Category Archives: Health and Medicine

Get you love drunk off my hump

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In the basement of our North Dakota headquarters we employ a small but elite team or researchers designated the “SMU.” Their sole job is to predict “the next big thing,” and they are rarely wrong. You see, our marketing department has indicated that based on focus group feedback, readers that visit our site will flock to other blogs the minute we fall behind on what’s happening in the world around us. They will leave us the minute we aren’t ahead of the curve on “what’s cool.” Therefore, whenever the SMU staff starts “rattling their cages,” they know they will have my full attention. I predict that the next big thing (and you are hearing it on our blog first) is…Camel Milk:

While slightly saltier than cow’s milk, camel milk is highly nutritious. Designed after all for animals that live in some of the roughest environments, it is three times as rich in Vitamin C as cow’s milk.

In Russia, Kazakhstan and India doctors often prescribe it to convalescing patients. Aside from Vitamin C, it is known to be rich in iron, unsaturated fatty acids and B vitamins.

Tapping the market for camel milk, however, involves resolving a series of humps in production, manufacturing and marketing. One problem lies in the milk itself, which has so far not proved to be compatible with the UHT (Ultra High Temperature) treatment needed to make it long lasting.

But the main challenge stems from the fact that the producers involved are, overwhelmingly, nomads.

Another problem, according to the FAO, is the nature of the animal itself. Camels can reputedly be pretty stubborn. And unlike cows, which store all their milk in their udders, camels keep theirs further up their bodies. [Link]

Now I know that some of you might not like milk of any kind. Some people just don’t. My mom for example never drinks milk. But what about chocolate? Everybody likes chocolate…

An easier sell would appear to be the low-fat, camel milk chocolate, which A Vienna-based chocolatier, Johann Georg Hochleitner intends to launch a low-fat, camel milk chocolate this autumn. With funding from the Abu Dhabi royal family, his company plans to make the chocolate in Austria from powdered camel milk produced at Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates, then ship 50 tons back to the Gulf each month. [Link]

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Baby, Baby…

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In the realm of health policy, the low birth weight of babies is used as a primary measure in infant health as well as welfare in economic research.

Low birthweight affects about one in every 13 babies born each year in the United States. It is a factor in 65 percent of infant deaths. [link]
[R]esearch has found that [low birth weight] infants tend to have lower educational attainment, poorer self-reported health status, and reduced employment and earnings as adults, relative to their normal weight counterparts…[B]irth weight has been used to evaluate the effectiveness of social policy. Research on the benefits of largescale social programs–including welfare and health insurance for the poor–typically use birth weight as the primary indicator of infant welfare. [link]

I would like to point out at this moment that I was a healthy 9 pound baby when I was born, well above low birth weight levels, thank you very much. Unfortunately when the time comes for me to have a baby, as a ‘U.S.-born Asian Indian woman’, I run a high risk of having a low birth weight infant, according to recent research coming out of Stanford.

U.S.-born Asian-Indian women are more likely than their Mexican-American peers to deliver low birth weight infants, despite having fewer risk factors, say researchers at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital and Stanford’s School of Medicine. The finding confirms previous research that showed a similar pattern in more recent immigrants, and suggests that physicians should consider their patients’ ethnic backgrounds when planning their care…They found that Asian-Indian women were more than twice as likely to have low birth weight infants as were white women. These infants weigh 2,500 grams (about 5.5 pounds) or less at birth, either because they grew poorly in the womb or were born prematurely.[link]

These results are important in the realm of South Asian American health policy and are significant, at least should be significant, as to how prenatal care for desi women are implemented. As a desi woman, it is important to be informed of this issue and as a policy maker, it has inherent long term effect in our community.

“You might ask, ‘What’s so bad about being small?'” said Madan, who points out that the growth curves used for this and other similar studies are based on white infants. “Is this just normal for Asian Indians? But we’re concerned because we know that abnormally small babies run a higher risk of fetal distress and often require more intensive medical care and longer hospital stays after birth.”

