Has that week-old yogurt really gone bad?

Is the chicken you bought just three days ago already spoiled?

Your smartphone might one day be able to tell you, new research suggests.

A group of scientists is developing a portable, inexpensive and easy-to-use electronic tag to send wireless alerts to smartphones when a telltale gas is emitted by rotten food.

Smartphones to the rescue

“As we know, spoiled food can be very harmful to our health,” said study author Guihua Yu.

“But sometimes we cannot easily notice the slightly degraded food by smell or vision. Therefore, we aim to develop a cost-effective wireless sensor for food spoilage detection with the assistance of mobile phones,” he explained.

Yu is a professor of materials science and mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

Reality of food poisoning

Food-borne illnesses strike 48 million Americans each year, leading to over 128 000 hospitalisations and 3 000 deaths, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

According to the Food Advisory Consumer Service (FACS), food poisoning statistics in South Africa is relatively scarce. Only a few hundred cases of food poisoning are reported in South Africa every year. However, FACS believe that these numbers are not a true reflection of the situation. Their belief is that due to poor surveillance, the number of food poisoning cases in South Africa may actually be in the thousands.  

Last year’s Listeria outbreak was believed to be the worst outbreak ever, according to the WHO. Over 1 000 reported cases were filed and around 200 people died from the food-borne illness. 

Unpacking the app

To tackle the problem, Yu and his colleagues first put together a tiny gas sensor with a very high sensitivity to the odour-causing “biogenic amines” that are released when food goes bad.

Then, the team embedded the sensors into “near-field communication” (NFC) tags, of the sort already deployed by businesses to track product shipping.

The NFC sensor tags were then put through a bad meat test, because slightly spoiled meat is a good example of something that can prove very harmful but also difficult to detect.

After placing tags next to meat, the researchers left it out in a temperature of 30°C, guessing that a notable amount of telltale biogenic amines would be produced by the end of the test period.

Sure enough, the sensor tags detected the biogenic amines, and communicated the presence of bad meat to a smartphone located within reach of the NFC’s wireless range (usually less than 10cm).

The findings were published in the journal Nano Letters.

Yu noted that the investigation was preliminary and that “it will still take some more time before it is ready for market” so that he and his team can try to improve the phone interface and device-packaging design.

“We developed the sensor possibly for both individual consumer households and industrial purposes,” said Yu.

Not everyone’s convinced

But the concept doesn’t appeal to food-safety expert Lona Sandon. “My concern with a sensor such as this is just how sensitive is it. If it detects gases at very low levels, will we end up throwing food out when it is still edible, further increasing the problem of food waste?” she said.

“I am also not sure we need a smartphone to tell us whether the food is past its prime or not. Smell, sight and common sense usually are pretty good for indicators,” Sandon added.

“A quick visual inspection of fruits, vegetables, cheeses and meats can tell you a lot about whether or not the food is still good to eat. Discoloration, soft spots, bruising, or fuzzy stuff growing on the food are easy to spot. Off-putting smells from things like milk and meat are also pretty easy to detect without a fancy gadget,” she suggested.

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A mom whose daily seizures were dismissed as depression and panic attacks was horrified to discover she had a golf ball-sized cancerous brain tumour – after ploughing her car into a tree.

Lauren Neville (30) from Lancashire, UK, believes the crash in January this year, which completely wrote off her 10-year-old car, may have saved her life.

A brain tumour called a glioblastoma

The mental health nurse had suffered from headaches, tunnel vision and dizziness for two years and experienced around 70 seizures a week – but doctors put her symptoms down to depression.

But that fateful day while driving Lauren ploughed her car into a tree and completely forgot where she was after suffering from a seizure.

An MRI scan in May, after the crash, revealed the horrifying cause of all her seizures – a 6-cm brain tumour called a glioblastoma.

Glioblastoma, also known as glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), is the most aggressive cancer that begins within the brain.

Lauren said she initially felt really frustrated and angry after her diagnosis.  

She knew something wasn’t right

“I was told I had emotional trauma and then depression and I kept going from diagnosis to diagnosis.

“It was only after the accident that I was diagnosed with a brain tumour. I don’t think I’d be here right now if it wasn’t for the accident. It was a blessing in disguise.

“I’d had symptoms for two years before I was diagnosed with the tumour.”

