World of Health

Over just the last two years the number of malaria infections has increased by over 30% in UK residents. In 2010 there were more than 1,700 new cases per figures from the Health Protection Agency (HPA). The majority of the cases are among those that have visited in the past decade South Asia and West Africa.

Malaria is the world’s second largest killer and the HPA is warning travelers to take their advice as to how to avoid the sickness. Each year since 2008 the numbers have increased and in 2010 alone, more than 40% UK residents that had contracted the disease had visited Ghana or Nigeria and 11% had been to India.

The HPA believes that the travellers may have thought they knew the area they were travelling to and did not think they were in risk or that the did not seek or were unable to get access to advise about the prevention of malaria.

Also, it is these types of travellers, because they tend to stay for longer periods of time that are more prone to contract the disease. And because they usually stay with family and friends than hotels or resorts they are exposed to the same risks that local people are exposed to.

Travellers need to take precautions before arriving. They need to get advice and take medication before they travel. Even those that have live in the UK and are just visiting family where they grew are not going to be immune to the disease. There are some that believe that once you have contracted the disease once you cannot contract it again and this is a fallacy.

In Africa alone it accounted for more that 20% of the childhood death and continues to be a very devastating disease in developing countries with only tuberculosis killing more people worldwide.

The spread of malaria is through mosquitoes in tropical areas and it cannot be transmitted for person to person. Symptoms are fever, headache, muscle aches, vomiting, nausea and diarrhoea. Medical experts are quick to point out that malaria is a very deadly disease but it is also very preventable.

Your diet and the amount of exercise you do are the two most important factors that affect your weight. Food supplements and slimming products may help you lose weight but the serious pounds will only drop if you take serious care of your diet and you begin to take regular exercise.

Watching your diet doesn’t equate not eating, calorie counting or overloading on reduced fat products in order to allow for occasional indulgences such as Pringles and biscuits, it needs perpetual self-check and balance. However, as it is very likely that you’ll be tempted to buy sliming products, below we provide some basic advice that will help you choose better.

Before you acquire them

Consult your doctor. It is very likely that they will advise you to avoid them, but if you explain that you are determined to use one behind their back, they may recommend some or at least tell you what to avoid. Your doctor can check and understand the ingredients of each slimming product on the internet and advise you as to whether they are particularly suitable for you. You may for instance suffer from hypertension, headaches, low blood pressure, stomach upsets and so on and certain ingredients may be harmful.

Choosing the shop

It is advisable to choose a store that you trust and where you can openly discuss with the staff.

The Label

The product you acquire should contain the following information. If it doesn’t it may be illegal:

• Name and description of the product, e.g. pill, liquid etc
• Weight of the product
• Ingredients and amount % per serving
• Any ingredients that may cause allergies
• Sell by date
• Recommended usage (RDA)
• Warnings
• Barcode

Usage

Once you’ve acquired it, keep it out of the reach of children and preferably in a dark and dry place. If you begin to have any side effects such as high fever, trembling, dizziness, instability, nervousness, itching, diarrhoea, consult your doctor immediately and never be afraid to admit that you are using slimming products. Your life is more important than your doctor’s opinion of you.

A new campaign to raise awareness about Lyme disease and tick bits is being spearheaded by Ray Mears, survivalist and TV presenter. He says there are not enough people that know about the disease as he spoke to kick off the tick bite prevention week. In the UK cases of Lyme disease are increasing with over 3,000 cases per year being reported says the Health Protection Agency.

The latest figures available show that Welsh residents accounted for 18 laboratory confirmed cases of the disease in 2009, the last year of available figures. In 2009 confirmed cases for England and Wales rose from 813 in 2008 to 973 in 2009 with over 80% of infections being contracted in the UK.

While outside in good weather you and your family need to be protected against tick bites in order to reduce your risk of Lyme disease. In rare cases the disease because chronic and there is not enough information known by people about the disease.

Infected Ixodid ticks cause the disease they bite someone and there are numerous high risk areas such as – woodland areas in the south and south western England, the Scottish Highlands and Islands, North York moors, Thetford Forest and the South Downs.

It is also very widespread in Europe from the southernmost Scandinavia countries to northern Spain and Portugal and east to many eastern and central European countries. Symptoms for Lyme disease and usually the only symptom is an ever so slow expanding pink and reddish rash called erythema migraines that usually moves outwards from the site of the tick bite and resembles a bullseye pattern.

