1. How do people Know they are ill? Often they have symptoms such as pain, nausea, sore throat, lack of appetite, fatigue or fever.
2. In years past, panic-button-pushing reports have included a link of hair dyes to cancer; coffee to heart disease, and alcohol consumption to breast cancer, among others.
3. One of the most widely used herbal remedies for depression, St. Johns Wort, is as effective as conventional antidepressant drugs but has fewer side effects, a study show.
4. Eating fresh fruit every day cuts the risk of dying from a heart attack by almost a quarter and from a stroke by almost one third, a study has shown. Overall, those who ate fruit daily increased their life expectancy by 20 per cent compared with those who ate fruit less frequently.
5. Malaria is caused by a parasite called a Plasmodium, which is passed on from infected humans when they are bitten by mosquitoes, which then go on to bite non-infected people. The symptoms are bouts of fever, tiredness, headache, nausea, and muscular pain, leading, without treatment, to delirium, convulsions and death.
6. AIDS, or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, is linked to HIV virus, which can be passed from human to human through blood to blood contact. Although HIV is symptomless, over time, it reduces the body's ability to deal with outside infections.
7. Measles was prevalent among children in the UK until recent years - the last mini-epidemic was in the late 1980s. But the disease, characterised by the purple-spotted skin rash and high temperatures, can cause permanent disability or even kill.
8. Many respiratory tract infections are very infectious, particularly in the early stages, and can be spread through droplets from sneezes or coughs, or from dirty tissues or water glasses.
9. Pneumonia is a common respiratory disease, and kills around one in 20 people who contract it. Elderly people, children, people with depressed immune systems and those with chronic conditions such as diabetes are particularly vulnerable.
10. Some estimate that TB was responsible for around 20% of all deaths in England and Wales in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the 19th and 20th centuries there has been a steady decline in deaths from the disease in industrialised countries. This was given a boost by the development of penicillin and other antibiotics in the last 50 years.
11. Flu and complications linked to it kill hundreds of people in the UK each year. But despite massive investment in research into the virus, there is no cure.
However, there are vaccines which have some protective effect. These are normally administered to the elderly and the vulnerable each year.
12.Because strains of flu viruses change every year, vulnerable people need to be vaccinated every 12 months. The vaccine is available free to older people, and those with chronic conditions including heart disease, asthma and diabetes.
13. Poor hygiene and water supplies are the main factors behind the spread of diseases like dysentery and cholera. Both, although quite treatable, cause death through dehydration, as the body cannot replace the water and body salts it loses through diarrhoea attacks.
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14. Pneumonia is a term used to refer to a variety of lung infections caused by viruses, bacteria and parasites. Common symptoms include fever, a cough, rapid breathing, chest pain, and perhaps a bluish or grey colour of the lips or fingertips, indicating that the body is not getting enough oxygen through the lungs.
15. Professor Paul Sharp, an expert on HIV origins and evolution at the University of Edinburgh, said that while the finding was mainly of "historical interest", it might provide more clues about how the virus changed over time. He suggested that it was likely that all of the early cases of "group M" HIV-1 - the strain causing 19 out of 20 modern infections - happened in the Leopoldville area.
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1
Stop That Germ! [ ʤɜ ːm
It's a jungle out there, teeming with hordes of unseen enemies. Bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites fill the air. They cluster on every surface, from the restaurant table to the living-room sofa. They abound in lakes and in pools, flourish in the soil and disport themselves among the flora and fauna. This menagerie of microscopic organisms, most of them potentially harmful or even lethal, has a favorite target: the human body. In fact, the tantalizing human prey is a walking repository of just the kind of stuff the tiny predators need to survive, thrive and reproduce.
Humans are under constant siege by these voracious adversaries. Germs of every description strive tirelessly to invade the comfortably warm and bountiful body, entering through the skin or by way of the eyes, nose, ears and mouth.
Fortunately for man's survival, most of them fail in their assault. They are repelled by the tough barrier of the skin, overcome by the natural pesticides in sweat, saliva and tears, dissolved by stomach acids or trapped in the sticky mucus of the nose or throat before being expelled by a sneeze or a cough. But the organisms are extraordinarily persistent, and some occasionally breach the outer defenses. After entering the bloodstream and tissues, they multiply at an alarming rate and begin destroying vital body cells.
The invaders soon-receive a rude shock, for they encounter one of nature's most incredible and complex creations: the human immune system. Inside the body, a trillion highly specialized cells, regulated by dozens of remarkable proteins and honed by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, launch an unending battle against the alien organisms. It is high-pitched biological warfare, orchestrated with such skill and precision that illness in the average human being is relatively rare.
Early-warning cells constantly monitor the bloodstream and tissues for signs of the enemy. With the gusto of -Man, they gobble up anything that is foreign to the body. They envelop dust particles, pollutants, microorganisms and even the debris of battle: remnants of invaders and infected or damaged body cells. Other early warners direct the production of unique killer cells, each designed to attack and destroy a particular type of intruder. Some of the killers, alerted to body cells that have become cancerous, may annihilate these too.
