Summertime is the time when cases of dogs infected with rabies begin to escalate. However the term for rabies in Thai, which translates to “mad dog’s disease”, is somewhat misleading as other types of household pets are also prone to rabies, including cats, hamsters, squirrels and rabbits. and if unaware, owners can get the virus from their infected pets.

A dog owner holds his pet while a veterinarian gives a rabies vaccination.

Rabies is a deadly virus that attacks the nervous system (especially the brain and meninges) in both humans and animals and can spread very rapidly, resulting in death. Currently there is still no cure for rabies and the mortality rate is almost 100%.

An infected animal carries the rabies virus in its saliva and, as we often hear, can be transmitted through open wounds, mostly from biting. Though its largely unheard of people getting rabies simply by being licked or scratched or coming into contact with an infected animal’s saliva, it is possible. Genital areas, even with no open wounds, are also prone to this infection.

There are two forms of rabies. the first, which is more common, is an aggressive type in which the infected animal becomes rabid and may try to attack or bite any moving objects, including people and other animals. the symptoms and signs of this form of rabies generally last a few days and the animal will eventually become paralysed in the throat, making it impossible to swallow, and both hind legs. the second form is harder to notice as the animal will only appear to be depressed. the infected animal may open its mouth often and its tongue will become a dark red colour. strange behaviour might also be noticed, such as eating leaves and rocks or drinking its own urine. If you are doubtful whether an animal is infected, stay away and notify relevant agencies immediately.

If you are bitten, whether its on an open wound or not, and you don’t know if the animal has been vaccinated against rabies, always assume the worst and seek medical help. Once bitten, clean the wound with water and soap as soon as possible and apply alcohol solution to the wound, then see a doctor immediately. If possible, keep the animal in a cage and observe its behaviour for 10-15 days. If the animal dies within that period, contact the Department of Livestock Development in your local area.

Those who are bitten and fail to get appropriate medical care will experience flu-like symptoms, including a low-grade fever and sore throat in the first few days, then begin to lose their appetite and develop a burning sensation around the wound. Later, they might experience symptoms such as restlessness, light sensitivity and have difficulty swallowing. Fatigue will also set in, followed by paralysis and low blood pressure, and possible death within two weeks.

Although the mortality rate of rabies is almost 100%, it can be prevented by getting your pets vaccinated. Free services are available according to the WHO’s policies to eliminate rabies by 2020. Animals that have been vaccinated will be given a vaccine tag on their collars. so lookout, and make sure your buddies have them!

Bangkok Health Research Centre, Bangkok Hospital.

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Asthma sufferer 10-year-old Anastasia Savvas, pictured at home in Plymouth, South Australia, went for five years without an attack. Picture: James Elsby Source: the Australian

DEATHS from asthma and the prevalence of the disease among five to 34-year-olds have declined substantially over the past decade, despite concern among experts the condition is still poorly managed by GPs.

The latest Australian Institute of Health and Welfare data on the disease shows two million people have asthma and the mortality rate is the fourth-highest in the developed world.

Experts are worried that fewer than 9 per cent of those who see their general practitioner with an asthma problem are given an asthma management plan or encouraged to use preventer medication, despite this being recommended practice.

Anastasia Savvas, 10, who was diagnosed with asthma as a toddler, thought she had outgrown the condition until a virus triggered an attack last year that left her hospitalised for three nights.

"It surprised me. It came just like that, out of the blue, after she had no symptoms for five years," says Anastasia’s mother, Sophie, who had difficulty getting a diagnosis from several GPs.

Ms Savvas says her daughter is managing well, using a preventer medication four times a day.

The prevalence of asthma among five to 34-year-olds declined by more than 25 per cent between 2001 and 2008 but remained stable in adults aged 35 years and over, the AIHW report Asthma in Australia shows. there were 411 deaths from asthma in 2009 but the mortality rate dropped by 45 per cent between 1997 and 2009.

