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Tuesday, July 11, 2023
What is 'long vax'? Symptoms linked to COVID-19 shot baffle docs
Monday, July 10, 2023
5 Simple Ways to Get Healthy and Fit on a Budget
5 Simple Ways to Get Healthy and Fit on a Budget
Are you looking for ways to get fit and healthy without breaking the bank? Health Train Express is here to show you how! With a few simple tips and tricks, you can learn how to take control of your health and fitness goals on a budget. So don't let financial constraints hold you back - set yourself up for success with these 5 cost-effective methods to stay healthy and fit.
1. Shop Smarter - Eating healthy doesn't have to cost you a fortune. Take the time to research which stores offer discounts on organic and natural foods, and try shopping at local farmer's markets for fresh produce that won't leave your wallet feeling empty. Additionally, look for deals like BOGO (Buy One Get One) or bulk buying options at grocery stores to help you save money.
2. Get Moving - Exercise doesn't have to involve expensive gym memberships or fancy equipment. You can get just as much benefit from activities like walking, jogging, biking, and swimming that don't require any extra costs after the initial investment of a pair of shoes or swimsuit. Plus, these activities are free and easily accessible, so you can get your workouts in without having to worry about the price tag.
3. Try At-Home Workouts - If you prefer more structured workout sessions, there are plenty of free and affordable options available online. From yoga and Pilates to HIIT and strength training programs, the internet is full of resources that will help keep your fitness goals on track.
4. Get Creative with Meal Prep - It's easy to get into a meal prep rut but don't let that deter you from eating healthy on a budget. Instead of buying pre-packaged meals or ingredients, create your own recipes using pantry staples like dry beans and grains. This way, you'll save money while still enjoying nutritious meals.
5. Find Support - Having a support system is crucial when it comes to staying motivated and on track with your fitness goals. Ask friends or family members to join you in healthy activities like walks, hikes, cooking classes, or even just meal prepping together. Not only will this help keep you accountable and motivated, but it can also be a great way to bond and have fun. With a few simple changes, staying fit on a budget is easy!
By taking advantage of the free and low-cost options available, you can still achieve your fitness goals without breaking the bank. Remember to plan ahead, get creative with your meals and workouts, and don’t forget to find a support system that will help keep you on track. With these tips in mind, you’ll have no problem staying fit without spending too much. Good luck!
Happy fitness journey! :-)
Sunday, July 2, 2023
Moving Away From the Medical Control Grid | Childrens Health Defense
Moving Away From the Medical Control Grid | Childrens Health Defense
Friday, June 30, 2023
New forms of Oral Polio Virus
“We’ve designed these new vaccines using lessons learned from many years of fighting polio and believe they will help eliminate the disease once and for all,” Andino says. “If there’s polio anywhere, it will come back where there are gaps in vaccination. The perception that polio is gone is a dangerous one.”
‘Reckless in the Extreme’: FDA Panel Recommends New RSV Shot for Use in Healthy Infants • Children's Health Defense Fund
Treatment options continue to expand
To create the new vaccines, the researchers used the molecular backbone of their earlier vaccine for the type 2 virus. They retained the genetic components that help keep the weakened virus from becoming pathogenic. But they replaced coding regions for the virus capsid (shell) unique to the type 2 virus with sequences from the other two polio types.
Time has shown critics were wrong. This is only the beginning of a tug of war as others pursue gains from Pfizer-Moderna.
The oral polio vaccine is often used in resource-poor regions, due to its lower cost and easy delivery. The oral vaccine is also more effective in many ways, but it has a significant drawback: It is based on a live weakened poliovirus that can mutate and evolve. In rare cases, it can become infectious. This can lead to a vaccine-derived outbreak in communities with many unvaccinated people. There are three poliovirus types, with only type one still spreading in the wild. But episodes of all three types can still occur because of the vaccines.
Studies in mice showed that both novel vaccines triggered strong immune responses similar to those seen with the current oral vaccines. Each effectively prevented infection after exposure to the poliovirus.
Polio – a disease many have prematurely consigned to history – made headlines around the world in recent months when the virus was detected in relatively high-income country settings from New York, London, Montreal, and Jerusalem. This apparent comeback in polio-free countries has left many questioning the feasibility of eradication. On the contrary, we have never been closer to achieving our goal of a polio-free world: this resurgence only underscores the urgent need for eradication.
