When the air you breathe is polluted, it can cause symptoms such as labored breathing; irritated eyes, nose and throat; burning of the eyes; cough; and tightness in the chest.

To minimize these side effects of air pollution — especially if you have heart or lung disease — the American Academy of Family Physicians offers these suggestions:

1. When pollution levels are high, stay inside as much as possible.
2. If you must engage in outdoor activities, try to schedule them first thing in the morning or in the evening, after sunset.
3. When air quality is poor, don’t exercise outdoors.
4. Avoid any outdoor activities that require you to exert yourself. Taking in more air also means breathing in additional pollutants.

As health professionals in the Quad-Cities try to help the man from the northwest part of the state, Nordlund has become an example of the cost involved in treating Iowans who do not have traditional health insurance.

While he is grateful for the help, the hospital is absorbing a bill of more than $80,000, part of the $4.3 million it spends on such patients as Nordlund in a year’s time. When all of the charity and uncompensated care is added up for 2007, Genesis wrote off $42.3 million, officials there said, a percentage that has grown dramatically over the past few years.

Nordlund has a high school degree and a year of post-graduate training. He has worked in factories most of his life and is skilled at welding and driving a forklift tractor. Divorced, he is the father of two teenage girls and has an extended family, several of whom live near his father’s farm in Albert City.
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A cervical cancer vaccine that has been recommended only for U.S. residents has become a requirement for all new female immigrants ages 11 to 26, sparking an outcry over the order’s safety and cost.

“It’s outrageous,” said Sara Sadhwani, project director for the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles. “It seems absolutely premature to mandate this for immigrant women.”

The new requirement went into effect Aug. 1 and will affect more than 130,000 immigrants a year.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration in June 2006 approved the vaccine Gardasil for females ages 9 to 26 to block strains of the human papillomavirus, or HPV, a sexually transmitted virus that can cause cervical cancer. About 4,000 women in the U.S. die of the disease each year.
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(NAPSI)-While most people recognize the importance of applying sunscreen at the beach or the pool, many don’t realize the value in wearing sun protection every day of the year.

Experts say about 80 percent of a person’s sun exposure occurs during daily activities-walking to the car, sitting in front of a window-and that one year of incidental sun exposure is like spending a week at the beach without sunscreen.

To keep skin healthy and protected throughout the day, incorporate a moisturizer that contains SPF into your daily skin care routine, as hydration and sun protection are key elements for maintaining healthy skin.

Skin that is dry may be unable to perform its primary function, which is to protect your body from environmental damage, such as free radicals, pollutants and the sun’s UV rays.
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(NAPSI)-For many of us, a meal is not complete without a sweet ending. Fortunately, eating a healthier diet does not mean having to give up desserts.

Choose all your ingredients carefully and make a few simple substitutions, and it’s easier than you might imagine to create tasty, decadent treats with significantly less calories and fat. Here are a few tips to help:

• Use low-fat sour cream or plain yogurt in place of sour cream.

• Try low-fat versions of half-and-half or cream cheese to reduce fat.

• Use egg substitute in place of fresh eggs to lower calories and fat, or use two egg whites in place of one whole egg.
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When kids are active, they have different nutritional needs compared to those who aren’t. As parents of active children, we need to know we’re feeding our kids what they need to meet their energy requirements. But how much do you feed them? What kinds of foods do you feed them? And what do you feed them before, during and after physical activity and athletic competitions?

Talking with other parents, I realized that many are getting bombarded with misinformation regarding sports nutrition. Therefore, I decided to write up some nutrition guidelines for active kids so that you will have answers to the most commonly asked questions. Active pre-teen females (ages 6 to 12) require anywhere from 1600-2200 calories per day, while males of the same age range need 1800-2400 calories per day.
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Eating out invariably raises a number of tricky questions: sit-down or drive-thru? Burgers or pizza? Thin or stuffed crust? And if you’re dining with your family, add the biggest question of all: Will the food we eat today bring a fatter tomorrow for our kids? And fewer tomorrows for the rest of us?

So the choice between McDonald’s and Burger King shouldn’t be based solely on whether you’re more terrified by the scary clown Ronald McDonald or that creepy masked Burger King. Choosing one over the other could be the difference of hundreds of calories in a meal, more than 10 unnecessary pounds over the course of a year, and countless health woes over the course of a lifetime.

