Public Health

Almost immediately after it is donated, human blood begins to lose a key gas that opens up blood vessels to facilitate the transfer of oxygen from red blood cells to oxygen-starved tissues. They also found that adding this gas back to stored blood before transfusion appears to restore red blood cells’ ability to transfer oxygen to tissues. These studies go a long way toward answering a major problem which many physicians are beginning to appreciate – blood transfusions with banked human blood may do more harm than good for a majority of patients, according to the researchers. Over the past…

A new survey(C) released by Litozin joint health reveals that men and women who aim to keep fit, could in fact, be damaging their joints. Over two thirds (68%) of all active respondents who took part in the survey had suffered from joint pain at some point. Joint injuries seem to be a common occurrence for the nations top sports performers with David Beckham and Freddy Flintoff both recent victims. Commissioned by LitoZin(R), a rosehip based supplement which improves joint health, the survey looked at the impact on joint health of various sporting activities amongst groups of men and women…

Moving away from home and adapting to a new social environment are just two of the many challenges that new students face as they enter university. An innovative new study conducted at the University of Alberta has found that these challenges can actually have a negative effect on a student's health. The researchers found that female students who lived away from home were three times more likely to report symptoms of binge eating compared to those students living with parents during their first year of university studies. Also, students who felt dissatisfied with their bodies were three…

Current recommendations developed by the Institute of Medicine in 1990 suggest women should gain at least 15 pounds during pregnancy and places no upper limit on pregnancy weight gain. Not a good idea, says Raul Artal, M.D., chairman of the department of obstetrics, gynecology and women’s health at Saint Louis University School of Medicine. “Guidelines for nutrition during pregnancy at that time were based solely on expert opinion and not on scientific data. Obesity was not the problem it is now,” Dr. Artal says. A new study led by Artal,published in the October issue of Obstetrics &…

A recent survey shows that only 12% of American consumers believe in the safety of the global food system and many believe that local foods are safer and better for their health than foods from afar. These are the views of a representative, nationwide sample of 500 consumers who participated in a web-based survey conducted by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture in July 2007. Their responses are summarized in a new Leopold Center report, "Consumer perceptions of the safety, health, and environmental impact of various scales and geographic origin of food supply chains." The paper was…

The H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus can pass through the placenta of pregnant women to the unborn fetus, and can infect organs other than the lungs in adults. Professor Jiang Gu, Peking University, Beijing, China and colleagues studied post-mortem tissues of two adults – one man and one pregnant woman, and also tested the dead fetus of the dead woman. They investigated how H5N1 – an emerging infectious disease which causes respiratory symptoms and a high fatality rate – affects different organs in the body. The authors say: “A pandemic outbreak of human infection with avian H5N1 currently…

Good news for lovers of fish and chips. Japanese scientists have come up with the perfect recipe to make a crispy batter which is also lower in fat, reports Joanna Harries in Chemistry & Industry. Dr Thanatuksorn and his team at Tokyo University of Technology studied how the structure of the batter molecules changes during the frying process. By altering the water content and frying time they were able to suggest the perfect conditions to create batter with the best lasting crispiness, as well as helping to reduce the fat content. During the deep-frying process a rigid microstructure of…

Six months of acupuncture treatment appears to be more effective than conventional therapy in treating low back pain, according to a study in the Sept. 24 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, although the study suggests that both sham acupuncture and traditional Chinese verum acupuncture appear to be effective in treating low back pain. “Low back pain is a common, impairing and disabling condition, often long-term, with an estimated lifetime prevalence of 70 percent to 85 percent,” the authors write as background information in the article. “It is the second most common pain for which…

In Sunday’s NY Times Magazine, Gary Taubes argued that epidemiology does not provide a good basis for health decisions — it is often wrong, he claimed. By “wrong” he meant experiments were more pessimistic. Things that seemed to help based on surveys turned out not to help, or help much less, when experiments were done. A 2001 BMJ editorial disagrees: Randomized controlled trials and observational studies are often seen as mutually exclusive, if not opposing, methods of clinical research. Two recent reports, however, identified clinical questions (19 in one report, five in the other) where…

Differences in sexual behaviours do not fully explain why the US HIV epidemic affects gay men so much more than straight men and women, claims research in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections. In 2005, over half of new HIV infections diagnosed in the US were among gay men, and up to one in five gay men living in cities is thought to be HIV positive. Yet two large population surveys showed that most gay men had similar numbers of unprotected sexual partners per year as straight men and women. US researchers applied a series of carefully calculated equations in different scenarios to…