Briefs

Critical Home Care moves into N.C. SOUTHFIELD, Mich. - Critical Home Care acquired Trinity Healthcare, a North Carolina-based durable medical equipment company in September. With locations in Winston Salem and Huntersville, N. C., and Marietta and Demorest, Ga., Trinity provides oxygen and other respiratory services, as well as such durable medical equipment as wheelchairs and hospital beds. It employs more than 50 people. This is the fourth acquisition for Critical Home Care in recent weeks. This is Critical Home Care's second DME acquisition in as many months. It August, it acquired Illinois-based American Oxygen & Medical Equipment. It also operates four retail stores in New York. Man pleads guilty to killing Apria nurse REDMOND, Wash. - A 24-year-old man admitted in September that he shot and killed an Apria employee on July 26, 2002. Jason Ray Taylor admitted in King County Superior Court that he was guilty of second-degree murder. He will serve 16 to 25 years in prison. Taylor approached Victoria Mardis, 49, an Apria senior nurse, after she pulled her car over to pick up some papers that had blown off the roof. Taylor asked her something like, “Have you seen three little kids?” and when Mardis turned to answer, he shot her once in the face, prosecutors said. Taylor was drunk and high on cocaine-laced marijuana at the time, his attorney said. New study: Helium helps COPD sufferers breathe LONDON - Breathing a mixture of helium and oxygen is beneficial for people suffering acute episodes of asthma, as well as for people with COPD, according to new studies reported last week at the European Respiratory Society meeting in Glasgow, Scotland. The low density of helium makes the mixture easier to breath, and for oxygen to diffuse throughout the lungs, according to Reuters. In one two-year study, fewer than half as many patients in the helium-oxygen group (8% vs. 20%) needed to stay in intensive care for more than four days, and the helium-oxygen patients were seven times less likely to require mechanical ventilation (1% against 7 percent).