Posts Tagged ‘infection’

Breast feeding

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

BREAST-FEEDING
Mother’s milk has sustained the human species for countless generations. Breast milk is high in substances that confer natural immunity on the developing infant and protect against infection and disease. Breast-feeding also confers protection for the mother. See AIDS, Chocolate, Microwave, Mochi, Pesticides, Prenatal Nutrition, Rice, Sea Vegetables, Skin Problems, Vegetarian Diet.

• Breast-feeding Reduces Ear Infections - Breast-feeding can drastically reduce the number of ear infections in babies for the first four months, according to a University of Arizona study.
“The longer you can breast-feed exclusively, the fewer the episodes of ear infection, but four months is the minimum for significant protection,” noted Dr. Burris Duncan, who directed the study. His findings showed that 56 percent of babies who nursed for four months or more had infections compared to 68 percent of babies who were not nursed.
Source: B. Duncan, “Exclusive Breast-feeding for at Least 4 Months Protects Against Otitis Media,” Pedriatrics; 91:867-72, 1993.

• Breast-feeding Lowers Lymphoma Risk - Breast-feeding can reduce the risk of certain cancers for both mother and child. Researchers from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Md., found that infants breast-fed more than 6 months had a lower risk of developing cancer in childhood, especially lymphomas. In this study, children who were formula-fed or breast-fed for less than 6 months had approximately twice the risk of getting some childhood cancers by age 15 as those breast-fed for longer than 6 months. They also had five times the risk of getting lymphoma. “Mother’s milk contains substantial antimicrobial benefits for infants, increasing their resistance to many infections and possibly protecting them from many diseases, including lymphomas,” researchers reported.
Source: “Breast-Feeding Linked to Decreased Cancer Risk for Mother, Child,” Journal of the National Cancer Institute 80:1362-63, 1988.

• Breast-feeding Promotes Mental Development - Children born prematurely who were breast-fed scored significantly higher on intelligence tests than those who did not. “Our evidence strongly suggests that human milk might have factors important to brain development,” noted Dr. Alan Lucas, director of the study and head of infant and child nutrition at the Medical Research Council’s Dunn Nutrition Unit in Cambridge, England.
On average, the children given breast milk scored eight points higher on a range of intelligence tests taken when they were eight years old.
Source: A. Lucas et al., “Breast Milk and Subsequent Intelligent Quotient in Children Born Preterm,” Lancet 339:261–64, 1992.

• Breast-feeding Lowers Breast Cancer Risk - In a Chinese medical study, researchers found that the longer the mother nursed, the less at risk she was of breast cancer. Mimi Yu, Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, studied more than 500 Chinese women with breast cancer in Shanghai and 500 healthy women. The women she studied on an average nursed their various children for a cumulative total of nine years, a common pattern in China. “We believe that long periods of nursing would have the same protective effect for American women,” Yu reported.
Source: “Breast-Feeding Linked to Decreased Cancer Risk for Mother, Child,” Journal of the National Cancer Institute 80:1362-63, 1988.

• Breast-Fed Children Smarter - Children who are breast-fed as babies are smarter and do better than kids brought up on bottled milk, according to a New Zealand study. In a study of more than one thousand children, researchers found that those who were breast-fed for 8 months or more tested between 35 and 59 percent higher in reading comprehension, mathematical ability, and scholastic ability when they were 10 to 13 years old.
Source: L. J. Horwood and D. M. Fergusson, “Breast-feeding and Later Cognitive and Academic Outcomes,” Pediatrics 101(1):E9, 1998.

• Attention Deficit Disorder Linked to Less Breast-feeding - In a case-control study of diet and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, Purdue University researchers reported that children with ADHD were about half as likely to have been breast-fed as controls. The duration of breast-feeding was also significantly longer in ordinary children than those with this behavioral disorder characterized by inattention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity. ADHD children were also found to have lower amounts of specific fatty acids, especially omega-3 fatty acids. These are found in vegetables, fruits, and other plant quality foods, as well as in fish and seafood.
Source: L. J. Stevens et al., “Essential Fatty Acid Metabolism in Boys with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 62:761-68, 1995.

