Exotic travel can lead to exotic sicknesss - More Health News

Exotic travel can lead to exotic sicknesss

Unusual illnesses not uncommon for adventure tourists
Aaron Jackson / AP
Jama Gibbs Jackson sits atop a camel as her guide, Dullah, takes a break during a four-day camel trek in Rajasthan, India, in September 1994. During the trip Jackson contracted malaria.

Kevin Keogh spent the morning doing ordinary chores. By afternoon, he was climbing out the window of his Mercedes and onto the roof as it sped down a busy street. Standing on top of the car, his arms outstretched as if he were surfing, he jumped to his death.

What would make the chief financial officer for the city of Phoenix do something so bizarre?

A leading theory is a parasite he caught on a trip to Mexico several years earlier. The bug can live for years inside the body, travel to the brain and cause seizures and hallucinations �" syndromes Keogh started suffering a few months after his trip.

His death in December is an extreme example of an exotic illness picked up in a foreign land. It’s a goes-with-the-territory downside that many group underestimate when they venture into territory far from their back yards.

American travelers made more than 56 mil. foreign trips in 2003, up from 46 mil. a decade ago. They often bring back germs that can take weeks or months to cause syndromes and sicknesss, which American doctors may be slow to recognize.

It took eight months for doctors to figure out Keogh’s illness, said his wife, Karlene. A blood agsdhfgdf showed he had cysticercosis, a parasitic illness often acquired from undercooked pork and common in Latin and Central America. The Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s office is awaiting more agsdhfgdfs to determine whether that led to his death.

“He was in excellent health, othernesswise. Whether he was in his right mind or not, no one can say,” said Dr. Rebecca Hsu, who is handling the case. “I do believe something horrible happened to this poor man.”

Keogh had traveled to a remote part of Mexico to explore artifacts and ruins, which he loved. A growing number of Americans are traveling overseas and to more non-traditional tourist destinations.

“Paris, London, Rome used to be exotic travel,” said Dr. Phyllis Kozarsky, an Emory University professor and senior travel health consultant to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Now group want to outdo each otherness” by heading for more obscure destinations.

Usually, the risk is limited to the traveler because most germs aren’t easily spread person-to-person, Kozarsky said. But SARS showed some germs can affect public health. Anotherness example is American travelers who returned with malaria which was then passed onto mosquitoes that bit them back home in the Carolinas, New York City and Palm Beach, Fla. These mosquitoes then bit local residents who had no reason to suspect they had a tropical sickness because they hadn’t gone anywhere tropical.

Dangerous for children
Some illnesses are especially harmful to children, said Dr. Tina Tan, medical director of the travel clinic at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

“We’ve seen kids come back with malaria,” and unusual spider or insect bites, she said. “A lot of times they go unrecognized for a while because they’re going to their pediatrician or family doctor, and they don’t think about exotic sicknesss.”

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Illness can be more annoying than the easily treated “travelers’ diarrhea” that develops in half of all group who visit a developing country for two weeks or longer.

A Minnesota town is the namesake of Brainerd diarrhea, first identified there in 1984. Dr. Robert Tauxe, head of foodborne illness at the CDC, calls it “diarrhea for life.” It sickened 200 group on successive voyages on a small boat around the Galapagos Islands in 1992. A 1998 report on the outbreak found many still suffering from it.

“We’ve studied it extensively, but to this day we don’t know the cause of this yet. We don’t know if it’s a virus or bacteria or what,” Tauxe said.

Mary Steigerwald, a Phoenix nurse who is vice president of communications for Ottawa University, knows that kind of misery. Doctors think she got a parasite on a trip to Asia, where she felt pressured to eat things like shark-fin soup at business meetings. She had diarrhea for 18 months.

“I went through eight difference courses of antibiotics. Nothing could stop it,” she said.