Flu-like systems are also common such as muscle and joint pains and a fever. If it is not properly treated the disease can affect the nervous system where one can have facial palsy, viral meningitis and radiculitis, an inflammation that can lead to pain, clumsiness of movement and disturbance of sensation. The impact can be enormous on the individual and the family and it is imperative that as the weather gets warmer and we move outside it is important to be vigilant for the presence of the ticks.

Recent research at Cardiff University has discovered another 5 genes that could be help to develop new treatments for Alzheimer’s. There are now 10 genes known to be directly associated with the degenerative and debilitating brain disease.

The team at Cardiff, led by Prof. Julie Williams, have been conducting their research by using a combination of 4 genetic studies which have involved almost 60,000 people across the globe. The latest findings were published in Nature Genetics, and will help further research to be focussed on the cause of Alzheimer’s and the possibility of future treatments.

It isn’t thought that these 5 new genes have a dramatic effect on the risk of a person developing Alzheimer’s, as genetic susceptibility, lifestyle, environment and ageing are generally believed to be involved.

Prof.Williams said that this latest study has followed up previous research that they did with about 20,000 Alzheimer’s sufferers and 40,000 healthy people. This helped them to identify the 5 new genes, which increase a person’s risk of developing the disease. She added that through their on going research and the discovery of these genes, they were closer to pinpointing what might be going wrong in the brain to trigger off Alzheimer’s.

She also said that what is particularly exciting about these discoveries is the variations of the genes fit together. 5 of the genes play a role in the immune system, 4 function on the surface of the cells and 3 move the fat around inside the cell. It was extremely likely that these separate processes play a key role in the cause of Alzheimer’s disease.

The possibility of future treatments for Alzheimer’s may come too late for present sufferers, but it’s good to know there may be hope for those who develop it in the future. Finding the cause will also be a major step forward.

There is a new global report that claims that premature deaths are more likely in early adulthood and adolescence that in childhood. The Lancet study looked at 50 years of data from 50 countries with all the economic classes studied. Even though the mortality rate has fallen it is higher in teens and young than  in young children, the study found.

Reasons for this change are due to traffic accidents, suicide and violence. Death rates for young have dropped significantly in the past 50 years with a 90% drop in the rates for children between 1 and 9 much of that due to infectious diseases killing fewer children.

Dr. Russell Viner of University College London said that among teenagers and young adults the death rates were not dropping as fast as for young children. Young men between 15 and 24 had a mortality rate decrease of close to 45%, much less than the younger aged children.

In all regions the biggest killer among young men is injury be it suicide, traffic accidents or violence and it is also what kills the most young women in rich and eastern European countries.

All this means that the mortality rate is now higher in teenagers and young adults than for children even though the overall rate has fallen dramatically. Young men are two or three times more apt to die prematurely than a young boy that is between 1 and 4 years of age.

Dr. Viner added that life today for teenagers and young people is much more toxic with the rises in death for violence, accidents and suicide that we do not see with the younger children. Even though the teenage years once were the healthiest in one’s lifetime, that statement is no long true in today’s world.

Finnish scientists have recently revealed that that there are certain metabolic abnormalities with a direct association schizophrenia. This is seen as a big step towards the possibility of a clinical test to determine the illness.

The severe and chronic Psychological disorder known as Schizophrenia affects approximately 1% of the world’s population. There is no test at present to diagnose it, so recognition of the condition’ symptoms in a patient is usually the basis of their treatment.

Matej Orešič and his colleagues from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland have performed the new study, along with Jaana Suvisaari of the Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare. The results shows that the metabolic abnormalities are linked specifically to Schizophrenia, and none of the other psychological disorders. Genome Medicine published the findings earlier this month, and it could well be the breakthrough needed to develop a clinical test..

The team used metabolomics, a high-throughput method for detecting small metabolites, to produce profiles of the serum metabolites associated with schizophrenia, other nonaffective psychosis (ONAP) or affective psychosis. Their analysis indicates that schizophrenia is associated with elevated serum levels of specific triglycerides, indicative of hyperinsulinemia, and also upregulation of the serum amino acid proline. Orešič et al. then combined these metabolic profiles to create a diagnostic model with the potential to discriminate schizophrenia from other psychoses.

This exciting study demonstrates how metabolomics can be a powerful tool for dissecting disease-related metabolic pathways and for identifying candidate diagnostic and prognostic markers in psychiatric research.

Reference

M. Orešič, J. Tang, T. Seppänen-Laakso, I. Mattila, S. E. Saarni, S. I. Saarni, J. Lönnqvist, M. Sysi-Aho, T. Hyötyläinen, J. Perälä, J. Suvisaari, Metabolome in schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders: a general population-based study, Genome Medicine (2011). doi: 10.1186/gm233.