How to Stay Safe When the Power Goes Out

WEDNESDAY, July 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Sudden power outages can be frustrating, but what if your power is knocked out for a prolonged period? Would you be ready?

The American Red Cross recommends preparing for emergency outages by putting together a kit that contains these essentials:

• Water (each person in the household needs one gallon per day),
• Non-perishable, easy-to-prepare foods,
• Flashlights (avoid candles, which could start a fire),
• Battery-powered or hand-crank radio,
• Extra batteries,
• First aid kit,
• A week’s supply of medications and required medical items,
• Multi-purpose tool,
• Sanitation and personal hygiene items,
• Copies of personal documents, such as a list of medications and medical information; deed/lease to home; birth certificates; passports; insurance policies,
• Cellphone with chargers,
• Family and emergency contact information,
• Extra cash.

People who are being evacuated should have a three-day supply of these items, according to the Red Cross. Those staying at home should store a two-week supply.

Provide a backup power source if someone in the home is dependent on electric-powered, life-sustaining equipment.

It’s also a good idea to keep the gas tank of at least one car full and to have a non-cordless telephone at home. It will probably work during a power outage.

Perishable food isn’t apt to spoil if an outage lasts less than two hours, the Red Cross noted in a news release. For prolonged outages, you should have at least one cooler on hand.

Surrounding food with ice in a cooler or in the refrigerator will keep it colder for a longer time. Use a digital quick-response thermometer to check internal food temperatures and make sure food is cold enough to use safely.

More information

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security provides more power outage safety and preparation tips.

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Men With Advanced Prostate Cancer Might Consider Gene Test

WEDNESDAY, July 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Men with prostate cancer that has spread to other parts of their body should be considered for genetic testing, a new study suggests.

Testing for inherited abnormalities in DNA repair genes could provide patients and family members important information about their health and cancer risk, the study authors said.

“With the exception of some cancer syndromes in children, prostate cancer is the most heritable of human malignancies,” said the study’s co-lead author, Dr. Michael Walsh. He is a geneticist and pediatric oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center in New York City.

“Historically, the main benefit of identifying cancer-causing mutations has been prevention and early detection in families. Now we can use inherited genomic information to target treatment, with specific therapies shown to be effective in those with specific genomic subsets of prostate cancer,” Walsh said in a cancer center news release.

The research team found a link between advanced prostate cancer and mutations in DNA repair genes.

The mutations occur far more often in men with advanced disease than in those with prostate cancer that hasn’t spread, the study authors said.

In addition, men with the abnormal repair genes are more likely to have close relatives with cancers other than prostate cancer compared to men without the mutations. These findings could help identify families that are at high risk for cancer and help prevent it in future generations, the researchers said.

The findings are of interest for two reasons, study co-senior author Dr. Kenneth Offit said in the news release. Offit is chief of clinical genetics and head of the Niehaus Center for Inherited Cancer Genomics at Memorial Sloan Kettering.

“First, these findings potentially change clinical practice because we now show that testing for these DNA repair genes should be offered to all men with advanced prostate cancer,” he said. “The second important finding is that we see clusters of cancers other than prostate, breast, ovarian, and pancreatic in these families that were not expected and that will stimulate further research.”

More study is needed to determine whether abnormal DNA repair genes could help predict disease outcomes, the scientists said.

The study team consisted of researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, the University of Washington School of Medicine, the University of Michigan and the Institute of Cancer Research, London.

The findings were published online July 6 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

More information

The American Cancer Society has more about prostate cancer.

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Don’t Blame the Media for Teen Sex, Study Says

WEDNESDAY, July 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Sexy movies, television and other media have little effect on teens’ sexual behavior, according to a study that challenges a common belief among parents and policymakers.

Researchers analyzed 22 studies of the influence of media on teens’ behavior, including when they start having sex and whether they engage in risky sex. The studies, which also examined teen pregnancy, included more than 22,000 participants younger than 18.

The researchers found only a weak link between media and teen sexual behavior.

“Evidence for an association between media and sexual behavior is minimal,” said study co-author Christopher Ferguson, co-chair of psychology at Stetson University in DeLand, Fla.

Parents and peers have a much greater influence on teens’ sexual behavior, he said.

The findings were published recently in the journal Psychiatric Quarterly.

But media may influence at-risk children who lack other sources of information about sexuality, according to Ferguson.

