Man has to lose his illogical fear of bacteria and stop trying to kill them all if the problem of drug-resistant ``superbugs'' is to be licked, an expert said on Thursday.

Not only will people have to stop over-using antibiotics, but they should stop buying anti-bacterial soaps and detergents because they are a waste of time, Dr. Stuart Levy of Tufts University in Boston said. ``People have to understand that bacteria are necessary and we are not going to sterilize our homes,'' Levy told a briefing sponsored by the American Medical Association.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are becoming a bigger and bigger problem. They range from penicillin-resistant gonorrhea to super-strains of staphylococcus that cannot be killed by vancomycin, the strongest antibiotic available. ``We have patients dying of infectious diseases because some of the hundreds of antibiotics we have are not working,'' Levy said.

Doctors are now being warned to cut back on frequent prescriptions of antibiotics except for people who really need them, and patients are being reminded to take their full course of drugs to make sure no resistant bacteria survive to breed more resistant bacteria.

``The problem with an antibiotic is it is not really the miracle we would like it to be,'' Levy said. The best way to deal with the problem, he added, is to let more bacteria live. ``Let the susceptible strains come back,'' he said.

The battle against bacteria, the oldest forms of life on Earth, is sure to be a losing one anyway, Levy said. ``They have seen lots of things come and go. Think of the dinosaurs,'' he said. ``Let's make peace. We should say 'be kind to bacteria. They are our friends'.'' For instance, people cannot digest food without the several pounds (kilos) of bacteria that live in the gut.

The overuse of antibiotics is one problem. But Levy said there was another threat -- the hugely popular antibacterial products. ``We are getting our antibiotic soap, our detergent, or pajamas,'' Levy said. ``It is a rage.'' ``In a home, the average washing time is five seconds,'' Levy said. But operating room staff scrub for 10 minutes in a hospital.

The danger is more than simply a false sense of security. Two years ago Levy's lab at Tufts found that E. coli bacteria can develop resistance to triclosan, one of the common antibacterial ingredients in store-bought soaps. Triclosan acts on a single gene in the bacteria to kill it, they found. They also found that tuberculosis has a similar gene -- and it is the same gene that one tuberculosis drug targets. It is possible, Levy's group says, that overuse of triclosan could lead to the rise of a new drug-resistant form of tuberculosis.

Levy said antibacterial soaps work well in hospitals, when they are used under controlled conditions and for a good reason. Any antibacterial agent, even bleach, takes time to kill bacteria. But a quick swipe of a kitchen counter or a hasty rinse under the sink will not kill bacteria. The whole point of washing hands, Levy said, is to wash the bacteria away. Adding a bug-killing agent will not accelerate the process. ``The public think 'I just sterilized my home','' Levy said. ''The antibacterial is not going to do a thing. It needs time.''

Association of Coffee and Caffeine Intake With the Risk of Parkinson Disease

G. Webster Ross, MD; Robert D. Abbott, PhD; Helen Petrovitch, MD; David M. Morens, MD; Andrew Grandinetti, PhD; Ko-Hui Tung, MS; Caroline M. Tanner, MD, PhD; Kamal H. Masaki, MD; Patricia L. Blanchette, MD, MPH; J. David Curb, MD, MPH; Jordan S. Popper, MD; Lon R. White, MD, MPH

Context: The projected expansion in the next several decades of the elderly population at highest risk for Parkinson disease (PD) makes identification of factors that promote or prevent the disease an important goal.

Objective: To explore the association of coffee and dietary caffeine intake with risk of PD.

Design, Setting, and Participants: Data were analyzed from 30 years of follow-up of 8004 Japanese-American men (aged 45-68 years) enrolled in the prospective longitudinal Honolulu Heart Program between 1965 and 1968.

Main Outcome Measure: Incident PD, by amount of coffee intake (measured at study enrollment and 6-year follow-up) and by total dietary caffeine intake (measured at enrollment).

