Fears of measles epidemic as cases soar to 13-year high in wake of MMR scare

There have been more than 1,000 measles cases so far this year – putting Britain at risk of a deadly epidemic, health officials say.

The Health Protection Agency blamed unfounded fears about the combined MMR jab for the increase and urged parents to vaccinate their children.

In the first ten months of 2008, there were 1,049 confirmed cases in England and Wales – the highest level since the early 1990s.

A recent outbreak of more than 60 cases in Cheshire has prompted the launch of a programme to vaccinate 10,000 pupils.

The agency blamed the rise on a low uptake of the MMR jab over the past decade.

A panic among parents was triggered by researchers who claimed there was a link between the combined measles, mumps and rubella jab and autism. Most experts believe the jab is safe and effective.

Around three million children and teenagers are believed to be at risk of a measles epidemic because they missed one of two doses of vaccine, or are entirely unprotected.

The disease can lead to ear infections, pneumonia, and permanent brain damage, and may even be fatal.

HPA immunisation expert Dr Mary Ramsay said: 'Over the last few years, we have seen an unprecedented increase in measles cases and we are still receiving reports of cases across the country.

'This rise is due to relatively low MMR vaccine uptake over the past decade and there are now a large number of children who are not fully vaccinated with MMR.

'There is now a real risk of a measles epidemic. These children are susceptible to not only measles but to mumps and rubella as well.'

The NHS information centre said uptake rates of the triple jab remained at 85 per cent in 2007-2008, the same as the previous year. A rate of 95 per cent is needed for immunity in the community.

In August, the Chief Medical Officer announced an MMR catch-up programme to reduce the risk of a measles epidemic.

Primary Care Trusts and GPs were urged to identify individuals not up to date with their MMR injections and offer catch-up immunisation

The move was based on models of measles transmission in England carried out by the Agency, which suggested there was a real risk of a large measles outbreak of between approximately 30,000 to 100,000 cases - with the majority in London.

Dr Ramsay said: 'We are glad to see that public confidence in the MMR vaccine is now high, with more than eight out of 10 children receiving one dose of MMR by their second birthday.

'But we shouldn't forget that the children who weren't vaccinated many years ago are at real risk.

'Measles is a very serious infection as it can lead to pneumonia and encephalitis, even in healthy children. It is highly infectious - it can be passed on without direct contact before the rash appears.

'This is why it's incredibly important to continue to remind parents about the benefits of having their child vaccinated with two doses of MMR for optimum protection. It is never too late to get vaccinated.'

A mass vaccination is to take place in Cheshire in early December.

The parents of 10,000 children have been asked to give consent for the MMR vaccine after tests confirmed 19 cases in the region, with a further 49 youngsters being treated for 'probable' measles.

Most reported cases were in Sandbach, Middlewich and Crewe, but there have also been reports from Congleton, Nantwich and Winsford, Central and Eastern Cheshire Primary Care Trust said.

Guy Hayhurst, consultant in public health at the trust, said: 'We identified 10,534 children who had no record of full MMR immunisation and wrote to their parents to seek consent for them to be vaccinated in school.

'We hope that by doing this we will halt the current outbreak in its tracks, or at least severely curtail it.'

Teams of nurses are being prepared to vaccinate children in 177 primary schools and 33 secondary schools. The vaccine will also be offered to younger school staff members.

The mass vaccination programme will begin on December 3 and is expected to be completed by December 17.

Nap Without Guilt: It Boosts Sophisticated Memory

WASHINGTON -- Just in time for the holidays, some medical advice most people will like: Take a nap.

Interrupting sleep seriously disrupts memory-making, compelling new research suggests. But on the flip side, taking a nap may boost a sophisticated kind of memory that helps us see the big picture and get creative.

"Not only do we need to remember to sleep, but most certainly we sleep to remember," is how Dr. William Fishbein, a cognitive neuroscientist at the City University of New York, put it at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience last week.

Good sleep is a casualty of our 24/7 world. Surveys suggest few adults attain the recommended seven to eight hours a night.

Way too little clearly is dangerous: Sleep deprivation causes not just car crashes but all sorts of other accidents. Over time, a chronic lack of sleep can erode the body in ways that leave us more vulnerable to heart disease, diabetes and other illnesses.

But perhaps more common than insomnia is fragmented sleep _ the easy awakening that comes with aging, or, worse, the sleep apnea that afflicts millions, who quit breathing for 30 seconds or so over and over throughout the night.

