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| Diseases (11227) | |
| Health problem (75) | |
This outward expression is accompanied by inner physiological changes like lowered blood pressure, reduced skin conductance and nausea.
Psychologist Paul Rozin, of the University of Pennsylvania, argues that our disgust response reduces the likelihood of ingesting disease-causing microorganisms in decayed meat, faeces, vomit, or blood.
perhaps the risk of infection from faecal matter is the lesser of two concerns. Laboratory animals, pets,
Does milk settle an upset stomach? When you're feeling too ill to eat, or have indigestion,
what could be better than a gentle, thick glass of milk to settle your stomach?
It's soothing to drink, and at least you are getting something nutritious inside you. This remedy has been around for years in countries where milk is popular.
Until the 1980s, doctors would sometimes recommend milk to patients with duodenal ulcers (in the intestine just beyond the stomach) to help ease their discomfort.
which could explain why people with ulcers typically experience pain a few hours after a meal.
The patients who had evidence of duodenal ulcers, but were not currently experiencing symptoms, produced more acid.
Either way, milk is recommended no longer for people with ulcers because it might do the opposite of soothing them.
In 1986 patients with duodenal ulcers spent four weeks in hospital on medication as part of a controlled trial.
At the end of the four weeks each patient underwent an endoscopy to examine their ulcers. Significantly more people on the standard diet had had ulcers that healed,
while fewer than expected got better in the milk-drinking group. Milk appeared to hinder the healing process.
which time 328 developed peptic ulcers (an umbrella term covering duodenal and stomach ulcers). They found that heavy milk drinkers (defined as four
or more glasses a day) were more likely to develop an ulcer, especially amongst the men.
So was the milk causing the ulcers? The difficulty here is that some people with pain drink milk to ease the symptoms temporarily,
so perhaps they were consuming milk as a result of the ulcer. But the risk was also high in those drinking large quantities of milk,
but settling an upset stomach isn't one of them. If you would like to comment on this article
prevent infection and help the healing process. Von Esmarch may be credited widely with coming up with the concept of"first aid Â,
It also seems to help the wound to heal, although researchers are still debating the exact mechanism by which this happens.
Last time I looked at the effect of a global pandemic, this time I'm looking at how we might change the agricultural landscape by hacking plants.
What if a pandemic strikes? Over the past century, humans have been transforming the planet so profoundly that we are pushing it into a new geological era, the Anthropocene (the Age of man.
what if our species were hit by a global pandemic? In the Anthropocene we are encroaching on wild lands,
It means that diseases that infect animals have unprecedented an chance to jump across species to us.
Humans are so genetically alike that pathogens easily spread between individuals and across populations. And because we are living in greater numbers and densities than ever before,
and because so many of us travel internationally oe and so much faster oe there's a greater opportunity for pathogens to spread.
Epidemics are certainly not new or unpredictable. A new strain of influenza virus occurs every 1-2 years, for example.
But the sudden global explosion of an epidemic that infects a large number of the population oe a pandemic oe is harder to predict.
We know a pandemic has occurred every 10-50 years for the past few centuries, and the last one was in 1968,
so we're overdue one. Epidemiologists do not talk of whether there will be a new pandemic, but of when it will occur.
Pandemics, which kill a significant proportion of the population have acute and lasting effects on society.
The Black death, a bubonic plague during the Middle ages caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, killed 30%-60%of Europeans (80%of people in the south of France and Spain) and reduced global population from 450 million to around 350 million.
In a single province of China, more than 4 million people died (90%of the population) in 1334 alone.
In some countries witch hunts rooting out the unknown cause of the plague resulted in minority groups being massacred,
For plague survivors life generally improved, especially for those at the bottom of the ladder.
The Black death also had an environmental impact oe loss of agricultural activity allowed forests to regrow,
the Spanish flu of 1918 killed one in five of those infected, some 40-50 million people worldwide,
The impacts of this pandemic should have been especially severe because unusually, more than half of those who died were young working-age adults,
aged 20-40 (most flu outbreaks kill the very old and young first). However, the global economic slump that resulted from incapacitation
The HIV/Aids epidemic, which also disproportionately effects young, working age men and women, can give some idea of economic impact oe in hard-hit sub-Saharan African countries the economies were estimated to be on average 22%smaller in 2010
So what would be the result of a global pandemic in the 21st Century? The world's population in the middle Ages was just a few hundred million;
Poverty in HIV-hit southern Africa means it has the lowest per capita greenhouse gas emissions on the planet.
