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Amish children raised on rural farms in northern Indiana suffer from asthma and allergies less often even than Swiss farm kids, a group known to be relatively free from allergies, according to a new study. "The rates are very, very low," said Dr. Mark Holbreich, the study's lead author. "So there's something that we feel is even more protective in the Amish" than in European farming communities. What it is about growing up on farms -- and Amish farms in particular -- that seems to prevent allergies remains unclear. Researchers have long observed the so-called "farm effect" -- the low...

Less is more, according to New Hampshire lawmakers debating whether to ban the use of scented or fragrant soaps by state employees. Under House Bill 1444, state workers who interact with the public would be prohibited from wearing fragrances or scented products while on the job, MyFoxBoston reported. The reason for the proposed ban -- exposure to scented products can irritate or worsen symptoms for people with asthma or allergies. "The chemicals in some of these products can trigger the nasal congestion, sneezing and the runny nose," Dr. Stanley Fineman, an allergist with Emory University and the Atlanta Allergy and...

Allergy research If infants encounter a wide range of bacteria they are less at risk of developing allergic disease later in life. This is the conclusion of research from the University of Copenhagen, which suggests completely new factors in many modern lifestyle diseases.Oversensitivity diseases, or allergies, now affect 25 per cent of the population of Denmark. The figure has been on the increase in recent decades and now researchers at the Dansk BørneAstma Center [COPSAC, Copenhagen Prospective Studies on Asthma in Childhood], University of Copenhagen, are at last able to partly explain the reasons. A variety of bacteria offers protection"In...

Sen. Jim DeMint is trying to stop the federal government from banning a popular over-the-counter asthma inhaler, introducing an amendment that would yank funding for the ban set to go into effect in January. The Food and Drug Administration rule would take off the shelves the epinephrine asthma inhaler known as Primatene Mist. The product is currently the only FDA-approved over-the-counter inhaler and is being banned because it uses something called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as a propellant -- the substance is considered harmful to the ozone layer.

Asthma inhalers, available over the counter from pharmacies will become prescription-only from 2012. The move comes as worries over ozone layer damage persist from continued use of chlourofluorocarbons to propel the medicine out of the inhaler. Primatene Mist, the only inhaler still available from pharmacies without prescription is an epinephrine inhaler that causes airways to relax, helping asthma patients during hard times or breathing difficulty. It is not a preventing medicine, but acutely used when airways constrict. CFC’s (chlorofluorocarbons) are concerning environmentalists, due to their dangerous depletion of ozone, the layer around the earth protecting us from the sun’s harmful...

Remember how Obama recently waived new ozone regulations at the EPA because they were too costly? Well, it seems that the Obama administration would rather make people with Asthma cough up money than let them make a surely inconsequential contribution to depleting the ozone layer: Asthma patients who rely on over-the-counter inhalers will need to switch to prescription-only alternatives as part of the federal government's latest attempt to protect the Earth's atmosphere.The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday patients who use the epinephrine inhalers to treat mild asthma will need to switch by Dec. 31 to other types that do...

Obama Administration to Ban Asthma Inhalers Over Environmental Concerns 3:00 PM, Sep 23, 2011 • By MARK HEMINGWAY Single Page Print Larger Text Smaller Text Alerts Remember how Obama recently waived new ozone regulations at the EPA because they were too costly? Well, it seems that the Obama administration is would rather make people with Asthma cough up money than let them make a surely inconsequential contribution to depleting the ozone layer: Asthma patients who rely on over-the-counter inhalers will need to switch to prescription-only alternatives as part of the federal government's latest attempt to protect the Earth's atmosphere. The...

Asthma patients who rely on over-the-counter inhalers will need to switch to prescription-only alternatives as part of the federal government's latest attempt to protect the Earth's atmosphere. The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday patients who use the epinephrine inhalers to treat mild asthma will need to switch by Dec. 31 to other types that do not contain chlorofluorocarbons, an aerosol substance once found in a variety of spray products. The action is part of an agreement signed by the U.S. and other nations to stop using substances that deplete the ozone layer, a region in the atmosphere that helps...

