The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's number is larger than previous studies have suggested, and is likely boosted by some of the patients with long COVID. The condition clearly "is not a rare illness," said the CDC's Dr. Elizabeth Unger, one of the report's co-authors.

Chronic fatigue is characterized by at least six months of severe exhaustion not helped by bed rest. Patients also report pain, brain fog and other symptoms that can get worse after exercise, work or other activity. There is no cure, and no blood test or scan to enable a quick diagnosis.

CDC'S COMMENTS ON TODAY'S PNEUMONIA OUTBREAKS VS. THE EARLY COVID CASES, AS COMPARED BY EXPERTS

Doctors have not been able to pin down a cause, although research suggests it is a body's prolonged overreaction to an infection or other jolt to the immune system.

The condition rose to prominence nearly 40 years ago, when clusters of cases were reported in Incline Village, Nevada, and Lyndonville, New York. Some doctors dismissed it as psychosomatic and called it "yuppie flu."

Some physicians still hold that opinion, experts and patients say.

Doctors "called me a hypochondriac and said it was just anxiety and depression," said Hannah Powell, a 26-year-old Utah woman who went undiagnosed for five years.

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The new CDC report is based on a survey of 57,000 U.S. adults in 2021 and 2022. Participants were asked if a doctor or other health-care professional had ever told them they had myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome, and whether they still have it. About 1.3% said yes to both questions.

That translated to about 3.3 million U.S. adults, CDC officials said.

Among the other findings: The syndrome was more common in women than men, and in white people compared with some other racial and ethnic groups. Those findings are consistent with earlier, smaller studies.

However, the findings also contradicted long-held perceptions that chronic fatigue syndrome is a rich white woman's disease.

There was less of a gap between women and men than some previous studies suggested, and there was hardly any difference between white and Black people. The study also found that a higher percentage of poor people said they had it than affluent people.

Those misperceptions may stem from the fact that patients who are diagnosed and treated "traditionally tend to have a little more access to health care, and maybe are a little more believed when they say they're fatigued and continue to be fatigued and can't go to work," said Dr. Brayden Yellman, a specialist at the Bateman Horne Center in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The report relied on patients’ memories, without verifying their diagnoses through medical records.

That could lead to some overcounting, but experts believe only a fraction of the people with chronic fatigue syndrome are diagnosed, said Dr. Daniel Clauw, director of the University of Michigan’s Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center.

"It’s never, in the U.S., become a clinically popular diagnosis to give because there’s no drugs approved for it. There’s no treatment guidelines for it," Clauw said

The tally likely includes some patients with long COVID who were suffering from prolonged exhaustion, CDC officials said.

Long COVID is broadly defined as chronic health problems weeks, months or years after an acute COVID-19 infection. Symptoms vary, but a subset of patients have the same problems seen in people with chronic fatigue syndrome.

COVID AND FLU VACCINE RATES ARE DECLINING FOR US HEALTH CARE WORKERS, CDC REPORTS: ‘DISTURBING TREND’

"We think it's the same illness," Yellman said. But long COVID is more widely accepted by doctors, and is being diagnosed much more quickly, he said.

Powell, one of Yellman's patients, was a high school athlete who came down with an illness during a trip to Belize before senior year. Doctors thought it was malaria, and she seemed to recover. But she developed a persistent exhaustion, had trouble sleeping and had recurrent vomiting. She gradually had to stop playing sports, and had trouble doing schoolwork, she said.

After five years, she was diagnosed with chronic fatigue and began to achieve some stability through regular infusions of fluids and medications. She graduated from the University of Utah and now works for an organization that helps domestic violence victims.

Getting care is still a struggle, she said.

"When I go to the ER or to another doctor’s visit, instead of saying I have chronic fatigue syndrome, I usually say I have long COVID," Powell said. "And I am believed almost immediately."

Santo Domingo.- Dr. Daniel Rivera, the Minister of Public Health, recently presented two new ventilators to the Dr. Arturo Grullón Regional Children’s Hospital, enhancing the facility’s newborn unit. This gesture aligns with President Luis Abinader’s government’s commitment to bolster public health, particularly pediatric care.

