medicalcondition:chronic diseases

  • Un autre hiver... un de plus...
    Winter conditions add to migrant hardship in northern Greece

    Freezing weather is exacerbating difficult conditions for migrants in overcrowded refugee camps in northern Greece. Last week the cold spell led to a protest by dozens of migrants at a camp near Thessaloniki. Greek officials have blamed the number of people flooding into the camp from the islands and across the Turkish border. But could the situation have been prevented?

    Harsh winter conditions hit northern Greece a few days into the new year, bringing sub-zero temperatures, strong winds, snow and ice. In the Diavata refugee camp near the port city of Thessaloniki, several hundred people are struggling with basic survival. Yet every week, despite the weather conditions, more continue to arrive.

    “They don’t think about this kind of thing, they just want to move on,” said one man at Diavata after another Afghan family arrived in the snow. “They just think that in the next stage from Turkey, when they go to Greece, everything will be fine.”

    Camp protests

    When they reach Diavata, the migrants find the reality is different. The camp is full to capacity, with around 800 registered asylum seekers. On top of these, there are between 500 and 650 people living at the site without having been registered by migration authorities.

    “Most of them have built their own makeshift shelters and tents, which are not providing them with the protection needed,” says Mike Bonke, the Greece country director of the Arbeiter Samariter Bund (ASB), an NGO providing support services to Diavata. “They have no (safe) heating, washing and sanitation and cooking facilities.”

    Last week, the difficult conditions prompted around 40 migrants to hold a protest outside the camp, burning tires and blockading the road. A truck driver tried to get through the barricade resulting in a fight which left one man in hospital.

    The driver lost his patience and started swearing at the migrants, who threw rocks and broke his windscreen, reports said. The driver and four migrants were charged with causing grievous bodily harm, according to the Greek daily, Katherimini.

    Conditions create health concerns

    Diavata is just one of a number of migrant facilities in northern Greece to have been affected by the cold snap. An NGO contacted by InfoMigrants said that Orestiada, near the Evros river to the east, was covered in snow. Migrants in the critically overcrowded camps on the islands too are contending with snow, frozen water pipes and icy roads.

    According to the ASB, the refugee reception camps lack resources to cope with the current conditions. “Healthcare services at all (refugee reception) sites are not adequate,” Bonke says.

    Agis Terzidis, an advisor to the Greek Minister of Health and Vice-President of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) which coordinates healthcare provision to migrants and refugees, admits that the cold weather, in addition to the poor conditions and overcrowding in the camps, is exacerbating migrants’ health problems. “We have people living in conditions that are not acceptable for anyone,” he says.

    National health system must step up

    In response to the worsening situation, there are plans to boost EU-funded medical teams operating in camps throughout the country, including the islands, Agis Terzidis says. But he told InfoMigrants that from now on, more pressure would be put on the Greek national health system and local hospitals to tackle the problem, rather than medical staff in the camps themselves.

    Terzidis also insisted that fixing the situation in the camps was “not in the mandate” of the CDC, as it was chiefly a result of greater numbers of people arriving and consequent overcrowding.

    Instead, the CDC’s main priority remains vaccinating migrants to prevent outbreaks of hepatitis, measles and other infectious diseases. It also focuses on treating those suffering from chronic diseases, some of whom will likely succumb to the harsh winter conditions.

    Too many people

    With more bleak weather predicted, a vegetable garden is being planned in the Diavata camp, giving the residents something to look forward to. That will have to be abandoned if more people start to arrive when the weather improves.

    The camps continue to be under pressure from the large and unpredictable numbers of arrivals. Currently there are around 20 arrivals per week at Diavata, but that could quickly escalate to hundreds. So far, Greek authorities do not seem to have taken steps to limit how many end up at the camps seeking protection.

    I think we can all agree that this situation should have been solved by registering these refugees in the Greek Migration system and providing them with dignified and safe shelters.
    _ Mike Bonke, Greece country director, Arbeiter Samariter Bund

    As both government and army staff and their NGO colleagues in the camps remain powerless to solve the problem of overcrowding, their main task will be to protect migrants from harm and exposure as the winter enters its coldest months.

    http://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/14401/winter-conditions-add-to-migrant-hardship-in-northern-greece
    #Grèce #asile #migrations #réfugiés #camps_de_réfugiés #neige #froid #Salonique #Softex #Diavata #résistance #protestation

  • How is Technology Transforming #healthcare at Home
    https://hackernoon.com/how-is-technology-transforming-healthcare-at-home-1ce827b355b9?source=rs

