Beware appendicitis in young kids

Children with stomach aches or cases of vomiting could be suffering from an inflammation of the vermiform appendix - or so-called appendicitis. As opposed to gastro intestinal infections caused by viruses or bacteria, the stomach pain in appendicitis occurs before a fever develops.

In such cases, parents should take their children to a pediatrician or young people's physician or take them to the emergency room, according to Ulrich Fegeler of the Professional Association of Children's and Young People's Physicians in Cologne.

"The pain usually begins in the middle of the stomach and then moves to the right lower side. But it can also prevail in the upper half of the stomach," Fegeler says.

"If the stomach is especially hard or seems bloated, this could be a sign of appendicitis."

Nausea, vomiting, constipation or even diarrhea, lasting flatulence as well as loss of appetite are other symptoms.

All told, appendicitis can become noticeable in many variations ranging from unspecific symptoms to classical pain in the right lower stomach.

Appendicitis can occur in all age groups, most commonly in 11- to 20-year-olds.

In small children, the appendix very rarely gets inflamed. The smaller the children the more unspecific the signs of the illness are.

"If untreated, this vermiform appendix can burst after two or three days, allowing bacteria and excrement to enter the stomach region and usually continue to swell as an abscess," Fegeler says.

"It could also develop into a life-threatening peritonitis."

New gonorrhea strain sparks fears

Scientists have found a "superbug" strain of gonorrhea in Japan that is resistant to all recommended antibiotics and say it could transform a once easily treatable infection into a global public health threat.

The new strain of the sexually transmitted disease - called H041 - cannot be killed by any currently recommended treatments for gonorrhea, leaving doctors with no other option than to try medicines so far untested against the disease.

Magnus Unemo of the Swedish Reference Laboratory for Pathogenic Neisseria, who discovered the strain with colleagues from Japan in samples from Kyoto, described it as both "alarming" and "predictable".

"Since antibiotics became the standard treatment for gonorrhea in the 1940s, this bacterium has shown a remarkable capacity to develop resistance mechanisms to all drugs introduced to control it," he says.

Gonorrhea is a bacterial sexually transmitted infection and if left untreated can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy and infertility in women.

It is one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases in the world and is most prevalent in South and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

British scientists said in 2010 that there was a real risk of gonorrhea becoming a superbug - a bacteria that has mutated and become resistant to multiple classes of antibiotics - after increasing reports of gonorrhea drug resistance emerged in China, Australia and other parts of Asia.

Nuts good for diabetes control

Replacing that daily muffin with a handful or two of nuts may help people with diabetes better control their blood sugar and cholesterol levels, a new study suggests.

Researchers found that when people with type 2 diabetes replaced some of their usual carbohydrates with about a half-cup of mixed nuts each day, the study participants' blood sugar and "bad" cholesterol levels dipped slightly over three months.

In contrast, no such improvements were seen among people who swapped their normal carbs for a daily whole-wheat muffin.

The findings, published in the journal Diabetes Care, do not mean that nuts are the key to diabetes control, the authors say.

"We should be focusing on overall diet and lifestyle," says Cyril W.C. Kendall of the University of Toronto in Canada, one of the researchers on the study.

The point, he says, is that "nuts can be part of a healthy diet".

"They have a lot of fat, but we now realize that those fats are healthy ones," Kendall adds, referring to the unsaturated fats that have been linked to a lower risk of heart disease and other health benefits.

Still, nuts are high in calories, and people with diabetes should not simply add a handful to their usual diet, according to Kendall.

"They could use them instead to displace some of the less healthy snacks they usually have," he says.

AFP-DPA