Snoring is one of the unfortunate realities of life.  Most of us do it to some degree and generally speaking, the older we get the worse the condition gets.

Snoring can kill

For 1 in 6 people snoring is a serious health issue.

Called Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA), it’s caused by the relaxation of the muscles in the back of the throat and tongue while sleeping which in turn blocks the airway.  That blockage cuts off breathing causing a person to momentarily wake up.  It can literally happen hundreds of times per night.

OSA can have serious health implications including chronic fatigue, high blood pressure, weight gain, and even heart failure and stroke.

Snoring can also put a huge strain on our most important relationship in life, as the person with whom we share our bed often suffers chronically as a result of their partner’s snoring.

So treating snoring can make a huge difference in a person’s long term health outlook not to mention the more immediate benefits of being able to get a solid night’s sleep every night.

The problem with snoring is that effective treatments have been highly intrusive.   They include surgery, in which a doctor cuts away or shrinks tissue in the back of the throat, a CPAP face mask which forces air into the lungs keeping the air passages open while you sleep, or an oral mouthpiece designed to force the lower jaw out during sleep, keeping the airway clear.

A breakthrough in controlling snoring

But now there’s a new product that seems to be the breakthrough so many people have been waiting for.  And like so many great innovations, it’s remarkably simple.

The product is an ergonomic strap that fits over the head and chin. It gently holds the jaw in a position that allows the breathing airway to remain clear which virtually eliminates snoring while you sleep.

Although the strap may look somewhat strange, it’s actually remarkably comfortable.

Better yet, the chinstrap’s effectiveness has been clinically proven.  In a case study by the Eastern Virginia Medical School, it was found to be as effective in treating OSA as expensive CPAP machines.

The chinstrap is offered online through a company called MySnoringSolutions.com. It sells for $89.97 but the company offers an unconditional 12 month guarantee, so there is zero risk you will be stuck with something that doesn’t work for you.

So if you want to get rid of snoring once and for all – this may be the solution you have been waiting for.

Source: http://howlifeworks.com

• Newspaper section: Spectru

From her appearance, Pui, 31, (not her real name) looks like a perfectly normal, healthy Thai woman. But she is actually HIV-positive. By day Ms Pui is a part-time cleaner and a mother to a 16-year-old daughter; by nights, she is a freelance prostitute, working along Sukhumvit Road. She has sold her body for the past eight years.

Ms Pui, who keeps her condition a secret from her family and friends, has unprotected sex with customers, even though having sex without a condom is probably how she contracted the disease in the first place.

“Now it’s too late for me to think what I should have done better in the past. Surely I would do things differently by insisting on a condom. I was careless.”

A life on the streets was never what she contemplated when Ms Pui left her native village in Loei province in northeastern Thailand about 13 years ago, to look for work in Bangkok. She made the move so she could support herself, her young daughter and her parents.

“I’m not the only one who has done it. There are many other girls who left poverty-stricken villages and came to Bangkok looking for a better life, but not all ended as prostitutes or HIV-positive like me. It was not my intention to become a prostitute, but because of a lack of education [she only had six years of schooling], I couldn’t get a well-paid job here,” she said.

“When I came to Bangkok the first time, I was about 18. I could only find an unskilled job in a factory, for 4,500 baht a month.

“It was enough then, but as my parents were getting older and my daughter growing up, I needed more money.

“I wanted her to be well-educated so she could get a good job, and not end up like me. And the only way to make extra money was to become a prostitute. I started when I was about 23, and I’ve been doing it ever since,” Ms Pui said.

“I was definitely infected by a farang, because at that time I only went with them, but now I’ll go with anyone, whether they are Arab, African, Japanese or whatever, provided they give me money,” she said with the same degree of coolness she displayed during the entire interview.

She doesn’t know when she was infected, or who did it.

“It might have been the first man. Who knows?” she said.

Ms Pui goes out looking for customers about 6pm daily, except on Sundays, which she spends with her 16-year-old daughter. Because she is relatively better looking than most of the other women working the streets, she says she can get customers almost every day.