Indigenous Australians and people living in areas of lower socio-economic status are more likely to be hospitalised for asthma than those in more wealthy areas, the report shows.

Guy Marks, who helped produce the report, says the causes of asthma and the reasons the rate of disease went up and down remain a mystery.

The reduction in prevalence of the disease and improved treatments were partly responsible for the reductions in the death rate, said Professor Marks, who is from the Australian Centre for Asthma Monitoring.

The chairman of Asthma Australia’s medical committee, Simon Bowler, said the report was good news because it showed fewer Australians were suffering asthma symptoms and fewer people were being hospitalised and dying from the disease.

However, he said the decline in asthma had undermined the hypothesis that the disease was caused by the lack of exposure to bugs and dirt in the first 12 months of a child’s life.

"It remains one of the mysteries of our time and it is frustrating we don’t know the cause," mr Bowler said.

In the onset of Lassa fever, the symptoms easily could be mistaken for malaria.

Anti-malarial drugs are prescribed, but the patient doesn’t seem to show improvement. The health, instead, is deteriorating.

Further actions are made to combat symptoms that mimic those of other diseases such as yellow fever and dengue fever. But nothing seems to take as the patient quickly approaches death.

As soon as five to seven days after infection — when the telltale signs of Lassa, a viral hemorrhagic fever, present themselves — it’s often too late.

Endemic to portions of West Africa, Lassa fever is estimated to infect anywhere from 100,000 to 500,000 people on an annual basis and official projections place the mortality rate in the 2 percent to 5 percent range. however, some in the medical field say those estimates are quite crude and that the cases and especially the mortality rates are much greater with 10 times the number of fatalities.

“I think what we believe is that (Lassa fever) is severely under-tested and severely undiagnosed,” said Douglass Simpson, president and chief executive officer of Broomfield-based Corgenix Medical Corp.

Corgenix, the locally based maker of diagnostic tests is one member of a multidisciplinary team that’s spent the past six years addressing that concern.

As a result of federal funding, a team of businesses and academics have worked in Sierra Leone, Africa, and surrounding areas to develop an array of diagnostic tests for the deadly Lassa fever. The program’s efforts also could result in potential therapeutics and vaccines and could play a role in the U.S. government’s biodefense efforts as well, Simpson said.

Seeing there were really no means of immediately diagnosing Lassa — let alone a dedicated treatment for the disease — the National Institutes of Health awarded a grant to Tulane University, Corgenix and others to develop new recombinant proteins and viral detection products that were deployed in Africa for clinical testing.

About $25.8 million in grants have been awarded through National Institutes of Health agencies for the three Lassa projects that started in 2005 and carry through 2015, Simpson said. of those funds, about $3 million went directly to Corgenix, he said.

The team — which also includes Autoimmune Technologies LLC, Vybion inc. and University of California-San Diego researchers, among others — is in the middle of a five-year grant to further develop the test kits, finalize the clinical studies and move the products into commercialization.

A third arm of the program involves research dedicated to creating therapeutics and possibly a vaccine for the disease that is treated now intravenously with ribavirin — an antiviral taken orally to treat hepatitis C, Simpson said.

While the results from the program should benefit Corgenix’s earnings and could help the United States diagnose a Class A biological agent in a matter of minutes, the greater cause of saving lives and advancing the on-site technologies sit at the heart for Matt Boisen, Corgenix’s research and development manager and a lead scientist in the Sierra Leone program.

“We’re really hoping that we can find an avenue to get these diagnostics distributed throughout West Africa,” he said.

Boisen last week was at his Broomfield lab preparing prototypes for Tulane University professor Robert Garry, who will travel to Sierra Leone in a couple weeks. The stateside work of Boisen and others does not involve any live samples of the virus, but rather irradiated samples or recombinant agents, Corgenix officials said.

In the coming months, Boisen expects to return to the West African country to further pre-clinical testing. The work he’s been involved with already has left a lasting impression.

