COVID-19 Precautions to Reduce Risk of Transmission and Illness

There are well-known basic protective measures to prevent spread of viral illnesses like COVID-19 including washing hands frequently, stay home, avoid touching your face, maintain social distancing, cleaning surfaces routinely , wear a mask , etc. However, there are also some interesting reports of other interventions that may provide further protection that one may not know about. 1) Published back in 2004, researchers noted that daily saline nasal spray  (plain old saltwater) use appears…

3/19/2020 0

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Early Exposure to Peanuts May Reduce Peanut Allergies, but Choking Risks Remain!

Image from Wikipedia In response to peanut allergies and children being in the news this week (Feb 2015), the American Academy of Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery is cautioning parents and caregivers about choking risks especially posed to young children and infants by peanuts, tree nuts, and nut fragments. The 2015 NEJM study on peanut ingestion and allergies in children suggested that exposing infants to peanuts before age 1 (even as young as 4 months) actually helped prevent pea…

2/27/2015 0

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Map of Vaccine-Preventable Outbreaks Over Time

Image by Council of Foreign Relations The council of foreign relations have produced an interactive map the shows the concentration of vaccine-preventable outbreaks throughout the world over time. Such diseases include measles, mumps, rubella, polio, and whooping cough . The take-home point of the map is that diseases that were once considered "eradicated" due to near-universal vaccinations have now made a tremendous comeback which is felt almost certainly due to the anti-vacci…

5/03/2014 0

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Permanent Hearing Loss From Noise May Depend on Time of Day!

Research out of Sweden have discovered that noise-induced hearing loss sustained at night is more likely to become permanent than if it occurred during the day... at least in mice. Apparently, there are certain genes found to cycle in the cochlea of mice in a pattern that followed the hours of the day. By measuring the auditory nerve activity, they found that mice exposed to moderate noise levels during the night suffered from permanent hearing loss while mice exposed to similar noise leve…

3/07/2014 0

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Vaccine to Prevent Throat Cancer

Spread through oral sex, it is well established that human papilloma virus (HPV) types 16 and 18 cause the vast majority of throat cancer especially in men... even more than smoking and drinking alcohol. What was not known, but suspected, was whether in BOTH men and women the HPV vaccine Cervarix (made by GSK) or Gardasil (made by Merck) would help prevent throat cancer as effectively as cervical cancer for which it is FDA approved for. At least for the vaccine Cervarix, a randomized, co…

7/19/2013 1

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Why Would a Zenker's Diverticulum Recur After Surgical Treatment?

Zenker's diverticulum is an extremely rare disorder whereby a pouch develops in the throat leading to food and liquids getting caught causing symptoms of swallowing difficulties and food regurgitation. One of the best ways to address this rare condition is a procedure called endoscopic staple diverticulostomy (ESD) . Unfortunately, with any Zenker's treatment including ESD, there is a small percentage (~10%) that the Zenker's diverticulum recurs typically within one year of tr…

5/29/2013 1

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Allergies May Prevent Heart Attacks???

Research has been published suggesting an inverse relationship between serum IgE and heart attacks in the US population independent of coronary risk factors. No kidding... This conclusion was reached based analyzing 4002 participants between 2005-2006. They also detected that of the 7 "data-driven, prespecified allergen clusters," house dust mite was the only allergen cluster for which serum IgE is associated with reduced risk for heart attack. For those wondering, serum IgE…

8/29/2012 0

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