Wednesday, March 14, 2007 4:28 AM
Calcium and its importance
-Calcium is found more commonly in the skeletal system, while it also can be found in your blood and the cell membranes. Calcium found in other ares help the body to carry out vital reactions.
- The skeletal calcium is in constant movement with the blood and other bodily fluids. It has been found out that in seven years, the whole skeleton breaks down and builds up again with new minerals and other bone materialsand without an adequate supply of calcium when growing, the bones deform and can lead to osteoporosis, a deficiency disease where the bones become brittle.
If YOU have backaches, or are having back muscle spasms, thigh bones aching, or if you are having any difficulty in twisting and bending, i advice you to consult a doctor to check if you have osteoporosis.
How does one get osteoporosis?
When the body lacks calcium, it obtains it from the bones and uses up the calcium meant for the bones, resulting in the bones becoming porous and as a result, brittle.
There are other dangers that one might face after having found out that he has osteoporosis:
If you have checked and acknowledged that you suffer from osteoporosis and have seeked medical attention, the doctor might conduct an operation which involves the inserting of heavy metals to fill up the spaces not filled by calcium. This can lead to cancer.
Vitamin D stimulates the production of calcium binding proteins in the digestive tract and if you don't have enough protein to begin with, it can't make the protein transporters needed to absorb calcium.
Your body also can't absorb calcium without balanced amounts of magnesium and phosphorus. Magnesium changes calcium to its soluble form so the body can absorb it. Too much phosphorus in the diet takes calcium from the bones and brings it into the rest of the body, making the bones soft. Calcium and magnesium are carried throughout your body by the blood component, albumin.
How can you lose calcium?
-Alcohol is a diuretic and draws out a lot of calcium and magnesium from your body with the increased amount of urine.
-By drinking a lot of water causes your body to lose more than the usual amounts of calcium and magnesium.
-Calcium and magnesium can also be lost through exercising and lots of perspiration.
-Calcium helps the adrenal glands produce stress coping hormones. If you are stressed, then your body will be using some calcium it would normally direct to the bones, in the extra production of hormones.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007 2:00 PM
We have found out a deficiency disease called GRID. It stands for gay-related immuno-deficiency diseases, now known as AIDS. This disease, which happens more to gay men, breaks down the immune system of the body. Hence there is this short circuit of the immune system among such a specific demographic group. Below is an article written by Randy Shilts on this extraordinary disease.
A 45-year-old San Francisco man looked at the purple spots covering his arms, face and chest and contemplated the death sentence they might foreshadow.
"Every time I see a new spot, I think I'm a step closer to death," said Jerry, a former waiter. "I don't even look in the mirror any more."
Jerry is a victim of one of a series of baffling diseases hitting primarily gay men with increasing frequency across the country.
Scientists have lumped the various illnesses together under the acronym of GRID -- for gay-related immuno-deficiency diseases -- and public health officials have come to view them as the most startling health problem to hit the United States since the first outbreak of Legionnaire's disease in 1976.
The numbers of gay men struck by the GRID disease passed epidemic proportions long ago and are now frightening public health officials for a number of reasons.
-- In the 11 months since the first American case of a rare skin cancer known as Kaposi's sarcoma was reported to federal authorities, the cancer and the other GRID illnesses have reportedly struck 335 Americans, almost all of them gay, killing 136 -- a higher death toll than both toxic shock syndrome and Legionnaire's disease combined.
-- The diseases, most of which were previously unheard of among healthy young men, offer few hopes for survival. Only 15 percent of the men diagnosed in 1979 for Kaposi's sarcoma, now colloquially known as "gay cancer," are alive now, say federal officials. Two-thirds of the reported 1980 victims have died.
-- The overall death rate for patients with Pneumocystis pneumonia, the "gay pneumonia," which is the deadliest GRID, now stands at 50 percent.
-- Public health officials are also discovering that a laundry list of other strange diseases are striking gay men, apparently associated with a dysfunction of the patient's immune systems. These "opportunistic" diseases now account for one-sixth of GRID victims.
-- Even more mysterious than the fact that these diseases are attacking a group with few if any common genetic physical or racial characteristics is the fact that the geographic regions where GRID victims have been found are so isolated. About half come from New York, with another quarter split almost evenly between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The remaining quarter is scattered throughout smaller centers of gay populations around the country.
