Tag: health care

If you want to get lean, lift:

According to a new study, weight training is the most effective way of keeping abdominal fat in check, compared to other activities such as running or cycling. Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health measured the activity levels of over 10,000 men aged 40-plus, monitoring their weight and waist circumference over a 12-year period.

They found that those men who spent an extra 20 minutes a day weight training
gained less abdominal weight over the course of the study than men who
increased the amount of time they spent doing aerobic exercise. Combining weight training with aerobic exerise led to even better results, the
study found.

I’m not surprised. I’ve noticed over time that lifting alone is much better than cardio alone, but the most effective program involves running once or twice per week in addition to at least three lifting days per week.

Don’t worry about your diet today and tomorrow. Eat, drink, and have a Merry Christmas. Then buckle down and address the fitness question the day after tomorrow. Any athlete will tell you that a cheat day makes no difference whatsoever.

If you’re going to face the world sober, you may as well do it with a hangover. So to speak.

Now things are getting very odd indeed. Last week, the WHO-reported numbers were 13,703 cases and 4,920 deaths, which amounted
to 3,767 new cases and 43 new deaths and indicated a rate considerably HIGHER than the
infection rate required for the number of cases to continue doubling.

However, the Week 44 numbers were just released. 13,042 reported cases of Ebola, with 4,818 reported deaths. Now, I realize not all of you are particularly good at math, but it doesn’t require advanced mathematics to realize that 13,042 is less than 13,703 and 4,818 is less than 4,920.

So, either the WHO numbers are becoming openly unreliable or we have 102 undead Ebola Zombies wandering the Earth.

I understand that the CDC probably believes that it is theoretically impossible, but I would like to see some indication that these reports of “polio-like symptoms” are not symptoms of actual polio:

More than 50 children in 23 states have had mysterious episodes of paralysis to their arms or legs, according to data gathered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The cause is not known, although some doctors suspect the cases may be linked to infection with enterovirus 68, a respiratory virus that has sickened thousands of children in recent months.

Concerned by a cluster of cases in Colorado, the C.D.C. last month asked doctors and state health officials nationwide to begin compiling detailed reports about cases of unusual limb weakness in children. Experts convened by the agency plan next week to release interim guidelines on managing the condition.

That so many children have had full or partial paralysis in a short period is unusual, but officials said that the cases seemed to be extremely rare.

One would assume that researchers have tested the children for polio even if the coverage never seems to mention it. But if they haven’t done so yet, they might want to be sure that this isn’t an unexpected side-effect of the polio vaccine combined with another risk factor or two. Simple logic would suggest that if children are experiencing “polio-like symptoms”, ruling out polio would be the first order of business.

Perhaps they have, certainly one hopes they have. But far too often, one sees people trusting their assumptions rather than testing them.

I suspect a lot of Americans will be feeling rather conflicted about the latest Ebola news:

A doctor in New York City who recently returned from treating Ebola patients in Guinea became the first person in the city to test positive for the virus Thursday, setting off a search for anyone who might have come into contact with him.

The doctor, Craig Spencer, was rushed to Bellevue Hospital Center and placed in isolation at the same time as investigators sought to retrace every step he had taken over the past several days.

At least three people he had contact with in recent days have been placed in isolation. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which dispatched a team to New York, is conducting its own test to confirm the positive test on Thursday, which was performed by a city lab.

The thing is, this variant of Ebola doesn’t appear to be as contagious as originally feared. Once it became clear that the family who stayed in an apartment with the sick Liberian who died did not become infected, and that none of the police and paramedics who attended him without proper precautions did not become infected either, the logical conclusion is that there will not be a massive African-style outbreak in the USA.

Of course, the logical conclusion can only hold insofar as the information we have is accurate. So, it’s certainly too soon to be confident that the danger has passed. But let’s face it, if the country wasn’t being run by the sort of idiot Axis of Lunacy people elected by NYC voters, there wouldn’t be any Ebola in the country in the first place. Actions have consequences, after all. Vote Obama, get Ebola in your neighborhood.

Vomiting Africans dying on planes is an everyday occurrence, right?

