Vaccines are available to protect against human papillomavirus

When researchers, whose findings appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, combined trials of all types of the gut-healthy microbes, they http://www.designerburberyoutlet.com/ found that patients with a range of conditions - from ear infections to sepsis - were 42 percent less likely to get diarrhea from their antibiotic drugs if they were also taking a probiotic. One-quarter to one-third of people treated with an antibiotic typically get diarrhea as a result, the researchers said. It's often not more than an unpleasant side effect, but can be serious enough to send some patients to the hospital. "Antibiotics in doing their work actually kill off a lot of the normal flora that are supposed to exist in our gut, so things kind of go haywire," said Sydne Newberry from the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, who worked on the study. Probiotics are strains of bacteria that research suggests can help replace some of the flora that antibiotics, especially so-called broad-spectrum antibiotics, wipe out. "More than likely, what they do is they start to designerburberyoutlet actually restore the normal bacteria in the gut, in the intestines," Newberry said. Probiotics can be bought over-the-counter as capsules, and are also present in some yogurt products. Newberry's team reviewed 63 trials in which researchers had randomly assigned a total of almost 12,000 patients needing antibiotic treatment to probiotics, a placebo pill, or nothing. Newberry and her colleagues calculated that 13 people being treated with antibiotics would need to take a probiotic for one case of diarrhea to be prevented. In a subset of 44 studies in which neither study participants nor the doctors treating them knew who was getting probiotics or placebo, the trials considered least prone to bias, patients on the probiotics were still 39 percent less likely to get diarrhea. The researchers couldn't tell whether one type of probiotic in particular was any better than others, especially since most of the studies used a combination of multiple bacteria strains. The most common probiotics used were from the genus Lactobacillus. Not being able to differentiate the benefits of different strains is a limitation, according to some researchers - because, as with antibiotics, each strain of probiotic can have very different effects. Other experts said that further questions involved the size of the dose and how long it should be given. Most of the studies were small and didn't report louis vuitton shoes on side effects from the probiotics, but those that did concluded that the supplements seemed safe. For that reason, while it's not clear that doctors should be giving out specific probiotics to all of their patients on antibiotic treatment - they may be harmful to small babies or very ill patients - it probably wouldn't hurt to try one, researchers said. One in six cancers - two million a year globally - are caused by largely treatable or preventable infections, new estimates suggest. The Lancet Infectious Diseases review, which looked at incidence rates for 27 cancers in 184 countries, found four main infections are responsible. These four - human papillomaviruses, Helicobacter pylori and hepatitis B and C viruses - account for 1.9m cases of cervical, gut and liver cancers. Most cases are in the developing world. The team from the International Agency for Research on Cancer in France says more efforts are needed to tackle these avoidable cases and recognise cancer as a communicable disease. The proportion of cancers related to infection is about three times higher in parts of the developing world, such as east Asia, than in developed countries like the UK - 22.9% versus 7.4%, respectively. Nearly a third of cases occur in people younger than 50 years. Among women, cancer of the cervix accounted for louis vuitton ring about half of the infection-related cancers. In men, more than 80% were liver and gastric cancers. Drs Catherine de Martel and Martyn Plummer, who led the research, said: "Infections with certain viruses, bacteria, and parasites are some of the biggest and preventable causes of cancer worldwide "Application of existing public-health methods for infection prevention, such as vaccination, safer injection practice, or antimicrobial treatments, could have a substantial effect on the future burden of cancer worldwide." Vaccines are available to protect against human papillomavirus (HPV) - which is linked to cancer of the cervix - and hepatitis B virus - an established cause of liver cancer. And experts know that stomach cancer can be avoided by clearing the bacterial infection H. pylori from the gut using a course of antibiotics. Commenting on the work, Dr Goodarz Danaei from Harvard School of Public Medicine in Boston, the US, said: "Since effective and relatively low-cost vaccines for HPV and HBV are available, increasing coverage should be a priority for health systems in high-burden countries." Jessica Harris of Cancer Research UK said: "It's important that authorities worldwide make every effort to reduce the number of infection-related cancers, especially when many of these infections can be prevented. In the UK, infections are thought to be responsible for 3% of cancers, or around 9,700 cases each year. "Vaccination against HPV, which causes cervical Designer louis vuitton women shoes 2012 style outlet black cancer, should go a long way towards reducing rates of this disease in the UK. But it's important that uptake of the vaccination remains high. At a global level, if the vaccine were available in more countries, many thousands more cases could be prevented."