In addition, unusually small babies are known to be at higher risk for a variety of medical problems in adulthood, including diabetes, hypertension and an increased risk of heart disease – conditions that some studies have reported to be higher in Asian Indians. [link]

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National Sexual Assault Awareness Month

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April is National Sexual Assault Awareness Month. To promote this important issue Lifetime Channel has descended upon Washington DC for “Stop Violence Against Women Week” going on now (April 3rd-7th) with a list of events worthy of Capitol Hill. This past summer, Lifetime dedicated a week around issues of human trafficking and they are interestingly using their media access to promote issues affecting women. I think this is great. It is rare that a television channel will make that kind of a commitment to their viewers. Violence against women is not just important to Lifetime viewers, but is an important issue in the upcoming midterm election as well:

According to a new “Lifetime Women’s Pulse Poll,” conducted for the network by Roper Poll, when women and men vote in the mid-term elections this fall, expected issues such as homeland security, jobs and the economy and the war in Iraq will be very important, but an issue that receives far less attention — preventing violence against women and girls — will be just as, if not more, important to them.[link]

As we all have read, violence against women can often hit closer to home than can ever be expected. It takes a powerful woman to live through the experience and an even more powerful woman to be able to share their personal story. In addition to the personal experiences, the statistics out there on violence against women are alarming:

  • One in three women worldwide will be beaten, raped, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime.[link]
  • One in four girls will be sexually assaulted before the age of 18.[link]
  • An estimated 1 million women are stalked each year in the US, with about 1/4 of them reporting missing an average of 11 days of work as a result of the stalking.[link]
  • Researchers Anita Raj and Jay Silverman discovered that more than 40% of the 160 South Asian women living in Greater Boston they surveyed indicated that they were victims of intimate partner violence, and only 50% of women who experienced intimate partner violence were aware of services available to help. [link]

What is unfortunate to see is the taboo in the South Asian American community when there is violence against our women. But the important thing is, you are not alone. There is a national network of South Asian women’s organizations out there to support our survivors of the trauma of sexual assault.

Sakhi, based in New York City and a partnering organization to the Lifetime campaign, provides language specific culturally sensitive services to South Asian women because..

  • Abused immigrant women may hesitate to reach out to police, shelters, courts, and mainstream violence agencies due to barriers of language, financial constraints, and fear of deportation;
  • Women that reach out to Sakhi may be abused not only by their husbands, but also by in-laws and other family members; and,
  • Survivors may face the cultural stigma and shame of divorce in the community, and be told that it is their “duty” to keep the family and marriage intact, despite abuse. [link]

But New York City isn’t the only place with with access to these South Asian specific organizations, there is a national network of organizations listed here, and for our Canadian sisters here, here, and here. In Chicago, there’s Apn Ghar which has served over 5400 clients since 2000. SAHELI Boston is working on a newly launched Men’s Initative, to bring men into the dialogue. Maitri in the San Jose area has volunteers that speak Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Marwari, Oriya, Punjabi, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. ASHA in the DC area has recently intitated a partnership to find employment for survivors of domestic abuse. There are a lot of resources out there specifically towards our community, and almost all of these organizations have a toll-free hotline, multi-lingual support, assistance to find shelter, and referral to social, legal and mental health services.

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Root canals sucked even worse back then

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Via our newsline we see that Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature has a paper out which indicates that dentistry may be one of the world’s oldest professions. The paper, which has an Italian as the lead author, is titled Early Neolithic Tradition of Dentistry (paid subscription required). Now when we are old uncles/aunties we can brag to our children that South Asians invented denistry also.

Proving prehistoric man’s ingenuity and ability to withstand and inflict excruciating pain, researchers have found that dental drilling dates back 9,000 years.

Primitive dentists drilled nearly perfect holes into live but undoubtedly unhappy patients between 5500 B.C. and 7000 B.C., an article in Thursday’s journal Nature reports. Researchers carbon-dated at least nine skulls with 11 drill holes found in a Pakistan graveyard.

That means dentistry is at least 4,000 years older than first thought — and far older than the useful invention of anesthesia.