But what if the pandemic was really severe oe killing 80%-90%of our species?
Wouldn't it be great to achieve some of these desirable planetary outcomes without the horrific suffering of a global pandemic?
and numerous food-borne disease outbreaks caused by microbes such as salmonella, E coli strain 0157, toxoplasma and listeria.
herbicides and other harmful chemical contaminants. At that point, vertical farming in tall buildings will replace less productive single-story greenhouses as the source of all city-grown produce.
Rather than being noxious sumps of filth and disease, these sewage plants are popular visitor attractions, odourless greenhouses with the look and feel of a botanical garden (such as Koh Phi Phi Don in Thailand).
Is China's flu pandemic the next big one? China's flu pandemic: The big one?
Laurie Garrett Foreign policy 24 april 2013 Ten years after Sars, a new virus strikes China, perhaps more deadly,
and certainly harder to contain. The H7n9 flu now evolving in China has a lethality about nine times the mortality rate of the Great Influenza of 1918-19,
which claimed at least 50 million lives. It's not a bird flu, but what is it,
and where does it hide? One week, no food S Abbas Raza Aeon 1 may 2013 Couple fast for seven days.
Destroying crops, spreading diseases.""Once a wild pig is full-grown, it is invulnerable to almost all forms of predators angry alligators being one possible exception Â. Boars are smart, fast, hard to hunt."
or slowed the spread of telltale brain and spine lesions.""I've always had a research interest so
At the start of the trial, MRI scans showed patients had an average of 6. 6 active lesions oe scars on the protective layer around nerve cells that disrupt the transmission of electrical messages in the brain and spinal cord.
the lesions rebounded to an average of 5. 8."The beauty of this is that the number of new lesions is really an objective, brutally honest answer,
"Over the years, people had looked for environmental factors that caused inflammatory bowel disease and hadn't found anything, Â Weinstock says."
The price might be the surge in cases of asthma and allergies we've seen in western countries over the past 40 years.
Likewise, rates of autoimmune and immunoregulatory conditions such as Crohn's diseases, type 1 diabetes inflammatory bowel disease and multiple sclerosis have been on the rise.
Yet in developing countries, such conditions remain rare. In 1989, David Strachan, an epidemiologist at St george's University in London, published a landmark study proposing that improved hygiene in the developed world could explain trends in hay fever incidence.
Strachan's idea was that changes to sewage treatment, availability of clean water and food,
and a shift away from farming lifestyles decreased our contact with soil, faeces and contaminated food where bacteria and parasites like helminths live.
The rise in allergies and inflammatory diseases may not necessarily be caused by a general lack of microbes in hygienic environments,
People who survived infection have passed on immune advantages to future generations. In the modern, developed and sterile West, the theory goes,
leaving some particularly vulnerable to allergies and inflammatory diseases.""It's not that you're diseased or abnormal,
when Elliott and Weinstock first found that helminths protected mice against colitis, news spread fast.
In one, involving 54 ulcerative colitis patients, 43%of those given pig whipworm eggs improved, compared with only 17%who received placebos.
In a second trial 29 patients with Crohn's disease took whipworm eggs every three weeks. By the end of 24 weeks
79%had reduced disease activity and 72%had gone into remission. Researchers and biomedical companies around the world began to investigate the potential of helminthic therapy for treating conditions ranging from asthma to autism to psoriasis.
Helminthic therapy is still at the experimental stage, but some patients are unwilling to wait.
Smith was diagnosed with Crohn's disease in 1996, and lost a foot of his intestines to surgeries before he stumbled on one of Weinstock's papers.
Moises Velasquez-Manoff, a journalist, also visited Aglietti's Tijuana clinic to receive a dose of 30 hookworms for his allergies and asthma,
and to chronicle the experience in his book, An Epidemic of Absence. Once infected, he suffered diarrhoea and a dull, constant gut pain,
and his allergies failed to improve. After a year and a half he took medication to flush out the invaders."
"The idea is very, very powerful, Â Velasquez-Manoff says.""They just weren't doing anything for me.
