Paid Sick Leaves Could Reduce Risk of Spread of Flu Infection

The researchers made use of data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics to simulate a flu epidemic in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County. The researchers calculated the number of people with paid sick days and the probability of them actually using them and found that if all the employees had access to paid sick leaves, then the spread of flu infection could drop by six percent.

The researchers also observed the effect of giving the employees extra days off especially when they had the flu and found that giving the sick employees one extra day cut down the flu infection spread by 25 percent and giving two days off cut down the spread by 40 percent. The study has been published in the American Journal of Public Health.

"Our simulations show that allowing all workers access to paid sick days would reduce illness because fewer workers get the flu over the course of the season if employees are able to stay home and keep the virus from being transmitted to their co-workers", lead researcher Supriya Kumar said.

Source-Medindia

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New Research Shows How Ideas are Spread in the Brain

The research has a broad range of implications, and could lead to more effective public health campaigns, more persuasive advertisements and better ways for teachers to communicate with students, the study authors said.

"Our study suggests that people are regularly attuned to how the things they're seeing will be useful and interesting, not just to themselves but to other people," the study's senior author, Matthew Lieberman, a UCLA professor of psychology and of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences, said.

"Before this study, we didn't know what brain regions were associated with ideas that become contagious, and we didn't know what regions were associated with being an effective communicator of ideas," lead author Emily Falk, who conducted the research as a UCLA doctoral student in Lieberman's lab and is currently a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, said.

"Now we have mapped the brain regions associated with ideas that are likely to be contagious and are associated with being a good 'idea salesperson.' In the future, we would like to be able to use these brain maps to forecast what ideas are likely to be successful and who is likely to be effective at spreading them," she said.

The study is published online in the journal Psychological Science.

Source-ANI

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WHO Concerned Over Potential Spread of SARS-Like Virus Among Humans

by Kathy Jones on? May 25, 2013 at 8:28 PM General Health News The World Health Organization deputy chief has voiced deep concern over the potential spread of SARS-like virus that has so far killed 22 people in less than a year.
"We have a high level of concern over the potential... for this virus to have sustainable person-to-person spread," WHO deputy chief Keiji Fukuda told diplomats gathered in Geneva for the World Health Assembly, the UN agency's decision-making body.

There has already been evidence of limited transmission between humans, and last week the WHO said two Saudi health workers had contracted the deadly coronavirus from patients -- the first evidence of transmission in a hospital setting.

But Fukuda said the WHO was looking into "whether this has the potential to have a more extensive spread, more extensive transmission."

Given the high fatality rate relative to the number of cases, experts have highlighted the power of the virus and the frightening prospect of its mutating into a form that leaps easily from human to human.

Fukuda's comments came after Saudi Arabia on Wednesday said another person had died from the virus. With a total death toll of 17, it has been the hardest hit by the disease that first emerged last June.

So far, there have been 44 lab-confirmed cases worldwide, half of them fatal, with 30 infections in Saudi Arabia and the rest spread across Jordan, Qatar, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, Britain and France.

Most of the patients infected in Europe and Tunisia had links to or had travelled in the Middle East.

The WHO said Thursday the virus, which until now has been known as the novel coronavirus, or nCoV-EMC, had been redubbed the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS CoV).

The virus is a cousin of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which triggered a scare 10 years ago when it erupted in east Asia, leaping to humans from animal hosts and eventually killing some 800 people.

Like SARS, the new virus appears to cause an infection deep in the lungs, with patients suffering from a temperature, cough and breathing difficulty, but it differs from SARS in that it also causes rapid kidney failure.

Source-AFP

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