Housework is responsible for 10 to 15 per cent of the skin problems that send people to their doctors. Many scrubbing powders contain abrasives – pumice, talc, sand, borax, corn-meal or wood powder – that are dynamite against ground-in oil, grease, tar and other stubborn dirt but also very rough on allergic skin. Seventy to 75 per cent of laundry detergents in the UK contain enzymes, proteins with allergic potential. And practically all laundry soaps contain additives such as sodium carbonate, sodium phosphate, ash, borax or sodium silicate -which may irritate even if they don’t trigger allergy directly. And of course, soaps and detergents contain fragrances, which are just as liable to cause allergy as the scents in cosmetics.

Besides causing allergy directly, soaps and detergents enhance other allergies. These cleansers break down keratin, the tough protein component of skin, and the protective surface oils, therefore speeding up the absorption of allergic chemicals through the skin.

One woman, who has been highly allergic to such substances as pollen, moulds and foods from early childhood, told us that she had been spared the miseries of skin allergies until around 1970, when enzymes became the ‘in’ laundry additives. Her legs broke out in oozing, weeping eczema like rashes. She remains free of the problem, however, as long as she uses only enzyme-free detergents.

You, too, can spare yourself the agonies of allergy to soaps and detergents by following a few simple guidelines.

• Buy only white, unscented soap that’s free of antiseptics, lanolin, enzymes and so forth. Baby soaps and soaps for washable woolens and fine fabrics are the safest.

• In general, simple, basic formulas are less prone to cause reactions than complex ones. Read labels.

• Even the mildest laundry soaps and detergents must be thoroughly rinsed from clothing and bed sheets.

• Pour or measure detergents or bleaches carefully so that they don’t splash on to your hands and arms. Or buy bleach sold in tablet form or packaged in premeasured envelopes.

• During the winter, when dry air makes skin more easily irritated by clothing, presoak laundry and use about half the amount of detergent the manufacturers recommend.

• Remove your rings when washing or using soaps, waxes and polishes to avoid trapping soap next to skin.

• Better yet, use protective gloves to do any kind of housework. For wet jobs, use rubber gloves over powdered cotton gloves to prevent excessive perspiration. To reduce irritation, wear the gloves for thirty minutes at a time rather than pulling them on and off several times in the course of a day. Even with protective gloves, don’t make the scrub water too hot; the heat will penetrate and irritate your hands.

• For dusting or other dry, dirty housework, wear cotton gloves to keep your hands from getting too dirty. That way you don’t have to scrub your hands with soaps to get them clean again.

• Use long-handled brushes as much as possible to keep sensitive skin on arms from being splashed with hot, soapy water or paints, varnishes and lacquers.

Incidentally, the tips suggested above will be helpful whether your skin is allergic or just easily irritated. And they’ll help you tolerate contact with other sources of chemicals besides soaps and detergents.

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Posted by admin on April 7th, 2009 :: Filed under Allergies
Tags :: Allergies

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Staying clear of our lively winged assailants isn’t always easy, but there are several steps you can take to minimize the chances that you will tangle with a stinging or biting insect.

How to avoid bee stings

• Stay away from beehives and known nests. Call a beekeeper or the local council if bees choose your immediate environment to form a colony.

• Have wasp and hornet nests removed while they are still small enough to handle.

• Persons allergic to insects should be wary of power mowing, hedge clipping, scything and the like.

• Avoid looking and smelling like a flower during bee-sting season: avoid bright-coloured clothing. Light green, white, tan and khaki are the safest colours. Forswear perfumes and sweet-smelling lotions, creams, shampoos and hairsprays if you plan to be outdoors.

• Don’t wear floppy clothing, and do tie up long hair; both can entangle the stinging insects and anger them into doing their worst.

• Don’t go barefoot or wear sandals – the foot is vulnerable. Stay away from clover patches, flower gardens and other places where bees are busy.

