7 Women Share The Heart Issues They Never Thought They'd Have To Deal With Before 35

womenshealthmag.com - You're young, you're healthy, you probably don't need to worry about your heart, right? Wrong, says Suzanne Steinbaum, a cardiologist and spokesperson for the American Heart Association's Go Red For Women campaign. "If you have a heart, you can get heart disease," she says. "It's not just something that affects old people and men." In fact, heart disease is the number-one killer of women, accounting for one in three deaths each year, according to the AHA. The difference between you and your 70-year-old neighbor, however, is the type of heart problems each of you is most at risk for. The most prevalent conditions in young women are congenital heart abnormalities, meaning you're just born with them, like a mitral valve prolapse, or genetic problems, Steinbaum says. About five out of every 500 female babies are born with heart defect, according to the AHA.

Your youth also doesn't excuse you from more "traditional" heart issues like heart attacks, clogged arteries, and strokes. Your set of personal risk factors, which include family history, lifestyle factors, and medical history, in addition to age, can give you a better idea of how worried you should be about your heart. For instance, the combo of birth control pills and smoking—both common in younger women—can up your risk of a heart attack by 20 percent, the AHA says.

Punjabi Filmmaker of ‘Patiala Dreamz’ gives you ‘Phullu’,satire on women health issues

indialivetoday.com - New Delhi, Dec 28 After receiving ecstatic reviews for their Punjabi Film ‘Patiala Dreamz’, filmmakers Anmol Kapoor and Abhishek Saxena have now come up with a comic satire “Phullu”, which raises women health issues. Anmol, who was in the national capital for the promotion of the film, scheduled for release on March 8 on the occasion of International Women’s day, said,”There are many myths regarding the women menstrual cycle.

It has become a stigma in our society.

Our protagonist Sharib Hashmi (Phullu) asks questions that why sanitary pads are not used by the women.

Why they use clothes, which later leads to infection.

” “It is a dark topic.

We wanted to make it entertaining besides giving education to people.

Though there were many challenges yet the movie can change the history of India.

We want to show it in every village and city,”the filmmaker said.

Speaking about the film, ‘Filmistan’ fame actor Sharib Hashmi said, “Phullu is an innocent pure man who notices this social stigma and deals with the problem in a comic way.

Linda Goler Blount: President and CEO of the Black Women's Health Imperative

Considering every aspect of a person's identity when delivering medical care or when advocating for women's health is crucial. The president and CEO of the Black Women’s Health Imperative, an organization devoted to advancing the health and wellness of 20 million black women and girls in the United States, talks about making sure black women are included in conversations about women's health. She discusses self-care, mental and physical health, black women's experience of certain diseases, and more.

hercampus.com - “We need to create our own movements,” says Linda Goler Blount, president and CEO of the Black Women’s Health Imperative (BWHI). “We need to highlight our issues, highlight the research, and propose the policy and programs and solutions.”

Founded in 1983 on Spelman College's campus, the Black Women’s Health Imperative is dedicated to health advocacy for black women. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., they push for policies that focus on black women’s health. “It’s my job to get the kind of information that black women need so that they can understand what the issues are and what they should be doing,” explains Blount.

Since Blount took over BWHI four years ago, she has spearheaded an effort to empower black women to take control of their health.

After graduating from Eastern Michigan University with a Computer Engineering/Operations degree, and then going on to receive a Master’s of Public Health from the University of Michigan, she was immediately thrown into the health services research industry. From there she has launched a successful career that spans the public, for-profit, and nonprofit sectors - including seven years of market analysis for Coca-Cola and a number of years working with reproductive health and STD surveillance systems in Africa and the Caribbean.

Now, at the Black Women’s Health Imperative, Blount works to eliminate health disparities between black and white women. “We need to talk about us,” Blount explains about black women, “and the way that disease is expressed in us differently.” She stresses the importance of making health accessible – “at the Black Women’s Health Imperative, we’re taking the science and then translating it into something that women can understand, and most importantly act on.” This includes an upcoming article series in Essence magazine that will feature information about black women for black women.

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Back from the Brink: Young TB Survivor Turns Advocate in South Africa

This article originally appeared on the Women & Girls Hub of News Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about issues that affect women and girls in the developing world, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list. By Sophie Cousins

Phumeza Tisile was 19 when she was diagnosed with a deadly, drug-resistant form of TB. Her experience of treatment and eventual survival turned her into an activist fighting for better access to treatment for others who face the same fate.

It was 2010 and South Africa was hosting the FIFA World Cup. Phumeza Tisile, who was 19 years old at the time and in her first year of university in Cape Town, was out celebrating with friends.

