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We all are. In light of a rapidly spreading virus outbreak it’s never been more important to boost your immune system. Am I doing enough? Did I consume enough nutrients? Is my body strong enough to fight off anything that may come its way? These are the questions I keep on asking myself while also ensuring that I’m practising good hygiene by frequently washing hands, using hand sanitiser, avoiding directly touching surfaces in public places, and more.  It’s worthwhile to point out that I continue to remind myself and others around me that eating real, organic, healthy vegan foods will cleanse the body and ensure that you are at your healthiest. It’s true that building a strong immune system is your best defence against infectious illness and disease. Your immune health depends on the lifestyle choices you make every day. By supporting your body’s own natural ability to defend itself against pathogens, you will not only have resistance to cold and flus but to other infectious illnesses as well.  We are all very aware that there is no vaccine yet for the current outbreak of the coronavirus, leaving each immune system of the world’s population of humans to fight off infection. It’s daunting. It’s more difficult for some than others. But it’s very, very possible — so we all need to ensure that our immune system is able to work as best as it can to protect us.  I’ve said it before and I will say it again: celery, kale, carrot, cabbage, apple, spinach, beetroot, and leafy greens need to be part of your every day eating routine in order to ensure that you’re consuming the very best antioxidants, vitamins and minerals. These foods are important as most of the immune system resides in the gut, and pure greens naturally provide the nutrients to keep everything healthy.  Starting the day with warm water and lemon is said to aid digestion, flush toxins, and give the immune system a boost. Lemons are loaded with Vitamin C, which is known for its ability to combat colds. A juice cleanse is another way to detox, which involves consuming vegetable and fruit juice periodically. The concept of making juice from fruits or herbs for health benefits has been used through the ages. After the invention of the first modern juicing machine in the 1930s, alternative health practitioners began recommending juicing as a cure for a number of issues with the body. If you’re wondering how best to be able to fight off infection, start drinking, and eating plants. Not tomorrow, or next week — but now.  Fruits and vegetables are filled with rich vitamins, minerals, and fibres – and juicing them can extract those nutrients making them easier to digest. Drinking juice can also flood the body with healing nourishment while flushing toxins and waste. For maximum nutrient absorption, you should drink juice slowly rather than gulping it down. Remember that more than 50% of people are dehydrated, even without realising it.  As my regular readers will know, I swear by the power of turmeric. Turmeric is hailed as one of the immune-boosting plant-based foods and a super spice in most health circles. Ensuring you are well rested is also key to boosting our immune system. When we sleep, our bodies are hard at work detoxing, repairing, and rebuilding. When we don’t get enough sleep, we’re denying our bodies the time it needs for these functions and we’re compromising on our immune system. Every person who goes vegan reduces their own risk of suffering from heart disease, obesity, cancer, strokes, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and numerous other health concerns. From deadly viruses to the bushfires and rainforest fires fuelled by the climate crisis, eating animals has apocalyptic consequences. The best thing you can do for your own health and the world we live in is to go vegan right now.  The author is an expert in vegan wellbeing and health. Instagram handle: @Ghanim92 

Bruce Schneier once said, “Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.” In modern times respecting someone’s privacy and space is essential, especially if you don’t want yours to be compromised. No one can deny Aristotle’s statement that “Man is a social animal” and he can’t survive in isolation. People have been provided with the right to speak and freedom of making opinion, by legal authorities as well as by society, but it has some limitations. For example, parents think they have all rights to intervene in their children’s lives. They inspect rooms, phones, and other personal belongings of their children without even getting permission. But this is not right. Similarly, in a marriage, both partners expect from each other to open up, to share every good and bad, and co-operate all the time. This may sound good but it is extremely inhuman. Both have their own spaces which must be respected. Privacy is a basic right of every individual. Stephen King wrote in his novel Heart in Atlantis, “Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy too.” You cannot enter someone’s room without knocking. You cannot use someone’s belongings without asking. You cannot ask someone to tell you their secrets if they are not comfortable enough. You cannot judge someone or comment on them. You cannot push the relationship boundaries if someone doesn’t allow you to. It’s unethical and immoral. Anthony Burgess stated in his essay Homage to Qwert Yuiop, “To be left alone is the most precious thing on can ask of the modern world.” We as a society often forget the boundary line of someone’s private life due to several reasons. We may have been born in a different society having some different norms. For example in the West it is common among males and females to shake hands and to hug each other on greeting while it is unacceptable in the Eastern countries especially in the Islamic states. We may cross boundary lines to protect or control someone like parents do. We may set our own expected boundary lines such as possessive partners do. Or sometimes we assume that others are thinking the same way, we think. And many times, it happens unintentionally especially if we don’t listen to others carefully. We as a society don’t notice such things because they have been embedded in the very root of society. Cutting the story short, respecting someone’s privacy can be easily defined by one’s own boundary line of respect. If you consider yourself capable enough to handle your issues by yourself, let others handle their issues as well. Every person has his own self boundary of respect, make sure to understand it and take account of it. Many people like to spend self-time like reading a book by their own or enjoying coffee by themselves. Just respect that choice of theirs. If someone is saying No to your invitation, accept that and don’t argue. If someone wants to move on, let them and respect their decision. There are some basic principles to respect other’s privacy: 1. Listen to the other person with full attention. Give them space to talk and try to understand what they say. 2. Try to focus on the verbal cues anyone gives you during a talk. Such as “Knock the door before entering”. 3. Consider and remember that everyone has his own goals, plans, feeling, in sum- whole life. So respect their space and accept it. 4. One of the most important principles, pay attention to the body language of the other person. Gestures speak louder than words. For example, if someone’s stepping back a little, it means you are standing too close. 5. Never ever touch someone’s mobile phone, laptop, documents, and other such belongings without permission. The author is a consultant in Public Relations and Personality Types. Instagram: @Tipsbyhalahill

Have you ever have had winter that lasted a long-long time? The winter I am talking about is not the weather, but more of a season of life when pain, suffering, disappointment, confusion and sadness fall down on you like snow on a cold, grey March day in London. Sometimes life is like spring: everything is new, fresh, growing and beautiful. The temperature is perfect with a slight breeze that kisses your face. Along this journey called life, we know winter comes after autumn, but some winters stick around way too long. I feel like I am in a winter season currently, and it’s never been so cold. I lost a loved one  and I am in London to attend the funeral. In retrospect, I’m thankful for the winter seasons of my life because the cold wind of suffering blew me into the direction of faith where I found warmth and love. The heat of faith comforts me and melts away any ice around my heart. So what do we do when winter lasts too long? We must grieve, the grieving process is essential to our healing. It’s good to remember we were never promised a winter-free life. Trials and tribulations are part of life and they shape our character and make us who we are. Once we understand that, we can prepare ourselves better for when winter does come, that way you will have a coat ready to wear to keep you warm on bone-chilling days. I remind myself that God is in charge, the same God who blessed me in spring is the same God who blesses me in winter. During prolonged winter seasons, our strength and resources are exhausted and we are left with nothing but hope and faith. Because I’ve experienced winter before, I know the snow will melt, the temperature will eventually warm, new things will come to life and spring will smile at us, but I don’t ever want to forget the seasons that have shaped me to be the person I am. If you are experiencing a winter that is over staying its welcome wrap yourself up in the blanket of unwavering faith, and remember, God is burning a fire for us even on the coldest of days. The author is a consultant and coach. Instagram handle: @miss_shefa,  Website: missshefa.com

