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    Lightbulb Health & Medicine thread...

    ...`cause Granny says dey ain't no Health & Medicine forum.

    AIDS complicates TB treatment...

    Tough TB Responds to Drug Treatment
    October 22, 2012 - An antibiotic used to treat severe infections shows promise against a very resistant and deadly form of tuberculosis. XDR-TB is resistant to at least four of the drugs used most often against the disease.
    Extensively drug resistant tuberculosis – or XDR-TB – is still considered rare, although cases have been reported in nearly 80 countries. Health officials believe the number of XDR-TB cases is underreported because there’s no specific test for it. It can be cured, but the odds against that happening are often quite high. It can kill quickly, especially if a person is co-infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

    Dr. Ray Chen, a staff clinician at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says XDR-TB is the next step after MDR-TB, or multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, which is a lot more common. “That’s been a known problem for many years, primarily as a result of people who don’t take their drugs well. And then the tuberculosis bug slowly develops resistance to the drugs that are used,” he said.

    MDR-TB is resistant to two of the top line drugs used for standard tuberculosis therapy. When the disease becomes resistant to two additional first-line drugs, it’s upgraded to XDR-TB. “It came to world attention in 2006 in a study in South Africa where a number of patients were found to have this extensive resistance to tuberculosis drugs, and they had a very high mortality rate. And so it became recognized as a major problem for tuberculosis,” he said.

    More http://www.voanews.com/content/xdrtb...2/1530836.html

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    Exclamation

    Granny says dis place gots a Religion & Philosophy forum - but no Health an' Medicine forum...

    Panel: Pregnant women, get whooping cough shot
    24 Oct.`12 — An expert panel is urging every expecting mother to get a shot preventing whooping cough, preferably in the last three months of her pregnancy to help protect her baby.
    The advice follows a frightening resurgence of the dreaded childhood disease. More than 32,000 cases, including 16 deaths, have been reported so far this year, and 2012 is on track to be the nation's worst year for whooping cough since 1959. It's only the second time a vaccine has been advised for all women during pregnancy. Flu shots were first recommended for them in the 1990s.


    The new advice was approved in a vote Wednesday by the government's vaccine advisory panel. Federal health officials usually adopt the group's guidance and promote it to doctors and the public. Whooping cough, or pertussis, is a highly contagious disease. Its name comes from the sound children make as they gasp for breath.


    Despite long-standing childhood immunizations, cases have been climbing in the past decade. Most are infants two months and younger — too young to be vaccinated because their immune systems are too immature. Health officials increasingly have pushed to get older children and adults vaccinated, to reduce the number of carriers who might infect vulnerable infants. An estimated 30 to 40 percent of infected newborns got the disease from their mothers.


    In recent years, a combination vaccine — that included protection against pertussis— was offered to women immediately after they gave birth. Then after a whooping cough epidemic in California, the panel last year recommended a one-time dose of a combination vaccine for expectant mothers, either before or during pregnancy.


    More http://news.yahoo.com/panel-pregnant...152229676.html

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    I found the following seriously cool:

    Scientists have found that cancer cells from leukaemia sufferers are killed when they are exposed to a type of matter known as cold plasma.

    These streams of ionised gas, similar to the material found inside decorative plasma balls and plasma televisions, are thought to trigger the in built self destruct mechanism in the cancerous cells while healthy cells remain unscathed.

    The researchers now believe it will be possible to develop a dialysis style treatment where the blood of leukaemia is patients is passed through plasma streams to destroy the cancer cells.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/s...of-plasma.html

  4. The Following User Says Thank You to Adelaide For This Useful Post:

    waltky (10-24-2012)

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    Question

    Are pharmas gettin' rich off international malaria scheme?...

    Concern raised about finance scheme for malaria drugs
    24 October 2012 - Combining drugs can reduce the risk of resistance
    The charity Oxfam has cast doubt on an international scheme that aims to boost the provision of the most effective treatment for malaria. The UK government has contributed £70m to the Affordable Medicines Facility for malaria (AMFm). Oxfam says there is no evidence the programme has saved the lives of the most vulnerable people. The body behind the AMFm says an independent study shows it has improved access and reduced drug prices.

    The scheme was introduced three years ago by the Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria. It acts as a global subsidy to provide greater access to combination therapy for malaria, particularly through private-sector drug retailers in developing countries. The idea is to reduce the use of older treatments that carry a higher risk of resistance, and to untap the potential of the private sector in reaching remote communities.

