Health Adda

While swine flu is still spreading, the mass hysteria and the whining of the media seems to be settling. People seem to have come to terms with the following facts: 1.        1) It is an infection caused by a variant (H1N1) of the Influenza A virus, that regularly causes seasonal flu in India and elsewhere 2.        2) It spreads from one person to another through droplets of saliva shed while speaking, sneazing or coughing, or by touching contaminated surfaces. 3.        3) The symptoms of this infection are similar to those of ordinary flu: running nose, cough, fever, body aches, and rarely breathlessness. You can’t distinguish the 2 by symptoms alone. 4.        4) The risk to life with either of the 2 infections is very small; around 99.9 % of those infected recover on their own, even without any special medicines like Tamiflu. Local figures show that of 700 people tested at SGPGI, 80 had swine flu, almost all of whomhave recoverd and none have died. Who then benefited from the mass

While excessive computer use can lead to conditions such as attention deficit disorder, depression anxiety and proneness to violence, recent research has sho wn that internet is not all that bad after all! The web may in fact be teaching our brains, subtly rewiring the way we respond, think and behave. The book iBrain – Surviving the Technological Alterations of the Modern Mind, by Dr Gary Small, provides new insight through research undertaken at UCLA, and reveals that an hour of internet use every day may boost brain function. “We learn to react more swiftly to visual stimuli, improve our ability to sift through large amounts of information, and decide what is important and what isn’t”. This training is most evident when we scan our e-mails, quickly deciding and deleting what is spam, while focussing on those that are important. “If you never use computers, then start”, Professor Small recommends. “As we found, even an hour a day can vastly improve yor infrmation process