Category Archives: Health

Imagining the post-antibiotics future

Maryn McKenna writes: A few years ago, I started looking online to fill in chapters of my family history that no one had ever spoken of. I registered on Ancestry.com, plugged in the little I knew, and soon was found by a cousin whom I had not known existed, the granddaughter of my grandfather’s older sister. We started exchanging documents: a copy of a birth certificate, a photo from an old wedding album. After a few months, she sent me something disturbing.

It was a black-and-white scan of an article clipped from the long-gone Argus of Rockaway Beach, New York. In the scan, the type was faded and there were ragged gaps where the soft newsprint had worn through. The clipping must have been folded and carried around a long time before it was pasted back together and put away.

The article was about my great-uncle Joe, the youngest brother of my cousin’s grandmother and my grandfather. In a family that never talked much about the past, he had been discussed even less than the rest. I knew he had been a fireman in New York City and died young, and that his death scarred his family with a grief they never recovered from. I knew that my father, a small child when his uncle died, was thought to resemble him. I also knew that when my father made his Catholic confirmation a few years afterward, he chose as his spiritual guardian the saint that his uncle had been named for: St. Joseph, the patron of a good death.

I had always heard Joe had been injured at work: not burned, but bruised and cut when a heavy brass hose nozzle fell on him. The article revealed what happened next. Through one of the scrapes, an infection set in. After a few days, he developed an ache in one shoulder; two days later, a fever. His wife and the neighborhood doctor struggled for two weeks to take care of him, then flagged down a taxi and drove him fifteen miles to the hospital in my grandparents’ town. He was there one more week, shaking with chills and muttering through hallucinations, and then sinking into a coma as his organs failed. Desperate to save his life, the men from his firehouse lined up to give blood. Nothing worked. He was thirty when he died, in March 1938.

The date is important. Five years after my great-uncle’s death, penicillin changed medicine forever. Infections that had been death sentences—from battlefield wounds, industrial accidents, childbirth—suddenly could be cured in a few days. So when I first read the story of his death, it lit up for me what life must have been like before antibiotics started saving us.

Lately, though, I read it differently. In Joe’s story, I see what life might become if we did not have antibiotics any more. [Continue reading…]

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Toxic waste ‘major global threat’

BBC News reports: More than 200 million people around the world are at risk of exposure to toxic waste, a report has concluded.

The authors say the large number of people at risk places toxic waste in a similar league to public health threats such as malaria and tuberculosis.

The study from the Blacksmith Institute and Green Cross calls for greater efforts to be made to control the problem.

The study carried out in more than 3,000 sites in over 49 countries.

“It’s a serious public health issue that hasn’t really been quantified,” Dr Jack Caravanos, director of research at the Blacksmith Institute and professor of public health at the City University of New York told the BBC’s Tamil Service.

The study identified the Agbobloshie dumping yard in Ghana’s capital Accra as the place which poses the highest toxic threat to human life.

The researchers say that the report has not been hidden from governments, and they are all aware of the issue.

Agbobloshie has become a global e-waste dumping yard, causing serious environmental and health issues Dr Caravanos explained. [Continue reading…]

A striking example of exposure to toxic waste appears in “Shower,” a short film made in Aleppo, Syria:

Every morning, Muhammed, 9 years, starts his journey towards landfill sites in his hometown of Manbij, near Aleppo. He searches for combustible, edible, or fit-to-wear materials. We join Muhammed in one of his daily journeys to find flammable materials to use for cooking and boiling water for bathing. In the afternoon, he comes back to his family with useable refuse and combustible materials. He awaits his turn as his mother baths his younger siblings.
Muhammed is just one of thousands of Syrian children who had to leave school and resort to vagrancy. Those children had to collect garbage because their families had been reduced to poverty by the Assad regime’s systematic policy of starvation and continuous targeting of civilians.

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Polio strain in Syria originated in Pakistan, WHO confirms

Reuters reports: Polio that has crippled at least 13 children in Syria has been confirmed as being caused by a strain of the virus that originated in Pakistan and is spreading across the Middle East, the World Health Organization said.

Genetic sequencing shows the strain found in Syrian children in Deir al-Zor, where an outbreak was detected last month, is linked to the strain of Pakistani origin found in sewage in Egypt, Israel and Palestinian territories in the past year.