• Keep an insecticide spray in the glove compartment of the car (along with the insect-sting kit) for use if a bee flies in, a very common occurrence.

• If an attack seems imminent, do not swat at the bee or bees and do not flail your arms. Retreat slowly, keep calm and make no sudden movement. If retreat is impossible, lie down and cover your head with your arms.

• Be wary of litter bins and rotting fruit under trees -favorite attractions for bees and wasps.

• Discourage allergic youngsters from eating sweets, ice cream cones and drinking soft drinks outdoors during warm months. They attract bees, wasps and hornets.

How to avoid ant stings

• Avoid anthills and mounds.

• Keep arms, legs and feet covered since they are the areas most frequently stung.

• Do not leave food uncovered or uncontained within the house, since this is an open invitation to ants.

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Posted by admin on April 7th, 2009 :: Filed under Allergies
Tags :: Allergies

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In one of the most comprehensive studies of drug allergy ever conducted – the Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program – doctors collected data from patients in ten hospitals in the United States, plus eight foreign hospitals, covering 22,227 people in all. The results show which drugs most often cause skin reactions (itching, rashes, hives and so on). It’s important to note that women reacted 50 per cent more frequently than men, and that the severity of a person’s illness had no bearing on how likely he or she was to react.

Penicillin. This is not one drug but a general name for a group of antibiotics. Different types of penicillin, made from special moulds, control specific types of bacterial infections -making penicillins the most useful and widely prescribed drugs in the world. Doctors find, however, that from 1 to 10 per cent of the population is allergic to penicillin. Fortunately, most reactions are mild. The chance of a dramatic, explosive reaction is relatively remote; the odds are somewhere between 1 and 4 in 10,000. Even then, only 2 in 100,000 of these result in death. The remainders are kept in check by emergency medical action. (Strangely enough, people who are allergic to penicillin moulds, such as those sometimes found in cheese or around the house, can generally tolerate penicillin.)

Doctors have begun to realize that many people who think they’re allergic to penicillin aren’t really allergic to it after all. Penicillin allergy, it seems, often fades with time if the drug is avoided. Researchers at the Clinical Research Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, tested 300 children who were reputedly allergic to penicillin, to find that only 19 per cent were indeed allergic. The authors conclude that the incidence of penicillin allergy is over-estimated, and that the allergy is not necessarily permanent.

In a similar study, a team of two doctors and a nurse tested nineteen children who had been judged allergic to penicillin three to five years earlier and found only five were still allergic (Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology).

In still another study, researchers tested almost 800 people presumably allergic to penicillin. Nearly half of them were no longer allergic (Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology).

These studies don’t mean you should throw caution to the wind and disregard any bad experience you may have had with penicillin. On the contrary: it’s important to know if you have an authentic, active allergy to penicillin. Certain conditions – for example, serious infections, a chronic disease such as cystic fibrosis or venereal disease — depend heavily on penicillin for their medical management. In such cases, doctors conduct a skin test with benzylpenicilloyl-polylysine (called Pre-Pen), which they consider to be the most accurate, lowest risk predictor available for penicillin allergy. Sometimes a doctor can manage penicillin allergy by giving stepped doses of penicillin to desensitize an individual to the drug. If using penicillin is out of the question, the doctor will look for a safe substitute.

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Posted by admin on April 7th, 2009 :: Filed under Allergies
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Pesticide spraying is by no means confined to overhead spraying of agricultural crops. Homes, schools, theatres, public buildings and camps are often sprayed – sometimes daily.

In fact, the smorgasbord of household pesticides sitting on the grocery shelf next to the mops and pet foods gives us a false sense of security about their safety. Few people realize they are applying highly toxic chemicals to their environment, so if we’re going to beef about supermarket oranges blitzed with malathion, we shouldn’t use pesticides in our own backyards and kitchen cupboards, either.

