virus

No 5 Second Rule at the Fair

Share this page

The Coconino County Fair opens this Labor Day Weekend, marking the unofficial end of summer.  While a good time is sure to be had by all, there’s something unique about the dynamics of state and county fairs.  Where else can you mix grungy amusement rides, livestock, thousands of people, and food? – if you can call a deep fried Twinkie food.    It reminds me of the song sung by Templeton the Rat in the animated movie Charlotte’s Web.

Local fairs, with all of the opportunity for microbial growth, give the human immune system an opportunity to demonstrate how effective a system it is.  Stomach acid is strong enough to kill many of the microbes that you might ingest if you happen to stick a dirty finger in your mouth or eat a hot dog from a hand that was just before petting one of the chickens.  But according to health officials at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), proper hand washing is always the best way to prevent the spread of bacteria and virus.

Our hands are a key way in which we express ourselves, and as such they often make their way around our eyes, nose and mouth allowing any microbes hitchhiking along to enter into our bodies.   Would you ever consider licking the back of a hog?  Of course you wouldn’t, but in effect that’s just what you do when you handle all of the animals in the petting section and then gobble up handfuls of kettle corn without washing your hands in between.  It’s common sense, but it’s easy to overlook this minor detail in the excitement of all of the fair activities.

That’s why it’s always a good rule to wash your hands before eating, whether you are at the fair or not.  But also, keeping your hands clean is helpful to the livestock too by preventing the spread of microbes between animals at the fair.

Using plain water to wash your hands is not enough.  The reason hand washing works, is that the process of washing removes the oils and proteins that the bacteria and virus are riding on.  Water and oil do not mix, so that’s where soap comes in and serves as a surfactant which enables the oils and proteins to be dissolved and washed away by water thereby removing the microbes they contain.  This usually takes at least 20 seconds of rubbing your soapy hands together, before rinsing with warm water.

Hand sanitizers can be helpful at the fair, where access to warm water and soap may be difficult.  The trick with hand sanitizers is all in the rubbing of your hands during the application of the sanitizer.  Follow the product’s directions, which will usually instruct you to continually rub the sanitizer onto all parts of your skin until your skin is no longer wet from the product.  The other thing to be aware of is that most hand sanitizers are more effective against bacteria, and less effective against virus.

The most critical times to wash your hands include:

  1. Before and after eating
  2. Before caring for young children
  3. After touching a public surface
  4. Before and after preparing food, especially raw meat, poultry and seafood
  5. After using the restroom
  6. When your hands are visibly dirty
  7. After touching animals
  8. When you or someone around you is ill

So wash your hands early and often and have a great time at the fair.  Oh, and if you happen to drop that corn dog while you’re trying to eat it, please don’t use the 5 second rule.  Go and get another one.


About

Paul Kulpinski is a licensed massage therapist, holistic wellness educator and co-founder of Mountain Waves Healing Arts in Flagstaff, Arizona. Information contained in this blog should not be taken as medical advice. Readers are advised to validate the information presented here with other sources including your personal physician for information specific to you.

Preventing Alzheimer’s

Share this page

human brain illustrationThe notion that Alzheimer’s Disease is the result of a genetic precondition or that the disease itself is not preventable is a myth, according to Gary Small, M.D., director of the UCLA Center on Aging.  There is growing research conducted over the past several decades that shows your lifestyle choices do have an impact on your risk of developing Alzheimer’s and other memory related conditions.

Health and nutrition author Jean Carper compiled results from thousands of studies and interviewed dozens of researchers which led to her book 100 Simple Things You Can Do To Prevent Alzheimer’s and Age Related Memory Loss. Her research revealed ten strategies that she found most surprising.

1.  Drink coffee. A large European study showed that drinking three to five cups of coffee a day in midlife cut Alzheimer’s risk 65% in late life.  Researchers say caffeine reduces dementia-causing amyloid in animal brains. Others credit the antioxidants found in coffee and tea.  One cup of black or green tea a week cut rates of cognitive decline in older people by 37%, but only brewed tea works.  Bottled tea doesn’t have any antioxidants.