“Genetic sequencing indicates that the isolated viruses are most closely linked to virus detected in environmental samples in Egypt in December 2012 (which in turn had been linked to wild poliovirus circulating in Pakistan),” the United Nations agency said in a statement on Monday.

Closely related strains of the wild poliovirus of Pakistani origin have also been detected in sewage samples in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip since February 2013, it said.

Polio virus has been confirmed in 13 of 22 children who became paralyzed in the northern Syrian province of Deir al-Zor. Investigations continue into the other nine cases. It is Syria’s first polio outbreak since 1999.

No children in Egypt, Israel or the Palestinian territories have been hit by polio thanks to high immunization rates and a strong response to the alert, WHO spokeswoman Sona Bari said.

Polio virus is endemic in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria despite a 25-year-old campaign to eradicate the disease, which can paralyze a child in hours.

Islamist fighters from countries including Pakistan are among groups battling to oust President Bashar al-Assad, leading to speculation that they brought the virus into the country. [Continue reading…]

See also, How the CIA and the Taliban undermined the global campaign to eradicate polio.

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Allergies and the ‘farm effect’

Moises Velasquez-Manoff writes: Will the cure for allergies come from the cowshed?

Allergies are often seen as an accident. Your immune system misinterprets a harmless protein like dust or peanuts as a threat, and when you encounter it, you pay the price with sneezing, wheezing, and in the worst cases, death.

What prompts some immune systems to err like this, while others never do? Some of the vulnerability is surely genetic. But comparative studies highlight the importance of environment, beginning, it seems, in the womb. Microbes are one intriguing protective factor. Certain ones seem to stimulate a mother’s immune system during pregnancy, preventing allergic disease in children.

By emulating this naturally occurring phenomenon, scientists may one day devise a way to prevent allergies.

This task, though still in its infancy, has some urgency. Depending on the study and population, the prevalence of allergic disease and asthma increased between two- and threefold in the late 20th century, a mysterious trend often called the “allergy epidemic.”

These days, one in five American children have a respiratory allergy like hay fever, and nearly one in 10 have asthma.

Nine people die daily from asthma attacks. While the increase in respiratory allergies shows some signs of leveling off, the prevalence of food and skin allergies continues to rise. Five percent of children are allergic to peanuts, milk and other foods, half again as many as 15 years ago. And each new generation seems to have more severe, potentially life-threatening allergic reactions than the last.

Some time ago, I visited a place where seemingly protective microbes occurred spontaneously. It wasn’t a spotless laboratory in some university somewhere. It was a manure-spattered cowshed in Indiana’s Amish country.

My guide was Mark Holbreich, an allergist in Indianapolis. He’d recently discovered that the Amish people who lived in the northern part of the state were remarkably free of allergies and asthma.

About half of Americans have evidence of allergic sensitization, which increases the risk of allergic disease. But judging from skin-prick tests, just 7.2 percent of the 138 Amish children who Dr. Holbreich tested were sensitized to tree pollens and other allergens. That yawning difference positions the Indiana Amish among the least allergic populations ever described in the developed world.

This invulnerability isn’t likely to be genetic. The Amish originally came to the United States from the German-speaking part of Switzerland, and these days Swiss children, a genetically similar population, are about as allergic as Americans.

Ninety-two percent of the Amish children Dr. Holbreich tested either lived on farms or visited one frequently. Farming, Dr. Holbreich thinks, is the Amish secret. This idea has some history. Since the late 1990s, European scientists have investigated what they call the “farm effect.” [Continue reading…]

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How the U.S. poisoned Iraq

MSNBC reports: Between 2002 and 2005, U.S. forces shot off 6 billion bullets in Iraq (something like 300,000 for every person killed). They also dropped 2,000 to 4,000 tons of bombs on Iraqi cities, leaving behind a witch’s brew of contaminants and toxic metals, including the neurotoxins lead and mercury. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, an Iranian-born toxicologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, is studying the health impact, and her early findings are worrying. Last year, in a study published with Iraqi colleagues, she reported staggering increases in birth defects in the heavily bombarded cities of Basrah and Fallujah. The increases started in the early 90s, after the bombings of the first Gulf War, and continued right through 2011.

