Month: November 2013

3 Kids Get E. Coli Infections from Dayton Petting Zoo

At least three Minnesota children are recovering from E-coli infections after visiting a pumpkin patch and farm. The Minnesota Department of Health is investigating after they say the children had been in contact with animals at Dehn’s Pumpkins in Dayton, Minn.

The department is following up with groups that have visited the farm since Oct. 12.

The three cases were all children, ranging in age from 15 months to 7 years and are residents of the Twin Cities metro area. One child is hospitalized with hemolytic uremic syndrome, a serious complication of an E. coli infection characterized by kidney failure. The others were not hospitalized and are recovering, according to the MDH.

The MDH says E. coli is common around animals like cattle and goats and that this is not unique to Dehn’s Farm. Access to cattle and goats at Dehn’s farms has been closed pending the investigation, but the pumpkin patch remains open. The owners are cooperating with the investigation.

MDH Officials stress if you come in contact with animals such as cows and goats that you should wash hands thoroughly with soap and water immediately after.

Symptoms of E. coli include severe stomach cramps and diarrhea with a low-grade or no fever.

Source; http://kstp.com/article/stories/s3200943.shtml

Woman who never aged dies at 20

A woman who never aged has died.

Brooke Greenberg, of Reisterstown, Maryland, looked and behaved like a toddler until her last breath.

Brooke was eventually diagnosed by her physician with “Syndrome X”, an unidentifiable and unexplained rare disease – which is known to affect only about six people in the world – where they do not age physically or mentally since early childhood.

“While the outside world may have noticed Brooke’s physical stature and been puzzled by her unique development state, she brought joy and love to her family,” Rabbi Andrew Busch, who delivered the eulogy at the funeral yesterday, told the New York Daily News. “Her parents, three sisters and extended family showered her with love and respected her dignity throughout her entire life.”

Brooke and her family appeared on Katie Couric’s talk show in the US in January.

They said Brooke could not talk, had baby teeth and still had to be pushed about in a chair.

“From age one to four, Brooke changed. She got a little bit bigger. But age four, four to five, she stopped,” her father told Couric.

Source: fox news

 

How Music Can Boost Our Workouts

Making music — and not just listening to it — while exercising makes the exercise easier, a remarkable new experiment finds, suggesting that the human love of music may have evolved, in part, to ease physical effort.

Researchers and exercisers have long known, of course, that listening to music alters the experience of exercising. Earlier studies have shown, for instance, that briskly paced music tends to inspire equally briskly paced workouts, and that music also can distract and calm nervous competitors before a race or other high-pressure situation, improving their subsequent performance.

But to date, no one had thought to investigate whether creating — and not merely hearing — music might have an effect on workouts, let alone whether the impact would be qualitatively different than when exercisers passively listen to music pumped through gym speakers or their ear buds.

So, for the new study, which was published online last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognition and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and other institutions began by inventing an electronic kit that could be integrated into the internal workings of weight-training machines, transforming them into oversize boom boxes. Once installed, the kit would produce a range of propulsive, electronic-style music with a variety of sound levels and rhythms, depending on how the machine’s weight bar or other mechanisms were manipulated during workouts.

The researchers installed the kits into three different workout machines, one a stair-stepper, the other two weight machines with bars that could be raised or pulled down to stimulate various muscles.

They then recruited a group of 63 healthy men and women and divided them into groups, each of which was assigned to use one of the musically equipped machines during a strenuous though brief six-minute exercise session.

As the volunteers strained, their machines chirped and pinged with a thumping 130 beats per minute, the sound level rising or falling with each individual’s effort and twining with the rhythms created by the other two exercisers. “Participants could express themselves on the machines by, for instance, modulating rhythms and creating melodies,” said Thomas Hans Fritz, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute who led the study.

The groups were, in effect, D.J.’ing their workouts, creating sounds that echoed their physical efforts.

During a separate exercise session, each group used the same machines, but minus the musical add-ons, while elsewhere in the gym, other volunteers sweated at the musically equipped machines, meaning that one group was passively listening to sounds created by another.

