Heena Sharma Blog

As mosquitoes mostly spread dengue virus while feeding on iron deficit blood, researchers suggest consuming iron-rich food if dealing with iron deficiency, anaemia or dengue fever. Dengue is most commonly acquired in urban environments, and the expansion of cities in the tropics has been accompanied by an expansion in dengue infections. UConn Health immunologist Penghua Wang wanted to see if blood quality had an impact on the spread of the dengue virus. Blood levels of various substances can vary tremendously from person to person, even among healthy people Wang and colleagues at Tsinghua University and State Key Laboratory of Infectious Disease Prevention and Control in Beijing, King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang in Bangkok, and the 920 Hospital Joint Logistics Support Force in Kunming ran a series of experiments to explore the idea. They collected fresh blood from healthy human volunteers, then added the dengue virus to each sample. Then they fed the...

Vitamin D, commonly known as the "sunshine vitamin", can combat tuberculosis (TB) bacteria found in the lungs of people with multi-drug resistant TB, according to latest research. The study showed that when added to antibiotic treatment, vitamin D was found to treat TB specifically in patients with multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB. The vitamin D supplementation was also found to be safe at the doses administered, with no links to serious adverse events, findings further revealed in the European Respiratory Journal. "Multi-drug resistant TB is on the rise globally. It's notoriously difficult to treat, and it carries a much worse prognosis than standard TB," said Lead Researcher Adrian Martineau, Professor from Queen Mary University of London. "Our study raises the possibility that vitamin D -- which is very safe and inexpensive -- could benefit this hard-to-treat group of patients by taking a novel approach to their treatment," said Martine...

Patients suffering from cancer and those treated with chemotherapy may be at 40 per cent increased risk of developing shingles, compared with those not having cancer, finds a new study. Shingles (herpes zoster) -- marked by painful rashes and skin blisters -- is caused by the varicella zoster virus that causes chickenpox. The virus remains dormant in the body but causes shingles if it reactivates later in life. The study showed that patients with a blood-related cancer had the greatest shingles risk of more than three times compared to people without cancer, the Health Day reported. The higher risk among blood cancer patients was present two years before their cancer diagnosis. In addition, those with a solid tumour including cancer in the lung, breast, prostate or other organs had a 30 per cent higher risk of shingles than people without cancer, lead researcher Jiahui Qian from the University of New South Wales in Australia was quoted as saying. Read More ...