In Basrah, the group’s analysis of hospital records revealed 16-fold increase in birth defects among babies delivered between 1994 and 2003 (from 1.4 to 23 per 1,000 live births), and another 48% rise between 2003 to 2009 (from 23 to 48). Likewise, a survey of 56 families in Fallujah showed a 50% increase in birth defects between 1991 and 2010, along with an eightfold increase in miscarriages. Neurological defects are now pervasive in both cities. And though the causes are still uncertain, Savabieasfahani has cited lead and mercury as likely culprits. In Basrah, she found that teeth from malformed children contained three times more lead than teeth from normal ones. In Fallujah, children with birth defects harbored five times more lead than normal kids from the same city, and six times more mercury.

“The explosion of bombs creates fine metal-containing dust particles that linger in the air and can be inhaled by the public,” Savabieasfahani wrote in an essay for Al Jazeera last week. “Metals are persistent in the environment and metal-containing fine dust may be re-injected into the air periodically as a result of wind and air turbulence. Iraq is well known for its strong and frequent sandstorms, which can easily render contaminated dust airborne. Since war debris and the wreckage from ammunition and bombs remain unabated in the environment, the weathering process facilitates continuous metal release into the environment.”

Are Basrah and Fallujah just sentinels of a wider crisis? In an initial effort to find out, the World Health Organization has helped Iraq’s health ministry sample birth-defect incidence across eight regions of the country. The survey is reportedly finished, but the findings are still under review in Baghdad. (Our calls to the health ministry weren’t returned.) Whatever the survey turns up, Savabiesfahani is deeply worried about the trends already documented in Basrah and Fallujah. “We can’t wish this away,” she says. “We need immediate efforts to identify and clean up the sources of hazardous waste. We can’t let this fester the way Agent Orange did in Vietnam.” [Continue reading…]

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No scientific consensus on the safety of GMOs

Sustainable Pulse reports: There is no scientific consensus on the safety of genetically modified foods and crops, according to a statement released today by an international group of more than 90 scientists, academics and physicians.

The statement comes in response to recent claims from the GM industry and some scientists, journalists, and commentators that there is a “scientific consensus” that GM foods and crops were generally found safe for human and animal health and the environment. The statement calls these claims “misleading”, adding, “This claimed consensus on GMO safety does not exist.”

“Such claims may place human and environmental health at undue risk and create an atmosphere of complacency,” states Dr. Angelika Hilbeck, chairperson of the European Network of Scientists for Social and Environmental Responsibility (ENSSER) and one of the signatories. “The statement draws attention to the diversity of opinion over GMOs in the scientific community and the often contradictory or inconclusive findings of studies on GMO safety. These include toxic effects on laboratory animals fed GM foods, increased pesticide use from GM crop cultivation, and the unexpected impacts of Bt insecticidal crops on beneficial and non-target organisms,” Dr Hilbeck continues.

In spite of this nuanced and complex picture, a group of like-minded people makes sweeping claims that GM crops and foods are safe. In reality, many unanswered questions remain and in some cases there is serious cause for concern.

Prof C. Vyvyan Howard, a medically qualified toxicopathologist based at the University of Ulster and a signatory to the statement, said: “A substantial number of studies suggest that GM crops and foods can be toxic or allergenic. It is often claimed that millions of Americans eat GM foods with no ill effects. But as the US has no GMO labeling and no epidemiological studies have been carried out, there is no way of knowing whether the rising rates of chronic diseases seen in that country have anything to do with GM food consumption or not. Therefore this claim has no scientific basis.” [Continue reading…]

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How the CIA and the Taliban undermined the global campaign to eradicate polio

The New York Times, July 2012: Did the killing of Osama bin Laden have an unintended victim: the global drive to eradicate polio?

In Pakistan, where polio has never been eliminated, the C.I.A.’s decision to send a vaccination team into the Bin Laden compound to gather information and DNA samples clearly hurt the national polio drive. The question is: How badly?

After the ruse by Dr. Shakil Afridi was revealed by a British newspaper a year ago, angry villagers, especially in the lawless tribal areas on the Afghan border, chased off legitimate vaccinators, accusing them of being spies.

And then, late last month, Taliban commanders in two districts banned polio vaccination teams, saying they could not operate until the United States ended its drone strikes. One cited Dr. Afridi, who is serving a 33-year sentence imposed by a tribal court, as an example of how the C.I.A. could use the campaign to cover espionage.

