Health & WellnessS


Syringe

Rural counties across the US becoming a powder keg for another HIV outbreak

Amanda Holpuch and Nadja Popovich
The Guardian
Sun, 31 Jul 2016 16:20 UTC
abandoned house in Beattyville
© David Coyle/TeamCoyle for the Guardian An abandoned house in Beattyville. The town is in Lee, one of 20 counties in Kentucky most vulnerable to an HIV outbreak.
A man was lying sedate after injecting drugs. His fellow users, to amuse themselves, threw needles at him like a human dartboard to see if they would stick, according to a recent police report in Wolfe County, Kentucky.

"Back in the day, all we had to worry about was people drinking or smoking weed," said special deputy Gary Smith, who is entering his 25th year with the Wolfe County sheriff's department.

But with a growing US opioid epidemic that has escalated the number of injection drug users, the bucolic county has become acutely at risk from another public health problem.

Wolfe County tops the list of places that are most vulnerable to an HIV outbreak.
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Syringe

Flashback 'Why our children should hate us': Read the Lance Simmens article banned by the Huffington Post


Liberty Blitzkrieg
Thu, 28 Apr 2016 15:28 UTC
VAXXED movie censored poster
Although Lance Simmens has been intimately involved in public life for several decades, you've probably never heard of him. As such, a little introduction is needed.

As mentioned, Lance Simmens' career was spent in public policy. Specifically, he worked for two U.S. Presidents as well as a couple of senators and governors. Since retirement, he's been a prolific writer, publishing 180 articles at the Huffington Post over the past 8 years. As such, it came as a great shock to him to discover that one of his recent articles was removed by the Huffington Post shortly after publication. It was the first article ever rejected by the online publication, and the unacceptable subject matter was nothing more than a positive review of the banned everywhere documentary VAXXED.
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Health

Zika virus could affect up to 10,000 pregnant women in Puerto Rico this year

Liz Szabo
USA Today
Fri, 29 Jul 2016 01:28 UTC
newborn baby
© ORLANDO SIERRA, AFP/Getty Images
The Zika virus could affect up to 10,000 pregnant women in Puerto Rico this year, putting hundreds of babies at risk of catastrophic birth defects, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Zika is spreading so quickly on the island that it's likely to infect one in four people by the end of the year, CDC director Thomas Frieden said. The greatest danger from Zika is microcephaly, in which infants are born with abnormally small heads and incomplete brain development, he said.

"That's horrifying," Frieden said. "This is a silent epidemic that is rapidly spreading through Puerto Rico."

About 41% of pregnant women in Puerto Rico with symptoms of Zika — such as a rash, fever, joint pain, pink eye, headache — tested positive for the virus, Frieden said. But just 20% of people with Zika develop symptoms. About 5% of pregnant women without Zika symptoms also tested positive for the virus, according to a CDC report published Friday.
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Health

Meningitis outbreaks among gay men in New York, Chicago, S. California have experts puzzled

Soumya Karlamangla
Los Angeles Times
Sat, 30 Jul 2016 14:26 UTC
Gunzenhauser
© Luis Sinco / Los Angeles TimesDr. Jeffrey Gunzenhauser of the L.A. County Dept. of Public Health discusses an invasive meningococcal disease outbreak that has hit gay and bisexual men disproportionately.
As cases of meningitis, a rare and potentially fatal disease, popped up in cities nationwide over the past several years, public health officials noticed a trend: many of those infected were gay men.

There's no known medical reason why meningitis, which is transmitted through saliva, would spread more among gay and bisexual men. Yet New York, Chicago and now Southern California have experienced outbreaks disproportionately affecting that population.

"It is perplexing," said Dr. Rachel Civen, a medical epidemiologist at L.A. County's Department of Public Health.

Of the 13 cases of meningitis this year in L.A. County — excluding Long Beach, which has its own health department — seven were gay men. There were only 12 meningitis cases in the county in all of 2015, one of which was a gay or bisexual man.


Comment: 2015: 1/12 cases affected a possibly gay man. 2016: 7/13 cases. If the phenomenon were limited just to this county, it might be written off as an anomaly. But it's happening elsewhere. Cases are not only on the rise, they're affecting gays at a higher rate. Very strange.


In Long Beach, there have been six meningitis cases this year, half of which were gay men. Last year there were no meningitis cases in the city, according to city officials.
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Post-It Note

Antibiotics found in noses can defeat drug resistance and superbugs

Paul Ratner
Big Think
Thu, 28 Jul 2016 00:00 UTC
nose pickin
Microbes that live in our noses are able to kill MRSA, a superbug that has been resistant to various antibiotics. Researchers hope to use this discovery to develop new antibiotics.

Utilizing bacteria from within the human body to fight off antibiotic resistance is a new approach as most previous antibiotics have come from soil samples.

Initially, German researchers from the University of Tübingen found that the Staphylococcus aureus bacteria (some strains of which become the MRSA) in about 30% of the population, while the other 70% did not have it. Further studies revealed that the reason for this lies in the Staphylococcus lugdunensis bacteria, which is able to fight off the other staph by creating its own antibiotic. This is the bacteria scientists are looking to harness to produce the new antibiotic they dubbed lugdunin.