 Researchers across the board are keen to discourage self-infection, which they say puts patients at risk of taking the wrong dose or purchasing contaminated batches.
but do not risk a chronic infection potentially spiralling out of control, or of accidentally infecting family members."
At New york University, immunologist P'ng Loke found monkeys suffering from chronic diarrhoea not only got better after receiving a dose of pig whipworms
but also had significantly different gut microbes post-infection. He is currently enrolling ulcerative colitis patients to repeat the experiment in humans.
Gastroenterologist John Croese, at the Prince Charles Hospital in Brisbane, is inoculating 12 coeliac disease patients,
who suffer from gluten intolerance, with hookworms. Gluten is introduced slowly into their diets to see
if the hookworms will suppress the disease's inflammatory response. Back in Wisconsin Fleming is continuing his studies on multiple sclerosis.
seeking to understand how helminths inhibit disease. Coronado Biosciences, a Massachusetts-based company, hopes to have results from two large studies being carried out in the US into the use of pig whipworm eggs to treat Crohn's disease by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, German firm Dr Falk Pharma is collaborating with Coronado in a similar trial. Coronado also expects results from its multiple sclerosis trials next year.
and the firm is planning studies on psoriasis, ulcerative colitis, type 1 diabetes and children with autism."
"Our most important task now is to identify which diseases to pursue and which patient populations to target, says Karin Hehenberger, Coronado's chief medical officer.
Does cranberry juice stop cystitis? Many women swear by the healing powers of cranberry juice, saying it not only helps cure painful bladder infections,
including cystitis, but also helps prevent future outbreaks as well. Given that bladder infections are one of the most common bacterial infections we face,
some women keep a carton of cranberry juice in the fridge at all times, just in case. Â Men are more fortunate.
They can also get urinary tract infections, but they are fifty times rarer, probably because the male urethra is longer.
The reason cranberries are thought to be special is that they contain substances called proanthocyanidins which are thought to prevent bacteria from sticking to the wall of the bladder.
So it is plausible that drinking cranberry juice could help to prevent cystitis. A systematic review of studies published last year found that products containing cranberries reduced the risk of infection,
particularly in those who repeatedly had infections and those who drank the juice at least twice a day.
Juice seemed to be more effective than tablets containing cranberry, possibly because the active substances are absorbed more easily.
So far, so good oe we have a biological explanation for why cranberry juice might prevent infections,
this time from the Cochrane Collaboration, examined 24 studies on the prevention of urinary tract infections and came to rather different conclusions.
The study in question divided 319 women with recent urinary tract infections into two groups: half were given cranberry juice to drink twice a day for the next six months;
Drinking cranberries made no difference to the recurrence of infections. The earlier review had excluded this study
because the authors had used a lower threshold to definite a urinary tract infection, but authors of the later review assessed it to be important enough to include in their study.
Cranberry juice might prevent infections, but if it does the effect seems to be minor at best
To reduce your risk of future infections by a small amount you would need to drink cranberry juice twice a day indefinitely.
But it's estimated that a woman unlucky enough to have two infections a year might be able to reduce that to one a year,
and for people who get a lot of infections this might be worth it. The alternative is tablets,
whether their infection would have got better on its own, or when and if they would have the next bout of cystitis.
So the only guaranteed treatment for urinary tract infections is antibiotics. With the risk of increased antibiotic resistance, an alternative treatment for such everyday infections would be welcome.
But for the moment, it's impossible to say whether cranberry juice is it. If you would like to comment on this article
or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.
and in the way people with visual disabilities handle them. Take another example: the Harrier jump jet.
In the United states, according to the Centers for Disease Control, one third of teenage deaths are associated with car crashes.
and much of the world seems to be in the grip of a shopping epidemic.
and calculus. Though I eventually got over my contempt for mathematics, there was a time in which
Decades of research have documented thoroughly the health problems that result from inhaling tobacco smoke oe more than a dozen different types of cancer, heart disease, stroke, emphysema and other respiratory diseases, among others.
 says Stephen Hecht from the University of Minnesota Cancer Center, who studies tobacco carcinogens oe substances that cause cancer.
And, they cause similar patterns of DNA damage to those seen in actual tumours. The route of exposure also matters.
or promote the growth of blood vessels that bring oxygen and nutrients to tumours. But both of these claims come from studies in lab-grown cells."
and have been linked to mouth, oesophageal and pancreatic cancers. The one possible exception is snus, a Swedish product that's not unlike a"tobacco-stuffed teabag  that you stick under your lips.
