Health News – Page 3

What Can Parents Do To Prevent Further Spread of Measles?

Written on April 13, 2015. Posted in Featured, Health News, Personal Safety.

Since December, there have been more than 130 confirmed cases of measles in the state of California, most of them connected to an outbreak that originated in a Southern California amusement park. Many of the infected persons were not vaccinated against the extremely contagious virus, which manifests itself through rash, fever and coughing. While thought to be eradicated in the U.S., the illness has been traced to travelers who were infected in...

Worms and Germs Lead to Better Immune Function

Written on April 13, 2015. Posted in Featured, Health News, Science News.

A growing body of evidence in the medical community holds that greater diversity of bacteria and even worms in the digestive tract offers protection against a variety of allergic and autoimmune problems. Germs from healthy people can be used to heal people with digestive disorders and other conditions caused by the loss of their own germs, and worms that live in the gut, called helminths, have shown success in quelling inflammatory diseases. With...

New Ebola Study Points to Potential Drug Target

Written on April 9, 2015. Posted in Featured, Health News, Science News.

Opening the door to potential treatments for the deadly Ebola virus, scientists have found that a protein made by the virus plays a role similar to that of a coat-check attendant. The protein removes a protective coat from the virus’s genetic material, exposing the viral genome so that it can be copied, and then returns the coat, according to a new study led by scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The research, in...

New Tool to Diagnose Ebola Uncovers Some Surprises

Written on April 7, 2015. Posted in Featured, Health News.

Abdominal pain, fever and unexplained bleeding – which are commonly believed to indicate infection with the Ebola virus — are not significantly predictive of the disease, according to the results of a study examining a new Ebola Prediction Score published online Friday in Annals of Emergency Medicine (“Derivation and Internal Validation of the Ebola Prediction Score for Risk Stratification of Patients with Suspected Ebola Virus Disease”) http://www.annemergmed.com/article/S0196-0644(15)00217-6/fulltext “Not...

Ebola Orphans Taking Desperate Measures to Survive

Written on April 6, 2015. Posted in Featured, Health News, World News.

Aid workers have warned that Ebola has created a generation of orphans forced into desperate measures to fend for themselves after the disease claimed their parents. A British-run charity says many of the thousands of children stricken by the virus have turned to crime and prostitution simply to care for their siblings. The Street Child charity’s researchers, who surveyed every district in Sierra Leone, first documented the shocking extent...

Who Should Get the Shingles Vaccine – Are There Side Effects?

Written on March 31, 2015. Posted in Featured, Health News.

Shingles most commonly occurs in people ages 50 years old or older, people who have medical conditions that keep the immune system from working properly, or people who receive immunosuppressive drugs. The vaccine has been approved for people ages 50 or older. As for recommendations, the CDC recommends a single dose of the vaccine for people ages 60 and older, even if they’ve already had a bout of shingles. Since the majority of older Americans...

Genetic Mutation Helps Explain Why, in Rare Cases, Flu Can Kill

Written on March 30, 2015. Posted in Featured, Health News, Science News.

Nobody likes getting the flu, but for some people, fluids and rest aren’t enough. A small number of children who catch the influenza virus fall so ill they end up in the hospital — perhaps needing ventilators to breathe — even while their family and friends recover easily. New research by Rockefeller University scientists, published March 26 in Science, helps explain why: a rare genetic mutation. The researchers scrutinized blood and tissue...

Is Marijuana Medicine?

Written on March 26, 2015. Posted in Featured, Health News.

While many states have pushed for new laws to legalize the use of marijuana for medical reasons, there are few well-controlled studies that demonstrate its effectiveness. As such, most major state and national medical professional societies have not yet supported its use in patient care until further research is conducted to show it is a safe and effective medicine for use in a wide variety of settings. That’s the primary point a white paper titled...

Marijuana Gears Up for Production High in U.S. Labs

Written on March 23, 2015. Posted in Featured, Health News, Science News.

Residents of 23 US states can buy medical marijuana to treat everything from cancer pain to anxiety, but US scientists must wade through onerous paperwork to score the drug for study. Their sole dealer is the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which has a contract with the University of Mississippi in Oxford to produce marijuana for research purposes. The agency has long faced complaints that its marijuana is too weak to represent what is...

Dr. Sanjay Gupta Honored for Reporting on Medical Marijuana

Written on March 20, 2015. Posted in Featured, Health News.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta—a practicing neurosurgeon and Chief Medical Correspondent for CNN—recently received the prestigious Alfred I. duPont Award for his work on a pair of influential documentaries on medical marijuana, according to a cover feature in the April issue of Neurosurgery, official journal of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. The journal is published by Wolters Kluwer. A special cover essay highlights Dr. Gupta’s achievement in...