2.  Floss. The health of your teeth and gums can help predict dementia.  Research from the University of Southern California found that having periodontal disease before age 35 quadrupled the odds of dementia in later years.  Other studies show that older people with tooth and gum disease score lower on memory and cognition tests.

3. Search the Web. Doing an online search can stimulate your brain even more
than reading a book according to research conducted at UCLA.   Researchers used brain MRIs and found that novice web surfers between the age 55 to 78, activated key
memory and learning centers after one week by web surfing for an hour a day.

4. Grow new brain cells. Once thought impossible, scientists now believe that thousands of brain cells are born daily. The trick is to keep the new brain cells alive.  What works: daily aerobic exercise of at least 30 minutes a day, strenuous mental activity, eating salmon and other fatty fish.  Avoid obesity, chronic stress, sleep deprivation, heavy drinking and vitamin B deficiency.

5. Drink apple juice. Apple juice can boost the body’s production of acetylcholine, a chemical linked to reducing Alzheimer’s symptoms.  In the laboratory, old mice given apple juice did better on learning and memory tests than mice that received water.  A comparable dose for humans: 16 ounces of juice, or two to three apples a day.

6. Protect your head. Blows to the head, even mild ones early in life, increase odds of dementia years later. Professional football players have 19 times the typical rate of memory-related diseases.  Research from Columbia University found that Alzheimer’s is four times more common in elderly people who suffer a head injury.  Another study found that accidental falls doubled an older person’s odds of dementia five years later.

7. Meditate. Brain scans show that people who meditate regularly have less cognitive decline and brain shrinkage – a classic sign of Alzheimer’s – as they age.   Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that yoga meditation of 12 minutes a day for two months improved blood flow and cognitive functioning in seniors with memory problems.

8. Vitamin D. A study at the University of Exeter in England found that severe deficiency of vitamin D boosts older people’s risk of cognitive impairment by 394%.  Most Americans lack vitamin D.  Experts recommend a daily dose of 800 IU to 2,000 IU of vitamin D3.  Vitamin D is manufactured by the body with exposure to sunlight.  Just 20 minutes of sun exposure each day is sufficient to provide enough Vitamin D for good health.

9. Build your cognitive reserve. Fill your brain with a rich accumulation of life experiences through education, marriage, socializing, a stimulating job, language skills, having a purpose in life, physical activity and mentally demanding leisure activities.  This makes your brain better able to tolerate plaques and tangles that are associated with the pathology of Alzheimer’s.  Researchers at Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center report that you can even have significant Alzheimer’s pathology yet have no symptoms of dementia if you have high cognitive reserve.

10.  Avoid infection. New evidence is linking the development of Alzheimer’s to the frequency of common infections like cold sores, gastric ulcers, Lyme disease, pneumonia and the flu.  Researchers at the University of Manchester in England estimate that the herpes simplex virus that produces cold sores is related to about 60% of Alzheimer’s cases. The theory is that these infections trigger production of beta amyloid plaque that kills brain cells.

Some simple things you can do that can have a big impact, not only on the health of your brain as you age, but on your entire body.  Let’s get started today!


About

Paul Kulpinski is a licensed massage therapist, holistic wellness educator and co-founder of Mountain Waves Healing Arts in Flagstaff, Arizona. Information contained in this blog should not be taken as medical advice. Readers are advised to validate the information presented here with other sources including your personal physician for information specific to you.

Human Predators

Share this page

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)We humans are so arrogant.  We pretend to be at the top of the food chain and are confident in our ability to develop technology to keep us there.  In all of nature, the natural checks and balances are created by predators and prey.   The grasses of the fields are preyed on by the rabbits which are then preyed on by the hawks, foxes and wolves, which are then preyed on by the lions and tigers and so forth.

So when you think of what predator would prey on humans, you might think of lions, tigers and sharks but when you think about it, the natural human predator is much smaller than that.  So much smaller that we humans take our superiority over these predators for granted, with little or no fear of them.

The human predators are microbes:  bacteria, viruses, fungus and the like.

How can something so small, insignificant and seemingly at the bottom of the food chain prey on the mightiest creature at the top of the food chain?  The answer lies in the beautiful irony of the natural world and it couldn’t be any more perfect.  And what makes the microbial world so powerful towards us is our perspective of superiority toward the microbial world.

