Lifestyle

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The proliferation of drug resistant diseases is as grave a national security threat as a major terrorist attack or global warming and should be added to the national risk register, England's senior medical officer warns.

The Chief Medical Officer for England Dame Sally Davies warned that within 20 years’ time, people would die simply for undergoing simple operations because we might “run out of antibiotics” that still work.

“Antibiotics are losing their effectiveness at a rate that is both alarming and irreversible – similar to global warming,” she told MPs on the House of Commons science and technology committee on Wednesday.

"It is clear that we might not ever see global warming, the apocalyptic scenario is that when I need a new hip in 20 years I'll die from a routine infection because we've run out of antibiotics."

She added that there was currently only one antibiotic left able to treat the venereal disease gonorrhea.

Davies told the legislators that antibiotic resistance should be added to the national risk register in pursuance of an annual report on infectious disease she is set to publish in March.

The register was established in 2008 to advise the public and businesses on national emergencies that Britain could face in the next five years. Currently, the highest priority risks on the register include a flu pandemic, a catastrophic terrorist attack, and a costal flood as was seen during the 1953 North Sea flood – the last time a national emergency was declared in the UK.

She blamed the potential crisis on the “broken market model for making new antibiotics” which has seen antibiotic development fall by the wayside as the pharmaceutical industry concentrates on more profitable drugs, especially those for chronic diseases.

An ineffective use of antibiotics has also led to the spread of increasingly virulent strains of disease.

Hospital superbugs such as MRSA are amongst the most well-known antibiotic-resistant diseases, but doctors were specifically warned of diseases such as gonorrhea, TB and E. coli which target the populace at large.

This is not the first time Davies has compared the threat of Antibiotic resistance to Climate Change. In November, she said "Antibiotics are losing their effectiveness at a rate that is both alarming and irreversible – similar to global warming.”

Davies has already met with senior officials at the World Health Organization and her counterparts in other countries to hammer out a strategy to tackle the global threat.

The World Health Organization made the drug resistance problem the focus of its 2011 World Health Day, warning that the “world is heading towards a post-antibiotic era, in which many common infections will no longer have a cure and, once again, kill unabated.”
 

Have you ever tasted a soft drink so good you thought it should be illegal? In some parts of the world, ingredients used in beverages available across the United States are outlawed — but not because they’re dangerously delicious.

Drinks including Mountain Dew, Gatorade, Powerade and Squirt are all commonly available at restaurants and convenience stores across the US. If you’re overseas and thirsty for one of many products made by PepsiCo, Cocoa-Cola or the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, you might get something entirely different. Brominated vegetable oil, an ingredient used by those manufacturers in an array of beverages, is banned in locales like Europe and Japan.

The New York Times reports that around 10 percent of drinks sold in the US contain brominated vegetable oil, or BVO, but elsewhere things are a bit different. Beverages overseas are stripped of the chemical, used usually to help distribute flavor, with foreign health officials citing some serious medical concerns as the reason for the ban.

Sarah Kavanagh, a teenager from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, only became aware of BVOs recently while examining a bottle of Gatorade. A quick Web search had her rethinking what she drinks, though.

“I knew it probably wasn’t from an animal because it had vegetable in the name, but I still wanted to know what it was, so I Googled it,” she tells the Times. “A page popped up with a long list of possible side effects, including neurological disorders and altered thyroid hormones. I didn’t expect that.”

Most Americans are in the same boat, but the substance is still completely legal in the US.

“BVO is banned other places in the world, so these companies already have a replacement for it,” Kavanagh tells the Times. “I don’t see why they don’t just make the switch.” According to the paper, companies say the switch would simply cost all too much.

After becoming aware of the compound, she started a campaign on Change.org to help raise awareness of BVO. Since that petition was launched in November, she has collected over 205,000 signatures from others urging a federal ban on BVOs.

"I was shocked that they'd put their consumers at risk like that and that the FDA would allow something like that to be put in products," she tells the Chicago Tribune.

The US Food and Drug Administration maintains that all foods sold legally in the US are safe for human consumption. In a statement to the Tribune, in fact, the FDA says the US food supply is “the safest in the world” and that the agency’s foremost promise is to “protect public health by ensuring that foods are safe and properly labeled.”

Even if American labels advertise the use of BVOs, though, that doesn’t do much to dismiss the concerns that have caused bans of the chemical internationally.