Throughout each workout, the researchers monitored the force their volunteers generated while using the machines, as well as whether the weight lifters’ movements tended to stutter or flow and how much oxygen the volunteers consumed, a reliable measure of physical effort. Afterward, the scientists asked the volunteers to rate the tolerability or unpleasantness of the session, on a scale from 1 to 20.

Tabulated afterward, the results showed that most of the volunteers had generated significantly greater muscular force while working at the musically equipped machines than the unmodified ones. They also had used less oxygen to generate that force and reported that their exertions had felt less strenuous. Their movements were also more smooth in general, resulting in a steadier flow of music.

Creating their own rhythms and melodies had lowered the physiological cost of exercise and greatly increased its subjective allure compared with when the exercisers passively listened to virtually the same music, Dr. Fritz said.

A similar dynamic may have motivated early humans to whistle or hum while they hunted or tilled and later to raise their voices in song during barn raisings and other intense physical labor, he said.

But why orchestrating your own soundtrack should have more physical benefit than merely hearing similar music in the background is not altogether clear.

“We think that the observed effects are most probably due to a greater degree of emotional motor control,” when you actively engage in making music, Dr. Fritz said. Emotional motor control, as opposed to the more workaday “deliberate” type that normally guides our muscular movements, he said, operates almost below consciousness. Your body responds to it with little volition and you move, he said, with reduced effort and increased joy. This is “musical ecstasy,” Dr. Fritz said, and it seems to have permeated, to some degree, the gym where the exercisers composed music while sweating.

Unfortunately, the musical kits that Dr. Fritz and his colleagues have developed are not available commercially, although they may be in the future. For now, he said, you may need to content yourself with purposely ignoring the supplied soundtrack at your local gym and instead singing to yourself. Perhaps harmonize, no matter how tunelessly, with a workout partner. Disdain naysayers and music lovers. You will be, in the felicitous phrasing of Dr. Fritz, “jymming; that’s like jamming, but with a ‘y’ from ‘gym.’”

Source: http://nyti.ms/1aBf66B

Sneaky Hairstyle Tricks To Disguise Gray Roots

If you find gray roots and regrowth peeking through too soon, try one of these handy tricks to disguise them as long as possible:

 1.) Don’t pluck: You may feel tempted to pluck those grays away, but try to resist. Plucking can damage the hair follicle and can possibly lead to bald patches.

2.) Braided styles: French braids or braids along your hairline (like Blake Lively’s or Jada Pinkett Smith’s below) are a great way to tuck away grays and conceal any appearance of regrowth between color applications.

3.) Change your part: For some women, more grays appear on one side of the head than the other. Plus, parting your hair in the same place can make regrowth more prominent. You can switch your part to the other side or try a slightly messy part to help conceal the grays.

4.) Clever clips: Embellished clips or barrettes can conceal root growth and grays. Try twisting and pinning your roots underneath the colored hair. Or, clip hair into a half-up hairstyle to cover grays at the crown and part if you don’t have time to color yet.

5.) Headband or scarf: Wrap a carefully-placed headband or scarf around your head to cover up the roots and leave only your colored ends showing.

6.) Powder: If you’re in a pinch and can’t color your hair, find a colored powder makeup, such as eye shadow or foundation, which matches your hair color. Use a damp brush and dab powder over roots to temporarily camouflage them.

Wipe out gray roots at home with the perfect hair color match from eSalon, which provides personalized hair color made just for you! First time clients can get a full color kit for only $9.95* (50% off!) with a satisfaction guarantee.

Source: http://bit.ly/185vma6

Smokers most likely to think about quitting smoking every Monday

Monday is the day when smokers are most likely to think about quitting smoking, a new study of Google search queries has found.

Researchers from San Diego State University, the Santa Fe Institute, The Monday Campaigns and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health examined weekly patterns in smoking cessation contemplations for the first time.

They monitored global Google search query logs from 2008 to 2012 in English, French, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish for searches related to quitting, such as ‘help quit smoking’.