“That is to say, when information from parents or schools are lacking, media may become the only source of information on sexuality,” he said in a journal news release.

Blaming the media might distract parents and policymakers from more significant issues related to teen sexuality, the researchers said. Parents should be encouraged to discuss sexuality with their teens; schools must offer appropriate sex education programs; and the use of peer networks to promote safe sex must be explored, Ferguson said.

“The encouraging message from our results is that the media is unlikely to thwart parental efforts to socialize children should parents take the initiative to talk directly to their children about sex,” he concluded.

More information

The American Academy of Pediatrics has more on teen sexuality.

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ER Death Rate in U.S. Drops by Nearly Half

By Maureen Salamon
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, July 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Hospital emergency room deaths in the United States plummeted by nearly half over a 15-year period, with several factors likely accounting for the drop, a new study indicates.

The upshot: It’s unlikely you’ll die in the ER, say researchers who analyzed almost 368,000 emergency department visits by adults between 1997 and 2011. They found a 48 percent reduction in deaths over that period.

Increasing use of home hospice care and improvements in emergency medicine and public health are among the factors that might help explain the results, study author Dr. Hemal Kanzaria said.

“This was a descriptive study, essentially looking at trends,” said Kanzaria, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at University of California, San Francisco. “Finding a nearly 50 percent reduction was thought-provoking, and I think there are many possible explanations. [But] dying in an emergency department is rare, and it’s important to highlight how rare an event it is overall.”

More than 136 million emergency room visits took place in the United States in 2011, the latest year for which data are available, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 40 million of those visits were injury-related, and almost 12 percent resulted in hospital admission.

Kanzaria and his team analyzed data from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey. They found that ER mortality rates fell from 1.48 per 1,000 U.S. adults in 1997 to 0.77 per 1,000 U.S. adults in 2011.

Compared to ER patients who survived, those who died tended to be older, more likely to be male and white, and were more severely ill or injured when brought into the emergency room.

In nearly 63 percent of ER visits in which patients died, they were in cardiac arrest, unconscious or dead on arrival, according to the study. The most common reasons for other ER visits ending in patient death included shortness of breath, injury or chest pain.

“As a practicing emergency physician, I feel the ED isn’t an optimal place for either a patient to die or a family member or loved one to experience such an event,” Kanzaria said. “We were interested in looking at how often this actually occurs.”

Several societal and health care shifts may contribute to the findings, Kanzaria said. These include greater use of palliative care services, in which patients typically die at home or in hospice settings instead of a hospital emergency room or as inpatients.

“Based on our analysis, it doesn’t appear patients are dying more elsewhere in the hospital, but it’s reasonable to think they’re dying in other settings,” Kanzaria said.

“There also have been pretty tremendous improvements in emergency medicine over the past couple of decades, so there have been significant gains in the management of conditions such as heart attacks, strokes, trauma or serious infections,” he added.

Dr. Kevin Rodgers, president of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine, praised the research. “It’s a good study that used a really good database to get at the best statistics,” he said.

But Rodgers, also a professor of clinical emergency medicine at Indiana University, said the research couldn’t decipher how many patients who once might have died in the ER are now being revived, only to end up “in terrible neurologic condition and counted as survivors.”

“Are we really doing a better job?” Rodgers asked. “We might be, but it’s hard to know.”

The study is published in the July issue of the journal Health Affairs.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shares statistics on ER visits.

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Gene Test Might One Day Gauge Alzheimer’s Risk in Younger Adults

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, July 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — A gene test may one day be able to predict the risk for Alzheimer’s disease in young adults, a new study suggests.

People without any thinking impairments, but with a high number of gene mutations linked to Alzheimer’s, developed worse memory over time and had a smaller hippocampus — the part of the brain associated with memory and emotion, the researchers found.

“This implies that genetic risk of Alzheimer’s disease may exert an effect on the hippocampus very early in life, which may make those individuals more likely to get Alzheimer’s disease late in life,” said lead researcher Elizabeth Mormino. She is an instructor in neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Charlestown, Mass.

Although the effects were small, they offer the possibility that genetic mutations may help spot people at risk of Alzheimer’s disease decades before symptoms start, she added.

But Dr. Sam Gandy, director of the Center for Cognitive Health at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, said people should not be rushing out to get tested to see if they have a high risk of Alzheimer’s.