Children with severe therapy-resistant asthma (STRA) may have poorer lung function and worse symptoms compared to children with moderate asthma, due to lower levels of vitamin D in their blood, according to researchers in London. Lower levels of vitamin D may cause structural changes in the airway muscles of children with STRA, making breathing more difficult. The study provides important new evidence for possible treatments for the condition. The findings were published online ahead of the print edition of the American Thoracic Society's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. "This study clearly demonstrates that low levels of vitamin...

Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Eating low-fat yoghurt whilst pregnant can increase the risk of your child developing asthma and allergic rhinitis (hay fever), according to recent findings. The study will be presented at the European Respiratory Society's (ERS) Annual Congress in Amsterdam on 25 September 2011. All the abstracts for the ERS Congress will be publicly available online from today (17 September 2011). The study aimed to assess whether fatty acids found in dairy products could protect against the development of allergic diseases in children. The researchers assessed milk and dairy intake during pregnancy and monitored the prevalence of asthma and...

(Boston) - Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) using a traditional Korean medicine, SO-CHEONG-RYONG-TANG (SCRT) that has long been used for the treatment of allergic diseases in Asia, found that SCRT treatment alleviates asthma-like pulmonary inflammation via suppression of specific chemokines or proteins. These findings appear online in the Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology. Asthma is a unique form of chronic respiratory disease characterized by reversible airway obstruction and pulmonary inflammation. It represents one of the most common chronic inflammatory diseases affecting an estimated 300 million people worldwide with an expected increase to 400 million by 2025....

Australian researchers have tested a new generation of asthma medication on a small sample of men, the effects show a high potential for improving fat and protein metabolism. The study involved seeing how various hormones affect the metabolism, specifically a class of hormones called catecholamines, which regulate heart rate, metabolism and breathing. The new generation asthma drug used called Formoterol, is a synthetic catecholamine. Although, the metabolic effects haven’t previously been studied, therapy doses given to animals have shown it stimulates the metabolism without affecting the heart.

NEW ORLEANS, LA – May 23, 2011 -- People with severe asthma are more likely to have antibodies against the disease-causing bacteria Chlamydia pneumoniae than the general population and in some cases antibiotic treatment can greatly improve symptoms according to research presented today at the 111th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology. "We conclude that a subset of severe asthmatics harbor infectious C. pneumoniae in their lungs, resulting in antibody production and increased asthma severity," says Eduard Drizik of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who presented the study. Asthma is a chronic respiratory disease, whose causes are not...

“The challenge with coal is that although it’s very cheap, it’s also dirty. And it can create the kinds of air pollution that not only is contributing to climate change but is also creating asthma for kids nearby,” Those words were uttered by President Obama today at a Facebook Town Hall meeting. Honest to God. It is true that coal emitting plants may contribute to those who have asthma suffering an bout, but how do you make the leap to "creating asthma"? Let us put aside the absurdity of the statement and suppose it were an accurate statement. It seems...

(CNSNews.com) – President Barack Obama claimed that coal could create "the kinds of air pollution" that is "creating asthma for kids," in speaking at a town hall event in Annandale, Va., on Tuesday. However, the National Institutes of Health says that “the exact cause of asthma isn’t known” and that “asthma is different for each person.” “The challenge with coal is that although it’s very cheap, it’s also dirty. And it can create the kinds of air pollution that not only is contributing to climate change but is also creating asthma for kids nearby,” Obama said in answer to...

The first owners of a Wheego LiFe will be Asma and Kevin Henry, residents of the Virginia Highland neighborhood in Atlanta. Kevin says buying a Wheego LiFe was his wife’s idea. Asma, a freelance consultant in international assistance programs, is committed to protecting the environment and reducing fossil fuel consumption. She walks and bikes to neighborhood shops, prefers fresh air to conditioned air, and dries laundry in the back garden. She has more than a casual interest in zero-emission vehicles and clean air because she helps manage the charity Speranta Terrei, which supports patients in Moldova with the air-borne disease...

