Natural birth 'bacteria' protects child from asthma, allergies

Sydney, May 30 : Babies delivered vaginally receive protective bacteria as they pass through the birth canal, a scientist says.

Infants born by caesarean section, however, are more vulnerable to asthma, allergies and infection as they miss out on receiving mothers' good bacteria, according to Professor Patricia Conway, of the School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences at the University of NSW.

According to the expert, the bacteria, left on the baby's skin, could then colonize the intestine and help inoculate newborns against hospital bugs, reports The Sydney Morning Herald.

Gut flora was also crucial for developing a balanced immune system, Professor Conway said.

"With a C-section, the newborn baby misses an opportunity to pick up a lot of mum's good bacteria," she said.

She added: "This can have long-term health implications, as the development of a good intestinal ecosystem is necessary for health and immunity to allergies, from childhood right through to adulthood."

Advantages of honey and it Medical usage

Sweet wonderful honey! It is the nectar of life! A little in my tea, coffee, desserts, and even main dishes makes our life so wonderful. It is even good in lip balms and lotions. To top it off, honey could be the solution to many ordinary health concerns.

Honey has been used by humans for thousands of years. The ancient civilizations such as Greece and Egypt were very familiar with the benefits of honey including the medicinal properties. How it worked, they did not know, but they knew it worked!

We all know that honey comes from bees. The kind we eat is only made by honeybees and can vary in taste based on the flowers they honey take the nectar from. The purpose of honey is not to sweeten our lives, but to feed the bees during the winter or other lean times. Beekeepers encourage extra honey money so that we can take the excess and enjoy our day.

Honey is largely carbohydrates and water. That much might be obvious because of its sweetness. But it also contains zinc, iron, potassium, calcium, riboflavin, phosphorus, and magnesium. All of these are needed by our bodies and can be useful in fighting diseases and keeping ourselves healthy. But lately, researchers have discovered that honey is full of antioxidants. These are important to fight cancer, the common cold, and other diseases and viruses. They help fight these out of our bodies. Honey is full of these wonderful antioxidants. In fact, the darker the honey the more antioxidants you will probably find.

It has only been with the rise in the use of antibiotics that honey began to take a back seat. Now, research is showing that antibiotics could be overused and will therefore make us immune to their effects. Honey has not shown any sign of immunity in human bodies. In fact, honey is a great way to kill off infection. When used in tending to a wound, you will find less chances of infection, the elimination of infection, and quicker healing. It does not have to be just a scratch. Deep wounds can also be treated well with honey.

There is extensive documentation on the healing effects of honey. Doctors around the world understand it and sometimes apply it in their practice. Throughout history it has also been used in preventative medicine. At this time, there has not been enough documented research shown to support any of these, but at the same time researchers are dismissing it either. Honey is very powerful and reports keep coming in to support that.

Of all these medicinal uses for honey, only the wound healing has been formally researched and documented with enough evidence to support it. Most of the others are from people who down through the generations have used honey for many more purposes. Here are few that you can try in your life. Some people also mix in cinnamon since it also has shown some help in these areas.

Wounds – If you have a wound which could be a scratch, cut, scrape, or resulting from surgery, try using honey under the dressing to work on killing any bacteria and help speed up the process of healing. Like treating any wound, make sure that it has been cleaned out thoroughly before apply the dressing. Do this on a regular basis and you will results.

Heart Disease – Replacing your morning jelly for honey could help you decrease you chances of heart disease. Honey could be effective in cleaning out the arteries and preventing heart attacks and future surgeries. It has been noted that those that take in a regular amount of honey each day has a decrease in cholesterol.

Oral Health – You would think that because of its sweetness that honey would be dangerous for your teeth. Quite the opposite is proving true. Have a tooth ache? Apply honey. Want to fight gingivitis? Honey can help you in that war. It works to help chronic bad breath, also.

Arthritis – Rubbing honey deep into the areas being affected by arthritis is a great way to help ease the pain. Taking a spoonful of honey each day also has shown results in keeping the pain at bay.

In fact, a daily intake of honey works great for all of these things:

Cough

Colds

Weight loss

Acne

Upset Stomach

Immune System

Honey is wonderful and the benefits of it are just being fully recognized. As time goes on, more and more conditions are being treated with honey. Begin taking a serious look at honey in your life and how you can use it. Make it a part of your daily life and feel the benefits of this sweet nectar.

Women testing make-up 'at risk of infections'

Women testing make-up and other products at beauty counters are leaving themselves at risk of a number of infections, a study has found.

So-called ‘tester’ pots and jars were found to expose customers to everything from E-coli to conjunctivitis, the eye disease.

Experts warned that women should avoid using the pots, provided so that they can try out make-up before they buy, as far as possible.

