Epidemic

In an age of long commutes, late sports practices, endless workdays and 24/7 television programming, the image of Mom hanging up her dish towel at 7 p.m. and declaring "the kitchen is closed" seems a quaint relic of an earlier era. It also harks back to a thinner America. And that may be no coincidence. A new study, conducted on mice, hints at an unexpected contributor to the nation's epidemic of obesity - and, if later human studies bear it out, a possible way to have our cake and eat it too, with less risk of weight gain and the diseases that come with it. Just eat your cake - or better yet, an apple - earlier.

As the World Health Assembly convenes in Geneva this week, one item on the agenda will be polio, or more specifically, how to finally deliver on an epic promise made a quarter-century ago: to liberate humankind from one of the world's most deadly and debilitating diseases. The world's war on polio has been as ambitious an undertaking as the successful campaign to eradicate another great public health menace, smallpox. Slowly but surely we have advanced on that goal. Polio, a highly preventable disease, today survives in only three countries: Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan.

Zimbabwe declared a national emergency as it battled a cholera outbreak that has killed more than 560 people and forced it to appeal for international assistance. The cases have been fueled by the collapse of the water system, which has forced residents to drink from contaminated wells and streams. Economic meltdown in Zimbabwe, isolated by Western countries under President Robert Mugabe's authoritarian rule, has left the health system ill-prepared to cope with the epidemic. There is not enough money to pay doctors and nurses or buy medicine.

In case you missed it, a recommendation came out last month that physicians cut back on using 45 common tests and treatments. In addition, patients were advised to question doctors who recommend such things as antibiotics for mild sinusitis, CT scans for an uncomplicated headache or a repeat colonoscopy within 10 years of a normal exam. The general idea wasn't all that new - my colleagues and I have been questioning many of the same tests and treatments for years. What was different this time was the source of the recommendations.

Meningitis has killed 1,965 people since an epidemic broke out in November in the West African nation of Niger, health officials said Monday. They said a vaccination campaign is under way.

So much stuff has been said about AIDS. Celebrities and everyone else cry bitter tears on TV in their pleas to help in the care, research and plight in general for those who have AIDS. We are all helping to pay for this epidemic. I am not insensitive to the terrible pain it brings to the person and those around him. I am not talking about the Ryan Whites nor the Paul Ganns nor the babies born to infected mothers. My concern is that most AIDS patients got that way knowing the risks and certainly knowing what causes it. My distress is that it is preventable and people are not being responsible.

It's that time of year again. Influenza, a contagious disease characterized by fever, muscle pain and an inflamed respiratory tract, is making its rounds in San Diego. In the past 30 days, five reported cases of influenza were confirmed by laboratory analysis, county health officials said. But, because most doctors don't confirm influenza by sending samples to a lab, "That's only the tip of the iceberg. . . .

At least 20 million Americans now suffer from varying degrees of hunger in a "public health epidemic" that is growing because of Reagan Administration cuts in federal nutrition assistance programs, according to a yearlong, privately funded national medical survey released Tuesday.

The new obesity report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is not just appalling, it's unsurprising. And as such, it's appallingly unsurprising. If you think your outlook can handle it, consider this overview from the Vital Signs report on adult obesity , released Tuesday: "In 2009, about 2.4 million more adults were obese than in 2007. This epidemic has affected every part of the United States. In every state, more than 15% of adults are obese, and in nine states, over 30% of adults are obese.

A cholera epidemic in central Tanzania has killed 23 people in the last 90 days, the official news agency said Sunday. Another 35 people have been hospitalized in the epidemic, which began around the district capital, Singida, 350 miles west of the Indian Ocean port of Dar es Salaam, the Shihata news agency said.

Prescription painkillers are growing in popularity in new parts of the country, according to a new Associated Press analysis that has experts sounding alarms of a new addiction epidemic. “Pharmacies, hospitals and physicians dispensed the equivalent of 69 tons of pure oxycodone and 42 tons of pure hydrocodone in 2010,” according to the study. “That's enough to give 40 5-mg Percocets and 24 5-mg Vicodins to every man, woman and child in the United States.” In some parts of the country, the report found that sales increased sixteenfold between 2000 and 2010.

