Health Adda

Surviving COVID is not easy; it is not just the threat of death and physical suffering, but many other issues that complicates life. As the COVID outbreak is marching on, many are coming out of the illness and narrating tales of the challenges they had to overcome. I spoke with RK today, a 30 year bachelor engineer who had consulted me on-line a month ago for symptoms of “acidity”…burning in the abdomen and poor appetite that had been going on for a few months. As he did not improve with the medications and worried about an ulcer, he insisted on getting an endoscopy done even in these COVID times. Ours, like most hospitals these days, recommend a precautionary pre-endoscopy COVID test to be done a day prior. The next day, to his surprise and ours, the test came POSITIVE! He was shocked, devastated, and agitated. As he was living alone in a rented apartment in the city, away from parents who stayed 400 km away in another town, he felt very alone and shaken. His cell phone app st...

The COVID19 story that started just 5 months ago as a regional outbreak and then snowballed into a massive pandemic, seems to have another facet that scientists are coming to terms with: a funny spin or DOOSRA for most aspects we thought we knew!  BLOOD VESSEL DISEASE There is increasing evidence that COVID that was thought to be a viral pneumonia quite like influenza, SARS or H1N1 is turning out to be BLOOD VESSEL disease. Studies on lungs of patients are showing that small vessels that supply blood to the lungs are choked with clots, in stark contrast to what we see in “pneumonia” where the blood vessels are intact but the small airspaces are filled with fluids and cells. This is helping explain why many patients have breathlessness and low levels of oxygen in the blood, and why providing high flow rates of oxygen rather than mechanical ventilation seems to help. Damage and choking of blood vessels in other parts of the body are being increasingly seen a...

With the COVID outbreak spreading and infecting more people across the world, doctors and scientists are getting to understand the widening spectrum of mischief this virus causes in the body, far beyond just lungs and respiratory passages. 1. Brain and Nerves Several patients report loss of taste or smell during the phase of illness. These symptoms ascribed initially to involvement of receptors of the tongue and nose, have now been traced to the brain. MRI studies have revealed that regions that receive the taste and smell signals brought there by the cranial nerves show small spots of oedema and nerve degeneration. Brain involvement has also been found in several patients complaining of headache, disturbed consciousness, loss of memory, tingling sensations and extreme body weakness due to a form of ‘encephalitis’ and neuronal degeneration. Fortunately, these changes regress in most who recover. 2. Muscle and Heart Another notable feature in a third of patien...

I cannot recall witnessing the government machinery of this country so active, energetic, concerted and committed in its fight against a common enemy, as during the COVID outbreak this time. The next few weeks are going to be a “make or break” phase…when we might either breathe a sigh of relief, or suffer much for a long time. But I must share a story with you. Our house help who shares our home for 20 years got a call on her cell phone t hat one of her elderly aunts staying in a congested part of her hometown had died. She had been old and had a long-standing breathing problem. To my obvious next question “Was it COVID?”, she answered that she had not been tested. On pursuing further if there was time still before the body was disposed, as a precaution just in case, she said “It would be too much hassle… the police will land up at home, perhaps take grieving relatives elsewhere, involve expenses, and delay the last rites”. Officials, be it of the health department...

The present outbreak of this viral respiratory infection is hogging the headlines, and triggering scares and concern across the world. On balance, while the number of people who have died till now is small (around 200, compared with 3000 deaths in road traffic accidents in India every year), there are two valid reasons to be cautious. 1. Viruses of the Corona group (named due to their resemblance to a crown) are not new; they account for a third of the common colds and fevers we suffer and recover from during change of every season. But this strain is a “new" virus called Wuhan Novel Co-V or 2019-nCo-V. 2. It has new antigens that can enable it to evade our immune radars. We do not presently have specific measures to protect or treat ourselves, such as a specific vaccine or medications. New things, like UFOs, always create awe and fear and make us panic. It is difficult to say at this stage how “badly” this viral infection can harm us or how infective it could get...