She had suffered from headaches, tunnel vision, dizziness, shaking, focal seizures and generally not feeling like herself. Deep down Lauren knew something wasn’t right but she was told by three doctors she was suffering from anxiety and prescribed antidepressants.

As a mental health professional the diagnosis didn’t sit well with Lauren but she said she was shocked to learn her seizures were caused by brain cancer.

An uncertain future

“I was completely devastated.

“I could only think of my kids as they are my first priority and my whole world, only them. It breaks my heart that I could die from this.”

The worried mom-of-two is now facing an uncertain future with her children, nine-year-old Lucy Dunn-Grimshaw and one-year-old Ollie Burns, and struggles with short-term memory loss.

On 8 June she underwent a gruelling six-hour operation to remove 80% of the mass at Preston Royal Hospital in Lancashire.

“Now I’m waiting for some more scans to find out what stage my cancer is at and what treatment I need to have next.

‘I’ve got people to lean on’

“It’s most likely I’ll need further surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

“My little boy, Ollie, is extremely sensitive at the moment and can’t look at me without crying.

“His fun mom who does everything for him day in, day out now can’t climb the stairs without getting out of breath all of a sudden.”

“Having the tumour is traumatic but my family are amazing. It’s nice that I’ve got people to lean on.

Tragically while fighting her own health battles, Lauren’s dad James has also been diagnosed with stage-three lung cancer as well as throat cancer.

Lauren and her family have set up a GoFundMe page to help raise £5 000 for their treatment.

“This has been very, very difficult.”

Overwhelming support

Now she’s recovering from the operation, Lauren hopes her story will raise awareness of the symptoms and encourage others to speak up earlier.

“It’s been very emotional and I’ve never felt so alone and frightened in my life.

“I decided I wanted to do something to help other people in this situation. I want to raise awareness of what I’ve been through in the hope it will encourage others to catch their tumour sooner.

“The support has been overwhelming. I don’t know what I’d have done without it – it’s made every day more bearable.”

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Magazine Features

Hanli Prinsloo can hold her breath for six minutes! It’s not a superpower she was born with, but rather a skill she’s developed during her long career as a freediver – that’s someone who spends time below the ocean’s surface without scuba gear or any other breathing apparatus. And it’s how Hanli’s Insta feed came to be filled with beautiful shots of up-close playdates with dolphins, seals, turtles and even whales.

On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve lived my whole life with asthma. I know what it feels like to almost die because you can’t breathe so my associations with not breathing aren’t exactly positive. But, it turns out, practising breath hold exercises actually comes with a world of benefits.

It makes you better at everything

There’s a lot of training that goes into learning to hold your breath. For starters, you need to practise slow, deep breathing. This activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which prompts your body to conserve energy so you need less oxygen. It also causes you to relax deeply, slowing your heart rate and sending you into a state of calm (stress for what?).

All those deep breaths make your blood more oxygenated, which helps every cell in your body function more effectively – including those in your brain. So you can expect to be sharper, more alert and have more energy. Plus, more oxygen reaching your muscles means you’ll be better at exercise.

“It’s like putting a really big engine in a really small car,” says Hanli. “The more oxygen we have in our system, the better we become at the sports we do, it increases our VO2 max, it increases everything in the body, including thinking and working.”

Breathe better in just one session

I caught up with Hanli in Los Angeles ahead of World Oceans Day and the adidas global Run For The Oceans event. We were sitting on a beach on Catalina Island, an idyllic getaway about an hour by boat from the mainland. It was a sunny day, warm but not too hot, and ocean ripples lapped gently at the shore, where we sat, cross-legged on the sand. As locations go, it doesn’t get much lovelier.

But when Hanli told us to hold our breath, I panicked before I’d reached a minute. Then she took us through a breathing exercise and, an hour later, I held my breath for over two minutes! Want to give it a try? Follow Hanli’s step-by-step plan.

1. Make sure you’re not in the water.

Seriously. If you’re not used to breathing deeply, you could feel dizzy or faint the first few times. And fainting mixed with water usually doesn’t end well. Instead, find a comfy spot on the floor with enough space to lie down.

