She also lost to Mikaelian four years ago at a small

She also lost to Mikaelian four years ago at a small tournament in Poitiers, France. The two have never met since.”It feels good to win after losing the first round to (Myriam) Casanova in Filderstadt last week,” Henin said “It was important to get off on the right foot.”. Britain has one of the world’s highest death rates from heart disease but patients cannot get treatment because of a critical shortage of specialists, a report said yesterday. Patients in Britain get sub-standard treatment until after they have had a heart attack, when the care is good, the report by the Royal College of Physicians and the British Cardiac Society says.Professor John Camm, president of the British Cardiac Society, said there were 630 cardiologists in Britain compared with 24,000 in the United States which has only four times the population.The report says advances have been made but care is patchy and patients face a lottery over whether they get access to the best treatments.

It calls for an extra 900 consultant cardiologists by 2010 and new efforts to train staff in different roles as surgeon and physician assistants. Professor Camm said: “Without basic manpower the service simply cannot be provided to the standard that it ought.”. One of the tenets of breast cancer treatment is undermined today with the publication of two definitive studies showing that mastectomy – total removal of the breast – is unnecessary for most women. It will also lend weight to women in the UK who are taking legal action against surgeons for performing mastectomies unnecessarily.A total of 51,000 breast cancer operations were performed in England in 2000-01, 15,000 of which involved mastectomy.Michael Dixon, consultant breast surgeon at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, said there were wide variations in mastectomy rates in different parts of the country that could not be accounted for by differences in the women affected.

In 1999, the highest rate was in Yorkshire where 27 per cent of women with early breast cancer (a tumour up to 1.5cm in size) had mastectomies and the lowest was in Wessex where 12 per cent had the surgery.Mr Dixon said: “A surgeon who advises a woman with breast cancer to have a mastectomy without making it clear why and offering her the choice of breast conserving surgery could face legal action for negligence.” Several legal cases were pending, he said, and one had been settled out of court with the woman receiving compensation.Mr Dixon said some women, such as those with two tumours in the breast or with a large area of pre-cancer, required mastectomy. But the variation revealed in the 1999 figures was “unacceptable”, although it had improved since.Dr Stephen Duffy, breast cancer epidemiologist for Cancer Research UK, said the main treatment centres in the UK accepted mastectomy was unnecessary for most but there were still some “more cautious and conservative” surgeons.”My impression is that mastectomy probably still is overused but not to the extent that it was 10 years ago and nothing like the way it was used 20 years ago,” he said.The US and Italian trials, involving a total of 2,500 women, found that recurrence of cancer was slightly greater in women who had lumpectomies (local removal of the tumour) but it did not affect survival. Modern techniques of chemotherapy and radiotherapy mean local recurrence is now less likely.In an editorial in the New England Journal, Monica Morrow, a breast cancer specialist at the Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, describes the trials as “pivotal” and says they should convince “even the most determined sceptics that mastectomy is not superior to breast conservation.”She adds: “A reasonable goal is that every woman should be informed of the availability of breast conserving surgery and of the suitability of the procedure in her particular case … It is time to declare the case against breast conserving therapy closed.”* The most important risk factor for breast cancer is old age but only 13 per cent of the population realise that, a Mori poll for the Breakthrough Breast Cancer charity shows. About 80 per cent of breast cancers occur in women over 50 but most respondents thought family history was more important.. The Vortex is the closest London comes to the small downtown New York bars, where experimental jazz is received enthusiastically by a crowd who realise that the music is something to listen to, not to chat over with fancy cocktails.

Tuesday night’s gig by this very impressive NY group had a real whiff of the city that never sleeps about it. Several began with Binney and the pianist Craig Taborn fiddling about with electronic boxes, producing sounds that hovered and echoed as though heard through a heavy curtain. Various band members gradually pitched in – a chord cluster here, a rattle on the kit there – until a riff emerged seamlessly from the noise. Binney’s “heads” (the tunes, although that implies something more purposefully melodic) are often short phrases, or even just one note, endlessly reiterated while the rhythm section plays another pattern of different length. The two times weave around each other, building a hypnotic momentum. Against that, Danny Yeiss, a highly inventive drummer, dropped beats and interrupted the feel as if he were throwing rhythmic spanners at the other musicians to stop them getting too comfortable.Although it was often Yeiss who was driving against the traffic, the others took their turns, too.