A plane from Nigeria landed at JFK Airport Thursday with a male passenger aboard who had died during the flight after a fit of vomiting — and CDC officials conducted a “cursory” exam before announcing there was no Ebola and turning the corpse over to Port Authority cops to remove, Rep. Peter King said on Thursday.

The congressman was so alarmed by the incident — and by what he and employees see as troubling Ebola vulnerabilities at JFK — that he fired off a letter to the federal Department of Homeland Security demanding more training and tougher protocols for handling possible cases there.

The unnamed, 63-year-old passenger had boarded an Arik Air plane out of Lagos, Nigeria, on Wednesday night, a federal law enforcement source said. During the flight, the man had been vomiting in his seat, the source said. Some time before the plane landed, he passed away. Flight crew contacted the CDC, federal customs officials and Port Authority police, who all boarded the plane at around 6 a.m. as about 145 worried passengers remained on board, the source said.

I have the impression that if Ebola starts to spread, people are going to be very, very angry indeed.

As the Ebola crisis surges to the top issue on the minds of Americans,
a new poll finds that 82 percent of those following the issue closely
want to quarantine anybody who has recently traveled to the
virus-stricken nations. The Economist/YouGov poll found that women are
more concerned than men and would refuse entry to anybody from those
nations. Just 16 percent would allow them into the nation.

If you want change, scare the women. This is the immutable law of broad-spectrum democracy.

The math just got worse:

A second health care worker at a Dallas hospital who provided care for the first Ebola patient diagnosed in the U.S. has tested positive for the disease, the Texas Department of State Health Services said Wednesday. The department said in a statement that the worker reported a fever Tuesday and was immediately isolated at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. Health officials said the worker was among those who took care of Thomas Eric Duncan, who was diagnosed with Ebola after coming to the U.S. from Liberia. Duncan died Oct. 8.

The department said a preliminary Ebola test was conducted late Tuesday at a state public health laboratory in Austin, Texas, and came back positive during the night. Confirmatory testing was being conducted at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta…. Officials have said they don’t know how the first health worker, a nurse, became infected. But the second case pointed to lapses beyond how one individual may have donned and removed personal protective garb.

Two patients in the USA in Spain, two deaths, three health care worker infections. This is not reassuring. As I, and every other sane Westerner said at the time, infected aid workers should have been left to their fates in Africa, where they were infected.

UPDATE: The news just gets better:

 The CDC has announced that the second healthcare worker diagnosed with Ebola — now identified as Amber Joy Vinson of Dallas — traveled by air Oct. 13, the day before she first reported symptoms. The CDC is now reaching out to all passengers who flew on Frontier Airlines flight 1143 Cleveland to Dallas/Fort Worth. The flight landed at 8:16 p.m. CT. The CDC is asking all 132 passengers on the flight to call 1 800-CDC INFO.

The medical workers in Africa are going down:

International aid organization Doctors Without Borders said that 16 of its staff members have been infected with Ebola and nine of them have died. Speaking at a press conference in Johannesburg Tuesday, the head of Doctors Without Borders in South Africa Sharon Ekambaram said medical workers have received inadequate assistance from the international community.

But the bigger problem is the sheer number of people involved in UNSUCCESSFULLY treating victims in the West in both the USA:

About 70 staff members at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital were involved in the care of Thomas Eric Duncan after he was hospitalized, including a nurse now being treated for the same Ebola virus that killed the Liberian man who was visiting Dallas, according to medical records his family provided to The Associated Press. The size of the medical team reflects the hospital’s intense effort to save Duncan’s life, but it also suggests that many other people could have been exposed to the virus during Duncan’s time in an isolation unit.

And in Germany:

A United Nations medical worker who was infected with Ebola in Liberia has died despite “intensive medical procedures,” a German hospital said Tuesday. The St. Georg hospital in Leipzig said the 56-year-old man, whose name has not been released, died overnight of the infection. It released no further details and did not answer telephone calls. The man tested positive for Ebola on Oct. 6, prompting Liberia’s UN peacekeeping mission to place 41 staff members who had possibly been in contact with him under “close medical observation.”

So, 111 medical workers with the best medical technology at their disposal couldn’t successfully treat two patients, and at least one worker has already been infected. This does not bode well if the medical system has to deal with 10 or even 100 victims simultaneously.