“It’s only for research at this point,” he said. “It’s potentially very useful in designing super early interventions, but not clinically useful yet.”

For the study, Mormino and her colleagues calculated a genetic risk score based on whether a person had several high-risk gene mutations. The participants, average age 75, included 166 people with dementia and more than 1,000 people without dementia.

In addition, Mormino’s team looked for markers of Alzheimer’s, including memory and thinking decline, disease progression and the size of the hippocampus. They also looked at links between the risk score and hippocampus size in more than 1,300 healthy 18- to 35-year-olds.

The investigators found that among older people without dementia, a higher genetic risk score was associated with worse memory and a smaller hippocampus at the start of the study, accounting for 2 percent of the total variance in memory and 2 percent of the variance in hippocampus size.

Over a three-year follow-up period, a higher risk score was tied to greater memory and thinking decline and disease progression, the researchers reported.

Moreover, the risk score was linked with overall Alzheimer’s progression. Among the 194 participants who were healthy at the start of the study, 15 developed mild thinking impairment or Alzheimer’s disease. Of 332 patients with mild thinking impairment at the start of the study, 143 developed Alzheimer’s disease, the findings showed.

With each increase in the Alzheimer’s genetic risk score, the odds of the disease progression increased nearly two times, the study authors said.

Among the younger participants, a high risk score was linked to a smaller hippocampus. However, the risk score accounted for less than 1 percent of the difference in hippocampus size between those with high and low scores, the researchers noted.

The findings were published online July 6 in the journal Neurology.

“We are starting to put the pieces of the puzzle in place that look at what these genetic risk factors might mean,” said Heather Snyder, senior director for medical and scientific operations at the Alzheimer’s Association. “It’s a first step in that direction, but it’s not ready for prime time — we still have a ways to go.”

If you have a parent or a sibling that has Alzheimer’s disease, you are at an increased risk, and “there is nothing more that a genetic test will tell you about your risk,” she said.

In the future, genetic testing might predict risk and there may be ways to stop or slow the progression of the disease, Snyder said. “But we are not there yet.”

More information

Visit the Alzheimer’s Association for more on Alzheimer’s disease.

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Does Medical Marijuana Reduce Need for Other Meds?

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, July 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — People are actually using medical marijuana as a treatment for health problems, not simply as an excuse to get high, a new study suggests.

States that pass medical marijuana laws tend to experience a significant decline in prescriptions for ailments that could be treated with cannabis, said study senior researcher W. David Bradford. He’s the chair of public policy with the University of Georgia’s Department of Public Administration and Policy.

At the same time, there hasn’t been a decline in prescriptions for drugs that treat conditions for which marijuana wouldn’t help much or at all, Bradford said.

“There was a substantial shift away from the use of [U.S. Food and Drug Administration]-approved drugs when states turned their medical marijuana laws on,” Bradford said.

Patients most often use medical marijuana to treat pain, causing a large decrease in the average daily doses of prescription painkillers, the researchers reported.

Given this, medical marijuana could play a role in reducing overdose deaths caused by prescription opiates, such as oxycodone (Oxycontin), hydrocodone (Vicodin), morphine and codeine, Bradford said.

“If you never start using an opiate, then you’re not put on the path to opiate misuse, opiate abuse and death,” he said.

For this study, researchers analyzed data from Medicare Part D, a federal program that covers prescription drugs for seniors. The study included all prescriptions filled by Medicare Part D enrollees from 2010 to 2013.

The investigators compared states that had legalized medical marijuana against states that hadn’t, to see if the availability of pot to patients made any difference in prescription drug trends.

The research team specifically looked at nine conditions for which marijuana might be considered a substitute for FDA-approved medications — anxiety, depression, glaucoma, nausea, pain, psychosis, seizures, sleep disorders and spasticity.

Pain is the condition for which there’s the strongest medical evidence recommending marijuana use, the researchers said. Accordingly, they found that legal pot had the greatest effect on prescriptions for painkillers.

There were 1,826 fewer daily doses of painkillers prescribed on average per year in states with medical marijuana laws, compared to states where pot is outlawed, the findings showed.

That’s three to four times greater than the reductions found in prescriptions for other marijuana-treatable conditions, including anxiety, depression, nausea, psychosis, seizures and sleep disorders, Bradford said. Reductions for those conditions were significant, but averaged between 265 and 562 daily doses annually.