As the public and governments grapple with understanding Covid-19 and how to curb its spread, sales of hand sanitiser gel have soared. In the UK, some supermarkets have already run out and Boots is rationing purchases to two bottles a customer. But is hand gel really effective against coronavirus? And, if so, should we be making our own if it is not available in the shops or online? Hand sanitiser is not new. In 1966, Lupe Hernandez, a student nurse from Bakersfield, California, patented the idea of an alcohol-based gel to clean hands in the absence of handwashing facilities. However, it was not until the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009 that the product went from being used in institutions to something the public carried with them. That year, sales of antibacterial gels and wipes in the US soared by more than 70% in six months. By 2010, little bottles of the stuff were everywhere — from checkout counters in airport bookshops to online retailers offering customisable dispensers. The popularity of hand gels has not just been driven by the fear of pandemics. Lucrative opportunities to market them have pushed sales: they now come in pretty, child-friendly colours (bubblegum pink, bright blue) and with wellness-friendly scents (cinnamon, lavender) that are a far cry from the pungent-smelling version found in hospitals. Sanitisers have also evolved to include other active ingredients in place of alcohol, and there are recipes online for making your own. Wellness bloggers plump for things such as witch-hazel and aloe vera. But are these effective in killing germs? Hygiene experts, the NHS and Public Health England all agree that to kill most viruses, a hand sanitiser requires at least 60% alcohol content (most contain 60-95%). For those with sensitive skin, there are now options that don’t contain alcohol. For decades, there were also versions made with another powerful antibacterial agent, triclosan, which was found in everything from soaps to toothpaste. However, research has since found that triclosan can be detrimental to the body’s endocrine system, and the US Food and Drug Administration banned its use in hygiene products at the end of 2017. Sally Bloomfield, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says that viruses are much more resistant to disinfectants than bacteria. Luckily, she says, coronavirus is an envelope virus, meaning it has a coating around it which the alcohol can attack, thereby eliminating the threat. (Norovirus and rhinovirus, by contrast, do not). This means that making your own sanitiser, while potentially effective against some bacteria, is not something Bloomfield would recommend. “It’s very unwise, dangerous, even,” she says. Shop-bought products also contain emollients to make them softer on the skin, without which you run the risk of hurting your hands. Getting the mix right at home would be very tricky — so it is a big no-no. The key thing is when to use hand sanitiser. Covid-19 is a new illness, so no-one knows exactly how it spreads. According to the NHS, it is likely that it is through cough droplets spread from person to person and very unlikely that it is transmitted through objects, be that packages or food. Bloomfield’s advice is to wash your hands with soap and water — or, if that is not possible, use hand gel — when you return to your “safe place”, by which she means your home, your desk or work station, or your seat on the train or plane, for example. Avoid touching anything you don’t need to touch, and be mindful of what you do touch — such as door handles and bus poles — and if you can’t wash your hands or use gel after coming into contact with things, do not touch your face. A virus needs a host — living cells — to reproduce: so don’t rub your eyes, or touch your mouth or any wounds if your hands are not clean. Keep your hands clear until you have access to gel or can wash them. The best option is soap and water. According to a 2019 study by the American Society for Microbiology, using running water and soap to wash your hands is more effective than a dab of gel that you have not quite rubbed in. Soap has mild antibacterial properties, but it does not kill viruses. It does remove dirt, though, so wet your hands with water, lather them up properly, on both sides, in between the fingers and under the nails, one hand and then the other. Rinse them thoroughly under running water for 20 seconds (or as the NHS puts it, the time it takes to sing Happy Birthday). Rinsing thoroughly is key to washing away any viruses. Dry your hands well with a disposable towel, then use that towel to turn off the tap before throwing it away. It might seem counterintuitive, but a study published in the medical journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings in 2012 concluded that, from a hygiene standpoint: “Paper towels are superior to air dryers.” This is because the towels dry your hands more quickly and more thoroughly than dryers do, and contamination happens more through wet hands than dry. Lisa Ackerley, a chartered environmental health practitioner, says that stocks of hand sanitiser running low is a problem, but cautions against panic-buying. First, you don’t need to use very much — a little bottle will go a long way. In fact, a spokesman for the chemical products company Kao Corporation reportedly said last week that too much hand gel can cause irritation and skin sensitivity, by drying out the skin and removing natural oils. Damaged skin increases vulnerability to infection, so hand sanitisers, like most things, are best used in moderation — and only when handwashing is not an option. As Bloomfield puts it, it is not about being paranoid. She likens the process to vaccinations or wearing seatbelts: it is about being disciplined. While some companies have reportedly banned handshaking and other physical contact in an effort to avoid Covid-19, that is not official guidance. It is impossible not to engage with the world, so you just need to be cautious and methodical in your hand hygiene. “If everyone complies with good hygiene,” says Bloomfield, “then you’re making sure as far as possible that you’re not picking it up, and in the unlikely event you are infected you’re not spreading it.” — The Guardian

In 2018 global health expert Jonathan D Quick, of Duke University in North Carolina, published a book titled The End of Epidemics: The Looming Threat to Humanity and How to Stop It. In it he prescribed measures by which the world could protect itself against devastating disease outbreaks of the likes of the 1918 flu, which killed millions and set humanity back decades. He is the former chair of the Global Health Council and a long-term collaborator of the World Health Organisation (WHO). The Covid-19 epidemic looks like it’s edging towards becoming a pandemic — that is, as the WHO defines it, “the worldwide spread of a new disease” — but the WHO hasn’t declared a pandemic yet. What are the best-case and worst-case scenarios? The best case is that the Chinese conflagration is brought under control, the smaller “flames” we’ve seen flare up in other countries are extinguished, there’s little or no spread to new countries or continents, and the epidemic dies out. The worst case is that the outbreak goes global and the disease eventually becomes endemic, meaning it circulates permanently in the human population. Your feeling as to which is more likely, as of today? The worst-case scenario is looking increasingly likely. We’ve now seen cases on six continents, apparently “silent” — that is, at least partly asymptomatic — chains of human-to-human transmission both inside and outside China, with additional countries reporting cases within the last week — bringing the total to 47 — and new, accelerating outbreaks in Iran, Italy and South Korea. If it becomes a pandemic, the questions are, how bad will it get and how long will it last? The case fatality rate — the proportion of cases that are fatal — has been just over 2%, much less than it was for Sars, but 20 times that of seasonal flu. There are still many unknowns — we may have underestimated the period during which a person is contagious, for instance, and the variety of ways in which the virus spreads. If the worst-case scenario comes true, are there still things we can do to minimise the pandemic’s impact? Absolutely. We can mobilise more health officials and keep engaging the public, implementing sensible travel controls and ensuring that frontline health workers have ready access to diagnostic tests and are vigilant — that they don’t send anyone who may have been exposed home without testing them, for example. Judging by past experience, however, it’s likely that health officials and the public in much of the world remain unaware or unconvinced of the danger this virus poses. You have said that time and trust are critical to good epidemic management. What do you mean? The delay between the frontline health workers noticing something unusual, in the form of an emerging disease, and that information travelling up the line to central decision-makers is critical. To illustrate that, a 2018 simulation that the Gates Foundation conducted of a flu pandemic estimated that there would be 28,000 after one month, 10 million after three months, and 33 million after six months. The virus used in that simulation was more contagious and deadly than Covid-19 — though they are both respiratory viruses — but the example shows how all epidemics grow exponentially. So if you can catch an epidemic in the first few weeks, it makes all the difference. As for trust, it’s critical to disseminate dispassionate, evidence-based information, and not to try to mislead the population. If you do, they will stop co-operating. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen in China. Judging by reports, we’re at least a year out from having an approved Covid-19 vaccine. Once one is available, do you think there will be a problem of vaccine hesitancy, as there has been with some of the resurgent childhood diseases? Evidence suggests that vaccine hesitancy diminishes when lots of people are dying. Once an outbreak is over, however, levels of vaccine uptake may depend on how fresh that outbreak is in people’s minds — even though the risk of another one is real. I’ve written about a hypothetical situation in which a new and dangerous pathogen emerges, a vaccine is developed, and you still get a pandemic, because large numbers of millennials refuse the vaccine. In the US, 20% of millennials believe that vaccines cause autism. The problem is bad information. As my students often remind me, news tends to be behind paywalls, while fake news is free. Is it plausible that the Chinese have already created a Covid-19 vaccine? The US drug company Moderna is the only one I’m aware of that has a Covid-19 vaccine ready for human trials. Those are due to start in April. Chinese firms are new to the global vaccine market, but at least one, Clover Biopharmaceuticals, is working to develop a Covid-19 vaccine. It appears that the Covid-19 virus originated in a “wet” or live animal market. Should such markets be banned? No. The Chinese government tried that after Sars. The markets just went underground. They need to be better regulated, and there needs to be active surveillance. Active monitoring and culling of poultry populations in Asia has stamped out outbreaks of avian flu in those populations. Was an epidemic like that of Covid-19 inevitable? From a biological standpoint an outbreak of a novel pathogen was inevitable, but this one happened in the worst place at the worst time. Wuhan is a big city and a crossroads, and the first cases were recorded there just before the lunar new year, when large numbers of people were about to travel to visit their families. In terms of containing it, was it a good or a bad thing that it happened in China? As of five months ago, we have a measure of epidemic preparedness — the Global Health Security (GHS) Index — that scores countries on six dimensions: prevention, detection, response, health system, risk environment and compliance with international standards. No country scores perfectly on all six. China has detected and responded to this epidemic pretty well, though its health system is now stretched beyond capacity, but it is weak on prevention — particularly when it comes to food safety. How well is the US prepared? The US ranks high on the GHS index, but is still unprepared for a severe pandemic, should one happen. Malfunctioning coronavirus tests have frustrated public health labs and delayed outbreak monitoring. Supplies of masks, suits and other protective material for health workers are running low in the midst of a moderately severe flu season. Since the creation of a much-needed public health emergency preparedness fund in the aftermath of 9/11, its budget and the public health functions it supports have been steadily reduced. This is the mentality that left the world vulnerable to the devastating 2014 outbreak of Ebola in west Africa — that is, close the fire department and cancel the fire insurance as nobody’s house or factory has burned down lately. It’s time we learned that the bugs never stop mutating and crossing over to humans. Has the world been an ostrich over pandemic risk? Generally speaking, no. After each major recent outbreak — Sars, swine flu, Ebola — we’ve moved ahead. The GHS Index is itself a big advance, because we can now see where individual countries are weak in terms of preparedness. We should be moving faster, though. What exactly should we be doing faster? Fewer than one in three countries are close to being prepared to confront an epidemic, which leaves the vast majority of the world’s population vulnerable. That in turn leaves us all vulnerable because we’re only as safe as the least safe place. We need to invest more in preparedness, and we need our leaders to take a greater interest in it — that’s all leaders, in both the public and private sectors — from the grass roots to the grass tops. Is a global health agency essential to managing a pandemic, and is the WHO up to the task? A global health agency is essential, yes. None of the advances I’ve mentioned could have happened without the WHO’s involvement, but the WHO can only perform as well as its members allow it to — and they have pulled back on funding since the 2008 financial crisis. Your book is optimistically entitled The End of Epidemics. Could we ever really wave goodbye to epidemics? The world will continue to have disease outbreaks, but there is plenty we can do to protect ourselves against global catastrophes like the 1918 flu. — The Guardian

