According to a new report from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, there is no link between Pampers Dry Max diapers and diaper rash.

The news comes months after thousands of mothers joined in a social media campaign against the diapers, claiming that the Dry Max diapers caused skin conditions and even chemical burns in their young children, reports AdAge.com.

The uproar even ended with several class action law-suits against Pampers parent company Procter & Gamble.

“We hope that today’s announcement will reassure the millions of moms and dads and child caregivers who place their trust in Pampers and Dry Max every day,” Jodi Allen, VP-North American Baby Care for P&G, said in a statement to the press.

The diaper debacle began in late May when moms took to Facebook, urging each other to call local media and report any rashes or skin conditions that resulted from using Dry Max, the outlet reports.

The movement was so large (one Facebook group named “Pampers Bring Back the Old Cruisers/Swaddlers” had 11,000 fans) it reportedly put a dent in Pampers sales.

The CPSC got  4,700 complaints of diaper rash between April and August, and since has evaluated the Dry Max diaper materials, construction and heat and moisture retention issues, reports AdAge.com.

“CPSC staff cannot rule out that there may exist a health concern for some babies,” the statement continued. “Most babies exhibit diaper rash at least once in their lifetime. If parents or caregivers believe that their child is suffering from a rash that they believe to be related to a diaper, CPSC staff suggests that they discontinue use of the diaper and contact their pediatrician.”

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BILL:” Former model turned freelance writer Avis Cardella lived the high life,”writes Jay MacDonald, “…complete with fashionista friends, weekends in the Hamptons and lots and lots of retail therapy.” In his Internet story about Cardella’s new book, “Spent: Memoirs of a Shopping Addict,” Macdonald tells us she realized her shopping problem only when (dead broke), “she found herself in the lingerie section of Barneys buying 20 Cosabella thongs, one in every color, without any idea of how she got there.” Dave, do you believe that?

DR.DAVE: How could Avis Cardella become so intoxicated trying on underwear that she did not know where she was? Ever driven your car over a route you know so well that you go into automatic, and suddenly “come to,” ten or fifteen miles further than you realized? The brain can divide itself, operating on several different levels.

BILL: Cardella blames her shopping addiction on the “luxury-label fever of the early 90s when retail therapy became a daily ritual.” What she does not mention is booze or dope. How do you get high merely on shopping, with no chemical intake at all?

DR. DAVE: Bill, this is your old problem – being unable to believe the brain can intoxicate itself. I know you realize that things like meth, cocaine, and speed are connected to dopamine –the feel good brain chemical behind a lot of intoxication?

BILL: But, Doc, those are drugs, they trigger a brain chemical in the same way that heroin triggers endorphins or booze links with serotonin. But how can anybody believe that activities like shopping or gambling are like meth or crack cocaine?

DR. DAVE: Well Bill, the drug company Pfizer has its corporate fingers crossed that 12 members of a jury don’t believe it either.

BILL: That compulsive shopping can be linked to dopamine pathways?

DR. DAVE: The Mayo Clinic found scientific evidence that’s touched off lawsuits from patients who took dopamine replacement drugs for Parkinsons. The Cinic found that 5% experienced gambling addiction behaviors, along with sex and eating impulse problems.

BILL: And compulsive shopping?

DR. DAVE: The highest correlation between addictive behavior and these drugs was found in the 5.7% of the patients who experienced control loss over their shopping behaviors.

BILL: So, it would seem that compulsive shopping is (1), a recognized addictive behavior and (2), can be linked to at least one of the typical feel-good brain chemicals of addiction?

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Employees’ average share of premium costs for family coverage is $482 more than last year as economic conditions push companies to pay less of the bill, the report said. Total premiums for family policies, including both worker and employer contributions, increased 3 percent to $13,770.

Reducing health care costs was a promise of the health care overhaul law signed in March by U.S. President Barack Obama. That would require reversing a five-year trend. Health insurance premium increases have outpaced inflation and wage growth every year since 2005, according to the annual survey by the Menlo Park, California-based foundation.

“Businesses have been shifting more of the costs of health insurance to workers through premiums, deductibles and other cost-sharing,” said Drew Altman, Kaiser Family Foundation Chief Executive Officer, in a statement. “From a consumer perspective, the cost of health insurance just keeps going up faster than wages.”

Since 2005, workers’ contributions have increased 47 percent as overall premiums — the cost of the employer contribution plus workers’ — have gone up 27 percent, according to the Kaiser report. Wages have increased 18 percent and inflation rose 12 percent over that period, the report said.

