Health News

Guinea Ebola outbreak: Bat-eating banned to curb virus

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Guinea has banned the sale and consumption of bats to prevent the spread of the deadly Ebola virus, its health minister has said.

Bats, a local delicacy, appeared to be the “main agents” for the Ebola outbreak in the south, Rene Lamah said. Sixty-two people have now been killed by the virus in Guinea, with suspected cases reported in neighbouring Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Ebola is spread by close contact. There is no known cure or vaccine. It kills between 25% and 90% of victims, depending on the strain of the virus, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Symptoms include internal and external bleeding, diarrhoea and vomiting.

‘Quarantine sites’

It is the first time Ebola has struck Guinea, with recent outbreaks thousands of miles away, in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Mr Lamah announced the ban on the sale and consumption of bats during a tour of Forest Region, the epicentre of the epidemic, reports the BBC’s Alhassan Sillah from the capital, Conakry.

People who eat the animals often boil them into a sort of spicy pepper soup, our correspondent says. The soup is sold in village stores where people gather to drink alcohol.

Other ways of preparing the bats to eat include drying them over a fire. Certain species of bat found in West and Central Africa are thought to be the natural reservoir of Ebola, although they do not show any symptoms.

Health officials reported one more death on Tuesday, bringing the number of people killed by Ebola to 62, our correspondent adds. The charity Medecins Sans Frontieres has set up two quarantine sites in southern Guinea to try to contain the outbreak

Health authorities are receiving help from the WHO while messages are being broadcast on national television to reassure people. Sierra Leone’s health ministry said it was investigating two suspected cases of Ebola.

“We still do not have any confirmed cases of Ebola in the country,” its chief medical officer Brima Kargbo told AFP. “What we do have are suspected cases, which our health teams are investigating and taking blood samples from people who had come in contact with those suspected to have the virus,” he added.

Mr Kargbo said one suspected case involved a 14-year-old boy buried in a Sierra Leonean village after he apparently died across the border in Guinea two weeks ago, AFP reports.

The other patient was still alive in the northern border district of Kambia, he added. Five people are reported to have died in Liberia after crossing from southern Guinea for treatment, Liberia’s Health Minister Walter Gwenigale told journalists on Monday.

However, it is not clear whether they had Ebola. Outbreaks of Ebola occur primarily in remote villages in Central and West Africa, near tropical rainforests, the World Health Organization says.

Source: BBC

Toddlers Who Sleep Less May Eat More

Toddlers who get too little sleep tend to eat more and are at increased risk for obesity, a new study indicates.

The study included children in over 1,300 British families who had their sleep measured when they were 16 months old and their diet checked when they were 21 months old.

Those who slept less than 10 hours a day consumed about 10 percent more calories than those who slept more than 13 hours, according to the study in the International Journal of Obesity.

This is the first study to link amount of sleep to calorie consumption in children younger than 3 years, the University College London (UCL) researchers said. They suggested that shorter sleep may disrupt the regulation of appetite hormones.

“We know that shorter sleep in early life increases the risk of obesity, so we wanted to understand whether shorter sleeping children consume more calories,” Dr. Abi Fisher, of the Health Behavior Research Centre at UCL, said in a university news release.

“Previous studies in adults and older children have shown that sleep loss causes people to eat more, but in early life parents make most of the decisions about when and how much their children eat, so young children cannot be assumed to show the same patterns,” she added.

Although the study found an association between toddler’s sleeping less and eating more, it did not prove a cause-and-effect relationship.

The main message from the study “is that shorter-sleeping children may [be] prone to consume too many calories. Although more research is needed to understand why this might be, it is something parents should be made aware of,” Fisher concluded.

Source: web MD

Good sleep needed to fight diabetes, obesity

It’s widely known that sleep is crucial for maintaining our health. Now, a new study sheds light its benefits, concluding that a lack of good sleep can increase the risk of type 2 diabetes, obesity, and other metabolic disorders.

The research, published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, says sleep aids in both the prevention and treatment of metabolic disorders because it helps regulate the metabolism of glucose, control food intake, and energy balance.

Disrupting the body’s sleep cycle is also linked to poor metabolic health, increased chronic illness rate, and premature death, according to the new study.

Researchers say more people are getting lower-quality sleep due to the modern lifestyles, including the use of technological devices at nighttime, such as tablets and smartphones.

Source: Health Central

Low back pain single largest factor behind work disability

A new study has revealed that low back pain causes more work disability around the globe than any other condition.

The researchers have found that the problem will get worse as the world population growth gathers pace and the proportion of elderly rises and the governments and health services need to take the issue far more seriously.

