Thursday, October 20, 2011

Multivitamins Can't Prolong Life


"...there are no benefits to taking multivitamins or supplements, at least if the hope is to prolong life or prevent disease or cancer." (Jaakko Mursu, nutritional epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota)


In recent years, studies have shown that vitamins such as A, C and E, which were supposed to lower risk of chronic illnesses like heart disease and cancer, didn't provide much benefit. But many patients kept taking them anyway, and few doctors in medical scrubs actively discouraged it, since the studies didn't show that taking vitamins did much harm either. Now, Jaakko Mursu, a nutritional epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, reports with his colleagues in the Archives of Internal Medicine that women who took multivitamins were 6% more likely to die over a 19-year period, compared with women not taking them.

Mursu and his team wearing lab coats or medical scrubs found that using multivitamins, which nearly half of all American adults do, was linked to a higher risk of death among a group of 38,000 women, average age 62, who were studied for nearly two decades. "Most supplements contain high amounts of specific compounds, and high doses could be toxic," says Mursu. "If you combine several supplements, or a multivitamin with supplements, then you reach even higher potentially toxic doses."

The researchers also looked at a variety of other supplements and found higher odds of death associated with six of them: Vitamin B 10% higher risk of death, compared with nonusers, Folic acid: 15%, Iron: 10%, Magnesium: 8%, Zinc: 8% and Copper: 45%

Thus, Mursu finally advise women to reconsider whether they need to use supplements, and if they really not in need of it, improving their diet is a better choice for it is more practical and safer.

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Disease Contamination at Hospitals are Possibly Caused by Scrubs Cheap and Nursing Uniforms


Ever heard of MRSA or methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus?
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a type or strain of staph bacteria that does not respond to some antibiotics commonly used to treat staph infections. This dangerous antibiotic-resistant infection has plagued hospitals for years. Sadly, nurses and doctors are the ideal agents of these superbugs as they go along their hospital duties. The harmful pathogens, including MRSA, collect in their nursing uniforms or scrubs cheap and they may pass the danger to other patients, to their families or even their colleagues.
Previous research and studies have found that nurses’ scrubs uniforms are often contaminated. In 1969, Staphylococcus aureus was found by British researches on nurses uniforms. Some British researchers on 1983 also reported contamination of cotton gowns and in 2001 another team reported finding Staphylococcus aureus, Clostridium difficile and vancomycin-resistant enterococci on nursing uniforms. Now, a recent study by Israeli scientists, led by Yonit Wiener-Well, M.D., from the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, showed that medical scrubs cheap and nursing uniforms are contaminated by harmful pathogens including MRSA or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. The study which was published in the September issue of the American Journal of Infection Control reported that 65 % of the hospital nurses uniforms and 60% of the doctors’ uniforms tested positive for potentially dangerous bacteria.
So, what do you think? Are nursing uniforms and scrubs cheap the culprit for the contamination of disease from the hospitals to our community? And if this is true, what should hospitals do in order to prevent the said contamination?