Up to 80% of sinus infections are caused by fungus. Even though many of the general treatments for sinus infection may work for fungal sinusitis, special medicines for treating fungal sinus infections are required.

Fungal sinus infection or Fungal sinusitis tends to go overlooked as a cause of sinusitis, partly because of the rarity of fungal sinus infections. Most cases of sinus infection are caused by bacteria. As such these types of sinus infection can be effectively treated with antibiotics. Yet fungal sinus infections may not respond to the types of antibiotics most commonly used for sinus infections.

Major Fungal Sinus Infection Symptoms
In addition to the major chronic sinus infection symptoms, the following symptoms would indicate a fungal sinus infection:

1. Frequent bouts of fever. The fever can come and go.
2. It is common to have fever lasting 5 days, recover and a few of days later, you are down again with another bout.
3. Persistent sore throat which does not heal. This is caused by oral thrush, a fungal infection, medically known as Candida Esophagitis. The main cause of thrush is a weakened immune system. It may also be caused by the destruction of the good bacteria in the body due to consumption of too much antibiotics.
4. Feeling extremely sick and weak. You will look very pale and have extremely low levels of energy.

Diagnosing Fungal Sinus Infections
If your symptoms of sinus infection do not go away or show marked improvement after a few days of over the counter medication, it's time to consult a professional. Your doctor will ask you about your history of sinus infection and symptoms, and may want to x-ray your sinuses.

General sinusitis symptoms include localized pain and inflammation in affected and surrounding areas. Sinus infections caused by fungus are rare, but not unheard of. Although fungal organisms are abundant and commonly found in many environments, they are typically harmless to those with healthy immune systems. Only in cases of compromised immune systems or extreme fungal conditions do fungal sinus infections usually occur.

Fungus like Curvularia and Aspergillus have been known to cause fungal sinus infections and serious illness, particularly in those with weakened immune system due to stress or illness.
Another factor in fungal sinus infection is allergy to fungus. Sometimes those with fungal sinus infection are allergic to the fungus causing the infection. In these cases the infection is treated with medicine and controlled by cleaning the surrounding areas of all allergens known to produce allergic reactions in the patient.

Patients with fungal allergies may develop 'allergic fungal sinusitis' which is a condition where the body reacts to inhaling offensive irritants by releasing histamines which contribute to inflammation.

For this reason, antihistamines and decongestants are important types of medicine to consider when treating any kind of sinus infection.

How to Tell if Your Home has a Mold Problem
For thorough inspection of your home contact a professional house inspector. According to one such professional inspection firm, there is greater than 80% chance that there is unseen mold in your house if there is any visible black mold in the basement or attic.

Even if you do not see any mold, but the basement or attic has a moldy smell, this is a sign of mold infestation of some degree. The smell of mold is created by gases that molds expel. When in doubt, hire a professional house inspector to investigate and document any household infestations. Many contractors offer free home inspections. If you are buying a house the cost of an inspection is usually paid for by the seller.

Prevention of fungal sinus infection
Just like with any kind of sinus infection, keeping inflammation in check, drinking enough fluids and helping the sinuses to drain will help alleviate conditions that contribute to the outbreak of sinus infection. Though taking a decongestant may seem like a way of merely treating the symptom of congestion, this may also keep infection from occurring or becoming worse.

If your case of fungal sinus infection is not related to allergies it's important to inspect your living areas for signs of fungal infestation. In some very humid places fungus can easily get out of hand and contaminate fabric, such as pillow cases and other bed clothes. Since we spend about a third of our lives breathing in air right next to these surfaces it's a good idea to make sure your sheets are washed in sufficiently hot water. The purchase of a quality indoor air purifier is another very good alternative.

Remember to keep your immune system strong. Only by doing so can you hope to avoid a fungal sinus infection!

by Armen Hareyan on Jan 8th, 2009

New study suggests spirituality, not religious practices, determine the level of child happiness.

To make children happier, we may need to encourage them to develop a strong sense of personal worth, according to Dr. Mark Holder from the University of British Columbia in Canada and his colleagues Dr. Ben Coleman and Judi Wallace. Their research1 shows that children who feel that their lives have meaning and value and who develop deep, quality relationships - both measures of spirituality - are happier. It would appear, however, that their religious practices have little effect on their happiness. These findings have been published in the online edition of Springer's Journal of Happiness Studies.

