medicalcondition:illness

Why Medication Can Be Dangerous to Your Health- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leo-galland-md/why-medication-can-be-dan_b_643690.html

Did you know that the majority of FDA approved drugs have serious potential side effects that were not detected before marketing approval? (1)

That about three quarters of a million people a year are rushed to emergency rooms in the U.S. because of adverse drug reactions, according to the CDC? (2)

That the number of medication-related deaths in the U.S. is estimated at over 200,000 a year, making medications the third or fourth leading cause of death in this country? (3)

1) Manag Care Interface. 2005 Oct;18(10):49-52 “Preventing adverse drug reactions in the general population” Pezalla E.

2) JAMA. 2006 Oct 18;296(15):1858-66. “National surveillance of emergency department visits for outpatient adverse drug events.” Budnitz DS, Pollock DA, Weidenbach KN, Mendelsohn AB, Schroeder TJ, Annest JL

3) Pezzalla E., Manag Care Interface. 2005 Oct;18(10):49-52

Is this the antibiotic apocalypse?
http://www.montrealgazette.com/health/this+antibiotic+apocalypse/8088447/story.html

Imagine a world where a scratch would strike terror into your soul. A place where giving birth is a life-and-death experience, where every sore throat and stomach upset is potentially lethal. A world where almost no surgeon will operate unless the only alternative is certain death and where chemotherapy is too deadly to contemplate. This could be our awful future, according to Prof. Sally Davies, the British government’s chief medical officer. She has warned the world faces an antibiotic apocalypse, a “ticking time bomb” and a “catastrophic threat to the population” as medicine faces the prospect of losing probably the most powerful weapon in its armoury - the effective antibiotic.

The tragedy is that this is a disaster of our own making. Thanks to a combination of profligacy, wilful stupidity, the laziness of thousands of doctors and the selfish persistence of millions of patients in demanding instant cures for minor illnesses that would go away on their own, simple bacterial infections could once again become the scourge of humanity.

(…)

This sad story is a version of the “tragedy of the commons” - a disaster that occurs when an action beneficial to an individual causes great harm to the community. The main cause of the antibiotic apocalypse has been over-prescribing, which increases the exposure of bacteria in the population as a whole to the drug in question, and gives these microbes more opportunity to evolve resistance.

(…)

Another major cause is the massive quantity of antibiotics fed to livestock. Cattle, pigs and chickens are not just given the drugs to cure illness, but for their side effects, which include their ability to stimulate growth.

Le Figaro - Flash Actu : Le pessimisme fait vivre plus longtemps
http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/2013/02/28/97001-20130228FILWWW00513-le-pessimisme-fait-vivre-plus-longtemps.php

Les personnes âgées pessimistes sur leurs perspectives de bonheur futur vivent plus longtemps et en meilleure santé que celles qui se montrent optimistes, selon une étude allemande. « Les personnes âgées qui s’attendent à un degré de satisfaction limité quant à leur situation personnelle à l’avenir vivent manifestement plus longtemps et en meilleure santé que les personnes âgées qui s’imaginent un avenir en rose », écrit l’institut économique allemand DIW, citant une étude universitaire.

Les chercheurs de l’Université Friedrich-Alexander de Nuremberg (sud) se sont basés sur les données du Panel socio-économique allemand, une étude multidisciplinaire de vaste ampleur (30.000 personnes) menée depuis 1984.

Ils ont étudié les réponses données chaque année entre 1993 et 2003 par les personnes sondées sur leur état de satisfaction actuel et sur leur estimation à un horizon de cinq ans. Ils ont ensuite vérifié si ces attentes s’étaient réalisées ou non.

Il en ressort que 43% des sondés les plus âgés s’étaient montrés trop pessimistes, 25% avaient raison et 32% avaient été trop optimistes. Mais plus surprenant, l’étude a aussi montré que, dans ce dernier groupe, le risque de dégradation des capacités physiques était plus élevé et le risque de mourir était 10% plus important, chez les personnes les plus optimistes.

