More than 11% of US children and teens take herbal supplements or another type alternative medicine, according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The study is the first to assess utilization of oral supplements, acupuncture, meditation and chiropractic care among children. The same study concluded that adult utilization of these treatments remained stable since 2002 at about 37%.

Herbal supplements were the most frequently used alternative therapy in all age groups. Children were particularly common users of Echinacea, fish oil, combination herb pills, flaxseed oil, and prebiotics or probiotics.

The most common symptoms triggering use of herbal supplements were head or chest colds, anxiety/stress and back or neck pain. Insomnia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and body aches made the top 10.

Kids were 5 times more likely to use alternative therapies if a parent or relative used them. Those with higher incomes and education, and those covered by private health insurance were more likely to use them than children who were uninsured or covered by public programs.

It’s hard to say whether this degree of utilization is useful or harmful since few of the therapies have been tested rigorously according to Richard Nahin, a study author head of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

The study relied on a 2007 survey of 23,000 adults representing themselves and 9,000 other adults who spoke for a child in their home.

The study did not examine use of vitamin and mineral supplements, folk medicine practices or religious healing.

Use of alternative therapies is likely much higher in immigrant communities, particularly those from China, Africa and the Caribbean.

The Great Economic Crisis of 2008 has blown the doors off every sector of the economy and the government has selectively bailed out insurers, bankers and auto makers, so no one can blame industry leaders in other sectors from giving it the old college try.

Take BioTech for example. The sector has been soundly thrashed, especially the little guys.  In fact BIO, a trade group reports that 33% of the 370 publicly traded US BioTech companies have less than 6 months’ cash on hand—twice as many as last year.

Whew, so last week BioTech executives had their day with Congress.

They proposed a deal: if you give us cash now, we won’t take our tax credits when we become profitable (when and if, they should say). And there’d be a cap, say $30 million, on the cash a single firm receives.

Ahem. How in the heck is Congress going to assess all that risk, or are are these people also proposing a built-in BioTech Czar?

Actually, it may be a good deal, but Congress has to weigh it against proposals from other sectors. And for all the bluster, BioTech is small. Only 200,000 people are at risk.

In its defense, CombinatoRx chief exec Alexis Borisy told the New York Times BioTech is “one of the few places where the US is the undisputed leader of the world.”

The plan has at least one ally in Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D-Penna.) who wants to include the proposal in the Big O’s stimulus package. “Innovation and technology are growth areas for American businesses and American workers and should be part of this package,” she told the Times.

Schwartz’ district is home to several BioTech and Big Pharma offices.

It was nice while it lasted, but the days when Web-based start-ups could focus on building traffic and cash in later on ad-based revenue models are going, going, gone.

Online display-ad spending will likely plummet in 2009, and probably stay low through at least part of 2010, and the line-up of affected companies looks like an Internet murderer’s row: Twitter, Facebook, AOL, CNET and Yahoo among others, according to Silicon Alley Insider.

In the Great Economic Crisis of 2008, Web companies need a balanced revenue model according to Roger Lee, a general partner from Battery Ventures.

Lee told the New York Times that most start-ups in his portfolio offer premium services, subscription products or e-commerce elements in addition to free services.

Pizaazz has covered several companies like this including comScore, LinkedIn, and Yammer.

Angie’s List does this as well. It provides reviews and ratings of local businesses for a monthly fee, as well as earning income from ads. World Golf Tour is yet another. The site lets people play famous golf courses for free on their computers, but charges tournament fees and has a virtual store that sells duds for avatars and tips from pros.

Or, as David Weiden said, “If a company approaches investors with a plan to lose money for three or four years while building an audience, it will encounter many closed doors.”

The partner at Khosla Ventures told the Times, “It’s gone from plausible to almost implausible.”

“What’s changed more than the ability to make money from ads is the ability to raise money at the same valuation it had six months ago (using an ad-based revenue model),” he added.

It’s a shame that blood pressure recordings from the doctor’s office aren’t great predictors of future cardiovascular events due to white-coat hypertension, but it is what it is.

The long-recognized phenomenon is characterized by office-based BP readings that are higher and more labile than those taken during the course of normal everyday life.

Thankfully, scientists have shown that ambulatory blood pressure recording devices provide useful predictive information, particularly in those having severe hypertension, a cardiac history, multiple cardiovascular risk factors, pregnancy and elderly folks.

Now Gil Salles and co-investigators at University Hospital Clementino Fraga Filho in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil have shown that ambulatory blood pressure recordings can predict CV risk in another subset of patients, the ones with resistant hypertension.