This was no mere tooth tinkering. The drilled teeth found in the graveyard were hard-to-reach molars. And in at least one instance, the ancient dentist managed to drill a hole in the inside back end of a tooth, boring out toward the front of the mouth. [Link]

My whole life I had looked down on people with multiple cavities because I had never had one. I usually snubbed these “enamelly challenged” because I saw them as being weak and unable to resist candy. I got my just desserts though. Last year I got my first (and I swear it will be my last) cavity. By the time the doctor was done she had pulled two of my innocent teeth just to get to the offending tooth which she then reconstructed with a crown. My wisdom teeth surgery was even worse (warning: NSDL). Apparently they were like upside down. I can’t even begin to imagine how people were able to withstand the pain in the Neolithic.

The site of Mehrgarh in Baluchistan lies along the principal route connecting Afghanistan to the Indus valley. After intermittent occupations by hunter-gatherers, Mehrgarh’s subsistence economy shifted to the cultivation of barley and wheat, cotton domestication and cattle breeding. Diachronic archaeological evidence records an increasingly rich cultural life, with technological sophistication based on diverse raw materials. Excavation of the Neolithic cemetery known as MR3 yielded more than 300 graves created over a 1,500-year time span…

Whatever the purpose, tooth drilling on individuals buried at MR3 continued for about 1,500 years, indicating that dental manipulation was a persistent custom. After 6,500 yr BP, the practice must have ceased, as there is no evidence of tooth drilling from the subsequent MR2 Chalcolithic cemetery, despite the continuation of poor dental health. [Link]

Teeth are the greatest find in any paleontological/archeological expedition. Measuring istope ratios can even tell you what the people ate. I keep two of my old teeth on my desk at home. This is just in case my body is lost during some adventure and someone wants to learn about my lifestyle when I was still alive.

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IndianDonating.com

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This NYT story about single women attempting artificial insemination explains what happens when a 38-year-old, blond, female advertising exec starts browsing sperm donor profiles. Yup, one of them turns out to be desi:

She loves dandy lions

As I sat across her desk, she pulled up the donors’ descriptions on her computer. One was Indian: “He’s got black straight hair,” she told me, “brown eyes, he’s six feet but he only weighs 150. Which is good. If I have a girl, she wants to be skinny, and if she can eat what she wants, that’s perfect. You don’t have to get in fights about food.” The Indian donor’s complexion was described as “medium/dark,” and he had proven fertility. He had a master’s degree in business. He was bilingual, Hindu, single and liked traveling and music. His family-health history looked good. [Link]

I can see their first meeting now. He comes out of the kitchen in a salwar kameez with a dupatta over his head, tea tray in hand, eyes downcast and shy. She ticks ‘wheatish complexion’ on her clipboard and says, ‘Beta, please walk around the room’ to make sure he’s not lame. She opens his mouth and checks his molars, hocks and withers.

Sure, everything looks good on paper now, but what happens 18 years down the road? They need to put out a public health warning:

YOUR TALL, STUDLY HADESI CHILD
MAY GROW UP ADDICTED TO
BADMINTON, PAAN AND TEEN PATTI

This story shouldn’t surprise anyone though. With the conservative public morés of traditional desi culture, hundreds of millions of desi men happily spill surplus gametes outside the regular channels. But this chap was the only one enterprising enough to get paid for it.

Is he desi? Oh, indubitably.

