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Tag: quick and healthy
This Week In Health: Bionic Limbs Are Here

This Week In Health: Bionic Limbs Are Here

“This Week In Health” offers some highlights from the world of health and wellness that you may have missed this week:

  • Fighting fire with fire? There’s been a promising development for treating skin cancer in virotherapy, in which viruses are reprogrammed to attack diseases. Researchers have had early success using a modified form of the herpes virus to treat skin cancer, even when the cancerous cells have spread throughout the body.
  • Obesity rates continue to soar across the country. According to a new survey, it may not simply be a matter of mitigating weight with diet and exercise. Obesity seems to be tied to larger issues, as the survey indicated high correlations between being overweight and a poor sense of well-being in other factors, including purpose, social, financial, community and physical.
  • No longer the stuff of science fiction, brain-controlled bionic limbs are not some near-future promise — they are already here. The hardware, which receives wirelessly transmitted signals from the brain, has already been introduced on a limited scale, and it’s only a matter of time.
  • An American traveling from Liberia to New Jersey died of what was later confirmed to be Lassa Fever, a viral hemorrhagic similar to Ebola, but not as deadly or contagious. It does not pose a major public risk, experts say.

Image from Mad Max: Fury Road

Quick & Healthy: Bye Bye Birdies

Quick & Healthy: Bye Bye Birdies

“Quick & Healthy” offers some highlights from the world of health and wellness that you may have missed this week:

  • UCLA researchers have started exploring non-surgical treatments for appendicitis. Dr. David Talan, an emergency medicine specialist, says recent studies in Europe have indicated that antibiotics can cure the disease in “many patients.” A survey of patients who had not had appendicitis found that nearly 50 percent would prefer the non-surgical option, while nearly 75 percent of patients who have had an appendectomy would have preferred taking a pill rather than going under the knife. Who knew?
  • Recent studies have found that depression increases one’s risk for stroke. A four-year study followed 16,000 men and women who had no history of stroke, characterizing them by levels of depression. Those with consistent depressive symptoms were found to have double the risk for stroke, while those few to no symptoms had no elevated risk. The next step, according to researchers, is to determine if treating depression can lower the risk for stroke.
  • Center Fresh Group, one of the nation’s largest egg producers, must dispose of 5.5 million egg-laying hens, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This is the first time American farmers have confronted such a widespread health crisis among livestock. The strain is thought to have been brought to the Midwest by migratory birds from the West Coast. So far, the bulk of the infection has been in Iowa farms, though North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Minnesota have also had high numbers of cases. Officials have descended on infected areas to assist locals with the safe disposal of the birds. The infection is expected to impact a wide swath of food producers, including Nestlé, which uses liquid eggs in its cake mix and ice cream brands. The wholesale price for liquid eggs has already doubled nationwide, hitting $1.23 last Wednesday.
  • A new study in mice finds that a lack of exercise may upset the body’s natural rhythms. Following up on a 2009 study that found activity levels became less regular with age, scientists tracked the effects of exercise in groups of mice divided by age. They found that exercise affected the mice’s activity patterns more than age, influencing their circadian rhythms and creating healthier patterns long term.

Photo: Matito via Flickr

Quick & Healthy: Take A Walk

Quick & Healthy: Take A Walk

“Quick & Healthy” offers some highlights from the world of health and wellness that you may have missed this week:

  • Please get up and take a quick walk around the block before finishing this article. It could save your life. Every week seems to bring a new study indicating that sitting down at our desks is slowly killing us with diabetes, obesity, heart problems, and so on. A new study suggests that taking even a mere two-minute stroll per hour could mitigate the risks from oversitting, and provide long-term benefits.
  • And while you’re out on your walk, perhaps take some time to get yourself screened for cancer. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the majority of adults do not get the recommended number of screenings for colorectal, breast, and cervical cancers. These findings come from the CDC’s weekly Morbidity and Mortality Report, and unfortunately show very little change from previous years’ reports.
  • After decades of maintaining a policy that barred gay men from donating blood, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has drafted new recommendations to lift the ban. Beginning in 1985, as a response to the AIDS crisis, the FDA issued recommendations to blood establishments to defer donations from gay men indefinitely, and codified those recommendations in a 1992 memo, which has remained in place ever since. Gay rights advocates have long decried the ban as arbitrary and discriminatory, since HIV — the virus that causes AIDS — can be transmitted through heterosexual intercourse, and we now have advanced blood-screening protocols that were not available in the 1980s and early ’90s.
  • The World Health organization (WHO) released its World Health Statistics report Wednesday. Among the good news: If things stay on track, the world will have met global targets for turning around the epidemics of HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis and increasing access to safe drinking water. The work continues, however. Read the complete report here.

Photo: Paolo Margari via Flickr

Quick & Healthy: Welcome To The Machine

Quick & Healthy: Welcome To The Machine

“Quick & Healthy” offers some highlights from the world of health and wellness that you may have missed this week:

  • IBM announced that it would be putting its state-of-the-art Watson supercomputer to use in the battle against cancer. The advantage and innovation of Watson, made famous when it bested two human competitors at Jeopardy, is its ability to process mountains of raw data to arrive at specific solutions to particular problems. In this case, it means Watson will analyze reams of genomic data from patients fighting cancer to find the best treatments.
  • An unprecedented outbreak of avian flu is ravaging turkey farms in the American Midwest. The virulent H5N2 virus has spread to poultry farms in 14 states, leading to mass culling and euthanasia of the affected stock.
  • We’ve got smartphones, smartcars, smartwatches — soon you could have smart dishware that can tell you when you’re consuming too many calories. (Americans clearly need someone to tell them.) The SmartPlate is a wi-fi-enabled piece of crockery that scans and weighs the food placed on it — identifying the amount and nutritional value (or lack thereof) of its contents.
  • A new report from the World Health Organization (WHO) finds that only one-fourth of 133 countries surveyed have a comprehensive plan to combat antibiotic-resistant pathogens, otherwise known as “superbugs.” Among the disquieting report’s key findings is that countries are less than diligent at monitoring for these novel strains and that rampant overprescription of antibiotics has continued, despite public warnings that this contributes to emergence of bacteria that cannot be killed with available drugs. A previous WHO report stated that the “post-antibiotic era — in which common infections and minor injuries can kill — is a very real possibility for the 21st century.”

Photo: Clockready via Wikicommons