The study found that people search about quitting smoking more often early in the week, with the highest query volumes on Mondays, using a daily measure representing the proportion of quit smoking searches to all searches.

This pattern was consistent across all six languages, suggesting a global predisposition to thinking about quitting smoking early in the week, particularly on Mondays.

English searches, for example, showed Monday query volumes were 11 per cent greater than on Wednesdays, 67 percent greater than on Fridays, and 145 percent greater than on Saturdays.

In total for all six languages, Monday query volumes were 25 percent higher than the combined mean number of searches for Tuesday through Sunday.

“Popular belief has been that the decision to quit smoking is unpredictable or even chaotic,” said the study’s lead author, San Diego State University’s John W Ayers.

“By taking a bird’s-eye view of Google searches, however, we find anything but chaos. Instead, Google search data reveal interest in quitting is part of a larger collective pattern of behaviour dependent on the day of the week,” Ayers said.

“Campaigns for people to quit may benefit from shifting to weekly cues. We know it takes smokers many quit attempts before they succeed, so prompting them to try again on Mondays may be an effective and easy to implement campaign,” said Joanna E Cohen, coauthor and Director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Global Tobacco Control.

The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Internal Medicine.

 See more at: http://bit.ly/175rdbj

Cervical Cancer vaccine may miss mark for some black women

A black female’s genetic make-up may reduce the effectiveness of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine in curbing rates of cervical cancer among that population, according to preliminary findings by researchers at Duke University School of Medicine and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Epidemiology Department.

Cautioning that more research is needed before these early findings can be fully confirmed—HPV researchers elsewhere say it’s not been proven that other regions are witnessing the same patterns as those shown in this new study—the North Carolina research team investigated the potential interplay between the vaccine and different types of HPV diagnosed among the 572 Durham County, N.C. women who enrolled in the study.

“It was a single population from a single clinic. All of these women came a small geographic area, and we know that women tend to have sex partners in the area where they live,” Dr. Rebecca Perkins, a Boston University researcher of HPV in poor and under-served communities and gynecologist told the Grio. “It’s hard to [apply] take this to any other states or, for that matter, to a health center outside of Duke.”

Of the 572 women, ages 18 and older, 280 of them were black and 292 were non-Hispanic whites.

In reviewing cervical pap smears taken since 2010, more than half of the women had changes associated with developing cervical cancer — 239 early-stage and 88 in the advanced stage. And many of the women — 73 percent — were infected with more than one type of HPV. There are 40 subtypes in total.

The HPV vaccine prevents infection from subtypes 16 and 18. Combined, those two account for 70 percent of cervical cancers, these researchers wrote.

In the study out today, the white women with early and advanced pre-cancerous abnormalities tested positive for the HPV 16 and HPV 18 subtypes. But in black women, neither HPV 16 nor HPV 18 was commonly found.

Instead, the most commonly detected subtypes during the early precancerous stage were HPV subtypes 33, 35, 58 and 68. HPV subtypes 31, 35, 45, 56, 58, 66 and 68 were the most commonly detected in black women with advanced-stage pre-cancerous abnormalities.

“Compared with white women, we saw that African-American women had about half as many infections with HPV 16 and 18, the subtypes that are covered by HPV vaccines,” said Adriana Vidal, Ph.D., an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Duke and the study’s lead investigator, according to a press release. “Since African-American women don’t seem to be getting the same subtypes of HPV with the same frequency, the vaccines aren’t helping all women equally.”

This study has not been approved for publication in a medical journal, through the authors has applied to have their work published, Duke Medical Center spokeswoman Rachel Harrison told the Grio via email.

The research team is slated to present its findings during the American Association for Cancer Research’s 12th annual International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research, which opens Monday in National Harbor, Md.

Morehouse School of Medicine’s Dr. Hedwige DiDi Saint-Louis said she hopes these preliminary findings lead no one to reflexively believe the vaccine is either ineffective or unnecessary. She will continue to encourage her patients to get vaccinated, she said.