Sales’ was a prospective study of 556 patients with resistant hypertension, defined as persistently elevated blood pressure despite treatment with 3 anti-hypertensive agents.

After median follow-up of 4.8 years, the scientists found that 109 patients (19.6%) either died or incurred a cardiovascular event.

After controlling for age, gender, prior cardiac events and other CV risk factors, Salas’ group confirmed that office-derived blood pressure recordings were not predictive of future events, but higher mean ambulatory BPs did predict these events.

Ambulatory systolic and diastolic blood pressure recordings were both effective predictors, and nighttime recordings were superior to those obtained during the day.

Russia’s cyber attacks on Georgia and Estonia didn’t do it. A US citizen’s big hack into the Pentagon’s computer system didn’t do it. Even a special Congressional commission’s warnings about China’s advanced cyber warfare capabilities didn’t do it.

But Agent.btz did. When the embarrassingly simple, 3 year-old worm infected the bejeesus out of the whole US Army necessitating a costly pan-continental thumb-drive scrubbing, the US government finally got the message.

And now, maybe, it will get serious about beefing up the nation’s cyber security systems. 

The likely starting point will be National Security Presidential Directive 54 a program that has languished since the day President Bush signed it into law.

Directive 54 set aside $15 billion to develop a national cyber security program that would protect the federal government’s computers as well as critical energy, electric and water systems.

The main reason Directive 54 has gone nowhere is the lack leadership on the issue, according to a special commission set up by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

So the commission plans to recommend appointment of a cyber czar, a person that would report directly to the President and have at his or her disposal all the proper diplomatic, military and intelligence tools to confront cyber threats.

The recommendation is likely to trigger the same furious debate around privacy that surfaced during Bush’s domestic wiretapping caper, so the Big O, who long ago recognized the cyber problem and promised during the campaign to appoint a “national cyber adviser,” better save some chips.

Hopefully, the Big O prevails because according to the commission, “America’s failure to protect cyberspace is one of the most urgent national security problems facing the new administration. The battle in cyberspace…is a battle we are losing.”

It wasn’t a pretty process, but FDA officials finally agreed to proscribe Serevent and Foradil as treatments for asthma while allowing asthma sufferers to continue using Advair and Symbicort.

The 4 inhalational drugs all contain long-acting beta agonists, but only the latter 2 contain steroids as well. Advair and Serevent are made by GlaxoSmithKline. The former is, at $6.9 billion in annual sales, GSK’s biggest seller.

Symbicort is marketed by AstraZeneca and has annual revenues of about $350 million. Foradil is marketed by Novartis.

All 4 drugs are still OK for use by patients with COPD, according to the FDA.

The FDA’s decision followed a hectic week in which officials openly disagreed about the drugs’ safety after a meta-analysis they commissioned on the subject was found to have methodological flaws rendering the study worthless.

Some physicians believe that long-acting beta agonists can prevent asthma attacks if used properly. The problem is that unless they are used in conjunction with inhaled steroids, they seem to increase the risk of particularly severe attacks.

And a lot of people don’t always use the long-acting beta agonists correctly.

The long-acting drugs are not effective treatment for acute exacerbations of asthma. If people use them for this purpose instead of rescue inhalers (which contain short-acting beta agonists), they delay proper treatment which can lead to unnecessary complications.

When two health insurance trade associations announced they’d agree to cover everybody regardless of pre-existing conditions if the Big O required everybody to get coverage, some sensed Big Insurance had become worried it couldn’t squash health reform as it did—with help—in ’93.

In the month since, health care reform has acquired an aura of inevitability and Big Insurance is backpeddling faster than Ali in the Thrilla in Manila.

In fact when Big O supporters hold their tea, arugula and health-reform parties this week, they can expect Big Insurance types to show up in droves.

That’s what the health insurance companies are telling their supporters to do, in what amounts to a complete capitulation to the Big O and his ground-up health reform process.

There will be roughly 4,000 such meetings around the country. Attendees don’t have to disclose their affiliations or employers.

Big Insurance has a problem with the Big O’s plan to create a new public insurance program that would compete, unfairly it fears, with none other than Big Insurance.

Then there’s that promise he made to cut the Medicare payments they receive in return for providing care to Medicare beneficiaries.

After tea is served, Big Insurance wants its supporters to assert that like Medicare and Medicaid, the new public program will stiff providers.

How honorable to stick up for providers like that, but providers and anyone with a pulse knows the Big O will print money if that’s what’s necessary to keep the ball rolling. 

So Big Insurance better come up with something else quick.

“Why do you need a new public program?” offers Alissa Fox, vice president of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association.

Because “public plans…do a better job of controlling costs,” retorts Richard J. Kirsch, the national campaign manager for Health Care for America Now.