“There’s a really huge public health awareness push, especially with the health care workers and midwives, because it could be very fatal in pregnant women,” Boisen said, noting a 90 percent mortality rate for women in their third trimester.

Boisen relayed one account of a woman in her third trimester of pregnancy who arrived at the Lassa ward in the city of Kenema very ill. She was diagnosed and treated.

But then there are the other cases — those that all too often include young children — where the sample is taken, the test is run, but the patient dies before treatment is administered.

“There’s big highs and there’s big lows,” Boisen said.

As a means of shifting that balance toward more positive results, a number of the program’s research efforts are expected to be published soon in medical journals, said Luis Branco, scientist at New Orleans-based Autoimmune Technologies.

“There’s been really tremendous progress; I think we’ve really changed the way that Lassa virus is diagnosed and therefore treated,” he said. “… I think that we have really gleaned new insights into the virus itself and how it operates at a molecular level and, at the same time, how to use that information.”

On a local level, Branco feels the program has helped to improve infrastructure in a country still recovering from the ravages of an 11-year-old civil war. The team invested in the diagnostics, lab equipment, power supplies and also has employed locals to assist in the efforts, he said.

“We try to develop the infrastructure in the country such that we can provide some sort of self-sufficiency,” he said.

The work for Corgenix and crew is far from over, although officials hope to have a slate of blood diagnostics — including a rapid, 10-minute test and more comprehensive, two-to-three-hour tests — ready for commercialization later this year, Simpson said.

“Ultimately, where Corgenix would like to go would be to have a battery of products, perhaps even configured on the same little cassette where we could detect three or four different viruses,” he said.

Corgenix (OTCBB: CONX) also expects to further diagnostic testing for other deadly viruses, he said.

Corgenix received the entirety of a $590,000 grant for a similarly focused Ebola virus and Marburg virus program that runs from 2010 to 2012, Simpson said.

“You’re never going to eradicate the virus,” he said. “What we want to do for the next 10 years is just get into a system where we can diagnose them quickly, treat them quickly and reduce the mortality rate.”

Contact Camera Business Writer Alicia Wallace at 303-473-1332 or wallacea@dailycamera.com.