American researchers found that all of the make-up they tested contained traces of E-coli, a cause of major food poisoning, which could cause skin infections in beauty consumers.

The study also found traces of the herpes simplex virus, which causes cold sores. Make-up was most likely to be contaminated on Saturdays – the busiest shopping day of the week. Bacteria die off relatively quickly within make-up, because it does not contain enough nutrients for them to continue to grow.

Dr Elizabeth Brooks, a biological sciences professor at Jefferson Medical College in Pennsylvania, who led the study, said: "Wherever you can see E-coli, you should just think 'E-coli equals faeces.' "That means someone went to the bathroom, didn't wash their hands and then stuck their fingers in that moisturiser."

She added: "If you're asking me if I would personally try a public lipstick tester – or if I would let my teenage daughters do that – then the answer is no. "I would ask for the individual tester.”

The researchers spent two years analysing make-up taken from department stores, specialist shops and chemists.

They used sterile swabs to take samples of products, including skin, eye and lip make-up.They then transferred the make-up onto a chemical substance on which cultures can grow. Between 67 and 100 per cent of the products showed at least some level of contamination,The experts recommend trying on make-up during weekdays, when there are generally fewer customers who could have contaminated the tester.

But women should also wash their faces after trying on make-up from a make-up counter, and be extremely careful when trying on eye make-up.

Engineers Generate Electricity by Tapping Into Algae Cells

In an electrifying first, Stanford scientists have plugged in to algae cells and harnessed a tiny electric current. They found it at the very source of energy production -- photosynthesis, a plant's method of converting sunlight to chemical energy. It may be a first step toward generating "high efficiency" bioelectricity that doesn't give off carbon dioxide as a byproduct, the researchers say.

"We believe we are the first to extract electrons out of living plant cells," said WonHyoung Ryu, the lead author of the paper published in the March issue of Nano Letters. Ryu conducted the experiments while he was a research associate for mechanical engineering professor Fritz Prinz.

The Stanford research team developed a unique, ultra-sharp nanoelectrode made of gold, specially designed for probing inside cells. They gently pushed it through the algal cell membranes, which sealed around it, and the cell stayed alive. From the photosynthesizing cells, the electrode collected electrons that had been energized by light and the researchers generated a tiny electric current.

"We're still in the scientific stages of the research," said Ryu. "We were dealing with single cells to prove we can harvest the electrons."

Plants use photosynthesis to convert light energy to chemical energy, which is stored in the bonds of sugars they use for food. The process takes place in chloroplasts, the cellular powerhouses that make sugars and give leaves and algae their green color. In the chloroplasts, water is split into oxygen, protons and electrons. Sunlight penetrates the chloroplast and zaps the electrons to a high energy level, and a protein promptly grabs them. The electrons are passed down a series of proteins, which successively capture more and more of the electrons' energy to synthesize sugars until all the electron's energy is spent.

In this experiment, the researchers intercepted the electrons just after they had been excited by light and were at their highest energy levels. They placed the gold electrodes in the chloroplasts of algae cells, and siphoned off the electrons to generate the tiny electrical current.

The result, the researchers say, is electricity production that doesn't release carbon into the atmosphere. The only byproducts of photosynthesis are protons and oxygen.

"This is potentially one of the cleanest energy sources for energy generation," Ryu said. "But the question is, is it economically feasible?"

Ryu said they were able to draw from each cell just one picoampere, an amount of electricity so tiny that they would need a trillion cells photosynthesizing for one hour just to equal the amount of energy stored in a AA battery. In addition, the cells die after an hour. Ryu said tiny leaks in the membrane around the electrode could be killing the cells, or they may be dying because they're losing out on energy they would normally use for their own life processes. One of the next steps would be to tweak the design of the electrode to extend the life of the cell, Ryu said.

Harvesting electrons this way would be more efficient than burning biofuels, as most plants that are burned for fuel ultimately store only about 3 to 6 percent of available solar energy, Ryu said. His process bypasses the need for combustion, which only harnesses a portion of a plant's stored energy. Electron harvesting in this study was about 20 percent efficient. Ryu said it could theoretically reach 100 percent efficiency one day. (Photovoltaic solar cells are currently about 20-40-percent efficient.)

Possible next steps would be to use a plant with larger chloroplasts for a larger collecting area, and a bigger electrode that could capture more electrons. With a longer-lived plant and better collecting ability, they could scale up the process, Ryu said. Ryu is now a professor at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea.

Herbs for Skin Care

There are a wide variety of skin problems many people face on a day to day basis. The most common of course, tends to be oily skin and acne. But there are others as well, such as dry skin, itching and flaky skin, rashes, wrinkles, and even more serious problems such as psoriasis and eczema.

