Posts Tagged ‘health tips’

Alaska Patient Tells Story

Posted in COVID-19, Economic Impact of Coronavirus Pandemic, Patient Experience, Patient Outlook, Population Health Management, Genetics & Pharmaceutical, SARS-CoV-2, Uncategorized, Virus Infective Acute Respiratory Syndrome: SARS-CoV, tagged COVID-19, Health policy, health tips, Patient, Public health on March 21, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Reporter: Gail S. Thornton, M.A.

The following article is reprinted from the Anchorage Daily News.

https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/2020/03/18/one-of-alaskas-first-confirmed-coronavirus-patients-tells-his-story/

One of Alaska’s first confirmed coronavirus patients tells his story

March 19, 2020

A Ketchikan man who contracted the illness caused by the new coronavirus is speaking out about his experience.

In a social media post and an interview with t he Ketchikan Daily News, he described his symptoms, how he was tested and his experience communicating with Alaska public health officials.

As of Wednesday morning, Glenn Brown, the attorney for the Ketchikan Gateway Borough, is one of nine people statewide who have confirmed cases of the virus. Officials have not said any of the people with confirmed cases have been hospitalized.

Brown said in a Facebook post that he was feeling better and was notified by public health officials that he’d tested positive for COVID-19 on Tuesday afternoon.

“I became sick Saturday morning with fever, headache, general achiness and chills,” Brown wrote.

Brown said he has “no idea” how he contracted the illness.

“I interacted with no one in recent weeks who was exhibiting obvious symptoms,” he wrote.

According to a statement Tuesday from the Ketchikan Emergency Operations Center saying one of its employees tested positive for the virus, the employee had a history of travel to the Lower 48. The Ketchikan Emergency Operations Center on Wednesday confirmed Brown is the employee.

The Ketchikan Daily News reported that Brown had recently traveled to Oregon and Juneau before returning to Ketchikan on March 9.

After public health officials told Brown his diagnosis, he said that he went through more than an hour of questions with them, he told the Ketchikan Daily News.

“I used everything from cellphone records to work calendars to debit card bills, to recall everybody that I may have had contact with,” Brown told the Ketchikan Daily News. “I wanted to provide that information to public health, (so) that they could alert those people and really hope to kind of arrest this thing.”

Brown told the paper that public health officials focused on two days before he developed symptoms of the illness. Brown had been “working closely with borough staff and upper management” in those days as part of his job, the paper reported.

“I apologize for causing undue concern for anyone, especially my co-workers at the Borough,” Brown said in the Facebook post.

Ketchikan Gateway Borough employees in direct contact with Brown were instructed to self-quarantine for two weeks, according to the Ketchikan Emergency Operations Center statement.

The statement also said that the borough had hired a service to disinfect the now-closed White Cliff Building, which houses the Ketchikan Borough offices.

According to the Ketchikan Daily News, the last time Brown was at the borough’s White Cliff Building was Friday.

The paper reported that as of Tuesday night, there were no plans to test people who had been in direct contact with Brown.

A public information officer for Ketchikan’s Emergency Operations Center told the Ketchikan Daily News that she understood that to be tested, people would need to have “several” symptoms of the virus.

“I would also ask that you join me and all of Ketchikan to actively minimize community transmission so that we can protect our seniors or other medically vulnerable folks in Ketchikan,” Brown wrote. “I pray that we all make it through this largely unharmed, and together.”

The first person in Alaska to test positive for COVID-19 was an air cargo pilot who arrived at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport on March 11, officials announced last week. He went through the airport’s North Terminal, which is separate from the domestic terminal.

Alaska’s chief medical officer, Dr. Anne Zink, said last week the man had self-isolated and was “stable.”

On Monday, officials said two older men in Fairbanks were diagnosed with the illness. Both had recently traveled to the Lower 48, Zink said, but were not traveling together.

In addition to the Anchorage case, the case in Ketchikan and the two in Fairbanks, officials on Tuesday announced that two more people had become sick with the virus — one in Fairbanks and one in Anchorage — bringing the total number of confirmed cases as of Wednesday morning to six.

Zink said that both of those cases were also travel-related. None of the three people who tested positive for COVID-19 on Tuesday were hospitalized, Zink said.

Fairbanks Memorial Hospital released a statement Tuesday saying a woman with a history of recent travel had tested positive for COVID-19.

“She self-isolated prior to testing,” the statement said. “This patient has been notified and is in stable condition and does not require hospitalization.”

A University of Alaska Fairbanks employee was one of the people who had recently tested positive for the virus in Alaska, university officials said Tuesday.

An internal email advised anyone who had used the O’Neill Building, which houses the College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, to stay home and monitor themselves for two weeks.

State and local officials have taken a series of steps to stem the spread of COVID-19 in Alaska, including closing schools, calling on hospitals to halt elective surgeries and shutting down dine-in service at all restaurants, bars, breweries, cafes and similar businesses.

About this Author

Morgan Krakow

Morgan Krakow is a general assignment reporter for the Anchorage Daily News. She is a 2019 graduate of the University of Oregon and spent the past summer as a reporting intern on the general assignment desk of The Washington Post. Contact her at mkrakow@adn.com.