There are so many things in life once considered ‘normal’ that today would have no place in our society. Seatbelts in cars, safety helmets when skiing, or high-visibility lights on a bicycle. Decades ago, each were not an important, nor significant consideration…but now we wouldn’t dream of purchasing a car that didn’t have seatbelts, or skiing down a mountain without head protection. That’s because we, as humans, learn over time. Through habit, research, and mistakes — our society is constantly adapting and recategorising to ensure that we aren’t often making the same mistakes twice.  It’s time to not continue the mistake of accepting the Zoo as an acceptable attraction, and instead work towards ensuring these animals being held in a prison (zoo) could be able to have a better life. Zoos have become a slippery divide between exploitation and education — and they’ve slipped deeper into the exploitation side as the world has evolved.  Animals are routinely treated badly, they’re suffering, and daily they are there purely to provide some form of entertainment to visitors. Zoos are doing their best to deliver what the public wants…but it’s at the expense of the animals welfare. The argument that zoos have educational merit might have once seemed convincing, but there is less reason to see animals in captivity than ever before. Just a quick look at David Attenborough’s Planet Earth on Netflix shows you all the animals you could ask for in their natural habitat, with added drama and narrative information. Zoos do not play a significant role in the conservation of wildlife, their claims to educate are exaggerated and their research is compromised. Recently, Al Khor Park, one of the oldest in Qatar, reopened after having been closed for the last six years while undergoing renovations. The website boasts “a small zoo with oryx, emu, zebras and exotic birds, among others” — animals that should be looked after in a sanctuary, such as the Oryx, and others that should be free in the wild, or looked after appropriately by conservationists, not by those using the animals for human entertainment. There are so many other, effective ways to educate young people on animals.  Our very own National Museum of Qatar does an excellent job at being a world-class, standard-setting learning space through innovative displays, interaction areas and exhibits.  You’re able to explore the geology of Qatar, its natural environment, and archaeological evidence of early life through various artefacts, 3D sculptures, recorded testimonials, films and poetry. It’s visually fascinating, informative, and doesn’t exploit animals.   If we do nothing, we are teaching the next generation to regard zoos as a completely acceptable part of our society — which they are not. It’s 2020 and the world has realised like it never has done before of the importance of allowing animals to lead the life they want to live, to co-exist with us humans, to be free and live the life they are destined to live. Look no further than the current coronavirus outbreak spreading across the world to realise how bad things get when humans mess with wild animals that were never supposed to end up on a plate.    The author is an expert in vegan wellbeing and health. Instagram handle: @Ghanim92 

It’s so funny seeing all these studies and articles bashing certain food groups and I will never understand that strategy, but when it comes to me, I do not base my diet decisions on trends, I base it on research. I do not appreciate or respect those who hate on certain food groups and do not consider all other angles in the situation or all other comparisons within the same context. People discussing food groups and certain products should provide hard facts, examples and general advice for both sides of the story and then justify their personal take on it, not just attack the products and explain their biased views. So I’m choosing to briefly discuss dairy this week and the rationale behind those products, so let’s get real with the facts. Because this is a short article and I cannot get into too much detail, I will make it brief and simple. To start, let’s go back to the basics. We all know that milk is produced by female mammals to feed their newborns; so it is a fact that newborns, including human babies, need human milk. Do humans (even animals) really need or require milk to survive? No. In that case, should we still drink milk and consume dairy products? In the end, there are numerous studies and professional reads that argue that there are pros and cons to having dairy, but this further goes to show, there is no wrong or right answer, only you have the answer. Milk has so many benefits but can also be harmful for some people, such as those that are lactose intolerant or those who feel some sort of discomfort after consuming dairy. Personally, the fact that we have lactose tolerant and intolerant people makes me feel more confident that milk is not bad, but not the best fit for some people. The same goes with the case in intolerance associated to dairy, the intolerance to the protein found in milk, not the sugar (lactose). So we have established that some people cannot tolerate certain dairy products and this is a no-go for them as their body rejects them. In this case, there is a biological reason why someone cannot have dairy, and that is clear. Looking at all the studies that show the benefits of milk and diary products, you can tell that there definitely is a reason for the high consumption of milk and it’s by-products and that they provide an abundance of natural nutrients that the body does require. Simultaneously, when you look at the chemical make-up of milk, lactose (milk sugar) is really high and may be harmful in big amounts. When it comes to the high amounts of sugar, I agree that minimising your direct intake of milk is beneficial as is with all other high-sugar products, especially when it comes to children. Here is where I will step in and get a bit more direct, children do not need to be drinking milk after being breastfed or after fully passing that critical newborn stage. I am not saying they shouldn’t have it, I’m saying that since it’s really high in sugar, that one could easily decrease the consumption and substitute it with other plant-based milk alternatives or by focusing on other highly beneficial dairy products.  Fermented milk products are cultured and have great benefits. Milk is not that high in probiotics as are the fermented derivates of milk, such as yogurt, kefir and some cheeses. The process of fermentation also helps break down the lactose and usually significantly reduces the amount of lactose to even a bare minimum where lactose-intolerant people can actually comfortably consume certain products; one can still gain the benefits of the essential nutrients found in dairy with almost no lactose, therefore, less sugar and more probiotics. So what’s my motto when it comes to milk and dairy products? I try not to include milk in my diet due to the high sugar content, but I do not mind it here and there in small amounts. When it comes to other dairy products, I make sure to get my dosage of essential nutrients through yogurt, laban, labnah or some cheeses an average of once a day. This is because I am able to tolerate small amounts of dairy and want to make sure I am eating a well-balanced diet full of calcium, protein, vitamin D and probiotics. If you stop or really reduce your milk intake, make sure to get enough vitamin D because the beauty of natural animal milk is that it has the perfect practicality of including calcium but also helps you absorb the calcium simultaneously due to the Vitamin D found naturally in it too. Also be ware of the food products that inhibit calcium absorption such as spinach, sweet potato, beans, high fiber foods such as whole wheat and high sodium foods. When stopping milk, you can get your calcium from other foods but make sure your getting your critical dosage of Vitamin D which is mainly found in milk, eggs, fatty fish, butter, man-made fortified foods or supplements.  The author is a wellness advocate and influencer @keys2balance.

A growing concern in today’s world is the abuse of the elder and it is a major issue especially in the United States. The older generation has become more active and independent with every passing year and today a larger percentage of older people live longer and in better health. However, even though an improvement can be seen in the state of older people today, the concealed issue of elder abuse, neglect and exploitation has become a pervasive problem which is often neglected.  Elder abuse can be defined as an intentional, negligent or knowing act by a caregiver or any other person that causes either harm or a considerable risk of harm to a vulnerable human being.  The word ‘vulnerable’ can be interpreted as all those older individuals who are lonely, depressed, and weak as well as those who have a mental or physical disease. Half of all reported cases are due to neglect which involves the failure or refusal to fulfill one’s obligations as a caretaker to the elder. Abandonment is an extreme type of abuse where the caregiver leaves an elder alone and stops providing care.  There is no one explanation for elder abuse as it is a complex problem and can stem from a multitude of factors like family and caregiving stressors and societal and cultural issues.  The family of an elder person plays a very vital role in his or her life and ensures a healthy lifestyle for him or her. The problem of adjusting to a new lifestyle or accommodating in a multigenerational household is a common family stressor. Elder people generally have limited physical and cognitive skills in relation to the other generations in the family and this may cause stress which would lead to abuse. The stress can also be triggered by financial burdens of multigenerational households, especially when the adult child has no financial resources except those of his/her parents. Social isolation within a family can also be seen as a risk factor for elder abuse. Social isolation can be seen as a strategy and a consequence; as a strategy it can used to keep the abuse a secret and as a consequence it makes dealing with the stresses of taking care of a loved elder person difficult. By isolating oneself from everyone outside the family, the adult child is blocking out all support and help from friends and concerned others. Sometimes a family isn’t able to cope up when the needs of the older adult increase beyond the help they typically provide. In such a case, the family members will unintentionally fail to provide proper care and support which will later turn into unintentional neglect or abuse.  The nature of the relationship between the caregiver and the older adult is the basis of effective caregiving and support. The act of caregiving however is a difficult and taxing task which requires a lot of sacrifices. Sometimes the caregiving creates stresses that affect both the caregiver and the older adult. These stresses lead to potentially dangerous behaviour which may leave the adult at risk. To be an effective caregiver one needs to know how to balance the needs of the elder person with their own needs and when this balance isn’t maintained it can lead to stress which in turn triggers abuse. Dependency, mostly financially can prove to be a contributing factor to abuse. For example, a caregiver who is financially dependent on the older person may exploit him/her. Generally when a caregiver feels there is no escape from the stress he/she experiences, abuse may occur. Societal attitudes play an important role in shaping the image of an older person and the relationship the caregiver has with that person. Older people are often regarded as insignificant and therefore many people fail to understand the importance of providing a nonabusive and supportive environment for the old person. Certain cultural value and beliefs may also influence the way a family functions, intergenerational relationships, and how people define their roles and responsibilities. Some people may face language barriers, financial or emotional dependence or even might be embarrassed to reveal or report abuse. While defining abuse, there are differences across cultures, religions, and ethnic groups.  Since many cases of elder abuse go unreported one would expect a lack of public concern for this issue which is not the case. Elder abuse exists in both developed and developing countries and with the number of elder people increasing year by year, elder abuse is becoming a more significant problem. By 2050 seniors will outnumber the children in the world, which increases the risk for elder abuse.  Providing support to the victim is one of the major ways in which elder abuse can be dealt with. The confidence of a victim needs to increase and this can be done by ensuring the victim that he/she has enough resources to tackle the problem. Awareness about the existence of old age homes, NGOs and helplines should increase so that the elder people are more aware of them.  The number of social services for the ageing should increase so that victims are provided with legal, psychological, medical and financial help. This can only be done if the government passes more laws that sanction funds for the development of social services for the aged. With the help of public education and awareness campaigns, the elder people along with the youth of the country should raise awareness about elder abuse as a social problem.  Another important aspect that needs to be given attention is the societal attitudes that influence the way families live and the intergenerational relationships. Children shouldn’t assume that taking care of their parents is solely their job. They should be more open to the idea of old age homes, residential care facilities etc. so that they don’t impose the burden of caregiving on themselves. With increased awareness of such facilities and social services, people will start accepting them and the burden on the families will reduce. With an expected rise in the population of older people in the world, there is a considerable public concern for this social issue, but no considerable action by the people. Abuse takes place, people are aware but, in most cases, neither the victim nor the observer says or does anything. Elder abuse has all the characteristics of a social issue but it is still neglected in most developing countries; this needs to change and soon.   The author can be contacted on Instagram @sincerelysanah