Both spirituality (an inner belief system that a person relies on for strength and comfort) and religiousness (institutional religious rituals, practices and beliefs) have been linked to increased happiness in adults and adolescents. In contrast, very little work has been done on younger children. In an effort to identify strategies to increase children's happiness, Holder and colleagues set out to better understand the nature of the relationship between spirituality, religiousness and happiness in children aged 8 to 12 years. A total of 320 children, from four public schools and two faith-based schools, completed six different questionnaires to rate their happiness, their spirituality, their religiousness and their temperament. Parents were also asked to rate their child's happiness and temperament.

The authors found that those children who said they were more spiritual were happier. In particular, the personal (i.e. meaning and value in one's own life) and communal (i.e. quality and depth of inter-personal relationships) aspects of spirituality were strong predictors of children's happiness. Spirituality explained up to 27 percent of the differences in happiness levels amongst children.

A child's temperament was also an important predictor of happiness. In particular, happier children were more sociable and less shy. The relationship between spirituality and happiness remained strong, even when the authors took temperament into account. However, counter intuitively, religious practices - including attending church, praying and meditating - had little effect on a child's happiness.

According to the authors, "enhancing personal meaning may be a key factor in the relation between spirituality and happiness." They suggest that strategies aimed at increasing personal meaning in children - such as expressing kindness towards others and recording these acts of kindness, as well as acts of altruism and volunteering - may help to make children happier.

Reference
1. Holder MD, Coleman B, & Wallace J (2008). Spirituality, religiousness, and happiness in children aged 8-12 years. Journal of Happiness Studies DOI 10.1007/s10902-008-9126-1

(NaturalNews) People still don't get it: Vitamin D is the "miracle nutrient" that activates your immune system to defend you against invading microorganisms -- including seasonal flu and swine flu. Two months ago, an important study was published by researchers at Oregon State University. This study reveals something startling: Vitamin D is so crucial to the functioning of your immune system that the ability of vitamin D to boost immune function and destroy invading microorganisms has been conserved in the genome for over 60 million years of evolution.

As this press release from Oregon State University (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_relea...) explains:

The fact that this vitamin-D mediated immune response has been retained through millions of years of evolutionary selection, and is still found in species ranging from squirrel monkeys to baboons and humans, suggests that it must be critical to their survival, researchers say.

"The existence and importance of this part of our immune response makes it clear that humans and other primates need to maintain sufficient levels of vitamin D," said Adrian Gombart, an associate professor of biochemistry and a principal investigator with the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University.

The announcement goes on to explain:

In primates, this action of "turning on" an optimal response to microbial attack only works properly in the presence of adequate vitamin D, which is actually a type of hormone that circulates in the blood and signals to cells through a receptor. Vitamin D is produced in large amounts as a result of sun exposure, and is available in much smaller amounts from dietary sources.

Vitamin D prevents the "adaptive" immune response from over-reacting and reduces inflammation, and appears to suppress the immune response. However, the function of the new genetic element this research explored allows vitamin D to boost the innate immune response by turning on an antimicrobial protein. The overall effect may help to prevent the immune system from overreacting.

Without vitamin D, you're a sitting duck
What this study reveals is that without sufficient levels of vitamin D circulating in your blood, you're a ripe, juicy target for influenza (H1N1 or otherwise). If you lack vitamin D, your immune system can't "activate" to do its job. That's why people who are deficient in vitamin D so frequently get winter colds.

But people who are high in vitamin D have the nutritional power to activate their immune system so that it can respond to invading pathogens. Crucially, vitamin D also manages to balance immune response and prevent inflammation -- the leading cause of death in the 1918 influenza pandemic.

So not only does vitamin D protect you from the initial infection; it also prevents your body from over-reacting and killing you with inflammation (which typically gets expressed as bacterial pneumonia, an infection of the lungs).

(NaturalNews) Since the prostate antigen screening test (PSA) began being widely used about 23 years ago, doctors have lauded its ability to detect prostate cancer at a very early stage. In fact, PSA testing has resulted in over a million additional men being diagnosed and treated for prostate cancer. The problem is, according to new research just published online in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, most of these cases were overdiagnosed and subjected men to treatment they didn't need.