    More than 200 million people contract malaria every year and 655,000 die from the disease - most of them are young children. The scheme is being piloted in seven countries including Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria. Its future will be considered at a meeting of the Global Fund's board next month. Oxfam has criticised it as "risky and dangerous".

    The charity's senior health policy advisor, Dr Mohga Kamal Yanni, said: "It is dangerous to put the lives of sick children in the hands of a shopkeeper with no medical training, and to pursue a scheme that doesn't help those people who need it the most. "There is no cheap option or short cut to combat malaria. "The AMFm is a dangerous distraction from genuine solutions like investing in community health workers, who have slashed the number of malarial deaths in countries such as Zambia and Ethiopia. "The Global Fund board must act on the evidence and put a stop to the AMFm now." The Global Fund said Oxfam's claims were "simply untrue".

    More http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-20046199
    See also:

    Longevity Traced to Grandmothers
    October 24, 2012 - In modern society, grandmothers are often called upon to babysit. But a few million years ago, when primate grandmothers first started doing that, they apparently had a major impact on human evolution. Scientists believe it’s a big reason why we live much longer than other primates. It’s called the “grandmother hypothesis.”
    University of Utah Anthropology Professor Kristen Hawkes says humans are distinct among primates when it comes to longevity. “One of the things that’s really different about us humans, compared to our closest living relatives, the other great apes, is that we have these really long lifespans. We reach adulthood later and then we have much longer adult lives. And an especially important thing about that is that women usually live through the childbearing years and are healthy and productive well beyond,” she said.

    Other primates are not as lucky. “In other great apes, females, if they make it to adulthood, they usually die in their childbearing years and they get to be old, frail and gray and less able to do all the things that we associate with getting old. Well, of course, it happens to all of us, but it happens slower and later to us compared to the other great apes,” she said.

    Hawkes said climate change may have set things in motion by affecting food supplies. Savannahs started replacing forests in Africa. “One of the things it did was restrict the availability of the kinds of things that little kids, little apes, can feed themselves on. So that meant that ancestral moms had two choices. They could either follow the retreating forests, or if they stayed in those environments, then they just would have to feed their kids themselves. The kids couldn’t do it,” she said.

    So, if mothers decided to feed their offspring themselves they would not be able to give birth as often. They’d just be too busy finding food. Here’s where granny primate steps in to help. She said, “It would also mean that older females, whose fertility was coming to an end, could now make a big difference in their fitness by helping their daughters feed those grandchildren. And that would mean that moms could wean earlier.” The act of early babysitting had long-range effects.

    More http://www.voanews.com/content/grand...2/1532183.html
    Last edited by waltky; 10-25-2012 at 01:26 AM.

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    Unhappy

    New outbreak of Ebola in Uganda...

    Uganda Faces Fresh Outbreak of Hemorrhagic Fever
    October 24, 2012 — Uganda is struggling to contain the spread of the deadly Marburg virus, just weeks after an outbreak of Ebola killed at least 16 people.
    Last week, health officials declared an outbreak of the rare and deadly Marburg virus, a type of hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola. Five people have died so far, six have been placed in isolation and over 150 more are being monitored for symptoms. One of the cases is being treated in the capital, Kampala. The outbreak comes just two weeks after Uganda was declared free of Ebola earlier this month. At least 16 people died of Ebola, a virus which in the past has killed hundreds.

    The cases of Marburg have all come from the southwestern district of Kabale, a heavily forested area where the vectors for the disease, monkeys and bats, are most commonly found. Ministry of Health spokesperson Rukia Nakamatte says the medical team working to contain the outbreak has considerable experience handling such diseases, which have been recurring in Uganda for decades. “There is a team of experts that is in Kabale district. These are experts that have handled the previous outbreaks, like the Ebola we had in Gulu in 2000. Most of these people are trained in handling patients of Ebola and Marburg," she said.

    According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, this is the first outbreak of Marburg in Uganda since 2008, when a Dutch tourist died after visiting a cave filled with bats. But in terms of the number of fatalities, the current outbreak is the most severe in Uganda since the first reported cases in the 1960s. The Marburg virus kills around 80 percent of those infected. It is highly contagious, and is spread through contact with bodily fluids. Symptoms of the virus include fever and headache, followed by a skin rash and, eventually, severe hemorrhaging.

    MORE

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    Outdated drugs have no affect on DR-malaria...