    The potential for Transforming Healthcare at Home is growing tremendouslyhttps://medium.com/media/24aafa5d9039edf21952f173b4f78fad/hrefThe world today;Is experiencing a dramatic change in age demographics. Considering America as a prime example, it is estimated — In the year 2019, the group of people of age older than 65 will outnumber the group of those younger than five. As life expectancy increases, the number of people living with different chronic conditions and functional impairments, for instance, dementia, diabetes and the inability to manage household chores with growing age are further increasing.People belonging to the “old age” group are more likely to suffer from chronic diseases and require more care and attention. In such times, the need of the hour is to discover and (...)

    #telehealth #home-healthcare #remote-patient-monitoring #healthcare-technology

  • World Diabetes Day: The Food System and Human Health – Food Tank
    https://foodtank.com/news/2018/11/world-diabetes-day-the-food-system-and-human-health

    The World Health Organization estimates the direct costs of diabetes at more than US$827 billion per year, globally. Sugary foods are aggressively marketed throughout the world, especially to children. And multiple studies find that these marketing efforts are especially likely to reach children of color and low-income kids. Food policies impact global sugar consumption, as well, particularly in the younger generation.

    “If we start with global dietary patterns, we know they are shifting towards the U.S. model of high meat and high calorie consumption, coupled with low fruit and vegetable consumption. With this shift, we are seeing increasing obesity and chronic diseases on the human side, and increased land and water degradation on the natural systems side,” says Dr. Michael Hamm, Founding Director of the Michigan State University Center for Regional Food Systems.

    #modèle #etats-unis #sucre #graisses_animale #diabete_sucré #maladies #sols #eau #santé

  • Vitamin D, the Sunshine Supplement, Has Shadowy Money Behind It - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/18/business/vitamin-d-michael-holick.html

    Enthusiasm for vitamin D among medical experts has dimmed in recent years, as rigorous clinical trials have failed to confirm the benefits suggested by early, preliminary studies. A string of trials has found no evidence that vitamin D reduces the risk of cancer, heart disease or falls in the elderly. And most scientists say there isn’t enough evidence to know if vitamin D can prevent chronic diseases that aren’t related to bones.

    Although the amount of vitamin D in a typical daily supplement is generally considered safe, it is possible to take too much. In 2015, an article in the American Journal of Medicine linked blood levels as low as 50 nanograms per milliliter with an increased risk of death. That’s within the level considered healthy by the Endocrine Society, which defined vitamin D “sufficiency” as between 30 and 100 nanograms, Rosen said.

    #corruption #conflit_d’intérêt #santé #pharma #vitamine_D

  • Egypt’s health sector in the shadow of devaluation: All roads lead to ruin | MadaMasr
    http://www.madamasr.com/en/2017/03/24/feature/politics/egypts-health-sector-in-the-shadow-of-devaluation-all-roads-lead-to-ruin

    “After the Egyptian pound was floated, we had to make a choice: either increase the price of medicine or no longer provide it. We always face terrible choices,” says Mona Mina, the secretary general of the Doctors Syndicate.

    Sitting in her office at the Doctors Syndicate’s headquarters next to a desk scattered with documents that trace her many commitments and the scope of the syndicate’s work, Mina reflects on the government’s decision to raise the price of 2,010 pharmaceutical products after the November decision to liberalize the foreign exchange rate. Of the drugs included in the adjustment, 619 are used to treat chronic diseases. Parliamentary sources indicated at the beginning of March that the government’s legislation to introduce universal healthcare will not be referred to the House of Representatives before June.

    #Egypte #santé #austérité

  • Women’s long work hours linked to alarming increases in cancer, heart disease | News Room - The Ohio State University
    https://news.osu.edu/news/2016/06/16/overtime-women

    Women who put in long hours for the bulk of their careers may pay a steep price: life-threatening illnesses, including heart disease and cancer.

    Work weeks that averaged 60 hours per week or more over three decades appear to triple the risk of diabetes, cancer, heart trouble and arthritis for women, according to new research from The Ohio State University.

    The risk begins to climb when women put in more than 40 hours and takes a decidedly bad turn above 50 hours, researchers found.

    Women – especially women who have to juggle multiple roles – feel the effects of intensive work experiences and that can set the table for a variety of illnesses and disability,” said Allard Dembe, professor of health services management and policy and lead author of the study, published online this week in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

    People don’t think that much about how their early work experiences affect them down the road,” he said. “Women in their 20s, 30s and 40s are setting themselves up for problems later in life.
    […]
    But prior to this study, efforts to examine a connection between long hours and chronic illness have had mixed results, in large part because it’s difficult to obtain long-term data on work patterns and health, Dembe said.

