Category: Health

{The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Rwanda country office, has donated materials worth over Rwf19 million, to be used during labour for mothers living in Mahama refugee camp and pregnant mothers giving birth at Kirehe hospital.}

Donated materials include equipments facilitating hygiene, family planning, and treatment of abortion related ailments.

Nyirahirwa Marie, a midwife in Mahama refugee camp, has said that donated materials are essential since they will help a great number of poor parents.

The Director of Kirehe hospital, Dr Patient Ngamije, said that donated materials will help to protect mothers’ lives while giving birth and improve services delivered at the hospital.

The representative of UNFPA, Daniel Alemu has said that donated materials were meant to save lives of mothers giving birth in the camp and their children.

“It is an act we have committed to. Life that mothers in the camp experience is complicated. We have committed to supporting them to save lives,” he said.

{Just 1 in 5 children in high-income countries are breastfed to 12 months, whilst only 1 in 3 children in low and middle-income countries are exclusively breastfed for the first 6 months. As a result, millions of children are failing to receive the full benefits provided by breastfeeding. The findings come from the largest and most detailed analysis to quantify levels, trends, and benefits of breastfeeding around the world.}

Just 1 in 5 children in high-income countries are breastfed to 12 months, whilst only 1 in 3 children in low and middle-income countries are exclusively breastfed for the first 6 months. As a result, millions of children are failing to receive the full benefits provided by breastfeeding. The findings come from the largest and most detailed analysis to quantify levels, trends, and benefits of breastfeeding around the world, published in The Lancet.

New estimates produced for the two-part Series reveal that increasing breastfeeding to near-universal levels for infants and young children could save over 800,000 children’s lives a year worldwide, equivalent to 13% of all deaths in children under two, and prevent an extra 20,000 deaths from breast cancer every year.

Although breastfeeding is one of the most effective preventive health measures for children and mothers regardless of where they live, it has been overlooked as a critical need for the health of the population, say the authors.

“There is a widespread misconception that the benefits of breastfeeding only relate to poor countries. Nothing could be further from the truth,” says Series author Professor Cesar Victora from the Federal University of Pelotas in Brazil. “Our work for this Series clearly shows that breastfeeding saves lives and money in all countries, rich and poor alike. Therefore, the importance of tackling the issue globally is greater than ever.”

Analysis of data from 28 systematic reviews and meta-analyses, of which 22 were commissioned specifically for the Series, indicate that breastfeeding not only has multiple health benefits for children and mothers, but it also has dramatic effects on life expectancy. For example, in high-income countries breastfeeding reduces the risk of sudden infant deaths by more than a third, while in low-and middle-income countries about half of all diarrhea episodes and a third of respiratory infections could be avoided by breastfeeding. It also increases intelligence, and might protect against obesity and diabetes in later life. For mothers, longer-duration breastfeeding reduces the risks of breast cancer and ovarian cancer.

There is also a strong economic case for investment in promoting breastfeeding. Modelling conducted for the Series estimates that global economic losses of lower cognition from not breastfeeding reached a staggering US$302 billion in 2012, equivalent to 0.49% of world gross national income. In high-income countries alone these losses amounted to US$231.4 billion, equivalent to 0.53% of gross national income.

Furthermore, the authors calculate that boosting breastfeeding rates for infants below 6 months of age to 90% in the USA, China, and Brazil and to 45% in the UK would cut treatment costs of common childhood illnesses (eg, pneumonia, diarrhea, and asthma) and save healthcare systems at least US$2.45 billion in the USA, US$29.5 million in the UK, US$223.6 million in China, and US$6.0 million in Brazil.

