ProRail, the Dutch railway network operator, wants to diminish the number of suicides committed by people jumping in front of a moving train. The organisation aims at a reduction of 5% over the next four years. Currently, 200 people kill themselves by jumping in front of a moving train, which is 12% of the total number of suicides, the highest ratio in the region.

According to ProRail, about half of all suicides are committed by people who are undergoing psychiatric care. The network operator has already experimented by placing gates near psychiatric hospitals and by turning level crossings into viaducts.

The current policy of the Dutch Association for Psychiatry (NVvP) is to advise its members to send the suicidal out into the street. This policy is much to the dismay of the Union for Train Drivers and Conductors (VVMC) who point out that people jumping in front of moving trains are very traumatic experiences for their members.

(Photo by Jason Rogers, some rights reserved)

A court ordered last week that the national care monitor NZA can no longer demand of psychiatrists that they provide details about their patients’ mental health problems.

Nationale Zorg Autoriteit, which monitors the application of the health care laws and sets prices where necessary, bases its rates for psychiatric care on so-called ‘diagnosis-treatment combinations’ (DBCs) and requires psychiatrists to report the DBCs they have used for specific patients.

The court (College van Beroep voor het bedrijfsleven, i.e. ‘college of appeal for businesses’) held on August 2 that since insurance company employees who were not bound by medical confidentiality had access to the DBCs, the NZA had not given enough weight to the privacy interests of patients.

NZA now gets to go back to the drawing board and come up with new plans for a rate structure that does not (or to a lesser extent) compromise patients’ privacy.

Last year, political blog Sargasso already pointed out that once these data are out from under the protective umbrella of medical confidentiality, they can easily be abused by for instance the government, which could, for example, decide not to hire somebody as a civil servant based on their detailed medical history.

Scientists of the Erasmus teaching hospital in Rotterdam have found that perinatal deaths (deaths of children between 0 and 7 days old) could be reduced by 25% if midwives and doctors communicated better, Volkskrant reports.

Currently, the Netherlands is a sad infant mortality leader in the European Union with 1 in 100 babies dying between the 22nd week of gestation and the first week of birth. Only France and Latvia are worse off.

Rather than taking responsibility, the union for midwives, KNOV, has responded furiously to the findings of professor Gouke Bonsel. Chairwoman Angela Verbeten berates the Rotterdam scientists for studying forbidden subject matter.

The Netherlands is the only country in the European Union with a sizeable number of home births (around 30% versus statistic noise in most other Member States). It is the midwife’s responsibility to warn a doctor about any complications during a pregnancy.

A 2009 study found that there are no differences between the perinatal mortality rates of home births and of hospital births, even though the latter pool should contain all the complicated births.

Although the reason for the KNOV’s anger is not apparent, it would seem likely that the home birth mafia’s contradictory depiction of home births as both natural and safe has something to do with it.

Researchers of the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam will be paying both Dutch and Spanish fans 150 euro a person to come over and watch the final of the 2010 World Cup football between Spain and the Netherlands at an on-campus bar tonight.

The scientists wish to find out more about stress. Subjects will be hooked up to equipment that tracks their heart rate. The fans had to show up yesterday for a pre-measurement, and have to stay for an hour and a half after the match, so it’s not all fun and games.

(Link: Telegraaf. Photo by Mike Gebbis, some rights reserved.)

Contrary to many other European countries, the Netherlands has very few homeless people (or so it seems) and in general, very few beggars on the streets. I’ve been to Paris and Brussels recently, which reminded me again how few beggars a city like Amsterdam has, even in the tourist season.

Apparently, in the town of Amersfoort, where someone has counted 25 homeless people, they have their own bar. They get free beer and can get food, a shower and medical attention while they’re at it. And that’s not all: they get a client card, allowing them to drink a 500 ml beer every hour and a half, with a max of 10 a day. Lucky them, as Dutch beers are usually a wimpy 200-300 ml.

It seems very sad to get them to drink more in a way, but my money is on the getting them off the streets for the sake of the yuppies and nice families who live in Amersfoort.