The handover of these critical devices, aimed at improving child healthcare services, was made to Dr. Mirna López, the hospital’s director. López expressed gratitude for the ventilators, emphasizing their importance in advancing the health of the children in the region.

“These ventilators will enable us to offer high-quality and timely care to pediatric patients in our reference center for the Cibao region,” Dr. López stated. The ventilators are described as state-of-the-art, equipped with features essential for the safe and effective treatment of pediatric patients.

The donation ceremony saw attendance from officials of the provincial Public Health Directorate in Santiago, the Norcentral Health Regional Directorate, and departmental managers from the Arturo Grullón Hospital.

“Improving your diet and having regular exercise can help you to avoid a stroke”

View the full post Proper nutrition can reduce your risk of stroke on NOW Grenada.

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Good morning, everyone. Damian here with another multibillion-dollar deal, a word on the future of Sanofi, and a setback in one of medicine’s longest-running quests.

Read the rest…

PrEPVacc announced today that it “has stopped further vaccinations as there is little or no chance of the trial demonstrating vaccine efficacy in preventing HIV acquisition”. Its pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) trial is set to continue. While IAS – the International AIDS Society – is disappointed at this outcome, we believe that this provides us with lessons to drive HIV […]

An estimated one in nine adult women struggle with an abnormal and painful fat buildup in the lower body — and no amount of diet or exercise can help.

Lipedema, a relatively common but often overlooked disease, causes fat to accumulate in the lower part of the body, primarily the butt, thighs and calves. 

For many women, like Molly Friar, an event planner in Sacramento, California, it can cause debilitating pain and impaired mobility.

In an effort to raise awareness of this condition, Friar, 53, spoke with Fox News Digital about her long journey to diagnosis — and what she calls her newfound "freedom."

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Friar was just 11 years old when she started to notice that her body was different than everyone else’s, she said during a phone interview.

"The lipedema itself is governed by hormone changes, so that's when things really took off for me," she said. "My legs were different from every other girl in my class, and I started to get a bit of a stomach in my lower abdomen."

It was puzzling for Friar, who was very fit and athletic. 

She played soccer, basketball and softball, and was also a cheerleader — yet no matter how active she was or how carefully she ate, her lower body carried an abnormal amount of fat.

"Somehow my legs and stomach were always disproportionately bigger than everybody else's," she said.

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Adding complexity to the situation, Friar is adopted — so she had no context that might have predicted this genetic condition.

"I don't have pictures of my family to look at, to see a grandmother or an aunt or other women in my life that were affected by it," she said.

Friar felt "completely out of place," she said, as everyone else in her family was "super skinny" and she was not.

Friar was just 12 years old when her parents put her on a Weight Watchers program.

"They felt like that was the best thing they could do to help me," she said. 

Throughout her adolescence and young adulthood, Friar worked out every day, biking to the gym and taking aerobics with all the adults.

"That’s absolutely where I started a battle of shame around my body — something I couldn't control," she said. 

"I would eat less or not eat, and exercise more, and do all the things I could think of to outpace something that I didn't know existed."

She added, "I always felt like there was a person inside of me who was thin and just wanted to get out."

In addition to the body image struggles, Friar’s condition also came with extreme pain.

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Lipedema causes inflammation and extreme bruising — "I would just brush up against something and get a bruise," said Friar.

The activities that were pleasant for other people, like getting a massage during a pedicure, created "excruciating pain" for Friar.

For someone with lipedema, she explained, running a hand over the skin is like touching a rocky beach — "you can feel the nodules like pebbles under the skin."

Other common symptoms include swelling, a feeling of heaviness in the legs and excess fatigue. 

For some patients, the condition can cause difficulty walking, heightened anxiety and depression, joint issues, venous (vein) disease and other complications, according to Cleveland Clinic.

In 2016, when Friar was 45 years old, she lost 50 pounds — but didn’t lose a centimeter in her calves.