by Julia Litzky '12 SCIENCE EDITOR

in the U.S., over 10 million women and one million men are currently struggling with an eating disorder. these disorders are especially prevalent among college-aged women, since the average age of onset is between 17 and 20 years old. in addition to these disorders, about a third of college-aged women have disordered eating habits, characterized by excessive dieting and exercise. Anorexia, which involves self-starvation, is the most dangerous eating disorder. at least one in 10 anorexics die from the effects of starvation. The mortality rate among anorexics is 12 times higher than any other cause of death among women between the ages of 15 and 24. Symptoms to watch for are dramatic weight loss, an obsession with food, counting calories, dieting, frequent discussion of feeling fat or fear of becoming fat, rituals involving food, excessive exercise and withdrawal from friends. The medical definition of anorexia involves having a body mass index below 18.5 and, for women, missing their menstrual cycle for several months (which happens when a woman’s body senses that she does not have the fat stores to carry a child). being very underweight is dangerous because the body must break down muscle tissue in order to acquire energy, instead of the fat it would normally use. since the diaphragm and heart are muscles, this can severely affect their function. Additionally, not eating means not getting enough nutrients and vitamins. This can result in imbalances in electrolytes, which can lead to heart attacks. A lack of calcium leads to reduced bone density (osteoporosis), which results in brittle bones that break easily. Additionally, dehydration can lead to kidney failure; the overuse of laxatives and diuretics, which is frequent in anorexics, adds to this dehydration. The causes of anorexia are still unknown, but anorexics’ brains have been found to process the taste of food differently than non-eating-disordered individuals. Additionally, anorexics seem to be more concerned with their choices’ consequences than the immediate pleasure they could attain from a choice. However, these differences could be a result of the disease instead of the cause. either way, antidepressants have been found to be helpful in treating the disorder, and 70 percent of women with anorexia recover by the age of 30, usually within three to five years of the onset of the disorder. Still, half of anorexics will develop a second eating disorder, bulimia, before recovering. Bulimia, which involves a cycle of binge eating followed by self-induced vomiting, abuse of diuretics or laxatives and fasting or exercising excessively, seems to be the result of reduced tryptophan levels in the brain. since tryptophan is required for serotonin production, and serotonin controls both happiness and appetite, lacking tryptophan can severely affect eating habits and depression. Like anorexics, bulimics tend to withdraw from their friends, exercise excessively and obsess over controlling food and weight. However, there are also clearer signs of bulimia, such as swollen cheeks or jaw, cuts on the knuckles or back of the hands, stained or discolored teeth and frequent trips to the bathroom, especially after eating. Like anorexia, bulimia can be deadly. Frequent vomiting disrupts the electrolyte balance in the body, leading to the development of an irregular heart rate, which can result in heart failure and death. since bulimics can eat up to 20,000 calories in one binge, they can rupture their gastric system, and the frequent vomiting can result in ruptures of the esophagus, ulcers and tooth decay, from stomach acids. The third, and lesser-known eating disorder is binge eating disorder, sometimes called compulsive overeating. It is characterized by frequently eating large amounts of food and then feeling guilty or disgusted by having done so. Often, eating is done in secret, and not necessarily when the person is hungry. The disorder is strongly linked with depression. Eating increases serotonin levels in the brain, and this decreases depression, but the effect is short-lived. since this disorder results in overeating, the most dangerous side-effects are those that result from clinical obesity, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes and heart disease. The goal of NEDAW is to help students understand eating disorders and body image issues such as these.

How does a person know if they have woughing cough?

its whooping cough and you'll sound like you are barking, it is persistent and hurts your throat. check webmd.com or call your dr.

reddish spots appearing on body that when a glass is pressed against them they donot disapear, if you even suspect whooping cough get to your g.p or hospital straight away

It can start off like an ordinary cold (catarrhal phase) for 7 to 14 days, but tends to worsen with periods of uncontrolled coughing. these are associated with a "whooping" noise during breathing in between bursts of coughing and often carry on until the child actually vomits. these episodes frequently cause the child to go blue and can be very worrying for the onlooker. between the periods or spasms of coughing the child seems fine. Often exercise or laughing brings on a spasm of coughing.

Attacks of whooping cough may last for six weeks or more and the reason that people worry is that there is a mortality rate, but this is low and happens mainly in children under 6 months. sometimes whooping cough may be complicated by brain damage or fits or pneumonia. When adults get whooping cough the diagnosis may not be quite so clear cut and it may just seem like a prolonged, irritating, cough.

If you think your child might have whooping cough you should consult your doctor

Monday 29 November 2010 Cancer Research UK Press Release

Failure to get moles and skin changes checked out by a doctor has contributed to a steep rise in deaths from malignant melanoma among pensioners, experts warned today (Tuesday).

The mortality rate in over 65s dying from the most dangerous kind of skin cancer has almost tripled in the last 30 years according to Cancer Research UK.

Figures from the East of England Cancer Registry (ECRIC*) showed that the over 65s were more likely to be diagnosed with melanoma at a late stage compared with younger people.

The later skin cancer is detected, the more likely it is to spread and the harder it becomes to treat.

Caroline Cerny, Cancer Research UK’s SunSmart campaign manager, said: “While the risk of skin cancer increases with age, the fact that so many over 65s are being diagnosed when the disease is advanced means that older people need to keep a close eye on any changes to their skin or moles to avoid late diagnosis. The earlier the cancer is diagnosed the easier it will be to treat.

