Health Tip: Who's at Greater Risk for Heat-Related Illness

Health Tip

Heat-related illness occurs when the body can't cool itself during extremely hot and humid conditions. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, certain people are at greater risk, including:

• Infants and young children up to 4 years of age.
• People aged 65 and older.
• People who are significantly overweight or obese.
• People who overexert themselves or don't drink enough fluids.
• People with high blood pressure, heart disease, and those who take certain medications for depression, insomnia or poor circulation.

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New vaccine may beat bird flu before it starts

Researchers studying bird flu viruses said on Thursday they may have come up with a way to vaccinate people before a feared influenza pandemic. Experts have long said there is no way to vaccinate people against a new strain of influenza until that strain evolves. That could mean months or even years of disease and death before a vaccination campaign began.

But a team at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Maryland and the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta said they may have found a short-cut. The vaccine might protect people against the mutation that would change the H5N1 avian flu virus from a germ affecting mostly birds to one that infects people easily, the NIAID's Dr. Gary Nabel and colleagues report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

"If we can define what changes need to be made to make that jump then we can target the immune system to that spot on the virus," Nabel said in a telephone interview.

"It gives us a chance to develop vaccines or monoclonal antibodies ... to really work in a preemptive way to be prepared."

Monoclonal antibodies, often used against cancer, are engineered immune system proteins that specifically attack proteins on a tumor or, in this case, on the flu virus.

"While nobody knows if and when H5N1 will jump from birds to humans, they have come up with a way to anticipate how that jump might occur and ways to respond to it," National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Elias Zerhouni said in a statement.

source : news.yahoo.com

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Health Care : Flu killed 68 children this season

Influenza killed at least 68 children in America during the latest flu season and a third of them had a worrying new complication, U.S. health officials said on Thursday. The 2006-2007 annual flu season never reached epidemic stage, but doctors should keep a lookout for such dangerous cases in children, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

The CDC issued an alert in May for deaths of children who were infected with both flu and a bacteria called Staphylococcus aureus, or staph. It said 21 of the children who died also had such infections, some of them resistant to antibiotics. "Only one pediatric death with influenza and S. aureus coinfection had been reported during 2004-05, and three had been reported during the 2005-06 season," the CDC report said.

Staph and other bacterial infections can complicate flu and make the disease more likely to kill and the number of antibiotic-resistant staph infections is on the rise.

More than 90 percent of the children who died in the latest season had not been vaccinated against flu, the CDC said. Flu vaccination is recommended for children aged 6 months to 5 years old, for anyone with chronic conditions such as asthma, and for people aged over 64.

Seasonal flu kills an estimated 36,000 people a year in the United States, most of them elderly. Last year 41 children who died from flu were reported to the CDC, although the agency stresses that reporting is not routine yet and it is misleading to compare deaths from one season to another.

The CDC is still trying to build an accurate picture of an average flu season in the United States but it is difficult because doctors do not often even test patients for respiratory diseases, much less report them to the federal government.

But because health experts suspect a pandemic -- a serious global epidemic -- of influenza is potentially imminent, the CDC is struggling to gather as much information as possible about flu now.

source : news.yahoo.com

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