Bird flu, pig flu, now bat flu? Human risk unclear.

Scientist recently have found evidence of a flu found in Bats. It is a never before seen strand of flu, and the risk to humans is still unclear. The Bats that the virus was found in was a kind of bat that only eats fruits, a little yellow-shouldered bat from Guatemala. They don't bite us so it can't spread that way. But it can spread by the bat leaving the virus on a piece of fruit and us humans eating it. But some people are still skeptical. Richard "Mick" Fulton said "In my mind, if you can't grow the virus, how do you know that the virus is there?” That is up to the scientist to decide with more research and more testing. So far, the virus hasn’t mutated and it still is unable to be transmitted from bat to human. If it stays that way, we will be safe. The next step is to try to find a way to keep the virus from ever being a threat to us. The scientists will do the necessary steps in order to find a way to keep it unthreatening.

With all the talk about swine flu in the past few years, I can only imagine what bat flu is. The Scientists say that they can't even grow the newly found flu virus on chicken eggs or a human cell culture. And they don't even know if it is going to be a risk to us yet. The risk is if the virus somehow got exposed to the more common influenza we know, and then mutate into something that can affect us and that we don't have a cure for yet. Just like the scenario in the recent movie Contagion, when the bird flu found a way to get transmitted human to human, and it caused massive amounts of deaths, in a short period of time. Hopefully that won’t happen!

In my opinion, I think this "Bat Flu" will be fully investigated by the scientists, and they will be able to keep it under control. It won't be a threat to humans, but that is just speculation. Let’s keep our fingers crossed!

To read more on this article go to:

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/02/28/bird-flu-pig-flu-now-bat-flu-human-risk-unclear/

Children and Rickets

The article I read was about Children around the world developing Rickets. It is a disease that is becoming more common in kids because they are staying out of the sun. Rickets may seem harmless, but it can actually be very effective on how kids grow.

If children were to stay indoors all day and never go outside, they would not get the Vitamin D that their bodies require to stay healthy. Their bones would slowly weaken and not grow properly.

The article says that the government has scared people into thinking that the sun is very dangerous and can kill. That people always need to wear sunscreen and wear lots of clothes to protect themselves from the sun. But the sun is what people need to survive. The Ultra Violet rays that the sun gives off are the fastest and easiest way to get Vitamin D into our bodies. So bye going out into the sun more, the healthier you will be.

I agree and disagree with this article. I agree that the sun is one of the most important things for our body. Also that it helps our bones grow strong and that without it, our ones will become weak. The part i disagree on is that I don't believe that the government scared people into thinking that the sun was bad. Because of all the technological growth lately, people around the world are finding it easier to do things from their own house and don't have to leave. Video games and TV are also big reasons as to why kids won't go outside as much as they used to. As our technology develops, so does Rickets disease.


http://www.naturalnews.com/031479_rickets_sunlight_exposure.html

HIV/AIDS Numbers Reducing, Infected Living Longer

The Aging Face of HIV/AIDS by Claudia Del Castillo covers the many new faces of HIV/AIDS, older men and women. Most of these people are those who contracted HIV/AIDS in their younger years through drug abuse or unprotected sex. In the article Castillo states "Life expectancy in the first years of the AIDS epidemic was very low. A report from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) stated that the average age of death for HIV/AIDS in 1991 was between 25 and 44 for men and between 15 and 44 for women. In 1994, death tolls were the highest, topping at 8,339 in New York City alone." With advances in modern medicine doctors have been able to increase the life expectancy by about 15 years; some HIV/AIDS victims may even live well into their 60's.

Later in the article Castillo talks about the spread of HIV/AIDS among the older population, "Recently infected seniors are less common than people who got it at a younger age, accounting for about 16 percent of new infection cases, according to a 2007 CDC report.”

The spread of HIV/AIDS amongst seniors is caused by "risky sexual behaviors." Because many people in this age group do not have to be concerned with pregnancy, no contraceptive measures are taken, increasing the risk of HIV/AIDS.

I found this bit of information to be very intriguing because when one thinks of someone who contracted AIDS, they will usually think of a younger person who is using drugs, not an old man or woman living in a retirement home.

This article was chosen because there is a unit on HIV/AIDS coming up and I thought this would serve as a good prelude to it. AIDS awareness has gone down since the 80's and 90's, but it is always good to be reminded every once and a while that AIDS is still a real epidemic in America and until a cure is found the people who suffered from the disease 20 years ago will still suffer today.

"Edward Shaw has a broad and inviting smile, his glasses resting on the bridge of his nose. He doesn’t look like he’s 70. He talks about his life with ease, even when it comes to disclosing that he has lived with HIV/AIDS for the past 23 years."

For futher reading here is the link to the original article:
http://thebrooklynink.com/2012/01/18/40262-the-aging-face-of-hivaids/

I'm not Obese?

This article called U.S. Obesity Problem shows no sign of Shrinking is by Lindsey Tanner of the Boston Globe on 1-17-2012. America has a obesity problem, and there is no sign in it decreasing. But luckily there are also no signs of it increasing. Even though the obesity rate is not increasing, from 2009-2010 it still remains at a relatively high rate. “In 2009-2010, more than 78 million adults and almost 13 million children aged 2-19 were obese, the CDC researchers reported.” If these obesity rates continue to remain the same there will be a significant increase in diabetes later on in these children’s lives, since type 2 diabetes becomes prevalent later in life. You are now considered obese if you have a BMI of at least 30, and over weight between 25 and 29. In this survey of 6000 adults and 4000 kids 33% of adults were overweight and 15% of children were. The government considers a healthy BMI to be between 18 and 25.