The only drugs not significantly affected by medical marijuana laws target glaucoma and spasticity. Those two diseases have shown the least proven benefit from cannabis, the researchers said.

For example, marijuana can decrease eye pressure caused by glaucoma by about 25 percent, but the effect lasts only an hour. That makes pot an unrealistic option for glaucoma treatment, the study authors said. Their data showed that daily doses of glaucoma medication increased by an average 35 daily doses per year in states with medical marijuana laws.

The researchers also found that medical marijuana laws caused no change at all in drugs for which cannabis cannot be considered a substitute, including antibiotics and antivirals, Bradford said.

According to Dr. David Katz, these results show that marijuana — “not a dangerous drug, in the grand scheme of things” — could serve as a valuable alternative to FDA-approved drugs that come with worse side effects. Katz is director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center in New Haven, Conn.

“What we want in medicine is to use the right thing for the right patient at the right time — something that relieves a disease, does it more effectively than anything else, and does it with a high margin of safety,” Katz said. “This research indicates that marijuana is populating exactly such a niche.”

Medical marijuana “is not the right choice for everybody, but there will be people for whom it is the right choice,” he continued. “We’re counting on well-trained physicians to apply sound judgment.”

Medical pot also appears to have saved taxpayers some money. By 2013, 17 states and the District of Columbia had implemented medical marijuana laws, and lower prescription drug use in those states added up to $165 million in savings, the study authors reported.

Marijuana could help treat pain for the same reason that it also can help treat depression and anxiety, by altering a person’s mood, said Dr. Daniel Carr. He is president of the American Academy of Pain Medicine and director of pain research at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston.

“Pain wouldn’t be pain unless there was an unpleasant emotion tagged onto it. This emotional aspect of pain is as important as the sensory aspect of pain,” Carr said. “Marijuana’s effects on mood could also alleviate the experience of pain, from the patient’s point of view.”

However, Carr said more research needs to be done on marijuana for it to serve as a true alternative to prescription drugs.

“The quality of the evidence for medical marijuana is really rudimentary,” he said. “I don’t think we have a full grasp yet on the long-term risks and benefits of medical marijuana.”

The new study was published in the July issue of the journal Health Affairs.

More information

For more on medical marijuana, visit the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse.

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Can an Antibiotic Help You? Quick Test Might Someday Tell

WEDNESDAY, July 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Health experts have long warned that antibiotics are overused, often prescribed for viral infections for which the drugs are useless.

A quick blood test to determine whether an infection is viral or bacterial would help curb the problem — and scientists now say that test may come soon.

One family physician believes the screen could be a great advance for patients.

“It would reduce unnecessary antibiotic use — which, if it continues unchecked, will threaten entire populations of individuals because of growing antibiotic resistance,” said Dr. Howard Selinger. He is chair of family medicine at Quinnipiac University’s School of Medicine in Hamden, Conn.

Such a blood test “would also have the advantage of helping patients avoid potentially dangerous and harmful antibiotic side effects,” Selinger added.

As explained by researchers at Stanford University in California, the overuse of lifesaving antibiotics has led to the emergence of a growing global threat: antibiotic-resistant bacteria, known as “superbugs.”

Left unchecked, the spread of superbugs raises the possibility of incurable infectious diseases that could cost the world $100 trillion in gross-domestic-product losses by 2050, the study authors said in a university news release.

The unnecessary use of antibiotics also raises the risk of unwanted side effects, such as tendon rupture, kidney damage or changes to the healthy gut bacteria, the researchers said.

Right now, health officials urge doctors to refrain from prescribing antibiotics for anything other than a bacterial infection. However, there’s still no easy way for physicians to determine whether a cough, sore throat, ear infection or other malady is caused by a virus or bacteria.

“A lot of times you can’t really tell what kind of infection someone has,” study author Dr. Timothy Sweeney said in the news release.

“If someone comes into the clinic, a bacterial or a viral infection often look exactly the same,” said Sweeney, who’s an engineering research associate at Stanford’s Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection.

The key to differentiating between the two may lie in something called gene expression, he said. Gene expression is a process by which cells extract information from genes and express it in the form of either protein or molecules called RNA.

In response to an infection, cells may express more or less of each molecule. For the study, published July 6 in Science Translational Medicine, Sweeney’s team looked at available data to identify genes with a pattern of activity that changes during an infection.

