Category: The Body Electric

Another Ebola forecast

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Where will Ebola strike next?

This one is going to be more gruesome than the last forecast:

Yet another set of ominous projections about the Ebola epidemic in West Africa was released Tuesday, in a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that gave worst- and best-case estimates for Liberia and Sierra Leone based on computer modeling.

In the worst-case scenario, Liberia and Sierra Leone could have 21,000 cases of Ebola by Sept. 30 and 1.4 million cases by Jan. 20 if the disease keeps following its current trajectory, without effective methods to contain it. These figures take into account the fact that many cases go undetected, and estimate that there are actually 2.5 times as many as reported.

The report does not include figures for Guinea because case counts there have gone up and down in ways that cannot be reliably modeled.

In the best-case model — which assumes that the dead are buried safely and that 70 percent of patients are treated in settings that reduce the risk of transmission — the epidemic in both countries would be “almost ended” by Jan. 20, the report said. It showed the proportion of patients now in such settings as about 18 percent in Liberia and 40 percent in Sierra Leone.

Diet soda is killing you

~ susie ~ 10 Comments

WE’RE ALL SCREWED!!!!!

A series of experiments conducted by researchers in Israel suggests that artificial sweeteners are a causative factor in metabolic disorders like glucose intolerance, a forerunner to diabetes.

According to New Scientist, chemical sweeteners have caused glucose intolerance in mice because they alter the bacterial balance in the gut, and early testing shows they do the same in some human subjects.

“The most shocking result is that the use of sweeteners aimed at preventing diabetes might actually be contributing to and possibly driving the epidemic that it aims to prevent,” said study co-author Eran Elinav of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel to New Scientist.

The study’s abstract — published in the journal Nature — said, “Non-caloric artificial sweeteners (NAS) are among the most widely used food additives worldwide, regularly consumed by lean and obese individuals alike. NAS consumption is considered safe and beneficial owing to their low caloric content, yet supporting scientific data remain sparse and controversial.”

Elinav and co-author Eran Segal said, “Collectively, our results link NAS consumption, dysbiosis and metabolic abnormalities, thereby calling for a reassessment of massive NAS usage.”

Fucking hippies

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

This reminds me: I have to get my flu shot!

According to an investigation by The Hollywood Reporter, wealthy and educated parents are forgoing vaccinations for their kids in some of the most elite and affluent areas of Los Angeles, California – all this while a potentially dangerous outbreak of whooping cough spreads through the L.A. area like “wildfire.”

In a stunning comparison, the vaccination rates in areas such as Malibu, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills are apparently on par with South Sudan.

From The Hollywood Reporter:

Across California, thousands of children and babies are coughing so violently that their bodies convulse, uncontrollably wheezing and fighting to breathe for weeks. Nearly 8,000 pertussis cases have been reported in 2014 to the state’s Department of Public Health as of Sept. 2, and 267 of those patients have been hospitalized, including 58 requiring intensive care.

Adults can contract the disease, but 94 percent of all cases reported statewide involve children — and the youngest suffer the most. So far this year, three infants under 2 months of age have died statewide from pertussis, a disease commonly known as whooping cough (named for the high-pitched sound that kids make when they inhale after coughing).

L.A.’s Children’s Hospital has seen 72 pertussis patients so far this year. Many of these children suffer broken ribs because the coughing is so violent.

“A number of them have been in the ICU and very, very sick,” says infectious disease specialist Dr. Jeffrey Bender. “They cough so hard, it turns into vomiting and broken ribs; they end up intubated, to ventilate their lungs.”

Progress

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

I have a relation who was diagnosed in her twenties with schizophrenia (and she was full-blown psychotic), but it seems to have just disappeared. She’s been fine for decades and has a full-time, demanding job. So this news may help explain why:

Schizophrenia is classified as a psychotic disorder, one characterized by an inability to discern what is real and not real, to think clearly, have normal emotional responses, and act normally in social situations. As Elyn Saks told us last year, “it’s a waking nightmare, where you have all the bizarre images, the terrible things happening, and the utter terror — only with a nightmare you open your eyes and it goes away. No such luck with a psychotic episode.”

Scientists aren’t entirely sure what causes it, nor does it manifest identically in all people who have it (leading to the broader diagnosis of being on the ‘schizophrenia spectrum’). But links have been made to genetics, social factors (including early development), and neurobiology. The heritability link looks to be particularly promising, however; about 80% of the risk for schizophrenia is genetic. Yet scientists have struggled to identify which genes are responsible for the condition.

But a novel approach to analyzing genetic influences on more than 4,000 people with schizophrenia has finally allowed researchers to identify distinct gene clusters that contribute to eight different classes of schizophrenia.

Riding the health care bus

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Tick Habitat

I spent much of my day in the hospital yesterday, getting my sinuses evaluated. (I have to admit, I was thrilled when getting a CAT scan was as simple as walking over to the next office.) The verdict? They’re perfectly clear! I thought I had another sinus tumor, because I had the same symptoms as the last time.

“Then why does my ear vibrate when I talk or sing?” I asked the specialist. “And why did the CPAP machine give me an earache on that side?” Off to another office for a hearing test.

Turns out my hearing is borderline — not quite hearing aid territory, but close, they said. (Hah! And here, all those years, I was such a good little girl, wearing earplugs to concerts.) The thing is, there’s nothing actually wrong with my ear drums, yet my hearing on one side is erratic — so now they want an MRI of my brain.
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Epidemic on the way

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

It’s called enterovirus 68, and it’s spreading like crazy. the danger of a virus like this is if it overwhelms hospitals’ abilities to deal with ICU overflow:

Doctors say they are not even sure yet how this particular virus spreads, though the back-to-school season is a normal time for illnesses to spread among children.