Snus is billed as the reason for Sweden's low rates of lung and oral cancers
and there's a possibility that it still poses a cancer risk, Â says Benowitz. Indeed, some recent studies have suggested that snus users have a higher risk of pancreatic cancer,
and a higher risk of dying from cancer.""If you simplistically said everyone stopped smoking and used snus,
there'd be a tremendous health benefit, but the question is whether they would do that,
or even ethical to reduce that harm by advocating products that are safer, but still not safe?"
and the spread of disease and introduced species. As many as 30%of all species may be lost over the next four decades, conservationists estimate.
We've also been spreading pests and diseases from place to place often causing local extinctions.
when we've introduced diseases such as flu, smallpox, HIV or malaria to places where the local people haven't developed adequate immunity.
Meanwhile, we've been artificially boosting the populations of certain select species, such as cows, dogs, rice, maize and chickens oe most
In the Galapagos, plagues of blackberry bushes originally from The himalayas are simply being controlled, whereas rats and goats that eat the food of rare tortoises are being eliminated.
because bed bugs are known not to spread disease. Finally, there is the problem of insecticide resistance. Even DDT, the supposed miracle cure, wasn't immune to this.
Planets, pandemics and powerthe vanishing groves Ross Andersen Aeon 16 october 2012 A superb essay on the world's oldest trees, the bristlecone pines of California,
Where will the next pandemic come from? And how can we stop it? David Quammen Popsci 15 october 2012 The best guess:
A human disease that comes from wildlife, probably from a subgroup known as RNA VIRUSES. They're highly adaptable, jump species,
I have asked eminent disease scientists and public-health officials the same two-part question: 1) Will a new disease emerge, in the near future,
sufficiently virulent and transmissible to cause a pandemic capable of killing tens of millions of people?
and 2) If so, what does it look like and from where does it come? Their answers to the first part have ranged from maybe to probably.
Their answers to the second have focused on zoonoses, particularly RNA VIRUSES. The prospect of a new viral pandemic, for these sober professionals, looms large.
They say it might happen anytime. Alpha centauri and the new astronomy Lee Billings Centauri Dreams 16 october 2012 The discovery of a new planet outside our solar system is a fascinating development,
He'd contracted bacterial meningitis and fallen into a coma in which state he'd experienced visions of intense beauty.
identify bird flu and figure out what plants the bees that made your honey were pollinating. Damon Little, a curator at the New york Botanical gardens has used it to see
she calls it) to let the community help diagnose pest and disease problems and showcase their work.
because the keratin oe a kind of biological plastic that encases the hair shaft-Â protects the DNA that it contains from the contamination
environmentalists and demographers predicting humanity's collapse through famine, wars and epidemics, if we don't check our population.
Depth of fieldin Bridgeman's case, he was left with a condition called alternating exotropic strabismus, often called"lazy eye Â
"It's not included in any of the standard tests that optometrists do, Â says Laurie Wilcox, a vision specialist at York University in Toronto."
I've been vaccinated against killers from polio to tuberculosis to measles; I've had an inside toilet and bathroom with hot and cold running water;
Technology and innovation has saved already us from plagues, low crop yields, water shortages, reliance on fossil fuels and more.
but a report by the World Health Organisation says there is no evidence that these mouthpieces reduce the harm.
but suggest that smokers of water-pipes could be at long-term risk for nicotine dependence, cardiovascular disease and even cancer.
 Professor Hani Najm, Head of Cardiac Surgery at National guard Health Affairs in Saudi arabia told me in an interview that he fears that water-pipe smoking could result in an escalation in heart disease in the Gulf states.
So do scientists trying to investigate the spread of deadly malaria. Whilst conservationists trying to get a handle on the state of illegal logging may have it worst of all.
Swiss malaria researchers need to run enormous numbers of calculations to simulate the spread of malaria worldwide;
For example, malariacontrol. net simulates the spread of the disease on computer oe helping governments decide how to invest most effectively on, for instance, bednets versus vaccines.
Last September, scientists reported the structure of a key enzyme that allows HIV to replicate,
a pair of eyes (to fight epilepsy) for $170, and powdered tiger humerus (for treating ulcers and typhoid) for $3, 200 per kilo in Seoul, according to the conservation charity.