(Link waarmaarraar.nl)

Coming to a theatre near us: On 1 July, surgeons of Amsterdam’s Slotervaart hospital are going to perform a laparoscopic gastric bypass, a stomach operation that is done through small incisions, and project it live in the capital’s Pathé Tuschinski theatre. The operation is a big matinee from 8:30 to 11:30 and will be performed on someone who is obese and needs the operation to survive. According to the hospital, it is a ‘very difficult operation that is only performed by a few Dutch hospitals’.

The audience will be able to ask questions about the operation to a doctor in the room who will then ask the surgeons performing the surgery.

Tickets are free, scroll down here to Gastric Bypass to send an e-mail and score some tickets.

(Link: Depers.nl)

Team Daisy, made up of Elsbeth Geukers and Nicole de Bakker, has won the 2010 Philips Innovation Award with a diagnostic technique that should drastically reduce the amount of operations required to treat strabismus (aka “cross-eyed”) in young children.

One of the problems that apparently plague doctors when trying to measure the angle of ‘crossed’ eyes is that young children do not sit still enough for an accurate measurement. Sprout.nl claims that this can lead to a failure rate of the operations of up to 50%.

The technique developed by the TU Delft students will simply measure from different angles simultaneously.

Earlier this year Geukers and De Bakker proved not only to be successful inventors but also promising businesswomen, when they won first prize (1500 euro) in the Writing a Business Plan course at their university.

(Photo by Flickr user net_efekt, some rights reserved)

According to a study carried out by doctor and reseacher Anne Vrieze at the Academic Medical Center (AMC) in Amsterdam, fat people have a different gut flora than thin people and you can use thin people’s poop, insert it into fat people and help them lose weight. It already works with rats, now it’s being rested on humans.

The idea is not new and dates back to 1955, where in one trial of ‘poop transplant’, a woman was cured from an intestinal disease by having her son’s healthy poop injected into her own intestines.

Vrieze explains that gut flora is as unique as fingerprints, and science still does not know why. Fat people shold have the chance to have more efficient bacteria in their intestines, which would help them poop out the bad stuff easier, which is what happens with thin people.

Vrieze was also surprised that so many men (they didn’t test women) were willing to have a tube shoved down their noses down to their intestines with poop to see if this could increase their chances of losing weight. Never mind the fact that so many things are just not tested on women for reasons that include getting sued because a woman might be pregnant, this time, the reason was that “we don’t know what influence hormone levels could have on gut flora.”

If the effects are temporary, getting a month poop transplant does not sound like much of a solution. The idea Vrieze has is to develop a capsule that could be taken, which would contain the ‘thinning’ bacteria. She responsibly adds that this would not replace proper dieting and exercise.

(Link: kennislink.nl)

A man with Parkinson’s Diseased treated in the Nijmegen academic hospital recently demonstrated that he can ride a bicycle, but not walk.

Dr. Bastiaan Bloem of Radboud University told the New York Times:

He said, ‘Just yesterday I rode my bicycle for 10 kilometers’ — six miles. He said he rides his bicycle for miles and miles every day.

I said, ‘This cannot be. This man has end-stage Parkinson’s disease. He is unable to walk.’

We helped him mount the bike, gave him a little push, and he was gone.

The 58-year-old man can only take a few steps before he falls to the ground, his hands shaking uncontrollably all the while. Dr. Bloem hypothesizes that bicycling may use a different part of the brain than walking. Another explanation could be that the pedals provide a pacing cue to the patients’ nervous system.

The Times’ article provides a video that shows the patient trying to walk, and that also shows him bicycling effortlessly.

The New England Journal of Medicine added this ‘helpful’ note:

(Editor’s note: In Video 2, the patient is not wearing a safety helmet because in the Netherlands, unlike the United States, wearing a safety helmet is neither required by law nor customary.)

Is anybody besides me reminded of this story?

(Photo by Flickr user heliosphan, some rights reserved)

Marien van Os was walking with his camera through Amsterdam when he heard a big splash. Turned out a drunken tourist had jumped into a canal. Van Os photographed the ensuing rescue by Erik Blom and other bystanders.

(Via Making Light. See also: interviews at AT5. Source photo: Flickr / Marien van Os.)