“Private insurers are always looking for ways to avoid paying claims or covering sick people. Their mission is not to provide health care, but to increase shareholders’ profits,” he added.

We hope zingers like that don’t spoil dessert.

While US lawmakers are busy bailing out banks, insurance giants and we’ll see about car companies, the Italians have rushed to bail out Parmesan cheese makers.

What’s next, buffalo mozzarella?

And how could it come to this for the iconic pasta-topper when demand remains strong in Italy and abroad?

It’s simple. Producers can’t cover their costs.

Marco Iemmi and his 7 employees for example produce 15 thousand 77-pound Parmesan wheels a year. Last year he sold them at 7.4 Euros per kilogram, but he spent 8 Euros per kilo to produce them.

“It’s a tragic situation,” Iemmi told the Wall Street Journal. “I’ll have to close up shop unless things improve.”

So thank heavens for the Italian government which announced it will subsidize Parmesan makers by purchasing 100,000 wheels and donating them to charity.

Most Italians on ‘Strada Principale’ support the bailout.

“Parmigiano is almost indispensable,” Antonio Piermani told the Journal. The Rome wine-bar owner buys 3 kilos per month and swears that any substitute “would compromise the taste of the dish.”

Italy’s cheese crisis is the product of a fragmented producer sector. The world’s supply of Parmesan comes from about 400 tiny, family-owned businesses located near Parma in northern Italy. They understand economies of scale, but refuse to consolidate.

“We have an ancient mind-set,” Iemmi explained. “Each one of us wants to take care of his own little business.”

Meaning producers have no leverage with wholesalers, and not even the Pope would dare to mess with the meticulous Parmesan production process that has remained unchanged for several hundred years.

There’s even price competition, at least in Italy where 80% of the world’s Parmesan is consumed. Grana Padano, another grated cheese has a similar taste and costs less to produce.

President-elect Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats are planning to beef up health care reform provisions in January’s economic stimulus package in order to jump-start the reform process and boost the economy in one fell swoop.

As part of his $600 billion New Year’s treat, the Big O already said he’d bump up Medicaid spending –$40 billion or so over two years — and invest in health IT.

Under consideration are expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, COBRA—the law that allows unemployed people to purchase health insurance through a previous employer’s plan, and some worker retraining programs.

Obama reasoned at a press conference that health system reform “has to be intimately woven into our overall economic recovery plan. It’s not something that we can sort of put off because we’re in an emergency…this is part of the emergency.”

Plus Obama learned from Hil-93 that he’s got to come out swinging. “Get a running start,” is the way Nancy LeaMond described it to the Post. LeaMond is executive vice president at AARP.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus added that whipping health system reform into the recovery package is a time-saver because it bypasses Congressional debates and budget-wrangling exercises.

(For better or worse, we add.)

Other than that, Baucus’ big thing is health IT, especially the mass implementation of electronic medical records.

“It’s very important that health IT be part of the economic recovery,” Baucus told the Post. “It represents the beginning of health care reform.”

During the campaign, the Big O promised $50 billion to get providers with computers. Sources told the Post $10 billion of that might be wrapped into the New Year’s treat with a real nice bow on top.

Driven by a marked increase in CT scanning, overall utilization of X-ray imaging in pregnant women has doubled in the last 10 years, according to a study presented at the RSNA meetings.

Elizabeth Lazarus and colleagues studied data from 5,235 radiology exams done on 3,249 women in the decade between 1997 and 2006. They found that CT utilization increased 25% per year during the decade. Use of plain x-ray tests and nuclear medicine studies increased 7% and 10% respectively.

The most frequent reason to order a CT scan was for the evaluation of headache (37%), a common symptom during pregnancy. Head CTs expose the fetus to less than 1 mGy of ionizing radiation.

But 32% of CT referrals were for abdomino-pelvic studies, typically to rule-out appendicitis. In these studies fetal exposure approximates 20 mGy.

Lazarus indicated that the standard allowable threshold for the fetus is 50 mGY. “So even abdominal studies were well within allowable bounds,” she told MedPageToday.

Of course no one really knows this for sure, and the time during pregnancy when the fetus is exposed has to play a role, although this wasn’t analyzed. Then there’s the matter of repeat scans during pregnancy, which did occur in some patients.

The study also did not report on the percentage of scans that actually changed care plans.

The American College of Radiology has published guidelines for using x-rays during pregnancy. The extent to which these guidelines were followed in this survey is also unknown.

No one believes that pregnant women became sicker during the study period, or that utilization of CT scanning at the beginning of the decade had been inappropriately low, by the way.