Premiums Increase

Total health insurance premiums for single workers increased $225 to $5,049 this year, 5 percent higher than in 2009. Of that total, workers will contribute $120 more than they did last year, or 15 percent more, according to the report.

The health overhaul contains a provision to help states review premium increases, and another to limit how much insurers spend on profits and administrative costs — both to try and give consumers value for what they spend on coverage.

Even as workers pay more for their health insurance, they’re getting less coverage for their money. In 2010, 27 percent of employees had deductibles of at least $1,000 before coverage kicks in. Last year, only 22 percent of workers had such a requirement for the plans they get through work, according to the survey. Such cost-sharing strategies are meant to get consumers to use fewer health resources by making them more aware of the price.

‘Less For More’

“What insurance is in this country is gradually changing. It’s becoming less comprehensive. It looks less and less like the comprehensive coverage their parents got,” Altman said on a conference call discussing the study. “From the perspective of working people, they’re getting less for more.”

Large employers with more than 200 workers are driving the trend toward employees paying a larger share, Gary Claxton, a vice president at the Kaiser Foundation who co-wrote the study, said on the conference call. The economic decline has put pressure on companies to reduce overall costs, which in the case of health insurance can mean passing along some expenses to employees.

“We’re seeing that the continued economic downturn is leading to more burden for employees,”Claxton said.

Obama’s health care overhaul will eventually drive down costs, said Claxton. “We don’t know how quickly that might happen,” he said during the conference call. “At least in the early years, I’m not sure health reform is going to mean that workers are going to face lower contribution amounts,” he said.

Health Care Law

This year’s survey didn’t take in any of the effects of the health care law, Altman said on the conference call. Because the survey of employers was done from January through May and examined plan costs that were mostly decided in late 2009, the law’s spring enactment wouldn’t be revealed in the figures.

“The study only highlights the importance of implementing health reform,” said Nick Papas, spokesman for the White House Office of Health Reform. “The new law will take us in the right direction and make care more affordable for workers and employers,” he said in an e-mail.

A study by the RAND Corporation, also released on Thursday, predicted that the health law would lead to 13.2 million more people getting coverage through work. Most of those will be from small businesses, according to the study by the Santa Monica, California-based research organization.

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Ardi Rizal, who once burned through 40 cigarettes a day, underwent therapy and now has a new addiction.

“We diverted his addiction from cigarettes to playing,” Indonesia’s secretary-general, Arist Merdeka Sirait, told AFP.

Ardi, who lives in the province of Sumatra, could use the playtime – and the exercise. He weighs nearly 60 pounds and is so fat he gets around on a plastic toy truck.

The tubby toddler got hooked on cigs when his father gave him a smoke to keep him quiet. One cigarette led to another and soon Ardi was throwing tantrums if he didn’t get his tobacco fix.

Ardi’s clueless pop didn’t try to cut him off until after footage of his son smoking hit the Web in May and caused a worldwide uproar. Even then, he didn’t quite get it.

“He looks pretty healthy to me,” Ardi’s dopey dad, Mohammed, said at the time. “I don’t see the problem.”

Sirait said Ardi’s dad now knows better and is looking forward to seeing his boy, who has spent much of the summer with his mother at a smoking cessation clinic in Jakarta.

“Ardi was very happy when he left Jakarta this morning as he has really missed his father in the village,” Sirait said.

csiemaszko@nydailynews.com

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But while the prognosis for Stage IV cancers of the colon, breast or lung can be dire, that’s not the case for the type of tumor the “Wall Street” star has.

In fact, doctors say even advanced-stage cancer in the base of the tongue, tonsils, soft palate or walls of the throat is remarkably curable.

“With oropharyngeal cancer, the majority of patients with Stage IV are going to be cured,” said Dr. William Kuhel, director of head and neck surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell. “They should not have that notion that it’s a death sentence.”

Douglas says he has a walnut-sized tumor at the base of his tongue with no spread below the neck, suggesting his cancer is in the earliest form of Stage IV.

He said doctors said his chance of survival is 80% with eight weeks of radiation and chemotherapy.

Dr. David Adelstein, a specialist in head and neck cancer at the Cleveland Clinic, agreed that chemo and radiation can wipe out “the garden variety cancers of the throat.”

But the side effects can be tough, and Kuhel said Douglas probably had a feeding tube hidden under his suit during his interview with David Letterman.