Public health officials also are worried that so far they have seen only the "tip of the iceberg" because of the increase in frequency with which the diseases are being reported. About 86 percent of the GRID victims have been reported since January and the federal Centers for Disease Control now average one new case a day.
Scientists fear the GRID problems may spread into the mainstream population before they find the solution. New figures are showing a growing number of women and bisexual or heterosexual men who have come down with one of the mysterious diseases.
In the Bay Area, where GRID disease have stricken 65 gay men and killed 19, authorities have responded quickly to the threats, establishing one of the nation's first GRID clinics at the University of California-San Francisco Medical Center.
"In San Francisco, it's an epidemic beyond anything that's acceptable," says Dr. Selma Dritz, assistant director of the bureau of communicable disease control for San Francisco's Department of Public Health. "It's like nothing we've ever had."
Every Wednesday, a half-dozen GRID victims discuss the turns of their unusual illness in conversations ranging from jokes about how they sneak marijuana into hospitals to counter their chemotherapy, to more somber thoughts about the five group members who have died from the baffling malaises.
For Jerry, the 45-year-old waiter, having a cancer associated with a stigmatized minority meant waiting for six months before telling his religious mother for fear that she might say that he was only experiencing what God does to the immoral.
And when one gay victim of pneumocystis lapsed into a semi-coma, his relatives tried to strike his lover's name from the guest list and forbid him from seeing the dying man.
Bobbi Campbell, a gay cancer victim who writes a column on the disease for a local gay paper, says he has found that many in the gay community are eager to pin the diseases on the drug use and exotic sexual practices that some medical officials have found to be associated with victims.
"There's this need to focus on these aspects of the disease -- so people can put the victims at arm's length from themselves, so it doesn't hit close to home," says Campbell.
The victims' search for a cure remains the most disheartening aspect of the strange diseases.
Jerry, a KS victim, already has gone through chemotherapy, a month of expensive and scientifically unproven interferon injections, and is now being treated with another drug, all with no apparent effect on the disease.
"We keep revising our treatment protocols," worries Dritz of city public health. "But nothing seems to work, so we just have to keep experimenting."
Scientists have had as much trouble isolating a cause for the outbreak as finding a cure. Put simply, researchers attribute the GRID diseases to a massive breakdown in the victims' immune systems. This stops the body's ability to arrest the development of cancer cells, or pneumonia, or any other invading organisms to which most people are exposed.
What causes this short circuit of the immune system among such a specific demographic group? Federal health officials ran profiles of 130 risk factors on the GRID victims through a computer and found that the typical patient had about twice the sexual activity of a normal American gay male, tending to be involved in bathhouses and esoteric sexual activities.
They also indulged in heavier use of such drugs as marijuana, MDA, ethyl chloride, LSD, alcohol and "poppers," the nitrate-based stimulants popular in gay circles. They also tend to have extensive histories of sexually transmitted diseases.
It is unclear whether sexual practices, drugs, diseases or treatments for the diseases -- or a combination of all these factors -- are behind the epidemic.
Complicating the search is the fact that several sets of roommates and lovers have come down with the same GRID disease, leading some researchers to suggest that a viral agent may be involved.
"The problems with this is that people who live together also tend to do a lot of others things that are similar," says Dr. Howard Jaffe, a member of the Atlanta-based Center for Disease Control task force on GRID.
Like just about any subject involving homosexuality, it hasn't taken long for GRID to become a political issue.
At congressional hearings on KS in Los Angeles last month, Congressman Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, accused the federal government of dragging its feet on gay- related diseases.
"There is no doubt in my mind that if the same disease had appeared among Americans of Norwegian descent, or among tennis players, rather than among gay males, the response of both the government and the medical community would have been different," said Waxman, whose district includes the predominantly gay West Hollywood neighborhood.
Some of the ideas about AIDS may seem infuriating and ignorant to us now, but this was the beginning of the war on AIDS, and Shilts was one of the first war correspondents.Randy Shilts wrote the article reprinted below for the May 13, 1982 edition of The Chronicle.
Through this blog, we hope that people will now be more aware of the many deficiency diseases in the world. These diseases can happen to anyone at any time, so we hope that people will take this opportunity to read and learn about them. We would also like to thank all the people whom we got this information from. For any inquires, please contact bionions@hotmail.com