Indeed, scientists increasingly are focusing less on sleep duration and more on the quality of sleep, what's called sleep intensity, in studying how sleep helps the brain process memories so they stick. Particularly important is "slow-wave sleep," a period of very deep sleep that comes earlier than better-known REM sleep, or dreaming time.

Fishbein suspected a more active role for the slow-wave sleep that can emerge even in a power nap. Maybe our brains keep working during that time to solve problems and come up with new ideas. So he and graduate student Hiuyan Lau devised a simple test: documenting relational memory, where the brain puts together separately learned facts in new ways.

First, they taught 20 English-speaking college students lists of Chinese words spelled with two characters _ such as sister, mother, maid. Then half the students took a nap, being monitored to be sure they didn't move from slow-wave sleep into the REM stage.

Upon awakening, they took a multiple-choice test of Chinese words they'd never seen before. The nappers did much better at automatically learning that the first of the two-pair characters in the words they'd memorized earlier always meant the same thing _ female, for example. So they also were more likely than non-nappers to choose that a new word containing that character meant "princess" and not "ape."


"The nap group has essentially teased out what's going on," Fishbein concludes.
These students took a 90-minute nap, quite a luxury for most adults. But even a 12-minute nap can boost some forms of memory, adds Dr. Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School.
Conversely, Wisconsin researchers briefly interrupted nighttime slow-wave sleep by playing a beep _ just loudly enough to disturb sleep but not awaken _ and found those people couldn't remember a task they'd learned the day before as well as people whose slow-wave sleep wasn't disrupted.

That brings us back to fragmented sleep, whether from aging or apnea. It can suppress the birth of new brain cells in the hippocampus, where memory-making begins _ enough to hinder learning weeks after sleep returns to normal, warns Dr. Dennis McGinty of the University of California, Los Angeles.

To prove a lasting effect, McGinty mimicked human sleep apnea in rats. He hooked them to brain monitors and made them sleep on a treadmill. Whenever the monitors detected 30 seconds of sleep, the treadmill briefly switched on. After 12 days of this sleep disturbance, McGinty let the rats sleep peacefully for as long as they wanted for the next two weeks.

The catch-up sleep didn't help: Rested rats used room cues to quickly learn the escape hole in a maze. Those with fragmented sleep two weeks earlier couldn't, only randomly stumbling upon the escape.

None of the new work is enough, yet, to pinpoint the minimum sleep needed for optimal memory. What's needed may vary considerably from person to person.

"A short sleeper may have a very efficient deep sleep even if they sleep only four hours," notes Dr. Chiara Cirellia of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

But altogether, the findings do suggest some practical advice: Get apnea treated. Avoid what Harvard's Stickgold calls "sleep bulimia," super-late nights followed by sleep-in weekends. And don't feel guilty for napping.
___

Alzheimer’s Help From Lowly Blackcurrants

Bioactive compounds in blackcurrants could help stave off Alzheimer’s disease, according to Scottish food researchers. Work is in progress to find an economical way to develop the compounds for use as food ingredients.

A briefing paper released by the Scottish Crop Research Institute said the compounds are extracted from wastes produced when blackcurrants are processed. Blackcurrants, which are high in vitamin C and other beneficial phytochemicals, have demonstrated the potential to inhibit inflammation, which is suspected to be at the origin of Alzheimer’s disease.

Blackcurrants are native to central and northern Europe and northern Asia.

Wash Your Hands—Or Else!

By: Sylvia Booth Hubbard

Health officials constantly warn of the importance of good hygiene, including washing your hands frequently, to stop the spread of germs that cause flu and colds. Now you can add the risk of worms in your brain to the list of problems caused by dirty hands.

Rosemary Alvarez began experiencing numbness in her arm and blurred vision. A cat scan revealed nothing, but an MRI showed something very deep inside her brain. “Once we saw the MRI we realized this is something not good,” neurosurgeon Dr. Peter Nakaji told Phoenix’s Fox News. “It’s something down in her brain stem which is as deep in the brain as you can be.”

She was rushed into surgery where doctors expected to remove a brain tumor. What they found was a worm! Dr. Nakaji began laughing when he realized his patient didn’t have a life-threatening brain tumor. “I was so pleased to know that it wasn’t going to be something terrible,” he said.