During more than a year of research, my coauthor and I discovered vast dietary discrepancies between many of the places Americans love to eat most. So to help you separate the commendable from the deplorable, we put 43 major chain restaurants under the nutritional microscope — both for your benefit, and that of your family.
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A recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine found that, in 3 percent of 969 women with newly diagnosed cancer in one breast, MRI scans were able to detect malignant tumors in the other breast, even though clinical exam and mammography showed no abnormalities.

These results clearly indicate the advantage of MRI on the opposite breast at the time of a diagnosis of breast cancer. Finding a site of malignancy in the other breast at that time would allow a single round of treatment and eliminate the need, for example, for two separate bouts of chemotherapy. On the other hand, a negative MRI of the opposite breast provides almost complete assurance that that breast is free of cancer.

One considerable downside, however: MRI can detect such small abnormalities that 75 percent of the women in the study underwent biopsies that were negative, and thus not needed.
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Most of the 5 percent to 20 percent of Americans who come down with influenza (flu) in a year have an unpleasant, short illness. The flu, however, can be quite dangerous to some: According to information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 200,000 people in the U.S. are hospitalized with the flu each year, and about 36,000 people die from it.

Children and adolescents have the highest infection rates for flu; however, children less than age 2, people ages 65 or older, and persons of any age with serious medical conditions such as heart disease, are the groups who most often become seriously ill and die from influenza.

The CDC recommends getting a flu vaccination as soon as the vaccines become available in September. But if you miss this early vaccine time, there’s plenty of reason to get a vaccination later, since flu infections generally peak in February.
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By ELIZABETH HAN
The Press-Enterprise

There’s a different dimension to back-to-school preparations when a child has asthma.

Parents and educators need to discuss the particulars of a child’s condition such as the symptoms and triggers and emergency plans at school.

The American Lung Association of California is holding free Asthma 101 classes in San Bernardino for parents and educators the last Tuesday of the month to raise awareness of how an asthma attack is triggered and how the condition is managed through medication.

According to the national American Lung Association, asthma is the most common chronic disorder in childhood, affecting 6.8 million kids in the country.

In San Bernardino County, the pediatric asthma rate is 17.1 percent, higher than the state average of 14.7 percent, and in Riverside County it is 11.3 percent, said Terry Roberts, area director of the state association’s Inland county office, based in San Bernardino and covering both Inland counties.

There are several things parents need to do to prepare their asthmatic kids for school, such as having an asthma action plan, making sure there is an inhaler at home and at school, and conferring with teachers about allergens and irritants.

A sample asthma action plan can be downloaded from the San Bernardino County Medical Society’s Web site at www.sbcms.org or obtained by calling the San Bernardino office of the American Lung Association of California at 909-884-5862.

The form is filled out by the child’s doctor and details an emergency plan on what to do if a child’s symptoms worsen. For example, it provides instruction to educators on when to call 911 (if symptoms are not relieved by medication after 15 to 20 minutes usually).

It is also important for parents to give a copy of the plan to the school and share with their child’s teacher, Roberts said.

“It’s a really good idea for parents to visit a teacher, or school nurses, and them about the child’s trigger and share the action plan with the teacher,” she said.

“Every child that has asthma has a different severity, different symptoms, different triggers,” she said, and it is important to educate teachers about how to recognize when a child has difficulty breathing.

“You won’t necessarily see them gasping for air,” Roberts said. Some kids can turn pale, sit there quietly, or have their lips or fingertips turn blue.

Symptoms such as blue lips or fingertips veer into dangerous territory, along with trouble walking or talking, a hunched posture, or struggling to breathe.

Parents need to make sure children have an inhaler not only at home but also at school, said Consuela Edmond, program coordinator for the Childhood Asthma Program, put on by the Riverside County Department of Public Health.

“There (are) a lot of allergens and irritants in the school such as chalk dust or even dry-erase markers — the scent — paints and glues, strong odors such as perfumes and room deodorizers, chemicals from science and art projects, even upholstered furniture,” Edmond said.

Pets, mold, dust and cockroaches are also triggers, Edmond said.

It is important to remember that asthma can be managed, Edmond said. It doesn’t need to hamper a child’s quality of life.