All Cold & flu Articles

A new treatment for swine flu may already be on pharmacy shelves -- cholesterol-lowering statin drugs like Lipitor and Zocor. A large study found that people who were taking these drugs when they caught seasonal flu and had to be hospitalized were twice as likely to survive than those who were not on such medicines. This doesn't prove that statins can cure flu, or that starting on them Read more...

Air "sterilizers." A photon machine. Supplement pills to boost the immune system. Protective shampoos and face masks. Even fake Tamiflu. These and other products making bogus claims to prevent or treat swine flu are flooding the Internet as scam artists prey on the public's fears while the vaccine is delayed and real Tamiflu -- made by Switzerland's Roche Group -- is rationed. Read more...

MIAMI -- Seniors who for years have made flu shots a fall ritual are being sent to the end of the line for the swine flu vaccine. And the reason -- their age group seems to have a bit of immunity -- appears to have warded off most potential grumbling. "I don't worry about getting it," said 89-year-old Robert Goodman, a Boca Raton retiree. "At this age, who the hell cares? You Read more...

SAN FRANCISCO -- Researchers delivered a double dose of good news in the fight against flu: successful tests of what could become the first new flu medicine in a decade, and the strongest evidence yet that such drugs save lives, not just shorten illness. A single intravenous dose of the experimental drug, peramivir, cleared up flu symptoms as well as five days of Tamiflu pills did, a large Read more...

WASHINGTON -- Influenza is circulating unusually early this year with cases in all 50 states -- nearly all the swine flu variety, government health officials said. The highest concentration of flu cases is in the Southeast and a few other states, Dr. Anne Schuchat of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said at a briefing. The good news is that testing of vaccines for swine flu Read more...

WASHINGTON -- Why do scientists warn it may take two doses of vaccine to protect against swine flu when one dose is the norm in a regular flu season? Blame your naive immune system. It takes the immune system a while to ramp up to fight unique types of influenza. Since we've never been exposed to this brand-new virus, formally called the 2009 H1N1 strain, scientists assume our bodies will act Read more...

WASHINGTON -- The alarm sounded with two sneezy children in California in April. Just five months later, the never-before-seen swine flu has become the world's dominant strain of influenza, and it's putting a shockingly younger face on flu. So get ready. With flu's favorite chilly weather fast approaching, we're going to be a sick nation this fall. The big unknown is how sick. One in five Read more...

ATLANTA -- Get ready to roll up your sleeve three times for flu shots this fall. That's right, three times. This year's flu season is shaping up to be a very different one. Most people will need one shot for the regular seasonal flu and probably two others to protect against the new swine flu. Experts suggest you get that first shot as early as this month -- if you can find it. "We'd Read more...

ATLANTA -- In a disturbing new projection, health officials say up to 40 percent of Americans could get swine flu this year and next and several hundred thousand could die without a successful vaccine campaign and other measures. The estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are roughly twice the number of those who catch flu in a normal season and add greater weight to Read more...

ATLANTA -- Some swine flu cases in Michigan are raising questions about obesity's role in why some people with infections become seriously ill. A high proportion of those who have gotten severely ill from swine flu have been obese or extremely obese, but health officials have said that might be due to the fact that heavy people tend to have asthma and other conditions that make them more Read more...

LONDON -- With swine flu now an official pandemic, the race is on among drugmakers to produce a vaccine. GlaxoSmithKline said Thursday after the World Health Organization declared a global flu epidemic that it would be ready within weeks to begin large-scale vaccine production. Sanofi-Aventis also said it had started working on its own version. On Friday, Swiss pharma giant Novartis announced Read more...

ATLANTA -- New test results show what scientists have suspected -- people in their 60's and older have signs of greater immunity to the new swine flu virus. Scientists think it's because older people have been exposed to other viruses in the past that are more similar to swine flu than more recent seasonal flus. But the results come from complicated lab work and calculations, and it's not Read more...

MONTREAL -- When it comes to immunity, men may not have been dealt an equal hand. The latest study by Dr. Maya Saleh, of the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre and McGill University, shows that women have a more powerful immune system than men. In fact, the production of estrogen by females could have a beneficial effect on the innate inflammatory response against bacterial Read more...

If the current strain of H1N1 swine flu is like flu strains of years past, it likely will mysteriously subside in the coming weeks. For whatever reason, in temperate areas such as North America, flu largely is a fall and winter phenomenon. A couple of theories have tried to explain that seasonality, but in recent years an intriguing new idea has emerged: Levels of flu-fighting vitamin Read more...

Update: May 22, 2009: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports 6,552 confirmed and probable cases of the H1n1 virus and 9 deaths in 48 states. We will keep you updated, here at ThirdAge. Almost 90 years ago, the Spanish influenza killed tens of millions of people worldwide (estimates range from 20 to 100 million). Well, a lot has changed in medicine since 1918, but one Read more...

ATLANTA -- Next time you have a case of diarrhea that lasts a day or more, chances are better than 1 in 3 that it was food poisoning. As many as a quarter of Americans suffer a foodborne illness each year -- though only a fraction of those cases get linked to high-profile outbreaks like the recent salmonella-peanut scare, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Read more...

Forget C. It's vitamin D that appears to mount the strongest defense against the common cold. When investigators from the University of Colorado in Denver asked 19,000 people of all ages about their health habits and then took blood samples, they discovered that those with the lowest level of vitamin D reported 40% more respiratory problems, including more frequent colds, than those who had Read more...

WASHINGTON -- Scientists have unraveled the genetic code of the common cold -- all 99 known strains of it, to be exact. But don't expect the feat to lead to a cure for the sniffling any time soon. It turns out that rhinoviruses are even more complicated than researchers originally thought. In fact, the genetic blueprints showed that you can catch two separate strains of cold at the same time Read more...

Newswise -- Want to avoid a cold this winter? Get some sleep. People who get less than seven hours of sleep per night are about three times as likely to develop respiratory illness following exposure to a cold virus as those who sleep eight hours or more, according to a report in the January 12 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. Studies have demonstrated Read more...

ATLANTA -- The medical arsenal against the flu just got weaker. Government health officials said Friday that a leading flu medicine, Tamiflu, might not work against all cases of the flu this year. The most common flu bug right now is overwhelmingly resistant to Tamiflu, they said. The alert is "an early heads-up" for doctors. If current trends continue, they may need to change how Read more...