With Republicans in control of the House for the first time since early 2007 and relevant in the Senate for the first time since early 2009, Americans are holding out hope for deliverance from some of the more onerous regulations imposed on them by Democratic lawmakers and bureaucrats. The liberal response to this faint but discernible strand of hope has bordered on panic. Consider the National Resources Defense Council's reaction to a Republican effort to block updates to the federal Clean Air Act. "By blocking the (Environmental Protection Agency), the lawmakers would be allowing polluters to continue emitting unsafe amounts...

Activating the right immune cells in infants could lead to new vaccineBoston, Mass. - In a paper that suggests a new strategy to prevent asthma, scientists at Children's Hospital Boston and their colleagues report that the influenza virus infection in young mice protected the mice as adults against the development of allergic asthma. The same protective effect was achieved by treating young mice with compound isolated from the bacterium Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori), a bacterium that colonizes the stomach and is best known for causing ulcers and increasing the risk of gastric cancers. The findings, published online December 13 in...

Study finds cause of allergic reaction could be growing in your lungs Scientists investigating the allergic reactions that asthmatics suffer towards a common mould have discovered that many people with asthma actually had the mould growing in their own lungs. The research led by University of Leicester scientists at Glenfield Hospital has been published in the December 2010 issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. The team based in the Institute for Lung Health at the University of Leicester and Glenfield Hospital examined the impact on asthmatics of a common environmental mould, Aspergillus fumigates, usually found...

Children with severe asthma should not be given a new injection that can cut the number of severe attacks they suffer, because it is too expensive, the NHS drugs rationing body has said. The drug called omalizumab, marketed as Xolair, is given as a monthly injection by a doctor and has been shown to reduce the number of times a child has a severe attack.

Bitter taste receptors we have in our mouths were found to also exist in our lungs - what researchers discovered about these functioning receptors in the smooth muscle of the bronchus in the lungs may transform future treatment for asthma and obstructive lung diseases, scientists wrote in an article published in Nature Medicine. When bitter taste receptors in the lungs were exposed to certain doses of substances known to activate bitter taste receptors in the tongue, they opened up the airways better than most current medications are able to do. Senior author, Stephen B. Liggett, M.D., a pulmonologist from the...

Young teenagers who use acetaminophen even once a month develop asthma symptoms more than twice as often as those who never take it, a large international study has found. And frequent users also had more eczema and eye and sinus irritation. Other studies have linked acetaminophen (often sold as Tylenol and in other over-the-counter remedies for pain, colds, fever and allergies) with an increased risk of asthma. But the new study’s authors cautioned that the findings did not mean children should stop using it. “Acetaminophen remains the preferred drug to relieve pain and fever in children,” said the study’s lead...

A jab that could provide a "one size fits all" approach to tackling hay fever, asthma and eczema could be available within a few years, a conference heard.Swiss researchers claimed allergies that blight the lives of 10 million British sufferers could be largely eradicated with a single vaccine. An allergy conference in London heard the “one size fits all” injection that wards off asthma, eczema, hay fever and even peanut allergies could be on the shelves within four to five years. Experts say if the jab, known only as CYT003-Qbg10 which has been tested on humans, is properly developed it...

A 49-year-old woman was arrested as police claim she nearly struck an officer with a thrown inhaler. Janice McCoy-Nuttle, of the 900 block of Beech Street, was laying in a bed surrounded by as many as seven Chihuahaus and 10 cages filled with birds. Police report a white parrot was standing on her forehead at the time, biting her face, while another smaller bird was perched on her chest. She was reportedly intoxicated to the point where she could not stand up and speak to officers and was unable to remove the bird from her face. Police were dispatched to...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – For children at higher-than-average risk of asthma, having a dog around the house may increase the chances of developing the lung disease, a new study suggests. The study, which followed 380 children at increased risk of asthma due to family history, found that those exposed to relatively high levels of dog allergen at the age of 7 were more likely to have asthma. In contrast, there was no relationship between cat-allergen exposure and a child's risk of asthma, according to findings published in the journal Pediatric Allergy and Immunology. > "Dogs tend to have a...

