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Showing posts with label BMJ. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BMJ. Show all posts

Friday, April 24, 2015

Health Care Workers' Hazard: Cloth Based Masked Face Masks

Infection in the workplace is now becoming a major concern as new epidemics of disease spread worldwide facilitated by the ever increasing global transportation network. The recent and urgent concerns over Flu, Ebola, Measles and Polio highlight the need to protect health workers.

A recent study published the British Medical Journal focuses on the inadequacy of current medical practices. The study of Clinical respiratory illness (CRI), influenza-like illness (ILI) and laboratory-confirmed the spread of respiratory virus infection and highlights the the problems with cloth face masks.

"We have provided the first clinical efficacy data of cloth masks, which suggest HCWs should not use cloth masks as protection against respiratory infection. Cloth masks resulted in significantly higher rates of infection than medical masks, and also performed worse than the control arm. The controls were HCWs who observed standard practice, which involved mask use in the majority, albeit with lower compliance than in the intervention arms. The control HCWs also used medical masks more often than cloth masks. When we analysed all mask-wearers including controls, the higher risk of cloth masks was seen for laboratory-confirmed respiratory viral infection."

Click here to read the entire report.
"A cluster randomised trial of cloth masks compared with medical masks in healthcare workers"
BMJ Open 2015;5:e006577 doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2014-006577

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Exercise 'can be as good as pills'

Medication can be replaced by exercise reports the the BBC. Today's post is shared from bbc.org.

Exercise can be as good a medicine as pills for people with conditions such as heart disease, a study has found.

The work in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) looked at hundreds of trials involving nearly 340,000 patients to assess the merits of exercise and drugs in preventing death.

Physical activity rivalled some heart drugs and outperformed stroke medicine.

The findings suggest exercise should be added to prescriptions, say the researchers. 
Man preparing to jog

Experts stressed that patients should not ditch their drugs for exercise - rather, they should use both in tandem.

Too few adults currently get enough exercise. Only a third of people in England do the recommended 2.5 hours or more of moderate-intensity activity, such as cycling or fast walking, every week.

In contrast, prescription drug rates continue to rise.

There were an average of 17.7 prescriptions for every person in England in 2010, compared with 11.2 in 2000.

For the study, scientists based at the London School of Economics, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute at Harvard Medical School and Stanford University School of Medicine trawled medical literature to find any research that compared exercise with pills as a therapy.

They identified 305 trials to include in their analysis. These trials looked at managing conditions such as existing heart disease, stroke rehabilitation, heart failure and pre-diabetes.

When they studied the data as a whole, they found exercise and drugs were comparable in terms of death rates.

But there were...


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