Due to the wide variety of skin problems and conditions people experience, there can be any number of reasons for the problems. Most modern doctors tend to treat the symptoms themselves though, instead of digging for deeper problems to resolve. Herbalists and natural remedy specialists agree however, that most skin related health problems are related to toxins within the body. Specifically the liver or colon is not functioning as well as they should be, and they need to be cleansed.

And since most skin problems are cleared up with liver or colon cleansing approaches, many skin remedies include herbs which work specifically to help the liver cleanse, tone and heal.

Dandelion for instance, is an excellent herb for liver health. It will help the liver produce more bile, which draws toxins and pollutants out of your body at a much faster rate. This process works very well for dealing with every day skin problems such as acne.

Eczema is often caused by a food allergy of some kind, and it's seen most often in children. The most common allergies which cause this skin condition are cows milk and wheat or gluten. Simply removing these items from the child's diet is often all that's needed to clear up the eczema problems.

When food allergies aren't the cause though, sometimes bacteria and infections is. In these cases, Garlic is the best herb to use for clearing up those problems. Garlic is a powerful anti fungus herb which can kill candida yeast related infections among many others. Garlic will also expel most parasites from your body, and those tend to cause skin related problems too.

For wrinkles and dry skin problems though, one of the most natural approaches you can take is to simply drink more water. Our bodies need two to three quarts of water every day, and more so if we're sick or live in dry climates. Since our skin always seems to get water last, after all the major internal organs have gotten their share, there's often not enough left over to hydrate the skin properly. This not only causes dryness, itching and flaking, but it can cause premature wrinkles too.

Applying Vitamins A, C and E to your facial skin directly will also help rehydrate it, fight free radical damage, and reduce or prevent wrinkles as well.

With summer coming very soon, many people will experience mild, moderate and severe sunburns from being exposed too long without proper skin protection. An excellent natural remedy for sunburns though, is to simply apply old fashioned black tea to the burned areas. Soak some teabags in cool water for a few moments to activate the tannin, then lay the bags on the sunburned skin. This will pull the heat and pain from the burn, as well as help it to heal into a nice tan without peeling

Fruits and veggies can reduce cancer

Researchers at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York, have discovered that just three servings a month of raw broccoli or cabbage can reduce the risk of bladder cancer by as much as 40 per cent. The team of researchers surveyed 275 people who had bladder cancer and 825 people without cancer. They asked especially about cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli and cabbage.
These foods are rich in compounds called isothiocyanates (ITCs), which are known to lower cancer risk. The effects were most striking striking in non-smokers.
Compared to smokers who ate fewer than three servings of raw cruciferous vegetables, non-smokers who ate at least three servings a month were almost 73 per cent less likely to be in the bladder cancer group, they found. Among both smokers and non-smokers, those who ate this minimal amount of raw vegetables had a 40 per cent lower risk. However the team did not find the same effect for cooked vegetables as cooking tends to reduce 60 to 90 percent of ICTs.

'Fat clue' to TB discovered

Washington, March 29 : In a major breakthrough that may pave the way for innovative strategies for treating tuberculosis, scientists in the US claim to have found a 'fat clue' to the progression of the disease.
The factors instrumental in triggering latent tuberculosis (TB) infection to progress into active disease have long remained elusive to researchers. Now, Professor David Russell and his group at Cornell University in New York, USA, have demonstrated that TB-causing bacteria are able to hijack fat metabolism in the host to drive the progression of the disease.

The research shows that Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) is able to stimulate macrophages - the immune cells the bacterium infects - to accumulate fat droplets, turning them into "foamy" cells. This cellular transformation can trigger a reawakening of the TB infection from its latent state.

Following initial infection by Mtb, the infected immune cells in the body can clump together in the lungs in a cellular mass that is surrounded by a fibrous cuff.

This containing structure, called a tubercle, physically protects the bacteria from being destroyed by the immune system.

This allows them to persist inside the host for years during a latent period in which the host shows no symptoms.

The respiratory infection is reactivated only in a small percentage of individuals in whom it progressively destroys lung tissue. Very little is known about the exact causes of reactivation and the relative roles of the host and the pathogen.

Russell's group discovered that inside the tubercle, surface molecules of Mtb prompted host macrophage cells to take up vast quantities of cholesterol-type lipids from the surrounding blood vessels.

"We think that the lipids in the newly-formed foamy cell are then expelled into the cellular environment, which contributes to the collapse of the tubercle," he said.

Once freed from their containing structure, the infectious bacteria are able to leak out into the airways where they can progressively destroy lung tissue.

"If our model is correct, it has huge implications for vaccines and chemotherapy programmes. A more detailed knowledge of the bacterium's life cycle and its host interactions will allow us to spot new targets for drugs - opening up new possibilities for treatment," said Russell.