“This is a very common time for outbreaks. Kids come back to school, they like to share things, they bring them home to their little brothers and sisters, and enteroviruses tend to occur in the summer,” Besser said. “But this one, this particular Enterovirus 68, is very rare and they have no idea why it showed up this year.”

At Children’s Hospital Colorado in Denver, officials say that between Aug. 18 and Sept. 4, doctors saw more than 900 pediatric patients with symptoms of the respiratory virus in the emergency room. Of those who came in, 86 were admitted into the hospital and a handful ended up in the intensive care unit.

“It can start just like a cold — runny nose, sneezing, coughs — but it’s the wheezing you have to watch out for,” Besser said.

Dr. Christine Nyquist, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Colorado, said the virus usually ends up appearing similar to a severe cold but can be particularly dangerous for children with asthma because of how it affects the respiratory system.

“The kids are coming in with respiratory symptoms, their asthma is exacerbated,” Nyquist said. “Kids with no wheezing are having wheezing.”

Caught

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

I remember this because it happened right after my physiatrist told me I should think about having steroid injections into my spine, and I told him I’d think about it. Then this happened and I stopped thinking about it:

(Reuters) – U.S. officials on Thursday arrested a pharmacist linked to a 2012 outbreak of meningitis, which killed 64 people across the United States, as he was boarding a flight out of the country, Justice Department officials in Boston said.

Glenn Adam Chin, 46, had been a supervising pharmacist at the former New England Compounding Center of Framingham, Massachusetts, which produced the tainted steroids that sickened 700 people in 20 states in the worst outbreak of fungal meningitis recorded in the United States, officials said.

The U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston is continuing its criminal probe into the matter, but arrested Chin because of his plans to board a plane to Hong Kong at Boston Logan International Airport, officials said.

He is the first person to face criminal charges related to the incident, which pushed NECC into bankruptcy and led to stricter national regulation of custom medication makers.

H/t Shawn Sukumar Attorney at Law.

Tales of the dead come back

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

I know this happened with my mother-in-law, and she absolutely refused to talk about it:

Why is it important for you to believe that there is life after death?

It was not important for me, at all, to believe. I’m a journalist. I don’t go around thinking, “I really hope there’s life after death.” Indeed, at the beginning I was the opposite—I didn’t want to believe. Yes, death was a source of terror. For me, the worst thing that could happen was nothingness. I would have far preferred to hear that Satan was waiting for me than to learn that there was nothing. But I was absolutely positive that there was nothing after death—that the curtain descends, and that’s it. Act III. It’s over. The stage is black.

And when I first ventured into this strange area of research, I was pretty sure, just as you said, that it was all the result of oxygen deprivation and that these were hallucinations. It was only after I discovered that it can’t be the result of oxygen deprivation, and these were not hallucinations, that I realized I had to change my views. That’s a very difficult thing to do, particularly when you’re past adolescence. But every bit of evidence, every single person I interviewed, forced me to change my views. It was something I did quite unwillingly and with a good deal of skepticism.

What I tried to do, as a journalist, was simply record what these people say happened. All I know is what I’ve reported, which is, when you die, that is not the end. Stuff goes on. That, to me, is weird. But it’s true.

Did engaging with this research make you want to die?

No! Nothing makes me want to die! But it did make me less fearful of dying. It was a long process, though. After the first 20 or 30 interviews, I was still terrified of death. All these people were telling me stuff that I never believed could happen. But gradually I came to accept that what they said was true. So I’m a little less terrified of death now.

You say that having an NDE often invests people with special powers. Tell us about the British air traffic controller.

[Laughs] The British air traffic controller makes me laugh. He told a person I interviewed, a British neuropsychiatrist named Dr. Fenwick, that he had a death experience. Oddly enough, as a result of this death experience, he became terrific at picking and choosing stocks. [Laughs]

The psychiatrist goes, “Uh-huh.” The guy says, “Yeah, you really should invest in British Telecom.”

Dr. Fenwick says, “Uh, yeah. Right.” And of course the stock soars right after that!

Usually these powers involve perceptual abilities, though, [such as] the ability to know what other people are thinking, the ability know what’s going to happen next. So they’re usually less materialistic than this gentleman’s powers. [Laughs] But, hey, whatever floats your boat.

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Why reading is good for you, Part 23

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Link:

The conditions for which bibliotherapy is prescribed are just as diverse as its forms. Research has shown that patients suffering from borderline personality disorder engage in significantly less frequent and severe deliberate self-harm when their therapy involves reading a booklet on coping strategies. Adults with asthma and rheumatoid arthritis found that their symptoms lessened in severity after they started keeping journals about their most stressful experiences. Obese adolescent girls who read an age-appropriate novel about a teenager who discovers “improved health and self-efficacy” lost weight more easily than those who didn’t read that novel.

What makes the written word so effective? Some experts believe success lies in a combination of the reading process and the content of what we read. When we immerse ourselves in a text, the words may stimulate the production of mental images. We imagine what characters look and sound like; we visualize the places they live and work; we act out the words on the page in our minds.

Brain imaging studies provide a glimpse of what happens when we get lost in a book. Some of the brain regions active during reading a story approximate the activity of performing, imagining or observing similar activities in the world. When reading, our brains simulate what happens in the story, using the same circuits we’d use if the same things happened to us. On a neurological level, we become part of the action.