By The Survivors Club Staff
July 21, 2009

Swept away by a Canadian river, a toddler managed to float eight miles by clinging to his beloved red toy truck.

Demetrius Jones, three years old, was playing with a battery-powered truck near the Peace River when he was carried off by a current.  A frantic search ensued and the boy was found two hours later floating atop his overturned toy Chevy Silverado. 

Demetrius had traveled eight miles downstream, somehow navigating whirlpools and waters that run more than 10-feet deep.

His grandmother, Anita Neudorf, said that Demetrius wasn't fazed by the adventure and wanted to go back on the river on what he called his "boat."

"His trucks mean the world to him and I think that's what saved him," Neudorf told the Edmonton Sun.  "He wasn't letting go of the truck for love or for money."

By The Survivors Club Staff
July 20, 2009

A special branch of The Survivors Club is made up of people who live to the age of 100 and beyond.  Once almost non-existent, The so-called Centenarians Club will reach six million worldwide by the year 2050, according to a new study from the US Census Bureau. Membership in The Centenarians Club will grow at more than 20 times the rate of the total population in mid-century, according to the National Institute on Aging.

Indeed, the fastest growing segment of the population in many countries around the world may surprise you.  It turns out that the number of people aged 80 and over is projected to increase by 233 percent in the next 30 years.  This so-called "oldest old" population is expanding rapidly in many places, placing a strain on their children and grandchildren.

In the year 2040, 14 percent of the world's population will be senior citizens.  That's 1.3 billion older people over age 65 according to the US Census Bureau.

"People aged 65 and over will soon outnumber children under age 5 for the first time in history," says a report by Kevin Kinsella and Wan He of the Census Bureau.

"Aging is affecting every country in every part of the world," said Richard Suzman of the National Institute of Aging, which commissioned the report.

By The Survivors Club Staff
July 20, 2009

You're lost in the Amazon.  Would you eat centipedes and spiders to survive?  Would you even know which critters were safe to swallow and which were poisonous?

What follows is TSC's Editor's Choice for the most interesting article on survivorship in recent days. 

It's a terrific summary of some of the most amazing wilderness survival stories in recent memory, including two Frenchmen who got lost in the Amazon and survived for seven weeks eating spiders, frogs and centipedes.  When he was rescued, one of the men was partially paralyzed after swallowing venom from a poorly cooked giant spider.

By The Survivors Club Staff
July 16, 2009

Saved by a pizza! Or maybe two pizzas!

That's the eye-catching headline in The Times of London.

Jamie Neale, a British backpacker, spent 12 days lost in the rugged Australian bush and managed to survive in part because of his last supper.

Jamie, 19, gorged on several pizzas the night before he went missing on July 3rd in the Blue Mountains, 50 miles west of Sydney in New South Wales.  “You can’t say he survived because of the pizza but it would have helped him a bit,” says Australian survival expert Paul Luckin.  Jamie set off on his outdoor adventure with only a bottle of water and two bread rolls.

For more on outdoor survival, take a look at this article by Luke Leitch in The Times of London.  The story features Survivors Club founder Ben Sherwood's thoughts on surviving and thriving in the wilderness.

Survivors Club trivia question of the day:

What's the best survival food in terms of cost per calorie?  Peanut butter, according to US air force survival specialists.  If you've got enough water, peanut butter is an affordable and rich source of energy.

By The Survivors Club Staff
July 15, 2009

It may be the largest gathering ever of American shark attack survivors.  Today in Washington, DC, nine shark attack survivors are lobbying Congress to put new restrictions on fishing for sharks. 

"The media makes sharks out to be monsters, some people make them out to be huggable little creatures, but neither is completely true," says Al Brenneka, of Raleigh, North Carolina, who lost his arm after being bitten while surfing in Del Ray Beach, Florida, in 1976. Brenneka now runs a shark attack survivors network and also tags and releases sharks for research. "Sharks are wild animals that deserve our respect, not our retribution."

The nine shark attack survivors are pushing for the Shark Conservation Act of 2009, which would strengthen the ban on so-called shark "finning" in US waters and encourage shark conservation programs around the world, according to a news release from the Pew Environment Group.

By The Survivors Club Staff
July 14, 2009

The Survivor of the Week award goes to Hannah Clark, a young British woman who proves that the healing power of the human heart.