She started digging in to figure out what was going on. "I knew something wasn’t right," she said.

In her online research, it wasn’t long before Friar was looking at photos of women with lipedema, with abnormal fat deposits in their lower bodies.

"In that moment, I cried — it was like looking in a mirror," she told Fox News Digital. 

"I felt validated and relieved and ecstatic — I finally had an answer."

But the relief was short-lived, as Friar quickly realized there was no cure for her condition. "It’s something that you have to try to battle for the rest of your life."

There are, however, options to alleviate some symptoms that come with lipedema, as Friar found out when she began seeing her doctor, Jaime S. Schwartz, M.D., in Beverly Hills, California.

A board-certified plastic surgeon and world-renowned lipedema specialist, Schwartz has dedicated much of his career to raising awareness for fat disorders like lipedema.

He launched Total Lipedema Care to help women like Friar.

"Most people will tell you that the lower half of their body just started growing a lot larger than the upper half, usually during puberty," Schwartz told Fox News Digital.

"It doesn't start as pain, but they start seeing physical changes that don’t really make sense."

Lipedema is usually misdiagnosed as morbid obesity, Schwartz noted.

"In the U.S., many doctors tell women, ‘You're fat, you did this to yourself,’" he said.

MORE THAN HALF THE WORLD'S POPULATION WILL BE OBESE OR OVERWEIGHT BY 2035, SAYS NEW REPORT

But the good news, he said, is that awareness is slowly starting to grow.

"Over the past five years, it's gone from no one knowing about it to a lot of people knowing about it, so it's definitely getting better."

As Schwartz told Friar, he recommends surgery as the best option to relieve lipedema symptoms.

At his practice, Schwartz performs a patented procedure called manual lipedema extraction, which involves a combination of liposuction and the removal of underlying nodules of fat through small incisions.

"When I take the ‘bad tissue’ out, people feel better as soon as the next day," Schwartz said. "That's the only thing that I've seen that works — and I've seen everything that's out there."

Friar ended up having a total of three surgeries — one on the back of her legs, one in the stomach area and one on the front of her legs.

"For me, the surgery was life-changing," Friar said. "I feel it changed the game for me — it extended my life and I gained back probably 75% to 80% of my mobility."

Each surgery required around six weeks of recovery time.

"It isn’t easy, but I would do it 1,000 times over," she said.

One caveat is that some insurance companies have been slow to cover the cost of lipedema surgeries. Friar had to pay out of pocket for the procedures, which can range from $4,000 to $16,000, according to Schwartz's website.

"I was very, very lucky — there are so many women who want the surgery that can't afford it," she said.

In addition to the surgeries, dietary changes have had a big impact on Friar’s quality of life.

"The optimal diet for me is gluten-free and dairy-free, with no added sugars, no processed foods, low salt and very little alcohol," she said.

She also wears medical-grade compression gear at night and lighter-compression leggings during the day.

"It helps alleviate a lot of the inflammation and excess fluid in the body," she said.

Other non-surgical options for relief include exercise and medications or supplements to reduce inflammation.

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As Schwartz told Fox News Digital, Friar’s case was pretty typical of most women’s experiences with lipedema, although he noted her positive mindset.

"A lot of women have had this for so long, and it defeats them emotionally, psychologically and mentally," he said. "But Molly has always had such an amazing outlook and personality."

He added, "Obviously, it's been emotional for her at times, but she never let it defeat her."

Friar said her life now is "like night and day" compared to before.

"Getting a massage for me is now enjoyable," she said through tears. "I can climb to the top of a mountain, and I can walk six miles and not stop."

"It’s like your mobility gets taken away from you, and when you instantly get it back, it's newfound freedom."

Friar’s goal is to increase awareness around this condition, among patients and doctors alike, so other women don’t have to live in shame for years like she did.

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"It’s something we need to be talking about," she said. "It’s such a visual thing, involving our bodies and how we present ourselves to the world, and it’s something we can’t control."

"I'm willing to shout from the rooftops if I can help even one person recognize the symptoms and be able to help themselves."

