National Water Safety Week:

Protect water to stay healthy

By Nilma Dole

Water is precious but in Sri Lanka, we underestimate the value of this essential life giving natural resource commodity. How do we understand the value of water in a country so aplenty with water?

We don’t give a moment’s thought to the bountiful water resource Mother Nature gives us but only worry when there is a water cut or a drought. It is sad to say that we take water for granted, exhausting nature of a vital resource.

We can live for a few days without food but we can never live without water? We leave the tap running, wasting water, while brushing our teeth and showering.

Moreover, we pay a high water tax as consumers to the National Water Supply and Drainage Board but slum dwellers who tamper with the main line set up unauthorised taps and pumps and they waste water using it absolutely free of charge.

In addition, pollution of natural water resources from industries, hospitals and people have contributed to the lack of clean water for consumption. The cleanliness of water and protecting it has been a boiling topic and it is time that we do something about it before we dry up Mother Nature completely and don’t leave enough water for our children.

The water-bottle mania has contributed to the garbage problem because it doesn’t biodegrade and also this has led to the belief that our water quality is bad. The Health Education Bureau held a water safety week in addressing the water pollution problem and the need for a water protection policy. ”Our water quality isn’t bad because as a researcher into water quality, I once found out that the best water in Sri Lanka comes from a well at Elephant Pass. I went for a seminar where Japanese water experts brought bottles of their best water after years of research and I tested the quality of both and found that the Elephant Pass water was of the same quality as the Japanese water produced,” said W.S.T.A Fonseka, the Chief of Laboratory Services of the National Water Supply and Drainage Board.

He said that Sri Lanka is blessed with the world’s best quality natural resource but we take it for granted. “It’s best that Sri Lankans don’t know about it because otherwise they’ll go and pollute it or make it into a profit-making bottled water scheme,” he said.This has been the problem of fresh water springs, the moment it is discovered, it causes more harm than good.

“In my experience, ordinary tap water is safe to drink than bottled water manufactured and marketed by profit-making companies,” said Fonseka.

The rampant problem of water pollution is massive, whether it is just dumping garbage into the ocean or into freshwater streams and rivers. Industries, corporations and domestic households resort to dumping garbage into the water.

“It might be convenient but it’s a very bad example for children as we need to protect our water resources for them,” he said. Fonseka also raised the issue of kasippu (moonshine) dumping in water bodies without a proper disposal mechanism in place to dump this illegal liquid.

Fonseka said, “During my research, I was shocked to find out how bad the kasippu dumping problem because it contains a BO5 (water quality indicator) of over 15 which meant the quality was ‘overly stressed’. I learned that before a kasippu raid, the wrongdoers quickly dump the kasippu in the nearby waterway in an attempt to avoid detection. However, even after a raid is conducted, I have seen policemen take the illegal kasippu and dump it into the rivers conveniently too!”

Speaking at the seminar was Dr. Paba Palihawardena, the Director of the Epidemiology Unit, Health Ministry. She said, “Water-borne diseases are caused by ingestion of water contaminated by human or animal excreta, which contains pathongenic micro-organisms.”

She said that there are problems in controlling water-borne diseases where morbidity is high; it is difficult to change attitudes in protecting water as people are used to a certain way of taking water consumption for granted.

Dr. Paba said, “Diseases that are spread through the water are typhoid, dysentry, cholera, diarrhoea, hepatitis and worm infection which are becoming increasingly common.”

She said that to prevent water-borne diseases, the first thing is to change the attitudes of people by educating them on keeping the water clean because they are directly part of the water cycle chain.

“Chronisation, handwashing, proper hygienic behaviour, proper sanitation, increase the quality of water available, being careful of drinking polluted water, good sanitation and good food hygiene,” she said.

Addressing the gathering was Dr. Palitha Maheepala, Additional Secretary of the Health Ministry who said that there is a national policy on water management in the country, but nothing was done at a grass root level when it comes to preserving and protecting water.

He said, “We have told people umpteen times and had many awareness campaigns on saving water, and it’s good to see the educational programs promoting water collection mechanisms such as rainwater harvesting, sewage treatment of water and other ways of getting the maximum out of water.”

There needs to be more concern towards saving water, people suffer with a water cut or a drought mainly because they waste water.

It’s not about karma, but it is about saving the little we have, as, in the future it would mean the difference between our limited resources since climate change takes a massive toll globally.

So use water, wisely!

Malaria parasite’s blood lifeline found

A new way has been identified by which the malaria parasite survives in human blood, a finding that marks the latest laboratory advance against the disease.

Malaria’s death toll has declined by a fifth over the past decade thanks to better drugs and distribution of insecticide-treated mosquito nets, but still claims some 800,000 lives every year, mostly children under five in sub-Saharan Africa.

Researchers from Britain and France said they had identified genes in the Plasmodium falciparum parasite which produce enzymes called kinases.

Thirty-six kinases are needed for the parasite to develop in human blood cells, a key part of its complex life cycle, they reported in the journal Nature Communications.

“We are now looking for drugs that... stop the protein kinases from working. If we find these drugs then we will have a new way of killing the malaria parasite,” said Christian Doerig of France’s Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale (Inserm). Andrew Tobin of Britain’s University of Leicester said the search for a new weapon was vital, given the parasite’s dismaying ability to build resistance against treatment.