The scientists, who studied data from the Global Burden of Disease 2010 study, found that out of all 291 conditions, low back pain came top of the league table in terms of years lost to disability and ranked as the greatest contributor to disability in 12 of the 21 world regions, and the greatest contributor to overall burden in Western Europe and Australasia.

It was also revealed that the relevant factors deemed to be linked to low back pain were jobs involving lifting, forceful movement, awkward positions and vibration.

The researchers said that in 2010 there were just short of 22 million disability adjusted life years (DALY) worldwide caused by workplace related low back pain, which amounted to more than a third of all DALYs linked to occupational risk factors.

The findings show that agricultural sector workers were almost four times as likely to develop low back pain disability as any other group of workers.

The study was published in the journal Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases.

source: business standard

 

Gene linked to deadly breast cancer found

Scientists from Weill Cornell Medical College and Houston Methodist have found that a gene previously unassociated with breast cancer plays a pivotal role in the growth and progression of the triple negative form of the disease.

Their research suggests that targeting the gene may be a new approach to treating the disease.

About 42,000 new cases of triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) are diagnosed in the United States each year, about 20 percent of all breast cancer diagnoses. Patients typically relapse within one to three years of being treated.

Senior author Dr. Laurie H. Glimcher, the Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean of Weill Cornell Medical College, wanted to know whether the gene – already understood from her prior work to be a critical regulator of immune and metabolic functions – was important to cancer’s ability to adapt and thrive in the oxygen- and nutrient-deprived environments inside of tumors.

Using cells taken from patients’ tumors and transplanted into mice, Dr. Glimcher’s team found that the gene, XBP1, is especially active in triple negative breast cancer, particularly in the progression of malignant cells and their resurgence after treatment.

“Patients with the triple negative form of breast cancer are those who most desperately need new approaches to treat their disease,” Dr. Glimcher, who is also a professor of medicine at Weill Cornell said.

“This pathway was activated in about two-thirds of patients with this type of breast cancer. Now that we better understand how this gene helps tumors proliferate and then return after a patient’s initial treatment, we believe we can develop more effective therapies to shrink their growth and delay relapse,” the researcher added.

The study is published in the journal Nature.

Source: yahoo news

Vitamin D deficiency risk to 84 % Indians: report

Changing lifestyle, increasingly odd-working hours and limited outdoor activities are leaving a bad impact on human health as 84 per cent of the country’s population was found vitamin D deficient, a recent study said here on Monday.

“In the face of present-day lifestyles, dominated by ungodly working hours and limited outdoor activities, inherent vitamin D deficiency is increasingly becoming an eyesore among a large number of people. (There is) Vitamin D deficiency risk to 84 per cent of Indians,” SRL Diagnostics said in its report.

The human body’s ideal dose of vitamin D ranges between 1,000 and 2,000 IU (International Units) per day.

“Vitamin D deficiency was found to be prevalent in around 69 per cent of the population, while 15 per cent more were found to be vitamin D insufficient, thus making around 84 per cent of Indians risk-prone to this, the study said.

The report pointed out that skin exposure to the sun is natural, intended, and most effective source of vitamin D, yet the most neglected. Tests that estimate the level of vitamin D have become increasingly common, pan-Indian.

Testing for vitamin D deficiency has been known to protect a majority of the Indian population from joint pains, muscle weakness, cardiovascular disorders and other more serious problems that could be permanently detrimental to one’s health.

While research on the impact of vitamin D on ailments is ongoing, doctors believe it is clearly associated with diabetes, high blood pressure, bone weakness, nerve-related disorders and obesity.

Doctors also point out that vitamin D directly benefits patients with diabetes and cardiovascular ailments. A sizable body of evidence proves the link between vitamin D and people with diabetes and heart ailments.

After pregnancy, women are at a higher risk of developing osteoporosis due to high demands of calcium and vitamin D, it added.

There are diagnostic tests to determine vitamin D levels in the body. It is extremely essential to keep a check on the levels of deficiency in the body as it helps retain calcium,” SRL Diagnostics President-Research & Innovation, Dr B R Das said.

“Sufficient vitamin D levels assist the body in reducing bad cholesterol and increasing good cholesterol, besides helping in the essential repair and maintenance activities in the body. It is directly linked to knee pains and osteoporosis,” Das said.

The study reveals that the differences between deficiency and insufficiency are conspicuous. Vitamin D deficiency manifests itself as a bone disease, which is mostly either rickets or osteomalacia. Whereas insufficiency may be associated with milder disease outcomes, including muscle weakness and fatigue.

Another outcome of this study draws attention to males between the ages of 30 and 60, while adolescent girls and women of child-bearing age (those belonging to the 16-30 age group) are more likely to develop vitamin D deficiency, as they require vitamin D in the form of extra supplements for growth, it said.