Yet, worldwide rates of breastfeeding are low, particularly in high-income countries. For example, the UK (<1%), Ireland (2%), and Denmark (3%) have some of the lowest rates of breastfeeding at 12 months in the world (web appendix table 4.2 page 16-17). "Breastfeeding is one of the few positive health behaviours that is more common in poor than richer countries, and within poor countries, is more frequent among poor mothers," explains Professor Victora. "The stark reality is that in the absence of breastfeeding, the rich-poor gap in child survival would be even wider. Our findings should reassure policymakers that a rapid return on investment is realistic and feasible, and won't need a generation to be realised." The International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes (BMS) was adopted at the 34th World Health Assembly in 1981 to protect the public from inappropriate marketing strategies, but has been weakly implemented, enforced, and monitored by countries. As a result, aggressive marketing of breastmilk substitutes is undermining efforts to improve breastfeeding rates, with global sales expected to reach a staggering US$70.6 billion by 2019 . "Saturation of markets in high-income countries has caused the industries to rapidly penetrate emerging global markets. Almost all growth in the foreseeable future in sales of standard milk formula (infants <6 months) will be in low-income and middle-income countries, where consumption is currently low," explains Series author Dr Nigel Rollins from the Department of Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health at WHO, Geneva. In the Middle East and Africa, for example, per-child consumption of breastmilk substitutes is projected to grow by more than 7% between 2014 and 2019. In high-income countries, growth will be driven by sales of follow-on and toddlers milk that are set to increase by 15% by 2019. Persistent underinvestment in protecting, promoting and supporting breastfeeding by governments and international funders has exacerbated the issue. "Currently, breastfeeding promotion focuses on encouraging women to breastfeed without providing the necessary economic and social conditions such as supportive health-care systems, adequate maternity entitlements and workplace interventions, counselling, and education," says Dr Rollins. Countries can significantly improve breastfeeding practices by scaling up known interventions, policies, and programmes identified in the Series. For example, Bangladesh has increased exclusive breastfeeding rates by 13%, which has been attributed to a number of key interventions including 6 months of maternity leave, comprehensive health-worker training, community mobilisation, and media campaigns. In Brazil, the length of breastfeeding increased dramatically from 2.5 months in 1974-75 (one of the shortest in any low-or middle-income country) to 14 months in 2006-07 due to a combination of policy, health service, civil society, and mass media initiatives. Powerful political commitment and financial investment is needed to protect, promote, and support breastfeeding at all levels -- family, community, workplace, and government, say the authors. Additionally, more needs to be done to regulate the multi-billion dollar breastmilk-substitute industry which undermines breastfeeding as the best feeding practice in early life. The authors point out that the International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes could be an effective mechanism if adequate investment is made to ensure its implementation and accountability across all countries. According to Professor Victora, "There is a widespread misconception that breastmilk can be replaced with artificial products without detrimental consequences. The evidence outlined in the Series, contributed by some of the leading experts in the field, leaves no doubt that the decision not to breastfeed has major long-term negative effects on the health, nutrition and development of children and on women's health." In an accompanying Comment, Frances Mason from Save the Children UK, Alison McFadden from the University of Dundee, UK, and other leading experts in the field write, "The omission of breastfeeding from the Millennium Development Goals, and the resultant lost opportunities to improve child survival, must not be repeated in the Sustainable Development Goals, for which the indicators will be decided in early 2016. Breastfeeding is too often siloed within agendas on nutrition or infant and young child feeding rather than treated as a key public health approach that can help prevent communicable and non-communicable disease prevention, reduce infant mortality, and lessen inequity...The active and aggressive promotion of BMS by their manufacturers and distributors continues to be a substantial global barrier to breastfeeding. The reach and influence of the BMS industry is growing fast. Global sales of milk formula (including infant formula and follow-on milks) have increased from a value of about US$2 billion in 1987 to about US$40 billion in 2014...Political commitment, investment, and effective international, national, and local leadership are needed to end promotion of products that compete with breastfeeding." The Series was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust.

{We all enjoy creamy flesh of an avocado because it isn’t just yummy and delicious but also a superfood due to the healthy fats it contains. But experts have now revealed that we’ve been throwing out the most nutritious part of an avocado.}

You might want to ask why? Whenever you eat an avocado, what we all normally do is slice it open, ditch the large seed and then dive into the green goodness.

According to One Green Planet, you need to stop throwing the seed in the bin because it contains loads of edible benefits. The seed of an avocado is actually a nutritional powerhouse.

“The seed holds 70 percent of the avocado’s antioxidants, including the well-respected polyphenols associated with green tea.”

The seed of an avocado is also packed with soluble fibre and healthy oils. The healthy oil it contains do wonders for your skin’s collagen, reducing wrinkles.

So how then do we eat the seed so we can get all its goodness since the seed is normally hard and biting into it is asking for a dental disaster?

Using a knife, cut the seed of the avocado quarters, put it in a food processor and blend. Add half of the powder (beware it’s a bit bitter) to smoothies, juices and whatever you really like and save the rest for later.

{Have you heard the one about the doctor in Kansas who made a fortune peddling goat testicles to cure impotence?}

This may sound like the opening line for a joke, but it’s actually the strange true tale of John Romulus Brinkley, a small-town doctor in 1900s America, whose rags-to-riches story is the subject of a funny and captivating documentary at the Sundance Film Festival.

Directed by Penny Lane, “Nuts!” traces Brinkley’s unbelievable rise to fame as he comes up with a surgical method to transplant goat testicles into impotent men while living in the tiny Kansas town of Milford in 1917.

