Leia was born profoundly deaf but pioneering surgery and therapy has enabled her to hear sounds.

We human beings are a pretty strange bunch. On the one hand, we’re the most intelligent species on planet Earth.

On the other, we behave completely differently to the rest of the animal kingdom.

But what things do we do that nothing else does? What makes the human race so unique?

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When you’re pregnant, it seems like everything is off limits: sushi, caffeine, soft cheese – the list of taboo items goes on (and on and on).

That goes doubly for medications. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) both have entire websites dedicated to the topic of the meds pregnant women can and can’t take – NSAIDS like Advil, for instance, have been linked to higher rates of birth defects compared to pain medications like acetaminophen, per the CDC.

But what about cough or throat lozenges? While, yes, they contain active ingredients for cough-suppressant purposes, they’re pretty tame as far as medications go. So can you reach for them when you’re dealing with a nasty cold – or no? (PS, thanks, compromised immune system!)

Read more: “No one tells you about constipation during pregnancy”

So what’s the deal? Can you take lozenges while pregnant?

Honestly, there’s not much info out there about the safety of lozenges during pregnancy, which can make the topic even more confusing. “There are no studies looking at the safety of menthol, the typical active ingredient in lozenges during pregnancy,” explains Dara Godfrey, a dietitian at Reproductive Medicine Associates in New York.

But even without tons of research, the Cleveland Clinic says menthol throat lozenges are fine to take, as directed, during pregnancy. Dr Mary Jane Minkin, an obstetric-gynaecologist and clinical professor at Yale School of Medicine also says that she has never told women they cannot take lozenges during pregnancy.

The same goes for dextromethorphan (the active ingredient in cough suppressant medicines) too, which the American Pregnancy Association deems safe for use during pregnancy.

But before you go stock up on lozenges and start popping them at even the slightest tickle, it’s always a good idea to touch base with your doctor before trying any new medicine while pregnant. And if you still aren’t comfortable taking lozenges while pregnant, sip on some hot water with lemon, ginger, and honey, says Godfrey, which can also help minimise your cough (because let’s be real, any coughing during pregnancy is painful).

The bottom line: Assuming your doc’s in the loop, go ahead and take lozenges in moderation if you have a cold during pregnancy

^{This article was originally published on www.womenshealthsa.co.za}

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Cassie Shortsleeve

Scientists restored some activity within the brains of pigs that had been slaughtered hours before, raising hopes for some medical advances and questions about the definition of death.

The brains could not think or sense anything, researchers stressed. By medical standards “this is not a living brain”, said Nenad Sestan of the Yale School of Medicine, one of the researchers reporting the results Wednesday in the journal Nature.

But the work revealed a surprising degree of resilience among cells within a brain that has lost its supply of blood and oxygen, he said.

“Cell death in the brain occurs across a longer time window than we previously thought,” Sestan said.

Such research might lead to new therapies for stroke and other conditions, as well as provide a new way to study the brain and how drugs work in it, researchers said. They said they had no current plans to try their technique on human brains.

The study was financed mostly by the National Institutes of Health.

Cells functioning

The 32 brains came from pigs killed for food at a local slaughterhouse. Scientists put the brains into an apparatus in their lab. Four hours after the animals died, scientists began pumping a specially designed blood substitute through the organs.

The brains showed no large-scale electrical activity that would indicate awareness. Restoring consciousness was not a goal of the study, which was aimed instead at exploring whether particular functions might be restored long after death.

After six hours of pumping, scientists found that individual brain cells in one area of the brain had maintained key details of their structure, while cells from untreated brains had severely degraded.

When scientists removed these neurons from treated brains and stimulated them electrically, the cells responded in a way that indicated viability.

And by studying the artificial blood before it entered the treated brains and after it emerged, researchers found evidence that brain cells were absorbing blood sugar and oxygen and producing carbon dioxide, a signal that they were functioning.

They also found that blood vessels in treated brains responded to a drug that makes vessels widen.

