Ginger, long used as a folk remedy for soothing tummyaches, helped tame one of the most dreaded side effects of cancer treatment – nausea from chemotherapy, the first large study to test the herb for this has found.

People who started taking ginger capsules several days before a chemo infusion had fewer and less severe bouts of nausea afterward than others who were given dummy capsules, the federally funded study found.

“We were slightly beside ourselves” to see how much it helped, said study leader Julie Ryan of the University of Rochester in New York.

Results were released Thursday by the American Society of Clinical Oncology and will be presented at the group’s annual meeting later this month.

But don’t reach for the ginger ale. Many sodas and cookies contain only flavoring – not real ginger, Ryan said. Her study tested a druglike ginger root extract, and it’s not known if people could get the same benefits from ginger teas or the powdered ginger sold as a spice.

The study involved 644 patients from cancer centers around the nation who had suffered nausea in a previous round of chemotherapy. Two-thirds had breast cancer and the rest, other forms of the disease. They were placed in four groups and given one of three doses of ginger (the equivalent of one-half, 1 or 1 1/2 grams of ginger per day) or dummy capsules in addition to standard anti-sickness medicines.

Patients took the capsules for six days, beginning three days before chemo treatment. They rated their nausea symptoms on a seven-point scale.

Offer is good for a year, with restrictions

Sales of Lipitor hit $12.4 billion for Pfizer Inc. in 2008, making it the company's top-selling prescription drug.

TRENTON, N.J. – Pfizer Inc. says it will provide 70 of its most widely prescribed prescription drugs including Lipitor and Viagra for free to people who have lost their jobs and health insurance.

The world’s biggest drugmaker said Thursday it will give away the medicines for up to a year to Americans who lost jobs since Jan. 1 and have been on the Pfizer drug for three months or more.

The announcement comes amid massive job losses caused by the recession and a campaign in Washington to rein in health care costs and extend coverage. The move could earn Pfizer some goodwill in that debate after long being a target of critics of drug industry prices and sales practices.

The program also likely will help keep those patients loyal to Pfizer brands.

“Everybody knows now a neighbor, a relative who has lost their job and is losing their insurance. People are definitely hurting out there,” Dr. Jorge Puente, Pfizer’s head of pharmaceuticals outside the U.S. and Europe and a champion of the project, told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview Wednesday. “Our aim is to help people bridge this point.”

The idea for the program came just five weeks ago, at a leadership training meeting, as the workers discussed how many patients are struggling, Puente said.

He said he urged top management to approve the program, presenting a recent Associated Press article about how newly uninsured diabetics are suffering serious complications because they can no longer afford the medicines and testing supplies. Approval came quickly.

“It was my idea,” he said. “I floated it, and the reception it got was so dramatic that it very quickly became our idea.”

Colleagues suggested employees could donate to a fund to help support the effort, Puente said. He said some employees had tears in their eyes when discussing how they could help people who had lost jobs.

Officials for New York-based Pfizer said they don’t know how much the program will cost and haven’t put a cap on spending for it.

Applicants will have to sign a statement that they are suffering financial hardship and provide a “pink slip” or similar employer notice. Applications will be accepted through Dec. 31, with medication provided for up to 12 months after approval, or until the person becomes insured again.

Starting Thursday, patients can call a toll-free number, 866-706-2400, to sign up, and those whose drugs are not included in the program will be referred to other company aid programs. Starting July 1, patients can also apply through the Web site, www.PfizerHelpfulAnswers.com, which has information about the other Pfizer aid programs.

Pfizer and the rest of the drug industry are trying to have a voice in the debate over how to overhaul the U.S. health care system, partly by joining in a pledge this week to help hold down inflation of health costs.

Pfizer’s program comes at a time when many drugmakers, including Pfizer, have been raising prices on their drugs, partly to offset declines in revenue as the global recession reduces the number of prescriptions people can afford to fill.

The 70-plus drugs covered in the program include several diabetes drugs and some of Pfizer’s top money makers, from cholesterol fighter Lipitor and painkiller Celebrex to fibromyalgia treatment Lyrica and Viagra for impotence. Drugs from several other popular classes such as antibiotics, antidepressants, antifungal treatments, heart mediations, contraceptives and smoking cessation products also are included. Cheaper generic versions are available for quite a few of the drugs.

Pfizer said that from 2004 through 2008, its patient assistance programs helped 5.1 million people get 51 million Pfizer prescriptions for free or at reduced cost, with a total value of $4.8 billion.

NEW YORK – New York City has closed three schools in response to a swine flu outbreak that has left an assistant principal in critical condition and sent hundreds of kids home with flu symptoms, in a flare-up of the virus that sent shock waves through the world last month.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that four students and the assistant principal have documented cases of swine flu at a Queens middle school. More than 50 students have gone home sick with flulike symptoms at the school, he said. At another middle school in Queens, 241 students were absent Thursday. Dozens more were sick at an elementary school.