Results: During follow-up, 102 men were identified as having PD. Age-adjusted incidence of PD declined consistently with increased amounts of coffee intake, from 10.4 per 10,000 person-years in men who drank no coffee to 1.9 per 10,000 person-years in men who drank at least 28 oz/d (P<.001 for trend). Similar relationships were observed with total caffeine intake (P<.001 for trend) and caffeine from noncoffee sources (P=.03 for trend). Consumption of increasing amounts of coffee was also associated with lower risk of PD in men who were never, past, and current smokers at baseline (P=.049, P=.22, and P=.02, respectively, for trend). Other nutrients in coffee, including niacin, were unrelated to PD incidence. The relationship between caffeine and PD was unaltered by intake of milk and sugar.

Conclusions: Our findings indicate that higher coffee and caffeine intake is associated with a significantly lower incidence of PD. This effect appears to be independent of smoking. The data suggest that the mechanism is related to caffeine intake and not to other nutrients contained in coffee.

JAMA. 2000;283:2674-2679

Mood Elevators? Something's got to be fishy!!

Australian scientists have claimed that eating oily fish can help give you a brighter outlook on life as well as keeping your heart healthy.

Mackerel, sardine and anchovy containing the beneficial Omega-3 fatty acids are now been considered as a treatment for depression following findings at Wollongong University, New South Wales.

Researchers have discovered that countries with high consumption of oily fish including Japan and Taiwan have lower levels of depression when compared to Australia and Britain where much less fish is eaten.

Do you always feel tired?
Care for some Energy Boosters to help you through.

For instant brainpower boost, try peppermint or menthol for simulated injection of fresh air. Either inhale some essential oil of peppermint or chew on a strong sweet,breathing deeply so that the strong flavour will shock your brain into action.

If you feel sluggish in the morning, treat your face, often the last part of the body to wake up, to a reviving splash of warm water scented with drops of geranium or lavender oil. Dunk a wash cloth, wring it and apply over face for 1 minute and repeat.

If you feel tired and down, listen to music. An upbeat tempo will raise your spirits. If unhappy, play something that holds fond memories.

Revive your body and mind with some gentle exercises. Physical activity increases a lot of feel-good hormones, increases the flow of oxygen to the brain, boosts adrenaline levels and leaves you feeling more energetic.

Visualise yourself getting through your day successfully, working through each encounter in your mind so that everything runs seemlessly. By doing this, you can easily achieve what is ahead.

Release built-up tension which can deplete energy levels. Vent your spleen after work. Running, aerobics are marvellous ways to release pent-up stress. But singing and yelling may do just as well. Popping bubble wrap have been shown to dispel pent up nervous energy and muscle tension.

Lost your creative urge? Try power walking. Any rhythmic form of exercise, running, swimming, or even pounding away on the stairclimber,can elevate creativity if you do it regularly, according to research at the Cornell University Medical College. This is partly linked to the release of endorphins, the so-called, feel-good chemicals.

If you still feel tired each morning, aromatherapy can help. Each evening run a bath and add three drops of camomile essential oils with some carrier oil. Then light an oil burner and add two drops of clary sage and lavender. This is sure to calm your system.

Turn of Ideas

Increasing dietary fiber was supposed to prevent colon cancer; now experts aren't so sure. Is there a way to make sense of this "back and forth" in health news?

For years eggs were bad for us. Then a study in the April 21, 1999, Journal of the American Medical Association said that having up to one egg a day is okay.

Mitral valve prolapse was once thought to be among the most common heart conditions--and a serious one, at that. Studies published in the July 1, 1999, New England Journal of Medicine said that the condition afflicts only about 2% of the population and isn't so risky.

Eating lots of fiber was supposed to gird us against colon cancer. Not so, said an authoritative study published earlier this year, also in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Foolish consistencies may be the hobgoblins of little minds, but the shilly-shally of health and medical recommendations frustrates almost everyone. Some people simply tune out altogether--and who can blame them? But another strategy, which is far more constructive as well as interesting in the long run, is to take a look at what's behind all the back-and-forth. That way you can follow the health news but avoid cognitive whiplash.