Source: Deccan chronicle

Active mums have active children

The more active a mother is, the more physically active her child will be, suggests a UK study of 500 mums and four-year-olds. But many mothers’ exercise levels fell way below recommended levels, it said.

Researchers from Cambridge and Southampton universities used heart-rate monitors to measure activity levels over seven days. The study, published in Pediatrics, said policies to improve children’s health should be aimed at mothers.

Children are not “just naturally active”, it concluded, and parents have an important role to play in developing healthy exercise habits early on in life.

Run around
As part of the study, 554 four-year-olds and their mothers from Southampton wore a lightweight combined heart-rate monitor and accelerometer on their chests, for up to seven days.

Participants wore it continuously, including while sleeping and doing water-based activities. Kathryn Hesketh, now a research associate at the Institute of Child Health at University College London, co-led the study and said the data from mothers and children showed a direct, positive association between physical activity in children and their mothers.

“The more activity a mother did, the more active her child. Although it is not possible to tell from this study whether active children were making their mothers run around after them, it is likely that activity in one of the pair influences activity in the other.”

She said that for every minute of moderate-to-vigorous activity a mother engaged in, her child was more likely to engage in 10% more of the same level of activity.

So if a mother spends one hour being more active per day, her child may spend 10 minutes being more active per day. These small differences may seem trivial but over the course of a month or a year they could be significant, she added.

Factors which influenced a mother’s activity levels included whether she worked or not and whether the child had brothers or sisters.

Co-study author Dr Esther van Sluijs, from the Centre for Diet and Activity Research at the University of Cambridge, said the link between a mother and child’s activity levels was stronger for mothers who left school at 16, compared to those who left at 18.

Changes in motherhood
The study recognised that once women become mothers their activity levels fell and often failed to return to previous levels. This lack of activity could then influence their young children, it said.

Miss Hesketh said: “There are many competing priorities for new parents and making time to be active may not always be top of the list. However, small increases in maternal activity levels may lead to benefits for mothers and children.”

Simply walking and moving more each day can be all it takes to create these benefits. Dr Ann Hoskins, director of children, young people and families at Public Health England, said it was committed to increasing physical activity in families and children to improve overall health.

“Active play is an important way to develop coordination and motor function skills in the pre-school early years and there are lots of activities like parent and toddler swims, buggy fit and baby gym which provide opportunities for mums to socialise, be active and support their child’s development.”

Their Change4Life campaign encourages families to eat well, move more and live longer. For children, that means being active for an hour a day and two and a half hours a week for adults.

Source: BBC news

Why happiness is healthy

You might call it a sense of well-being, of optimism or of meaningfulness in life, although those could also be treated as separate entities. But whatever happiness is, we know that we want it, and that is just somehow good.

We also know that we don’t always have control over our happiness. Research suggests that genetics may play a big role in our normal level of subjective well-being, so some of us may start out at a disadvantage. On top of that, between unexpected tragedies and daily habitual stress, environmental factors can bring down mood and dry up our thirst for living.

Being able to manage the emotional ups and downs is important for both body and mind, said Laura Kubzansky, professor of social and behavioral sciences at Harvard School of Public Health.

“For physical health, it’s not so much happiness per se, but this ability to regulate and have a sense of purpose and meaning,” Kubzansky said.

Why be happy?

Many scientific studies, including some by Kubzansky, have found a connection between psychological and physical well-being.

It’s not as simple as “you must be happy to prevent heart attacks,” of course. If you have a good sense of well-being, it’s easier to maintain good habits: Exercising, eating a balanced diet and getting enough sleep, researchers said. People who have an optimistic mindset may be more likely to engage in healthy behaviors because they perceive them as helpful in achieving their goals, Kubzansky said.

Lower blood pressure, normal body weight and healthier blood fat profiles were also associated with a better sense of well-being in this study.

For now these studies can only show associations; they do not provide hard evidence of cause and effect. But some researchers speculate that positive mental states do have a direct effect on the body, perhaps by reducing damaging physical processes. For instance, another of Kubzansky’s studies found that optimism is associated with lower levels of inflammation.

If what you mean by happiness is specifically “enjoyment of life,” there’s newer evidence to support that, too. A recent study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal found that people ages 60 and older who said they enjoyed life less were more likely to develop disability over an eight-year period. Mobility was also related to enjoyment of life. This study does not prove that physical problems are caused by less enjoyment of life, but suggests a relationship.

Where happiness comes from: genes + environment
There is substantial evidence that genetics play a big role in happiness, according to Nancy Segal, psychologist at California State University, Fullerton, and author of “Born Together — Reared Apart.”

Research has shown that identical twins tend to have a similar level of happiness, more so than fraternal twins. And in identical twins, one twin’s happiness is a better predictor of the other twin’s current or future happiness than educational achievement or income, Segal said.