“People should be aware of the basic warning signs for malignant melanoma. If a mole is as big as a pencil-top eraser, bleeds, is sore or itchy, uneven in colour or has jagged edges then people should visit their GP without delay.”

Cancer Research UK found that there was a steeper increase in the number of cases of malignant melanoma in the over 65s compared to younger people which also contributed to the threefold increase in deaths.

Data from ECRIC showed that for every year since 1997, significantly more people aged 65 and over have been diagnosed with malignant melanoma at a late stage than those under 65.

In recent years, around seven per cent of 15-64 year olds were diagnosed with late stage malignant melanoma compared with around 20 per cent of people over 65.

Dr Jem Rashbass, director of ECRIC, said: “We know that late diagnosis is a problem in this country and this is likely to be a combination of a number of factors. An important part of the National Awareness and Early Diagnosis Initiative (NAEDI)** is to ensure we develop the evidence both to help us understand the key reasons for delays and find the right approaches to improve earlier diagnosis.”

Although there have been some improvements in the number of over 65 year olds being diagnosed with melanoma at a late stage***, the figures suggest that more needs to be done to raise awareness about skin cancer among this generally retired population.

Cancer Research UK figures showed that the rate of people aged 65 and over dying from melanoma in the UK rose from four deaths per 100,000 people in 1979 to 11.4 deaths per 100,000 people in 2008.

In contrast, the death rate for people aged 15-64 has remained stable over the same period at around 2 deaths per 100,000 people.

The five-fold increase over the last 30 years in the number of malignant melanoma cases among the over 65s showed that people need to be careful in the sun now to protect their skin against the disease in years to come.

Sara Hiom, director of health information at Cancer Research UK, said: “It can take decades for skin cancer to develop so to avoid developing the disease in the future, it is vitally important for young people to be aware that not protecting their skin from sunburn while they are young can increase the risk of melanoma later in life.

“Melanoma is a largely preventable disease; people can reduce their chance of getting skin cancer in the first place if they protect their skin from sunburn. Summer may be over, but the damage to skin cells shown by sunburn can remain long after the redness fades.”

For media enquiries please contact Angela Balakrishnan on 020 3469 8311 or, out-of-hours, the duty press officer on 07050 264 059.

Lung cancer remains the deadliest type of cancer globally accounting for more deaths than the combined mortality rate for other types of cancer including breast, colon, kidney, liver, skin cancer and prostate. each year, 1.18 million people die from the disease.

Five-year survival rates for lung cancer are also very poor at only 15 percent compared to breast cancer survival which is at around 89 percent.

In the Philippines, figures show that despite the increase of breast cancer incidence, lung cancer kills 80 percent of those diagnosed (8518 or 14 percent mortality among 10643 or 17.4 percent incidence) of all diagnosed with the disease compared to 35 percent mortality among breast cancer patients (4085 or 11.9 mortality among 11524 or 31.9percent incidence).

The Philippine Society of Medical Oncology, in cooperation with the C-Network and Roche Philippines embarked on an awareness campaign to convey the much-needed steps to elevate awareness on the disease and expound on the new developments in screenings and therapies for the disease.

Despite these alarming statistics, lung cancer is not as highlighted in mass media, as much as other cancer types. A study in the US indicated that of 600 randomly selected cancer stories that appeared over the course of a year, 61 percent reported on breast cancer; 23 percent on prostate cancer; 17 percent on colorectal cancer; and only 9 percent focused on lung cancer outside of tobacco and smoking issues.

Lung cancer may be asymptomic is most cases, resulting in the majority of cases being diagnosed at an advanced and sometimes incurable stage. however, despite symptoms being non-specific there are new diagnostics that a doctor may perform that could make it possible to have an early diagnosis of the disease.

Dr. Dennis Ramon M. Tudtud, PSMO president, said common symptoms are mostly non-specific and can be indicative of other illness or conditions. This means that symptoms are sometimes disregarded, a major factor why many patients go to their doctors at a later stage when the disease had already advanced.

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