The Food and Drug Administration is requiring major changes to the prescribing information of inhaled long-acting beta-agonists as part of a risk management plan to address the ongoing safety issues associated with the products' use in children and adults with asthma, the agency announced at a press briefing. Safety concerns regarding long-acting beta-agonist (LABA) therapy date back to a major study reported more than 7 years ago and include a 2008 FDA meta-analysis, which indicated that treatment with LABAs—either alone or when combined with an inhaled corticosteroid (ICS)—is associated with an increased risk of severe asthma symptoms and hospitalizations as...

The government is taking steps to curb use of some long-acting asthma drugs used by millions, issuing safety restrictions Thursday to lower a life-threatening risk that asthma could worsen suddenly. The Food and Drug Administration's warnings cover the drugs Advair, Symbicort, Foradil and Serevent. The FDA said they should be used only by asthmatics who can't control their lung disease with other medications _ and even then only for the shortest time possible.

A Montbello mother says her 9-year-old son's death from severe asthma could have been prevented had Denver Human Services resolved problems with his Medicaid pharmacy benefits. Zuton Lucero said she called Human Services every three days for months last year when she was suddenly unable to get prescription drugs for her son, Zumante. The boy's health deteriorated without the medication, his doctor said, and he died at Children's Hospital in July after losing consciousness at his house after an attack. "I don't want anyone else to be sitting where I'm sitting," Lucero said. Advocacy lawyers who met Wednesday with the...

Uncommon version seems to lessen risk of lung disease in smokers People who carry a variant form of a gene that encodes a protein called MMP-12 are in luck. This uncommon form of the gene appears to provide some protection against emphysema and asthma, researchers report online December 16 in the New England Journal of Medicine. In the study, an international team of researchers analyzed data on lung function and genetics from seven studies that included more than 5,000 people and found that 7 to 13 percent of people harbored the beneficial variant of MMP-12. In four of the studies,...

In the future, asthmatic children may be able to monitor their condition using breath analysing sensors built into their mobile phones. Thanks to a UK company who have embedded a carbon nanotube sensor, which can monitor nitric oxide (NO) levels in exhaled breath, into mobiles. '200 different chemicals are exhaled in your breath,' says Victor Higgs, managing director of Applied Nanodetectors, during a demonstration of his company's latest prototype at the Nano and emerging technologies forum 09 in London this week. And these can be used to monitor and diagnose a wide range of diseases.  Nanotube sensors inside mobile phones could potentially be used...

I don’t often write about alternative remedies for serious medical conditions. Most have little more than anecdotal support, and few have been found effective in well-designed clinical trials. Such trials randomly assign patients to one of two or more treatments and, wherever possible, assess the results without telling either the patients or evaluators who received which treatment. Now, however, in describing an alternative treatment for asthma that does not yet have top clinical ratings in this country (although it is taught in Russian medical schools and covered by insurance in Australia), I am going beyond my usually stringent research criteria...

The Food and Drug Administration last month called on manufacturers of leukotriene inhibitors to include safety precautions on their drug's labeling, because of reports of neuropsychiatric events in patients taking these drugs. The FDA said the reported neuropsychiatric events included cases of agitation, aggression, anxiety, dream abnormalities and hallucinations, depression, insomnia, irritability, restlessness, suicidal ideation and behavior, and tremor in patients using montelukast (Singulair), zafirlukast (Accolate), and zileuton (Zyflo, Zyflo CR). Manufacturers of these drugs were asked to submit all available clinical trial data for these products for the safety review that concluded in April. In its review, the FDA...