According to study senior author Purvesh Khatri, in prior research, the investigators “found a common response by the human immune system to multiple viruses that is distinct from that for bacterial infections.” Khatri is an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford’s School of Medicine.

“We wondered whether we could exploit that difference to improve the diagnosis of bacterial or viral infections,” he added.

Prior tests had involved hundreds of genes, Khatri said, and “we needed a gene signature consisting of far fewer genes for the test to be clinically useful.”

The new blood screen, tested on 96 critically ill children in Nepal, requires just seven genes to sort out whether an infection is bacterial or viral, the researchers reported.

However, before the new test becomes available to doctors, it must be thoroughly tested in larger studies and incorporated into a device that can give a result within an hour, the study authors noted. That’s at least three hours faster than the fastest existing tests, which are still too slow to help critically ill patients.

For his part, Selinger said he’s hopeful a quick, blood-based test is finally on the horizon.

“For someone with an infectious disease, the ability to distinguish between a viral and a bacterial cause would be game-changing,” he said. “In the primary care setting, a point-of-care outpatient test of this nature would enable the clinician to educate their patient with certainty about the time course and severity of symptoms associated with their illness.”

Dr. Len Horovitz is an internist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. He agreed that if the Stanford test proves successful, it could “drastically reduce the over-prescribing of antibiotics.”

“The test ultimately would be based on gene responses, and the result would be available in an hour — enough time for critical decision-making,” Horovitz said.

The new research was funded in part by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Sweeney and Khatri said that the seven-gene test is up for possible patent protection by Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains when antibiotic use is appropriate.

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U.S. Car Crash Deaths Down, But Still Surpass Other Nations

WEDNESDAY, July 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Car crash deaths on American roads fell nearly one-third over a recent 14-year period, but the nation’s collision death rate still tops that of other high-income countries, health officials reported Wednesday.

About 90 Americans die in crashes every day. That’s the highest roadway death rate among 20 countries examined, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

“It is important to compare us not to our past but to our potential. Seeing that other high-income countries are doing better, we know we can do better, too,” said Dr. Debra Houry. She’s director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

“People of our nation deserve better and safer transport,” she said in a CDC news release.

Crash deaths in the United States fell by 31 percent from 2000 to 2013. In other countries studied, crash deaths declined by an average of 56 percent during the same time, the researchers found. Spain had the greatest reduction in crash deaths — 75 percent. The United States had the smallest reduction, according to the report.

Alcohol and a lack of seat belts figured in many of the U.S. deaths, suggesting much more progress is possible, the CDC said.

“We know what works to prevent crashes, injuries and deaths,” said Erin Sauber-Schatz, transportation safety team lead at the Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the CDC.

“About 3,000 lives could be saved each year by increasing seat belt use to 100 percent, and up to 10,000 lives could be saved each year by eliminating alcohol-impaired driving,” Sauber-Schatz said.

If the United States had the same crash death rate as Sweden — the country with the fewest crash deaths — more than 24,000 U.S. lives could’ve been saved in 2013. And $281 million in direct medical costs would’ve been saved in 2013 if U.S. drivers were as safe as those in Sweden, the researchers noted.

Besides never drinking and driving, the agency said crash deaths can be avoided by using seat belts in both front and rear seats; properly using car seats and booster seats with children through age 8; eliminating distracted driving, and obeying speed limits.

Strategies such as graduated licensing requirements, increased alcohol taxes and campaigns on proper car seat installation also help stem unnecessary traffic deaths, the researchers said.

For the study, the researchers used data from the International Road Traffic and Accident Database for 2000 through 2013.

The United States had the most motor vehicle crash deaths based on population and number of registered vehicles. America ranked second in the percentage of deaths involving alcohol (31 percent) and third lowest in front seat belt use (87 percent), the report showed.

Comparison countries included Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

The study results were published July 6 in the CDC’s Vital Signs report.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention outlines strategies to curb car crash deaths.

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U.S. Army, French Drugmaker to Join Forces on Zika Vaccine

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, July 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — The French pharmaceutical firm Sanofi said Wednesday that it’s joining with U.S. Army researchers to work on a vaccine for Zika virus, which has caused thousands of birth defects, primarily in Brazil.

Brazil is the site of the upcoming Summer Olympics.