« Il est probable que le fait d’être plus pessimiste quant à son avenir incite les personnes âgées à prendre davantage soin de leur santé et à se montrer plus prudent vis-à-vis du danger », suggère Frieder Lang, directeur de l’institut de psychologie gérontologique de l’Université de Nuremberg.

(intégralité de l’article du Figaro)

La dépêche AFP (anglais) http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iD6MR2lOf1MigOo30fZF-fgOG24g?docId=CNG.3e2207ddaab63f3ebeb9b8780d4ac87

L’article original (anglais) Forecasting Life Satisfaction Across Adulthood : Benefits of Seeing a Dark Future ? http://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.411490.de/diw_sp0502.pdf

Le graphique (il n’y en a pas beaucoup, 3, tous en annexe…)
http://i.imgur.com/LajKU3L.jpg

En trait plein, le taux de survie des pessimistes/réalistes, en pointillés celui des optimistes.

First UK victim of Sars-like virus dies at a hospital in Birmingham | Mail Online
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2280676/First-UK-victim-Sars-like-virus-dies-hospital-Birmingham.html

A man infected with a Sars-like illness has become the first person in Britain to die from the virus.

The 39-year-old, who died in the intensive care unit at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital, caught the illness from his father, who had become infected while travelling in Pakistan and the Middle East.

So far there have only been four confirmed cases of the illness in Britain and 12 anywhere in the world, with six deaths.

The illness, known as novel #coronavirus, causes a cough, breathing difficulties and fever which can lead to pneumonia and kidney failure.

It is from the same virus family as Sars, which claimed 900 lives worldwide in 2002 and 2003.

But scientists say novel coronavirus is nowhere near as dangerous as it has difficulty spreading between humans.

The man who died on Sunday was suffering from a long-term condition which made him more susceptible.

Le nouveau coronavirus (#NCoV , grippe #chiroptère) provoque le premier décès au Royaume-Uni. Le patient était porteur d’une pathologie de longue durée qui avait fragilisé son système immunitaire.

Par ailleurs, les premières études sur ce nouveau coronavirus (identifié en septembre 2012) commencent à sortir http://afludiary.blogspot.fr/2013/02/mbio-ncov-affinity-for-replication-in.html (synthèse, avec lien vers l’étude originale dans le billet). Le papier détaille la voie d’infection (voie aérienne) et indique des moyens de traitement possibles (interféron).

La viande bovine traitée à l’acide lactique est bientôt dans nos assiettes !
http://www.coordinationrurale.fr/la-viande-bovine-traitee-a-lacide-lactique-est-bientot-dans-nos-a
via "Environnementalement votre" #consommation #viande

La Commission européenne vient d’autoriser l’importation, dès fin février, de viande bovine américaine désinfectée à l’acide lactique.

Je ne sais pas si c’est problématique, mais en tout cas, traiter les poulets à la javel et la viande à l’acide... Quelle drôle d’idée... Oô

Retro Cultural: The subtle interplay of Information and Immortality.
http://retrocult.blogspot.nl/2012/07/subtle-interplay-of-information-and.html

How our true nature is that one of information, and how it is the only way of becoming immortal.

Farewell, Alex, My Friend | Jeffrey St Clair (CounterPunch)
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/21/farewell-alex-my-friend

Our friend and comrade Alexander Cockburn died last night in Germany, after a fierce two-year long battle against cancer. His daughter Daisy was at his bedside. Alex kept his illness a tightly guarded secret. Only a handful of us knew how terribly sick he truly was. He didn’t want the disease to define him. He didn’t want his friends and readers to shower him with sympathy. He didn’t want to blog his own death as Christopher Hitchens had done. Alex wanted to keep living his life right to the end. He wanted to live on his terms. And he wanted to continue writing through it all, just as his brilliant father, the novelist and journalist Claud Cockburn had done. And so he did. His body was deteriorating, but his prose remained as sharp, lucid and deadly as ever. (...) Source: CounterPunch

William Blum :: Anti-Empire Report, Number 106
http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer106.html#link-5

I’m sure most Americans are mighty proud of the fact that Julian Assange is so frightened of falling into the custody of the United States that he had to seek sanctuary in the embassy of Ecuador, a tiny and poor Third World country, without any way of knowing how it would turn out. He might be forced to be there for years. “That’ll teach him to mess with the most powerful country in the world! All you other terrorists and anti-Americans out there — Take Note! When you fuck around with God’s country you pay a price!”