“I started working on this documentary after coming across a book in the library about Brinkley called ‘Charlatan’,” Lane told AFP. “And the whole time I was reading it, I was thinking, ‘did it (his medicine) work?’”

Legend has it that the transplant idea dawned on Brinkley when he was visited by a farmer named Bill Stittsworth who, gazing out the window at two copulating goats, asked the good doctor if he could do something about his “sexual weakness.”

“It’s too bad I don’t have billy goat nuts,” Stittsworth tells Brinkley — as recounted in the film — before convincing him to “just put some goat nuts in me.”

FAME AND FORTUNE

As some of Brinkley’s “satisfied” customers begin showing off their offspring and the procedure gains popularity, he enjoys a meteoric rise to fame, amassing a fortune and a roster of celebrity clients.

That’s until his dubious practices gain the attention of the medical establishment and the federal government, which goes after him and strips him of his license.

Brinkley responds by getting into advertising, launching a wildly popular radio station and continuing to peddle miracle cures to his followers.

He also uses his enormous wealth to dabble in politics and almost wins the governor’s race in Kansas.

The documentary, which has received favorable reviews at Sundance, skillfully mixes animated reenactments, interviews and archival footage to bring Brinkley’s story to the screen.

Lane said she was keen on the project because the subject was entertaining, and because it showed how easily people can be seduced, “and maybe fooled,” by quacks like Brinkley.

“I wanted to make clear that we are all gullible and dumb enough to fall into it,” she said. “But if someone is telling you a story and it seems too good to be true, that’s when you should start questioning it.”

She added that while some today may laugh at those who fell for the goat testicle impotence cure, there were plenty of modern-day Brinkleys walking around.

“Some people, I think, would compare Donald Trump to Brinkley,” Lane said, referring to the leading Republican candidate in the US presidential race.

“Brinkley’s campaign for governor annoyed the hell out of the establishment, and we find out that he wasn’t really even interested in politics,” she added.

“I don’t know if that’s true about Trump but I suspect it is.”

Source:Daily Nation:[Goat testicle cure for impotence? A strange tale at Sundance->http://www.nation.co.ke/lifestyle/travel/Strange-tale-of-goat-testicle-doctor-at-Sundance/-/1950822/3049102/-/u10sio/-/index.html]

{The latest virus to break out of the tropics may be the most frightening.}

Zika virus, which has already blazed across Brazil and pressed northward into Central America and Mexico, now is poised to jump to the United States. Infection typically causes minor or even no symptoms. But in pregnant women, it’s been linked to a birth defect called microcephaly, which leaves babies with abnormally small heads and partially developed brains (SN Online: 12/2/15).

The mysterious tropical virus is an arbovirus, one of many that are spread by insects such as mosquitoes and ticks. With the rise in international travel, the rapid emergence — and reemergence — of little known arboviruses such as Zika may be the new normal, Anthony Fauci and his colleague David Morens suggest January 13 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“Dengue hit with a vengeance in the ’90s. Then we had West Nile in 1999, chikungunya in 2013, and lo and behold, now we have Zika in 2015 and 2016,” says Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md. “This is a disturbing, remarkable pattern.”

Already, travelers have brought Zika home to Texas, Hawaii and Illinois, though the virus doesn’t seem to have infiltrated U.S. mosquitoes yet. But the United States, with its warm, humid regions, pockets of poverty and ready fleet of mosquitoes capable of carrying the virus, has all the right ingredients for an outbreak, says Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and microbiologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

“We’ve been wringing our hands about Ebola,” he says, but “Ebola was never a threat to the Western Hemisphere.”

Zika is.

A virus emerges
Scientists first collected Zika virus in 1947 from a rhesus monkey that was part of an infectious-disease study in the wetland-edged Zika forest of southern Uganda. For decades, the virus flitted between monkeys and mosquitoes, infecting humans only rarely — and until 2007, never outside of Africa and Asia. That’s when Zika escaped into the Pacific, causing an outbreak on Yap Island in the Federated States of Micronesia. The virus was spotted in French Polynesia next, in 2013. It came to Easter Island a year later, and in May 2015, the first confirmed cases cropped up in Brazil. There, Zika flourished, gaining a firm foothold in the Americas.

In less than nine months, Zika infected as many as 1.3 million people in Brazil, the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control reported on December 10, and some estimates put the number even higher. Zika virus has now spread through 18 countries and territories in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Pan American Health Organization and World Health Organization report.

“The cat’s out of the bag now,” Hotez says. “Zika virus is going to be all over.”

On January 15, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued warnings (SN Online: 1/15/16) for people traveling to countries with Zika. Pregnant women, in particular, should be especially cautious, the CDC advised.