In 2006, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the HPV vaccine for prevention of cervical cancer, a disease which kills a greater percentage of black women than white women. Sold under the brand names of Gardasil or Cervarix, the drug has been a debate for many, largely because it’s recommended for boys and girls to begin getting the series of three vaccination shots starting when they are about 11 or 12 years old.

One U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study concluded that the vaccine had cut in half the rate of sexually transmitted disease infections in teen girls.

Although a new HPV vaccine targeting HPV subtypes 16, 18 and seven other types is currently being tested in clinical trials, the Duke and University of North Carolina researchers noted that, even if approved for use, it may not address the challenges detailed in their research.

Similarly, Saint-Louis added that this study spotlights the lingering question of whether pharmaceutical firms, among others, are doing enough to ensure that their clinical trials include all racial and ethnic groups. Coupled with that is a lingering reluctance of many non-whites to sign up for trials that do exist.

“With most of these clinical trials, there’s an issue with recruiting African-Americans and other minority populations,” Saint-Louis said. “ … Always, we need to look at genetic differences in disease and treatment. The goal in clinical trials should be to get as wide a circle of participants as possible so that the trials represent the population at large. Then, you can confidently generalize about what the findings truly mean.”

Taking race-based genetics into account should be a front-end priority for drug-makers aiming to make effective medicines, Saint-Louis said. “If it isn’t, that greatly increases the likelihood that [pharmacology] is going to miss something that makes a difference for minority groups.”

Patricio Meneses, an epidemiologist and HPV researcher at Fordham University in New York City, said drug-makers might be better advised—and the public better served—by developing a more powerful “second-generation vaccine that actually attacks the biology of virus … after it gets inside the body’s cells.”

The current vaccines don’t go that far, he added. They work by keep the many subtypes of viruses from attaching to the outside of cells.

Source: http://on.thegrio.com/1avcwLs

UN confirms 10 polio cases in northeast Syria

The UN’s health agency said on Tuesday it has confirmed 10 polio cases in northeast Syria, the first confirmed outbreak of the diseases in the country in 14 years, with a risk of spreading across the region.

 Officials are awaiting lab results on another 12 cases showing polio symptoms, said World Health Organization spokesman Oliver Rosenbauer.

Rosenbauer said the confirmed cases are among babies and toddlers, all under 2, who were “under immunized”.

The polio virus, a highly contagious disease, usually infects children in unsanitary conditions through the consumption of food or liquid contaminated with feces. It attacks the nerves and can kill or paralyze, and can spread widely and unnoticed before it starts crippling children.

“This is a communicable disease — with population movements it can travel to other areas,” said Rosenbauer. “So the risk is high of spread across the region.”

Syria had launched a vaccination campaign around the country days after the Geneva-based WHO said it had received reports of children showing symptoms of polio in Syria’s Deir el-Zour province, but the campaign faces difficulty with lack of access in many parts of the war-torn country.

Nearly all Syrian children were vaccinated against the disease before the civil war began more than 2 years ago. Polio was last reported in Syria in 1999.

The Syrian conflict, which began as a largely peaceful uprising against President Bashar Assad in March 2011, has triggered a humanitarian crisis on a massive scale, killing more than 100,000 people, driving nearly 7 million more from their homes and devastating cities and towns.

UN officials have warned of the spread of disease in Syria because of lack of access to basic hygiene and vaccinations.

Source: http://bit.ly/1hpRza0

Get dangerous germs out of your home

Even if you’re one of the many people who believe that exposing yourself to day-to-day germs is healthy for your immune system, it’s still wise to take steps to protect yourself from the most infectious germs in your home.

“Bugs like Escherichia coli (E.coli), salmonella and campylobacter can make you pretty sick or even kill you,” says Douglas Powell, professor of diagnostic medicine and pathobiology at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, and author of Barfblog.com. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that seven pathogens cause about 90% of these illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths. Scientists dub them “food-borne illnesses” because they’re microbes that invade your body through the gastrointestinal tract.