The surgery was a success and doctors believe Ms Alvarez will have a complete recovery. How did she get the worm? Doctors said she could have gotten it from eating undercooked pork or from someone who handled food after not washing their hands after using the bathroom.

Experts note that one person with dirty hands could pass along a disease—or worms—to many people. Ms Alvarez has a few words of advice for others. “Wash your hands, wash your hands.”

Attending Religious Services Cuts Death Risk

A study published by researchers at Yeshiva University and its medical school, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, strongly suggests that regular attendance at religious services reduces the risk of death by approximately 20 percent. The findings, published in Psychology and Health, were based on data drawn from participants who spanned numerous religious denominations. The research was conducted by Eliezer Schnall, Ph.D., clinical assistant professor of psychology at Yeshiva College of Yeshiva University, and co-authored by Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, Ph.D., professor of epidemiology and population health at Einstein, as an ancillary study of the Women's Health Initiative (WHI). The WHI is a national, long-term study aimed at addressing women’s health issues and funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The researchers evaluated the religious practices of 92,395 post-menopausal women participating in the WHI. They examined the prospective association of religious affiliation, religious service attendance, and strength and comfort derived from religion with subsequent cardiovascular events and overall rates of mortality. Although the study showed as much as a 20 percent decrease in the overall risk of mortality for those attending religious services, it did not show any consistent change in rates of morbidity and death specifically related to cardiovascular disease, with no explanation readily evident.

The study adjusted for participation of individuals within communal organizations and group activities that promote a strong social life and enjoyable routines, behaviors known to lead to overall wellness. However, even after controlling for such behavior and other health-related factors, the improvements in morbidity and mortality rates exceeded expectations.

“Interestingly, the protection against mortality provided by religion cannot be entirely explained by expected factors that include enhanced social support of friends or family, lifestyle choices and reduced smoking and alcohol consumption,” said Dr. Schnall, who was lead author of the study. “There is something here that we don’t quite understand. It is always possible that some unknown or unmeasured factors confounded these results,” he added.

During WHI enrollment, study participants, aged 50 to79, were recruited on a voluntary basis from a variety of sources, from all over the nation. The women answered questions about baseline health conditions and religiosity and were followed by WHI researchers for an average of 7.7 years, with potential study outcomes of cardiovascular events and mortality adjudicated by trained physicians.

To evaluate the impact of religiosity on mortality and morbidity, the investigators looked at variables including self-report of religious affiliation, frequency of religious service attendance, and religious strength as well as comfort, in relation to coronary heart disease (CHD) and death. It is important to note that the study did not attempt to measure spirituality; rather, it examined self-report religiosity measures (irrespective of the participant’s religion). Participants answered three key questions at registration, regarding:

1) religious affiliation (yes or no);

2) how often services were attended (never, less than once per week, once per week, or more than once per week);

3) if religion provided strength and comfort (none, a little, a great deal).

Those attending religious services at least once per week showed a 20 percent mortality risk reduction mark compared with those not attending services at all. These findings corroborate prior studies that have shown up to a 25 percent reduction in such risk.

The study investigators concluded that although religious behavior (as defined by the study’s criteria) is associated with a reduction in death rates among the study population, the physical relationships leading to that effect are not yet understood and require further investigation. “The next step is to figure out how the effect of religiosity is translated into biological mechanisms that affect rates of survival,” said Dr. Smoller. “However, we do not infer causation even from a prospective study, as that can only be done through a clinical trial.

She added, “There may be confounding factors that we can’t determine, such as a selection bias, which would lead people who are at reduced risk for an impending event to also be the ones who attend services.”

The investigators are considering doing an analysis of psychological profiles of women in the study to determine if such profiles can help to explain the apparent protective effects of attending religious services.

Saturated Fats Tied to Small Intestine Cancers

Diets high in saturated fat appear to increase the risk of cancer of the small intestine, a study shows.

The small intestine makes up 75 percent of the digestive tract, yet rarely do cancers develop there, more often showing up in the large intestine, or colon.

"Identifying modifiable risk factors for cancer of the small intestine is important not only because the incidence of this cancer is on the rise, but it may enable us to further understand other gastrointestinal malignancies," study chief Dr. Amanda J. Cross, from the National Cancer Institute, Rockville, Maryland, said in a statement.

Findings from several studies have linked consumption of red and processed meats with colon cancer, but the association with small intestine cancer has received relatively little attention and has not been examined in a "forward-looking" prospective study.