Brominated vegetable oil isn’t addictive and it hasn’t been proven to be fatal just yet. According to some studies, rodents subjected to the substance developed reproductive and behavioral problems.

"The FDA has been extremely lenient in evaluating food additives and it's almost impossible to get the FDA to ban an additive once they have approved it," Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest adds to the Tribune. "It's just not as public health oriented as it should be."

“I just don't think they're doing enough to protect the public's health with regard to food additives,” he says.

That one additive, BVO, certainly doesn’t seem safe to Kavanagh. On her Change.org petition, she notes that one of the elements of BVO, bromine, is used most often to make products flame retardant.

It’s also been included in gasoline additives and pesticides, and was originally used as a general sedative until only a few decades ago. Scientific Americans says BVO “links to impaired neurological development, reduced fertility, early onset of puberty and altered thyroid hormones.”

“I’m not a scientist, but if there are lots of suspicious things about putting a flame retardant chemical in Gatorade (most flavors don’t even use it!) then why would Gatorade want to put it in a product designed for people like me who are into sports and health?” Kavanagh asks on Change.org.

The petition, which needs fewer than 95,000 more signatures before it is complete, will be sent to Gatorade, PepsiCo and other American beverage companies. “Please stop deceiving consumers and remove this chemical from your products,” the petition insists.
 

Kazakhstan Healthcare Ministry has blacklisted the U.S., Great Britain and China, Tengrinews.kz reports citing chairman of the State Sanitary-Epidemiological Control Commission of Kazakhstan Healthcare Ministry Zhandarbek Bekshin.

Kazakhstan's chief sanitary doctor has tagged sushi a dangerous food, Tengrinews.kz reports citing chairman of the State Sanitary-Epidemiological Control Commission of Kazakhstan Healthcare Ministry Zhandarbek Bekshin.

An early and nasty flu season has prompted a public health emergency in Boston, where health officials say 700 people have been diagnosed with the cold-weather virus. Four Bostononians -- all elderly -- have died from flu.

"This is the worst flu season we've seen since 2009, and people should take the threat of flu seriously," Boston Mayor Thomas Menino said in a statement.

This time last year the city had seen only 70 cases of influenza, The Associated Press reported. And with flu activity likely to extend into March or even April, the number will only grow.

Menino said the city is working with health care centers to offer free flu vaccines, and he urged anyone with flu-like symptoms to stay home from work or school.

"This is not only a health concern, but also an economic concern for families," he said in the statement. "I'm urging residents to get vaccinated if they haven't already."

Eighteen people have died from flu in Massachusetts, one of 41 states battling widespread influenza outbreaks. Emergency rooms across the country have been overwhelmed with flu patients, turning away some of them and others with non-life-threatening conditions for lack of space.

The proportion of people seeing their doctor for flu-like symptoms jumped to 5.6 percent from 2.8 percent in the past month, according to the CDC.

Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago reported a 20 percent increase in flu patients every day. Northwestern Memorial was one of eight hospitals on bypass Monday and Tuesday, meaning it asked ambulances to take patients elsewhere if they could do so safely.

 Most of the hospitals have resumed normal operations, but could return to the bypass status if the influx of patients becomes too great.

"Northwestern Memorial Hospital is an extraordinarily busy hospital, and oftentimes during our busier months, in the summer, we will sometimes have to go on bypass," Northwestern Memorial's Dr. David Zich said. "We don't like it, the community doesn't like it, but sometimes it is necessary."

A tent outside Lehigh Valley Hospital in Salisbury Township, Pa., was set up to tend to the overflowing number of flu cases.

A hospital in Ohio is requiring patients with the flu to wear masks to protect those who are not infected.

State health officials in Indiana have reported seven deaths. Five of the deaths occurred in people older than 65 and two younger than 18. The state will release another report later today.

Doctors are especially concerned about the elderly and children, where the flu can be deadly.

"Our office in the last two weeks has exploded with children," Dr. Gayle Smith, a pediatrician in Richmond, Va., said

It is the earliest flu season in a decade and, ABC News Chief Medical Editor Dr. Besser says, it's not too late to protect yourself from the outbreak.

"You have to think about an anti-viral, especially if you're elderly, a young child, a pregnant woman," Besser said.

"They're the people that are going to die from this. Tens of thousands of people die in a bad flu season. We're not taking it serious enough."
 