“I’ll walk or stand on the pavement of Sukhumvit Road between sois 3 and 5, and sometimes sit in open bars. Since Middle Eastern men prefer fat girls to skinny ones, who are in the majority, I usually have no problem finding a customer.

“I charge 1,000 baht for a short time and prefer not to use a condom, because it’s faster. I can make money easily and go home. I’ll take only one customer per day, and if I can’t then I’ll go home at 11pm.

“I can’t stay too late because I must get up at 6am to send my daughter to school and then go to work,” she said.

Ms Pui doesn’t show much consideration to her foreign clients and readily agrees to, and even encourages unprotected sex, despite knowing that she might infect not only her customers, but also their wives and girlfriends as well as other prostitutes. Some of her foreign customers, she says, take two or even three women every day.

Surprisingly, Ms Pui blames men for the problems she faces, but denies she is seeking revenge by deliberately infecting them.

Most of the men, especially from the Middle East and Africa, won’t use a condom. Every man who takes girls from the street should realise the risk of contracting HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases. It appears to me that they don’t really care, so why should I? I’m HIV-positive, they are not!

“The business around Sukhumvit is getting worse for Thai women because of the influx of prostitutes mainly from Uzbekistan and African countries. They’ll stand on the pavement the same as we do and approach foreigners who are passing.”

This gives us a lot of competition, because many men, especially from the Middle East, like to take them,” she complained. “For sure, I’m not the only one who is HIV-positive working on the street. There are others as well.”

Other street women and transsexuals who are joining them on the street in increasing numbers will have sometimes two or even three customers in one day.

“What can I do? I need money now more than ever before. My daughter is a bright student and I want her to continue her studies at a university, so that she can get a well-paid job when she grows up and not end up like me. “

She wants to be a doctor, but I doubt that this will be possible because I don’t have enough money to give her that kind of education.”I also have to take care of my 65-year-old ailing father.

My mother died six years ago, when she was 44. She didn’t want me to have an abortion; at the time I was only 15-years-old.

“The child’s father, a 20-year-old Thai man, left me before she was born, and never contacted or supported us.”

I haven’t had a boyfriend since and I don’t think that I want one now. I like to stay alone with my daughter.

Ms Pui discovered she was HIV-positive about two years ago after she applied for a manual job with a government agency and was told to have a medical examination before she could start work.

“When I saw the result, I was devastated and tore the medical certificate to pieces. I couldn’t sleep, eat or do anything for days, and I cried constantly. I thought: ‘I am dead.”

“I thought that my sick father and daughter would lose their only breadwinner, and it made me miserable and it still does. After the blood test, I didn’t contact the government agency. “I couldn’t go back and tell them because others would find out sooner or later about my misfortune.” It took her a few days to pull herself together and to find a full-time cleaning job with a private company, where she earns 7,500 baht a month, and importantly for her, there was no compulsory medical check-up required. At the same time she returned to Sukhumvit Road, looking for men.

“As my income from cleaning is not enough, I have to subsidise it by going with men. There’s nothing else for me to do. I have to pay 2,500 baht for a room and utilities, send 2,000 baht monthly to my family and look after my daughter.” At Spectrum’s request, she went to a city hospital and took a further test, which confirmed the original result.

After her first HIV test, a doctor suggested she start taking a cocktail of anti-retroviral drugs. She refused, saying it would result in pimples on her face. “Even now, I’m not taking any medicine or getting treatment. But I’m otherwise healthy, apart for an occasional cold. In fact, I’m getting fat. I now weigh almost 75kg.”

The trial team in Bangkok, Thailand’s capital, announced on 24 September that a combination of two vaccines had reduced the rate of HIV infection by 31 percent in about 8,200 volunteers, compared to around the same number who were given a placebo.

A few weeks later, researchers who had seen full data from the trial told Science magazine that an analysis based only on participants who had received all six doses of the vaccine at the right times did not show a statistically significant protective effect.

It was hoped that the release of more details from the trial to coincide with the AIDS Vaccine 2009 conference taking place in Paris this week would settle the question of whether the vaccine results were really as significant as the initial announcement had suggested or a mere fluke. Instead, full results of the study, published online yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) raised more questions than they answered.