“It’s a little tube that goes through the abdomen and is hidden under the shirt so nobody notices,” he said.

ndillon@nydailynews.com

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“This was a shakeup for me,” Oz told People.com. “I have done everything right. I don’t have any family history, and yet I’m high risk now.”

The good doc, a bestselling author and host of his own healthy-lifestyle talk show, opened up to the outlet about his scare, which happened after a routine colonoscopy around his 50th birthday earlier this year.

Oz said his doctor found a precancerous growth in his intestine, which could have eventually become cancer, reports People. The growth was removed, but Oz reportedly has to go back in three months for further screening.

Never one to shy away from giving people a healthy reality check, Oz believes he and his fans can learn something from his troubles.

“The only thing holding me back from a terrible outcome is the dumb luck that I checked myself…I would have put this off, like a lot of people. But I bet this saved my life,” he added.

Oz will reportedly discuss the scare more on the September 7th episode of his show, “The Dr. Oz Show”.

“There’s a lot of tension,” he said. “It’s frustrating. Why did this happen to me? It forces you to question the assumptions you make about life.”

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As Director of the Learning and Development Center at Mount Sinai, Dr. David Marks conducts and supervises neuro-psychological and Psycho-educational evaluations of children, adolescents, and adults with suspected learning and developmental disabilities.

Who’s at risk

As a household word, dyslexia is often believed to involve the reversal of letters or words. But this is not always the case. Broadly defined, “Dyslexia is an unexpected difficulty learning to read in the context of otherwise intact intellectual functioning, motivation, instruction, and sensory abilities,” says Marks. “This deficit can make for problems with reading accuracy, efficiency, or comprehension.”

Dyslexia, which affects about 9 percent of the population, is the result of a combination of factors. “Both genes and the environment play a hand,” says Marks. “Between 30 and 40 percent of children who have dyslexic parents develop dyslexia themselves.”

Studies suggest that everything from the birth environment, complications in pregnancy, and the educational setting can play a role. Boys are more likely to acquire dyslexia than girls, by a ratio of 1.5 boys to every one girl. But that imbalance may not be due exclusively to gender differences.

“It may be that boys tend to have other behavior problems like ADHD that make it more likely for teachers and parents to consider an evaluation for learning disabilities and developmental disorders.”

Signs and symptoms

Despite the public’s awareness of dyslexia, it’s not always easy to spot.

“The symptoms vary a lot,” says Marks. “For most, dyslexia comes to attention when the kids are learning to read, often in kindergarten and first grade.”

For some, the disorder isn’t caught until later in elementary school, when children are expected to read more efficiently and understand more complex passages. Some people find ways to compensate for dyslexia and aren’t diagnosed until adulthood. But even before children learn to read, there are warning signs.

“Early on, there may be delays in speech and language–trouble pronouncing speech sounds and difficulty with comprehension and formulation of language,” says Marks. “Later on, there can be problems with school readiness skills like naming letters, colors, and shapes, or pronouncing sounds and symbols.”

Dyslexic children may struggle to decipher new words and be inconsistent about recognizing common words. By high school and adulthood, undiagnosed dyslexics can be fairly accurate readers, but they may be slow readers or have limited comprehension.

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Wood’s husband, a plumbing contractor, watched his business dry up in 2008 with the mortgage crisis.

“The economy hit us,” said Wood in an interview at the not-for-profit Chicago Family Health Center.

Like millions of Americans, she is waiting for healthcare reform legislation signed into law by President Barack Obama in March to take effect. But like millions of Americans, she is not sure what it will do for her.

A Thomson Reuters poll of consumer confidence released on Monday shows Americans’ confidence in their ability to pay for and access healthcare has fallen by 5 percent since December 2009.

The Thomson Reuters Consumer Healthcare Sentiment Index, based on a monthly survey of 3,000 consumers, asks if they have had trouble paying for or had to postpone care in the three months prior. And it asks if they expect to in the coming three months.

On every survey question, responses were more pessimistic in July than they were in December.

“That’s a cause for concern to healthcare providers and policymakers,” Gary Pickens, chief research officer at Thomson Reuters, parent company of Reuters, said in a statement.

Pickens has seen a gradual eroding of confidence since December, despite a few notable peaks, such as in April, the month after Congress passed the Affordable Care Act.

“I doubt the average person really knows what has been implemented,” he said. “They just know there is a lot of talk and there has been a lot of negative publicity.”

LETDOWN

David Kendall, a senior fellow for health and fiscal policy at ThirdWay, a centrist think tank, said dissatisfaction with the current health system likely reflects a letdown after the reform debate subsided.