Tauxe teases his sister, Lisa Tauxe, a geologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., who got hepatitis from a trip to Africa. She doesn’t know what did it: the miniature zoo in the water she swallowed while windsurfing in a polluted bay or the raw sea urchin she had afterward.

“It walked across my plate as I was trying to eat it. It’s sushi. It’s stupid. I don’t do that anymore,” she said.

Boom in extreme travel
The boom in extreme travel and adventure tourism has some health experts worried.

“Many group feel that their lives are overly routine, overly bureaucratized, that they’re constrained by institutions,” said Lori Holyfield, a University of Arkansas sociologist who has studied group who seek ultimate experiences like rock-climbing in remote places. “They don’t want real danger, just the feel of flirting with it.”

But they often get more than they bargained for. A whitewater rafting expedition in Costa Rica in 1996 gave five rafters leptospirosis, a serious sickness that can lead to organ failure. It’s caused by rodent urine contaminating water.

A bigger outbreak of it occurred in 2000, when more than 100 group from around the world competed in an endurance event called EcoChallenge in Malaysia. Health officials at first had trouble figuring out what sickened them because of the endless possibilities: competitors had swum in rivers, crawled through bat-dung-encrusted caves and hiked through jungles where everything from malaria to tsetse flies were present.

Adventurous hunters and fishers have to worry, too. A few years ago three Wisconsin hunters got trichinosis from eating the meat of a bear they’d shot in Alaska. Bear meat is notoriously full of parasites.

Sometimes exotic illness does public health a favor. The germ cyclospora, recently linked to raspberries from central America, was first identified in the early 1990s in group on a high-altitude expedition who got sick on lettuce.

“We’re very grateful both to the hikers and the lab and the clinic group in Nepal,” Tauxe said.

Mundane hazards
But besides these germs, there are more mundane hazards: Accidents are the leading cause of medical problems involving travelers, said Dr. Michael Zimring, director of the Center for Wilderness & Travel Medicine at the Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore.

Dr. Ben Koppel, medical director of Medex Assistance, a Baltimore-based travel insurance firm, tells of having to airlift a woman out of Tibet who had been riding in a Jeep that went off the road.

She suffered a punctured lung, made more serious by the blood-thinning medication she was taking for heart problems. The nearest hospital was portrayed on the Internet as being a top-tier facility, but it turned out to have no blood bank, X-rays or 24-h.care, let alone sterile needles.

“We took her to Bangkok, which has excellent medical care,” Koppel said. “The moral of the story for adventure travelers is, you go to places that you might think have facilities and you find out the facilities are horrific. Even in Italy there are hospitals where the nurses go home at night. There’s no staff.”

The woman’s medical evacuation cost $75,000, covered by her $4-a-day travel insurance plan. Even an air ambulance from the Caribbean to Miami costs $11,000 to $15,000, Koppel said.

Many travelers don’t even check their insurance coverage ahead of time, and most policies don’t cover medical care abroad �" Medicare doesn’t.

An ounce of prevention
Many travelers also don’t get vaccines or medicate s to prevent illness. Jama Jackson, a fund-raiser for a nonprofit group in New York City, took antimalarial medicate s during parts of two years that she worked and traveled in southeast and central Asia. But the medicine has unpleasant side effects when taken long-term, so she skipped it when she took a four-day camel trek through India.

“It’s not like it was in a humid, wet, tropical rain forest place where you would expect mosquitoes. This was dry desert,” she explained.

But she caught malaria, which gave her “the worst fever you can imagine. I couldn’t get food for myself and actually needed help to walk.”

Now fully recovered, she regrets the illness but not the trip.

“I’m not an extremist, but I also don’t live in a cloistered, sheltered way, either. I wanted to experience life in those places,” she said. “You have to be willing to take some risks.”

If you do travel, experts say you shouldn’t let your guard down on the way home. Food on the plane usually comes from the country you visited, not where you are going.

� 2006 . .