Some people consider Zika virus a mild cousin of dengue: Only about 20 percent of infected people get sick, and symptoms (typically a slight fever, rash and pinkeye, to name a few) fade quickly. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the virus could also cause a devastating birth defect.

In Brazil, the number of babies born with microcephaly is steadily ticking up. In 2015, the country recorded roughly 20 times as many cases as in previous years, and new cases — sometimes hundreds — appear every week. On January 20, Brazilian health officials reported a total of 3,893 cases, 363 more than a week earlier.

Based on the number of babies born in Brazil in 2015 and the number of microcephaly cases that year, public health researcher Ernesto Marques of the University of Pittsburgh estimates that roughly 1 in 150 babies were born with the birth defect.

“This is just a huge number,” he says. “And it’s in an outbreak that has just started.”

That Zika might wreak havoc in fetal brains isn’t all that surprising, given the virus’s effect on mice and the neurological problems sometimes observed in infected adults, says Carlos Marcondes, an entomologist who studies disease-carrying insects at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. In lab mice, Zika virus makes a beeline for the brain. “It causes serious damage,” Marcondes says. Nerve cells break down and brain tissue softens.

In the 2013–2014 French Polynesia outbreak, at least 73 people developed neurological conditions such as Guillain-Barré syndrome, which can cause paralysis. Health officials have linked the condition to Zika virus infection in the current outbreak as well.

Early this year, scientists discovered the most concrete clues yet that Zika virus can cause microcephaly: genetic traces of Zika in the amniotic fluid of two pregnant women carrying fetuses diagnosed with the birth defect, and in four babies who were miscarried or died shortly after birth.

“The evidence is very, very strong,” says Marques, but only a few babies have been tested.

Searching for answers
Marques and collaborators in Brazil, England and the United States have begun a study to examine even more babies. The researchers aim to enroll 200 infants with microcephaly and 400 infants without the birth defect (all from hard-hit Pernambuco, Brazil) and will look for traces of Zika in maternal blood, umbilical cord blood, amniotic fluid and other tissues.

At this point, Marques isn’t expecting to figure out how the virus may cause brain damage; he just wants enough cases to tease out any link between Zika and microcephaly. “If we see signs of viral infection in the placenta or the blood or brain tissue of these babies, that would strengthen the case,” he says. The researchers have already begun enrolling people, and Marques hopes to recruit all 600 participants by June or July.

Scientists still have a lot to learn about Zika virus, Hotez says, such as how the virus passes from mother to fetus, and — if infection does cause microcephaly — what exactly Zika virus does to developing brains.

Currently, scientists have no antiviral therapy for Zika infection and no vaccine. Developing a vaccine could take years, Fauci says. “Even though we started aggressively on it a month or two ago, it’s going to take a while before we get one.”

In the United States, that could leave millions of people at risk for infection, Isaac Bogoch and colleagues reported January 14 in the Lancet. Bogoch’s team made a global map of places Zika virus could readily spread. The researchers factored in climate, flight patterns out of Brazil, and mosquito species that can carry Zika virus, Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. (Both species hug the U.S. Gulf Coast, and A. albopictus fans out across the southeast and up along the coast, ranging as far north as Connecticut.)

As many as 60 percent of U.S. residents live in areas threatened by Zika virus (at least during warm seasons), the team found. For southern states, especially, “there’s a potential for ongoing transmission,” says Bogoch, a tropical infectious diseases physician at Toronto General Hospital.

Still, that doesn’t mean a Zika virus outbreak is imminent, or inevitable, he says. The virus doesn’t ordinarily pass from person to person (though it may be transmitted sexually). And it might not move beyond a handful of confined cases. After all, chikungunya and dengue virus, which ride the same mosquitoes as Zika, haven’t hit the United States especially hard.

For all these viruses, getting control of an outbreak requires getting rid of mosquitoes, Marcondes advises in a review published December 22 in the Journal of the Brazilian Society for Tropical Medicine. “Preventing breeding is the only way,” he says.

Already, Brazil is trying out an approach to cut wild mosquito populations by genetically engineering and releasing mosquitoes that can’t reproduce.

Fauci agrees that controlling mosquito populations is key. But the recent emergence of so many tropical viruses might also require some new defensive strategies, he says. If scientists could find an antiviral drug that targeted the larger group of viruses that Zika belongs to, for instance, they could knock out several threats.

“You would automatically get chikungunya, West Nile, yellow fever, Zika and dengue with one shot,” he says.

Source:Science News:[Rapid spread of Zika virus in the Americas raises alarm->https://www.sciencenews.org/article/rapid-spread-zika-virus-americas-raises-alarm]