Sanofi Pasteur said it will begin working with the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) on development of a potential vaccine. The institute will transfer its inactivated Zika virus technology to Sanofi Pasteur, opening the door to what the drugmaker called a “broader collaboration with the U.S. government.”

Sanofi said it’s working on pre-clinical studies that utilize technology previously and successfully used to develop both its dengue fever and Japanese encephalitis vaccines.

“Zika, Japanese encephalitis, and dengue belong to the same family of viruses [flaviviruses], are transmitted by the same type of mosquito, and share some similarities at the genetic level, and we already licensed vaccines against those flaviviruses,” John Shiver, senior vice president for research and development at Sanofi Pasteur, said in a company news release.

Last month, WRAIR researchers reported that two studies done with mice supported the potential effectiveness of two Zika vaccine candidates.

This “critical first step” will lead to trials in monkeys and humans, “and gives us early confidence that development of a protective Zika virus vaccine for humans is feasible,” said researcher Col. Nelson Michael. He is co-leader of WRAIR in Silver Spring, Md., and a member of a team involved in the search for a vaccine against the mosquito-borne virus.

Zika infection during pregnancy can cause a devastating birth defect known as microcephaly, where an infant is born with an abnormally small head and brain. In Latin America, thousands of babies have already been born with microcephaly, and health officials are working to help prevent cases in the United States as the summer mosquito season arrives.

Reporting June 28 in the journal Nature, researchers said one of the new experimental vaccines was developed at Harvard Medical School in Boston and is partly based on a Zika strain isolated in Brazil.

The other vaccine, using a strain isolated in Puerto Rico, has been developed by Michael’s team at WRAIR.

Both vaccines shielded mice against Zika infection with just a single shot required, the researchers said.

“We showed that vaccine-induced antibodies provided protection, similar to existing vaccines for other flaviviruses,” said Dr. Dan Barouch. He directs the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

In related news, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) said it will study some U.S. athletes and Zika during the upcoming Summer Olympics and Paralympics in Brazil. The goal: to better understand how the virus infects people, the Associated Press reported.

Health officials have recommended that pregnant women avoid the games, which begin Aug. 5. But, the Zika virus can also be spread through sexual activity. Some athletes from several countries have already said they’ll skip the games due to concerns about potential infection with Zika.

No nation has been more affected by the Zika epidemic than Brazil, where an estimated 5,000 babies have been born with microcephaly.

The NIH plans to recruit at least 1,000 athletes, coaches and staffers for its study. The participants will provide samples of bodily fluids for routine testing to help determine risk factors for infection, and how long the virus remains in the body, the AP reported.

Most people infected with Zika typically experience mild symptoms. But the risks to a pregnant woman and a fetus are very real.

To date, the vast majority of Zika infections have occurred in Latin America and the Caribbean.

So far the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says there have been no local transmissions of Zika reported in the United States. But health officials have said they expect to see local transmission — particularly in Gulf Coast states such as Florida, Louisiana and Texas — as the mosquito season wears on.

Zika is typically transmitted via the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito. However, transmission of the virus through sex is more common than previously thought, World Health Organization officials have said.

Women of child-bearing age who live in an active Zika region should protect themselves from mosquitoes by wearing long-sleeved shirts and long pants, using mosquito repellent when outside, and staying indoors as much as possible, according to the CDC.

More information

Visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for more on the Zika virus.

This Q&A will tell you what you need to know about Zika.

To see the CDC list of sites where Zika virus is active and may pose a threat to pregnant women, click here.

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Ashley Graham’s Latest #BodyPos Message Will Leave You Totally Inspired

Photo: Getty Images

We can probably all agree that Ashley Graham is the ultimate role model, right? Her Instagram messages are always so inspirational, and we’re thankful she’s out there spreading the word that we should embrace who we are and kick shaming to the curb. With that being said, the stunning model, who has graced the cover of Sports Illustrated in one super sexy pic, has been a passionate and outspoken advocate for body positivity. Her latest message on social media, though, contains one of her most powerful comments yet.

Graham took to IG to share that someone once told her her thighs were “cellulite city.” But kudos to Graham for taking the high way in this case and showing trolls she could care less about what they think about her.

“…But I now realize these thighs tell a story of victory and courage. I will not let others dictate what they think my body should look like for their own comfort, and neither should you,” she continued in her caption.

Amen to that, Ashley! Thank you for the reminder that we should all love and be proud of who we are, not constantly pick ourselves apart.

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