    This study used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, administered by Ohio State’s Center for Human Resource Research and sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which includes interviews with more than 12,000 Americans born between 1957 and 1964.

    Dembe and his collaborator, Mayo Clinic researcher and former Ohio State doctoral student Xiaoxi Yao, examined data for survey participants who were at least 40 in 1998, when interview questions began to include questions about health status and chronic conditions.

    They averaged the self-reported hours worked each week over 32 years and compared the hours worked to the incidence of eight chronic diseases: heart disease, cancer (except skin cancer), arthritis or rheumatism, diabetes or high blood sugar, chronic lung disease including bronchitis or emphysema, asthma, depression and high blood pressure. They also examined the results by gender.

    Intéressante (et rare) #étude_longitudinale

  • How a national food policy could save millions of American lives - The Washington Post
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-a-national-food-policy-could-save-millions-of-american-lives/2014/11/07/89c55e16-637f-11e4-836c-83bc4f26eb67_story.html

    The food system and the diet it’s created have caused incalculable damage to the health of our people and our land, water and air. If a foreign power were to do such harm, we’d regard it as a threat to national security, if not an act of war, and the government would formulate a comprehensive plan and marshal resources to combat it. (The administration even named an Ebola czar to respond to a disease that threatens few Americans.) So when hundreds of thousands of annual deaths are preventable — as the deaths from the chronic diseases linked to the modern American way of eating surely are — preventing those needless deaths is a national priority.

    (...)

    Only those with a vested interest in the status quo would argue against creating public policies with these goals. Now weigh them against the reality that our current policies and public investments have given us:

    Because of unhealthy diets, 100 years of progress in improving public health and extending lifespan has been reversed. Today’s children are expected to live shorter lives than their parents. In large part, this is because a third of these children will develop Type 2 diabetes, formerly rare in children and a preventable disease that reduces life expectancy by several years. At the same time, our fossil-fuel-dependent food and agriculture system is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than any other sector of the economy but energy. And the exploitative labor practices of the farming and fast-food industries are responsible for much of the rise in income inequality in America.

    We find ourselves in this situation because government policy in these areas is made piecemeal. Diet-related chronic disease, food safety, marketing to children, labor conditions, wages for farm and food-chain workers, immigration, water and air quality, greenhouse gas emissions, and support for farmers: These issues are all connected to the food system. Yet they are overseen by eight federal agencies. Amid this incoherence, special interests thrive and the public good suffers.

    (...)

    The contradictions of our government’s policies around food become clear as soon as you compare the federal recommendations for the American diet, known as MyPlate, with the administration’s agricultural policies. While MyPlate recommends a diet of 50 percent vegetables and fruits, the administration devotes less than 1 percent of farm subsidies to support the research, production and marketing of those foods. More than 60 percent of that funding subsidizes the production of corn and other grains — food that is mostly fed to animals, converted to fuel for cars or processed into precisely the sort of junk the first lady is urging us to avoid.

    How could one government be advancing two such diametrically opposed goals? By failing to recognize that an agricultural policy is not the same as a food policy — and that the former does not necessarily contribute to public health.

    Our food system is largely a product of agricultural policies that made sense when the most important public health problem concerning food was the lack of it and when the United States saw “feeding the world” as its mission. These policies succeeded in boosting the productivity of American farmers, yet today they are obsolete and counterproductive, providing billions in public support to an industry that churns out a surfeit of unhealthy calories — while at the same time undermining the ability of the world’s farmers to make a living from their land.

    These farm policies have nourished an agricultural-industrial complex before which the president and the first lady seem powerless. The administration’s early efforts to use antitrust laws to protect farmers and consumers from agribusiness oligopolies were quietly dropped. Promises to regulate the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture — widely acknowledged as a threat to public health — resulted in toothless voluntary guidelines from the Food and Drug Administration.

    When it came to regulating #methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed stringent rules for the energy industry — and another voluntary program for agriculture, the single biggest emitter of the gas. And in February the president signed yet another business-as-usual farm bill, which continues to encourage the dumping of cheap but unhealthy calories in the supermarket.