US fast food giant Yum! Brands has apologised to customers of its Chinese KFC restaurants after a scandal over tainted chicken that dented sales at the popular chain, AFP reports.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flicking through her photos on her living room couch, Julia Quinn recounts the array of plastic surgery procedures she has undergone.

"That is when I had my eye done again, a bump taken out of my nose," she says, looking at a photo of her severely swollen face.

There isn't much cosmetic surgery that this housewife from Surrey in the UK has not had done.

A few years ago, feeling unhappy about the lines around her eyes and mouth, she first dabbled in surgery. She opted for a private clinic in the UK, but after a bad experience there she started looking around for alternative places to get the work done. That's when she first discovered that South Africa offered the same procedures at a fraction of the cost, she says.

"You get a lot of good surgeons and dentists in South Africa," says Quinn. "It's like a holiday -- you are looked after, the weather is fine."

January is a good time to flee the UK's winter weather, so Quinn is heading back to Johannesburg for more work. This time it's a mini facelift and more liposuction. In total, she will have spent nearly $15,000 on surgery in South Africa. She says should would have spent a lot more if she had continued to be treated in the UK.

In a suburb in northern Johannesburg Lorraine Melvill is running around trying to organize hospital visits for her clients staying in her guest house. She started her business, "Surgeon and Safari," back in 2000 and since then she has had people from all over the world, including Quinn, come to her to facilitate their cosmetic procedures, and perhaps go on safari too.

"For most people in the first-world economies like the UK, and especially in America, their biggest desire is to go on African safari," she explains, "and yet their greatest want in their life was to have plastic surgery, so why not put the two together?"

Like most companies, however, Surgeon and Safari was hit by the global financial crisis, particularly as a number of Melvill's clients were borrowing money to afford their procedures.

She says: "When there was a greater volume of people coming through then it was people who were borrowing money, for example, or using their credit cards to pay for the plastic surgery. So they weren't necessarily as educated or as financially secure, they weren't the typical baby boomer.

"So when the economic recession came along, that was the first market that dropped away because, obviously, there was a credit crunch, so that's the first thing you stop spending your money on, something like plastic surgery."

However, whilst the United States and eurozone economies may have languished, Melvill says she has benefited from the growth of some African countries' economies.

"There is a huge emergence of local Africans that chose to come to South Africa for elective surgery, whether it be breast reduction, tummy tucks, lipo," she says.

"I would say one of the biggest countries is Zambia," she adds. "There is quite a big market coming out of Angola, Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana ... Their economies are growing and therefore their middle classes are growing and therefore the need increases."

Chetan Patel works at Johannesburg's private Mediclinic, in Sandton. In the three years that he has been a private cosmetic and reconstructive surgeon, he says that he has also seen an increase in clients flying in from parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

"Certainly we are seeing people from very high income groups," says Patel. "From a regional African point of view, countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, the DRC, all play an important role where socio-economic factors all dictate that there are more and more people who can afford this kind of surgery and so we are seeing a larger amount of those people coming certainly to Johannesburg for that kind of surgery."

These clients are very clear about what work they want done, says Patel. "For instance, they would come to me and say 'I would like Jennifer Lopez's butt' or 'I would like to look like Kim Kardashian,' and the obvious body features of those two individuals are curvaceous hips and thighs with an augmented or accentuated buttock.

"Other than that, I think more and more African women are conscious of what their lower bodies look like, so what their tummy looks like, so they would like tummy tuck procedures, for instance."

Cosmetic surgery isn't new to Africa -- after all, in 2005, the wife of the former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo died after having liposuction in a Spanish clinic. But Patel says that from what he is seeing this is no longer just the preserve of the super rich or political elites.

"It is not a necessity it is a luxury, so I see the trend [in having plastic surgery in] the next five to 10 years increasing amongst people from the rest of Africa," he says.

For now, though, it's people like Quinn who are keeping Melvill and Patel busy; repeat customers are the norm in the area of elective surgeries, Melvill says.

But whilst Quinn will be having her surgery in South Africa, and will be recuperating in the sunshine, she has decided against going on safari.

In fact, Melvill says that these days most of her clients opt instead to spend the day on a different type of safari; they choose to visit the nearby designer shops.
 

As much as half of the world's food, amounting to two billion tonnes worth, is wasted, a UK-based report has claimed.