When the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) was launched in 1988, nearly 1,000 children were being paralyzed with wild poliovirus (WPV) infection across 125 countries every single day. Since then, a concerted effort of health workers, communities, local governments, and global partners such as Rotary International has helped eradicate two of the three serotypes of wild poliovirus (WPV2 and WPV3) and cornered the remaining strain of WPV – type 1 (WPV1) – to small areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan – the last wild polio-endemic countries. The genetic diversity of the remaining chains of WPV1 is also on the decline, indicating the virus might very well be on the verge of being wiped out.
However, this incredible progress is in jeopardy. Due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has seen a worrying drop in immunization rates over the past few years, creating pockets of under-immunized communities at heightened risk of polio infection and paralysis. Children missing polio vaccinations create opportunities for polio to re-emerge and spread – as seen in 2022 when WPV1 originating in Pakistan was detected in paralyzed children in Malawi and Mozambique. This episode served as a poignant reminder that as long as polio exists anywhere in the world, it remains a threat to people everywhere.
Persistently under-vaccinated communities are also at risk of outbreaks of vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPVs). These polio variants evolve from oral polio vaccines (OPVs), which use a weakened form of the virus to protect children from infection and act as a key tool for many countries to stop the spread of polio. When a vaccinated child sheds that weakened virus into the environment, it can help provide indirect protection for the entire community. However, in areas with persistently low immunization coverage, the weakened vaccine virus can circulate over a prolonged period, ultimately regaining the ability to cause paralytic outbreaks that can spread across geographies.
What do we do about it?
One technological solution to the VDPV situation is the development of OPV strains that are more genetically stable and therefore less likely to evolve into VDPVs. In 2011, a scientific consortium was formed to explore the development of a next-generation vaccine while still maintaining the advantages of existing OPV, such as ease of delivery and intestinal mucosal immunogenicity. As poliovirus serotype 2 strain has been associated with most of the paralytic polio outbreaks of cVDPVs, a new, type 2 OPV was selected as the initial focus of the consortium.
In November 2020, the novel oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2) was authorized under the Emergency Use Listing (EUL) pathway by the World Health Organization (WHO) following positive findings from phase I and phase II studies of safety, reactogenicity, immunogenicity, and the desired genetic stability. The rollout of nOPV2 for outbreak response began in March 2021 and since then, more than 580 million doses of nOPV2 have been delivered in 28 countries, with surveillance data from initial field use indicating a high likelihood of success at closing outbreaks with a lower risk of seeding the emergence of new ones.
Regardless of which polio vaccine is used to stop an outbreak, there must be high immunization coverage for all children to be protected against paralysis. Following the detection of an environmental sample or confirmation of a case of paralytic polio, outbreak response campaigns must be launched in a timely manner to reach all at-risk communities with vaccines. Coordination transcending geographic borders is also key, which is why countries currently at a high risk of polio spread – such as Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe – are synchronizing campaigns to help ensure that underserved and migrant communities are not missed. Readiness on the regulatory front to use a vaccine under EUL provisions as in the case of nOPV2 and maintaining adequate global supplies of such vaccines will be important in minimizing the risk of the spread of polio.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25824845/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32330425/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37317297/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24175215/
Wednesday, June 28, 2023
Novel vaccines may help quell polio outbreaks | National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Monday, June 26, 2023
Wednesday, June 21, 2023
Advanced Treatments for Refractory Treatment of Epilepsy
Advances in epilepsy diagnostics, and treatment return man to quality of life
For years, Eric Walthall of Woodville, Wisconsin, experienced more than 100 debilitating epileptic seizures a month. For more than 20 years, he couldn’t drive. He stopped attending many of his sons' activities because he feared a seizure would cause him to lose consciousness. He separated his shoulder twice and hit his head because seizures caused him to fall.
"I couldn't get through life much more," says Eric, now 53, who was diagnosed with epilepsy at 16. He had tried several medications and procedures, seeking care in five different states, with limited success over more than 30 years.
Still, when Eric came to Mayo Clinic in 2021, he had hope. "I knew Mayo was going to knock it out of the park," says Eric, who is seizure-free after extensive evaluation and eventual surgery.
