Category: HND_Disease

A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests that foodborne illness might be on the rise. Approximately 48 million people get sick from one of 31 pathogens each year, sending about 128,000 people to the hospital and causing 3,000 deaths.

Catherine Donnelly, a professor of food science at the University of Vermont, believes that the increase might at least partly be due to improvements in the tools that detect food contamination as well as outbreak reporting, surveillance, and investigation.

“Surveillance has drastically improved, and state public health labs are linked to databases at CDC, allowing quick identification of patterns of illness and links to food products,” she said. “As a result, we see more reports of foodborne illness.”

“People are tending to eat more produce and eat it in different forms, and those are good things, because we want people to eat more fresh produce, but when that happens, you’re likely to increase the risk,” said FDA deputy commissioner Mike Taylor.

And this risk is likely due to the fact that fresh produce is “sold and prepared without any kill step” to remove illness-causing germs.

“Foods travel longer distances to get from farms to consumers, and pathogens can be introduced along the way,” Donnelly said. “There is wider geographic distribution of centrally produced foods, so when something goes wrong during production, the impacts are widespread.

“Many outbreaks linked to poultry, eggs and meat can be traced back to farms where intensive production practices can lead to [the] spread of highly virulent pathogens,” she said, and some reflect “poor food handling practices.”

Regardless, Taylor doesn’t think there’s cause for a huge alarm.

“People should know that there’s a lot of high tech, high-powered science going into figuring out how to do better at preventing foodborne illness,” Taylor said. “People should know that the system — government and industry — they’re not just sitting back.”

Fog in the San Francisco Bay Area may represent a huge highway for genes that create perilous super bugs. The increase of super-bacteria through overuse of antibiotics may be emerging out of the air we breathe.

The frightening spread of infections proves how bad this super- bacteria problem has become. According to the World Health Organization, 500,000 people across 22 countries had this type of infection that is almost impossible to treat.

These are extremely dangerous because they carry ARGs, (antibiotic resistance genes), that protect them from most drugs. ARGs usually spread when a lucky superbug survives after an antibiotic dosage kills most of its comrades.

This allows the superbug to multiply, creating its own colony of dependents. These dependents share its superior genetic material. However, the team behind the new study discovered that in these ARGs it could spread differently. “ARGs could travel through air to remote regions or other places, where antibiotics on the other hand are less used,” said study author Maosheng Yao Ph.D. of Peking University’s College of Environmental Sciences.

Yao says ARGs represent bacteria’s second, more difficult-to-manage method of accumulating genes. Bacteria can inject each other with genetic material and the effects are permanent because they encode in the DNA of the recipient bacteria.

This process is horizontal transfer. Air currents that swirl in urban environments circulate around millions of people daily and increase the odds of a typical resistant bacteria meeting an antibiotic-resistant one.

A new study suggests that a cannabis-like drug called nabilone might treat agitation in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. The synthetic drug is typically used to control nausea in cancer patients.

Agitation is one of the most disturbing Alzheimer’s symptoms and it can be very tough to manage. In order to control the symptom, many doctors go against medical advice and prescribe antipsychotic drugs and sometimes even physically restrain patients.

“Agitation, aggression, sleep disturbances — all have a significant impact on both their quality of life and their carers’ quality of life,” said Heather Snyder, senior director of medical operations for the Alzheimer’s Association.

“Currently prescribed treatments for agitation in Alzheimer’s do not work in everybody, and when they do work the effect is small and they increase risk of harmful side effects, including increased risk of death,” said Krista Lanctôt of the University of Toronto, who led the research. “As a result, there is an urgent need for safer medication options.”

Lanctôt are her team tested nabilone for six weeks by giving the pill to 39 dementia patients. Afterwards, they gave them a placebo for an additional six weeks.

“Agitation improved significantly in those taking nabilone, compared to placebo,” the Alzheimer’s Association said in a summary of the research, which is being presented at its annual Chicago meeting.

The non-profit association also said that “nabilone also significantly improved overall behavioral symptoms, compared to placebo, as measured by the Neuropsychiatric Inventory” questionnaire.

The findings were published in The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.