Comment: This certainly reminds us that our bodies already have some of the tools necessary to naturally fight off some bugs. The question then is: How do we strengthen those already existing defenses so that we can resist and mitigate the effects of the bugs?

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Arrow Down

Antioxidant suppression eradicates pancreatic cancer cells

Hannah Nichols
Medical News Today
Fri, 29 Jul 2016 14:18 UTC
Pancreas
© UnknownA reduction of antioxidants in pancreatic cancer cells can help kill them.
A novel drug therapy - that mimics the suppression of an antioxidant-promoting protein - kills pancreatic cancer cells, new research reveals.

According to the American Cancer Society, around 53,070 people will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the Unites States in 2016, and around 41,780 people will die of the disease. Pancreatic cancer accounts for about 3 percent of all cancers in the U.S. and about 7% of cancer deaths.

Pancreatic cancer is caused by the abnormal, uncontrolled growth of cells in the pancreas.

A research team at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in New York finds that reducing levels of antioxidants in pancreatic cells can help to kill them. This new strategy for eradicating pancreatic cancer cells may open new doors for treating this serious illness, in which less than 5 percent of patients survive 5 years.

Comment: See also:

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Health

Less than five hours of sleep: expect 'memory malfunctions'

Tony Brooks, Olivia Lerche
Express
Fri, 29 Jul 2016 09:44 UTC
trouble sleeping
© MIN HEO
Research has finally confirmed what most of us take for granted - poor sleepers are more likely to be forgetful as well as unhappy.

A study of more than 1,000 UK adults showed that 25 per cent of those who spend less than five hours in the land of Nod suffer from memory malfunction which affects their quality of life.

Participants aged 18 to 80 were asked to measure their sleep against five different "everyday" memories: having to check whether they've done something; forgetting to tell somebody something important; where things are normally kept; doing something they intended to do such as posting a letter and finding it difficult to concentrate.

Poor sleep was classed as under five hours a night and the results found that all aspects of memory are affected by low levels of sleep.

Comment: The importance of good quality sleep cannot be stressed enough, it is the time for rest, repair and regeneration and when new neural circuits pathways are formed allowing you to process the emotional content from the day. Check out the links below for more information.

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Info

Are nuts Paleo? Paleolithic man would probably say no

Michael Eades
The Blog of Michael R. Eades, M.D.
Wed, 27 Jul 2016 15:29 UTC
nuts
Paleolithic man doubtless ate anything he could get his hands on that was even remotely edible, drank his water from streams, ponds, and probably even mud puddles as dogs do today. Of the many ways scientists have to unearth the actual diets of early ancestors, stable isotope analysis is probably the most accurate. Such analysis of ancient human remains show most were at least as carnivorous, if not more so, than foxes and wolves.

Compare and contrast our robust, nose-to-tail meat-eating Paleolithic forebears with today's modern Paleo man, who drinks crystal-clear, reverse-osmosis-filtered, bottled spring water, wears five-toed Vibram shoes, wouldn't be caught dead eating grain-fed beef, totes his almond-flour-based snacks, and always carries his baggie of nuts to nosh on.
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Info

'Elixir of youth' found in sex hormone


RT
Fri, 29 Jul 2016 05:59 UTC
Elixir of youth
© Navesh Chitrakar / Reuters
A team of US and Brazilian researchers have used a synthetic sex hormone to stimulate production of a naturally occurring enzyme called telomerase that is capable of reversing ageing and has been dubbed a possible "cellular elixir of youth."

While in embryos, telomerase is expressed by practically every cell. It can then only be produced in cells that are constantly dividing, such as blood-forming stem cells, which can differentiate into various specialized cells, scientists say. Certain cells avoid aging by using telomerase to lengthen their telomeres, which are DNA-protecting structures at the ends of chromosomes. The length of telomeres is a laboratory measure of a cell's age, as each time a cell divides, its telomeres get shorter.
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Health

American medical complex - The best protected cartel in the world

Jon Rappoport
Jon Rappoport's Blog
Wed, 27 Jul 2016 03:47 UTC
American Medical Complex
© ProTenders
Which is worse: the NSA or the FDA?

A message to Wikileaks, Cryptome, Public Intelligence, and other sites that expose secrets; Does 2.25 million deaths in America, per decade, at the hands of the medical system, rate as a significant leak?

As my readers know, I've reported on a number of scandals concerning the toxicity of medical drugs, including shocking death numbers in the US.

These scandals are leaks from inside the National Security State.

If you visit Wikileaks, Cryptome, Public Intelligence, and other similar sites, how many purely medical documents do you find posted?

How many damaging leaks exposing the crimes of the medical cartel do you find?

Very, very few.

Where are the medical insiders who are liberating and passing along incriminating documentary evidence?

Some of the best exposers of political, intelligence-agency, and military crimes are way behind the curve, when it comes to medical matters.

The medical sphere, for various reasons, is far better protected than any other segment of society.

For the hundredth time, let me cite Dr. Barbara Starfield's stunning review, "Is US health really the best in the world?" published on July 26, 2000, in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Starfield, at the time, was working as a highly respected public health expert, at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

She concluded that the US medical system kills 225,000 Americans a year. That would add up to 2.25 million deaths per decade.

Laid directly at the door of the American medical complex.

106,000 of those annual deaths, as Starfield reports, are the direct result of medical drugs.
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