Eric's complicated case was reported in Epilepsy & Behavior Reports. His treatment included radiofrequency ablation with high electrical current guided by stereoelectroencephalography (SEEG), which uses electrodes placed directly into Eric's brain to find where seizures originate.
Treatment options continue to expand
"Mr. Walthall's case was extraordinarily complex and required close teamwork from a multidisciplinary team," says Brian Lundstrom, M.D., Ph.D., Mayo Clinic neurologist and senior researcher on the report. "Fortunately, combined with recent advanced approaches, we were able to find and treat a specific area of Mr. Walthall's brain and control his seizures.”
Epilepsy affects about 50 million people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. For about a third of people with epilepsy, seizures persist despite use of medication. For some people, surgery to remove brain tissue where their seizures originate is not an option because of the potential risk to brain areas that control speech and movement.
Before coming to Mayo, Eric had tried various epilepsy treatments. He tried two neurostimulation devices that were implanted and ultimately removed — a vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) device and a responsive neurostimulation (RNS) device. While many patients have had success controlling seizures with neurostimulation devices, Eric did not.
He also had undergone extensive evaluations at other medical institutions. Eric's Mayo team incorporated a wide array of data from these previous tests. "It was critical for us to fully incorporate previous data into our current approaches to optimize seizure control for Mr. Walthall and minimize risk to his speech and motor functions from surgery," Dr. Lundstrom says.
Complicated epilepsy case
Kai Miller, M.D., Ph.D., Mayo Clinic neurosurgeon, used SEEG — temporarily putting small electrodes directly into Eric's brain to find the origin of Eric's seizures and help plan personalized treatment options. The Mayo Epilepsy team read the electrical changes in Eric's brain while he was being monitored in the hospital, narrowing the seizures' origin to a specific region of the brain.
Then, using the same temporary electrodes, Dr. Miller used a high electrical current called radiofrequency ablation to treat the brain area that the team identified. For some people, radiofrequency ablation will stop the seizures. But if it doesn’t, surgery still may be performed with no additional risk.
For Eric, the radiofrequency ablation treatment helped temporarily, and this was crucial in confirming the location in his brain for further surgery. He did go on to have surgery to remove part of his brain tissue where seizures were originating.
"Radiofrequency ablation allowed us to test the effect of disrupting the brain region where we believed the seizures were starting from, using electrodes that were already in place," Dr. Miller says. "The ablation gave us information to help weigh the benefits and risks of removing brain tissue in an open surgery; we always must balance the likelihood of a cure against possible risks of surgery. I'm thrilled that Eric's seizures have stopped and he's back to enjoying an active life."
Brain mapping
New technology has improved even traditional surgery for epilepsy. During the operation, Eric was awake, which allowed innovative brain mapping — using a Mayo-developed software tool — to ensure the surgery was as precise as could be to help preserve important brain functions, including language and movement.
In the operating room, Dr. Miller stimulated Eric's brain directly. Eric could speak with Dr. Miller and Eva Alden, Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic neuropsychologist, who administered tests to Eric and compared Eric’s presurgery responses to his abilities during the surgery.
"By assessing and monitoring Eric's responses during surgery, I could provide real-time feedback about his cognitive performance," Dr. Alden says. "This helped Dr. Miller gauge whether it was safe to continue operating in that part of the brain, or whether removing it could potentially result in a functional deficit of language or movement."
Eric recovered in the hospital for a week and had speech and occupational therapy.
'This is a blessing now
Today, Eric is back to driving. He and his wife, Melissa — Eric's chauffeur for years — are figuring out their new normal. Eric was able to take a trip to Canada last fall with his hunting buddies. He returned to downhill skiing, a hobby he had given up. Most importantly, he's able to enjoy family time, in the stands at his younger son's high school basketball games or visiting his older son in college.
"There was a lot of emotional pain and suffering, missing out over the years," says Eric, adding, "This is a blessing now. I give all the credit for my healing to my faith in God and the support of my family and friends and doctors."
For Eric, seeing someone else experience a seizure inspired him to share his story. Once, in a patient reception area, he saw a young girl convulse with a seizure. "Boom, she had one. My eyes welled up. I thought, 'If I ever get better, I want to be an ambassador to show what's possible.'"