Exotic, six-syllable chemicals aren’t the only pesticides that can cause trouble. Many household insecticides contain pyrethrum, a perfectly natural product made from the flower of a plant related to ragweed. If you’re allergic to ragweed, you’re apt to be allergic to pyrethrum, too. All of which prompts Dr Randolph to warn, ‘Never, never use a pesticide indoors.’

If it comes down to either having the termites in your house exterminated or waiting for the timbers to crash down around you, ask the exterminator to apply the chemicals directly to the nest rather than zapping the entire house. If the firm won’t do that, find one that will. And have any extermination done right before you go on holiday so fumes have a chance to lie down while you’re away.

You may even be able to escape overhead spraying outdoors. A woman in Texas who is extremely sensitive to chemicals tells us: ‘The little town I live in fogs for mosquitoes. I was hit with the fumes six times before I finally convinced them that they had to call me before they started fogging. I told them that if they hit me again, they might as well not send an ambulance they should send the hearse instead. Now they have a sign on the fogger that says “Do not remove this machine from the garage without calling Mrs Scherzer.”

‘This year,’ she continued, ‘the town itself wasn’t spraying, but the county was. And the county man would come around and knock on my door at nine a.m. and say, “We’re going to fog this area at six o’clock this evening.” That would give me enough time to leave town. I’d spend a couple of days with my daughter or mother-in-law until the stuff got out of the air.’

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Posted by admin on April 7th, 2009 :: Filed under Allergies
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Sooner or later, you’re going to eat something you shouldn’t — largely because eating is not only a nutritional duty but a social and aesthetic experience. Dinners are shared in other people’s homes. Birthdays and anniversaries are celebrated in restaurants. So are business lunches, even family get-togethers. (We won’t even mention holidays!) Few people have 100 per cent control over their diet all the time. Besides, nobody likes to be a killjoy. So you eat the cheese dip or chicken croquettes and hope for the best. Thankfully, there are a few emergency measures you can use to undo your errors. An ice pack will take the sting out of the hot and pounding lip discomfort of a food reaction. For more generalized symptoms, you can force yourself to vomit recently eaten food by sticking your fingers down your throat. Sounds unpleasant, we know. But quick and lasting relief is worth a few seconds of discomfort, and several doctors we interviewed suggest the technique. If you prefer, you can take a cathartic like plain milk of magnesia instead, to help nudge food through the intestines more rapidly.

Doctors also tell us that a solution of mineral salts – such as plain old baking soda diluted in plenty of water – seems to help neutralize the effects of an allergic food, nipping an adverse reaction in the bud. For people watching their sodium intake, potassium bicarbonate alone is a better alternative. It’s available at most chemists.

Mineral salts are all right in a pinch – before a dinner party or other occasion where what you eat is beyond your control, or as an after-dinner bromide. Don’t make a daily habit of mineral salts or cathartics, though – they’re strictly emergency outs, to help you cope with inadvertent violations. Avoidance is still the name of the game.

Allergy doctors who prescribe the Rotary Diet encourage people with food allergies to follow the four-day plan for life, speaking well of its ability both to relieve existing food allergies and prevent future problems. (Not to mention the fact that allergy injections have a poor track record for removing problems.) Invariably, compliance comes down to two things: how allergic you are, and how essential is the offending food to your diet. If you get giant hives or splitting headaches from wheat, you’ll need little encouragement to avoid it completely. But if you feel only slight fatigue or a little depressed, you’ll probably be inclined to risk minor discomforts for the convenience of eating wheat. You really owe it to yourself to rotate, though -or to encourage your child to rotate.

We’re not so naive as to suggest that sticking to a Rotary Diet is always easy. Few people, after all, have the patience and perseverance to deal with a rigid schedule of permitted and forbidden foods with no let-up for months on end. Doctors know that, too. Kendall Gerdes, an allergist in Denver, Colorado, told us that some people are able to return to their customary eating habits as long as they periodically return to a Rotary Diet long enough to build up their resistance to troublesome foods. ‘Three months down the line,’ says Dr Gerdes, ‘I want them to go back on a Rotary Diet for three cycles to reestablish their tolerance.’

