There are a lot of people talking about the Swine Flu this week. It’s not a big surprise that the discussion is so big, because there are a lot of issues involved in it right now. It’s also a growing discussion. As with all influenzas, it can be a respiratory related problem and then you can get very ill from it. However, we should keep this in perspective: there is so far a relatively limited number of people who have it. While it may spread widely, it being uncontainable right now, it’s still a small number of people who are sick. And even fewer are seriously ill from it. The chances of being very ill from this flu are probably lower than the chances of getting a regular flu. It spreads quickly, but it’s also fairly weak. A few notes of precaution: make sure you’re not sharing your respiratory aids (inhalers, nebulizers, etc) with other people, because that would be an easy way to get infected, with that or other illnesses.

Let’s go back and review a little bit of background information that we have talked about before. We review because there are always new readers on this site, and we need to catch them up instead of simply assuming that they already understand everything about the basics. It seems like time to review what a nebulizer is used for and why. The nebulizer is an important piece of equipment in anyone’s respiratory therapy. This is a tool that will take the liquid medication that the person needs in the lungs, and breaks it up into tiny particles so you can breathe it in. It’s much like a humidifier, with you breathing in the humidity in the air. This makes it easier to take the medication, and for the lungs it’s practically the only way to get medication in, short of some much more drastic measure. It’s a very helpful thing for a person to have in their medication cabinet, especially if they need some kind of respiratory treatment.

We need to look again at the relationship between air pollution and health problems. It is true that there are many health problems associated with the presence of air pollution in a person’s area. Some of these problems are irritated eyes, hurting skin and noses and, of course, breathing problems. A lot of these problems diminish to a certain extent when the pollution source goes away, or when the person experiencing the problems leaves the location of the pollution. But there are certain levels at which the person can’t get better afterwards. In the past, there have been incidents where large communities are badly harmed by an unusually concentrated amount of pollution. People have died from this. The point of all this is that, in choosing respiratory aids and other kinds of devices, a person should be well aware what the environmental factors around him or her are in order to be sure that therapy will ultimately help the most.

This is a great story about a college student who has muscular atrophy and still is living life as well as anyone else. This is one of those fun stories that make you feel that you could do anything in your life. The student has been in a wheelchair since he was 10 and he would have great difficulty breathing if he were to do it on his own. In fact, it’s possible that he wouldn’t be able to breathe at all anymore. But he has a non-invasive breathing aid that will allow him to live like the other students. It provides intermittent air pressure in order to push air into his lungs. He basically takes a sip of air whenever he needs it. The problem would be that he is unable to get his muscles moving in his chest. The lungs are healthy, but the diaphragm isn’t strong enough to suck air out of the room. But this is non-invasive, requires no incision or trach operations. It just gives some extra pressure of air into the respiratory system easily. Read his amazing story behind the link above.

One of the biggest problems in respiratory health is lung cancer. This is different in many ways from the other respiratory illnesses that we’ve seen previously. You can’t attach a tube or use a nebulizer to get medicine to reduce the symptoms of this illness. Lung cancer needs to be treated much more aggressively. That is to say, it is not just a recurring condition, but a sickness that progresses. Treatments are becoming much better honed than they had been before. Now, surgery followed by radiation can bump up the chances of long-term survival. Or at the very least, it will give the patient a much better chance for living a longer time. Of course, the best way to avoid this illness, and many other respiratory issues, is to avoid or stop smoking. This is interesting information and there is a lot of research still underway! Keep reading here.

When you look at a nebulizer, you really want it to be especially strong and durable everyday. The concentric glass nebulizer that is described on the University of Wisconsin website is supposed to be a stronger than the normal kind. It’s also small and so a person can have several of them on hand at any one time without taking a lot of space. And it’s also made of glass, which we previously learned was a safer way to have respiratory products made. We learned that glass could help prevent pneumonia, although in a nebulizer this isn’t really a concern. But it is important for the nebulizer to be made out of stronger materials so that any person can use it. Check out the site for this nebulizer and let me know what you think!

There is perhaps no kind of respiratory illness that frightened people more than did SARS a few years ago. It’s become a much smaller issue in the meantime. This is mainly because the doctors have found a way to treat it, or at least to let it run its course rather than letting other people become exposed to it. People are kept more in isolation and given a certain set of drugs in order to treat this illness. But in certain parts of the world, we can imagine that the illness will not be well treated. I have read that it’s possible that some of the respiratory aids that we talk about here could be used to help treat SARS or to make people feel much more comfortable during treatment. Take a look at this information to get some idea about the sickness and how it’s dealt with.