Stray dog saves life of abandoned baby - Pet Health

Stray dog saves life of abandoned baby

Canine motherness finds infant, brings her to join litter of puppies
Sayyid Azim / AP
Felix Omondi, an 11-year-old student, pets a dog May 9 who rescued an abandoned baby girl on the outskirts of Nairobi.

NAIROBI, Kenya - A stray dog saved the life of a newborn baby after finding the abandoned infant in a forest and apparently carrying it across a busy road and through some barbed wire to her litter of puppies, witnesses said.

The stray dog found the infant, clad in tattered clothing, in a poor neighborhood near the Ngong Forests in the capital of Nairobi, Stephen Thoya told the independent Daily Nation newspaper.

The dog apparently found the baby Friday in the plastic bag in which the infant had been abandoned, said Aggrey Mwalimu, owner of the shed where the animal was guarding its puppies. The seven-pound, four-ounce infant was taken to the hospital for medical aid on Saturday.

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“She is doing well, responding to medical aid, she is stable. ... She is on antibiotics,” Kenyatta National Hospital spokeswoman Hanna Gakuo told from the hospital, where health workers called the infant Angel.

Kenya’s media often report the abandonment of newborns by mothernesss. Poverty and the inability to care for the child are seen as the root cause of the problem. Most group who abandon babies are never caught.

The child had not yet been claimed.

“Abandoned babies are normally taken to the Kenyatta National Hospital because it is a public hospital,” Gakuo said. “People are now donating diapers and baby clothes for this one.”

� 2007 . .

Mysterious disorder killing preemie babies - Kids & Parenting

Mysterious disorder killing preemie babies

Doctors hunt for a way to protect tiniest patients from inagsdhfgdfinal disorder

WASHINGTON - It's one of the grimmest threats to premature babies: Their immature inagsdhfgdfines break down. They can't be fed. In the worst cases, holes in the bowel let bacteria leak into the blood ??" and kill.

This mysterious disorder is expected to soon overtake lung disease as the leading killer of preterm infants, and researchers are struggling to figure out why it strikes and develop the first real protection.

"We're keeping the most fragile and vulnerable babies alive longer" with better respiratory care, but "at a price," laments Dr. David Hackam of Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh.

"What hasn't gotten out is that many of these babies then are at risk of developing NEC" ??" the shorthand term for necrotizing enterocolitis, a severe inagsdhfgdfinal inflammation that can blindside doctors and parents alike.

Diana Seabol's experience is typical: Her twins were born almost 2 1/2 months early. Three weeks later, she was ecstatic that son Cameron's lungs were strong enough to come off a ventilator ??" only to watch him be rushed to Hackam's hospital for emergency surgery that same day because his inagsdhfgdfines had perforated.

"Nobody really talked to me about what happens with preemies," said Seabol, whose son, now 2, survived that first bout with NEC and some life-threatening complications a few months later. "It would have been nice to look for some signs."

Affects 1 in 5 premies
NEC occasionally hits a full-term infant, but mostly afflicts the tiniest preemies, born smaller than 3 1/2 pounds. Estimates vary, but Hackam said NEC may affect as many as one in five preterm infants.

The National Center for Health Statistics reports there were about 500,000 pre-term babies born in 2004, the most recent data available.

It starts with subtle symptoms, such as poor food tolerance. In babies diagnosed early, feeding is stopped to let the inagsdhfgdfines rest and hopefully heal themselves. They're also given intravenous antibiotics. About half recover.

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Breast milk may help smallest preemies

But the rest worsen, their abdomens swelling as inflammation increases. Bacteria inside the inagsdhfgdfines leak out, causing bloodstream infections. Surgery is required to remove portions of dead inagsdhfgdfine, but "by the time you get to that stage, it is too late," says Dr. Gail Besner of Columbus Children's Hospital. "The damage has already been done."

About half of babies with severe NEC die, and survivors can face lifelong complications depending on how much of their bowel was lost.