In all honesty, this week I am at a loss for words, I am grieving the loss of a loved one. Nothing makes sense right now, all I feel is a profound sense of sadness and I just wanted to share this words from a beautiful book called If You Feel Too Much: Thoughts on Things Found and Lost and Hoped For by Jamie Tworkowski. “If you feel too much, there’s still a place for you here. If you feel too much, don’t go. If this world is too painful, stop and rest. It’s okay to stop and rest. If you need a break, it’s okay to say you need a break. This life – it’s not a contest, not a race, not a performance, not a thing that you win. It’s okay to slow down. You are here for more than grades, more than a job, more than a promotion, more than keeping up, more than getting by. This life is not about status or opinion or appearance. You don’t have to fake it. You do not have to fake it. Other people feel this way too. If your heart is broken, it’s okay to say your heart is broken. If you feel stuck, it’s okay to say you feel stuck. If you can’t let go, it’s okay to say you can’t let go. You are not alone in these places. Other people feel how you feel. You are more than just your pain. You are more than wounds and silence. There is still some time to be surprised. There is still some time to ask for help. There is still some time to start again. There is still some time for love to find you. It’s not too late. You’re not alone. It’s okay – whatever you need and however long it takes-  its okay. It’s okay. If you feel too much, there’s still a place for you here. If you feel too much, don’t go. There is still some time.” “We’re all in this together. It’s okay to be honest. It’s okay to ask for help. It’s okay to say you’re haunted or that you can’t begin to let go. We can all relate to those things. Screw the stigma that says otherwise. Break the silence and break the cycle, for you are more than just your pain. You are not alone. And people need other people.” “More than anything, my wish for you is this: That when your awful darkest days come, you will know you’re not alone. Pain will tell you to keep quiet, but that’s a lie. Life is fragile and we all break in different ways. I hope you know you can be honest. I hope you know that you can ask for help. Did you catch that? It is absolutely positively okay to ask for help. It simply means you’re human. Help is real and it is possible; people find it every day.  author is a consultant and coach. Instagram handle: @miss_shefa,  Website: missshefa.com

With new exercises invented every week, new gurus trending by the day and a fresh study that contradicts all the other ones released every time you think you’re getting the hang of things, it’s easy to think that fitness is confusing — but it isn’t. The fundamentals stay the same, and the science is pretty well agreed — so by simply arming yourself with a few basic facts, you can step into any gym forewarned against whatever fresh nonsense the #fitstagrammers are preaching. These are the 10 biggest myths in fitness — exercise your synapses for a couple of minutes by memorising them, and do your curls with confidence. Soreness is a sign of a good workout Yes, there’s something masochistically satisfying about limping your way down a flight of stairs the morning after a big legs workout, but delayed onset muscle soreness — Doms to its Insta-buddies — isn’t actually a convincing indicator of progress. It’s thought to be caused by micro-tears in muscle, and tends to crop up when you do movements you’re not used to, when you deliberately slow down the “eccentric” (or muscle-lengthening) part of whatever move you’re doing (such as the downward bit of a squat) or just do a ridiculous number of reps. Conversely, then, you can eliminate soreness almost entirely by keeping the reps low, or doing moves that don’t have an eccentric, such as throws and sled pushes. There is such a thing as pain-free progress. Lifting heavy will make you bulky There are two key ways to get stronger: increasing the size of your individual muscle fibres, and recruiting more of them to fire together when you need to use them. The first is what bodybuilders aim to do, but the second is what your body would do — automatically — if you had to lift a car off a loved one. In sports where excess size is a negative, it is what competitors teach themselves to do. This is how female Olympic weightlifters in the lighter weight categories can outlift larger men. Getting big requires specific, targeted training, including lots of volume and extra calories and protein — and it almost never happens by accident. Scales are pointless This one’s been popularised by modern fitness gurus, who will (fairly sensibly) point out that weight isn’t a true measure of progress, as fluctuations in the amount of water being retained can lead to day-to-day shifts in the numbers, and putting on muscle can lead to the numbers going up while you’re making progress in the right direction. This doesn’t mean you should toss away your scales entirely. “Yes, you have to understand that short-term fluctuations are inevitable and don’t represent changes in body fat,” says Emma Storey-Gordon, the trainer/owner of ESG Fitness. “But, over time, changes in scale weight are predictive of body fat. Even if you are also building muscle, the rate at which you can lose fat will be much quicker than the rate at which you can build muscle.” Don’t become over reliant on them, but scales can show whether you’re moving in the right direction. Exercise is bad for your knees Actually, it’s more like the opposite: properly done squats will strengthen the stabiliser muscles around your knee joints, safeguarding you against injury as well as making you a bit more capable of bounding up escalators. As for running, a 20-year study conducted by Stanford University found that consistent runners (many of whom were well into their 70s by the time the research period ended) showed a lower incidence of arthritis than non-runners as they aged. It also showed that runners have a lower risk of osteoarthritis and hip replacements, suggesting that pounding pavements isn’t actually as bad for you as advertised. You can ‘spot reduce’ fat While we all lived in the offline wilderness, the myth persisted that you could, for instance, target the fat around your midriff by doing hundreds of sit-ups. That myth has been mostly wiped by the ubiquity of the Internet, but replaced by the subtler half-truth that it’s possible to single out problem areas by thinking hormonally: that since, for instance, the stress hormone cortisol causes belly-fat buildup, a bit more sleep and a few sessions on the Calm app should see your abs emerge. And while this is technically, sort of, true, deliberately messing with your hormones is tougher than advertised and not really advisable. “The truth is, we all have stubborn fat areas that seem to take the longest to get lean,” says Storey-Gordon. “There are various reasons for this — hormones and sex both play a role, for instance. These can’t be easily changed, so you can’t really choose where you lose fat from. Don’t give up, though. Stubborn areas will get leaner alongside everything else. Patience is the key.” Less rest means you’re working harder CrossFit and endless neon-tinted, EDM-soundtracked fitness classes have made “rest” a four-letter word in the fitness industry, but constant movement for the sake of it could actually be hindering your gains, not helping them. “For most people — especially beginners — periods of recovery between sets or intervals allows for higher-intensity, better-quality movement, lower risk of injury and a greater training stimulus that is likely to lead to superior results,” says the performance and wellbeing coach George Anderson. Or, in other words: if you push yourself for an hour straight, you’ll be forced to lift lower weights, go slower and generally put in less work than you might with some strategic downtime. And the optimum varies — for fat loss, anywhere from 15 to 60 seconds between sets is ideal, but for strength you might spend five minutes preparing for ultra-intense efforts. Machines are pointless (or dangerous) As sparse-and-spartan gym spaces emphasising basic barbell movements have proliferated, so, too, has the idea that using machines to train is at best inefficient, at worst dangerous. Machines force your body into awkward, over-linear movement patterns, goes the theory — reducing the input from important stabiliser muscles and stopping you from moving naturally. But while there is some truth to this, not every machine is the enemy. “Whether you’re a time-poor, technique-free novice or a more advanced lifter, machines can involve less setup, allow more work and provide extra stimulus to isolated muscle groups,” says the trainer Dan Osman. That said, the leg press is no substitute for learning to squat properly. The cross-trainer is the best full-body cardio machine Let’s be honest: you’ve never seen Britain’s greatest living Olympian, Sir Steve Redgrave™, dry-heaving over the side of a cross-trainer. “It may be intuitive and burn some calories, but that’s all this outdated relic offers,” says Dr Cameron Nichol, the founder of RowingWOD. “When done correctly, the rowing machine uses 86% of your muscles spanning nine major muscle groups.” The rower also works with the time you have — if you need a short, horrible finisher, a 500-metre sprint will leave you sucking air and burning fat, while a more ponderous 10k feels almost meditative and the Olympic-length 2k is a test of will as much as power. Shorter is better Once, the four-minute Tabata — 20 seconds of work and 10 seconds of rest, repeated eight times — seemed the logical endpoint of the workout-shortening craze, with claims that it could replace much longer training sessions while offering roughly the same benefits. Now it seems almost glacial, with three, two, and one-minute workouts promising to harness high-intensity interval training’s (HIIT) mystical powers and leave you more time for Candy Crush. The truth? Anything is better than nothing, and it’s certainly possible to make some gains in whatever limited time you have, but longer workouts have effects that no micro-workout can mimic. Oh, and by the way: in the original Tabata study, the test subjects — who were professional cyclists — worked so intensely that some of them refused to countenance trying the protocol again. If you’re not doing that, there’s no guarantee it will work as advertised. There is one ‘best’ way to train Is running better than lifting for longevity? Do you need the mobility yoga offers more than a really jacked set of quads? Is Zumba just a waste of valuable time that you could spend boxercising? “Whatever training style you experiment with, you’ll find someone ready to argue that everything else is useless and stupid, that you should stick with them or go home,” says Dr Michael Banna. “This kind of absolutism risks deflating people by telling them that their efforts have been pointless. The reality is, any physical activity has health benefits; the right type is the one that doesn’t injure you, make you sad or make you want to stop.” Ideally your physical activity should include a mixture of cardio, resistance and mobility work spread across the week — but do what you enjoy. — The Guardian • Joel Snape is a former editor of Men’s Fitness and runs the website LiveHard

