Women who give up smoking by the age of 30 will almost completely avoid the risks of dying early from tobacco-related diseases, according to a study of more than a million women in the UK. The results, published in the Lancet, showed lifelong smokers died a decade earlier than those who never started.
The European Commission is not acting quickly enough to protect patients from potential harm from medical implants, a parliamentary committee warns. Current Europe-wide regulation on medical implants, such as hip replacement joints, is too slow to change, they say. The EC is revising the regulation, but changes are not expected to take effect until at least 2015.
Two types of herpes simplex are known. The first causes cold sores or fever blisters—an eruption of blisters that often occurs during the course of or after one of a variety of diseases associated with fever. The blisters usually appear around the mouth and on the lips (herpes labialis); about the nose, face, and ears; and in the mouth and pharynx.
Known as shingles, this is a one-time recurrence of the symptoms of chicken pox, usually during adulthood. It is caused by the chicken pox virus attacking a sensory nerve. The skin over the nerve generally breaks out in blisters a few days after the onset of the disorder, which is accompanied by pain and frequent numbness or hypersensitivity along the course of the nerve, usually the trunk. The blisters are at first clear, but become cloudy within a few days and form crusts that dry up after five or ten days.
Infectious Mononucleosis, also glandular fever, an acute disease of humans, caused by the Epstein-Barr virus. Its mode of transmission is not known, but may be facilitated by saliva exchange, as in kissing. The disease, which attacks chiefly adolescents and young adults, usually runs its course in two to four weeks, although cases may be as brief as a week or last six to eight weeks. After recovery, weakness may continue for several months.
Chicken Pox, also called varicella, contagious viral disease that affects mainly children. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 4 million people develop chicken pox each year, and more than 95 percent of Americans will have had chicken pox by the time they reach adulthood. There are about 100 deaths from chicken pox each year in the United States.
Diabetes is classified into two types. In Type 1 diabetes, formerly called insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM) and juvenile-onset diabetes, the body does not produce insulin or produces it only in very small quantities. Symptoms usually appear suddenly, typically in individuals under 20 years of age. Most cases occur around puberty—around age 10 to 12 in girls and age 12 to 14 in boys. In the United States Type 1 diabetes accounts for 5 to 10 percent of all diabetes cases.
Diabetes is detected by measuring the amount of glucose in the blood after an individual has fasted (abstained from food) for about eight hours. In some cases, physicians diagnose diabetes by administering an oral glucose tolerance test, which measures glucose levels before and after a specific amount of sugar has been ingested.
TB is transmitted from person to person, usually by inhaling bacteria-carrying air droplets. When a person sick with TB coughs, sneezes, or speaks, small particles that carry two to three bacteria surrounded by a layer of moisture are released in the air. When another person inhales these particles, the bacteria may lodge in that person’s lungs and multiply.
In primary TB, a person has become infected with the TB bacteria but often is not aware of it, since this stage of the disease does not produce noticeable symptoms. Primary TB is not contagious in this early stage. Macrophages, immune cells that detect and destroy foreign matter, ingest the TB bacteria and transport them to the lymph nodes where they may be inhibited, destroyed, or they may multiply.
Diagnosis of TB requires two separate methods. Tuberculin skin testing is a method of screening for exposure to TB infection. A person who was infected with TB will have developed a hypersensitivity to the TB bacteria even if they did not develop the disease. A purified protein derived from the bacteria is injected into the skin.