The 31 percent efficacy in the initial announcement was based on a “modified intention-to-treat” analysis that included all the 16,402 trial participants, except for seven who were found to have contracted HIV before receiving any vaccinations.

A second analysis included those seven, while a third “per-protocol” analysis involving 12,452 participants – the one cited in Science magazine – found that the vaccine was only 26 percent effective. This was not enough to be statistically significant, meaning that the difference between the vaccine and the placebo arms of the trial was so small that it could have been a coincidence.

Different interpretations Dr Jerome Kim of the US Military HIV Research Programme, who helped lead the trial, yesterday told reporters at the vaccine conference in Paris that the modified intention-to-treat analysis was the most accurate, but others disagreed.

A statistician quoted in a New York Times report placed more emphasis on the analysis that included the seven HIV-positive participants, while another did not believe that any of the analyses provided sufficient evidence the vaccine worked.

In an editorial accompanying the article, NEJM editor Raphael Dolin said that “although the merits of each type of analysis can be debated, all three yielded a possible, albeit modest, effect of the vaccine in preventing HIV infection.”

The study authors also argued that, taken together, the three different analyses of the results were “consistent with a modest protective effect of vaccine”, but could not explain why other findings from the trial indicated that the vaccine’s efficacy appeared to decrease over time, or why it was less effective among participants at high risk of infection.

They were also unsure whether it was one of the two vaccines that produced a potentially protective effect, or the combination of the two. Dolin noted that the findings raised “a number of questions that have important implications for future directions in vaccine research”, and recommended that the duration of the vaccine’s effect be addressed by following up the trial participants, as well as by future trials.

According to a report by a South African news service, Health-e, Colonel Nelson Michael of the US Military HIV Research Programme, another lead investigator of the Thai trial, told a press conference in Paris that a further study of the vaccine may be conducted in South Africa, which has a much higher HIV prevalence than Thailand. The vaccine would have to be modified to contain the strain of HIV most common in sub-Saharan Africa.

Source: IRIN News

See also: GLOBAL: First positive results from an HIV vaccine[ENDS]

HE Dr. Hor Bunleng, Deputy Secretary General and Team Leader of NASA II said “AIDS spending in Cambodia has slightly declined from US$ 53,258,765 in 2007 to US$ 51,846,997 in 2008”

Prevention this remains the largest share of spending though it declined in the in the two years under the investigation (44% in 2007 and 39% in 2008) and follow by care and treatment (25% in 2007 to 29% in 2008), then the program management and administration (18% in 2007 to 20% in 2008). This trend is source of concerns as it is considered essential to avert new infection, especially among high risk group such as establishment workers, man who have sex with men and injecting drug users (NASA II finding). 2007, numbers of entertainment workers are 23,000. This amount was increase highly to 34,193 in 2009 which 5,000 are operated in brothels (NCHADS Report). The number of MSM in Cambodia was increased, but the budget line for Most At Risk Population (MARPs) are decreased (17% in 2007 to 12% in 2008).

The HIV response in Cambodia is highly reliant on external funding (2008, 90% from International support and 10% contribution from Royal Government of Cambodia). The majority of funds spent on AIDS related to intervention came from bilateral agencies (47% in 2007 to 40% in 2008), Global Fund to Fighting HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria (31% in 2007 to 37% in 2008), Government of Cambodia (11% in 2007 to 10% in 2008), UN agencies (10% in 2007 to 8% in 2008), and other international source (1% in 2007 to 5% in 2008).

The NASA resource tracking methodology is designed to describe the financial flows and expenditures using the same categories as the globally estimated resource needs. This alignment was conducted in order to provide necessary information on the financial gap between resources available and resources needed, and in order to promote the harmonization of different policy tools frequently used in the AIDS field. NASA provides indicators of the financial country response to AIDS and supports the monitoring of resource mobilization. Thus, NASA is a tool to install a continuous financial information system within the national monitoring and evaluation framework.