The Health Department said the assistant principal from the Susan B. Anthony middle school is on a ventilator, marking the most severe illness in the city from swine flu to date. The students who have fallen ill in this latest surge of illness appear to be experiencing mild symptoms, similar to routine flu.

The assistant principal, identified by colleagues as Mitch Weiner, may have had pre-existing health problems, the mayor said. In many other swine flu cases that turned critical, patients had pre-existing conditions.

The mayor said that the sick assistant principal may have had pre-existing health problems. In many other swine flu cases that turned critical, patients had pre-existing conditions.

Bloomberg said that three schools — with more than 4,000 students altogether — would be closed for at least a week because “there are an unusually high level of flulike illnesses at those schools.”

“There are documented cases of H1N1 flu at one of them,” the mayor said, using the formal name for swine flu.

New York City’s first known cases of swine flu appeared in late April, when hundreds of teenagers at a Roman Catholic high school in Queens began falling ill following the return of several students from vacations in Mexico, where the outbreak began.

At first, the virus appeared to be moving at breakneck speed. An estimated 1,000 students, their relatives and staff at the St. Francis Preparatory School fell ill in a matter of days. A limited number of kids had confirmed cases of swine flu because the Health Department tested only a small amount of students.

City health officials became aware of the outbreak on April 24. The school closed and health officials began bracing for more illnesses throughout the city.

But the outbreak then seemed to subside. Additional sporadic cases continued to be diagnosed, but the symptoms were nearly all mild. The sick children recovered in short order. St. Francis reopened after being closed for a week.

The middle school with the confirmed cases is two miles from St. Francis.

People at the school said students started going home sick on Tuesday and Wednesday, alarming parents.

“I’m worried,” said Dino Dilchande, whose sixth-grade son goes to the school. “The city should have taken more precautions. We should have been notified earlier.”

At the Susan B. Anthony, administrators posted a sign on the door from the Health Department informing students and teachers that the school would be closed for a week. The school is in the Hollis section of Queens, a neighborhood known for producing several rappers including the group Run-DMC.

A knock on the door of an address for a Mitch Weiner in the neighborhood of the school went unanswered.

Dr. Isaac Weisfuse, a deputy commissioner of the health department, said investigators are trying to learn more about why the disease has spread erratically, moving quickly through a few schools but slowly everywhere else.

“We’re trying to answer some of those questions,” he said.

Schools are a good incubator for illness in general, he said, because space is tight and youngsters often don’t practice the best hygiene.

Across the country, most of the people getting the illness have been young. Some experts have speculated that older people might have some immunity to the virus because of genetic similarities to more common types of flu.

At the start of the flu outbreak in the United States, government health officials recommended that schools shut down for two weeks if there were students with swine flu. But when the virus turned out to be milder than initially feared, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dropped that advice but urged parents to keep children with flu symptoms home for a week.

So far, the virus has not proved to be more infectious or deadly than the seasonal flu.

CDC officials said schools may decide to close if there is a cluster that’s affecting attendance and staffing.

MEXICO CITY – Swine flu has infected Mexico’s relations with China and other countries that have canceled airline flights and halted some trade. But its most prickly neighbor — the United States — now seems like the country’s most loyal friend.

Mexico is smarting from what it considers discriminatory actions by countries it had considered friendly, insisting the world should be grateful for its open and aggressive efforts to stem the spread of swine flu. The shutdown of public life cost Mexico $2.2 billion in the first 10 days after the epidemic was announced.

The government sent a plane to pick up 70 of its citizens quarantined in China. It rebuked Cuba, Ecuador, Argentina and Peru for banning flights to Mexico, saying they were acting “incongruously with our traditional ties of friendship.”

France tried — and failed — to win a European Union-wide ban on flights to Mexico.

Particularly insulting for Mexico: Haiti rejected a Mexican ship last week carrying 77 tons of much-needed food aid because of swine flu fears.

All of that put the U.S. response in a very favorable light. Neither the United States nor Canada banned flights or restricted trade with Mexico. The three countries are partners in the North American Free Trade Agreement.

President Obama forcefully rejected the idea of closing the border, despite arguments from conservative talk show hosts that swine flu showed immigration from Mexico was a threat.

The Obama administration cast the decision as a recognition of reality: Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said sealing the border would be extremely costly and pointless since the virus was already in the United States. Obama likened the idea to “closing the barn door after the horses are out.”

Even so, it was symbolically significant in Mexico, which protested when the U.S. began building a border fence under former President George W. Bush.

While Obama has also beefed up border security, he has pledged to renew efforts to push through immigration reforms that eluded the Bush administration, including extending a citizenship path for illegal immigrants. His emphasis on open borders during the swine flu outbreak could help set the tone.

“There was a very explicit recognition that the U.S. and Mexico cannot close their borders,” said Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico Institute at the Washington-based Wilson Center. “Maybe that tells you that Mexico is really more integrated with its neighbors to the north than the rest of Latin America.”