“It seems perfectly realistic to us that we can now develop novel anti-malaria drugs based on the findings that we have made - it certainly is a big moment in our fight against this terrible disease that mainly affects the world’s poorest people,” he said in a press release issued by the university.

The research is a further step, at research level, in identifying chinks in malaria’s armour.

Earlier this month, a research team said they had discovered a single microscopic channel through which P. falciparum must pass in order to infect red blood cells. Intrusion depends on the interaction between a specific molecule on the parasite, called a ligand, and a specific receptor on the surface of the blood cell.

Blocking this lock-and-key interaction prevents the parasite from breaching the cell wall.

In October, early results from clinical trials among African children showed that the world’s first malaria vaccine cut infection rates by roughly half.

The so-called RTS,S vaccine, is the first of its kind to prime the immune system against a parasite, rather than a bacterium or a virus.

(AFP)

Sleep paralysis studied

by psychologists

What do Moby Dick, the Salem witch trials and alien abductions all have in common? They all circle back to sleep paralysis. Less than 8 percent of the general population experiences sleep paralysis, but it is more frequent in two groups — students and psychiatric patients — according to a new study by psychologists at Penn State and the University of Pennsylvania. Sleep paralysis is defined as “a discrete period of time during which voluntary muscle movement is inhibited, yet ocular and respiratory movements are intact,” the researchers state in the current issue of Sleep Medicine Reviews. Hallucinations may also be present in these transitions to or from sleep.

Alien abductions and incubi and succubi, as well as other demons that attack while people are asleep, are implicated as different cultural interpretations of sleep paralysis. The Salem witch trials are now thought possibly to involve the townspeople experiencing sleep paralysis. And in the 19th-century novel Moby Dick, the main character Ishmael experiences an episode of sleep paralysis in the form of a malevolent presence in the room. Brian A. Sharpless, clinical assistant professor of psychology and assistant director of the psychological clinic at Penn State, noted that some people who experience these episodes may regularly try to avoid going to sleep because of the unpleasant sensations they experience. But other people enjoy the sensations they feel during sleep paralysis.

“I realized that there were no real sleep paralysis prevalence rates available that were based on large and diverse samples,” Sharpless said.

“So I combined data from my previous study with 34 other studies in order to determine how common it was in different groups.”

He looked at a total of 35 published studies from the past 50 years to find lifetime sleep paralysis rates.

These studies surveyed a total of 36,533 people. Overall he found that about one-fifth of these people experienced an episode at least once. Frequency of sleep paralysis ranged from once in a lifetime to every night.

When looking at specific groups, 28 percent of students reported experiencing sleep paralysis, while nearly 32 percent of psychiatric patients reported experiencing at least one episode.

People with panic disorder were even more likely to experience sleep paralysis, and almost 35 percent of those surveyed reported experiencing these episodes. Sleep paralysis also appears to be more common in non-Caucasians.

“Sleep paralysis should be assessed more regularly and uniformly in order to determine its impact on individual functioning and better articulate its relation to other psychiatric and medical conditions,” said Sharpless.

He looked at a broad range of samples, and papers were included from many different countries. People experience three basic types of hallucinations during sleep paralysis — the presence of an intruder, pressure on the chest sometimes accompanied by physical and/or sexual assault experiences and levitation or out-of-body experiences.

Up to this point there has been little research conducted on how to alleviate sleep paralysis or whether or not people experience episodes throughout their lives.

“I want to better understand how sleep paralysis affects people, as opposed to simply knowing that they experience it,” said Sharpless.

“I want to see how it impacts their lives.” Sharpless hopes to look at relationships between sleep paralysis and post-traumatic stress disorder in the future.

askmedicalnews

The implications of disease co-existence

Study highlights importance of diagnosing ‘overlap syndrome’ in sufferers of muscle weakness disease (ALS) and early-onset dementia (FTD).

In order to better counsel patients, it is key for clinicians of different disciplines to be aware of, and diagnose, the ‘overlap syndrome’ between two medical disorders - ALS and FTD - since it significantly affects patient survival. In her new study, Catherine Lomen-Hoerth, from the University of California San Francisco in the US, also highlights that from a research perspective, identifying the syndrome early is an opportunity to study damaged nerve cells and understand more about the early stages of both ALS and FTD.

Her work is published in Springer’s Journal of Molecular Neuroscience, in a special issue entitled Frontotemporal Dementias, which contains 56 studies on this topic.

ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, is a progressive, fatal disease causing weakness of the voluntary muscles of the body. FTD, or frontotemporal dementia, is the second most common early-onset dementia after Alzheimer’s disease, caused by the degeneration of the front part of the brain which may also extend to the back of the brain; it is characterized by behavioural changes and language difficulties. Up to 15 percent of FTD patients and 30 percent of ALS patients experience the overlap syndrome (ALS-FTD). However, it may be difficult to identify because patients either attend a neuromuscular clinic or a memory disorder center, each with limited expertise in the other’s speciality.

Lomen-Hoerth’s paper argues that early detection of this syndrome is critical since it greatly impacts survival, and requires adequate patient counselling.

It presents the clinical characteristics of the overlap syndrome with new diagnostic criteria.

It also looks at screening strategies and techniques to manage the condition.

The author concludes: “There are many important clinical and research implications for ALS-FTD. Identifying FTD patients as they are just developing motor neuron problems, even before they become clinically weak, provides a window into very early motor neuron disease.

Conversely, the ALS patient with very subtle impairments can be followed as the dementia progresses.

MNT