“The healthcare debate raised people’s expectations and there is now disappointment as a result that the problem isn’t solved,” Kendall said.

He said growing dissatisfaction with healthcare may help Democrats who supported health reform a little. But it may also be polarizing.

In the Thomson Reuters poll, Republicans tend to have slightly higher confidence about access to healthcare, which may be linked to employment, Pickens said.

“Clearly, at the top of the pile, the most important factor is having insurance coverage,” Pickens said in a telephone interview. “It’s related to your employment status and, obviously, so many people in the country are out of work.”

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said in a statement on Friday that the White House has failed to win widespread support for health reform.

“For months, the White House promised wavering Democrats that the bill would become more popular once it became law. The White House was wrong,” he said.

Kendall, however, thinks concerns about the economy will overshadow any concerns about health reform in the midterm elections.

“What matters more to people right now is their concern about the deficit and the economy and their own jobs,” he said.

Stephanie Washington, a 50-year-old clerk for the Chicago Public Schools, said she hopes healthcare does become an election issue.

“We are in a recession. Anybody who thinks because the president is trying to reform healthcare and they don’t think one day it’s going to benefit you as well as the next person can go and vote Republican,” she said.

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Giving a series of network interviews in the wake of the egg and salmonella breakout, Hamburg said the FDA is taking the issue “very, very seriously.” At the same time, she said Congress should pass pending legislation that would provide her agency with greater enforcement power, including new authority over imported food.

“We need better abilities and authorities to put in place these preventive controls and hold companies accountable,” Hamburg said as she discussed the approximately 1,300 cases of salmonella poisoning and the recall of roughly a half-billion eggs from two Iowa egg distributors.

She also had some practical advice for consumers: Reject over-easy eggs. She said that as federal investigators continue their work with the companies involved, consumers should strictly avoid “runny egg yolks for mopping up with toast.”

Two Iowa farms linked to the disease outbreak — Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms — share suppliers of chickens and feed as well as ties to an Iowa business with a history of violating state and federal law.

The number of illnesses, which can be life-threatening, especially to those with weakened immune systems, is expected to increase. The most common symptoms are diarrhea, abdominal cramps and fever eight to 72 hours of eating a contaminated product.

Jewanna Porter, a spokeswoman for the egg industry, said Saturday the company Quality Egg supplies young chickens and feed to both Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms. The two share other suppliers, she said, but she did not name them.

The egg industry has consolidated over recent years, placing fewer, larger businesses in control over much of the nation’s egg supply to consumers.

The salmonella outbreak has raised questions about federal inspections of egg farms. The FDA oversees inspections of shell eggs, while the Agriculture Department is in charge of inspecting other egg products.

William D. Marler, a Seattle attorney for a person who filed suit alleging illness from tainted eggs in a salad at a restaurant in Kenosha, Wis., said Sunday his firm has been retained by two dozen families and was representing a woman who was hospitalized in California.

Businessman Austin “Jack” DeCoster owns Wright County Egg and Quality Egg. Wright County Egg recalled 380 million eggs Aug. 13 after it was linked to more than 1,000 cases of salmonella poisoning. A week later, Hillandale Farms recalled 170 million eggs.

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Foursquare, the phone application for telling friends and strangers where you are, is offering a special virtual “badge” through September to people who do just that.

The badge is part of MTV’s “GYT: Get Yourself Tested” campaign. MTV says the idea is to remove the stigma attached to getting checked out for STDs.

Foursquare and similar services use smart phones’ GPS capabilities to locate where users are and what’s around them. Users can then “check in” to a venue by tapping it on a list – or typing in their own.

Foursquare users already receive scout-inspired merit badges for a range of check-in accomplishments. These include “Gym Rat” for hitting the gym 10 times in a month or “Crunked” for checking in to four or more places in a single night.

Stephen Friedman, the general manager of MTV, said he expects that some people will decide to get the badge despite the social stigma surrounding STDs. And once they do, their friends may, too.

“It only takes a few to get the ball rolling,” he said. The point is to make these checkups as commonplace as going to the dentist or getting a physical.

The badge itself is lime green and black, with the letters “GYT” emblazoned in the middle.

Foursquare users can go to their own health care providers, or they can find nearby clinics by visiting GYT’s website and entering their ZIP code.

The GYT campaign launched in 2009. It’s part of a partnership between MTV and the Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-profit organization that focuses on health care issues. MTV said the campaign has helped increase the number of young people getting tested at Planned Parenthood clinics nationwide.

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