Surprising results

Sestan said researchers don’t know whether they could restore normal whole brain function if they chose that goal. If such consciousness had appeared in the reported experiments, scientists would have used anesthesia and low temperatures to quash it and stop the experiment, said study co-author Stephen Latham of Yale.

There’s no good ethical consensus about doing such research if the brain is conscious, he said.

Researchers are now seeing if they can keep the brain functions they observed going for longer than six hours of treatment, which Latham said would be necessary to use the technology as a research tool.

Christof Koch, president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, who didn’t participate in the study, said he was surprised by the results, especially since they were achieved in a large animal.

“This sort of technology could help increase our knowledge to bring people back to the land of the living” after a drug overdose or other catastrophic event that deprived the brain of oxygen for an hour or two, he said.

Unlike the pig experiments, any such treatment would not involve removing the brain from the body.

Ethical minefield

The pig work also enters an ethical minefield, he said. For one thing, it touches on the widely used definition of death as the irreversible loss of brain function because irreversibility “depends on the state of the technology; and as this study shows, this is constantly advancing”, he said.

And somebody might well try this with a human brain someday, he said. If future experiments restored the large-scale electrical activity, would that indicate consciousness? Would the brain “experience confusion, delusion, pain or agony?” he asked.

That would be unacceptable even in an animal brain, he said.

In a Nature commentary, bioethicists Stuart Youngner and Insoo Hyun of the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine in Cleveland said if such work leads to better methods for resuscitating the brain in people, it could complicate decisions about when to remove organs for transplant.

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Liz O’Riordan had to stop working as a breast cancer surgeon because of her own cancer. How did she move on?

A 29-year-old New Jersey man died in September of a brain-eating parasite after swimming in a wave pool at a Texas resort, and now, seven months later, his mother has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the resort.

Fabrizio Stabile swam at the BSR Cable Park in Waco, Texas during a visit to the area, before returning home to New Jersey. Then on Sept. 16, Stabile was mowing the lawn when he had to stop due to a severe headache. He took medication and slept through the night, but was still dealing with pain the next day, and went back to sleep with more medication.

That afternoon, his mother tried to wake him up but Stabile was unable to get out of bed or speak coherently, and he was rushed to the hospital, according to his GoFundMe page.

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Doctors treated him for bacterial meningitis after seeing that he had brain swelling and a fever, but he didn’t respond to the medication and his condition worsened.

After four days of testing, they finally determined on Thursday that Stabile had contracted the rare Naegleria fowleri parasite, but it was too late to help. He died the next day, Sept. 21.

His mother, Rita Stabile, is seeking $1 million in damages from BSR, which she said could have prevented her son’s death “had they exercised ordinary care in the operation of their water park,” the Houston Chronicle reports.

The lawsuit also argues that the park’s “blue-green dyed waves masked a pathogen soup in which Naegleria fowleri amoeba — ‘the brain-eating amoeba’ — could thrive.”

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Stuart E. Parsons Jr., the owner of BSR Cable Park, shared his condolences to the Stabile family and said that “only God knows where he got the amoeba,” the Waco Tribune-Herald reports. But in the months since, he installed a $2 million “state-of-the-art” filtration system approved by the Texas Department of State Health Services and the Waco-McLennan County Public Health District. The park has since reopened for the 2019 season.

Cases of Naegleria fowleri are extremely rare, with just 34 reported infections in the U.S. between 2008 and 2017, according to the Centers for Disease Control. And surviving it is unlikely — of the 143 known cases total, between 1962 and 2017, just 4 people have survived, a 97 percent fatality rate.

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The BSR Cable Park closed temporarily the day after Stabile’s death so the CDC could test the area, the Associated Press reported.

Naegleria fowleri is most likely to be found in warm water temperatures, at 115 degrees or higher. It occurs in freshwater, such as lakes and rivers, or in poorly maintained swimming pools.

Stabile’s friends and family created The Fabrizio Stabile Foundation for Naegleria Fowleri Awareness, “to bring awareness to, and educate as many people as possible about, this rare and preventable infection,” they wrote on the GoFundMe page, which raised over $26,000.