While we humans are busy ignoring the microbial world, the microbial world is changing and adapting faster than we can invent new antibiotics and counter measures against it.

Bacteria actually rule the world.  One estimation counts about five billion trillion trillion microbes on the planet.  Just inside your body, there are more bacterial cells than you have body cells by a factor of 10 to 1.  Now, most of these bacteria are friendly and beneficial to us.  In fact without this symbiotic relationship, life as we know it couldn’t exist.  Yet humans have declared war on all bacteria.

We have anti-bacterial soaps, lotions and hand sanitizers every where.  In fact the places where the most dangerous bacteria live are in hospitals, where so much effort is put forth to eliminate microbes.  Why?  Because when you seek to destroy all bacteria with the carpet bombing approach of antibiotics, all but the strongest bacteria are killed (the 0.1% of the bacteria not killed in the 99.9% effective hand sanitizers).  It’s this 0.1% of the remaining bacterial that are left to multiply and re-colonize without any competition from other bacteria.  And since they are the strongest of the bunch, this only allows them to get stronger.

Yes, our declared war on microbes is actually making them stronger.   Over time, exposure to a particular antibiotic will cause the bacterial to mutate and develop an “immunity” to the antibiotic.  When a bacteria becomes resistant to multiple antibiotics, it is considered to be a “superbug”.  In 2007, these superbugs were responsible for more than 63,000 deaths in the United States, and that’s just in the hospitals!

The trend is still growing. By 2009, hospitals have seen a rapid growth in resistance to carbapenems, an antibiotic considered a “last resort” when other antibiotics have failed.  The percentage of carbapenem bacteria which have shown antibiotic resistance has spread from 5% in 2000 to over 40% in 2009.   Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) once only found in hospitals is now spreading to other communal settings like gyms, with as resistance rate of over 70% in some areas of the country.

The cause is the widespread use and increasing misuse of antibiotics, coupled with the proliferation of antibiotic use in animals raised for human food, the residue of which are ingested by humans upon consumption.    Our desire for sanitizing our world is actually making us sick!

The solution lies in multiple actions.  First, minimize your use of antibiotics.  Use them to fight infection as a last resort using the minimal dose to be effective and use the antibiotic properly by completing the full course of meds according to directions.  If taking an antibiotic, promote the recolonization of friendly bacteria by using acidophilous or eating good quality yogurt with natural cultures.

Avoid or eliminate your regular use of hand sanitizers and anti-bacterial soaps.  Use more conventional sanitizers like diluted chlorine bleach or alcohol.  Incorporate good hygiene by washing your hands regularly with warm water and regular soap.  After all, it’s not the soap that eliminates the bacteria, its the friction from rubbing your hands together that does the trick.  In fact, studies have shown that simply washing your hands is just as effective at removing bacteria than is using an anti-bacterial soap or hand sanitizer without the harmful side-effects of creating resistant bacteria.

Finally, keep yourself healthy by boosting your natural immunity through proper nutrition, adequate rest, exercise and hydration.  Your body knows how to defend itself.  Simply let it do it’s job naturally and you’ll be much better off in all but the most severe cases of bacterial infection.

Let’s call a truce with microbes and recognize that for most of them, we are allies that can actually help protect us from the few strains of non-friendly microbes.   In doing so, we might actually find that we are no longer being hunted by the smallest organisms on the planet.

About

Paul Kulpinski is a licensed massage therapist, holistic wellness educator and co-founder of Mountain Waves Healing Arts in Flagstaff, Arizona. Information contained in this blog should not be taken as medical advice. Readers are advised to validate the information presented here with other sources including your personal physician for information specific to you.

Sanitary Procedures to Prevent the Spread of Virus at MWHA

Share this page

The Swine Flu has captured the nation’s attention quickly in the past two days.  So I thought I’d take a moment and explain the routine steps we take at Mountain Waves Healing Arts to help prevent the spread of bacteria and virus – like the Swine Influenze Virus H1N1.

1. All bodywork therapists wash their hands and forarms with soap and warm water immediately before and after each session.  Therapists providing out-call corporate therapy sessions use an alcohol based hand sanitizer in lieu of soap and water.