I’m a firm believer of the fact that ‘nobody’s perfect.’ That’s not because I’m looking for faults in others to somehow discredit them from amazing achievements, success or accomplishments, but instead because I realise that perfect has no standard definition. The very meaning of “perfect” differs depending on our own individual interpretations of what we consider perfect to be.  This week I received a message from a follower who told me he was trying his best to become “the perfect vegan like you, Ghanim” — and while I am both blessed to receive such a compliment, and also to have a platform to reach out to readers, to lecture at universities, to engage, discuss, debate, argue, teach, and explain about a subject, veganism, that I have committed my life to; let’s be very clear: I am not the ‘perfect’ vegan. In fact, a universally recognised “perfect vegan” does not exist.  I consider my idea of the ‘perfect vegan’ as achievable, but only because perfect to me means flawed, real, human. Someone that has learnt from mistakes, or learnt from the lessons and teaching of others. I’ve seen a number of people I’d consider perfect human beings, and it is because of how much I know I can learn from them, and grow from them, and appreciate their authenticity.  This week I gave a lecture at Qatar University’s College of Pharmacy on maintaining healthy digestion through plant-based eating. The certified plant based nutritionist side of me served up the facts, stats and knowledge, answering questions and explaining how this part of the body can benefit from vegan foods. The other side to me, which I’ll refer to as just ‘me’ gave real-life examples of how I integrate those teachings into my day-to-day life, what I’ll drink, when I’ll eat, how many hours of sleep I’ll aim for, etc.  But even after everything I have discussed, not just at this lecture but at every lecture I have ever given, at every public speaking event, every conversation with my customers, and every column I have ever written here in the newspaper, I want you to know that as long as you can equip yourself with the knowledge and power of all things vegan— what works for me might not exactly work for you, but what works for you may be perfect for you, because the key part is that it works — so embrace your originality, and keep moving along your own path on your vegan journey. Mistakes will be made, and lessons will be learnt. But ‘Perfect’ is never a lifetime away, instead, it is right around the corner.  To an extent, we are all perfect, and we are all not — and that’s the beauty of it.  I often think there is an overwhelming amount of pressure people feel to jump from zero to one hundred without embarking on an authentic journey true to their goals. Instead, follow the urge you feel inside of you, that push to do the right thing, that urge to improve on becoming healthier, or following a plant based diet, and that’s what will transform you into a perfect person— that grows, learns, and adapts to new ideas, and keeps an open mind through it all. Keep going. .    The author is an expert in vegan wellbeing and health. Instagram handle: @Ghanim92 

I have been getting a lot of queries about how one can still enjoy desserts while trying to be and stay healthy. Well, when it comes to desserts, I legitimately take it day-by-day. Although people might see me as a person that does not eat desserts and never indulges, that is extremely incorrect. I love sweets, especially chocolate and I love desserts, especially donuts; so how do I manage? First off, let’s talk logic… I firmly believe that we should never deny ourselves sweets but to be practical and balanced with the types of sweets and the amounts we eat. From past experiences and from hearing your stories, I maintain my stand and say that us humans will eventually find a way to scratch that itch, or to satisfy our intense cravings which may lead to hardcore binge eating. Now you may ask, how can we moderate our intake and keep it under control? This is where strategy as well as discipline play their roles. When it comes to your sweet tooth cravings, you have to acknowledge the craving but first test it. I usually try to ignore if for a minute or two to see if it goes away or not. This is because our minds and bodies play tricks on us, you might crave something because you saw it, or because you smelled it or because you heard someone mentioning it, but is that an actual need or craving or just your mind getting the best of you? If you ask yourself why you are craving a certain dessert (or anything else), make sure to understand why before your go ahead and indulge. What if the craving is strong and still remains even though you tried to ignore and get past it? In this case, my next step is asking myself if I deserve the indulgence. Challenging your mind is critical when it comes to training your mind to be emotionally intelligent and showing it how to control those urges through active decision making. If you have been “good” and eating well and not slacking on your healthy lifestyle, then maybe you deserve a dessert or sweet. If you have been “bad” and slacking in terms of eating well, keeping active and maintaining control over your food intake, then maybe you shouldn’t give-in to that craving. This is where you can start training your mind to understand that sweets can be used as rewards. I am not saying that you should only have a dessert when you have been good, you can still have those random moments where you eat whatever you want, whenever you want, but it works best if you really do have general control over your overall wellness. Giving-in to those moments all the time (without any discipline) can be highly detrimental to your general diet and will most likely programme your body to crave more in the future. Our minds play the strongest role when it comes to our food intake and the secret to a well-balanced diet is discipline and training. We as humans are able to change and adapt, therefore, there is no excuse, especially when it comes to our health. There is no doubt that our food is one of the biggest factors of our overall health and longevity, so if you aren’t already, please try to gain that control. There are ways to get around these cravings by satisfying them but of course, in a more balanced manner. For example, I decided to take responsibility for my cravings and make my own “healthier” desserts. I simply went online and found healthier versions of my favourite sweets and started trying our different versions until I found my favourite but with a little of my own tweaks. I even noticed that I can simultaneously benefit from the healthier version due to the nutrient rich ingredients that I use instead of the usual ingredients such as processed sugar, eggs, dairy or gluten-full items. For example, I really love brownies, but started making tahini brownies that consist of raw, natural ingredients: tahini, chia seeds, water, coconut sugar, maple syrup, salt and raw cacao with a pinch of baking soda compared to the usual ingredients such as all-purpose four, white sugar, butter and eggs. Again, I am not saying that you shouldn’t eat or use those ingredients, but why not indulge in a healthier version where the sugar is more natural, you don’t have to deal with any digestive issues you may suffer from when eating gluten, eggs or lactose and you can benefit from super-food ingredients such as tahini and chia seeds. Remember, there are no excuses, you can always find a way. I introduced these brownies to my family , friends and even to my nephew and their friends and you should see how they finish them up without even tasting the difference. Once you find those versions, take matters into your own hands and make them readily available so that you can easily satisfy your cravings without losing your balance. The author is a wellness advocate and influencer @keys2balance.