Using data from the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study, the research team examined dietary associations with small intestine cancer in half a million men and women. Food frequency questionnaires were used to gauge meat and fat intake and the subjects were followed for up to 8 years for cancer.

During follow-up, 60 people developed adenocarcinomas and 80 developed gastric carcinoid tumors -- a rare type of stomach cancer.

No statistically significant association between red or processed meat intake and small intestine malignancies was seen, the investigators report.

Saturated fat intake, on the other hand, was positively associated with the development of carcinoid tumors. Relative to people with the lowest intake of saturated fat, those with the highest intake had a 3.18-fold increased risk of carcinoid tumors.

SOURCE: Cancer Research, November 15, 2008.

Vampire lesbian killers allowed jail sex

SADISTIC murderers Jessica Stasinowsky and Valerie Parashumti are being allowed to continue their lesbian love affair behind bars, despite the sentencing judge demanding that they be kept apart.

Prison insiders say the cold-hearted killers - sentenced to life in jail over the brutal murder of Stacey Mitchell, 16 - are free to kiss, hug and have had a sex romp in jail.

Parashumti, once part of a blood-drinking, vampire sub-culture, was reprimanded for sharpening chicken bones into makeshift weapons, while the pair requested raw meat to eat, sources claim.

Authorities refused to comment on the claims, but confirmed the couple are allowed physical contact.

WA Corrections Minister Christian Porter launched an urgent investigation, after media inquiries about the pair's conduct. Mr Porter said he would consider moving one of them to another jail.

Insiders said Stasinowsky, 21, and Parashumti, 20, are housed in separate units at Bandyup, but have constant access to each other during recreation times. This gives the women at least seven hours a day together on weekends and 90 minutes on weekdays.

"They spend a tremendous amount of time together,'' a former inmate told The Sunday Times this week.

"They're feeding off each other,'' said the woman, who did not want her name published. "Their relationship will not end while they are in Bandyup together.

"The officers know what they are up to. But at the end of the day, when you have so many prisoners and you only have so many officers, it's hard to control what prisoner is doing what...They just get away with it.''

Prison authorities have allowed the toxic relationship to continue despite Judge Peter Blaxell recommended that the pair be segregated.

Bikers Risk Urinary Problems!

• Kate Benson
• November 23, 2008

SUFFER in your jocks, bikers. Yes, that means you, you wussy Hell's Angel. And you, Bandido boy. The secret's out. You aren't just overweight, smelly, middle-aged drug dealers with more tattoos than teeth. You are soft in the pants department - and quite probably bedwetters, as well.

And guess what? These afflictions are caused by riding motorcycles.

That's right, a new study has found that men who ride them risk impotence and urinary problems because the engine vibration damages nerves in their penises.

A survey of more than 230 motorcyclists who ride for about three hours every weekend found that almost 70 per cent had problems getting an erection or emptying their bladders.

The news is alarming for Victorian men who have turned to motorcycles and scooters in the past few years to beat rising fuel prices and growing traffic congestion.

Doctors in Japan, who published two studies on the dangers in the Inter-national Journal of Impotence Research, said most motorcycle seats put undue pressure on the area between the anus and the scrotum, cutting blood flow to the penis.

Vibrations from the engine also caused a decrease in two growth hormones in the bladder and prostate related to bladder relaxation.

Impotence affects most males during their lives and can be caused by emotional issues, high cholesterol, heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, smoking or alcohol.

But all men should avoid sitting too long on hard bicycle or motorcycle seats, particularly ones with thin, pointed ends, to prevent compression of pelvic floor muscles, Impotence Australia chief executive Brett McCann said yesterday.

About 76 per cent of riders aged 40 to 49, and 93 per cent of those aged 50 to 59, reported severe erectile dysfunction, compared with 37 per cent and 42 per cent respectively among those who did not ride motorcycles.

John Sbrocchi has been riding a scooter to work for 2 years. His sex life had not suffered.

Scooters normally have wider, softer seats than motorcycles, but vibrations can still affect the genitals.

"I do have urinary flow issues, but I'm not putting it down to the scooter," Mr Sbrocchi said.

"I'm a man of 62 and when you get to that age you get prostate problems.

"I think scooters are one of life's greatest innovations - so it would take more than that to put me off."

Most seats are too hard

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Edible Healing

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