Category: Daily Health FAQ

‘Smoker’s cough’ drug succeeds in late-stage trials, Novartis says. Four more trials will be completed this year, to prepare for United States Food and Drug Administration approval, as well as that of European and Japanese drug regulators.

Caused mainly by tobacco smoking, air pollution or job exposure to lung hazards, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) — known commonly as smoker’s cough — is painful and debilitating. It forces its sufferers to cough most of the time, to take painful breaths, and to fall into debilitating bouts of breathlessness.

Chronic bronchitis and emphysema — over-inflation of the air sacs or alveoli in the lungs — are common symptoms that progress slowly and in time, lead to an irreversible loss of lung function. Around three-fourths of patients with advanced COPD are unable to perform normal everyday activities — and a good number of them go on to die when their lungs collapse.

Continue reading “Smoker’s Cough: Will Novartis’ Drug QVA149 Be Effective vs. COPD?”

Animal to Human Disease Transmission: Can Sick Pets Infect You? Our health question of the day goes: Can pet owners catch diseases from their pets? The probability that you will be infected by your pet is pretty small but the answer is a big fat “Yes!”.

Bruno Chomel, professor of zoonoses at University of California Davis, says that animal-to-human disease transmission is extremely rare but the risk is there particularly for kids and those with a compromised immune system. Says Professor Chomel: “It can happen. It’s rare when it happens and it can be bad. It’s not told to panic people or scare people, but to be aware there are things that can happen.”

In an article Zoonoses in the Bedroom published in the February 2011 issue of the Centers for Disease Control journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, Professor Chomel and co-author Ben Sun identified 250 zoonotic diseases or infections which can be transmitted from animals to humans. Of said diseases, more than 100 can be transmitted by domestic pets.

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Vitamin E Side Effects: Does it Increase the Risk of Stroke? There’s some good news and bad news for those of you who are taking vitamin E? The bad news is that it can increase your risk of suffering from haemorrhagic stroke or bleeding in the brain. And the good news? The same vitamin can reduce your risk of having ischaemic stroke or that kind of stroke where a blood clot prevents blood from reaching your brain.

Researchers from the Harvard Medical School (Boston) and INSERM (Paris) arrived at the above findings after analyzing data from nine previous trials which covered nearly 119,000 people. The study, recently published in the British Medical Journal, found that vitamin E ups the risk of extra haemorrhagic strokes by 22% but, on the other hand, it lowers the risk of ischaemic strokes by 10%.

Continue reading “Vitamin E Side Effects: Does it Increase the Risk of Stroke?”