory devices are inserted into them. Infected computers subsequently hooked up to the Internet automatically download programs enabling distant operators to access the hard drive.

It’s not clear who perpetrated the worm or why they did it but Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff thought it was important enough to brief President Bush on the matter last week.

And Agent.btz is not overly sophisticated. In fact it’s a variant of malware that’s been around for 3 years.

By contrast, Congress was warned last month by a special commission that “since China’s current cyber operations capability is so advanced, it can engage in forms of cyber warfare so sophisticated that the US may be unable to counteract or even detect the efforts.”

Meanwhile simple though Agent.btz may be, it costs a fortune to deal with. One commercial bank that got hit by the worm decided the best approach was to block its computers’ USB ports with glue.

The Army plans a different approach. It’s going to scrub every memory card in its 6-continent system. Tennnn-HUT!

Closing the book on another unseemly tale of tainted drug imports from China, the CDC has concluded that contaminated heparin caused an outbreak of serious, occasionally fatal allergic reactions in dialysis centers one year ago.

The CDC performed a case-control study on the matter and published its findings in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The study confirmed that oversulfated chondroitin sulfate was responsible for 152 adverse reactions in 13 states that were reported to the CDC between November, 2007 and January, 2008.

The allergic syndrome was characterized by shortness of breath, hypotension and nausea occurring within 30 minutes after administration of heparin supplied by Baxter Healthcare.

Oversulfated chondroitin sulfate has a similar molecular structure and the same molecular weight as heparin, but lacks its anticoagulant properties.

The CDC study compared 21 dialysis centers that reported reactions with 23 that did not. It also tested unopened heparin vials from affected facilities.
  
The CDC found that 98.5% of the 130 reactions for which complete information was available occurred in a facility where contaminated heparin was used. Of 54 reactions in which the heparin lot number was known, 96.3% occurred after administering contaminated heparin.

Baxter Healthcare has stated on its Web site that it “will not sell another vial of heparin until the company has helped to create a system in which the quality and safety of heparin is secured.”

At the moment, APP Pharmaceuticals is the major heparin supplier to the US. Its products were never found to have been contaminated with oversulfated chondroitin sulfate.