Hope for finding a cure
The goal: To develop drugs that can protect these fragile babies' inagsdhfgdfines from becoming inflamed in the first place, just as doctors now routinely give preemies lung-protecting therapies.

Besner discovered a growth factor, named HB-EGF, that promises to do that.

The body normally produces this protein, which helps stimulate inagsdhfgdfinal cells to grow and counters inflammation. It's found in the amniotic fluid that nurtures a fetus, and in breast milk. (In fact, premature infants given breast milk through their feeding tubes seem to have a lower risk of NEC than those who receive formula.)

Giving extra doses of the growth factor to newborn rats whose inagsdhfgdfines were deliberately stressed greatly reduced their chances of getting NEC, and helped those who still got it to survive, Besner found. Now she is seeking permission from the Food and Drug Administration to begin the first human studies, by administering doses straight into high-risk preemies' feeding tubes.

In Pittsburgh, Hackam found a different molecule that seems important for inagsdhfgdfinal healing.

The "inagsdhfgdfinal barrier," or lining, Hackam describes as "a real living fort," requiring constant maintenance to seal off injuries before bacteria can penetrate them. Cells called enterocytes are the repair workers, swarming over to patch any breach.

But the inagsdhfgdfinal barrier in newborns, especially premature infants, isn't fully developed and thus has an impaired ability to do those repairs, Hackam discovered.

Moreover, in babies with NEC, a switch that acts like a brake is turned on inside their inagsdhfgdfinal cells, abruptly halting the enterocytes' movement. He's now hunting drugs to turn that switch back off, so the babies' innate ability to heal can finish developing, and he hopes to begin clinical trials within a few years.

For now, hospitals are supposed to watch closely for the earliest signs of NEC; it's one reason that feeding is begun slowly for small preemies.

Watchful parents
But parents have a big role, too, Pittsburgh's Seabol points out. They may be first to notice warning signs, even after survivors go home. At 4 months, Cameron suddenly quit finishing his bottles, and his mother had to insist to initially skeptical doctors that something was very wrong. Indeed, a temporary patch from his initial surgery had quit working, leaving the baby unable to absorb food. After a month in the hospital, Hackam successfully reattached the remaining ends of Cameron's inagsdhfgdfines.

Now 2, Cameron is thriving, "but I'm aware it could come back at any time," Seabol says.

Copyright 2006 . .

Louis-Dreyfus says there??�s no Seinfeld??� curse - TV COMEDY

Louis-Dreyfus says there??�s no Seinfeld??� curse

Actress will return with New Adventures of Old Christine??�

PASADENA, Calif. - Seinfeld curse? What Seinfeld curse?

My short answer is I have no worries about that because I??�m on a heavy dose of antibiotics right now, actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus said Wednesday.

With that, she deflected questions about the inability of former Seinfeld cast members to have much television success after that NBC hit ended its run. Louis-Dreyfus??� own Watching Ellie is in the wastebasket of failed shows.

You just have to keep trying, said Louis-Dreyfus, who is portraying a divorced mom in The New Adventures of Old Christine, which will premiere on CBS this spring.

Her goal isn??�t to find a different character from Elaine, just to find someone funny, the 45-year-old actress said.

I think the difference with this character is that perhaps she??�s a little more grounded and perhaps she??�s a little bit more real in a way that Elaine wasn??�t, she said. But I would say that she has a pathetic quality that is similar, frankly. So set your TiVos.

Her 8-year-old son found it a little odd to watch his mom onscreen kissing another 8-year-old boy, she said.

He??�s subsequently gotten over it, she said. He knows I love him.

? 2006 . .