2. Learn to breathe deeply.

Most of us spend much of the day walking around with our tummies sucked in because, you know, muffin top. But in order to breathe effectively, you need your belly to expand to make room for your diaphragm, says Hanli. So if you’re keeping your tummy sucked in, you’re only breathing with your upper chest, creating tension in your neck and shoulders and feelings of anxiety.

Try this: Sit up straight, chest open, shoulders relaxed. Relax your tummy completely. Breathe out, then take a deep breath in. Don’t lift your shoulders; instead, let your belly expand to make way for the air. Put your hand on your belly to feel it expanding and shrinking with each in and out breath. Do 10 breaths like this.

3. Warm up your muscles.

Those would be the muscles you use for breathing – your diaphragm and intercostal muscles (when last did you think about them?). Take a deep belly breath. Holding your breath, raise your hands above your head, place the back of one hand against the palm of the other, shoulders away from ears, elbows straight. Press your chest forward and pull your elbows back. Hold for a few counts, then breathe out and relax.

Take another deep breath and hold it and this time, gently lean over to the left, then the right. Return to centre and breathe out. These exercises make your intercostal muscles more supple, creating more space for your lungs to expand and ultimately increasing your lung capacity, explains Hanli.

4. Practise three-step breathing.

Imagine your chest consists of three spaces: Your belly, your chest and your shoulders. First, fill your belly with air. Breathe in so that just your belly expands. When it can’t expand any further, breathe into your chest cavity and feel your ribs expanding outwards. When they can’t expand anymore, breathe the last little bit into your shoulders – imagine air flooding in behind your collar bones.

Once you’re full of air, consciously relax your shoulders – they’ve probably tensed up. Exhale and breathe normally.

5. Slow your breath down.

You’re going to need to lie down for this next part. Lie on your back as though you’re in Savasana in yoga class: Body relaxed, legs straight with feet flopped out to the sides, hands by your sides, palms up, eyes closed. Breathe in for a count of eight seconds and out for a count of 10 seconds. It doesn’t matter whether you breathe through your nose or mouth, but make sure you’re breathing into your belly so only your belly rises and your chest stays still. Repeat this pattern for two to three minutes.

It’s called a breathe up. It slows your heart rate and oxygenates your blood, prepping you for the breath hold to come. Too hard? Breathe in for six seconds and out for eight seconds.

6. Hold it.

Close your eyes. Do a three-step breath and hold it. As soon as you feel like you need to breathe, exhale and breathe normally. Repeat step five again (your breathe up). Then, take another three-step breath and hold. This time, when you feel like you need to breathe, be aware of the trigger, but hold your breath for a few seconds longer.

Repeat step five again, take a final three-step breath and hold it again. This time, when you feel the trigger to breathe, make a conscious decision to hold your breath for longer. Tell your body that you’re safe, calm and relaxed. Relax your muscles. Relax your forehead. If you hold it long enough, you’ll feel your diaphragm start to constrict. This is an early warning system that your body needs oxygen, but you still have time to, for example, come up from a dive, says Hanli.

“We use that as a mental exercise,” she says. Don’t try and go beyond this point unless you’re under the supervision of a trained professional and, we’ll say it again, never try this exercise in the water.

You can use a timer to see how long you held each breath. Over time, you should notice your times increasing as your body gets better at breathing.

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The immediate removal of Gauteng ANC chief whip Brian Hlongwa, investigations against more than 10 corrupt officials, the seizing of assets – these are among the calls made by SECTION27, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and Corruption Watch.

This comes after the civil society organisations partnered together and released explosive details of a Special Investigation Unit report on massive corruption within the Gauteng Health Department.

The 122-page report, which was quietly shelved for over a year, exposes rot amounting to about R1.2 billion and documents widespread corruption and gross financial mismanagement which took place within the department from 2006 to 2010.

And now they are calling for swift and heavy action as well as intervention by the Asset Forfeiture Unit and other authorities who have been asked to respond by next Wednesday(27 June).

Seven years to finalise

The original investigation was commissioned by a presidential proclamation in 2010. Back then Corruption Watch, TAC and SECTION27 regularly asked the SIU for updates on the progress of the investigation – but were met with silence.

The report took seven years to finalise and was eventually presented to then President Jacob Zuma on March 29 last year. Yet nothing was made public and no action was taken.