Leniency of that sort helps enormously when you’re trying to get your allergic child to stick to a Rotary Diet – although Dr Boxer told us that he found some kids are often surprisingly cooperative about food rotation. ‘We’ve got a lot of kids who are great about it,’ he told us. ‘They’ll say, “No, thanks, this isn’t my day to eat that food.” In some ways, children may find a Rotary Diet easier to follow than adults, since it all seems like a game. And they don’t have twenty or thirty years of entrenched eating habits to change.

But childhood is dotted with enough important social events like birthday parties and school festivities to tempt even the most self-disciplined child. On special occasions, it’s probably wiser to allow children to eat forbidden food and to have them feel they are different or less healthy than their friends – unless they’re going to get severely ill.

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Posted by admin on April 7th, 2009 :: Filed under Allergies
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Convulsions, which are sometimes known as fits, seizures, or epilepsy can be very frightening. They do occur in a small number of people with dementia, but not in the majority. Again, like so many other symptoms, they can be caused by illnesses other than the dementia and so it is important that a doctor establishes that there is no other cause that might be treatable.

Most fits can, in fact, be prevented by medicines, so if convulsions become a major problem, the frequency with which they occur can be considerably reduced and often they can be prevented altogether.

Fits are usually associated with loss of consciousness, jerking movements of the arms and legs and sometimes the whole body and the head and neck, disturbance of breathing pattern, and in some a period of extreme stiffness. This is the picture of a fullblown fit, but very often they are much less dramatic, involving only abnormal movements of a single limb for a short period. The disturbed electrical activity may, however, affect the whole brain and this can result in a period of sleepiness or drowsiness after the fit is over.

Although they can be alarming to onlookers, fits rarely result in any harm to the sufferer. When they do, the damage is usually caused by trauma resulting from the abnormal movements, or a head injury if the fit is accompanied by a fall. Sometimes a person vomits while they are fitting, or shortly afterwards. For this reason it is best to lay those who have had a fit on their side or face downwards, but making sure that they can still breathe and that their breathing passages are not obstructed. The ideal position is that known to first-aid workers as ‘semi-prone’.

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Posted by admin on April 2nd, 2009 :: Filed under General health
Tags :: General health

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Many people with dementia become depressed. This can be the result of a realization, usually early on in the course of the disease, that the brain isn’t working as it should be. Sometimes it happens for other reasons and occasionally an apparent dementia can, in fact, be depression. There is a difference between being depressed and feeling miserable. A person who is depressed will usually be withdrawn and unhappy, will speak, act, and think slowly. This can affect the daily routine and interest in food, and is sometimes associated with early morning awakening with difficulty in getting back to sleep. Some people with depression experience mood swings, and are much happier in the evening than they are when they first get up in the morning.

If depression is present against a background of dementia, it can be difficult to realize that the increased impairment in the sufferer’s intellectual ability is the result of depression rather than of a worsening of the dementing process. If you ever have any fears that the sufferer has depression, it is best to ask the doctor for advice. He should be able to help, even is he has to refer the sufferer to a psychiatrist for a more expert assessment.

The presence of depression will often mean that the sufferer requires even more love and support. If he or she is given medicine for the depression, this may actually cause a worsening of the memory for a while and may have other side-effects. It is important that you ask the doctor to let you know what you should be looking out for, and also important to decide whether the treatment seems worthwhile. In some patients, anti-depressants just make the situation worse. Nevertheless it is often necessary to undertake a few weeks’ trial of treatment, just to see whether there is any improvement.

One very important thing not to forget is that one mustn’t expect someone with depression to ‘snap out of it’. A person with normal intellectual function can’t manage this and it is even less possible for someone with dementia. Depression is an illness that has a physical basis to it and is not just an attitude of mind. It has to be regarded in the same light as other medical illnesses that are more clearly due to physical abnormality.