IP Theft: China's Piracy Culture - Newsweek: International Editions

A Piracy Culture

Beijing continues to defy U.S. and European efforts to stop IP theft.
By By Sarah SchaferNewsweek International

Jan. 16, 2006 issue - On a recent afternoon at Beijing's famous Silk Street Market, a vendor displayed a wide selection of Burberry rain coats. Price: $40, subject to negotiation. Like virtually all of the luxury goods for sale at the market, the coats were counterfeit. To tourists who swarm the market daily, they may seem like just another great bargain. But to Beijing's critics they are a symbol of indifference, if not outright defiance. Burberry is one of five companies suing the Silk Market, five of its vendors, and the landlord of the property himself, for selling knock-offs of its products. (The other brands are Gucci, Chanel, Prada, and Louis Vuitton, which just opened its first outlet in Beijing.) The companies are seeking a few hundred thousand dollars in compensation, among other remedies. The landlord of the building, Zhang Yongping, said in an interview recently that he is innocent, adding: "We don't allow any fake products in the market." Told of the prominent display of Burberry coats just a few floors down from his spacious office, Zhang turned to his lawyer, who quickly told a NEWSWEEK reporter, "Tell us which vendor it is and we'll go down there."

The cloned garments in the Silk Market, and Zhang's seemingly feigned ignorance of their existence, shows why some experts think the fight against Chinese intellectual-property violations is hopeless. Western governments and corporate executives are deeply frustrated by China's indifference to the IP issue, but rather than give up, both are putting more pressure than ever on Beijing to crack down on pirates. In October, the U.S. initiated action at the World Trade Organization, demanding that China provide details of its efforts to combat piracy, including information about specific cases and their outcomes, by the end of January. "I think we continue to see a troubling disconnect between comments made by Chinese leaders and enforcement," Chris Israel, the U.S. Commerce Department's Coordinator for International Intellectual Property Rights, told reporters at a recent IPR roundtable hosted by the American embassy in Beijing.

Indeed, despite years of legal action by corporate America, the piracy problem is worse than ever. At the U.S. Embassy round table, an assistant FBI director said U.S. companies lost $40 billion in 2004 alone from intellectual-property rights violations, most of them committed in China. There is almost nothing that Chinese firms don't copy�"software, movies, clothes, auto parts, computer-chip designs, even antibiotics. For years, most of the piracy was confined to the local Chinese market. No longer. Chinese exports of fakes are on the rise. According to a report by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the value of counterfeits coming into the United States from China was up 47 percent in 2004 from about $134 million in 2003. (About 67 percent of counterfeit goods seized by U.S. Customs officers came from China.) The report noted that IP infringement in China had reached "epidemic levels."

China presents unique challenges. The central government has long viewed intellectual property not as an individual right, but as something to benefit the state. It encouraged borrowing, if not stealing, technology (especially foreign technology) on which to build a strong economy. Now that the nation is booming, the commercial environment is so competitive that many see ripping off other people's ideas as the quickest way to cash in.

The Internet has multiplied all of the enforcement problems a hundredfold. College students across China, like many of their peers in the U.S. and elsewhere, download the laagsdhfgdf Western television shows and movies from vast networks of computers. One young student recently interviewed by NEWSWEEK said that it was legal to do so; after all, she was using a network run by her university. "Cybercrime, including IPR infringement, is the fasagsdhfgdf-growing problem faced by China-U.S. cooperation," FBI Assistant Director Louis M. Reigel III said recently in Beijing.

That's one reason Chinese companies spend far less than their Western counterparts inventing new products and innovations. According to a 2003 report by the accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers, China spent less than 6 percent of total RD on basic research, compared with 19 percent in the United States. Companies spend more time and money tweaking existing technology just enough to avoid paying royalty and licensing fees. Some government officials implicitly support this practice, railing against unfair foreign patent royalties, for example.

Foreign firms are desperately seeking ways to protect their brands in China. Victor Kho, a Hong Kong-based investigator, spends his days researching counterfeit networks and coordinating raids for his clients, which include Mercedes and Ford. "Progress is being made, but may be slower than people expected," he says. "There are too many people who want to be rich, and copying things is the easiest way."

� 2007 Newsweek, Inc.