Thursday 11-05-15

I guess it good new for the drug companies, but not regular people

Number of Americans using 5 or more drugs nearly doubles

One of the first medical references to the term "polypharmacy" is in a 1959 New England Journal of Medicine paper that warned of a growing number of multiple drug preparations on the market.
It even hearkened back to ancient times to one of the first such preparations, a concoction known as theriac used for poisonous animal bites. It was made from squill (a flowering bulb), viper's flesh, opium and honey.
Today, polypharmacy refers to people taking five or more prescription drugs. And, according to a paper Tuesday in JAMA, the number of Americans on such regimens has nearly doubled over a decade to 15% of adults.
Instead of snakes, the modern culprits more likely are societal conditions such as aging and obesity and possibly nonmedical factors such as increased Medicare coverage and the ever-present direct-to-consumer television ads.
Instead of flowers and honey, today's most popular or fastest growing drugs include cholesterol-lowering statins, antidepressants and drugs to control diabetes, acid indigestion and high blood pressure.
The JAMA paper also found that, in addition to the growing ranks of polypharmacy patients, the number of adults taking at least one prescription drug grew from 51% of the population in the years 1999-2000 to 59% in 2011-2012, the most recent year data was available.
"The population has aged," said lead author Elizabeth Kantor, an epidemiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. "Older people tend to take more drugs."
So do heavier people. Several of the drugs that saw increasing use were for conditions linked to obesity.
In the study, blood pressure drugs were among the most prescribed, increasing from 20% of adults in 1999-2000 to 27% in 2011-2012.
Statins increased from 6.9% to 17%; antidepressants increased from 6.8% 13%; antidiabetic drugs increased from 4.6% to 8.2%;and tranquilizers and sedatives increased from 4.2% to 6.1%.
Some drug classes saw a decline in use including sex hormones for women, declining from 19% to 11% and antibiotics declined from 5.7% to 4.2%.
The prescription numbers were based on a national in-home survey of 38,000 adults looking at use of 18 classes of prescription drugs in the previous 30 days.
The unanswered question is whether the prescribing trend is beneficial.
"The increase in use of prescription medications over time is good for those who need them, and bad for those who don't," said Walid Gellad, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh who was not involved in the study. "We need to make sure we are careful about who's who."
Side effects and drug interactions can be serious problems for people taking multiple medications, said Lee Vermeulen, a clinical professor of pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin School of Pharmacy.
For instance, drugs that reduce blood sugar in diabetics can lower it too much, leading to dangerous hypoglycemia. Blood pressure drugs can reduce blood pressure too much, causing fainting and falling, which can lead to a broken hip in older people, he said.
One piece of good news — at least from a financial standpoint — is that many of the drugs on the list of the most used are available as generics, he said. Going forward, policies are needed to ensure that the most-used drugs remain available as lower-cost generics, said Gellad, a physician and co-director university's Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and Prescribing.
The paper also reveals a change in how doctors and patients have dealt with pain.
Use of narcotic painkillers increased from 3.8% of adults to 5.7%, reflecting the growing use of opioids throughout much of the 2000s.
However, so-called COX-2 inhibitors, which include pain medicines such as Celebrex, declined from 1.9% to 0.6%. Also, prescription drugs known as NSAIDs (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs), dropped from 5.6% to 4.2%.
The decline in those two classes of drugs, and the increase in opioids, may reflect concerns relating to increased cardiovascular and heart attack risk, said Robert Hurley, a professor and vice chair of pain medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
"The prescription of opioids is still high and higher than most industrialized nations despite having similar levels of pain in the population per capita," he said. "They are likely overprescribed."

http://www.jsonline.com/news/drugs04-b99608174z1-339445841.html

Avoiding diseases When Dressing Game

   

   

Plague

In a TEOTWAWKI situation, we may find ourselves having to dress wild game anything from rats to deer.  Because we cannot afford to get sick under these conditions we need to be more careful about protecting ourselves from diseases while dressing the game.
There are numerous diseases that you can contact while dressing out the game or from the ticks and fleas that are leaving them.  As soon as the game begins to cool the ticks, fleas and other parasites will leave and look for new homes.  Hopeful it will not be you.
While there are many potential diseases that you can contact from wild game we will mainly concentrate on four.  Rabies, plague, rocky mountain spotted fever and lyme disease
Rabies, the virus is not present in the meat itself, but in the surrounding nerve tissue, as well as in the brain, spinal cord and the animal’s saliva.  Rabies is only transmitted when the virus is introduced into an open wound or to mucous membranes (eyes, nose, mouth).  For more information on rabies see Rabies – After TEOTWAWKI Rabies Will be a Major Threat
If for any reason you suspect the possibility of rabies or other diseases, avoid touching the animal’s mouth, brain or spinal cord and use the following safety.

• Wear goggles and long rubber or plastic protective gloves while field dressing, skinning, butchering and processing the meat.
• After butchering, wash hands with soap and water, and wash any contaminated clothing and the work area. (this should apply if possible whenever you field dress or butcher an animal)
• Disinfect gloves and butchering utensils in a solution of one part household bleach to 20 parts water for twenty minutes.
• Cook game meat thoroughly. Heat destroys the rabies virus and other disease organisms that might be present.
• Freezing will not destroy the rabies virus.  Precautions should be taken while thawing meat.

Fleas and ticks.  Here the problem is to avoid getting them on you.  As soon as the game starts to cool, the fleas and ticks will start to look for a new home.  You need to avoid become their new host.  Because you may be hunting at different times of the year, both fleas and ticks may be more prevalent. Both lyme disease and rocky mountain spotted fever are spread by tick bites. Fleas are a carrier of plague, you can contact it from their bits.  For more information on these diseases, see the following posts.

Rabies in one year

Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever

Lyme disease

• Ticks and Lyme Disease
• Insect Repellants Like Permethrin for Preppers
• Plague, A Hazard After TEOTWAWKI
• How to Get Rid of Fleas when There are No Pesticides Available

For further information on these diseases as well as many less common ones see an excellent article published by the American Veterinarian Medical Association, Disease precautions for hunters   this article covers symptoms and contains some information on treatment in both animals and humans.  This is a situation in which prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Howard

http://preparednessadvice.com/medical/avoiding-diseases-when-dressing-game/#.VjoXcmfbLIU