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The Short Kiss Goodnight

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How to dispose of a dead body is carefully prescribed by religion. Burial is popular in the U.S., but a new book called Body Brokers makes clear that unregulated burials shunt body parts into a ghoulish trade. In a morbid sense, it’s a triumph of capitalism:

Every year human corpses meant for anatomy classes, burial, or cremation find their way into the hands of a shadowy group of entrepreneurs who profit by buying and selling human remains. While the government has controls on organs and tissue meant for transplantation, these “body brokers” capitalize on the myriad other uses for dead bodies that receive no federal oversight whatsoever: commercial seminars to introduce new medical gadgetry; medical research studies and training courses; and U.S. Army land-mine explosion tests. A single corpse used for these purposes can generate up to $10,000. [Link]

The corpses — including those donated for medical research and those left unclaimed at morgues — “are cut up into parts, not unlike chickens, and distributed through a complex network of suppliers, brokers and buyers,” Cheney writes…

… she takes a tour of a factory where crushed human bone is turned into precision-tooled orthopedic tools… their loved ones are destined for, among other things, testing of anti-mine protective armor… she tells the grim story of how mishandled bodily tissue killed a young man who underwent a routine orthopedic operation using bone from a cadaver. The killer? Deadly bacteria from the bone’s donor, a young man who shot himself and went undiscovered for almost a day. [Link]

Many Hindus and Buddhists practice cremation due to hygiene and beliefs about detachment and reincarnation. However, Christian and Muslim theologians have long opposed the practice, Christians because of a belief in literal resurrection:

Many people thought cremation was at best irreligious and at worst barbaric. The strongest opponents came from the Catholic Church which banned cremation for its members in 1886, and did not finally remove the ban until the 1960s. [Link]

In an Instruction issued in 1926, the Holy Office [of the Vatican] referred to cremation as “a barbaric custom . . . a practice repugnant to the natural sense of reverence due to the dead.” [Link]

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TGN1412

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TGN1412 is the current designation given to a trial drug that is being tested in the UK as a treatment for leukemia. The first human trial resulted in some horrific results earlier today. First the background though:

Another human trial gone horribly wrong

Two men were in critical condition Wednesday in a London hospital and four others were seriously ill after taking a new drug in a trial supervised by a Waltham, Mass.-based company.

British regulators ordered the immediate suspension of tests of the drug, developed to treat autoimmune and inflammatory diseases and leukemia.

“Two patients remain critical and four patients are serious but showing some signs of improvement,” Ganesh Suntharalingam, clinical director of intensive care at Northwick Park Hospital, said in a statement. “The drug, which is untested and therefore unused by doctors, has caused an inflammatory response which affects some organs of the body…” [Link]

Here is how things took a turn into science fiction territory and became plain scary for the volunteers:

The girlfriend of a man fighting for life after taking part in a pharmaceuticals trial has said the drugs he was given have left him looking “like the Elephant Man”.

“His chest is puffed out. He is already a big kind of guy but his face is out here, like Elephant Man, it’s completely puffed.

She added: “They haven’t got a cure. This is not leukaemia. This is a drug they have never tested on humans before so they don’t know what they are dealing with. It’s completely messed up their vital organs…” [Link]

A couple of the hospitalized volunteers appear to have been of South Asian origin. Continue reading →

Chikungunya

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One of the scenarios that pessimists foresee for the new century involves a rapid spread of disease due to population growth, habitat erosion, migration, travel and trade. Already this year, the avian flu H5N1 has reached Europe and Africa; its jump-in-progress to human beings has got the Cassandras clucking. Between this, killer mudslides and embryonic civil wars, 2006 is already proving a fine year for catastrophists — and it’s not even two months old.

In the desi-heavy islands of the Indian Ocean, another odd little disease is on the move. Chikungunya is a mosquito-borne infection that produces high fever, rashes, and intense joint pain. It has no known cure, only symptomatic treatment. It was not thought to kill, but since an epidemic broke out a year ago in the French territory of Reunion, it has caused at least 77 deaths.

In Reunion, “chik” has hit 115,000 people out of a total population of 750,000, and the French media are calling the government to task for its passive response to a crisis in an overseas territory/colony. For those who read French, today’s portfolio of stories in Liberation is edifying.