(Considering that we put our hands to our faces anywhere from 18 to 40 times per hour, is it any surprise that our mouths are the primary point of entry?)

You’ll recognize the poisoning by the fever, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea that results. Luckily, it isn’t too hard to eliminate the dangerous microbes you may unknowingly drag into your home. “Chlorine bleach is your friend,” says Powell, referring to one of the most effective toxin-destroying products around. Rooting out the microbes’ whereabouts, on the other hand, can be trickier. Read on, and you’ll learn how to eliminate from your home the microbes and toxins that could affect your family’s health.

Good: Rearrange your fridge to reduce your risk

You don’t have to travel to Latin America to experience a case of Montezuma’s Revenge. Each year, one in six Americans contracts food poisoning right here on U.S. soil, according to the CDC. In fact, a mere trip to your refrigerator could put you at risk. “The raw meat you bring home from the grocery store has bacteria that can result in diarrheal disease,” says Dr. Rose Devasia, assistant professor at University of Louisville School of Public Health And Information Sciences in Louisville, Kentucky.

A recent report from the Center for Science in the Public Interest listed ground beef, chicken, turkey and steak as the most susceptible to disease. Devasia recommends double-bagging the meats or placing them on the bottom shelf of your refrigerator on a plate, away from the likes of the apples, strawberries or celery you’ll eat cold.

“You’ll go on to cook your meat to kill these microbes,” she says, “but you don’t want that slimy liquid from the package to spill onto the fruits and vegetables you eat raw.”

Better: Place toothbrushes far away from the john

You wouldn’t lick your toilet on purpose. Yet leaving a damp, exposed toothbrush within three feet of the loo isn’t much better. “Studies have shown that bacteria in the toilet can disperse in the air after flushing it,” says Devasia. “Toilet water — along with whatever you’ve deposited in it — gets aerosolized and lands onto what’s nearby, like a toothbrush or hand towel.”

A recent University of Manchester study found that the average toothbrush contained about 10 million germs, including E. coli and staphylococci. An easy fix: Put the lid down on the toilet before you yank the lever to dispose of the contents.

Adds Devasia: “We all know the bathroom is not the cleanest place, so wash your hands to avoid getting yourself sick.” Soaping up at the sink can reduce your chance of getting ill by 30%.

Best: Leave your shoes at the front door

Sleeping with the enemy may only be a closet door away. If you walk through your house with your shoes on, you may be dragging in all kinds of nasty germs and chemicals from the great outdoors. The bottoms of your shoes spread many unhealthy agents, from pollen and pesticides on the lawn to salmonella in bird poop.

In fact, as many as nine different kinds of pathogens can thrive on shoes, according to a University of Arizona study. Microbes can survive and even multiply because of nutrient-rich soil and other deposits left on the soles. “In my house, we take our shoes off when we enter,” says Devasia. “Why drag in a bunch of dirt and dust? Even if you clean floors and carpets regularly, there is some level of dirt that remains.”

Source:  http://www.medicalwebtimes.com/read/get_dangerous_germs_out_of_your_home/

Man lives without breathing for a month

A year ago, 42-year-old runner Victor Carlos never thought he’d be excited just to see the starting line. But that was before he almost died.

In fact, the father of two girls didn’t breathe for a month; a machine pushed oxygen through his body.

Now he’s training for another marathon.

It all began in December with a bad bout of the flu that led to an acute bacterial infection. By the time he checked into the hospital, Carlos was barely hanging on.

“We walked into the triage, and his oxygen level was only 57%, and everybody turned a corner,” Carlos’ wife, Brenda Voglewede, told CNN. Healthy blood oxygen levels are higher than 95%.

Carlos was in deep trouble. He had developed acute respiratory distress syndrome, also known as ARDS. It was slowly killing Carlos by attacking his lungs.

“Not only that, but he had multiple organ failure related to the infection. So his kidneys were not working. His liver was not working. And his bone marrow was failing as well,” said Dr. Ashok Babu, a cardiothoracic surgeon at the University of Colorado Hospital.