Dropping numbersi was in Nepal to see one of the country's estimated breeding population of 120-one of perhaps 3,
However, Noah died two days later of an infection unrelated to the cloning process. And like the guar, other attempts to clone endangered species through somatic cell nuclear transfer tended to be one-offs.
They are impervious to cancer and do not feel pain from acids. To endow ordinary lab mice with these traits Church will try to partially rewrite the genomes of mouse stem cells.
lower disease resistance, stunt growth and even cause blindness, which greatly increases a person's risk of death in the developing world.
and avoid environmental harm by not adding unnecessary fertiliser or water, Khosla says.""But with precise input management, farmers can also influence grain yield and efficiency.
Ernest Mahler, the head of research at Kimberly-clark, had started hay fever and using the tissue as a disposable handkerchief.
when she set to work baking a preservative-free loaf of bread for her allergy-prone son. She had baked never a loaf in her life,
but we do need a cure for Alzheimers disease and Parkinsons disease. Recent experiments show that dead brain cells in mice (which are mammalian like us) can be regenerated with immature brain cells.
Interestingly, the use of chimeras even for scientific research into diseases is an ethical and legal powder keg.
since the Epilepsy Foundation of America, uploading seizure-inducing content to its forums. They also targeted the kid who started The No-Cussing Club
or how potent a strain might be. oeyou dont go into a Walgreens with a headache
say, pain or nausea? -Should medical pot be labeled by potency? Patients using over-the-counter and prescription drugs can read the medicines ingredients,
Should growing operations have guidelines to limit contamination, such as mildew and mold? oegiven the lack of USDA or other oversight of this agricultural industry, were at square one,
Alzheimers disease and other dementias. As one of the worlds fastest-aging countries, with nearly 9 percent of its population over 65 already afflicted, South korea has opened a oewar on Dementia, spending money and shining floodlights on a disease that is,
here as in many places, riddled with shame and fear. South korea is training thousands of people,
Dementia Epidemic South korea is at the forefront of a worldwide eruption of dementia from about 30 million estimated cases now to an estimated 100 million in 2050.
the National Alzheimers Project Act was introduced this year to establish a separate Alzheimers office to create oean integrated national plan to overcome Alzheimers.
whose late husband had Alzheimers. South korea also worries that dementia, previously stigmatized as oeghost-seeing
disease of knowledge and the brain which makes adults become babies. But South koreas low birth rate will make family caregiving tougher. oei feel
as if a tsunamis coming, said Lee Sung-hee, the South korean Alzheimers Association president, who trains nursing home staff members,
Dr. Yang said. oethis is the very beginning stages of Alzheimers disease. He suggested that Mr. Cha get a government-subsidized brain M. R i. to confirm the diagnosis,
which is run by Mrs. Lee, the Alzheimers Association president, for women without sons to care for them.
got Alzheimers, and oei would just feel it was annoying and walk out of the room, he said. oeshe would ask to do an activity,
The city of Alphen aan den Rijn ordered the study five years ago after officials found unexplained abnormalities on trees that couldnt be ascribed to a virus or bacterial infection.
Additional testing found the disease to occur throughout the Western world. In The netherlands, about 70 percent of all trees in urban areas show the same symptoms,
#Plants and Animals Fending Off Diseases! This is a plant nothing touches! Contrary to long-held beliefs, plants and animals have developed remarkably similar mechanisms for detecting microbial invasions.
This holds promise for the future treatment of infectious diseases in humans. It may have been 1 billion years
and resisting diseases. This revelation was arrived at over a period of 15 years by teams of researchers from seemingly disparate fields who have used classical genetic studies to unravel the mysteries of disease resistance in plants and animals
according to a historical overview that will appear in the Nov 19 issue of the journal Science.
and fend off microbial infection and disease. Beutler and Ronald have played key roles in this chapter of scientific discovery.
Their overview in Science includes illustrated descriptions of the disease-resistance or immunity pathways in the mouse, Drosophila fruit fly,
and respond to infection. The 1980s brought about an intense hunt for the genes that control production of the receptor proteins, followed by an oeavalanche of newly discovered receptor genes and mechanisms in the 1990s.
How much does that affect the risk for cancer? We cant measure how diet changes our health,
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