Simple Hygiene Steps Can Prevent Flu, Food-Borne Illnesses, Experts Say
http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5jUwWsF1VfBy8gilb89UDqeUtVtYA
Oct 8, 2008

TORONTO — With flu and cold season just around the corner, public health experts are trying to get Canadians to lessen their chances of getting sick by adopting some simple hygiene practices to keep disease-causing germs at bay.

The Health and Hygiene Council of Canada says an international survey suggests that overall, Canadians have the best understanding in the world of the role that good hygiene plays in preventing infection. But there are gaps between the knowing and the doing, the recently formed council says.

Dr. Brenda Cholin, a medical health officer in North Battleford, Sask., said 90 per cent of Canadians believe that regular hand-washing can prevent influenza. "But when it comes to actually doing that, only about 40 per cent have their children wash their hands before eating," she told a Toronto news conference Wednesday. "And this is despite risks that we know are in the home."

Mindful that children are especially vulnerable to respiratory diseases like influenza, the council has set an initial priority of encouraging programs in daycare centres and elementary schools that would teach children the importance of hand-washing and other good hygiene. Council chair Dr. Donald Low, chief medical microbiologist at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital, said the idea is that the lessons learned in school would translate into better hygiene at home.

"There's no program in place in order to share this information, either with teachers (or) with children at school," he said. "This is not part of the school process." Low said having children learn the proper way to wash their hands and how often would go a long way to preventing transmission of bacteria and viruses that can cause disease. Hands should be washed by both adults and children before eating or taking medications and after using the washroom or handling pets.

He also suggested that classrooms have dispensers of an alcohol-based hand cleaner, such as those found in hospitals and many businesses. In the home, the kitchen is probably the biggest breeding ground for germs, the council advises. Countertops and other hard surfaces can become contaminated with such bacteria as Salmonella and Listeria from fresh produce and uncooked meat.

"The vast majority of food-borne illnesses occur because the food was not handled or cooked properly and 80 per cent of these cases occur within the home," said Low, noting that up to 13 million cases of disease from contaminated food occur in Canada each year.

Low said kitchen surfaces should be regularly disinfected with alcohol-based cleaners or bleach diluted with water.

It's not clear, he said, whether the myriad number of products on store shelves that claim to kill household germs are in fact effective, so the council is supporting a study that will test these cleaners to see how well they actually work.

"The bottom line is these things aren't going to be magic," he said. "They're not going to protect you if they're not used properly, so what we'd like to do is find out: Do they have any value and how can that value be best enhanced by how they're used?"

For instance, some products may kill bacteria but not viruses, he said. And some viruses - including influenza - can survive on hard, moist surfaces for 24 to 48 hours. The council also targeted the lowly and ubiquitous kitchen cloth as a veritable Petri dish for microbes, and advised it be routinely thrown in the washing machine or even the dishwasher for disinfection.

It's not known whether dish cloths laden with germs actually cause disease, Low said. "I don't know the answer, but we do know that these dish cloths - because they're wet, because they come in contact with so many different raw (foods) - it's a perfect environment for these things to replicate in."

As for the coming flu season, Low said it's "going to be an interesting one," because infectious disease experts aren't sure how the 2008-09 strains are likely to behave.

Last year, there was an unexplained rise in one strain's partial resistance to the antiviral drug Tamiflu, which is most often used to treat elderly people in long-term care centres at high risk of dying from influenza. Another of last year's circulating flu strains was resistant to another antiviral, Amantadine, he said.

While doctors don't know yet which strains will dominate this year's flu season in Canada, they advise that people who come down with a respiratory illness follow the steps to prevent others from getting sick - including frequent hand-washing and coughing or sneezing into their elbow instead of their hand.

Contamination of such objects as doorknobs is a sure-fire way to spread cold and flu viruses. And Low said people should stay home from work when they are sick to avoid coming in contact with others and making them ill, too.

"We've always had this attitude in the past that the good worker is the worker that's there 365 days, rain, sleet and illness ... I think we have to change our attitude about this. It's not responsible for us to come to work when we're sick."

Some Cold Medications Not For Kids Under Four
Warning Labels To Come
http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?-8171-c67a6ee5fc32
Wednesday, October 08, 2008

As drug companies in the United States put new warning labels on cold and flu medication for children under four years old, a Canadian manufacturer of children's medicine, said it would not follow suit.