“It was a setback, no doubt,” conceded Dr. Elias Durry, the World Health Organization’s polio coordinator for Pakistan. “But unless it spreads or is a very longtime affair, the program is not going to be seriously affected.”

Reuters, October 18, 2013: A Taliban ban on vaccination is exacerbating a serious polio outbreak in Pakistan, threatening to derail dramatic progress made this year towards wiping out the disease worldwide, health officials say.

Health teams in Pakistan have been attacked repeatedly since the Taliban denounced vaccines as a Western plot to sterilize Muslims and imposed bans on inoculation in June 2012.

In North Waziristan, a region near the Afghan border that has been cordoned off by the Taliban, dozens of children, many under the age of two, have been crippled by the viral disease in the past six months.

And there is evidence in tests conducted on sewage samples in some of the country’s major cities that the polio virus is starting to spread beyond these isolated pockets and could soon spark fresh polio outbreaks in more densely populated areas.

“We have entered a phase that we were all worried about and were afraid might happen,” Elias Durry, head of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) in Pakistan, told Reuters in a telephone interview.

“The risk is that as long as the virus is still circulating, and as long as we have no means of reaching these children and immunizing them to interrupt virus transmission, it could jeopardize everything that has been done so far – not only in Pakistan, but also in the region and around the globe.”

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How America is killing itself with sugar

Nature World News: A diet in which 25 percent of one’s calories come from added sugar could be just as harmful to a person’s health as being the inbred offspring of first cousins, a new study conducted by University of Utah researchers found.

The scientists chose this threshold due to the National Research Council’s formal recommendation that a person’s calories from added sugar not exceed 25 percent of their total caloric consumption. However, even this may be far too much, according to the study’s results which found female mice died at twice the normal rate and males were a quarter less likely to hold territory and reproduce when fed the diet reflective of many Americans.

“Our results provide evidence that added sugar consumed at concentrations currently considered safe exerts dramatic adverse impacts on mammalian health,” the researchers said regarding their findings published in the journal Nature Communications, adding they were careful to keep the administered levels of sugar proportionate to the amount consumed by humans through candy, beverages and baked goods. For example, the researchers stressed that the mice’s diet directly corresponded with one in which a person drinks three sodas a day “plus a perfectly healthy, no-sugar-added diet.”

According to Wayne Potts, a biology professor and the study’s senior author, the researchers placed groups of mice in room-sized pens with multiple nest boxes and allowed the mice to compete more naturally for mates and desirable territories, thereby revealing even subtle effects of the diet on mice’s behavior.

As a result, the scientists found 35 percent of females on the extra sugar diet died after 32 weeks in the mouse barns versus 17 percent of the control group. And while no difference appeared in the case of the rate of death for the male mice, those on the added-sugar diet acquired and held 26 percent fewer territories than males on the control diet and ultimately went on to produce 25 percent fewer offspring.

Such “level of health degradation is almost identical,” the researchers pointed out, to that of cousin-level inbreeding and persisted despite a lack of obesity and few metabolic symptoms. [Continue reading…]

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Psychiatrists: professional drug pushers

Will Self writes: A psychiatrist who once “treated” me used to recite this rueful little mantra: “They say failed doctors become psychiatrists, and that failed psychiatrists specialise in drugs.” By drugs this psychiatrist meant drugs of addiction – and his “treatment” of me consisted of prescribing Temgesic, a synthetic opiate, as a substitute for the heroin I was more strongly inclined to take. So, he undertook this role: acting, in effect, as a state-licensed drug dealer; and he also attempted a kind of psychotherapy, talking to me about my problems and engaging with my own restless critique of – among many other things – psychiatry itself. Together we conceived of doing some sort of project on drugs and addiction, and began undertaking research. On one memorable fact-finding trip to Amsterdam, we ended up smoking a great deal of marijuana as well as drinking to excess – I also scored heroin and used it under the very eyes of the medical practitioner who was, at least nominally, “treating” me.