Dr. Leila Daughtry Denmark, a Georgia pediatrician who was the country's oldest known practicing physician when she retired at 103, died Sunday at her daughter's home in Athens, Ga., her family announced. She was 114. Denmark was the world's fourth-oldest person when she died, according to the Gerontology Research Group, which verifies claims of extreme old age. The third of 12 children, she was born Feb. 1, 1898, in eastern Georgia and grew up on a farm learning to tend to plants and wanting to heal animals, she later said.

Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and the How the World Can Finally Overcome It By Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin Penguin Press, 421 pp., $29.95 Few diseases have been the subject of more books than the HIV/AIDS pandemic, with such notable works as Randy Shilts' 1987 volume "And the Band Played On: People, Politics and the AIDS Epidemic" and Laurie Garrett's 1995 "The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Disease in a World Out...

Shari Roan's profile of Louisiana State University fitness and nutrition expert Melinda Sothern was excellent ["The Birth of Obesity," Dec. 19]. Sothern postulates that the obesity epidemic may have roots in the 1950s because "a generation of young women … smoked, spurned breast-feeding, and restricted their weight during numerous, closely spaced pregnancies. " We know that there is great work being done around the nation to combat this "obesity trinity. " Sothern believes we can reverse the epidemic and so do I. As a breast-feeding advocate, I support the surgeon general's call to reduce the barriers to breast-feeding.

After long days discussing America's obesity problem, Melinda Sothern has had enough of windowless conference rooms. "I need to exercise," she says, pausing to review her plans in the San Diego Convention Center lobby. She plans to rent a bicycle in Coronado and ride, fast and far. Sothern, 55, is a woman who practices what she preaches. And one of her messages about obesity is aimed at women like herself: mothers. Fat mothers. Thin mothers. And especially mothers-to-be.

For this sequel to 2007's far-roaming critique of the beauty industry, "America the Beautiful 2: The Thin Commandments" filmmaker Darryl Roberts narrowed his focus — a bit. The result is a mixed bag of a film that scores not when rehashing our national obsession with dieting but when it challenges the underpinnings of a national obesity epidemic. Loosely structured around Roberts' quest to get healthier through diet and exercise instead of prescription drugs, the film raises serious questions about undue influence — Big Pharma and medical professionals, the dieting industry and government health standards.

Journalist Nick Reding stumbled into Gooding, Idaho, in 1999, to report a magazine story about ranching in the sparsely populated flatlands northwest of where Idaho, Nevada and Utah come together. It was there that Reding first encountered crystal methamphetamine, and he didn't just see it in one place. It was everywhere -- on the ranches, in the bars that overmatched police dared not enter and in the ranch bunkhouses where dealers dropped by like door-to-door salesmen. Over the next several years, as the meth epidemic exploded across small-town America, Reding encountered it so often that, he writes, "I even began to get the feeling that the drug was somehow following me around."

Doctors in the Angolan capital of Luanda are reporting more than 100 new cases of cholera daily in an epidemic that has claimed dozens of lives, the newspaper Diario de Noticias reported Monday.

The film "Contagion" may have been fiction, but the 1918-19 influenza epidemic was horrifyingly real. The "Spanish flu" epidemic tore a path of destruction across the globe, killing an estimated 50-100 million people within months before disappearing into history. Now, evidence from U.S. soldiers felled by the virus reveals that it circulated in the country for four months before the pandemic was even identified. The findings, published online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offer a picture of a virus as it turned from common pathogen to killer bug, said senior author Jeffery Taubenberger, a pathologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md. "This was one of the worst infectious disease outbreaks that ever occurred," Taubenberger said.

"We Were Here" shows that a situation you think you know can be something you haven't known at all. That is the surprise, and the power, of this unexpected film. An extraordinarily moving examination of how the AIDS epidemic both devastated and transformed San Francisco's gay community, this clear-eyed and soulful documentary brings us inside the contagion in a way that is so intimate, so personal, you feel like you're hearing about these catastrophic events for the first time. It's not surprising that "We Were Here" comes from producer-director David Weissman and editor/co-director Bill Weber, the team responsible for 2002's "The Cockettes," one of the few documentaries about San Francisco in the deliriously countercultural 1960s that allows you to experience what it felt like to be there.