incredulous

The quest to build ever more proficient athletes keeps hitting unexpected snags, and perhaps nowhere is this more vivid than in Major League Baseball. Several top players have been hampered by a hip ailment that was unheard of in the sport a decade ago.

Knee injuries to countless recreational and professional athletes in recent years made anterior cruciate ligament a household phrase and compelled trainers to emphasize building leg strength. Sports medicine experts now say that approach, while mitigating knee injuries, may be making hips vulnerable.

Hip Injuries Bringing More Athletes to Their Knees – NYTimes.com.

Whooping cough, or pertussis, has been making a resurgence in recent years as more parents decide not to vaccinate their children, says Jason Glanz, author of a study in today’s Pediatrics. In a study of 751 children enrolled in Kaiser Permanente of Colorado, one in 20 children who skipped the vaccine developed whooping cough, compared with one in 500 vaccinated children. In all, 11% to 12% of pertussis cases were in unvaccinated children.

Though more than 90% effective, the vaccine doesn’t protect everyone, says Sean O’Leary, an infectious-disease fellow at Children’s Hospital in Denver.

That’s why vaccinating all children is crucial to creating “herd immunity” for the entire community, including newborns who are too young to be immunized, O’Leary says.

A study in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal in March found that 91 babies under age 1 died of whooping cough from 1999 to 2004. More than half were under 2 months old, the age at which infants get their first in a series of whooping cough shots.

A group of running rebels are shedding their shoes and reporting years of injury-free miles. Some ultramarathoners, biomechanics experts and doctors think that’s probably a good thing. Others go so far as to say running shoes are in fact causing injuries. Meanwhile, running shoe companies continue to precisely measure runners, and pound and flex shoes in their high-tech labs. Could shoes—and shoe companies—be covering hundreds of thousands of perfectly able bare feet? If shoes are doing damage, just what are the companies measuring?

via Barefoot Running and Shoe Companies – New Balance, Nike and the Biomechanical Debate – Popular Mechanics.

The fact of the matter is, swine flu has been hopping from pigs to humans for decades, sometimes causing disease, sometimes not. According to a study done by the Centers for Disease Control, 76% of swine exhibitors at a 1988 county fair had antibodies in their bloodstream indicating a prior swine flu infection, even though the exhibitors showed no signs of illness. There was also an outbreak of swine flu among military recruits in Fort Dix, New Jersey in 1976, causing severe illness in 13 soldiers and one death. With this current swine flu outbreak, we simply don’t know what to expect. There’s been no reliable pattern. Some people have gotten mildly ill, and some have died. Some have probably been transiently infected and didn’t even notice.

But I don’t think we need to worry about this pandemic too much, because there’s one thing to keep in mind when news of a unique flu strain breaks: perspective. As of this writing, 80 people in Mexico have succumbed to swine flu. By comparison, the CDC estimates that 36,000 people in the United States die each year of influenza-related illnesses. And in spite of this, we in the medical community still have a hard time convincing people to get their flu shots. If you’re not afraid of influenza, then you shouldn’t be afraid of the swine flu. Even in the event that someone gets infected with swine flu, we have medications with demonstrated effectiveness against the strain that’s currently active.

via Medical Marginalia » Blog Archive » Swine flu: nothing new » A True/Slant Contributor.