    These policies and the diet they sponsor threaten to undermine President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The government now finds itself in the absurd position of financing both sides in the war on Type 2 diabetes, a disease that, along with its associated effects, now costs $245 billion, or 23 percent of the national deficit in 2012, to treat each year. The government subsidizes soda with one hand, while the other writes checks to pay for insulin pumps. This is not policy; this is insanity.

    The good news is that solutions are within reach — precisely because the problems are largely a result of government policies. We know that the government has the power to reshape the food system because it has already done so at least once — when President Richard Nixon rejiggered farm policy to boost production of corn and soy to drive down food prices.

    Of course, reforming the food system will ultimately depend on a Congress that has for decades been beholden to #agribusiness, one of the most powerful lobbies on Capitol Hill. As long as food-related issues are treated as discrete rather than systemic problems, congressional committees in thrall to special interests will be able to block change.

    (...)

    Brazil has had a national food policy since 2004. In the city of Belo Horizonte that policy — coupled with an investment of 2 percent of the local budget in food-access and farmer-support programs — has reduced poverty by 25 percent and child mortality by 60 percent, and provided access to credit for 2 million farmers, all within a decade.

    #alimentation #lobbies #lobbying #corruption #santé #obésité #diabète_sucré #Etats-Unis

  • Why Racism Is A Public Health Issue | ThinkProgress
    http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/02/03/3239101/racism-public-health-issue

    Here’s why racism is a serious public health issue:

    Racial discrimination puts black Americans at risk for long-term health problems.
    According to a new study, black teens who experience racial discrimination in adolescence are more likely to develop stress-related health issues that could put them at risk for chronic diseases later in life. Specifically, researchers found that they were more likely to have higher levels of blood pressure, a higher body mass index, and higher levels of stress-related hormones once they turned 20. The psychological toll that racism takes on adults has also been well-documented, and racial discrimination has been repeatedly linked to high blood pressure. Just the fear of racial discrimination can trigger stress-related responses, which means that many people of color who live within a society defined by racism are constantly under increased biological stressors.

    The majority of doctors harbor “unconscious racial biases” toward their black patients.
    A 2012 study found that about two-thirds of primary care doctors harbor biases toward their African-American patients, leading those doctors to spend less time with their black patients and involve them less in medical decisions. Although doctors typically aren’t aware that they’re treating African-American patients any differently, this ultimately creates an environment in which black people often don’t feel welcome in the medical system — and may start avoiding it. On top of that, black Americans are more likely to lack access to health insurance and less likely to have a regular doctor. This creates a situation in which African-Americans are dying from diseases at higher rates than other racial groups because they don’t get treatment in time.

    Black scientists are systematically underfunded.
    According to a recent analysis of grant data from the National Institute of Health (NIH), black scientists — and not other types of minorities — are less likely to receive government funding for a research project, even when they have the same credentials as their white peers. In fact, a black researcher’s chances of winning an NIH grant is 10 percentage points lower than a white researcher’s chances. Aside from the obvious issues with discriminating against qualified scientists, there’s some evidence this could be having a lasting impact on the types of research that’s conducted in this country. Research into diseases that disproportionately affect black people is underfunded, too — and people of color are underrepresented in clinical trials.

    Disparities in the health care sector continue to hit the African-American community the hardest.
    Thanks to structures of racism and poverty that stretch back for generations, black Americans are still more likely to lack access to surgical and emergency medical care, more likely to patronize hospitals that employ less-experienced staff, and much less likely to receive high-quality primary care. That puts this community in a position to significantly benefit from some of the reforms included in the Affordable Care Act. But it also means that black Americans are hit the hardest by the political resistance to implementing health reform. Republican governors’ ongoing resistance to the optional Medicaid expansion disproportionately harms African-Americans, particularly low-income black people living in the South.

    #santé #racisme

  • #MERS-Cov 3 nouveaux décès, 1 nouveau cas en Arabie Séoudite

    Respiratory disease MERS kills three more in Saudi Arabia - CBS News
    http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57586913/respiratory-disease-mers-kills-three-more-in-saudi-arabia

    Three more people from Saudi Arabia have died from MERS, a lethal new respiratory virus, bringing the total number of deaths globally to 30.

    The country’s Ministry of Health said Thursday the three deceased, who ranged in age from 24 to 60, had chronic diseases, including kidney failure. It says they were hospitalized a month ago.

    The Ministry also announced a new case MERS, bringing to 38 the number of those infected in the kingdom. It identified the afflicted person only as a 61-year-old from the Al-Ahsa region in the Eastern part of the country where the outbreak in a health care facility started in April.