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, better known as NASA, said in July that it had found the "smoking gun" that caused the space shuttle Columbia to break apart as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere on Feb. 1: a piece of foam that had peeled off the external fuel tank and struck the shuttle's wing 1 minute and 22 seconds after liftoff. But many experts looking at the tragedy that killed seven astronauts say there is a deeper cause. They say that the metaphorical smoking gun should be painted green. Because of demands that the agency help to front for...

Link only, per rule: Health Buzz: Fried Insects Bad for Asthma

Mepolizumab prevents some ER visits in people with a severe form of asthma An experimental drug called mepolizumab can prevent severe asthma attacks in people with an uncommon form of the disease that responds poorly to standard steroid medications, researchers report in two studies in the March 5 New England Journal of Medicine. Scientists from Britain and Canada also find that a simple test of sputum (coughed up matter) can reveal which patients would most likely benefit from mepolizumab. Thus the drug might help some people with asthma reduce the use of steroids such as prednisone, which have side effects,...

Infecting patients with worms 'could hold key to treating asthma' Infecting patients with worms could hold the key to treating asthma and other conditions on the rise because of the modern obsession with cleanliness, scientists believe. By Kate Devlin 28 Jan 2009 Researchers are testing whether parasitic worms can stimulate patients' immune systems to fight illnesses. The worms have been all but eliminated from humans in developed countries, because of an increased emphasis on hygiene. But experts believe their absence could be one of the reasons why some illnesses, including asthma and diabetes, are increasingly prevalent. A trial by scientists...

WASHINGTON — Two federal drug officials have concluded that asthma sufferers risk death if they continue to use four hugely popular asthma drugs — Advair, Symbicort, Serevent and Foradil. But the officials’ views are not universally shared within the government. The two officials, who work in the safety division of the Food and Drug Administration, wrote in an assessment on the agency’s Web site on Friday that asthma sufferers of all ages should no longer take the medicines. A third drug-safety official concluded that Advair and Symbicort could be used by adults but that all four drugs should no longer...

A federal ban on ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), to conform to the Clean Air Act, is, ironically, affecting 22.9 million people in the United States who suffer from asthma, says Scientific American. Generic inhaled albuterol -- the most commonly prescribed short-acting asthma medication that requires CFCs to propel it into the lungs -- will no longer be legally sold after December 21, 2008. As more patients see their prescriptions change and costs go up -- the reformulated brand-name alternatives can be three times as expensive, raising the cost to about $40 per inhaler -- many question why this ban must begin...

ScienceDaily (May 30, 2008) — A presentation that demonstrates breathing exercises designed to help reduce the use of asthma inhalers is today available to the general public for free from the Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) for Asthma and Airways website. The 40 minute production is in response to a research paper on the management of asthma through the use of breathing exercises, conducted by researchers and doctors at Sydney's Woolcock Institute of Medical Research and Melbourne's Alfred Hospital, which was published in the August 20061 edition of Thorax. The results of this study showed that asthmatics who undertook regular breathing...

The following petition has 2,200 signatures. Also please file any complaints with the FDA (Medwatch Reporting Form). Here is the link. https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/medwatch/medwatch-online.htm Find the blue Begin button to the right to start. Text of petition: The FDA, in compliance with the Montreal Protocol, has banned the use of life-saving CFC propellant albuterol asthma rescue inhalers in order to help restore the ozone layer, even though it has been widely acknowledged that these CFC inhaler emissions are too trivial to harm the ozone layer: Leslie Hendeles, University of Florida Professor of Pharmacy and Pediatrics, has noted that CFC inhalers release negligible...

FRIDAY, May 30 (HealthDay News) -- Asthma inhalers that contain the drug albuterol to relax the airways also contain chemicals that harm the ozone layer. And these inhalers won't be available after this year, so U.S. health officials are urging patients to switch to alternative inhalers now. Chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, are widely used to propel inhaled drugs into the lungs. However, products containing CFCs are being phased out, because the chemicals damage the Earth's protective ozone layer. CFC inhalers are being replaced by inhalers powered by HFAs, or hydrofluoroalkanes, which are ozone-friendly. The change to HFA-powered inhalers has been in...