There is a persisting impression outside the Arab states that women in these countries are restricted to their houses. They don’t have the freedom and liberty to speak, to educate, or to work for that matter. But the scenario is quite the opposite. In the last few decades, the region has seen a discrete change in the status and role of Arab women in the progress and development of this region. Economic, political and social forums of GCC have welcomed women participation with open arms. This progress can be seen in the education and  business sectors as well as in  law firms, healthcare sectors, state politics and international press. Education played the key role in promoting women empowerment. The 1920’s witnessed the first girls’ schools of the Arabian Peninsula and now women are overtaking academic institutions in numbers. They have the right to have higher education and to study abroad, minimising gender discrimination and empowering women status. Economic organisations have also went through great changes. Women are not only enjoying labour participation but have also increased their personal wealth. In 2018, Saudi women, Lubna Olayan and Rania Nashar were ranked as the most powerful women by Forbes. Women’s impressive contribution in education and labour gave a helping hand to serve in the political field as well. Early 2000’s showed a massive change where women not only participated in politics but also occupied several posts. 1. 2002- Bahrain gave women the right to vote and to stand for election. 2. 2003- Women in Oman, Sheikha Aisha bint Khalfan, was appointed as the head of National Authority for Industrial Craftsmanship. 3. 2003- Sheikha Ahmed al-Mahmoud took charge of Qatar’s education ministry. 4. 2005- Kuwait also gave the right to vote and to stand for election. 5. 2006- First Bahraini woman, Lateefa al-Gaood, was elected in the parliament. 6. 2009- Kuwaiti women, Massouma al-Mubarak, Salwa al-Jasar, Aseel al-Awadhi and Rola Dashti were elected in the parliament. 7. 2013- 30 Saudi women were elected in Shura Council by late King Abdullah 8. 2018- Tamader bint Yousif al-Rammah was entrusted the position of deputy minister of labour and social development by King Salman. Every department of every Gulf state is showing positive attitude towards women. To empower women mentally and socially, Saudi Arabia showed leniency in visa and passport policies for women allowing them to travel without their male guardian. Britain inspired and supported women to start business and gave them access to micro-financing loans. Kuwait has established economic and political incubators to strengthen the role of women. According to Princess Ameerah al-Taweel, social media helped women a lot to achieve their maximum potential. She said, “I believe that access to information and social media is what helped women overcome barriers and break the shackles of society.”  In a Plenary session which was titled ‘From Vision to Leadership’, Chairperson of Sharjah Investment and development Authority (Shurooq) Shaikha Budour bin Sultan al-Qasimi stated that, “A successful leadership is one that achieves success and expected results regardless of the gender.” She has the opinion to inspire our girls by talking to them in terms to make them future female leaders. Gulf and Arab states are now adapting the change and empowering women. They are making more policies to increase women participation in region. Now it’s time to change the world’s opinion towards them. And as  K.M. Golland said: “At many points in your life, you’ll be taught by those who are afraid of women that women are much less than they really are. Don’t believe them. Being a woman is powerful. Use that power; don’t waste it”.  The author is a consultant in Public Relations and Personality Types. Instagram: @Tipsbyhalahill

A few years ago I made a commitment to myself to be an advocate for mental health, For me, that means I make efforts to talk about it on my Instagram posts, on Swalif (my instagram live show) and in conversations whenever I get the chance. Next week I am hosting a ladies event in which I will be addressing the topic. Before we can make efforts to address mental health, I think we need to stop stigmatising it. Attitudes towards mental health are still not on equal terms with those towards physical health and that stigma can result in barriers for the early diagnosis and treatment of different mental health conditions. Stigmatisation can take so many different forms, without thinking we use stigmatising language. Using mental illness as the defining characteristic of a person; “paranoid or physco”, using derogatory language like “crazy” and “insane”. Describing people with mental illness as “not normal” implies that there is a fundamental difference between individuals without mental illness (“normal”) and individuals with mental illness (“not normal”). How we talk about mental illness matters, because incorrect messaging can easily reinforce stereotypes in society, by becoming more aware of how we speak about mental illness and encouraging others to do the same we can start to de-stigmatise. For example the phrase “a mentally ill person” could be replaced with the phrase “a person with mental illness” to reflect that mental illness is not the defining characteristic of that person. We can also ask questions to encourage anyone who does use stigmatising language to reflect on the language that they use. For example, “What did you mean when you said ‘psychotic’?” or “Can you explain what you meant by saying ‘She’s so bipolar’?” You can even suggest more appropriate ways of talking about mental illness. For example, if someone uses the term “mental” to describe a person with mental illness, you could explain why that word is not appropreiate and instead suggest they say, “a person with mental illness.” Stopping stigma is not only by acknowledging the existence of mental health, but also refraining from self-diagnosing normal behaviours; it seems like it has become trendy to self-diagnose oneself as OCD when you liked your room organised or paranoid if you’re suspicious. Mental illness terms have become adjectives to describe normal behaviors and emotions, when in reality they are labels of complex behaviours that have been brought about due to a series of unpleasant events, unhealthy coping methods/thought processes, or chemical imbalances that can require anti-psychotic medicines and treatment by professionals. The way those suffering from mental illness feel goes far beyond the shallowness of social media trends, we can be sad without labeling ourselves #depressed and we can be organised without having #OCD. The author is a consultant and coach. Instagram handle: @miss_shefa,  Website: missshefa.com

Changing over to daylight saving time — a major annoyance for many people — may be on its way out as lawmakers cite public health as a prime reason to ditch the twice-yearly clock-resetting ritual. The time change, especially in the spring, has been blamed for increase in heart attacks and traffic accidents as people adjust to a temporary sleep deficit. But as legislatures across the US consider bills to end the clock shift, a big question looms ahead of this year’s March 8 change: Which is better, summer hours or standard time? There are some strong opinions, it turns out. And they are split, with scientists and politicians at odds. Retailers, chambers of commerce and recreational industries have historically wanted the sunny evenings that allow more time to shop and play. Researchers on human biological rhythms come down squarely on the side of the standard, wintertime hours by angry farmers who objected to daylight saving time when it was first widely adopted during World War I. What’s not in question is that the clock switching is unpopular. Some 71% of people want to stop springing forward and falling back, according to a 2019 Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. Politicians have reacted accordingly. More than 200 state bills have been filed since 2015 to either keep summer hours or go to permanent standard time, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The measures getting the most traction right now are for permanent daylight saving time, which makes more sun available for after-work activities. In 2018, Florida passed a bill and California voters backed a ballot measure to do so. Maine, Delaware, Tennessee, Oregon and Washington joined in 2019, passing permanent daylight saving bills. President Donald Trump even joined the conversation last March, tweeting: “Making Daylight Saving Time permanent is OK with me!” But none of those efforts can become reality without the blessing of Congress. States have always been able to opt out of summer hours and adopt standard time permanently, as Arizona and Hawaii have done. But making daylight saving time year-round is another story. Still, Scott Yates, whose #Lock the Clock website has become a resource for lawmakers pushing for change, believes this year will be another big year. Yates is particularly encouraged by the attitude he saw from state legislators in August when he presented on the issue at the legislators’ annual national summit in Nashville, Tennessee. “I wasn’t the court jester and it wasn’t entertainment,” he said. “It was like, ‘What are the practical ways we can get this thing passed?’” Yates, 54, a tech startup CEO based in Denver, has been promoting an end to clock switching for six years. He doesn’t pick a side. It’s the switching itself that he wants to end. At first, it was just about the grogginess and annoyance of being off schedule, he said. But then he began to see scientific studies that showed the changes were doing actual harm. A German study of autopsies from 2006 to 2015, for instance, showed a significant uptick just after the spring switch in deaths caused by cardiac disease, traffic accidents and suicides. Researchers have also noted a significant increased risk for heart attacks and strokes. Three measures pending in Congress would allow states to make daylight saving time permanent. But, in the meantime, state lawmakers who want the extra evening sunlight are preparing resolutions and bills, some of which would be triggered by congressional approval and the adoption of daylight time in surrounding states. The Illinois Senate passed such a bill, and Kansas is considering one after a bill to end daylight saving time died there last year. Utah passed a resolution in support of the congressional bill last year, and state Representative Ray Ward, a Republican family physician from Bountiful, is steering a recently passed state Senate permanent daylight bill through the House. “The human clock was not built to jump back and forth. That’s why we get jet lag,” said Ward, who was a co-presenter with Yates at the NCSL summit. “It is very easy to show that if you knock people off an hour of sleep there’s a bump temporarily in bad things that will happen.” Efforts have been particularly strong in California, where 60% of voters passed a ballot issue for permanent daylight time in 2018. A bill is pending in the state Assembly. All of this alarms scientists who study human biological rhythms. Researchers in the US and the European Union have taken strong positions about permanent summer hours. The Society for Research on Biological Rhythms posts its opposition prominently at the top of its website. Messing with the body’s relationship to the sun can negatively affect not only sleep but also cardiac function, weight and cancer risk, the society’s members wrote. According to one often-quoted study on different health outcomes within the same time zones, each 20 minutes of later sunrise corresponded to an increase in certain cancers by 4% to 12%. “Believe it or not, having light in the morning actually not only makes you feel more alert but helps you go to bed at the right time at night,” said Dr Beth Malow, director of the sleep division of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Malow has seen a lot of anecdotal evidence to back that up at the sleep clinic. Parents report their children with autism have a particularly hard time adjusting to the time change, she said. Jay Pea, a freelance software engineer in San Francisco, was unhappy enough about California’s proposed permanent daylight time that he started the Save Standard Time website to promote the health arguments for keeping it permanent. He said he doesn’t think the scientific community is being heard. “Essentially it’s like science denial,” he said. “It’s bizarre to me that politicians are not hearing the experts on this.” Pea, 41 and an amateur astronomer, understands the human need to have the sun directly overhead at noon. “It’s a wonderful connection to natural reality that unfortunately is lost on many people,” he said. Daylight saving time “distances us from the natural world.” At the very least, lawmakers ought to consider history, he said. Daylight saving time was originally a plan to save energy during the two world wars but wasn’t popular enough to be uniformly embraced after the conflicts were over. In 1974, the federal government decided to make it temporarily year-round as a way to deal with the energy crisis (although energy savings were later found to be underwhelming). Its popularity fell off a cliff after the first winter, when people discovered the sun didn’t rise until 8 am or later and parents worried for the safety of kids waiting in the dark for school buses. Pea finds it frustrating that the momentum now is for permanent summer hours — a fact he attributes to the emotional attachment with summer. “It’s a shame that every generation we have to revisit this issue,” he said. The AP-NORC poll found 40% of its respondents support permanent standard time, with 31% opting for permanent daylight saving time. Ward said people have gotten comfortable with daylight saving time since its duration has been lengthened to eight months by extensions in 1986 and 2007. (Before 1986, daylight saving time lasted six months.) “So now really most of the year we are on the summer schedule, and people are used to that and they like it,” he said. “That makes them more aggrieved when we change back to the winter schedule.” In any case, changing the clocks is a rare issue in that it isn’t partisan, Ward said. “If the government can’t respond to people when they want something and it’s not even a partisan issue, that’s just a sad commentary,” he said. “Can’t we please fix something that doesn’t make sense anymore?”  — Kaiser Health News/TNS