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Antibiotics

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009

ANTIBIOTICS
Initially, penicillin and other antibiotics proved to be extremely effective, saving the lives of millions of people who otherwise would have died. However, the euphoria surrounding these “miracle drugs” quickly began to fade. Streptomycin almost completely lost its effectiveness after two months of use, especially on pulmonary tuberculosis. It also left many patients deaf or permanently dizzy. However, because the life-saving benefits still clearly outweighed the drawbacks, postwar physicians continued to prescribe strong drugs like these, and they became the treatment of choice for most acute conditions.
Within several decades, they began to be used prophylactically to prevent future infection, as well as remedially to treat existing disease, and antibiotics were routinely added to livestock feed, over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and other non-prescription products.
In the United States, 240 million doses of antibiotics are prescribed every year, almost one per person. One of every three hospital patients receives an antibiotic, and physicians routinely administer antibiotics for everything from the common cold to pneumonia.
Altogether, medical use accounts for 60 percent of antibiotic use. The other 40 percent is used in livestock feed to promote rapid growth. By 1980, 75 percent of all cattle in the United States received antibiotics, 90 percent of swine and veal calves, 50 percent of sheep, and nearly 100 percent of chickens and poultry. The drugs not only were used to prevent infection but to fatten up the animals and ensure maximum growth—and thus profits.
In recent years, research has shown that antibiotics can interfere with the production of red blood cells, the metabolism of vitamin B-12, and kill benign or beneficial bacteria in the intestines that synthesize Vitamin K, biotin, riboflavin, panthothenate, and pyridoxine. These nutrients are all associated with proper immune function and protection against disease. Side-effects associated with antibiotic use and misuse include diarrhea, rashes, fever, allergic reactions, hemolytic anemia, bleeding, bone marrow toxicity, and disorders of the kidneys, liver, and central nervous system. The rapid spread of candida albicans and other acute infections has been associated with chronic antibiotic use that has disrupted the normal homeostasis in the digestive system and enabled the selection of pathogenic strains of yeast, fungi, bacilli, and other microorganisms. See Drug-Resis-tance, Infectious Diseases.

• End of the Antibiotic Era? In a review of the history and therapeutic use of antibiotics, two medical researchers in Texas document how the modern science was lulled into complacency. “The scientific community grossly underestimated the remarkable genetic plasticity of these organisms and their ability, through mutations and genetic transfer, to develop resistance to antibiotics,” they explain. “Antibiotic resistance has made potential killers out of bacteria that previously posed little threat to mankind. The indiscriminate and reckless use of antibiotics has led to a fast ap-proaching crisis in which human dominance of the planet is threatened by single, elementary cells of the microbal world.”
Source: J. W. Harrison and T. A. Svec, “The Beginning of the End of the Antibiotic Era?,” Parts I and II, Quintessence International 29(3):151-62, 1998 and 29(4):223-29, 1998.

• Overprescription of Antibiotics - Abuse of antibiotics is contributing to disease, according to researchers at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. Every year doctors write 12 million antibiotic prescriptions—one in every five—for colds, bronchitis and other viral infections for which antibiotics are useless. “Every time we use an antibiotic, we run the risk of promoting antibiotic resistance, or drug resistance, by bacteria,” said lead scientist Ralph Gonzales.
In the last 10 years, an epidemic of Streptococcus pneumoniae that is resistant to penicillin drugs has developed and is a leading cause of ear and sinus infections, meningitis, and other common illnesses.
Source: R. Gonzales et al., “Antibiotic Prescribing for Adults with Colds, Upper Respiratory Tract Infections, and Bronchitis by Ambulatory Care Physicians,” Journal of the American Medical Association 278(11)”901-4, 1997.

• Dangers of Antibiotics - In a critique of modern medicine and agriculture, a noted public health official presents evidence that the overuse of pharmaceuticals is creating an epidemic of new drug-resistant diseases.
“The sheer magnitude of this assault [the creation of new diseases by antibiotic-resistant microbes] is staggering. For four decades now, we have thrown hundreds of tons of antibiotics against our Hollywood imagination of microscopic enemies. In the process we have sown seeds for a whole new array of actual germs and diseases. . . . We favor simple technological fixes for complex disease entities, while our medical complex fosters a near-sighted one-germ, one-chemical mentality. Together, these positions contribute to a world view that encourages the proliferation of new chemotherapeutic agents, and in turn, the proliferation of new disease entitles. . . . The answer clearly does not consist of throwing more troops into a losing battle.”
Source: Marc Lappé, When Antibiotics Fail: Restoring the Ecology of the Body, (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1986).

• European Meat Tests Positive for Drug-Resistant Bacteria - In samples from a European Union-licensed meat-processing plant, German researchers found that 8 percent of minced beef and pork samples tested positive for vancomycin-resistant enteroccoi (VRE), antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria associated with human infections.
Source: G. Klein et al., “Antibiotic Resistance Patterns of Enterocci and Occurrences of Vancomycin-Resistant Enterococci in Raw Minced Beef and Pork in Germany,” Appl Environ Microbiol 64(5):1825-30, 1998.

• WHO Calls for End to Antibiotics in Livestock Feed - The World Health Organization has recommended phasing out the use of antibiotics to promote livestock growth. “Farms are factories of drug resistance,” stated Dr. Stuart Levy, director of the Center for Adaptation, Genetics, and Drug Resistance at the Tufts University School of Medicine. “The non-therapeutic misusage is just causing more multi-drug resistance in human therapy. They can transfer resistance, whether it’s something we eat or touch or waste that’s tilled into another source.”
Source: Stan Grossfeld, “Animal Waste Emerging as U.S. Problem,” Boston Globe, September 21, 1998.

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