“If you have happy parents and happy children, I think that people usually assume it’s because the children are modeling the parents,” she said. “But that’s not really so. You need to make the point that parents pass on both genes and environments.”

What’s more, there seems to be a certain level of happiness that individuals have generally, to which they usually gravitate, Segal said. That level depends on the person, and the situations he or she is in.

Even if genetics has a big influence, though, that doesn’t mean anyone is biologically stuck being unhappy, she said. It might take more work if your baseline mood is low, but certain therapies have proven useful for elevating psychological well-being.

The environment is still quite important for psychological well-being, too, Kubzansky said.

“To say to someone, ‘Don’t worry, be happy,’ is kind of not looking at the whole picture of, what are the environmental constraints on things they can do?” Kubzansky said.

Source: cnn

China Smog Is Economic, Regional Health Problem, WHO Chief Says

China’s air pollution is a regional health issue and impacts the economy in terms of foreign investment and talent retention, the United Nation’s health agency chief said.

“Talented people have actually talked to me, and they’ve changed their decision to settle in China because of the air pollution,” World Health Organization Director-General Margaret Chan said today in an interview with Bloomberg TV in Hong Kong. “I think Chinese authorities understand this and they know what’s going on.”

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said earlier this month that pollution is a major problem and the government will “‘declare war’’ on smog by removing high-emission cars from the road and closing coal-fired furnaces. Air pollution led to genetic changes that may have sapped learning skills in children whose mothers were exposed to a Chinese coal-fired power plant a decade ago, researchers reported on March 19.

Pollution in Beijing today rose to more than 10 times levels considered safe by the World Health Organization. The concentration of PM2.5 — the small particles that pose the greatest risk to human health — hit 270 micrograms per cubic meter in the Chinese capital as of 12 p.m., a U.S. Embassy monitor said. The WHO recommends 24-hour exposure to PM2.5 levels of less than 25.

Smog produced by China affects not just the country, Chan said, as winds can carry pollutants across borders to neighboring states and even further afield. Pollution from China’s export manufacturers travels across the Pacific Ocean to the U.S. West Coast, contributing to smog in Los Angeles, according to a University of California, Irvine study published in January.

Source: bloomberg

Ebola outbreak in West Africa infects 80, killing 59

An outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus has killed at least 59 people in Guinea and is suspected to have spread to neighbouring Liberia.

Health workers in Guinea are trying to contain the spread of the disease which causes severe internal bleeding. In neighbouring Liberia, health officials said they are investigating five deaths after a group of people crossed the border from Guinea in search of medical treatment.

“The team is already investigating the situation, tracing contacts, collecting blood samples and sensitizing local health authorities on the disease,” Liberian Health Minister Walter Gwenigale said.

The Ebola virus leads to severe hemorrhagic fever in its victims and has no vaccine or specific treatment. The new cases mark the first time in 20 years that an outbreak of the virus has been reported in West Africa.

Sierra Leone on high alert

Already health workers fear the outbreak could overtax Liberia and Guinea, both deeply impoverished countries with severely limited medical facilities. Officials in Sierra Leone are also on high alert and have sent medical teams to the border with Guinea, though no cases have emerged so far.

“The Ebola fever is one of the most virulent diseases known to mankind with a fatality rate up to 90 per cent,” said Ibrahima Toure, Guinea’s country director for the aid group Plan International.

“Communities in the affected region stretch across the borders and people move freely within this area. This poses a serious risk of the epidemic becoming widespread with devastating consequences,” he said.

The World Health Organization said it is dispatching experts to help ministry officials in Guinea.

Panic erupts

Efforts were underway to keep the virus from reaching the capital of Conakry, home to some 3 million people. Panic erupted Sunday amid reports that two of the deaths had occurred in the capital. However, on Monday authorities said that those cases were only under investigation and later proved not to be positive for the virus.

As the government issued messages on state radio and television urging people to wash their hands and avoid contact with sick people, medical officials said supplies of chlorine and bleach were running out at stores.

“I usually take a taxi to get to work but in order to avoid contact with strangers, I’m going to walk instead, said Touka Mara, a teacher in Conakry.

Authorities said that goods in Conakry that had been imported from the affected part of the south were being quarantined as a precautionary measure.

Ebola was first reported in 1976 in Congo and is named for the river where it was recognized. Ebola outbreaks were reported in Congo and Uganda in 2012.

The virus can be transmitted through direct contact with the blood or secretions of an infected person, or objects that have been contaminated with infected secretions. During communal funerals, for example, when the bereaved come into contact with an Ebola victim, the virus can be contracted, health officials said.

Source: msn news