Up until now, we have been brought up to believe that many of our physical traits such as shape (thinness or chubbiness), height, prone ness for metabolic illnesses, kidney stones or gout were all decided by either our genes that we inherit from our parents, or the environment in which we live and eat! A startling new discovery is now pointing to yet another “third” factor, something that that we could not have imagined five years ago! Let us start with a simple observation. We know that fatness, or obesity, for example, runs in families. It is therefore reasonable to assume that this trait got passed down from overweight parents to one or more children through “genes”. To explain why some sibs had more fat than others we invoked additional environmental factors such as gluttonous consumption of fatty and starchy food and perhaps a sedentary or lazy life style. But when you look around with greater scrutiny you often come across someone who seems a “one-off” in the fa...

Scientists are beginning to discover that “germs”, perceived generically as enemies of man, may indeed be our partners who keep us healthy. What has come as an astonishing finding is why healthy humans carry a load of 6 Kg of microbes in our body, and why they often fall ill when we try to reduce this load. The human microbiome, as it is called,  consists  of the sum total of all small germs (bacteria, fungi, viruses) that are present in our body, with the largest numbers residing in our intestines and on the skin. There are around 100 trillion (1014) of these organisms in a single human body, a number several times larger than the stars in our universe. This figure amounts to10 times the number of all the cells of our body. With around 500 species already identified till date, microbes constitute atleast 90% of all the genes present in an individual. Despite these large numbers, the contribution of microbes to our body’s weight is around 10% due to their smaller ...

Our media has been so obsessed with scams and corruption that it has not had space and time for the Dengue epidemic raging across the country. And in a country of 1.2 billion, numbers of those affected or dead have ceased to shock us any more. The travesty of the Dengue epidemic, in Shakespearean parlance, could go well in the way “When beggars die there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes”. Let us therefore not count the number of the incognito dead but focus on a few precious lives that fatal mosquito bites have claimed. When the nation of movie lovers had just celebrated the 80th birthday of one its best loved romantic movie-makers, Yash Chopra, and started marveling at his good health at this vintage, the Aedes mosquito struck stealthily with its fatal sting. And as is typical of Bollywood, our media and us Indians, while we went into hysterical reminiscence of the lovely movies that he had made in his lifetime, we chose to overlook...

The scare of the currently raging Dengue epidemic in Lucknow is neither a false alarm nor media hype. Good many people have fallen prey, and few have already died. The tragedy is that Dengue assumes an aggressive form in young healthy adults, who were, till yesterday, up and about their usual lives, going to school or college, attending to work, partying or planning a grand Diwali bash. Attempts at mosquito control seem to have gone away. Many might ask if it had started at all, seeing the heaps of polythene bags by the roads. The striped Aedes mosquitoes are easily seen in homes and offices on their dauntless flights landing on arms, necks and feet for their blood meals and injecting the virus through skin pricks. What can you do to protect your self and your family? Involve your neighbours, make a local team, pool some money and arrange people to clear the heaps of polythene bags from the neighbourhood, burning them if necessary. Arrange a fogging machine and organi...

The scare of the currently raging Dengue epidemic in Lucknow is neither a false alarm nor media hype. Good many people have fallen prey, and several have already died. The tragedy is that Dengue is assume its most aggressive form in you ng healthy adults, who were, till yesterday, up and about their usual lives, attending to business, going to college, partying or planning a grand Diwali bash. Attempts at mosquito control seem to have gone awary. Many might ask if it had started at all, seeing the heaps of polythene bags by the roads. The striped Aedes mosquitoes are easily seen in homes and offices on their dauntless flights landing on arms, necks and feet for their blood meals and injecting the virus through skin pricks. High fever with body aches, visit to the doctor, the blood test confirming Dengue, falling platelet count, scurrying to hospitals for platelet transfusions, overcrowded hospitals is the usual circuit. What can you do to protect your self and your fami...