Major U.S. pharmaceutical companies announced Tuesday they would change labels on cough and cold medicines to warn consumers not to give the products to children under four, said the Consumer Healthcare Products Association, a group representing the American producers of over-the-counter kids medicine.

"After consulting with the Food and Drug Administration, the leading manufacturers of these medicines are voluntarily transitioning the labelling on oral (over-the-counter) pediatric cough and cold medicines to state "do not use" in children under four years of age," it said in a statement. However, Johnson & Johnson Canada said no such warnings will be put on the Canadian products yet.

"At this time the initiatives in the U.S. don't affect our products in Canada," said spokeswoman Tina Peyregatt. Peyregatt said the companies in the U.S. made the decision in part because of "an overabundance of caution. These products remain safe and effective when used as directed."

Pediatricians in Canada and the U.S. argue there is little evidence the drugs work on children up to the age of 12. They also point to the number of deaths from accidental overdoses, saying often parents give the child more cough syrup when it appears like it isn't working.

Health Canada said a scientific panel is currently reviewing the safety of the products.

Depression, Healthcare Services and Heart Attacks - What's the Connection?
New data points to psychosocial factors impacting how often cardiac patients seek further care

TORONTO, Oct. 21 /CNW/ - Depression symptoms are associated with significantly higher use of healthcare services following a heart attack, according to a new study released today by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). With approximately 70,000 Canadians experiencing a heart attack each year, this new data may help thousands of people get the care they need and reduce hospital visits.

"While we know that the use of health services is higher for people with depression symptoms, and depression is common for people who have had a heart attack, this is one of the first studies to quantify the relationship between depression symptoms, cardiac illness severity and their effect on health service consumption," explains Dr. Paul Kurdyak, head of CAMH's Centralized Assessment, Triage and Support research program and principal investigator for this research.

Data from almost 2000 heart attack patients showed that depression symptoms alone resulted in an increase in health service consumption with a:

• Nine per cent increase in heart-related hospitalizations,

• 24 per cent increase in total re-hospitalization days, and

• 43 per cent increase in non-heart related hospitalizations visits following discharge after a heart attack.

Surprisingly, the data also showed that depression caused the greatest increase in health service use in those patients with lower cardiac illness severity, and therefore, the least need for those services. "What we're seeing is people who are clearly in distress seeking help from our healthcare system, but it may not include the right kind of help to address their distress," says Dr. Kurdyak.

While there are well-established and effective chronic cardiac care and depression intervention programs, "this data supports the need for integrating depression screening and case-management into existing cardiac care," says Dr. Kurdyak. "Integrated depression care for people who have had a heart attack can improve their quality of life and may reduce the apparent mismatch between need and service use."

The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) is Canada's largest mental health and addiction teaching hospital, as well as one of the world's leading research centres in the area of addiction and mental health. CAMH combines clinical care, research, education, policy development and health promotion to transform the lives of people affected by mental health and addiction issues.

Moderate drinking could increase dementia risks: study
Sharon Kirkey
Canwest News Service
Monday, October 13, 2008
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/story.html?id=47fdab7d-2609-4097-bbc2-0bda597f3465

Moderate drinking that can be good for the heart is bad for the brain, a recent study by a team of researchers at Wellesley College found. The day after a long weekend of food and drink comes sobering news: the same kind of moderate drinking that can be good for the heart is bad for the brain. And the effect is even more profound in women.

Researchers who compared MRI scans of the brains of nearly 2,000 adults to the amount of alcohol they consumed found - after correcting for head size - a "significant negative linear relationship" between alcohol consumption and total cerebral brain volume.

Put more simply, the more alcohol, the smaller the total brain volume, researchers report in a study to be published Tuesday in the journal Archives of Neurology. Lower brain volumes increase the risk of dementia and problems with thinking, learning and memory.

"The public health effect of this study gives a clear message about the possible dangers of drinking alcohol," the researchers warn.

The human brain slowly shrinks in volume as we age, at an estimated rate of 1.9 per cent per decade. There was already evidence that heavy drinking increases brain atrophy. Less clear is what the effects might be of low to moderate drinking.

If anything, the researchers were expecting a small amount of booze would be better than none. The brain, like the heart, is perfused with blood vessels, "so whatever the alcohol is doing to the cardiovascular system, you would expect a similar effect in the blood vessels in the brain," says lead author Carol Ann Paul, an instructor in the neuroscience program at Wellesley College.