“I’ve never seen people in such pain,” says Dr. Jean-Luc Yvin, chief of internal medicine … [T]he symptoms of “chik,” as it’s now called, have evolved. “In the first phase last March, we were dealing with simple, typical symptoms: fever, joint pain and rashes. Then the epidemic slowed in May, and we were still getting sporadic, typical cases,” Yvin says. Since the end of 2005, when the epidemic flared up, the symptoms have grown richer. The specialist lists them: skin disorders, mouth sores, digestive ulcers… Joint symptoms seem more severe, with full-fledged arthritis in the hands and feet. And complications never previously described in the literature have appeared: encephalitis, myocardia, hepatitis… [my translation]

In nearby Mauritius, chikungunya has made fewer inroads but anxiety is high. There are 1,700 suspected cases so far this year. According to the Mauritius press, political leaders are responding in classic fashion to the threat to public health and to the nation’s large tourism industry:

Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam denounced foreign press ‘propaganda’ about the virus during a ceremony to mark the 70th anniversary of the [Labour Party]. For his part, Pravind Jugnauth, leader of the [opposition] MSM, was critical of the government, particularly the initiatives of the health ministry in this period of Shiva Maharatree. [my translation]

The Seychelles, Comoros, and Madagascar have all been touched by chik and South Africa, an air gateway to the region, is keeping a close watch. There are also direct flights between Mauritius and Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai.

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A mass grave of a different feather

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I’m really busy today but I still want to put a topic out there that is worth discussing. This means that I’m going to have to resort to some lazy blogging. Please forgive my complacence. Every blogger knows that a good picture is worth a thousand words and can bail you out from time to time:

A good poster for vegetarianism

A veterinarian doctor puts chickens into a pit for burial at Navapur, in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, Monday, Feb. 20, 2006. Farmers burned their dead chickens and health officials went door-to-door Monday in western India for signs of people infected with the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus as a massive poultry slaughtering operation entered its second day. (AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh)… [Link]

The slaughter seems pretty bad already and may get a lot worse:

The bird flu is taking grip of the world slowly and steadily. Because of massive population density in India and to some extent china/South East Asia, these countries may plunge into a deep deflationery depression cycle. According to some experts, in India, people and poultry live close to each other. In the country side most families keep poultry for eggs. With a serious break out of bird flue, India can lose 18% of its population within the first year. If the outbreak is not controlled, 38% of the population can be affected.

According to media reports, a poultry farmer has died of suspected bird flu in western India, where the country’s first outbreak of the H5N1 avian flu virus has been confirmed. [Link]

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No Ice Please

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One stereotypical but reliable way to distinguish a FOB from an ABCD is their attitude towards ice. Whereas an ABCD will load their drinks cup up with ice before filling it, a FOB will (usually) leave their cup entirely devoid of crushed frozen water.

Mmmmm … bacteria!

To some extent this is about thrift – why pay for ice when you could be getting more coke – but largely this is a vestigial health mechanism, left over from a childhood in a third world country where ice was unsanitary and teeming with dangerous bacteria. In the USA, it’s superstition, plain and simple.

Or is it? A 7th grader in Tampa Florida decided to compare the bacteria in the ice at a fastfood restaurant to the bacteria in its toilets. Her findings:

Roberts set out to test her hypothesis, selecting five fast food restaurants, within a ten-mile radius of the University of South Florida. Roberts says at each restaurant she flushed the toilet once, the[n] used sterile gloves to gather samples. Roberts also collected ice from soda fountains inside the five fast food restaurants. She also asked for cups of ice at the same restaurant’s drive thru windows.

Jasmine Roberts: “I found that 70-percent of the time, the ice from the fast food restaurant’s contain more bacteria than the fast food restaurant’s toilet water…” [Link]

Note that the ice is not necessarily more unsanitary than the toilet water because bacteria is not necessarily a bad thing. For example, bacteria in yogurt is good for you. Most types of bacteria are benign and the ice in question probably has high levels of harmless bacteria in it. Toilet water may have lower levels of aggregate bacteria (because they are regularly disinfected) but still higher levels of unhealthy bacteria, so you don’t want to start emulating your dog just yet.

In short, her study is far from an argument that fast food ice is unhealthy. Still, I suspect that the ice at a fast food restaurant probably is kinda gross (via Boing Boing).

Related Posts: How to befriend a vegetarian

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