The realm of what's possible for patients with epilepsy continues to expand, notes Dr. Lundstrom. Including RNS and VNS, there are other forms of stimulation including noninvasive stimulation and deep brain stimulation for epilepsy. In addition to radiofrequency ablation, there are minimally invasive lasers and guided ultrasound treatment. New research includes studies to predict seizures using wearables, like a smartwatch.
"From a research perspective, it is very exciting to see new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches developed every year," Dr. Lundstrom says. "Even better, though, is to see the difference they can make in a patient's life."
Wednesday, June 14, 2023
How Artificial Intelligence such as ChatGPT will aid in Cancer Treatments
This content was generated by ChatGPT4
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the prognosis for cancer has shown great promise in improving the management of cancer patients. AI techniques, such as machine learning and deep learning, have the potential to analyze large amounts of data derived from multi-omics analyses and assist in decision-making processes related to cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment [[1](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41416-021-01633-1)][[3](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31830558/)].
AI in precision oncology is transforming the current approach by integrating data from various sources, including genomics, imaging, and clinical information. These techniques enable the identification of patterns and interactions that may be difficult to detect through traditional methods [[1](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41416-021-01633-1)]. Radiomics, a field within AI, focuses on extracting quantitative features from medical images, such as CT scans and MRI, to create predictive models for cancer diagnosis and prognosis. Radiomics-based AI models have shown promise in predicting cancer outcomes and guiding treatment decisions [[2](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-021-00560-7)].
By leveraging AI algorithms, researchers and clinicians can develop predictive models that consider multiple factors and biomarkers, providing a more accurate prognosis for cancer patients. These models can help in assessing disease progression, determining the risk of recurrence, and guiding personalized treatment plans [[3](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31830558/)].
Some specific applications of AI in cancer prognosis include:
1. Cancer Detection and Screening: AI algorithms can assist in the detection of cancer by analyzing medical imaging data. Deep learning models have demonstrated high accuracy in detecting lung nodules in chest radiographs [[2](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-021-00560-7)]. AI-based screening systems have also been evaluated for breast cancer screening, showing potential in improving detection rates [[2](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-021-00560-7)].
2. Prognostic Prediction: AI models can help predict the prognosis of cancer patients by analyzing various clinical and molecular features. These models take into account factors such as tumor characteristics, genomic profiles, and clinical data to estimate the likelihood of disease progression and overall survival [[1](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41416-021-01633-1)][[3](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31830558/)].
3. Treatment Response Assessment: AI techniques can aid in assessing treatment response and distinguishing between true disease progression and pseudoprogression (an imaging phenomenon that mimics tumor growth). This information can guide treatment decisions and prevent unnecessary interventions [[2](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-021-00560-7)].
While AI shows great potential in improving cancer prognosis, there are challenges to be addressed. The development and validation of robust AI models require large and diverse datasets, access to high-quality data, and careful consideration of ethical and regulatory aspects. Integration of AI into clinical practice also requires careful validation, standardization, and ongoing refinement to ensure its reliability and effectiveness [[3](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31830558/)].
In conclusion, the use of AI in prognosis for cancer holds promise for improving patient outcomes. AI techniques, such as machine learning and deep learning, can analyze complex data sets and provide valuable insights for personalized treatment strategies. Continued research and development in this field have the potential to revolutionize cancer care and enhance the accuracy of prognosis prediction in the future.
Monday, June 12, 2023
Medical Freedom Panel 2023 - Senator Mastriano- State of Pennsylvania
Friday, June 9, 2023
‘Reckless in the Extreme’: FDA Panel Recommends New RSV Shot for Use in Healthy Infants • Children's Health Defense
Reckless in the Extreme’: FDA Panel Recommends New RSV Shot for Use in Healthy Infants
Advisors to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Thursday recommended approval of AstraZeneca’s new monoclonal antibody, which the drugmaker said is designed to protect infants and toddlers up to age 2 from respiratory syncytial virus, but medical experts interviewed by The Defender called the move “reckless” and “preposterous.”
This is the Waste from a Surgery
Hospitals produce an enormous amount of waste. Much of it is a biological hazard from infectious diseases, blood products, and as a result of operations.