    Outdated Drugs Slow Nigerian Malaria Treatment
    October 25, 2012 — A large percentage of people killed by malaria each year are in Nigeria, and the disease is the country’s number one killer of small children. Health officials say modern life-saving drugs are available but the widespread use of out-dated drugs on a resistant strain of malaria continues to cost lives.
    In this hospital in Nigeria's Zamfara State, these small patients have malaria. Mothers travel for hours to get to treatment for their children because there is no medicine in their villages. "I brought the baby here because I noticed he had a high fever, and then he got diarrhea,” explains a mother. Aid workers say the current surge in malaria began over the summer, and patients continue to pour in. "At the end of July, my team called me and said, ‘Malaria exploded," says Chloe Wurr, a physician with Doctors Without Borders in the northern state of Sokoto. "We have so many children coming. Some of them arrived and we could barely keep them alive. They died before we could give them treatment."

    Wurr says one out of every 10 children with severe malaria here dies, and that's with the best of care. "Heath personnel are often very committed and want to help their community but they often don’t have the resources to treat people," she said. "If I do find any treatment present, it’s usually that that health worker has gone to a local pharmacy and purchased a drug and the drug they are most likely to purchase is chloroquine.” The doctor says chloroquine can treat malaria in some countries. But in Nigeria, the disease has been resistant to the drug since the 1980s. There are drugs that have been effective against malaria in Nigeria for the past decade and they are known as ACTs.

    However Doctors Without Borders says the vast majority of clinics they have visited in the country don't have them, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control says they are not available to most Nigerians. The Nigerian government says it’s planning to increase ACT availability along with providing more bed-nets, which can keep the mosquitoes that transmit the disease from biting in the night. But with the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) saying that 250,000 Nigerian children under the age of five die every year from malaria, aid workers claim the program has a long way to go.

    Source

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    I work in healthcare, so this caught my eye:

    In a new study out today, researchers used mice to identify a combination six naturally occurring bacteria that eradicate a highly contagious form of Clostridium difficile, an infectious bacterium associated with many hospital deaths. Three of the six bacteria have not been described before. This work may have significant implications for future control and treatment approaches.

    The researchers found that this strain of C. difficile, known as O27, establishes a persistent, prolonged contagious period, known as supershedding that is very difficult to treat with antibiotics. These contagious 'supershedders' release highly resistant spores for a prolonged period that are very difficult to eradicate from the environment. Similar scenarios are likely in hospitals.
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1025174629.htm

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    Adelaide...

    ... C.diff is also suspected in ulcerative colitis.

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    Defeating C. diff with competing bacteria...

    'Faecal transplant' clue to treating gut bug
    25 October 2012 - C. difficile bacteria live in many people's guts
    The gut infection Clostridium difficile can be defeated by a $#@!tail of rival good bacteria, experiments in mice show. When C. difficile bacteria overwhelm the gut, it can be fatal and difficult to treat with antibiotics. A UK team showed a combination of six bacteria could clear the infection. The study, published in PLoS Pathogens, builds on faecal transplant procedures - which are used to introduce competing bacteria. C. difficile bacteria live in many people's guts alongside hundreds of other species - all fighting for space and food. However, a strong course of antibiotics can kill off C. difficile's competition. Numbers then explode, C. difficile dominates the gut and masses of toxins are produced. It results in diarrhoea and can be deadly.

    The main treatment, antibiotics, is part of the problem. It means the condition can be difficult to get rid of and can affect patients again and again. Rarely, some patients have faecal transplants as a way of restoring the balance of bacteria in the gut. Material is taken from a donor, mixed with water, filtered and passed down a tube into the stomach. It is thought to be successful in about 90% of cases. However, even the only doctor in the UK to use the treatment, Dr Alisdair MacConnachie from the Gartnavel General Hospital in Glasgow, says its a last resort and quite frankly "disgusting".

    'A tough bug'

    In this latest study, researchers at the Sanger Institute, near Cambridge, tried to find exactly which bacteria in faecal transplants were needed to clear the infection. They grew bacteria from mouse faeces in the laboratory and tried different combinations of bacteria in infected mice. They found a combination of six, including three previously unidentified species, did the trick. The super-six $#@!tail cleared the infection in all 20 infected mice given the oral treatment. Crucially the bacteria can be grown in the lab without needing a fresh sample for each transplant.

    More http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-20081895

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    Quote Originally Posted by waltky View Post
    Adelaide...

    ... C.diff is also suspected in ulcerative colitis.
    Do you also work in the medical field, waltky?

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