Matthew Dominic Hunter ([info]virtualexile) wrote,
@ 2003-04-17 09:59:00
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Current mood: creative

Heh
SARS is probably a false alarm. My bad. Alertness was good, but paying attention to the data is key.

A diagnostic criterion issue. Yeah, it's a cold virus, and some people are taking it hard, but it isn't all that. If a person's symptoms match a particular grid, then it "becomes" SARS, even though other people who are exposed to that virus don't get very sick. In this way, it is sort of like HIV and AIDS. Different viruses affect different people in different ways.

If the scientific community is careful about this, they might figure out ways to help treat viral pneumonia regardless of which cold virus causes it. My personal suggestion, from personal experience, is that sodium intake makes respiratory problems worse, in some people.


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sodium
[info]dsmorgan
2003-04-17 07:34 am UTC (link)
is bad. ask patients who have CHF (congestive heart failure). :-D

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Re: sodium
[info]virtualexile
2003-04-17 07:35 am UTC (link)
OK, so, it depends on the patient's condition, among other things.

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Re: sodium
[info]ron63z
2003-04-17 08:45 am UTC (link)
I'll back you up on the hazards of salt even when you're not ill. While I don't have asthma, I noticed a couple years ago that after eating some foods -- especially evil fast food -- I get congested as one might with a mild chest cold. After some trial and error I was able to reproduce the symptoms, which last an hour or so, at will with a simple order of salty french fries.

As for SARS, well, here's one fashionable way to protect yourself as seen on some news site the other day. ;-)




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Re: sodium
[info]virtualexile
2003-04-17 10:15 am UTC (link)
That's exactly how I determined that salt was affecting my asthma. I noticed that certain foods made me congested. I'm so much more aware of what I eat these days.

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[info]voltbang
2003-04-17 08:44 am UTC (link)
Well they had the grib before they had the virus pegged. Now they have the virus, it shouldn't be a "syndrome" anymore. Syndromes are collections of unexplained symptoms. Now it's just a virus that kicks some people's asses for reasons that may not be clear yet. It may turn out to be a bad cold year instead of a bad flu year. Or two. But it'll pass.

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Re: virus
[info]virtualexile
2003-04-17 10:14 am UTC (link)
Ah ... just like with HIV you don't really need the AIDS label anymore? I guess they are trying to figure out whether people with HIV need any treatments before they show symptoms, given that there are some serious side effects to the drugs.

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Re: virus
[info]voltbang
2003-04-17 10:26 am UTC (link)
Well, the AIDS label is still pretty useful as labels go. So I guess the SARS label is still useful too, but more because of inertia than proper nomeclature.

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[info]eyow
2003-04-17 08:58 am UTC (link)
Your recent obsession with got me researching it a bit, and two things have popped out at me in the last couple of days:

1. sodium-asthma link seems to affect men significantly more than women, and
2. lots of studies have suggested that non-chloride sodium sources don't affect people in the same way that sodium chloride does (this holds true for hypertension and cardiac problems - I can only find one study about asthma, but it also seems to have been concerned with salt rather than sodium). So it seems to be more of a *salt* problem than a sodium problem.

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Re: salt
[info]virtualexile
2003-04-17 09:14 am UTC (link)
Thanks for the input! What makes something a salt?

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Re: salt
[info]pinkfish
2003-04-17 01:34 pm UTC (link)
As I recall from high-school chemistry, a salt is a crystaline structure of two ions; the most common is the Na+ and Cl- ions of common table salt. For some reason I don't recall, these molecules happen to fit into a nice right-angle structure that is very stable (this is why grains of salt are often cubes).

I bet there is a real chemist somewhere in this friends list who will fill in any necessary details.

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Re: salt
[info]eyow
2003-04-17 05:21 pm UTC (link)
Actually, a salt is a compound in which metal atoms replace one or more of the replaceable hydrogen atoms of an acid. :)

However, for this discussion, "salt" refers to common table salt, sodium chloride (NaCl). In the things I'd read, it seemed that other forms of sodium consumed (sodium bicarbonate/baking soda, sodium monofluorophosphate/sodium fluoride/the fluoride in your toothpaste, perhaps the naturally occurring sodium in raw/whole foods, and so on) didn't have an effect on health like the table salt did.

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[info]pinkfish
2003-04-17 03:11 pm UTC (link)
Interestingly, I have no such response to salt like you describe here, and in fact, I have found (by watching how what I eat affects my body) that salt often cures headaches for me (or perhaps, lack of salt causes them?).

About ten years ago, I didn't even keep table salt in my kitchen. And as I ate mostly meals I prepared myself, mostly from fresh ingredients, I actually ingested very little salt. Furthermore, I sweat a lot, all the time. I found that often, when I was feeling tired or worn down for no apparent reason, that eating something salty (or even, just eating salt directly from the shaker!!) would help a lot. Sometimes the symptoms would get as bad as headaches or even dizziness.

I have since put salt into my diet on a regular basis (I am sure that [info]fj would be amazed to hear that I used to eat so little salt, since I always reach for the saltshaker nowadays). I have found that there are a lot of minerals that help my overall energy level and feeling of health; salt is one, magnesium is another. So I also take mineral supplements.

Like many people, I used to take supplements because somewhere, someone told me that substance X was good for me, so I took it. Nowadays, I take the ones that actually make me feel better. It took a while paying attention to what foods and supplements made me respond in what ways, but it was worth it.

The lesson here is that for minerals anyway, even more so than in most things, YMMV.

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