But, "it wasn't there."

Her team analyzed data from 1,839 adults, aged 33 to 88, without dementia or stroke, who were children of participants of the Framingham Heart Study, a decades-long examination of the health of thousands of people near Boston and one of the world's longest-running health studies.

Between 1999 and 2001, all had a MRI scan of the brain. They also reported how much beer, wine or liquor they drank each week. Participants were divided into five drinking groups: abstainers, former drinkers, low (one to seven drinks per week), moderate (eight to 14) or high (more than 14 drinks per week).

Brain volume declined .25 per cent per drinking group. Normal decline in brain volume is .19 per cent per year. "So this was like adding one to two years to your normal decline in brain volume," Paul says.

It's not clear why. "But if you think of the cardiovascular system as a pump and pipes, what alcohol is doing is flushing it out every day, increasing the flow a little bit. It also dilates the blood vessels." But in the brain, alcohol appears to be damaging neurons.

Women showed larger declines in brain volume than men at every level of alcohol consumption - a finding that could be due to biological factors. Women, on average, are smaller than men and have less blood to dilute the alcohol.

"Women are more sensitive to alcohol, they don't weigh as much and they metabolize alcohol differently," Paul says. "It kind of makes sense." However, there were more men than women in the heavy drinking group.

"To me the take home message is, discretion in all ways. Moderation in everything that you do," Paul says.

She says she believes moderate drinking (one drink for women per day, two for men) doesn't undo the benefits to the cardiovascular system.

EU warns youth: turn your MP3 players down!
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/reuters/081013/tecnology/ctech_us_eu_music
Mon Oct 13, 3:32 PM

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Millions of youngsters across Europe could suffer permanent hearing loss after five years if they listen to MP3 players at too high a volume for more than five hours a week, EU scientists warned Monday.

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The scientists' study, requested by the European Commission, attacked the concept of "leisure noise," saying children and teenagers should be protected from increasingly high sound levels -- with loud mobile phones also coming in for criticism.

"There has been increasing concern about exposure from the new generation of personal music players which can reproduce sounds at very high volumes without loss of quality," the Commission, the EU's executive arm, said in a statement.

"Risk for hearing damage depends on sound level and exposure time," it said. More and more young people were exposed to the significant threat that leisure noise posed to hearing, it said.

Commission experts estimate that between 50 and 100 million people listen to portable music players on a daily basis. If they listened for only five hours a week at more than 89 decibels, they would already exceed EU limits for noise allowed in the workplace, they said. But if they listened for longer periods, they risked permanent hearing loss after five years.

The scientists calculated the number of people in that risk category at between five and 10 percent of listeners, meaning up to 10 million people in the European Union. Sales of personal music players have soared in EU countries in recent years, particularly of MP3 players.

Commission experts estimate unit sales between 184 and 246 million for all portable audio devices just over the last four years, of which MP3 players range between 124 and 165 million. Mobile phones used at excessive volume also came under fire from Meglena Kuneva, the EU's consumer affairs commissioner.

"I am concerned that so many young people ... who are frequent users of personal music players and mobile phones at high acoustic levels, may be unknowingly damaging their hearing irrevocably," she said in the statement.

(Reporting by Jeremy Smith)

Towering Disturbance - Signals From Cell Phone Towers Affect Pacemakers
Your Health
DR GITA MATHAI

Dr Gita Mathai is a paediatrician with a family practice at Vellore. Questions on health issues may be emailed to her at yourhealthgm@yahoo.co.in
Source: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080818/jsp/knowhow/story_9704648.jsp

Signals from cell phone towers affect pacemakers
Q: I own a flat on the third (top) floor of a building. The residents’ association has leased out the terrace to a cell phone company which has erected a tower there. I have a pacemaker and am worried about the impact of the signals from the tower on my heart. What should I do?

A: Signals from microwaves and cell phones do affect pacemakers. Irregularities in the heart rate have been noticed when a phone is held even 15cm away from the pacemaker. When you are living just under a phone tower, the signal is likely to be strong and powerful. The first symptoms of the pacemaker being affected are a feeling of faintness and irregularity in your pulse rate. You can be fitted with a 24-hour monitoring device by your cardiologist. This will document any irregularity, so you know it is real and not psychological.

If there are any changes, it may make sense to move. Your building association is unlikely to cancel a financially lucrative enterprise and get the tower relocated.