For Robin Addison, January 20 was like any other Monday night. She had just slipped into her pajamas after a long day of work at Providence Regional Medical Center when, around 8:30pm, she got a phone call from a fellow nurse. “Robin, I think we have to open the unit,” she recalls Sarah Wilkerson saying. “The unit” is a pop-up biohazard chamber that can be erected to quarantine someone with an infectious disease. The hospital obtained it in 2015 with Ebola patients in mind. It had never been used. Wilkerson, the hospital’s infection prevention manager, explained that a Snohomish County man had tested positive for a new coronavirus that broke out late last year in Wuhan, China. He was the first confirmed case in the United States, and he was on his way to Providence. Addison pulled her scrubs on and went back to the hospital. The novel coronavirus — officially named SARS-CoV-2 or known by the illness it causes, COVID-19 — has infected more than 68,000 people globally and killed more than 1,666, most of them in China, where the outbreak began in December. It has spread to more than two dozen countries, including the United States, which has confirmed 15 cases and no deaths. When the Snohomish County patient was diagnosed, little was known about the new virus or how it spreads. It had no treatment or vaccine. The man, 35, had been visiting family in Wuhan. He flew into Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on January 15, two days before flights from China’s Hubei province began being funnelled through three US airports that could screen passengers for signs of illness. (That has now been expanded to 11 airports, of which Sea-Tac is one.) When he got home, he developed a dry cough and low fever and, having read news of the new coronavirus, promptly visited an urgent care clinic. The Snohomish Health District sent samples to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta for testing. The results came back positive. So Addison got the call, and her team got busy. As luck would have it, Providence staff — along with the Snohomish Health District, the state Department of Health, the Northwest Healthcare Response Network and the Everett Fire Department — had done a dry run earlier that month to practice receiving an Ebola patient. Ebola is a serious and often fatal illness. Addison and Wilkerson had led the drill with the hospital’s BEST Team — Biocontainment, Evaluation and Specialty Treatment — which was created after a man with Ebola sickened two nurses in a Dallas hospital. The team of volunteers understood it wasn’t likely to encounter Ebola in Everett, but it’s best to prepare for the worst and be able to scale back depending on what infectious disease shows up, said Dr George Diaz, the hospital’s section chief for infectious diseases, who led the treatment of the COVID-19 patient. Two hours after Addison got Wilkerson’s call, the biohazard team had erected the isolation unit. They’d needed to move patients who were in the designated space and put up movable walls to create a room with negative pressure so no air could escape. Donning protective gear, the nurses greeted the patient as he arrived in a mobile isolation unit, which Addison described as looking like a bigger version of pods used for premature babies. Once the patient was in the unit, Diaz examined him from the next room using what is called a telehealth system, basically a video call that allows a doctor to speak to and see the patient. From there, a lot of the work was fairly routine. A rotating staff of 20 nurses, three doctors and personnel from every corner of the hospital kept the patient as comfortable as possible. They took his vitals regularly. They gave him an IV to replenish his fluids. But the gear the medical team had to wear made these basic tasks difficult. There was the respirator helmet, which came with a plastic faceguard. They doubled up on gloves. The whole outfit got so hot that the nurses had to swap out every four hours at the most. “Doing things that we do every day, like starting an intravenous, when you have two pairs of gloves on, it becomes a whole different skill because you’re used to being able to feel for a vein,” Addison said. Five days in, the man’s condition started to worsen. On the sixth day, he had to be given oxygen, and a lung X-ray showed he was developing pneumonia. After discussions with doctors at the CDC and the patient, Diaz got approval from the Federal Drug Administration to administer an experimental antiviral drug called remdesivir. Remdesivir has been tested in Ebola patients and proved to be safe but not effective against that virus. Researchers have reported some success using it to treat monkeys who have MERS-CoV, which is another coronavirus. China has begun enrolling COVID-19 patients into a clinical trial of the antiviral, which was developed by the pharmaceutical company Gilead. The patient’s fever went away the day after treatment, and he began feeling better. It is too early to know how well the treatment will do in others, but the results are promising, Diaz said. “It is only one case,” Diaz said. “It’s the first person in the world who got this medication for novel coronavirus, but it seems to have worked.” Once the patient was doing better, it was a matter of working with the CDC and the health district to determine when he could be discharged and how he would be monitored after that. He lives alone, which made the prospect of quarantining him easier. Sometime between January 31 and February 3, the patient was stealthily taken home. The isolation unit has been taken down, the area sterilised. At the hospital on the northern edge of downtown Everett, life goes on.   — The Seattle Times/TNS

An associate professor from Michigan State University has helped invent a potential treatment for coronary artery disease — a sub-microscopic scouring process he likens to “taking out the garbage.” Bryan Smith, 40, came to MSU in late 2018 from Stanford University, where he and a few other extremely smart people figured out they could direct nanoparticles to tell cells to engulf and eat the arterial debris that can cause heart attacks. The hope, he says, is that their tiny Trojan horses “can reduce the need for bypass surgery, for stents and for other drugs.” Assuming it works, it’s probably a decade away from actually saving lives. As Smith and his colleagues continue the arduous process of testing their creation and bringing it to market, however, it’s a fine time to be astonished at just how small a nanoparticle is. Consider the human hair and the concept of a trillion. “Classically,” Smith says, “the width of a human hair is 50 microns.” That changes a bit by individual and how much they spend on conditioner, but still: 50 microns, which translates to 50,000 nanometres. One trillion, meantime, is a million millions. Smith’s nanoparticles are two nanometres in diameter, which means a hair is 25,000 times their width. And the number of nanoparticles it took to inject 40 mice in the lab, he says, was about a quadrillion, which is a thousand trillions. The next logical question is what kind of container holds a quadrillion nanoparticles. Do they fit in a thimble? A syringe? A medium-sized squirt gun? Like many medications, Smith says, each mouse dose was suspended in a saline solution for proper dilution. The entire swarm of dark black nanoparticles, however, “can easily fit into a syringe, and could fit within a drop from an eyedropper if you really scrunch them together.” Scrunched or otherwise, “it’s astonishing when I think about it sometimes,” Smith says. “But people have been doing all kinds of fun things to molecules for years.” He joined the nanoparticle party after growing up in Cincinnati and earning a PhD. in biomedical engineering from Ohio State. In deference to his Big 10 colleagues and his health, he says, he only displays his OSU memorabilia at the East Lansing home he shares with wife Ziba, an MSU research grants administrator, and their 3-month-old daughter, Adara. Smith had set out to be a veterinarian like his dad but discovered he loved animals too much to watch them die. Fortunately, he also loved asking how-does-this-happen sorts of questions, to the point where “I annoyed the heck out everybody. I wanted to know how nature worked.” The language of that area is math, which he turned out to speak fluently. That led him to a teaching position at Stanford, where he found cardiologist Nicholas Leeper, who’d published a paper that showed how immune cells called macrophages were being told not to eat the plaque dandruff within arteries that can lead to atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis is a specific type of arteriosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, that can be a highway to cardiac arrest or stroke. Smith, Leeper, postdoctoral research fellow Niloufar Hosseini Nassab, medical student Alyssa Flores and a cast of colleagues focused on selectively intercepting the signalling of receptors within the macrophages and sending out messages to get busy. The base nanoparticles are created through what’s known as a high-pressure carbon monoxide process. HiPco is the gas-phase reaction of a highly pure iron, often a gray powder, with high-pressure carbon monoxide gas. The team can create them in a day, Smith says, but frequently buys them from a Canadian company because it’s cheaper. It’s a two-day effort to render them biocompatible, affix polymers to allow them to work in a syringe, and lace them with chemicals. “They’re targeting turning off the turn-off process,” says physician and Wayne State professor Phillip Levy, board president of the Detroit division of the American Heart Association. “By doing that, they can restimulate the macrophages to start consuming debris and shrink the size of the plaque from within. “It’s actually a really cool idea.” At Beaumont Health, Justin Trivax notes that he and other interventional cardiologists are “sceptical of many treatment modalities,” no matter how promising they seem in the early stages. He is intrigued, however, with the nanoparticles’ potential for treating high-risk patients or those who arrive in the midst of a mini-stroke or heart attack. “Atherosclerosis is stable until it’s not. We just don’t know when that’s going to be,” Trivax says. “That’s why this shows some promise.” The inventors have filed for a provisional patent, and Smith says the Stanford patent office will be looking for a partner to develop the discovery for clinical use. While he holds several patents and teaches a year-long class on medical-technical entrepreneurship, “I’ve never been through this whole process, taking something from bench to bedside,” he says. It should be interesting, he predicts, if potentially frustrating. The nanotherapy will be tested in rabbits, then other animals, then people. A toxicity study will need three to five years. After that would come clinical trials, assuming the treatment aces all the earlier tests. “I’d say we’re looking at eight years total,” Smith says, “as a super-optimist, assuming everything goes perfectly, which I’ve never heard of in the history of medicine.” So likely 10 years, which feels like forever when he talks to people who need help now. But when he speaks to other scientists who’ve jumped through the hoops, he says, “I feel like we’re on a really good track” — a little bitty one, with a line of tiny nanohurdles.  — The Detroit News/TNS