Mexico took note. The Foreign Relations Department held a special ceremony to thank the U.S. government both for keeping the border open and for providing aid and medical expertise.

“The way in which the border between Mexico and the United States stayed not only open but alive in the past days has been exemplary,” said Carlos Rico, Mexico’s deputy secretary for North American relations. “The open border is something that has not been recognized enough.”

Even members of the opposition leftist Democratic Revolution Party — long known for its nationalistic wariness of the United States — were impressed.

“I thought the reaction and response from the three countries — Mexico, the United States and Canada — was definitely laudable,” said Alfonso Suarez de Real, a lawmaker from the party. “It contrasted with the reaction that other countries have had.”

The experience added momentum to increasingly warming relations, coming on the heels of Obama’s April 16 visit to Mexico and his acknowledgment that Americans share the blame for violence south of border because of drug consumption and gun trafficking. Mexico, for its part, has set aside traditional sovereignty concerns in welcoming increased U.S. border security and even U.S. training for Mexico’s navy.

In contrast, relations with China have been frayed, threatening to undermine trade and investment between the two countries just as it has been picking up, said Hector Cuellar, president of the recently formed Mexico-China Chamber of Commerce.

Prominent Mexican companies have started opening operations in China in the last three years, while Mexican exports to China have jumped ninefold over the past decade to some $2 billion.

But Mexicans were angered when China banned the direct flights that leading Mexican airline Aeromexico started offering in October, and then quarantined Mexican travelers. Mexico canceled its participation at a Shanghai trade fair where it had meant to showcase its pork products — now banned in China and at least four other nations even though health experts say people can’t catch swine flu from meat.

The epidemic also set back Mexico’s efforts to improve ties with Cuba, which soured during the 2000-06 presidency of Vicente Fox, when Mexico voted at the U.N. in favor of monitoring human rights on the communist island.

Fox’s successor, Felipe Calderón, had planned a conciliatory trip to Cuba this year. That’s up in the air after Calderon said he may have to cancel because Cuba grounded flights to and from Mexico.

Mexican officials also didn’t take kindly to Fidel Castro lashing out after Cuba confirmed its first swine flu case, accusing Mexico of waiting to disclose the epidemic until after Obama visited, even though Canadian and U.S. scientists did not identify the virus in Mexican patients until a week later.

In Europe for a summit Tuesday, Foreign Relations Secretary Patricia Espinosa told Cuba’s foreign relations minister, Bruno Rodriguez, that such remarks “hurt bilateral relations.”

Deputy Health Secretary Mauricio Hernandez said Wednesday that Mexico would support a global compensation fund for countries that suffer from epidemics, and warned that the threat of trade and travel restrictions could provoke governments to hide future outbreaks.

“We were responsible, and we ended up with trade sanctions — we were discriminated against,” Hernandez said at an academic forum on swine flu. “So, the question is: What is the incentive (for countries to be open)?”

ATLANTA – The percentage of births to unmarried women in the United States has been rising sharply, but it’s way behind northern European countries, a new U.S. report on births shows.

Iceland is the leader with 6 in 10 births occurring among unmarried women. About half of all births in Sweden and Norway are to unwed moms, while in the U.S., it’s about 40 percent.

France, Denmark and the United Kingdom also have higher percentages than the United States, according to the report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The U.S. and at least 13 other industrialized nations have seen significant jumps in the proportion of unmarried births since 1980, said Stephanie Ventura of the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.

Rates have doubled and even tripled in these countries, according to the CDC report released Wednesday.

“Basically we’re seeing the same patterns,” Ventura said, noting the trend has accelerated in the last five years.

Experts are not certain what’s causing the trend but say there seems to be greater social acceptance of having children outside of marriage.

“The values surrounding family formation are changing and women are more independent than they used to be. And young people don’t feel they have to live under the same social rules that their parents once did,” said Carl Haub, a demographer at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C.

But there are differences in how unmarried pregnancies are viewed in different countries.

In the United States, unmarried mothers are more likely to be on their own and traditionally they are more likely to be poor and uneducated, experts said.

In northern Europe, men and women more often live together in unmarried, long-term, stable relationships, Haub said.

Because of declining birth rates in some European countries, people tend to be more focused on whether the baby is born healthy instead of whether the mother is married, Haub said.

The CDC previously has reported on the percentage of U.S. births to unmarried mothers. The new report gathers previously released information from other countries to make an international comparison.

The report shows trends from 1980 to the most recent years available – 2007 for the United States and most of the other countries, but 2006 for six nations.

Japan had the lowest percentage of unmarried births, with 2 percent in 2007, up from 1 percent in 1980.

Increases were much more dramatic in the other countries, with Italy rising from 4 percent to 21 percent, Ireland from 5 percent to 33 percent, Canada from 13 to 30 percent, and the United Kingdom from 12 percent to 44 percent.

WASHINGTON – House Democrats are looking at big health care changes, including federal aid to help families earning up to $88,000 pay for insurance and a requirement that all must carry coverage.

A document obtained by The Associated Press shows the plan being developed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee would also require employers to offer coverage to their full-time workers, or pay a percentage of their payroll to the government.

The committee summary is a first look at where House Democrats are headed as leaders try to meet an ambitious goal of passing a health care overhaul by the end of July. Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., is expected to play a leading role in crafting the plan and steering it through negotiations with the Senate later in the year.

The three-page summary broadly tracks with the type of plan President Barack Obama outlined during the political campaign. The summary does not include any cost estimates, but independent experts have put the price tag for such a plan at $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion over 10 years, with some estimates ranging as high as $1.7 trillion.

Obama has said the final legislation must rein in costs, guarantee choice of health plans and medical providers, and ensure that all Americans have access to affordable coverage. The president has proposed a downpayment of $634 billion over 10 years to pay for expanding coverage. He’s also promising to hold hospitals, doctors, drug makers and other providers to their recent offer of $2 trillion in savings over 10 years.

The Energy and Commerce plan would build on the current system in which employers, government and individuals share responsibility for the cost of health insurance. But it would make major changes in the way Americans get and pay for coverage. Workers and employers would have new obligations to obtain coverage. Insurers would have to abide by new consumer protections to prevent sick people from being denied coverage.

The subsidies for health insurance would be offered on a sliding scale to those earning up to four times the federal poverty level, or $88,200 for a family of four, according to the document.

The House plan would set up a new insurance purchasing pool called an “exchange” to help make private coverage more affordable for individuals and small businesses. In its first year, the exchange would be open only to employers with fewer than 10 workers.

Health insurance plans that participate in the exchange would have to follow the same consumer protection rules. They would not be able to deny coverage to the sick, or charge them exorbitant rates.

The document also calls for creation of a new government insurance plan to compete with private companies. The government plan would probably be run by the Health and Human Services department, but it would have to compete on its own. The government insurance plan would be financed by premium payments, not taxpayer dollars.

By Erica Werner, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar

One proposal: Tax boss-paid health insurance

WASHINGTON – After weeks of discussing ways to provide health care to the uninsured, Congress is beginning the difficult task of finding a way to pay for it.

Lawmakers are considering a broad range of ideas – including a new federal tax on soda – but a key Senate committee focused Tuesday on a proposal to tax health insurance that millions of Americans receive through their employers.

“I don’t think you can avoid taking that on,” Gail Wilensky, senior fellow at the health education foundation Project HOPE, told the Senate Finance Committee, which is helping to craft an overhaul of the health care system.

Nearly 164 million people, or 62 percent of the nation’s non-elderly population, receive health insurance through work, according to a joint congressional committee on taxation. Money spent on insurance provided by employers is excluded from an employee’s taxable income. If the exemption was lifted entirely, it could have raised about $226 billion in 2008, the joint committee reports.

During the campaign last year, President Obama opposed taxing employer-based health care benefits, and White House press secretary Robert Gibbs reiterated that opposition Tuesday.

Even so, Senate Democrats are taking a closer look at the idea of at least limiting the tax break. Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., said the exemption helps the well-off more than the poor, who are less likely to receive health care through work.

Baucus said the idea of repealing the break entirely is “just not going to happen,” but said Congress could cap the amount of benefit made available tax-free. He also said lawmakers may set an income limit so the exemption would not apply to high-paid employees.

Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi, the top-ranking Republican on the Senate’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, also supports the idea of repealing the exemption.

Gerald Shea of the AFL-CIO said limiting the tax break is “a step in the wrong direction” because it could punish employees who negotiated for better health care coverage rather than higher wages. Also, some employees pay more for health care insurance because of factors outside of their control, including the size of their company, he said.

WASHINGTON – Social Security and Medicare are fading even faster under the weight of the recession, heading for insolvency years sooner than previously expected, the government warned Tuesday.

Medicare already is paying out more money than it receives, something that happened for the first time last year. And Social Security will be by 2016, a year sooner than had been projected, the trustees’ annual report said.

Unless changes in Social Security are enacted, the retirement fund will be depleted in 2037, four years sooner than projected last year. The Medicare trust fund is in even worse shape. It is projected to become insolvent in 2017, two years earlier than expected.

More immediately, the trustees do not expect Social Security recipients to get cost-of-living increases in 2010 or 2011, something that hasn’t happened since automatic adjustments were adopted in 1975. The Social Security Administration will set next year’s cost-of-living adjustment in October, based on inflation over the previous year.

“We should neither be casual nor hysterical about the revised insolvency dates,” Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue said. “The Social Security system will weather this recession. However, the sooner we get on with the task of reforming the system, the easier it will be to make the tough choices.”

The recession is hurting both funds, which are financed by payroll taxes. The U.S. has lost 5.7 million jobs since the recession began, meaning fewer payroll taxes are flowing into the funds. At the same time, aging baby boomers and rising health care costs are adding to expenditures.

The trust funds – which exist in paper form in a filing cabinet in Parkersburg, W.Va. – are bonds that are backed by the government’s “full faith and credit” but not by any actual assets. That money has been spent over the years to fund other parts of government. To redeem the trust fund bonds, the government would have to borrow in public debt markets or raise taxes.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the head of the trustees group, said reducing health care costs is the key to saving Medicare.

“The most effective entitlement reform measure will be a major health reform that helps bring down the growth rate of national health care spending,” Geithner said.

SAN JOSE, Calif. – An office worker cleaning a fridge full of rotten food created a smell so noxious that it sent seven co-workers to the hospital and made many others ill.

Firefighters had to evacuate the AT&T building in downtown San Jose on Tuesday after the fumes led someone to call 911. A hazmat team was called in.

What crews found was an unplugged refrigerator crammed with moldy food.

Authorities say an enterprising office worker had decided to clean it out, placing the food in a conference room while using two cleaning chemicals to scrub down the mess.

The mixture of old lunches and disinfectant caused 28 people to need treatment for vomiting and nausea.

Authorities say the worker who cleaned the fridge didn’t need treatment – she can’t smell because of allergies.

HAVANA – Fidel Castro accused Mexico of failing to disclose the spread of swine flu until after U.S. President Barack Obama had visited, as Cuba confirmed its first case of the virus in a Mexican medical student studying on the island.

The Health Ministry said the “young male” became ill during a vacation in Mexico and returned to his studies at a medical clinic in Matanzas province, east of Havana. A statement read on state television Monday night gave no details on his current condition.

Castro, the former Cuban president, reacted hours later, writing in a column posted on a government Web site that “Mexican authorities did not inform the world of the presence (of swine flu), while they waited for Obama’s visit.”

Obama stopped in Mexico en route to the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad last month, days before Mexican health officials closed schools and announced swine flu was spreading, prompting an eventual mass shutdown that brought many parts of the country to a virtual halt.

The Cuban Health Ministry statement said a group of Mexican students began arriving on April 25 — four days before Cuban authorities halted airline flights to and from Mexico to keep swine flu from spreading to the island.

Relations between Cuba and Mexico have been chilly for several years, since a diplomatic spat involving the government of then-President Vicente Fox. Mexican authorities had said Fox’s successor, Felipe Calderon, would visit the island during the first quarter of 2009 as part of an ongoing effort to improve ties.

But Calderon recently said he may have to delay plans for a Cuba visit, quipping that the island’s grounding of flights to and from Mexico may leave him with no way to make the trip.

Cuba’s 82-year-old former president blasted Calderon for that comment and chided Mexican authorities for failing to disclose the spread of swine flu sooner.

“At this moment, we and dozens of other countries are paying the consequences and, on top of that, they accuse us of taking hurtful measures toward Mexico.”

He added that the measures that the Mexican president was complaining about “met established norms and had not even the slightest intention of affecting the brother country of Mexico.”

In its statement Monday, Cuba’s Health Ministry said other Mexican medical students returning from vacation at the same time as the young man diagnosed with swine flu experienced cold symptoms and were quarantined for observation, but most were deemed healthy and released.

Tests by the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Havana confirmed the first case of swine flu, though it was unclear how many Mexican students might still be isolated for more testing.

The ministry said that in all of Cuba, authorities tested 84 possible cases in people of eight nationalities and had only found the one positive result.

The official ban on flights between Mexico and Cuba has since been eased to allow Cuba’s national airline to send a few planes a week to pick up its citizens in Mexico. Still, several flights a day between Havana and the resort of Cancun or Mexico City continue to be canceled, stranding hundreds of passengers.

A study published Monday in the journal Science estimated Mexico alone may have had 23,000 cases by April 23, the day it announced the epidemic. The study estimates swine flu kills between 0.4 percent and 1.4 percent of its victims, but lead author Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, London, said the data remain incomplete.

The number of countries reporting swine flu cases stands at 31, with the World Health Organization confirming about 4,800 cases. At least 61 people have been killed by swine flu around the world: 56 in Mexico, three in the U.S., one in Canada and one in Costa Rica.

This is a June 25, 1990 file photo of Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O'Neal. Ryan O'Neal says Farrah Fawcett's strength in the shadow of cancer has made him love her more than ever.

LOS ANGELES – Ryan O’Neal said Farrah Fawcett’s strength in the shadow of cancer has made him love her more than ever.

“She’s so much more of a woman and powerful, courageous, fearless and all those adjectives. And I look at her with awe,” he said in an interview with Meredith Vieira for NBC’s “Today.”

Vieira also talked to Fawcett’s friend, Alana Stewart, for reports airing on the “Today” show Wednesday and Thursday.

O’Neal and Stewart participated in the documentary titled “Farrah’s Story,” a video diary of the actress’ fight against anal cancer that has spread to her liver. The film airs Friday on NBC.

O’Neal and the “Charlie’s Angels” star had a long romantic relationship that ended in the late 1990s and are parents of a son, Redmond O’Neal.

Ryan O’Neal said Fawcett has managed to joke about her illness and his own battle against chronic myelogenous leukemia, which was diagnosed in 2001.

“She asked me once, `Am I gonna make it?’ She asked me that a couple of weeks ago,” O’Neal recounted. “I said, `Yeah, sure, you’ll make it. And if you don’t, I’ll go with you.’ And she said, `Then stop the Gleevec.’ And the Gleevec’s the medicine that I take for my leukemia.

“She’s the rock. She taught us all how to cope,” O’Neal said. “She’s extraordinary. I don’t know what I’ll do without her, to tell you the truth.”

WASHINGTON – The FDA on Tuesday warned consumers to stop using face paints commonly dabbed on children’s cheeks at parties, sporting events and other festivities and sold in retail stores.

The six face-paint products are being recalled after reports of rashes and skin irritation, according to the Food and Drug Administration. FDA spokeswoman Susan Cruzan said the products were found to have yeast and mold counts above industry guidelines.

The FDA said it learned of children suffering rashes, itchiness, burning sensations and swelling where the face paints were applied.

Fun Express Inc., which recalled the products, said in a statement that it sold the affected items to 130 customers and 95 percent of these sales were before January. “The recall action is being taken as a precautionary measure to ensure there are no other occurrences,” the company said in a statement.

Fun Express is a wholly owned subsidiary of Oriental Trading Co., the distributor of the product. The face paints were made in China by Shanghai Color Art Stationery Company Ltd.

A sales manager for the company, Jiang Chao, said he was unaware of the recall but would look into the situation.

“We’ve been exporting our face paint to America for over three years and never had a recall,” Jiang said.

Chinese regulators have repeatedly pledged to tighten enforcement of safety and quality standards following a slew of complaints about shoddy or dangerous products. Shanghai’s own food and drug administration had no immediate comment about the recall.

Any reactions should be reported to the Food and Drug Administration’s MedWatch adverse event reporting program at www.fda.gov/medwatch.

The recall includes face paint in these colors with the following codes:

• Blue: item No. 85/2077; UPC 8 8760048110 7.

• Purple: item No. 85/2078; UPC 8 8760048112 1.

• Red: item No. 85/2079; UPC 8 8760048114 5.

• Orange: item No. 85/2080; UPC 8 8760048116 9.

• Black: item No. 85/2081; UPC 8 8760048118 3.

• Green: item No. 85/2082; UPC 8 8760048120 6.

———

ON THE WEB

Food and Drug Administration: www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2009/NEW02015.html

WASHINGTON – The White House trumpeted the news: health care providers taking a $2 trillion scalpel to their costs and pushing the U.S. toward President Obama’s vision of health coverage for all. But don’t line up yet for those insurance cards.

First, a reality check for the nation’s 50 million uninsured.

Medical providers have a long track record of avoiding fiscal constraints, as witnessed by the government’s efforts to tamp down Medicare costs.

And none of the groups that went to the White House can actually dictate prices to itsr members. Doctors in New York or hospitals in Los Angeles are free to charge what the market can bear.

There’s one more catch: Even if every penny of the promised savings shows up, not all of it would be used to help cover uninsured Americans. Actual savings to the government are all that can be counted as Congress tries to pay for subsidies that will be needed to help make health insurance affordable for everyone.

Costs could still turn out to be the greatest obstacle to Obama’s health care plan.

Outside experts estimate the taxpayers’ tab could total between $1.2 trillion and $1.5 trillion over 10 years. Some go as high as $1.7 trillion. Obama’s budget proposal includes a down payment that may cover less than half the bill.

Pledging restraint on costs Monday at the White House were groups representing hospitals, doctors, drug makers, medical device manufacturers and a major health care labor union – a Who’s Who of health care interests. The president posed proudly with them and called it “a watershed event.”

Obama wants to build on the current system in which most people get coverage through private insurers. But he wants to change the rules so the sick can’t be turned down. And he wants to provide subsidies to help low-wage workers and even some in the middle class afford their premiums.

House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio isn’t impressed. “Today’s announcement promises savings with no concrete plan to achieve them and no enforcement mechanism if they don’t,” he said Monday.

Indeed, it’s too early to tell whether the White House meeting will be remembered as a turning point or as a political mirage.

The administration is projecting an image of a new coalition for health care, with Obama and most of the health care industry and consumer interest groups claiming the political center.

Left out, for now, are conservative Republicans, who oppose Obama’s direction but have yet to articulate their own vision, and liberal Democrats who have been hoping to move toward a nationalized system like Medicare for all. As the debate heats up, the voices from both ends of the political divide will get louder – and the pressure on the center will increase.

By joining Obama, providers are acknowledging at least some responsibility for a bloated and dysfunctional system that economists say is unaffordable.

“I think the reason all these groups want to actively participate in the process is they don’t want to see a blunt instrument used to get spending down,” said Mark McClellan, who ran Medicare for President George W. Bush. “This is an opportunity to get everyone behind a better approach to improve the way health care works.”

That’s just what the groups say they want to do. Their proposals include coordinating care for people with chronic illnesses, rewarding quality not quantity, and using technology to root out waste and prevent errors that get patients sicker.

But it’s hard to put numbers next to any of those ideas. For example, what if better care for chronically ill patients turns out to increase costs? None of the groups has set a target for how much its members should have to pony up.

Congress is going to need hard numbers to pass Obama’s plan this year.

Robert Laszewski, a former health insurance executive turned policy consultant, said he’s betting the consensus won’t last.

“When Congress comes up with mechanisms to reduce costs that actually take money out of the hands of doctors, hospitals and insurance companies, that’s when we’re going to find out if things are really different this time,” he said.

Research shows therapy may cure at least 10 percent

CHICAGO – Leo Lytel was diagnosed with autism as a toddler. But by age 9 he had overcome the disorder.

His progress is part of a growing body of research that suggests at least 10 percent of children with autism can “recover” from it – most of them after undergoing years of intensive behavioral therapy.

Skeptics question the phenomenon, but University of Connecticut psychology professor Deborah Fein is among those convinced it’s real.

She presented research this week at an autism conference in Chicago that included 20 children who, according to rigorous analysis, got a correct diagnosis but years later were no longer considered autistic.

Among them was Leo, a boy in Washington, D.C., who once made no eye contact, who echoed words said to him and often spun around in circles – all classic autism symptoms. Now he is an articulate, social third-grader. His mother, Jayne Lytel, says his teachers call Leo a leader.

The study, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, involves children ages 9 to 18.

Autism researcher Geraldine Dawson, chief science officer of the advocacy group Autism Speaks, called Fein’s research a breakthrough.

“Even though a number of us out in the clinical field have seen kids who appear to recover,” it has never been documented as thoroughly as Fein’s work, Dawson said.

“We’re at a very early stage in terms of understanding” the phenomenon, Dawson said.

Previous studies have suggested between 3 percent and 25 percent of autistic kids recover. Fein says her studies have shown the range is 10 percent to 20 percent.

But even after lots of therapy – often carefully designed educational and social activities with rewards – most autistic children remain autistic.

Recovery is “not a realistic expectation for the majority of kids,” but parents should know it can happen, Fein said.

Doubters say “either they really weren’t autistic to begin with . . . or they’re still socially odd and obsessive, but they don’t exactly meet criteria” for autism, she said.

Fein said the children in her study “really were” autistic and now they’re “really not.”

University of Michigan autism expert Catherine Lord said she also has seen autistic patients who recover. Most had parents who spent long hours working with them on behavior improvement.

But, Lord added, “I don’t think we can predict who this will happen for.” And she does not think it’s possible to make it happen.

The children in Fein’s study, which is still ongoing, were diagnosed by an autism specialist before age 5 but no longer meet diagnostic criteria for autism. The initial diagnoses were verified through early medical records.

Because the phenomenon is so rare, Fein is still seeking children to help bolster evidence on what traits formerly autistic kids may have in common. Her team is also comparing these children with autistic and non-autistic kids.

So far, the “recovered” kids “are turning out very normal” on neuropsychological exams and verbal and nonverbal tests, she said.

The researchers are also doing imaging tests to see if the recovered kids’ brains look more like those of autistic or nonautistic children. Autistic children’s brains tend to be slightly larger than normal.

Imaging scans also are being done to examine brain function in formerly autistic kids. Researchers want to know if their “normal” behavior is a result of “normal” brain activity, or if their brains process information in a nontypical way to compensate for any deficits.

Results from those tests are still being analyzed.

Most of the formerly autistic kids got long-term behavior treatment soon after diagnosis, in some cases for 30 or 40 hours weekly.

Many also have above-average IQs and had been diagnosed with relatively mild cases of autism. At age 2, many were within the normal range for motor development, able to walk, climb and hold a pencil.

Significant improvement suggesting recovery was evident by around age 7 in most cases, Fein said.

None of the children has shown any sign of relapse. But nearly three-fourths of the formerly autistic kids have had other disorders, including attention-deficit problems, tics and phobias; eight still are affected.

Jayne Lytel says Leo sometimes still gets upset easily but is much more flexible than before.

CHICAGO – Did government health officials “cry swine” when they sounded the alarm on what looked like a threatening new flu?

The so-far mild swine flu outbreak has many people saying all the talk about a devastating global epidemic was just fear-mongering hype. But that’s not how public health officials see it, calling complacency the thing that keeps them up at night.

