Swine Flu, How Serious Is It?

The novel influenza A (H1N1) virus strain continues to expand in the United States in the ongoing outbreak. The CDC expects that more cases, hospitalizations and deaths from this outbreak will continue over the upcoming days and weeks.

Officials from the U.N.’s World Health Organization (WHO), based in Switzerland, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the U.S., as well as some doctors, have expressed serious concern about the flu outbreak, worried that it might become a worldwide flu pandemic.

Although the exact origin of the outbreak is unknown, it was first detected when officials in Mexico and the United States suspected a link between an outbreak of late-season flu cases in Mexico and cases of influenza in communities in Texas and California. Within days, hundreds more suspected cases were discovered in Mexico, with more cases also showing up in the U.S. and infect populations of several other countries.

As of this morning, the CDC reports, according to the Associated Press, said the following key developments on swine flu outbreaks have occurred:

• Health officials gathering in Bangkok say Asia must remain vigilant over the threat of swine flu, which has largely spared the region. South Korea and Hong Kong are the only places in Asia with confirmed cases.
• Diplomats and officials say the World Health Organization intends to shorten its annual meeting in Geneva later this month because health ministries around the world are busy working on the outbreak.
• Mexico City lets all businesses reopen, including sports arenas, dance halls, movie theaters and restaurants, but they must screen for ill people and make surgical masks mandatory for employees and customers.
• Swine flu survivors in Mexico complain they’ve been shunned and discriminated against.
• China releases a group of people quarantined for a week after being on the same flight as a Mexican man diagnosed with swine flu.
• Filipino boxing champion Manny Pacquiao says he’ll return to Manila as scheduled, ignoring advice from Philippine health officials to self-quarantine in the United States to help prevent the spread of swine flu.

The first national death from swine flu has intensified a drive by health officials to make sure the public remains vigilant against the disease. Judy Trunnell, a 33-year-old Texas woman who died Tuesday is the first known fatality from the swine flu outbreak in the United States. Vaccine manufacturers say that they are in a good position to produce mass quantities of a potential vaccine, as a treatment, should the outbreak take a turn for the worse, to prevent others from being hospitalized or killed.

With concerns about contact & transmission risk, a vaccine has been at the forefront of plans to curb the swine flu virus, and The Washington Post reported late Tuesday that the Obama administration may even be considering a vaccination plan this fall for Americans that would involve a battery of three shots, two of which would be against the new viral threat.

Such a plan has not yet been confirmed to be in the works. Still, health officials told lawmakers Wednesday it took only two weeks to identify the symptoms & genetic characteristics of swine flu, which bodes well for fighting the virus on a larger scale should that become necessary.

The CDC naturally continues to take aggressive action to respond to the expanding outbreak. CDC’s response goals are to reduce spread and illness severity, and provide information to help health care providers, public health officials and the public address the challenges posed by this emergency.

Is the Swine Flu seriously dangerous? Only time will tell; the CDC is issuing updated interim guidance daily in response to the rapidly evolving situation.

References:

CDC Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Wikipedia 2009 Swine Flu Outbreak
AP The Associated Press
ABC ABC News

Article Date: 25 Apr 2009 - 0:00 PDT

University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston researchers have discovered that a form of vitamin B1 could become a new and effective treatment for one of the world’s leading causes of blindness.

Scientists believe that uveitis, an inflammation of the tissue located just below the outer surface of the eyeball, produces 10 to 15 percent of all cases of blindness in the United States, and causes even higher rates of blindness globally. The inflammation is normally treated with antibiotics or steroid eye drops.

In a paper appearing in the May issue of the journal Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, however, the UTMB researchers describe striking results achieved with benfotiamene, a fat-soluble form of vitamin B1. In their experiments, they first injected laboratory rats with bacterial toxins that ordinarily produce a reaction mimicking uveitis. When those rats are fed benfotiamene, they fail to develop any signs of the inflammatory disorder.

“Benfotiamene strongly suppresses this eye-damaging condition and the biochemical markers we associate with it,” said UTMB associate professor Kota V. Ramana, senior author of the study. “We’re optimistic that this simple supplementation with vitamin B1 has great potential as a new therapy for this widespread eye disease.”

The researchers’ data shows benfotiamene works by suppressing the activation of a crucial signaling molecule called NF-kappa B, which is normally triggered by the stress caused by infection. Shutting down NF-kappa B, they said, prevents the runaway production of inflammatory proteins that generates uveitis.

Benfotiamene’s low cost, rapid absorption by the body and lack of negative side effects make it an ideal candidate for uveitis prevention, according to Ramana.

“Already, clinical trials have shown that benfotiamene is absorbed better than thiamine [the most common form of vitamin B1] and significantly improved diabetic polyneuropathy in patients, and it’s already taken as a supplement for diabetic complications,” Ramana said.

Source:
Jim Kelly
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston
Medical News Today

As Americans have grown more health-conscious, the country has seen a surge in litigation against food companies for allegedly selling unhealthy products and for misrepresenting their products’ nutritional value.