“The lungs basically collapse down to nothing. … They are just resting.”

Dr. Ashok Babu

Babu had no time to spare. He knew trying to force air into Carlos’ lungs would do more harm than good. But without oxygen, Carlos’ organs would soon shut down. Babu had one shot: a procedure called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO.

With this treatment, doctors turn down the patient’s respirator, then insert a special tube through the heart. A pump draws blood from the body, flushes it through an oxygenation machine that removes the carbon dioxide and delivers oxygen back to the heart. It functions as an external lung, without the patient taking a single breath.

“So (oxygenated blood) could pass through the lungs, and the lungs didn’t have to do anything to it because it was already processed,” Babu said. “And what we see on the X-ray is the lungs basically collapse down to nothing. … They are just resting. We support the patient until the lungs can heal on their own.”

Carlos’ family was told he had a 40% to 50% chance of survival.

“Dr. Babu initially said he thought he’d be on ECMO for a week,” Voglewede recalled. “Then the week turned into two weeks. And then he’s just like, ‘Well, sometimes you just have to wait these things out.’ ”

Babu said, “Two weeks into it we were all pretty worried that we had this young guy whose lungs just didn’t seem to be coming back. At the time, he was the patient we had had on ECMO the longest in the history of our program.”

Two weeks became four. Carlos didn’t take a single breath for a month.

Then a breakthrough came.

“Somewhat miraculously, his lungs just started to open up on their own,” Babu said.

By that time, Carlos was a shadow of his former self. He had lost more than 30 pounds.

“You can imagine, before going into the hospital you are this active person. Then you go in, they put you under, and when you wake … you can’t sit up, you can’t move your arms up and you look at your legs, and they’re just not there anymore,” Carlos said. “Then you realize it’s far worse than you ever expected it to be.”

Still, he was determined to make a full recovery. Seven weeks after entering the hospital, Carlos got to go home.

Carlos recently completed a 20-mile run while training for his next marathon.

“I started out just walking a block and then pushing that out the following day to a block and a half, or two. Then it was like walking to school with the girls,” he said.

Remarkably, just six months later, Carlos is running.

“My goal at the time was to be able to jog nonstop for three miles. And I didn’t think that was going to happen until November. That happened in May,” he said.

Once he was able to cover three miles, the distance he usually started out at to train for a marathon, “that’s when I knew it was just a matter of time.”

Carlos has set his sights on completing the Denver Rock ‘N Roll Marathon on October 20. He’s already covered the 26.2 miles in a training run.

Carlos isn’t running for time. He’s running just because he can.

“Every long run gets a little emotional for me this time around. I think of all the people who were there when I couldn’t do it for myself. I think of the nurses, people at work, my boss who sent cards … neighbors, friends, family, all praying for me,” he said.

Source:

AIIMS researchers prove yoga’s benefits for COPD patients

 The study by researchers at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Department of Pulmonary Medicine and Sleep Disorders found that lung function, shortness of breath, and inflammation all showed significant improvement after patients completed 12 weeks of training.

“COPD is a systemic inflammatory disease that causes difficulty breathing. We investigated to see whether simple, structured yoga training affects the level of inflammation, shortness of breath, and quality of life in patients with stable COPD,” study presenter Randeep Guleria said.

The study included 29 stable patients with COPD who received yoga training in a format that included the use of physical postures (asanas), breathing techniques (pranayama), cleansing techniques, (kriyas), meditation, and a relaxation technique (shavasan) for 1 hour, twice a week, for 4 weeks.

Following the 4-week period, patients were trained for 1 hour every 2 weeks, with the remaining sessions completed at home. Patients were evaluated on assessment of lung function, breathing, quality of life, and inflammation status.

A repeat assessment was done at the end of the 12-week training session. All parameters showed significant improvement at the end of the 12-week period.

Guleria said that yoga can be a simple, cost-effective method that can help improve quality of life in patients with COPD.

Source: