Health News Roundup: Few U.S. college sports teams have female physicians and more

Following is a summary of current health news briefs.

China to reduce number of small slaughterhouses to better control African swine fever

China's agriculture ministry on Tuesday said it will reduce the number of small-scale slaughterhouses to better prevent and control African swine fever. There are too many small slaughterhouses in some places in China, equipped with old facilities and backward production techniques, and checks on the pork quality are not done properly, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs said in a statement on its website.

Increasing emergency department admissions in U.S. for child sexual abuse

The rate at which children are being admitted to U.S. emergency departments for sexual abuse almost doubled between 2010 and 2016, a new study finds. Nationwide emergency department data show that admissions of youngsters under age 18 to EDs for sexual abuse rose from just under six per 100,000 children to nearly 12 per 100,000, researchers report in JAMA Pediatrics.

FDA classifies Abbott's blood pumping system recall as most serious

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday classified the recall of Abbott Laboratories' CentriMag blood pumping system following the death of a patient, as Class 1 or the most serious type of recall. The CentriMag System pumps blood through a patient for up to six hours during open-heart procedures and is also used to provide temporary blood circulatory support to patients for up to 30 days.

How one county scrambled to keep America measles-free

In Rockland County, New York, a wooded suburb 30 miles north of Manhattan, a teenage boy lay in a room in an empty wing of a health clinic, in a fetal position, coughing. It was October 2018. The boy had measles, which spreads through the air. His illness was the dawn of the worst outbreak in the United States for more than a quarter-century, and the start of a multi-million-dollar effort by an understaffed health department to contain it.

Few U.S. college sports teams have female physicians

Even as women make up larger proportions of college athletes and medical school graduates in the U.S., a new study suggests the vast majority of head team physicians at the college level are still male. Researchers examined data on head team physicians and athletic trainers in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) member directory for the 2018-2019 academic year. Excluding teams with unfilled positions, just 11.2% of head team physicians and 31.7% of head athletic trainers were women, the study found.

Measles and mistrust in Ukraine weaken world's defenses

Many of the people coming to Anna Kukharuk's private medical clinic don't have a disease. What plagues them is doubt. But its effects are a health emergency that the doctor and hundreds of others are struggling to remedy. Deep mistrust of vaccines in Ukraine has allowed measles, a virus which according to United Nations data kills 367 children a day worldwide, to grow into an epidemic infecting more than 58,000 people in the country of 42 million this year alone.

Teen self-harm tied to higher risk of ER visits, suicide attempts

Teens who visit the emergency room for self-harm injuries have a higher risk of repeat ER visits for self-harm and suicide attempts and higher mortality risk than their peers, a Canadian study suggests. For the study, researchers followed 5,661 adolescents who visited Ontario emergency rooms for self-harm. They also tracked 10,731 similar teens seen in the ER for other reasons.

Mexico's drug gangs churning out deadly fentanyl-laced pills: DEA

Mexican drug cartels are making "mass quantities" of fake prescription pills containing the synthetic opioid fentanyl with the intention of selling them to users throughout North America, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) said on Monday. Mexico's cartels have for years diversified into a wide variety of illicit activity, helped by porous domestic law enforcement agencies as well as long-standing trafficking routes into the United States, their biggest market.