Tag Archives: Survival

The Age Of Pandemics-

Posted on May 3, 2009 by | Leave a comment

The Age of Pandemics- Wall Street Journal

The threat of deadly new viruses is on the rise due to population growth, climate change and increased contact between humans and animals. What the world needs to do to prepare.

By LARRY BRILLIANT

In 1967, the country’s surgeon general, William Stewart, famously said, “The time has come to close the book on infectious diseases. We have basically wiped out infection in the United States.” This premature victory declaration, perhaps based on early public health victories over 19th-century infectious diseases, has entered the lore of epidemiologists who know that, if anything, the time has come to open the book to a new and dangerous chapter on 21st-century communicable diseases.

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Indeed, to the epidemiological community, the Influenza Pandemic of 2009 is one of the most widely anticipated diseases in history. Epidemiologists have been shouting from rooftops that a pandemic (or, a world-wide epidemic) of influenza is overdue, and that it is not a matter of “if” but “when.” The current pathogen creating the threat is actually a mixture of viral genetic elements from all over the globe that have sorted, shifted, sorted, shifted, drifted and recombined to form this worrisome virus.

No one knows if the 2009 swine flu will behave like the 1918 Spanish flu that killed 50 million to 100 million world-wide, or like the 1957 Asian flu and 1968 Hong Kong flu that killed far fewer. This 2009 flu may weaken and lose its virulence, or strengthen and gain virulence — we just do not know.

Here’s the good news: Compared with a few years ago, the world is somewhat better prepared to deal with pandemic influenza. There have been training meetings, table-top exercises, dry runs and preparedness drills at virtually every level of government and civil society. World Health Organization member states have agreed on a set of regulations that require all members to report the status of diseases of global significance within their borders. We have two effective antiviral drugs, at least for the time being. There have been some breakthroughs to reduce the time required to get effective vaccines into the field, and there is even a small chance that last year’s seasonal vaccine will help protect lives from H1N1. In the U.S. at least, influenza surveillance has improved…read more here…

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Girl Lives 118 Days without a Heart.

Posted on November 23, 2008 by | 2 Comments

This is an inspiring story about a young girl’s desire to live. She can teach all of us a lesson..

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By Jim Loney

MIAMI (Reuters) – An American teen-ager survived for nearly four months without a heart, kept alive by a custom-built artificial blood-pumping device, until she was able to have a heart transplant, doctors in Miami said on Wednesday.

The doctors said they knew of another case in which an adult had been kept alive in Germany for nine months without a heart but said they believed this was the first time a child had survived in this manner for so long.

The patient, D’Zhana Simmons of South Carolina, said the experience of living for so long with a machine pumping her blood was “scary.”

“You never knew when it would malfunction,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, at a news conference at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Medical Center.

“It was like I was a fake person, like I didn’t really exist. I was just here,” she said of living without a heart.

Simmons, 14, suffered from dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the patient’s heart becomes weakened and enlarged and does not pump blood efficiently…..read more here.

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Posted in Diseases, Health & Fitness, Society, Survival

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TV Ads Contribute to Childhood Obesity, Economists Say

Posted on November 23, 2008 by | Leave a comment

By RONI CARYN RABIN
Published: November 20, 2008

Banning fast food advertisements from children’s television programs would reduce the number of overweight children in the U.S. by 18 percent and decrease the number of overweight teens by 14 percent, economists have estimated in a new study.

The researchers used several statistical models to link obesity rates to the amount of time spent viewing fast food advertising, finding that viewing more fast food commercials on television raises the risk of obesity in children. The study appears in this month’s issue of The Journal of Law and Economics.

“There is not a lot of evidence that overweight kids are more likely to watch TV than other kids,” said Michael Grossman, professor of economics at the City University of New York. “We’re arguing the causality is how many messages are aired — seeing more of these messages is leading people to put on weight.” The study’s co-authors are Shin-Yi Chou, an economist at Lehigh College, and Inas Rashad, an economist at Georgia State University.