For their study, H. Gilbert Welch, M.D., MPH, of the White River Junction VA and the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice., and Peter C. Albertsen, M.D., of the University of Connecticut, studied data from the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results program. They looked at age-specific prostate cancer incidence rates to investigate whether there was an excess or a deficit in the number of American men diagnosed and treated for prostate cancer after PSA screening was introduced in l987.

The results were clear. The researchers found that an additional 1.3 million men, especially younger men, had been diagnosed with the malignancy who would never have been found to have prostate cancer without the PSA test. And over one million of these men have been treated since l986.

So why isn't this good news if cancers are being found and treated earlier? Because over a million of these men who were told they had prostate cancer most likely had no real health problem -- until they started down the path of side-effect laden treatments and became labeled as "cancer patients".

"Given the considerable time that has passed since PSA screening began, most of this excess incidence must represent overdiagnosis," the authors of the study wrote. "All overdiagnosed patients are needlessly exposed to the hassle factors of obtaining treatment, the financial implications of the diagnosis, and the anxieties associated with becoming a cancer patient."

Even more importantly, as Otis W. Brawley, M.D., chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, pointed out in an editorial accompanying the study, there has been little evidence that PSA screening has saved lives. All it has done is surge the rate of diagnosed prostate cancers upward. Moreover, Dr. Brawley warned that the highly marketed early-detection message has pushed public opinion toward accepting PSA screening as critically important and necessary for men -- when there's a lack of good science to back up that belief.

"Prostate cancer screening has resulted in substantial overdiagnosis and in unnecessary treatment. It may have saved relatively few lives. Results from this article and recent results from prostate cancer screening and prevention trials demand reflection about what we as a society have done and are doing. Lessons to be learned have ethical and economic implications and involve our lack of respect for the scientific process and scientific evidence," Dr. Brawley wrote.

Another new study adds even more evidence that prostate cancer is being overdiagnosed and over treated. According to research just published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, many prostate cancer patients, including older men and men with small, low-risk tumors, can safely defer treatment for many years with no adverse consequences at all.

"With the advent of PSA screening nearly 20 years ago, we started to detect prostate cancers at much earlier stages," researcher Martin Sanda, MD, Director of the Prostate Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, said in a statement to the media.

"Consequently, while PSA testing has enabled us to successfully begin aggressive treatment of high-risk cancers at an earlier stage, it has also resulted in the diagnosis of cancers that are so small they pose no near-term danger and possibly no long-term danger."

Dr. Sanda, along with colleagues from Brigham and Women's Hospital, the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of California, San Francisco, studied data from the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, a large cohort study comprising 51,529 men who have been followed since 1986. Every two years, the participants respond to questionnaires and list information about diseases and health-related topics, including whether they've been told they have prostate cancer.

In all, 3,331 men reported receiving a diagnosis of prostate cancer between 1986 and 2007. Among this group, about ten percent (342 men) decided to put off having any treatment for one year or longer. Ten to 15 years later, 50 percent of these men who had initially deferred treatment still had not undergone any prostate cancer treatment.

To find out how this group of men fared in the long-term, the scientists looked at the data after an average of eight years after their initial diagnosis and then compared it with information provided by prostate cancer patients who had decided on going ahead with aggressive treatment, including surgery, radiotherapy or hormonal therapy.

"We found that the deaths attributed to prostate cancer were very low among the men with low-risk tumors," Dr. Sanda stated. "Our analysis showed that only two percent of the men who deferred treatment eventually died of the disease, compared with one percent of the men who began treatment immediately following their diagnosis. This is not a statistically significant difference."

According to the press statement, the researchers found that men diagnosed with low-risk tumors who deferred treatment were still doing fine an average of eight years and up to 20 years after their cancer diagnosis.

"Only half of these men wound up undergoing any treatment 10 to 15 years post-diagnosis. This means that they were able to avoid the disruption in their quality of life which might have occurred had they undergone immediate treatment," Dr. Sanda explained in the media statement.

For more information:
http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/...
http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/...
http://www.bidmc.org/News/InResearc...