All of this happened more than 20 years ago, and I drag it up here not in order to retrospectively censure the psychiatrist concerned, but rather to present him and his behaviour as a perversely honest version of the role played by his profession. For what, in essence, do psychiatrists specialise in, if not mood-altering drugs? Or, to put it another way, what do psychiatrists have to offer – over and above the other so-called “psy professions” – beyond their capacity to legally administer psychoactive drugs, and in some cases forcibly confine those they deem to be mentally ill?

Psychiatry is undergoing one of its periodic convulsions at the moment – one that coincides with the publication by the American Psychiatric Association of the fifth edition of their hugely influential “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (DSM–5) – and I think we should all take the opportunity to join in the profession’s own collective navel-gazing and existential angst. After all, while the influence of the talking cures is pervasive in our society – running all the way up the scale from anodyne advice dispensed on daytime TV shows, to the wealthy shelling out hundreds of pounds a week to pet their neuroses in the company of highly qualified black dog walkers – psychotherapy and psychoanalysis remain essentially voluntaristic undertakings; only psychiatry deals in mandatory social care and legal sanction. Besides, only psychiatry partakes of the peculiar mystique that attaches to medical care. We may dismiss the opinions of all sorts of counsellors and therapists, secure in the knowledge that their very multifariousness is indicative of their lack of overall traction, but psychiatry, dealing, as it claims, with well-defined maladies – and treating them with drugs and hospitalisation – exerts an enormous pull on our collective self-image. Just what the nature of this pull is, and how it has come to condition our understanding of ourselves and our psychic functioning, is what I wish to unpick. [Continue reading…]

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Fewer calories, healthier gut, longer life

Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News: Emerging research continues to show that the microbes inhabiting the gut play pivotal roles in health and disease throughout life. Two recent studies highlight how gut microbiota affect their hosts over the long term.

The first, published today in Nature Communications, charts changes to microbial composition based on life-long caloric restriction. In it, Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Liping Zhao, Ph.D., and his colleagues show that mice that were calorie-restricted on both high-fat or low-fat diets throughout their lives showed gut microbiota phylotypes that correlated positively with lifespan, such as Lactobacillus, as compared with their non-calorie-restricted counterparts.

“These calorie restriction-induced changes in the gut microbiota are concomitant with signifcantly reduced serum levels of lipopolysaccharide-binding protein, suggesting that animals under calorie restriction can establish a structurally balanced architecture of gut microbiota that may exert a health benefit to the host via reduction of antigen load from the gut,” Dr. Zhao et al. write. [Continue reading…]

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Breeding the nutrition out of our food

Jo Robinson writes: We like the idea that food can be the answer to our ills, that if we eat nutritious foods we won’t need medicine or supplements. We have valued this notion for a long, long time. The Greek physician Hippocrates proclaimed nearly 2,500 years ago: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” Today, medical experts concur. If we heap our plates with fresh fruits and vegetables, they tell us, we will come closer to optimum health.

This health directive needs to be revised. If we want to get maximum health benefits from fruits and vegetables, we must choose the right varieties. Studies published within the past 15 years show that much of our produce is relatively low in phytonutrients, which are the compounds with the potential to reduce the risk of four of our modern scourges: cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and dementia. The loss of these beneficial nutrients did not begin 50 or 100 years ago, as many assume. Unwittingly, we have been stripping phytonutrients from our diet since we stopped foraging for wild plants some 10,000 years ago and became farmers.

These insights have been made possible by new technology that has allowed researchers to compare the phytonutrient content of wild plants with the produce in our supermarkets. The results are startling.

Wild dandelions, once a springtime treat for Native Americans, have seven times more phytonutrients than spinach, which we consider a “superfood.” A purple potato native to Peru has 28 times more cancer-fighting anthocyanins than common russet potatoes. One species of apple has a staggering 100 times more phytonutrients than the Golden Delicious displayed in our supermarkets.

Were the people who foraged for these wild foods healthier than we are today? They did not live nearly as long as we do, but growing evidence suggests that they were much less likely to die from degenerative diseases, even the minority who lived 70 years and more. The primary cause of death for most adults, according to anthropologists, was injury and infections. [Continue reading…]

Among wild foods, dandelions are probably among the easiest to find and if picking them to eat in a salad or as a cooked vegetable, just pay attention to their habitat — their virtues as a superfood won’t be as great if they’ve been exposed to pollution, pesticides, or pets. And if you’re only used to tasteless salads, be prepared for this plant’s bitter kick.

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