Endowed with such specialized weapons, the properly functioning immune system is a formidable barrier to disease. Even when an infection is severe enough to overcome the system's initial response and cause illness, the immune cells are usually able to regroup, call up reinforcements and eventually rout the invaders. But when the system is weakened by previous illness or advancing age, for example, the body becomes more vulnerable to cancers and a host of infectious diseases. And should the system overreact or go awry, it can cause troublesome allergies and serious disorders called autoimmune diseases.
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As they probe the intricate workings of the immune system, scientists are awestruck. "It is an enormous edifice, like a cathedral", says Nobel Laureate Baruj Benaceerraf, president of Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The immune system is compared favorably with the most complex organ of them all, the brain. "The immune system has a phenomenal ability for dealing with information, for learning and memory, for creating and storing and using information", explains Immunologist William Paul of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Declares Dr.Stephen Sherwin, director of clinical research at Genentech: "It's an incredible system. It recognizes molecules that have never been in the body before. It can differentiate between what belongs there and what doesn't".
Knowledge about the inner workings of the immune system has undergone an astonishing explosion in the past five years. Although researchers began to pry
pace of discovery began to quicken, boosted by such achievements as the deciphering of the genetic code and recombinant DNA technology. But no early advances can match those of recent years, which have enabled doctors to devise ingenious new treatments for a host of disorders. Says Immunologist John Kappler, of the National Jewish Center for Immunology and Respiratory Medicine in Denver: "The field is progressing so rapidly that the journals are out of date by the time they are published".
Kappler is not exaggerating. In the past few months alone, dozens of new immune discoveries and promising therapies have been reported. Researchers announce in March that by activating certain immune cells, they had increased by 20% the five-year survival rate of patients in the early stages of lung cancer. In the same month, European scientists reported eliminating the need for insulin shots in some diabetic children by administering a drag that suppresses the immune system. Researchers in Colombia have tested a malaria vaccine that, unlike previous efforts, seems, to provide protection against the disease. Advances have come so fast, says Dana-Farber's Benacerraf, that "we're now on the threshold of being able to activate the different components of the immune system at will to provide therapies for cancer and even for AIDS.
From Times
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How Stress Erodes Health
By Daniel Goleman
People with many friends or family ties tend to live longer than loners. Heart attack victims who have emotional support survive longer than those who do not. The mind has many subtle influences on the body, and a spate of new studies are seeking to explore further, the nature of this mysterious axis.
Your closest relationships seem to matter most for your health, said Dr.Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, a psychologist at Ohio State University Medical School who has just completed a study showing that marital fights can weaken the immune systems of couples.
She and other researchers are trying to find out how the body turns states of mind like close relationships into a biological advantage that improves health. The evidence to date points to physiological mechanisms in the immune and cardiovascular system.
What is it that happens in a social network that makes such a difference for health? asked Dr.Sheldon Cohen, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University. To find the answers, Dr.Cohen joined forces with Dr. Jay Kaplan, a psychiatrist at Bowman Gray School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who studies stress in macaque monkeys.
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In their research, 40 male macaques were randomly assigned either to stable or shifting groups, the latter having three or four new monkeys added to their cage every month. For macaques, joining a new group of monkeys is highly agitating and stressful; the males threaten each other'until a dominance hierarchy is established.
Yet even under the duress of the struggle for dominance, some monkeys remained friendly. These monkeys touched other monkeys more, groomed their cagemates or simply sat close to them, Dr.Cohen said. In monkeys, those are all gestures of affiliation.
After 26 months of shifting groups and fights for dominance, the friendliest monkeys were found to have stronger immune responses while the most hostile and aggressive monkeys had the poorest. Dr.Cohen's results were reported in the journal Psychological Science.
If friendly intimacy protects the immune system from stress, consider what a fight does. How couples handle their disagreements seems to affect their immune system, said Dr.Kiecolt-Glaser. She has been studying couples with her husband, Dr.Ronald Glaser, an immunologist and associate director for research at Ohio State University Medical School.
In their study, 90 couples were brought into a laboratory and asked to resolve an issue of disagreement. Continuous blood monitoring for 24 hours allowed their immune responses to be measured during and after the discussion.
We found a far stronger effect on the couples' immune system than we ever expected, said Dr.Kiecolt-Glaser. The more hostile you are during a marital argument, the harder it is on your immune system.
It is not, of course, the sheer number of relationships in a person's life that seem to offer a buffer against stress so much as the quality of those connections. For example, a study of college students found that the more roommates dis
liked each other, the more often they came down with colds and the flu and vis
ited a physician.,
It's the most important relationships in your life, the people you see day in and day out, that seem to be crucial for health, said Dr.John Cacioppo, a psychologist at Ohio State University who did the roommate study with Mary Snydersmith, a graduate student.
But not all relationships are of equal significance. If you have a romantic partner, we found, how you're getting along with your partner matters far more for your health than does how you like your roommate, Dr. Cacioppo said.
In a study of 194 elderly men and women who had suffered heart attacks, those who had two or more sources of emotional support were found to be twice as likely to survive longer than a year after the attack than those with no support, according to a report in The Annals of Internal Medicine.
The study, led by Dr.Lisa Berkman, an epidemiologist at Yale University Medical School, found that of the patients who said they had two or more people they could count on, only 27 percent died within the first year of the heart attack. But of the patients who reported no such close supports, 58 percent died within the year.