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Posted by admin on April 2nd, 2009 :: Filed under General health
Tags :: General health

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Virus infections, albeit with a very long period between initial infection and development of symptoms, are known to cause some other dementing illnesses. It is probably not quite right to call them viruses as the infective agents which are responsible for diseases like Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease are very unlike conventional viruses. There is also a rare brain disease which occurs in New Guinea and an infectious disease of sheep called scrapie in which an infectious particle of some sort appears to play a part as seerris to be the case too for the more recently publicized disease of cattle — bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). The interrelationships, if any, between these conditions are complex but the fact that an infectious agent seems to be involved has led to the search for the presence of a virus or similar particle in Alzheimer’s disease. So far, none has been definitely implicated.

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Posted by admin on April 2nd, 2009 :: Filed under General health

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The parietal lobe puts together all the information that our brains obtain in order to allow us to undertake quite complicated activities. For instance one of the characteristic problems experienced relatively early in the course of Alzheimer’s is difficulty with operating machinery or equipment such as a washing machine or television, and later with dressing. Difficulties like this, which are not caused by a specific abnormality in one of the nervous pathways outside the brain, are called apraxias. The presence of apraxias for a variety of activities usually indicates that the disease is going to progress fairly rapidly.

The parietal lobe also integrates the information that is obtained from the senses. Most people will be able to distinguish between a ten pence piece and a fifty pence piece when put in their hand, even if their eyes are closed so that they can’t see what the coin looks like. A person with parietal lobe damage won’t be able to do this and is said to be suffering from an agnosia.

A frequently employed test of parietal lobe function, which is really trying to elicit evidence of the presence of apraxia, is to ask the subject to draw or copy a diagram. This may be a simple clock-face or a more complicated structure such as intersecting geometric shapes.

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Posted by admin on April 2nd, 2009 :: Filed under General health

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Our brain is such an important part of our body, even of our very existence, that it is protected by the bones of the cranial cavity within the skull. Any damage to the head sufficient to break the skull bones has serious consequences for the brain, ranging from loss of consciousness to permanent brain damage, with subsequent impairment of intellect or physical body function.

It is less well known that the brain also has other protective systems. These consist of a series of membranes and a fluid known as the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). These are arranged in such a way that the brain is enclosed within a tough outer membrane called the dura mater, and within this lies another sack containing the CSF and the brain. Suspending the brain within the bag of fluid protects it not only from the day to day jolts that it would otherwise receive, but also from more serious damage — say a blow on the head that is insufficient to fracture the skull bones. Despite this protection, excessive physical force is still capable of causing damage, although this would be much greater if the fluid wasn’t present. The membranes also stretch tightly between the major subdivisions of the brain, thus limiting the degree to which any part of the brain can be displaced if physical trauma occurs. Our brain is therefore very well-protected from the outside world.

The brain is a pinkish structure, the pink colour coming from the blood that is circulating in the minute blood vessels that nourish the nerve cells. Each brain contains some 10 to 12 billion nerve cells – also called neurones. The brain is so important that it takes up about 20 per cent of the blood that our hearts pump out, and consumes a similar amount of the oxygen that we breathe in through our lungs. Despite requiring such a large amount of blood and oxygen it weighs only a fraction of our total body weight, usually in the region of 2-3 lb (1—1.5 kg). It is often assumed that the larger a person’s brain the more intelligent they are; this is fine for male chauvinists as in general men appear to have larger brains than women! Sadly, however, at least for us men, intelligence or other aspects of mental ability are not related to the size of the brain.

In order to allow us to understand more easily some of the illnesses that cause dementia, this chapter will describe some aspects of the structure of the brain, and how it works. The brain is, however, such an enormously complex organ that it would be confusing, and to a certain extent irrelevant, to explore these subjects at other than a simple level. The description that follows is, therefore, particularly arranged to take into account structures and functions that are important for the understanding of some of the dementing conditions.

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Posted by admin on April 2nd, 2009 :: Filed under General health

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