Russian Military Medics Vaccinate Syrian Refugees to Prevent Epidemics

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Russian military medical personnel are treating residents in Umm-al-Tiur in Syria’s Hama Governorate who returned to their homes after the end of hostilities. Military doctor Vyacheslav Bolshakov told reporters:

The people in the specified community may be at risk of endemic typhoid and viral hepatitis A. We’re administering typhoid and hepatitis A vaccines to civilians. Initially, we worked with the administration and the mayor. They conducted an outreach campaign, addressing people with the need, and we carried out the vaccinations.

The terrorists failed to reach central Umm-al-Tiur during military operations but carried out regular attacks on the community, badly damaging the electric and water supply systems. The local authorities are restoring the infrastructure with support from Russian specialists, who are gathering samples for analysis in order to evaluate the serviceability of the water system and delousing the city yards and streets. Russian military medical personnel and local authorities are carrying out outreach activities and establishing vaccinating centres to avoid epidemics. As many as 27 communities in the southern de-escalation zone in Quneitra, as-Suwayda, and Daraa Governorates joined the ceasefire and sided with the Syrian government over the past week due to negotiations conducted by the Russian Reconciliation Centre for the Opposing Sides.

6 July 2018

TASS

http://tass.com/society/1012157

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US Life Expectancy Rates Drop for the Second Year in a Row: Alcohol, Drugs, and Suicide Noted

The Republicans are the main architects of the falling life expectancy… but Clintonista Democrats are just as bad. Neoliberalism IS bad for your health… in BOTH its “conservative” and “liberal” iterations.

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Life expectancy in the Land of the Free dropped for the second year in a row. A new report published in the British Medical Journal revealed that drug addiction, alcohol abuse, and suicide rates contributed to the dramatic drop. The report pointed up that the drop was most significant among middle-aged white Americans and those living in rural communities. Steven Woolf, a co-author of the report released Wednesday, said:

We’re seeing an alarming increase in deaths from substance abuse and despair.

The report stated that the US life expectancy average was 78.6 years in 2016, a 0.1-year drop from 2015. It didn’t yet calculate the US life expectancy for 2017. Woolf noted:

It may not sound like much, but the alarming story isn’t the amount of the decrease but that the increase ended.

The USA had the highest life expectancy in the world in 1960. However, American life expectancy is currently 1.5 years lower than the 35 nations included in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which includes Canada, Germany, Mexico, Australia, the Netherlands, and the UK. The report also reveals that Americans are less healthy than those in other developed nations due to adolescent pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Americans also engage in risky behaviour, including high-calorie intake, drug abuse, and gun ownership. In addition, many Americans live in cities where walking or biking is less common. The lack of universal health care in the USA also contributed to poorer American health. The report stated:

The consequences of these choices are dire… not only more deaths and illness, but also escalating health care costs, a sicker workforce, and a less competitive economy. Future generations may pay the greatest price.

According to Woolf, the deadly US opioid crisis contributed to the drop in life expectancy, but it isn’t the primary cause:

It’s a larger issue, involving addiction to opioids but also fatal overdoses from other drugs.

The rate of fatal drug overdoses surged 137 percent in 2000-14. In addition, deaths from alcohol abuse and suicide dramatically increased. In 1999-14, the suicide rate rose 24 percent. White middle-aged Americans, people with limited education, women, and those in rural areas experienced the largest increase in suicide rates. Woolf explained:

The problem is concentrated in rural largely-white counties that often struggled for many years with stagnant wages, unemployment, poverty, and the loss of major industries that fuelled local economies. The root causes argue for policy solutions, especially those directed at strengthening the middle-class, but these aren’t sufficiently prioritised by elected officials.

11 February 2018

Sputnik International

https://sputniknews.com/society/201802111061548893-US-life-expectancy-rates-drop-second-year-in-row/

Another Cultural Myth That Must Go: Menstruating Women Told Not to Cross River

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Beliefs can be useful… if they help. In Ghana, some beliefs are decidedly not helping. In a nod to the persistence of cultural taboos surrounding the natural process of menstruation, many women and girls can’t travel or go to school because a river god decreed… although they haven’t made the decree public… that they may not cross during their normal monthly biological cycle. The River Ofin, a boundary between the Ashanti and Central Regions of Ghana, supposedly has a guardian god who… if you can believe certain regional officials… decreed that women and girls couldn’t cross while menstruating, preventing vital travel and school attendance. Shamima Muslim Alhassan, the UNESCO menstrual hygiene ambassador, noted that the apparently anonymous deity travel directive is a violation of women’s rights and a violation of a child’s right to education:

It seems the gods are really powerful aren’t they? I think that we need to ask for some form of accountability from these gods.

