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During Antibiotic Awareness Week (18-24 November) NPS MedicineWise is urging health professionals to use vaccinations as one important way to limit Australia’s use of antibiotics.

Doctors, pharmacists and nurses are being asked to encourage their patients to keep up with the vaccinations recommended in the National Immunisation Program (NIP) schedule, as immunisation can help reduce the rates of vaccine-preventable diseases that may have required antibiotics to treat them or their complications.

A new NPS Direct article published this week explains that along with the judicious use of antibiotics, vaccinations are an integral component in the fight against antibiotic resistance.

When vaccination rates are high, the incidence of certain bacterial infections in the community is reduced as is the need for antibiotics.
During flu season, it is recommended that people at risk of complications such as pneumonia receive the influenza vaccine – these include people aged over 65, pregnant women, and people with medical conditions like chronic lung disease or heart disease.
Health professionals working in aged care, long-term care and child care facilities are also encouraged receive the flu vaccine to prevent transmission to these at-risk groups, reducing the risk of associated complications requiring treatment with antibiotics.
Antibiotic resistant pneumococci is a current challenge in Australia, but following the introduction of widespread pneumococcal vaccination in Australian children, incidence of the disease has declined sharply. Current guidelines now recommend use of a 13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (13vPCV) for children at two, four and six months of age, with an extra dose at 12 months for at-risk groups, while the 23-valent pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine (23vPPV) is recommended for adults and children aged 4 years and over who are considered to be medically at risk, to prevent invasive pneumococcal disease and pneumonia.

Source: http://www.nps.org.au/

Cape Town summers can be fickle things. Just when you think it’s safe to go out in flops and t-shirt, another front glances off the peninsula and we’re back to the wind and rain for another few days. An old friend of mine used to say that Cape Town only ever gets 10 perfect days a year: 28-32 degrees, light to zero wind, and those wonderful warm evenings that linger long after the sun’s gone down.

He may be right, he may be wrong, but when those perfect days do come along they’re not to be wasted. There are plenty of ways to spend them – propping up a bar is just one – but if a bar beckons then let it be an outdoors bar, or at least something inside with a lekker sunset view.

With that in mind I’ve put together some of my favourites. Cape Town has plenty of candidates and I don’t claim this as the exhaustive list, but if you’re looking for some outdoor pub/bar/bistro inspiration, here’s a good place to start.

In what are believed to be the first studies of their kind, Cedars-Sinai researchers recording the real-time firing of individual nerve cells in the brain found that a specific type of neuron in a structure called the amygdala performed differently in people who suffer from autism spectrum disorder than in those who do not.

Autism spectrum disorder and autism are general terms for a group of complex disorders of brain development that affect social interactions, communication skills and behaviors.

"Many studies have found that people who have autism fail to focus on the eye region of others to gather social cues and process information about emotions," said Ueli Rutishauser, PhD, assistant professor of neurosurgery and director of Human Neurophysiology Research at Cedars-Sinai, and first author of an article in the Nov. 20 issue of the journal Neuron. "The amygdala - which is critical for face recognition and processing of emotions - is thought to be one of the principal areas where dysfunction occurs, but this is the first time single neurons in the structure have been recorded and analyzed in patients with autism."

Researchers in Cedars-Sinai's Department of Neurosurgery and Department of Neurology, with colleagues from the California Institute of Technology and Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, "listened in" and recorded the firing activity of individual nerve cells in the amygdalae of two patients with a high-functioning form of autism as they viewed pictures of entire faces or parts of faces on a screen. Each face expressed an emotion - fear or happiness - and the patients were asked to look at the pictures to decide which emotion was expressed.

The research team then compared recordings from neurons in the patients with autism to recordings from neurons in patients who did not have autism, which led to the discovery that a specific type of neuron performed atypically in those with autism.

Different neurons respond to different aspects of a task. In the amygdala, which is known to be important for emotional memory, certain neurons fire when a person looks at a whole face; another population responds when viewing parts of faces or certain facial features such as an eye or mouth. In the two patients with autism, "whole-face" neurons responded appropriately, but the "face-part" neurons were much more active when the patients were shown the mouth region compared to when they were shown the eyes.

"A subpopulation of neurons in these patients with autism spectrum disorder showed abnormal sensitivity to the mouth region. The amygdala neurons appeared normal from an electrical point of view, and the whole- face-sensitive neurons responded normally. Thus, the subset of face-part-sensitive neurons was specifically abnormal in autism," Rutishauser said.

The article's senior author, Ralph Adolphs, PhD, Bren Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Caltech, said the study presents new insights into mechanisms underlying the symptoms of autism and opens the door for further studies.

"Are there genetic mutations that lead to changes in this one population of neurons? Do the cell abnormalities originate in the amygdala or are they the result of processing abnormalities elsewhere in the brain? There are many questions yet to be answered, but this study points us in a specific direction that we believe will help understand autism," he said.

In Mexico, overweight or obese children could suffer a step back in life expectancy by up to 10 years.

According to the National Institute of Geography and Statistics (INEGI), the life expectancy in Mexico is of 73 years for women and 76 years for men. However, Arturo Perea Martínez, member of the International Pediatrics Association said that obese children can develop early diabetes by the time they turn 30 and, depending on whether they take care of themselves or not, reduce their life expectancy.

According to generational studies performed in the medical environment, the individual that suffers from overweight or obesity will live 10 years less than its predecessors.

"Children with obesity have an excess of adipose tissue, which secretes a series of toxic substances that degenerate the organism and, in time, cause the development of chronic diseases at an early age" the pediatrician said.

This decline in life expectancy depends on several factors: according to diverse studies executed in the late 80's and early 90's, the genetic factor influences between 40 and 70 per cent of all cases which, conjoined with a bad life style, favor obese or diabetes in the youngsters.

The specialist said that in Mexico one of every three children is overweight or has obesity.

In turn, Maricarmen Oses mentioned that this generation is the most affected by the obesity problem because it was gestated in the 80's when the boom of eating disorder started with the offer of junk food and the enlargement of food portions, besides de greater sedentary and stressful lifestyle.

The nutritionist highlighted that 25 percent of obese children suffer hypertension, 22 percent have fatty liver and between 4 and 6 per cent have diabetes. This is why she insisted in the necessity of a balanced nutrition and daily exercise encouraged by the parents.

Finally, she added that taking account the reality of Mexico regarding a sedentary lifestyle and bad feeding habits, the intervention of health professionals to guide the population in their diets is highly important.