Science Confirms: Bieber Fever Is More Contagious Than the Measles - The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/06/science-confirms-bieber-fever-is-more-contagious-than-the-measles/258460

A mathematical model proves that Bieber fever is one of the catchiest diseases of our time.

#épidémiologie #culture #memes #lol via @opironet

Nora0315
Heartbreaking. Baby killed because of an illness. Parents were unable to take him to hospital bc of Assad forces. http://t.co/qQQs3Tgq

Pfizer’s Rezulin Suit: Prosecuted by Thomas Girardi, Defended by Pierce O’Donnell — While Concurrently Both Girardi and O’Donnell Were Representing Plaintiffs in Class-Action Against Sempra

After just two days of deliberations, a Los Angeles jury unanimously rejected claims Thursday that the diabetes drug Rezulin — taken off the market in March 2000 because of safety concerns — contributed to the deaths or illness of three people.

In the Los Angeles case, the jury found that the plaintiffs’ attorney, Thomas Girardi, proved that Rezulin can cause liver injury, but failed to “prove that Rezulin was a substantial factor in” the deaths of Lupe Contreras and Manuel Cervantes, or the illness of Leonard Clinkenbeard.

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Carl J. West presided over the seven-week trial. Attorney Pierce O’Donnell, who defended the drug company, could not be reached for comment.

Please see @:

http://lesliebrodie.posterous.com/2004-pfizers-rezulin-suit-prosecuted-by-thoma

RIP Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

“I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me,” wrote Christoper Hitchens in his most recent essay. But today, after 18 months, his duel with cancer ended. He was 62 years old. The world has lost one of its most outstanding and prolific journalists and a wonderful polemicist, orator and bon vivant. Hitchens could write brilliantly about an extraordinarily wide range of subjects and people: the death penalty, religion, Leon Trotsky, Evelyn Waugh, the British monarchy, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, George Orwell, Saul Bellow, the Elgin Marbles, North Korea, the Balkans, Henry Kissinger, Thomas Paine and Philip Larkin.

In recent months, we had sad cause to add cancer to that list. The series of essays Hitchens wrote for Vanity Fair about his illness stands as the finest writing on the subject since John Diamond’s C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too. Without a hint of self-pity or sentimentality, Hitchens confronted his fate with pure reason and logic. “To the dumb question, ’Why me?’” he wrote, “the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: ’Why not?’” Nor did his humour desert him. To a Christian who insisted that God had given him “throat” cancer in order to punish the “one part of his body he used for blasphemy”, he replied: “My so-far uncancerous throat . . . is not at all the only organ with which I have blasphemed.” And to those who insultingly suggested that he should embrace religion, Hitchens’s flawless riposte: “Suppose there were groups of secularists at hospitals who went round the terminally ill and urged them to adopt atheism: ’Don’t be a mug all your life. Make your last days the best ones.’ People might suppose this was in poor taste.”

Christopher Hitchens: Arrest The Pope!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBody5RPo2o

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/12/hitchens-cancer-war-religion

Tiens, puisqu’on en parle, maintenant que le prince Sultan, ministre de la défense et père du prince Bandar, est mort : ça devient quoi, la faramineuse affaire de corruption al-Yamamah ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Yamamah_arms_deal

Je suppose que c’est enterré avec le prince.

British nuclear test veterans take cancer claims to supreme court | World news | The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/28/nuclear-bomb-test-veterans-at-supreme-court

Veterans of Britain’s 1950s nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific Ocean and Australia who claim their cancers and illnesses were caused by radiation have defeated Ministry of Defence attempts to have the case thrown out of court.

#nucléaire #militaire #santé
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/7/28/1311856735189/bomb-test-007.jpg