According to the BBC, Kwamena Duncan, the Ghanian Central Regional Minister, indicated that he’d take the matter seriously by speaking to an Ashanti regional minister to find a solution.

Formed in 1946, UNESCO is the UN humanitarian assistance provider for children and mothers in developing countries. It estimates that at least one in ten female students in the region isn’t able to attend school when they menstruate. A recent World Bank report also notes that over 11 million women in Ghana lack appropriate hygiene and sanitation resources. Human rights issues resulting from cultural myths surrounding the biological process of menstruation persist, including in the island nation of Madagascar, where women are taught to avoid bathing during their period, and in rural areas of mountainous Nepal, where menstruating women must sleep in huts away from family.

15 January 2018

Sputnik International

https://sputniknews.com/africa/201801151060751990-myths-surrounding-the-human-body/

Drinking to Remember: Your Coffee Habit May Protect Against Dementia

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According to evidence from a new study in the Journals of Gerontology, coffee drinkers, take comfort… your beverage of choice may be helping your brain. Ira Driscoll, the study’s lead author and psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

The mounting evidence of caffeine consumption as a potentially protective factor against cognitive impairment is exciting, given that caffeine is also an easily modifiable dietary factor.

Study results, first published online in late September, found that older women who consumed more caffeine suffered less cognitive impairment in the form of dementia. The study tracked 6,467 women who self-reported their caffeine intake over ten years. Those who drank more than 261 milligrams of caffeine saw their risk of developing dementia or some other form of global cognitive impairment drop by 36 percent. Researchers say that this is a significant relationship, although it stops short of establishing cause and effect. Getting that much caffeine would take three regular eight-ounce cups of coffee, five or six cups of black tea, or more than seven cans of Coke (or, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, one 12-ounce cup of Starbucks brewed coffee). That may sound like a lot, but the FDA and several other major food safety authorities call 300 to 400 mg per day “moderate consumption”, which isn’t associated with adverse health effects in most healthy adults. Studies over the past 20 years have found that American adults consume between 165-300 mg of caffeine a day on average.  Driscoll explained:

While we can’t make a direct link between higher caffeine consumption and lower incidence of cognitive impairment and dementia, with further study, we can better quantify its relationship with cognitive health outcomes. Research on this topic will be beneficial not only from a preventative standpoint but also to better understand the underlying mechanisms and their involvement in dementia and cognitive impairment.

The study used participants from the Women’s Health Initiative Memory Study, funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, who reported some level of caffeine consumption. Driscoll and her colleagues gathered data using questions about how often and how much coffee, tea, and cola beverages the women drank, and combined that with information gathered from yearly assessments of cognitive function over a period of up to ten years. In that period, 388 participants in the study received a diagnosis of probable dementia or some form of cognitive impairment. The study found that participants who consumed more than the median caffeine intake for the group… 261 mg per day… were diagnosed with cognitive impairment less often than those who consumed less caffeine. Researchers adjusted results to take into account factors like hormone therapy, age, race, education, body mass index, sleep quality, depression, hypertension, prior cardiovascular disease, diabetes, smoking, and alcohol consumption.

The new research noted in its conclusion that caffeine and its relationship to dementia has been studied many times. Their findings, suggesting lower odds of cognitive impairment in older women consuming more caffeine than the group’s baseline average, “are consistent with the existing literature showing an inverse association between caffeine intake and age-related cognitive impairment”. The study also noted its demographic limitations, specifically that it was confined to postmenopausal women, many of whom were highly-educated, as well as reporting limitations, in that the researchers didn’t collect data about caffeine sources beyond caffeinated beverages, meaning that they have underestimated consumption. The study said:

We need further research in order to assess or confirm the exposure through more objective biological assays compared to self-reported caffeine intake, and to isolate potential acute effects that caffeine may have on cognitive performance.

4 October 2016

Sputnik International

https://sputniknews.com/art_living/201610041046002586-caffeine-may-prevent-dementia-study/