WASHINGTON - The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday it is investigating a possible link between Merck’s best-selling asthma drug, Singulair, and suicide. FDA said it is reviewing reports of mood changes, suicidal behavior and suicide in patients who have taken the popular drug also used for allergies. Merck has updated the drug’s labeling four times in the past year to include information on a range of side effects: tremors, anxiousness, depression and suicidal behavior.

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) - Those all-over body sprays that promise to turn teenage boys into babe magnets? Instead of attracting girls, they could be making them sick. A Minnesota lawmaker proposed a bill Monday urging a fragrance-free educational campaign to discourage students from dousing themselves in scents that aggravate classmates with asthma and other health problems. Odors that fill hallways come mostly from boys who douse themselves in body sprays like Axe, said Mikolai Altenberg, a senior at Minneapolis South High School. He said the smell is "indescribable" and unavoidable. "You can smell it from 10 feet away," Altenberg...

A woman in her late teens died from an acute asthma attack triggered by secondhand cigarette smoke shortly after arriving at her job as a waitress in a bar in Michigan, researchers reported on Friday.

This is the problem with the politicians, and especially those who are so worried about the environment: They forget what and who is important -- people. The reason I say this is because of what has happened with prescription inhalers used for asthma treatment. I recently needed to refill my inhaler and was told by the local pharmacist that the inhaler was now different because it contained ingredients that harmed the ozone layer. However, these ingredients were the most effective for helping calm down an asthma attack. I was also informed by the pharmacy that since the medication was altered,...

Roundworms may infect close to a quarter of inner city black children, tapeworms are the leading cause of seizures among U.S. Hispanics and other parasitic diseases associated with poor countries are also affecting Americans, a U.S. expert said on Tuesday. Recent studies show many of the poorest Americans living in the United States carry some of the same parasitic infections that affect the poor in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, said Dr. Peter Hotez, a tropical disease expert at George Washington University and editor-in-chief of the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. Writing in the journal, Hotez...

Much of what is known about the health problems of ground zero workers comes from a small clinic in Manhattan that at the time of the trade center collapse had only six full-time doctors and a tiny budget. Yet in the weeks after 9/11, its doctors stepped into the fray in the absence of any meaningful effort by the city, state or federal government to survey, interview or offer treatment to potentially sickened recovery and cleanup workers. Since then, the clinic, the Irving J. Selikoff Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine, based at Mount Sinai Medical Center, has examined more...

Children ages 5 to 11 with asthma require different treatment than do adults, guidelines issued yesterday by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute say. The new guidelines are the first to recognize that this age group has distinct needs and should not be lumped together with adults, as has been done in the past. Specifically, these children can often control their asthma with inhalers that contain only steroid drugs, whereas adults are more likely to need inhalers that combine steroids and other medicines. (The steroids used to treat asthma are different from the ones that athletes take to bulk...

Rescue and recovery workers at ground zero have developed asthma at a rate that is 12 times what would be expected for adults, according to findings released yesterday by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Of nearly 26,000 workers surveyed in 2003 and 2004, 926 reported that they developed asthma for the first time after working at ground zero (a rate of 3.6 percent). In a group that size, under normal conditions, no more than 77 new cases of asthma (0.3 percent) would have been expected, according to the report, which is published in the current...

NEW YORK (AP) -- An image of a sad-looking little girl squeezing an asthma inhaler is being used to pressure state lawmakers into approving Mayor Michael Bloomberg's controversial plan to reduce traffic and pollution by charging motorists who drive into Manhattan. The tag line: ``She cannot hold her breath waiting for Albany to act.'' The flier is being mailed this week to 350,000 households throughout the city, urging residents to call lawmakers in Albany. The state legislature would have to come back for a special session to approve the plan before a July 16 application deadline for federal funding. Bloomberg's...