Source: Nutrition News

Researchers have uncovered new evidence suggesting factors other than genes could cause obesity, finding that genetically identical cells store widely differing amounts of fat depending on subtle variations in how cells process insulin.

Learning the precise mechanism responsible for fat storage in cells could lead to methods for controlling obesity.

“Insights from our study also will be important for understanding the precise roles of insulin in obesity or Type II diabetes, and to the design of effective intervention strategies,” said Ji-Xin Cheng, an assistant professor in Purdue University’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Chemistry.

Findings indicate that the faster a cell processes insulin, the more fat it stores.

Other researchers have suggested that certain “fat genes” might be associated with excessive fat storage in cells. However, the Purdue researchers confirmed that these fat genes were expressed, or activated, in all of the cells, yet those cells varied drastically - from nearly zero in some cases to pervasive in others - in how much fat they stored.

The researchers examined a biological process called adipogenesis, using cultures of a cell line called 3T3-L1, which is often used to study fat cells. In adipogenesis, these cells turn into fat.

“This work supports an emerging viewpoint that not all biological information in cells is encoded in the genetic blueprint,” said Thuc T. Le, a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at Purdue who is working with Cheng. “We found that the variability in fat storage is dependent on how 3T3-L1 cells process insulin, a hormone secreted by the pancreas after meals to trigger the uptake of glucose from the blood into the liver, muscle or fat cells.”

The findings are detailed in a research paper appearing online in the journal PLoS ONE, published by the Public Library of Science, a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians.

“This varied capability to store fat among genetically identical cells is a well-observed but poorly understood phenomenon,” Cheng said

The researchers determined that these differences in fat storage depend not on fat-gene expression but on variations in a cascade of events within an “insulin-signaling pathway.” The pathway enables cells to take up glucose from the blood.

“Only one small variation at the beginning of the cascade can lead to a drastic variation in fat storage at the end of the cascade,” Cheng said.

The researchers conducted “single cell profiling” using a combination of imaging techniques to precisely compare fat storage in cloned cells having the same fat genes expressed.

Single cell profiling allows researchers to precisely compare the inner workings of individual cells, whereas the conventional analytical approach in biochemistry measures entire populations of cells and then provides data representing an average.

“In this case, we don’t want an average. We need to find out what causes fat storage at the single-cell level so that we can compare one cell to another, ” Le said. “By profiling multiple events in single cells, we found that variability in fat storage is due to varied rates of insulin processing among cells.”

The cell culture used in the research contains cloned mice fibroblast cells.

“This particular type of cell culture has been used to study the molecular control of obesity for the past 35 years,” Cheng said. “Researchers have observed tremendous variability in how much fat is stored in cells with identical genes, but no one really knows why. Our findings have shed some light on this phenomenon.”

The researchers used a specialized imaging method called coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering, or CARS, combined with other techniques, including flow cytometry and fluorescence microscopy.

“This multimodal imaging system allows us to correlate different events, like fat storage, gene expression and insulin signaling,” Le said. “We can monitor these different events at the same time, and that’s why we can determine the mechanism at the single-cell level.”

Insulin attaches to binding sites on cell membranes, signaling the cells to take up glucose from the blood. Cells that are said to be resistant to insulin fail to take up glucose, the primary cause of Type II diabetes, a medical condition affecting nearly 24 million Americans. About two-thirds of U.S. adults are overweight, and nearly one-third obese.

The research, which has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, is ongoing. Future work may seek to pinpoint specific events in the insulin-signaling cascade that are responsible for fat storage.

Source:  Medical News Today

Cancer treatment can greatly affect your nutritional needs. Whether you need help dealing with side effects or simply want to make sure you maintain your health, these resources will help.

Source:  Diet for Cancer

There are many different dieting ideas out there in today’s market. The amount of different diets can be very discouraging to many people that are in need of a diet plan that works for them. It can be very disheartening to continually have a diet that may work for someone else and when a person tries the diet for themselves it does not work.

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Without the use of many different diet plans there would not be much merit to the plan because most diets that are in existence always omit something or encourage over eating something. For instance a low carbohydrate diet encourages the removal of a large part of your carbohydrate intake.

By contrast to the omission diets, the excessive diets encourage people to overindulge on higher amounts of a certain type of food than a normal person would typically eat. For example, in a high protein diet, a person is encouraged to eat protein in excess instead of other types of foods.

Trying different diet ideas in a continuing attempt to lose weight can end up being not only confusing and taxing but ultimately unsuccessful. Many different diet ideas on the market today focus on one type of food or behavior pattern to the exclusion of all others. While these plans may work for some, ultimately they are never the correct or ideal solution for everyone. This is the rationale behind the diet for idiots. This comprehensive plan of weightloss for idiots combines and alternates among many of the ideas suggested by the traditional diet plans providing a complete and workable approach to fat loss for idiots.

Article By: Josh Green

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