For many of Schwartz’s patients, he said, the disease has "destroyed their lives."

"They don't go out, they don't socialize, they're afraid to work or wear certain clothes in public," he said.

Some women can't have their grandchildren sit on their lap or can't hold their spouse's hand because it’s too painful, he said. 

"So when they have surgery and they're not in pain, not only do they look different and they're so happy to rediscover their body, but they can even have their dog sit in their lap for the first time," he said.

"It’s a very overwhelming reality for them in a beautiful way," he also said.

It is estimated that around 11% of women are living with lipedema today.

For more Health articles, visit www.foxnews.com/health.

Presented by Honourable Dennis Cornwall, Minister for Finance

View the full post 2024 Budget Statement on NOW Grenada.

Santo Domingo.- Around 15% of the global population, or at least one billion people, live with some form of disability. This statistic includes nearly 240 million children, with a significant portion in Latin America and the Caribbean, where approximately 19.1 million children and adolescents have disabilities. However, 70% of school-age children and adolescents with disabilities in this region do not attend school. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, endorsed by the Dominican Republic, aims to ensure equal rights and freedoms for children with disabilities.

In the Dominican Republic, UNICEF highlights that one in ten children between 2 and 17 years old has a disability. The situation is more acute among the 5-17 age group, with 11.3% having a disability. Carlos Carrera, UNICEF’s country representative, points out that these children and their families face numerous barriers, including negative societal attitudes, lack of supportive policies, and limited educational and economic opportunities.

To address these challenges, significant initiatives have been undertaken in the Dominican Republic. In December 2022, 500 families with disabled children received a social protection bonus, spearheaded by First Lady Raquel Arbaje. This effort aims to ensure equal rights for these children and adolescents. Despite such measures, families like Antonia Peguero’s, who has a son with Down syndrome, still face hardships due to economic realities and high living costs.

Efforts to promote inclusive education are underway, with the Ministry of Education and UNICEF implementing pilot projects to transform education services for inclusive learning. This initiative involves the development of a National Inclusive Education Model to enhance inclusive education services in regular and special schools. UNICEF calls for societal change to overcome prejudices and eliminate barriers, ensuring inclusion for all children and adolescents with disabilities.

View the full post International Day of Persons with Disabilities on NOW Grenada.

Emphasis will be placed on four parishes this week when the Vector Control Unit of the Ministry of Health and Wellness continues its fogging exercise.

The programme starts in St Michael on Monday, December 4, with fogging at Lower Burney, Cutting Road, Mount Friendship Road and the environs.

On Tuesday, December 5, the team will journey to St Joseph, where Horse Hill, Orange Cottage, Vaughns Road 1, 2 and 3, Easy Hall, Bowling Alley Hill and the environs will be sprayed.

The following day, Wednesday December 6, attention will shift to St Philip where fogging will occur at Hill Drive, Apple Hall, Bottom Bay Road, Terrace Drive, Bottom Drive, Bay Drive, Ocean Drive and the environs.

On Thursday, December 7, the team will spray the St James districts of Jamestown Park, First and Second Street, Cherry Ave., Frangipani Row, Carnation Row, Orchid Row, Oleander Row and environs.

Fogging culminates on Friday, December 8, with a return to St Michael. The areas to be visited are Bank Hall, Dash Gap with Avenues, Quarry Road, Industry Road, Kew Road and the surrounding districts.

Fogging takes place from 4:30 to 8:30 p.m., daily.

Householders are asked to assist in the control of the aedes aegypti mosquito and are reminded to open their windows and doors to allow the spray to enter. Persons with respiratory problems are asked to protect themselves from inhaling the spray.

Pedestrians and motorists should proceed with caution when encountering fogging operations on the street and parents are instructed to prohibit children from playing in the fog or running behind the fogging machine.

Members of the public are advised that the completion of scheduled fogging activities may be affected by events beyond the Unit’s control.  In such circumstances, the Unit will return to communities affected as soon as possible.

(PR)

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