Here are six reasons why the results of health and medical research seem to contradict themselves so much:

Attractive ideas can be seductive. The notion that eating fiber would protect us from getting colorectal cancer took hold about 25 years ago when a British clinician, Denis Burkitt, drew a connection between low colon cancer rates in Africa and what he thought were high-fiber diets. His observation had an almost irresistible intuitive appeal: it was so easy to think of all that spongy fiber coursing through the intestine, diluting or soaking up fecal carcinogens; "fiber as a sort of colonic broom," said an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine. And it wasn't just the public that was drawn to this idea; researchers also studied it extensively. Yet Burkitt really didn't have the kind of training to reliably study an issue as complicated as the African diet and colorectal cancer rates. Meanwhile, over the years more careful, large studies of the connection between fiber and colorectal cancer were, at the very least, suspiciously inconsistent. Then a study published in the January 21, 1999, New England Journal of Medicine found no link between fiber and colorectal cancer. This study was based on the Nurses' Health Study, which in many ways is the gold standard study for research on nutrition.

One study does not settle an issue, and there is plenty of evidence that fiber has other health benefits. But the fiber-colon cancer story does show how an attractive idea has staying power, even when the underlying evidence is uneven. Sometimes, what looks like a sudden reversal is actually a matter of slowly accumulating evidence becoming so strong that a major study can make the attractive idea teeter and then perhaps fall.

Comparisons are incomplete. A half-century ago, researchers noticed that rodents gorging on high-fat diets developed mammary tumors. Then, in 1975, a study showed that countries with low per capita fat consumption had low breast cancer rates. It seemed so clear: dietary fat had some causative connection to breast cancer. In the past 25 years, however, the fat-breast cancer connection has been studied from many angles in controlled studies. And the breast cancer verdict for a high-fat diet is not guilty. Capping off this trend was a study in the March 10, 1999, Journal of the American Medical Association, which found no evidence of a link between total fat or any specific kind of fat and breast cancer.

All kinds of insights and good guesses come from animal studies, but at the end of the day they are just studies in animals, not people. And comparisons among countries are really just first-cut, hypothesis-generating studies, not conclusions.

Not all studies are created equal. An obvious point, perhaps, but one that gets glossed over. Medical journal editors and the process of peer review do act as a filter, keeping some unreliable studies at bay. But it is a partial, hardly foolproof filter. Especially if the findings are provocative, they can usually find a home, sometimes even in prestigious journals. Research can seem to change its position because tentative results, even from poor research, get more attention than they deserve. Without digging into the study itself, it can be hard to judge research findings, but there are some obvious clues to reliability. For instance, size matters: usually the more people in a study, the more believable the results. Studies of an intervention--a drug, a surgical procedure--are more reliable if the people enrolled in the study are randomized (a systematic sorting by the laws of chance) between getting the treatment (the cases) or the alternative (the controls). More reliable yet are the double-blind studies, in which neither the subjects nor the people running the study know who is getting the treatment. Without blinding, even the most scrupulous researchers are prone to steering more promising patients to the experimental drug or treatment. Subjects will often feel better if they know they are getting the new treatment. (A secret code is kept in a double-blind study so that at the end of the study researchers can figure out who got what.)

It is also important to recognize that health research is rife with controversies about the best way to design a study and analyze the results. Much of the debate is arcane, but how these issues get settled does shape the results of research.

Medicine is practice not perfect. Drugs are tested for safety and efficacy in clinical trials to meet FDA standards. Medical devices are reviewed by the FDA, but they generally don't go through the same kind of rigorous testing as drugs. And the practice of medicine is not regulated by the FDA at all. As a result, new procedures can come into vogue without being vetted in the same systematic way as drugs. The Vineberg procedure for angina, freezing duodenal ulcers, routine tonsillectomies--they all fell by the wayside as either studies eventually showed they didn't work or the pendulum of clinical judgment swung the other way.

Technology changes what can be seen, tested, and known. The recent mitral valve prolapse findings were based partly on a new, three-dimensional imaging of the heart valve that enabled researchers to better interpret the standard two-dimensional images. Particularly with improvements in imaging--the CAT scan and the MRI--the ability of doctors to diagnose a condition properly have vastly improved. And better diagnosis changes everything--estimates of how common an ailment is, its risk factors, and the treatments.