The World Health Organization added a scary-sounding warning Thursday, predicting up to 2 billion people could catch the new flu if the outbreak turns into a global epidemic.

Many blame such alarms and the breathless media coverage for creating an overreaction that disrupted many people’s lives.

Schools shut down, idling even healthy kids and forcing parents to stay home from work; colleges scaled back or even canceled graduation ceremonies; a big Cinco de Mayo celebration in Chicago was canned; face masks and hand sanitizers sold out — all because of an outbreak that seems no worse than a mild flu season.

“I don’t know anyone who has it. I haven’t met anyone who knows anyone who contracted it,” said Carl Shepherd, a suburban Chicago video producer and father of two. “It’s really frightening more people than it should have. It’s like crying wolf.”

Two weeks after news broke about the new flu strain, there have been 46 deaths — 44 in Mexico and two in the United States. More than 2,300 are sick in 26 countries, including about 900 U.S. cases. Those are much lower numbers than were feared at the start based on early reports of an aggressive and deadly flu in Mexico.

Miranda Smith, whose graduation ceremony at Cisco Junior College in central Texas was canceled to avoid spreading the flu, blames the media.

“It’s been totally overblown,” she said Thursday.

“Everyone seems to know it’s not going to kill you and it’s not as deadly as they think,” she said. “Everybody needs to just calm down and chill out.”

Craig Heyl of Decatur, Ga., said the government overreacted.

“Swine flu is just another strain of flu. People get the flu. I guess you have to call it a pandemic when it’s a widespread virus, but I don’t think the severity of it is all that concerning,” said Heyl, 43.

Public health authorities acknowledge their worst fears about the new virus have not materialized. But no one’s officially saying it’s time to relax. And experts worry that people will become too complacent and tune out the warnings if the virus returns in a more dangerous form in the fall.

“People are taking a sigh of relief too soon,” said Dr. Richard Besser, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In an interview Wednesday with The Associated Press, Besser said the outbreak in the United States appears to be less severe than was first feared. But the virus is still spreading and its future potential as a killer is not clearly understood.

“The measures we’ve been talking about — the importance of handwashing, the importance of covering coughs, the real responsibility for staying home when you’re sick and keeping your children home when you’re sick — I’m afraid that people are going to say, ‘Ah, we’ve dodged a bullet. We don’t need to do that,”‘ Besser said.

“The thing that’s keeping me up right now is that feeling of dodging the bullet,” he added.

Peter Sandman, a risk communication specialist, says on his Web site that reminding people the risk is still real and warning them in the future if a pandemic looks imminent “will be extremely difficult.”

“Swine flu looks to be an extremely mild pandemic if it goes pandemic at all, despite WHO warnings that it may ‘come back with a vengeance’ in the fall. People are going to be very, very skeptical,” Sandman wrote.

That concern is shared by infectious disease specialists. But elsewhere, especially online, talk of hype is rampant.

“If I hear 1+ person freaking out because of the “Swine Flu” they won’t have 2 worry about dying from it. I will kill them w/ my handbag!” read a comment Wednesday on Twitter.

“Adults are acting like a bunch of crybabies in a B-rated science fiction germ-outbreak movie, wringing their hands, whining about what to do next,” Dallas Morning News reader Mark Thompson wrote in a letter to the editor posted online Wednesday.

Kari Carsey Valente of Lake Oswego, Ore., had similar thoughts in a letter on the Oregonian newspaper’s Web site.

“Is the daily front page body count really necessary? In reading the entire content of the collected articles one learns that the H1N1 strain is not likely to be more lethal than its predecessors. Give it a rest — and lots of liquid!,” Valente wrote.

Colt Ables, 22, an economics major at the University of Texas in Arlington, said he thinks the Obama administration overreacted and unfairly tried to make it seem as if Republicans have been soft on preparedness.

“This shouldn’t be about politics or about hyping up a virus to send the American people into a panic. Do yourself a favor, wash your hands and turn off the TV,” he wrote in a campus newspaper column.

Whether the media overhyped or accurately reported the dangers is a toss-up, according to a USA Today/Gallup poll published Thursday on Americans’ views of the media’s flu coverage.

The May 5 poll also found that concern about the flu peaked a week ago. But even then, only 25 percent of Americans said they worried about getting the virus.

Dr. Robert Daum, a University of Chicago infectious disease expert, says authorities acted properly when news first broke about the new flu strain.

“It’s like overcalling a snowstorm in Chicago. You want the plows out even if it’s only going to snow a flake,” Daum said. If not, and a blizzard hits, “there will be an outcry like you’ve never seen before.”

Still, Daum says authorities have been a bit awkward in “downshifting” now that it appears the U.S. situation isn’t dire.

“I think it was right to place everyone on high alert, and now right” to say it’s time to calm down, Daum said.

By Mike Stobbe, Lindsey Tanner