In 1995, British doctors came up with a radical idea to save 11-month-old Hannah who was experiencing heart failure. In a so-called "piggyback operation," they implanted a donor heart from a 5-month-old baby directly into Hannah's own failing heart.  The theory behind the operation was that the donor heart would pump while Hannah's heart rested.

By The Survivors Club Staff
July 14, 2009

The Survivors Club grew by 131 people last night when a Southwest Airlines plane made an emergency landing in West Virginia after a hole opened in the body of the plane and the cabin lost pressure.

Flight 2294 bound for Baltimore-Washington landed in Charleston, W.Va., about 50 minutes after its departure from Nashville, according to the Charleston Daily Mail.  No injuries were reported.

Passenger Brian Cunningham told NBC's Today show that he had dozed off in his seat when he was awakened by "the loudest roar I'd ever heard."

"There was no pop, no creak, no explosion-like noise," Cunningham went on.  "There was just a loud roar. It took me a couple of seconds to wake up. I got the baseball cap out of my face and I look up and there's the sun coming through the ceiling. ... I saw sky where I shouldn't be seeing it."

What caused the hole in the plane?  So far, experts are stumped, according to The Christian Science Monitor.  Metal fatigue and corrosion are immediate suspects.  They were both involved in the 1988 gash in an Aloha Airlines 737 that resulted in rapid decompression, killing one flight attendant (who was sucked out) and injuring 65 passengers and crew.

By The Survivors Club Staff
July 13, 2009

Count your moles. That's the key lesson from scientists who have discovered two new genes that double your risk of developing melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. In 2009, 68,720 people will be diagnosed with melanoma in the US, according to the National Cancer Institute.  Some 8,650 people will die from the disease.

According to a new study in the journal Nature Genetics, the number of moles on your skin is the most important factor in your risk of getting melanoma -- even greater than your exposure to the sun.  Indeed, the new study says that sunshine only causes a small percentage of melanoma cases.

Warnings about the health risk of sun exposure are overstated, according to the study's authors.  The real public health focus should concentrate on people most at risk – namely anyone with more than 100 moles on their body, redheads and people with fair skin. 

People at risk should be taught to check their moles for changes in shape, size or color.

For more on surviving and thriving with skin cancer, please visit The Survivors Club Skin Cancer Support Center.

For more on the new study, please keep reading...

By The Survivors Club Staff
July 10, 2009

If you're unlucky enough to have a heart attack or heart failure, where you live may determine whether you survive.  According to a new study in the medical journal Circulation, patients may be three times more likely to die in some US hospitals than others.

Hospitals in northeastern states like Massachusetts and New Jersey have the lowest death rates while those in Arkansas, Oklahoma and California have the highest death rates, according to researchers from Yale University School of Medicine.

The new study offers insight into the best places for the cure and treatment of heart attacks.  "This suggests that patients' outcomes are dependent, at least in part, on the hospital that provides their care," Krumholz said in an American Heart Association press release.

From CBSNews.com:

Top 3 Hospitals with Lowest Heart Attack Death Rates

Heart Hospital Of Austin (TX) -- 10.9%
New York-Presbyterian (NY ) -- 11.1%
NYU hospital Center (NY) -- 11.1%

Bottom 3 Hospitals with Highest Heart Attack Death Rates

Southwest, Mississippi Regional (MS) -- 24.9%
Hospital Damas Inc. (PR) -- 24.5%
Jefferson Regional Medical (PA) -- 23.9%

Where does your state and hospital rank?  

By The Survivors Club Staff
July 10, 2009

You're awaiting test results from the doctor, but she never calls. You breathe a sigh of relief.  No news is good news, right?  Wrong.

It turns out that seven percent of the time, doctors fail to let patients know about abnormal cancer screenings and other tests, according to a new study in the Archives of Internal Medicine.  At some offices, the failure rate was zero while at other offices, it was as high as 26 percent.

These mismanaged results can pose an immediate health danger and a long-term threat.  "Failure to report abnormal test results can lead to serious, even lethal consequences for the patient," says lead author Dr. Lawrence Casalino of Weill Cornell Medical College.  "It really does happen all too often," he goes on.

"If you've had a test, whether it be blood test or some kind of X-ray or ultrasound, don't assume because you haven't heard from your physician that the result is normal," Casalino warns.

Medical offices that use electronic records systems did worse or no better than those with old-fashioned paper systems in the study of more than 5,000 patients.  The study examined tests including cholesterol blood work, mammograms, Pap smears and screening tests for colon cancer.

What can you do to make sure you get your test results?