Author: Truth & Hammer

Gonorrhoea diagnoses in England have risen to their highest level for 40 years and jumped 26 per cent since 2017, sparking warnings from health chiefs about the threat from drug resistant strains. Public Health England figures show there were 447,694 sexually transmitted infections diagnosed in 2018, a rise of 5 per cent in a year. The biggest increase was in gonorrhoea where there were 56,259 cases diagnosed, 14,000 more than in 2017. Experts warned about the UK’s first case of “super-gonorrhoea” a year ago, although the man was eventually cured it required extensive treatment with a cocktail of drugs usually held in reserve for the most serious infection. “This is of concern given the three cases of extensively drug resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae identified in England in 2018,” PHE warned. The number of gonorrhoea diagnosis in 2018 was the largest annual number reported since 1978, since 2009, gonorrhoea diagnoses have risen by 249 per cent (from 16,141 to 56,259), mostly due to increases among gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (referred to collectively as ‘MSM’).” Sexual health groups have warned about the damaging impact of repeated government cuts to sexual health programmes.  Testing fell again, by 1 per cent, last year but the number of chlamydia cases rose by 2 per cent since 2017, with roughly one in 10 tests resulting in a positive diagnosis, 131,000 infections in all.

Syphilis and herpes cases also continued to rise, jumping 5 per cent and 3 per cent respectively. “The continuing escalation in gonorrhoea and syphilis diagnoses must be addressed as an urgent health priority, otherwise there is the potential for devastating consequences to the wellbeing of the wider population and the health system as a whole,” said Dr Olwen Williams, president of the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV. “The workforce issues currently being experienced have left the sector at breaking point.” Cases of genital warts fell by 3 per cent, to 57,318, and halved in 15-17-year-olds, because of the routine vaccination of school age girls against the human papillomavirus (HPV). Dr Gwenda Hughes, head of STI surveillance at PHE, said: “The rise in sexually transmitted infections is concerning. STIs can pose serious consequences to health – both your own and that of current and future sexual partners. “No matter what age you are, or what type of relationship you are in, it’s important to look after your sexual health. If you have sex with a new or casual partner, make sure you use condoms and get regularly tested.”

Israeli study authored by Dr. Michel Balaish, Director of the Veterinary Institute at the Ministry of Agriculture & Rural Development, has discovered that the blood pressure of children who were raised with a dog in the house were lower than children who were raised without one, according to Israeli media.  It is widely known that having an animal in the house can greatly reduce stress and anxiety among pet owners and can even lead to a longer life. In fact, some doctors even prescribe therapy dogs or recommend that a patient adopt an animal if their anxiety or depression is severe enough, as opposed to normal medications. Although it has been discovered in past studies that introducing a dog into a room will immediately reduce the blood pressure of a young child, there have been no studies conducted that have determined if children growing up with a dog in the house do in fact have lower blood pressure, according to Israel Hayom.
The observational clinical trial had a sample size of 229 children, ages six to nine, chosen from two different schools in the Shoham area, just southeast of Tel Aviv. The children’s blood pressure were checked at three different times throughout the day – during class, during relaxation and during times of stress (such as reading an excerpt from a text to the class). The process was tracked through questionnaires and daily diaries the parents of the children kept throughout the process.

The blood pressure of children who raised a dog had an average measurement of 4.5mm Hg during times of stress, whereas the rate dropped as expected during times of relaxation, the difference was not significant to the findings. “The study shows that raising a dog at home is associated with low blood pressure during stressful situations in children and that owning a dog has added health value,” Dr. Blaish explained. In a related development, UK-based researchers found in that by combining information from different senses dogs form abstract mental representations of positive and negative emotional states in people. “Our dog Bamba gives me a sense of security and good feeling. I feel really happy with her and when I’m sad she comforts me. It’s fun to play and hug her. Sometimes, when I have nothing to do, I just lie with her. I have never lived without a dog in the family and I can not imagine my life any differently,” said eight-year-old dog-owner Yaara. Yaara’s statement can be confirmed by previous studies in the past that have shown that dogs can differentiate between human emotions from signs such as facial expressions. However, this is not the same as emotional recognition, according to Dr Kun Guo, from the University of Lincoln’s School of Psychology.

“This is the first empirical experiment that will show dogs can integrate visual and oratory inputs to understand or differentiate human emotion as dog emotion,” Kun told Reuters. Experiments were carried out by a team of animal behavior experts and psychologists at the University of Lincoln, UK, and University of Sao Paulo, Brazil.  They presented 17 untrained domestic dogs with images and sounds conveying either positive or negative emotional expressions in humans and dogs. The dogs used in the testing were unfamiliar with the procedure; avoiding any chance of conditioning. The vocalization sound accompanying the human faces was also unfamiliar. “We used Portuguese to British dogs so they weren’t habituated with any words, they weren’t familiar with any words. So, we wanted to see if the dogs could assess the emotional content of the human voices and whether they would actually discriminate the emotional information within them,” explained Natalia De Souza Albuquerque, a PhD student in experimental psychology. The results, published recently in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, found that dogs spent significantly longer looking at the facial expressions which matched the emotional state of the vocalization, for both human and canine subjects. “What we found is that when dogs were hearing positive sounds they would look longer to positive faces, both human and dog. And when they were listening to negative sounds they would look longer to negative, angry faces,” added De Souza Albuquerque. The study shows that dogs can integrate two different sources of sensory information into a perception of emotion in both humans and dogs. This means dogs must have a system of internal categorization of emotional states. Among animal groups, it’s a cognitive ability previously only evidenced in primates.

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