Health & WellnessS


Health

WHO: Up to 2 billion people might get swine flu over next two years

Eliane Engeler and Alexander G. Higgens
Associated Press
Sat, 09 May 2009 15:50 UTC
GENEVA - The World Health Organization said Thursday that up to 2 billion people could be infected by swine flu if the current outbreak turns into a pandemic. The agency said a pandemic typically lasts two years.

WHO flu chief Keiji Fukuda said the number wasn't a prediction, but that experience with flu pandemics showed one-third of the world's population gets infected.

"If we do move into a pandemic then our expectation is that we will see a large number of people infected worldwide," Fukuda said. "If you look at past pandemics, it would be a reasonable estimate to say perhaps a third of the world's population would get infected with this virus."
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Pills

Probiotics May Help Ward Off Obesity


Science Daily
Fri, 08 May 2009 14:47 UTC
One year after giving birth, women were less likely to have the most dangerous kind of obesity if they had been given probiotics from the first trimester of pregnancy, found new research that suggests manipulating the balance of bacteria in the gut may help fight obesity.
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Magnify

Your Mind is Your Best Weapon against Any Flu

Cathy Sherman
Natural News
Fri, 08 May 2009 10:00 UTC
This year's flu of the year has made its appearance and with it, media buzz about vaccines, normal treatments, such as hand washing, and so on. Most "experts" have neglected one basic, free, non-invasive, yet therapeutic modality: mind over flu matter.

Metaphysical healer Louise L. Hay says that the mental cause of influenza is "Response to mass negativity and beliefs; fear; and belief in statistics." This is quite interesting in light of the media's use of all three: statistics and mass negativity in order to create fear. For those susceptible to such fears, any flu strain would find a welcoming home.

The suggested antidote is the affirmation: "I am beyond group beliefs or the calendar. I am free from all congestion and influence."
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Eye 2

Flashback Merck Drug Company Had Hit List for Doctors Who Criticized Them

Dr. Mercola
Mercola.com
Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:02 UTC
The international drug company Merck had a hit list of doctors who had to be "neutralized" or discredited because they had criticized the painkiller Vioxx, a now-withdrawn drug that the pharmaceutical giant produced.

Staff at the company emailed each other about the list of doctors. The email, which came out during a class-action suit against the drug company, included the words "neutralize," "neutralized" or "discredit" alongside some of the doctors' names.

The company is alleged to have used intimidation tactics against researchers, including dropping hints that the company would stop funding their institutions, and possibly even interfering with academic appointments.

"We may need to seek them out and destroy them where they live," a Merck employee wrote, according to an email excerpt read to the court.
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People

Harvard Medical School in Ethics Quandary

Duff Wilson
New York Times
Tue, 03 Mar 2009 08:31 UTC
In a first-year pharmacology class at Harvard Medical School, Matt Zerden grew wary as the professor promoted the benefits of cholesterol drugs and seemed to belittle a student who asked about side effects.

Mr. Zerden later discovered something by searching online that he began sharing with his classmates. The professor was not only a full-time member of the Harvard Medical faculty, but a paid consultant to 10 drug companies, including five makers of cholesterol treatments.

"I felt really violated," Mr. Zerden, now a fourth-year student, recently recalled. "Here we have 160 open minds trying to learn the basics in a protected space, and the information he was giving wasn't as pure as I think it should be."
Harvard Med Students
© Jodi Hilton for the New York TimesHarvard Medical School students like Kirsten Austad, left; Lekshmi Santhosh, Kim Sue and David Tian, members of the American Medical Student Association, object to the influence of drug companies in the school’s educational curriculum.
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Pills

Pfizer Worker Photographed Protesters at Harvard

Duff Wilson
New York Times
Mon, 02 Mar 2009 08:28 UTC
Harvard Medical School's rules say that students on campus are supposed to be off-limits to drug company representatives.

That is why David Tian, a first-year Harvard medical student, said he found it "strange and off-putting" last fall when a man who identified himself as a Pfizer employee took a cellphone photo of students as they demonstrated against pharmaceutical industry influence on campus. "We could only assume he intended to share this with his company," Mr. Tian said.

The students did not get the man's name, but they took his picture.
Pfizer worker photographing Harvard students
© David TianAn October 2008 photograph of a Pfizer sales representative taking a picture of students on the Harvard Medical School campus demonstrating against pharmaceutical company influence.
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Sun

Constant Sunlight Linked to Summer Suicide Spike?


PhysOrg
Fri, 08 May 2009 00:00 UTC
Sky
© PhysOrg
Suicide rates in Greenland increase during the summer, peaking in June. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Psychiatry speculate that insomnia caused by incessant daylight may be to blame.

Karin Sparring Björkstén from the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, led a team of researchers who studied the seasonal variation of suicides in all of Greenland from 1968-2002. They found that there was a concentration of suicides in the summer months, and that this seasonal effect was especially pronounced in the North of the country - an area where the sun doesn't set between the end of April and the end of August. Björkstén said, "In terms of seasonal light variation, Greenland is the most extreme human habitat.

Greenland also has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. We found that suicides were almost exclusively violent and increased during periods of constant day. In the north of the country, 82% of the suicides occurred during the daylight months (including astronomical twilight)".
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Syringe

NVIC Says BMJ Review Demonstrates Medical Journal Bias Toward Pharma-Sponsored Influenza Vaccine Studies


Medical News Today
Sat, 07 Feb 2009 22:39 UTC
In a review of influenza vaccine studies published in the British Medical Journal Tom Jefferson, M.D., Ph.D. (Cochrane Field, Rome, Italy) and colleagues found that published influenza vaccine studies sponsored by industry are treated more favorably by medical journals even when the studies are of poor quality. "This independent Cochrane review confirms that drug companies marketing vaccines have undue influence on what gets published in medical journals about vaccine safety and effectiveness," said Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), a non-profit vaccine safety watchdog group that earlier this week issued a new report on Gardasil vaccine risks.
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Family

Parent-Child Tension Never Ends


LiveScience
Thu, 07 May 2009 16:40 UTC
If you've ever felt aggravated with your parents, even as an adult, you're hardly alone.

Nearly all parents and their adult children experience at least some tension in their relationships, a new study finds. Among the never-ending topics of frustration: cleaning the house.

The study asked parents and their grown children to rate the tension they felt on specific issues that can cause relationship strain. On simple scale, 1 indicated no tension and 5 indicated a great deal.

Ninety-four percent said they felt at least a little tension about one of the topics.

That's probably no big surprise to, say, about 94 percent of readers. But the researchers also found that mothers and fathers had different views than other family members about some of the tension-causing issues. Parents generally felt more intense strain, specifically when it came to issues such as their children's finances or housekeeping.
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Magnify

Brain Activity Linked with Junk Food Cravings


PsycPORT/Xinhua
Sat, 02 May 2009 16:00 UTC
Level of willpower can be attributed to people's cravings for junk food, a new study found.

Self-control to reject unhealthy foods is related with two areas of the brain, researchers at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) said in the study published in the May issue of Science.

The researchers used MRI to scan the brains of volunteers as they looked at photos of dozens of types of foods and decided which ones they'd like to eat. They found significant differences in the brain activity between people who had self-control in terms of making food choices and those with no self-control.
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