2. The face cradles of the massage tables are thoroughly wiped with with a disposable sanitizing cloth, or sprayed with an alcohol/tea tree essential oil mixture.

3. Our linens, face cradles and towels are washed and sanitized after each use with extra hot water, detergent and chlorine bleach.

Influenza is a virus that is spread via the water droplets expressed during a cough or sneeze from the infected person and inhaled by another person.  Sometimes influenza can be spread by touching somthing that has the flu virus on it and then touching their nose or mouth.  The Swine Influenze Virus A is no exception, except that this strain of influenza is very rare in humans and mostly found in pigs – hence the name Swine Flu.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this virus contains unique strains of genetic material not previously seen in either swine or human influenza viruses.   This means that most people won’t have natural antibodies ready made in their bodies to respond to an infection and that conventional human flu vaccinations are likely to be ineffective.

In general, once infected with influenza of any kind, the fundamental treatment is rest, fluids and limited contact with others to avoid spreading the virus.  The problems occur with the development of secondary bacterial infections in the lungs that if untreated can lead to pneumonia, respiratory distress and possibly death.  That’s why prevention of contacting the flu virus is the most important first step.  So what are the things you can do.

First, recognize the symptoms of Swine flu – which are the same a seasonal flu.  They include:  fever, cough, sore throat, body aches, headache, chills and fatigue.  In some cases, people experience diarrhea and vomiting.

Secondly, practice good hygene.  Wash your hands regularly with soap and warm water.  Cover your mouth and nose with the inside of your elbow if you cough or sneeze.

Finally, keep your immune system in top shape by getting plenty of regular sleep, eating nutritious food, getting regular physical activity, drinking plenty of water and keeping your stress levels in check.

While the current spread of the virus may seem to be rapid, it’s not a time to panic.  But it is a time to review your personal wellness practices and tune them up so your immune system is in top shape and ready to defend you if the need should arise.

For more information,  log into the CDC website by clicking on the link below.

http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/

About

Paul Kulpinski is a licensed massage therapist, holistic wellness educator and co-founder of Mountain Waves Healing Arts in Flagstaff, Arizona. Information contained in this blog should not be taken as medical advice. Readers are advised to validate the information presented here with other sources including your personal physician for information specific to you.

Sudden Hearing Loss

Share this page

tuningforksoundI have a friend who recently experienced what he thought was a routine head/sinus cold.  After several days into the cold symptoms, he woke up in the morning with a clogged right ear.  At the time he didn’t think much about it because he didn’t have any pain.  However by the end of the day, he was unable to hear out of the ear.

The next day he did the sensible thing and saw his regular doctor who treated it as a middle ear infection with anti-biotics.  However, more time went by with no improvement.  So he then went to the emergency room and was diagnosed with Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss (SSHL) and was advised that he only had about a 30% chance of recovering his hearing.  This amazed me, because he experienced no pain in his ear to reinforce how serious the problem was.

What he eventually learned was that his hearing loss was likely the result of the virus that created the original cold symptoms, as it attacked the auditory nerve from his ear to his brain literally cutting the cord so the brain could no longer receive the signals the ear was sending it.

The condition is rather rare, with only about 15,000 cases reported world wide.  While researchers have identified over 100 conditions that can lead to SSHL, doctors are able to diagnose a specific cause in only about 15% of the cases.    As a result, definitive diagnosis and effective treatment are still largely unknown.

What is known is that the best results from any treatment are seen within the first 3 days to 1 week of the onset of symptoms.  For this reason, doctors recommend that you treat any sudden hearing loss as a medical emergency and receive a thorough examination by an otolaryngologist (an ear, nose and throat doctor) as soon as possible.

In my friend’s case, it was nearly 3 weeks after the onset of hearing loss that he received treatment.  While his chances of recovery are diminished because of this time factor, he still remains hopeful.

Sources:
Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss

Sudden Hearing Loss (SHL, SSHL)

About

Paul Kulpinski is a licensed massage therapist, holistic wellness educator and co-founder of Mountain Waves Healing Arts in Flagstaff, Arizona. Information contained in this blog should not be taken as medical advice. Readers are advised to validate the information presented here with other sources including your personal physician for information specific to you.