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Women’s Health and the Human Pheromone

Posted in Bio Instrumentation in Experimental Life Sciences Research, Cell Biology, Signaling & Cell Circuits, Molecular Genetics & Pharmaceutical, Personalized and Precision Medicine & Genomic Research, Reproductive Andrology, Embryology, Genomic Endocrinology, Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis and Reproductive Genomics, Reproductive Biology & Bio Instrumentation, Technology Transfer: Biotech and Pharmaceutical, tagged health, health and fitness, health articles, Health care, health tips, hormone, menstrual cycle, Odor, Pheromone, sex on December 21, 2012| 1 Comment »

Author: Jukka Karjalainen, MD, PhD

Sorry ladies, you will be seduced, pheromones make it impossible for you to resist men, no matter how dreadful the man wearing the pheromones may be.

Wait, please don’t panic. Sadly, the pheromone marketing craze may be causing us to turn a blind eye to an interesting discovery. As far as I see it’s like hearing about vitamins for the first time from a hard core drug dealer. When you get over your encounter with Mr. Dealer, you are not going to think of vitamins in the same way as a person who had heard about vitamins from GNC or Vitamin World. I believe the same thing is happening with marketers and pheromones. With that in mind let’s take a deeper look at pheromones.
Most people still believe pheromones are no different from X-ray glasses sold in the back of comic books. Some have been using them for years. To be sure, they are used heavily by government agencies worldwide. Business uses them daily, you may even use them. Of course I’m talking about insect and animal pheromones.
It was well known by the late 70s that females of the insect and animal kingdom produced chemicals for attracting males of the same species. Several examples were presented in literature. By the late 70s pheromones were already being manufactured for pest control. Indeed, pheromones were being used to attract or repel bugs and animals. Pheromones were already protecting crops from damage. Roaches were checking in and not checking out. At the same time scientist were working hard to find and prove the existence of human pheromones. This evidence was found in the mid 70s but did not reach the public with any power until the mid 80s.

Human pheromones made front page news in 1986 when Researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center of Philadelphia released their findings to the scientific journal Hormones and Behavior, as well as to the public by way of:

Time Magazine: “Studies find that male pheromones are good for women’s health.”
News week: “The Chemistry Between People: Are Our Bodies Affected by Another Person’s Scent?”
USA Today: “The Real Chemical Reaction between the Sexes.”
The Washington post: “Pheromones Discovered in Humans.”

The human pheromone was big news in the 80s. It was found that women’s health was directly affected by male pheromone. Interestingly, Monell Chemical Senses Center of Philadelphia reported that women who work or live together tend to get their menstrual cycles in sync. That curious phenomenon known for years by scientists and many ordinary folk, has long been suspected as an indication that humans, like insects and some mammals, communicate subtly by sexual aromas known as pheromones. (1)

In 1986 Dr. Winnifred Cutler, a biologist and behavioral endocrinologist, co discovered pheromones in our underarms. She and her team of researchers found that once any overbearing underarm sweat was removed, what remained were the odorless materials containing the pheromones. The approach to test the hypothesis was interesting: women and men emitted pheromones into the atmosphere and the authors showed that extracted pheromones could be collected, frozen for over a year, thawed and then applied topically above the upper lip of recipients to mimic some of the pheromonal effects found in nature. Dr. Cutler’s original studies in the ’70s showed that women who have regular sex with men have more regular menstrual cycles than women who have sporadic sex. Regular sex delayed the decline of estrogen and made women more fertile. This led the research team to look for what the man was providing in the equation. By 1986 they realized it was pheromones. (1, 2, 3).
Male scents play a role in maintaining the health of women, particularly the health of the female reproductive system. Pheromones help to maintain the health of women. To be more exact, they keep a woman’s reproductive system healthy. They found that women who have sex with men at least once a week are more likely to have normal menstrual cycles, fewer infertility problems and a milder menopause than celibate women and women who have sex rarely or sporadically. A healthy testosterone rich male pheromone signature somehow encouraged a woman’s body to keep itself healthy and young.

The scent of a good man may be music to a woman’s nose. Researchers also found that exposure to the male pheromones also prompted a shift in blood levels of a reproductive hormone called luteinizing hormone (LH). Levels of this hormone typically surge before ovulation, but women also experience small surges during other times in the menstrual cycle. It also can stabilize the menstrual cycle and reduce the symptoms of PMS. Pheromones could lift a woman’s mood actually alleviating depression, even postpone and then alleviate menopause health. (1, 2)
How did we get from health benefits to wild seduction products? People can’t resist a fast buck. If it’s about money, maybe we should be using pheromone products to make women’s lives better. Strike that. We should instead be using pheromone products to make people’s lives better. Provide pheromones that do the things mentioned above. Help to enable pheromone research that will gain more knowledge related to health and longevity. I don’t have anything against attracting the opposite sex. I think that’s a good idea. It’s just sad to see a good thing, or potentially good thing, be lost because of a poorly focus on health.

There is always more to the story than meets the eye. The person who does not ask questions has either been beaten down low by the people who know-it-all, or, they are the people who know-it-all. Keep asking questions. You will keep finding better answers.

REFERENCES:
1. Biology of Reproduction, June 2003. News release, University of Pennsylvania.
2. Cutler WB, Preti G, Krieger A, Huggins GR, Garcia GR, Lawley HJ. Human axillary secretions influence women’s menstrual cycles: the role of donor extract of men. Horm Behav 1986; 20: 463473.
3. McCoy and Pitino. Pheromonal influences on sociosexual behavior in young women. Physiology & Behavior 2002; 75: 367-375.