This article really jumped out to me of how awful Americas obesity problem is. One think I found interesting is that the high number of overweight (not obese) people. This was interesting because people may think that there not obese but they could still be overweight, and that causes an unhealthy risk. This massive number of overweight and obese people most likely are the cause of Americas problem of not eating healthy. We must take action to develop and demonstrate proper eating habits.


http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/health/articles/2012/01/17/obesity_epidemic_shows_no_hint_of_reversing_course/

Diabetes in Children

Although Diabetes is not extremely common, there has been a significant rise in childhood diabetes over the last thirty years. The most common type of diabetes in children under 16 has always been type 1. But it seems that type 2 diabetes, which is more commonly found in middle aged and elderly people, is somehow getting "passed down" to the children. Doctor Francine Ratner Kaufman wrote, "Type 2 diabetes has been described as a new epidemic in the American pediatric population that has been coincident with the overall 33% increase in diabetes incidence and prevalence seen during the past decade." Although there are not a great deal of cases in the U.S., this type 2 diabetes in children is prevalent in parts of Africa and Asia.

How are our children getting this mature disease? Obesity. Within the last 30 years there has been a rise in all diabetes cases, due to the worlds love of fattening food and lack of sports. Although obesity may not always be the cause for diabetes it plays a major role in effecting your insulin resistance.

There may not be numerous cases of type 2 diabetes in America but type 1 is effecting children like a common cold. If the world does not shape up and start eating healthier we are bound to see another rise in the cases of children with diabetes.

http://clinical.diabetesjournals.org/content/20/4/217.full

Laziness: The Silent Epidemic of Americans Everywhere

An article that I read that I found especially interesting was

The Silent, Deadly Epidemic of Non-Communicable Disease, by, Ray Suarez. This Article was written on September 8, 2011, and although it is not too recent, it is still an ongoing problem.

This article does not deal with the well-know diseases, such as , malaria, tuberculosis, and influenza , but with the everyday conditions that are just barley recognized as diseases. These silent killers are conditions like diabetes, cancer and heart and lung disease.

In the article Suarez writes "Not all non-communicable diseases are linked to lifestyle choices, but many are exacerbated by poor diet, smoking, alcohol use, or environmental conditions. Obesity is a major risk factor for diabetes, heart disease and some types of cancers", this is a sad statistic that many people are aware of, and what shocks me the most is that people choose to live this way, they can take measures to prevent themselves from contracting these diseases, but instead they would prefer to slowly diminish their quality of life and succumb to their addictions. In a world where there are countries suffering from vicious diseases, such as cholera and malaria, we cannot make the slightest effort to change our lifestyles?

Later in the article Suarez makes a very interesting point, he states, "Watch a day of commercial television in the United States (if you can bear it). Hour after hour come a parade of advertising for drugs to lower blood sugar, cholesterol, blood pressure, stop plaque forming on blood vessels, aid in weight loss, relieve the symptoms of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. This is a crazy, slightly backwards way of treating non-communicable disease in the rich world, but we have decided we can afford it, and it turns out to be much easier that taking four inches off your waistline", this just proves the point that we would rather take the easy way out and live a life that is not as full as it could be, because we can not make simple changes, like eating better, not consuming as much alcohol, or quite smoking.

This reminded of the film One Water that we watched a few weeks ago. It makes me think of the part were it shows many American families using clean water for luxury purposes like swimming pools and water fountains, while places like Haiti suffer from cholera because they do not have enough clean water.

If something does not change soon, the U.N. estimates that by 2030, 52 million people will die annually from these non-communicable diseases.

This article was posted on Pbs.org and for further reading here is the link:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/09/the-silent-deadly-epidemic-of-non-communicable-disease.html

Who's in the Most Danger from H1N1?

The article I read was about the H1N1 flu and its effects on pregnant women. I'll give a summary of it below, but here is the link if you want to read the whole thing.

Some major points the article made were that pregnant women had a one in five chance of dying from H1N1 and that about two-thirds of the women who had given birth while being sick with H1N1 delivered preterm babies or a little less than half delivered low weight babies.

The CDC had gathered data about the death rate of pregnant women sick with H1N1 and determined that the mortality rate was almost 22%. However, it also said that pregnant women were more likely to survive when given antivirals quickly. So the CDC wanted to emphasize the importance of immunization for pregnant women and quickly using antivirals to treat them.

Besides being a threat to women who had been pregnant when they caught the disease, H1N1 proved to be threatening to women who had just given birth and then became severely ill.

Many of the women who died, however, had underlying conditions that could have contributed to the fact that they'd died or had birth problems.

The article also stressed that the data was limited seeing as it relied on case reports on a hot line the CDC set up and due to these underlying conditions many of the pregnant women had.

This article relates to our class because H1N1 virus has become epidemic in the United States recently, and was especially prominent a couple of years ago. It also talked about how treating it quickly with antivirals would help prevent it from getting worse and give the woman a better chance at surviving.

I thought that this article was interesting because everyone knows about swine flu and is cautious about it, but I never thought that it could affect some people more than others. The statistics in the article were pretty surprising to me - like that 63.6% of women who delivered while in the hospital for swine flu gave birth preterm when the national average of preterm births is only 12.3%.

Overall, this article gave me a new look at an infectious epidemic disease that I thought I already knew a good deal about.