But the researchers’ estimate relies on older data gathered in the late 1990s, according to Elaine Kolish, a spokesman for the Council of Better Business Bureaus. Since then, two of the largest fast food chains — Burger King and McDonald’s — and more than a dozen other packaged food companies have signed on to the council’s Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, she said, pledging to advertise only their healthier products to children under age 12….read more here..

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Your Birthday May Increase Your Risk Of Asthma

Posted on November 22, 2008 by | Leave a comment

Perhaps Vitamin D deficiency is directly related to this increase in asthma development more than the infections themselves. It is well established that vitamin D, a hormone, can affect the immune system.

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Your birthday may decide your risk of asthma
By Sue Mueller

Saturday Nov 22, 2008 (foodconsumer.org) — Your birthday may decide your risk of asthma, according to a new study led by Dr. Tina Hartert, director of the Center for Asthma Research and Environmental Health at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tenn.

The study in the first December issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine found babies born in autumn, 4 months before the peak of winter virus season, were 30 percent more likely to acquire asthma.

The researchers speculated that winter viruses like respiratory syncytial virus or RSV may be responsible for the elevated risk of asthma and suggested that preventing these viruses could prevent asthma.

For the study, Hartert and team followed up more than 95,000 infants born between 1995 and 2000 under the Tennessee Medicaid program from birth through early childhood to examine whether the timing of birth and seasonality of winter virus was associated with the development of asthma.

They found that babies born in the fall or autumn, which is about four months before the peak of the winter virus season, had a 29 percent increased risk of asthma.

The speculation as to what causes the elevated risk of asthma is not new.

A study led by Jackson DJ and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and published in the Oct 2008 issue of American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine has already shown that RSV was strongly associated with asthma symptoms like wheezing.

Kackson et al. found “from birth to age 3 years, wheezing with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) (odds ratio [OR], 2.6), rhinovirus (RV) (OR, 9.8), or both RV and RSV (OR , 10) was associated with increased asthma risk at age 6 years.

Hartert was cited as saying that parents should practice good hygiene and take infection-control measures such as washing their hands frequently to prevent viral infections and the development of asthma in their babies.

A health observer affiliated with foodconsumer.org said babies and their mothers in winter are less likely to be outdoors and suffer vitamin D deficiency, which would reduce the immunity and increase the risk of winter virus infection. Because of this, supplements may be taken during pregnancy and breastfeeding. Or eat some oily fish

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Posted in Diseases, Health & Fitness, Medicine, Society, Survival, Vitamins, Wellness

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Exercise and Sleep Help Fight Cancer

Posted on November 22, 2008 by | Leave a comment

Boston – A recent study has shown that women who exercise regularly and get a full eight hours of sleep each night helps to bring down the risk of getting cancer.

Lisa Nemcheck, a breast cancer survivor says that she has come to know that exercise and sleep is helping her remain cancer free. She says, “I recently joined a gym. I started swimming, and I exercise five times a week. I listen to my body, and my body tells me that I do have to rest.”

It has been discovered that regular exercise can help to bring down the risk of cancer in women by 20 percent in a study done by the National Cancer Institue. The fact that exercise has many positive effects on your body such as body weight, immune system functions and hormone functions makes researchers believe that exercise is extremely helpful in reducing the risk of cancer even though there hasn’t been an association between exercise and cancer that has been proven.

Dr. Susan Boolbol says, “This is one of the first studies that has shown that in women who do not have a history of breast cancer, they can actually reduce their risk by exercising.”

Research also shows that even if a women exercises it won’t help unless she gets a full nights sleep also. Sleeping and exercising go hand in hand. Without the proper amount of sleep the exercise doesn’t really matter when reducing cancer risk because it fights the benefits of the exercise. It has been shown that inadequate sleep can actually increase the risk of cancer by 50 percent….read more here

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