Dengue is having a free run this autumn, thanks to the abundant rains, ramapant water logging and unrestricted breeding of mosquitoes. Almost every household in and around Lucknow has either had a bout of fever in the last month or is likely to in the next one.  Recognizing Dengue Fever (DF): It is a viral infection transmitted by mosquitoes and presents as a sudden febrile illness of 2-7 days’ duration, with 2 or more of the following: 1.      Headache 2.      Pain behind the eye balls 3.      Severe body aches 4.      Pain in the joints 5.      rash In children, DF is usually mild. In adults, it can be quite incapacitating, with associated nausea, vomiting, depression and fatigue. Dengue Haemorrhagic Fever (DHF) is a more severe form of the disease associated with bleeding from different parts of the body such as red spots or patches in the skin, bleeding from the no...

Indian doctors were galvanized last month when the prestigious medical journal, Lancet, published an article describing super bugs that are virtually resistant to all known anti-biotics, and alleging that they originated from the Indian subcontinent.  To add insult to injury, the lead authors, who were British, named this germ after New Delhi (NDM1), consigning the name of our national capital to the immortal pages of medical notoriety. What most Indians found blasphemous was the fact that although this highly resistant strain was also isolated from other parts of the world, the authors chose to name it after New Delhi, a city from which no sample had actually been tested, and went on to sound a travel advisory cautioning Britishers to travel to India for “medical tourism”. Development of resistance in bacteria to the latest and strongest antibiotics called Carbepenems, is however alarming news. Alexander Fleming, who had discoverd the first antibiotic, penicillin, in...

None of our clever politicians and planners could have thought that a burgeoning swarm of mosquitoes could change the course of emerging India and humble us. While children are dying like flies in and around Gorakhpur from the annual post-monsoon wave of mosquito borne encephalitis that year-after-year we promise to stem but never seem to be able to achieve, hospitals of the national capital are being deluged by dengue victims. Our financial capital, Mumbai, especially in its southern part where the rich and mighty live, is also being swamped with malaria, serving as a harsh reminder of our human vulnerability. Of the several problems threatening the forthcoming Commonwealth games, mosquitoes and threat of diseases caused by them are emerging as key factors to k eep international players and fans away. There are 3 types of mosquitoes spreading diseases: Anopheles, the night biter spreading malaria, Aedes, the striped day time stinger spreading Dengue, and Culex transmitt...

Hepatitis C, a small RNA virus that causes infection and damage to the liver, had its moment of public recognition when the well-endowed silverscreen celebrity Pamela Anderson of Baywatch fame got diagnosed with it. The way she contracted it wa s equally sensational: she had shared the needle for a skin tattoo with her boyfriend, Tommy Lee, who carried the infection. The gossipy tale went further to her litigating against him for concealed the information, but as often happens there, they finally united by wedlock! Hepatitis C infection is indeed more common than most of us probably know. Of all us who consider ourselves perfectly healthy and volunteer to donate blood, 1% harbour the infection. In other words, approximately 10 million people in India have the infection and do not know it. Hepatitis C virus is a stealthy one that hardly ever produces jaundice, the commonly known symptom of liver disease. It lodges in the liver and nibbles away at its cells over years. Duri...

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, almos...

When Siddharth, a 22 year old, went to donate blood for his mother’s treatment, he was shocked to hear that he harboured the Hepatitis B infection! He was fit, played for his college cricket team and had not sufferred from jaundice. Hence hi s disbelief! Hepatitis B is usually a silent infection. This year’s global awareness campaign  “Am I number 12?” was aimed at drawng attention to this frequency. In India, the rate is somewhat less; 43 of 2500 apparently healthy people tested positive during a free checkup camp in the city. Around 20-40 million people in India are infected, 6 to 10 times more than HIV. It spreads through infected reused needles, poorly tested transfused blood, sharing of instruments such as shaving blades or ear piercing needles, from a “carrier” mother during child birth, or unprotected sex with an infected person. What makes Hepatitis B worrisome is its silent nature for many years during which the virus nibbles away at liver cells, leading ultim...