Now, following a Promotion of Access to Information Act request, the Presidency has released the report to SECTION27, who have made the damning findings public.

Civil society reacts

Hlongwa, the former Gauteng Health MEC under whose watch the corruption took place, and at least another 10 other former officials are implicated by the report in financial misconduct. A few have been lightly disciplined after disciplinary enquiries, others were allowed to resign and walk away and Hlongwa remains in office, seemingly protected.

“It appears that the Gauteng government failed to refer any of this conduct to the criminal justice authorities, and quite a few people who were implicated were never investigated so we will also be following that up,” said Kavisha Pillay of Corruption Watch.

She said the TAC and Corruption Watch have this week written to the Johannesburg Director of Public Prosecutions, where criminal matters from the SIU report were referred for further investigation. The Anti-Corruption Task Team (ACTT) and the Asset Forfeiture Unit (AFU)  were also made aware of the information and a second letter was sent to the AFU, as assets held by Brian Hlongwa and others.

Section 27’s Mark Heywood, “This is a textbook example of state capture in practice – happening before the time we even started talking about it. And what’s important to note is that it’s not unique to Gauteng. Now that we have things out in the open in black and white, it needs to be slapped down in other provinces.”

Kickbacks received by key public officials included free overseas holidays and a R7.2 million house in an upmarket suburb was bought for Hlongwa in 2009.

A system in crisis

Anele Yawa, the general secretary of TAC, said there was a direct connection between the current devastating financial crisis in the Gauteng Health and the rampant corruption that had gone on for years.

“The Gauteng health system is in crisis. Patients’ needs are growing yet critical posts are being frozen; community health workers are unpaid; critical institutions like the NHLS and SA National Blood Service are owed billions and their viability is threatened. And despite all this, several implicated officials remain in high office. This sends the message that crime does pay,” Yawa said.

The partner organisations will actively engage the Gauteng government and the Presidency to ensure implementation of the policy recommendations contained in the SIU report. They want Hlongwa to be removed swiftly and investigations into other corrupt officials to go ahead quickly. – Health-e News.

Gill Gifford

Chronic sinusitis can be extremely painful, and those with the condition may feel sick for weeks and find it difficult to participate in everyday life or complete simple tasks.  

According to a recently published Vanderbilt University study, a person’s nasal mucus could provide vital information to predict the type of chronic sinusitis, which could ultimately assist doctors in determining whether surgery or medical treatments will be the most effective. 

What does the research entail and what does this mean for the future treatment of chronic sinusitis? 

What is chronic sinusitis? 

The sinuses are hollow, moist spaces that drain through the nose. When the sinuses are prevented from draining due to either an infection or allergic reaction, fluid and mucus remain trapped. This results in the inflammation and irritation of the sinuses, which is referred to as sinusitis.

Chronic sinusitis is sinusitis that lasts for a long time, usually longer than three months. People with asthma and allergies are usually more vulnerable to chronic sinusitis. There are various types of sinusitis: 

• Acute sinusitis: typically lasts up to a month
• Sub-acute sinusitis: longer than one month 
• Chronic sinusitis: longer than three months

While chronic sinusitis lasts longer than acute sinusitis, the symptoms are the same and include: A cough, thick nasal mucus, post-nasal drip, headaches, fever, congestion, facial pain and swelling. 

However, chronic sinusitis sufferers may also develop nasal polyps, which are growths on the tissue of the nose and sinuses, resulting in difficulty breathing. 

“When we look at the postoperative outcomes for those patients, which we assess through a quality of life measure that assesses patient symptom burden, we find that at one year follow up, patients in certain clusters do much better than patients in other clusters,” Dr Turner said.

Future of chronic sinusitis treatment 

According to Dr Turner, the findings should pave the way for more personalised medication and treatment options for chronic sinusitis patients, instead of the one-size-fits-all option that is currently in use.

Presently, chronic sinusitis patients are examined to determine how much previous treatment they have undergone and are then administered courses of anti-inflammatory medications such as antibiotics. Only once this has taken place the surgical options are explained to the patient. 

“In theory, going forward, this is something that could be used in a point-of-care fashion before making a decision to take a patient to surgery. Perhaps some patients may do better with continued medical therapy, or with biologic medications.” Dr Turner emphasised. 

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Jemima Lewin