There was a clear winner that took centre stage at this year’s Oscars, and it wasn’t an actor or actress, director or producer — no, it was veganism.  With the mainstream emergence of veganism, more people are becoming aware of the cruel practices that are normal in milk production. Now, they are even talking about it at the Oscars. It was led by vegan actor Joaquin Phoenix who won the Best Actor Award. Phoenix’s acceptance speech encompassed the fight against injustice, animal and environmental rights, and the need to stop consuming animal-based foods.  Phoenix has been a vegan since he was three years old and is closely involved with PETA and other animal rights organisations. He focused particularly on the dairy industry to highlight that all forms of animal agriculture, not just the meat industry, are cruel. “We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakeable,” Phoenix said on stage at the Oscars — among the biggest platform any person could ever dream of speaking from. “Then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal.” I’ve written extensively of the reality of dairy farming that can be shocking for people who have always assumed milking a cow is harmless. From the age of 15 months, female cows are artificially inseminated. Once born, the calf will usually be taken away within 36 hours. This is so farmers can take the milk the mothers are making. Experts say that a strong bond is formed quickly after birth and the separation is traumatising for both cow and calf. If the calf is male, he will be either killed immediately or sold on. If it’s female, she will follow her mother in the cycle of forced pregnancies until she is too old to carry on, after which she will be killed. At the Oscars, Phoenix went on to say, “We fear the idea of personal change, because we think we need to sacrifice something; to give something up. But human beings at our best are so creative and inventive, and we can create, develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and the environment.” “We’ve become very disconnected from the natural world,” he added.  The reality and truths surrounding the need to go plant based are working. All ceremonies this year, including the Oscars, the BAFTAs, and other award winning ceremonies have either fully eliminated animal products from their menus or substantially increased plant-based options.  The actor offered solutions to move toward a more ethical world. “I think when we use love and compassion as our guiding principles, we can create and develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and the environment,” he said. The rise of veganism is hitting the dairy industry hard. Sales of plant-based milks are soaring. In fact, in Europe, the average person’s milk consumption has fallen by 50% since the 1950s.  While the Oscars celebrated the best movies of the last year, it’s once again thrown veganism into the spotlight for millions and millions of viewers worldwide — another achievement for the plant based movement, and our journey towards a more ethical, sustainable world.  The author is an expert in vegan wellbeing and health. Instagram handle: @Ghanim92 

I hope you all had a blessed Qatar National Sport Day (QNSD)! For me, the day began with a bumpy start due to my pregnancy nausea but ended up being such an enjoyable day out. I had the pleasure of providing prenatal and general female body shaping fitness classes at Losail International Circuit for their annual ladies-only QNSD event. This was my third time being a part of their extensive list of activities and I am so happy I was able to feel better. I got so sad thinking that I might would have to cancel my attendance once my nausea hit early that morning, but thankfully, I was able to manage my situation and hit the road. So how about you? What did you end up doing on your day off? Did you stay in and enjoy your time off at home or did you opt to go out and take part in some of the country-wide events? If you were at home, were you at least a bit active? I completely understand those who chose to stay in and enjoy their time, and those who chose to enjoy their time in the outdoors but not necessarily related to sports or fitness. I also believe that there shouldn’t necessarily be a scheduled reason for you to be fit and active, but a National Sport Day such as ours help reinforce the idea of health and fitness in our lives as a lifestyle and it allows the general public to have the excuse and/or motivation to get busy and active on a national holiday celebrating overall wellness.  Regardless of what you ended up doing, I still urge you all to take this as a reminder of how critical and important sports alongside health and fitness are for our daily routines and overall lifestyles. So if you were out and about or if you are usually active but just wanted a day-off then good for you, but if you did not to do anything active, please ask yourself why and try to figure out the reasons you didn’t allow yourself to engage in this socially motivating and community bonding opportunity. Whatever your reasons, I feel I want to share how you can be active and make a positive difference in their health without changing your routine and without feeling it as such a big change to implant in your life. So let’s get started. Just as a reminder, the usual standard is three days of exercise for a minimum of 20 minutes per week, but if you are being real with yourself and know that you will not reach that level, then how about this routine with a few tips: The Rule of 10s: Aim for just 10 high knees, 10 sit-ups, 10 push-ups and 10 squats or 10 jumping jacks, 10 dips, 10 lunges and 10 planks each day. This can be done at home and only takes a few minutes. If you are feeling stronger, then do both routines together each day. The Rule of Standing: Aim to stand up and move for a minute or two every one hour. Get your blood circulating and give your mind a quick break from whatever it is your doing. The Rule of Walking: Whenever and wherever you can, try to walk at least 20-30 minutes during your day. The Rule of RRR: Aim to rest, relax and recover well each day. You have to relieve your mind and body of all and just give one hour a day to yourself to breathe and enjoy ‘doing nothing.’ Aim to also sleep well each night because rest and recovery are crucial to your health too. The Rule of Creativity: Be creative with your time and your activities, you can fit in more calorie burning movements into your daily routine by incorporating chores or hobbies into your health activities such as cleaning the house, organizing your room, cooking yourself a healthy homemade meal or even dancing as you get ready for work or to go out. There are so many ways to get your heart pumping and get those muscles moving, so just get creative. The author is a wellness advocate and influencer @keys2balance.

Mistakes are the essential component of a human being’s life. It is in our genes. A common human being is expected to make a mistake in every phase of his life. It differentiates right and wrong for us. It is very common to goof, everyone does. But getting a second chance for your mistakes is not typical; it’s a blessing for you. Time never rewinds itself, but that second chance gives you the opportunity to rewind your mistake and make it right this time. Second chances make you work harder with more passion. I believe second chances are beneficial. Have you ever thought of the spirit you show for your second chance? It feels like life is giving you the opportunity to fix what you have previously ruined. We often screw things up in the first place because we don’t realise the scope of the consequences we will face, because of that single mistake. But after ruining our first chance we realise the extent of our loss. Then, we understand the importance of that ‘other’ chance and give our best to not repeat that situation. Honestly speaking, it has occurred personally to me several times at work. Once I was asked to make a presentation. I underestimated the intensity of the task and I almost lost my job. Thankfully, I got a second chance. That chance empowered me a lot, by turning that presentation around in a way to get my promotion! Second chances or a ‘one more chance’ has great significance in our relationships. Quarrels are a regular component of a healthy relationship. If partners don’t fight and get back together again, anger accumulates leading to a dead end. But you can rarely get more chances for the same mistake. If you are getting one, use if efficiently and prove that you deserve it. Usually people don’t put an effort in giving you second chances in relationships, because it is too hard to risk their feelings again, but if someone is strong enough to give you a second chance, he or she must truly value the connection you both have. Value that second chance and ensure to not mess up again. If life is giving you another opportunity to build your career, to live with your loved ones, or to do what you dream of, don’t mess it up! Not everyone gets that chance and maybe it’s the last chance for you to do something great for yourself. Just think for once, what would have you lost if your first chance was your last one and you haven’t gotten that second opportunity? The answer itself will tell you the importance of it.  The value and significance of another shot can be seen in the lives of former inmates in prison. After receiving the punishment by court, they must face their fate for the rest of their lives. Every job interview after finishing their sentence asks for previous police records and if finding them, rejects the former prisoner without even discussing the reason behind what they have done. The only thing former prisoners ask for, is for life to grant them a new fresh beginning for a clean record.  Be thankful for the chance life is awarding you with and strive hard to nail it with success! The author is a consultant in Public Relations and Personality Types. Instagram: @Tipsbyhalahill