“We aim to do this through an annual fundraiser in Fabrizio’s memory in hopes that this will not affect another family,” they said. “Please help us in keeping Fabrizio’s memory alive.”

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A 3-year-old girl who was born with an extremely rare condition that caused her legs to bend backward was recently able to walk for the first time after undergoing a life-changing surgery. 

Victoria Komada, who's from Poland, has bilateral tibial hemimelia, a congenital deformity that caused her to be born with deformed legs, according to Fox News. Doctors first told Komada's family that her only option was to have both legs amputated. But they found an American surgeon in Florida who said there was another option: One of her legs could be saved. 

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In July of last year, Komada's family traveled to the Paley Institute in West Palm Beach, Florida, where Dr. Dror Paley told them that he could fix her left leg. But in order to walk, he would have to amputate her right leg and fit it with a prosthetic.

Komada had her first surgery on July 24. Dr. Paley amputated her right leg above her knee and put pins into her left leg that a fixator, or bone stabilizing frame, could attach to. Screws were then twisted into her legs every day for months to move her bones into the right position. Her second surgery happened on November 13, which fused the bones in her left leg together. 

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"She was in a lot of pain all day and all night," Komada's mother, Marzena Drusewicz, said of her daughter's recovery. "We had all had enough. It was really horrible. Of course, I was so scared and didn't know what was going to happen. She would cry and scream so much after the operation."

Yet just two days after the second procedure, Komada was able to walk for the first time. 

"Every week she got better and better and now she is not in any pain at all and can walk normally and we can all start our life again now [that] we are home," she said. “We were so happy when she took her first steps, we started crying." Komada and her parents returned home to Poland on Monday after spending the last nine months in Florida.

Komada's family received about $234,000 in donations from Polish communities to pay for treatment. Thankfully, with help from these communities—and of course, from an incredible team of doctors—Komada was able to get the "miracle" she deserved. 

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We’ve seen no shortage of dangerous internet “challenges” making the rounds over the past few years. From the "Tide Pod Challenge” (eating a Tide laundry detergent pod) to the "Hot Water Challenge" (pouring hot water on yourself or drinking it through a straw), there are plenty of online trends that have kids risking their lives for a few extra likes.

Just when we thought that kids were finally learning the dangers of internet challenges, another harmful one has cropped up. While it may not be as dangerous as swallowing laundry detergent, the “shell-on challenge,” which has kids attempting to eat food with its packaging still on, has its own risky list of consequences.

According to ABC Action News, some of the social media posts involving this challenge have included kids eating a sandwich inside a plastic bag, baby carrots inside the packaging, and a lemon with the rind still on.

It’s unclear exactly when this trend started, but it seems to have gained popularity over the past week on social media. There have already been dozens of videos shared across the internet of kids pursuing this dangerous feat. In a video posted on April 15, one teen recorded himself eating a banana with the peel still on and biting the cardboard on a box of cereal.

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Another video on Instagram shows a girl at a school lunch table taking a bite out of a banana with the peel still on.

While it’s a no-brainer that eating non-edible materials is bad for your body, Andrew Bernstein, MD, a pediatrician at North Suburban Pediatrics in Evanston, Illinois and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics, tells Health exactly why the trend is so detrimental to the body.

“Eating food with packaging still on could be dangerous for a number of reasons,” says Dr. Bernstein. “Packaging is meant partly to keep food germ-free and safe from the surrounding environment. If packaging is eaten, there may be dangerous bacteria or chemicals on the outside packaging that could be toxic or could otherwise make someone sick. Additionally, packaging is not designed to be digested and could cause damage or obstruction to internal organs.”

Hopefully, kids and teens will learn the effects of these less-than-safe internet trends and stop promoting them across social media.

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Around 5,000 heart attacks and strokes a year could be prevented by personalising heart health checks.

Solid-state sodium-ion batteries are far safer than conventional lithium-ion batteries, which pose a risk of fire and explosions, but their performance has been too weak to offset the safety advantages. Researchers Friday reported developing an organic cathode that dramatically improves both stability and energy density.