She had noticed that she had been getting thinner, but didn’t think anything of it until that day, when she tried to blow the vuvuzela – a blow horn that can be heard at most soccer games in South Africa. It was difficult. She couldn’t breathe.

Tisile went to her doctor and was diagnosed with “regular” tuberculosis (TB) and put on a six-month course of treatment.

But two months on, she seemed to be getting sicker. She eventually went back to the doctor, and further tests found she had a multi-drug-resistant form of TB, often referred to as MDR-TB.

TB, a contagious airborne disease, is the leading cause of death in South Africa, which has one of the highest incidences of the disease in the world. According to the latest figures from the World Health Organization (WHO), an estimated 450,000 new cases arise every year across the country. While more men than women are diagnosed with, and subsequently die of, TB, the disease can have particularly dire consequences for women of reproductive age. TB is one of the top five killers of women aged 20 to 59. If a pregnant woman contracts the disease, the risk of her pregnancy ending in perinatal death is six times higher, while the risk of premature birth and low birth weight increases twofold.

There is also a rising number of people, like Tisile, being diagnosed with drug-resistant strains of the illness. Most of these patients are resistant to at least two first-line drugs. Some people, known as extensively drug-resistant patients, are resistant to at least four of the core anti-TB medicines.

Dealing with patients who develop drug resistance can be very costly, as the specialist medicines needed are sometimes up to 200 times more expensive than normal TB treatments. The drugs are stronger and can have devastating side effects, including kidney impairment and depression.

Tisile was put on a drug regime for two years. “They put me on 20 tablets [a day],” she says. “I also had to have an injection every day for six months.”

But it wasn’t long before the medicines took a toll on Tisile, who ended up hospitalized for five months when she stopped being able to walk properly.

Furthermore, one day she woke up and noticed there was something else seriously wrong. She went to the bathroom, used the toilet and noticed she couldn’t hear it flushing. Then she turned on the tap to wash her hands, but again, there was no sound.

“I thought, ‘OK, maybe there’s something blocking my ears.’ I cleaned my ears but there was still no sound. People were moving their lips, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying,” she says.

What Tisile didn’t know, and hadn’t been told, was that hearing loss is a common side effect of the daily injections she was taking as part of her MDR-TB treatment. “When the doctor told me I was deaf, he also told me I was resistant to eight MDR-TB drugs,” she says. “I had been taking the wrong medication.”

Tisile was finally diagnosed with XDR-TB – the most severe form of TB, with little hope of survival.

The medicines made her feel even sicker. She was constantly in and out of hospital. An operation to remove TB from her lung resulted in a broken rib and a collapsed lung. By mid-2011, her XDR-TB treatment was no longer working.

Then medical staff from Doctors Without Borders (MSF) stumbled across her at a government clinic, and started her on an individually tailored XDR-TB regimen.

After two more years of treatment, she was told she had a 20 percent chance of survival.

“MSF told me that if I wanted to stop the medication all together, then I should and that I should consult a priest to prepare myself, because they didn’t see a way out of this one,” she says.

Against the odds, Tisile’s health finally started improving and, in August 2013, she was declared cured of XDR-TB.

After managing to raise $80,000 for a cochlear implant, Tisile regained her hearing in February 2015, almost five years after she lost it, and is excited to be restarting university next year to pursue gender studies.

Now she’s a fierce advocate for better access to testing and treatment for drug-resistant TB. She wants to see better, more affordable treatments with fewer side effects and a higher cure rate. And she is calling for the international community to fully fund the fight against the disease. “I could have died, and they don’t really know why I didn’t,” she says.

One of the drugs credited with helping cure Tisile is a high-strength antibiotic called linezolid. While the drug has shown promising results, it’s not widely available in South Africa due to its cost. It’s currently under patent and is not registered as a drug-resistant treatment in the country, making it difficult to access in public facilities.

Two new drugs for treating the most resistant forms of TB, bedaquiline and delamanid, have been developed since 2012 – the first new TB treatments in almost a century. But access remains severely limited due, again, to high cost and the fact that the drugs are registered in only a few countries. While the companies that produce them have set up limited donation programs, the cap on the number of treatment courses given is far below what’s required, and many high-burden countries are excluded from the deal.

“The world is just letting people with TB down,” Tisile says. “We know TB affects those who don’t have money. We need to raise awareness.”

Members of the World Health Assembly have committed to WHO’s End TB Strategy, which hopes to end the TB epidemic by 2035, reducing deaths by 95 percent and cutting new cases by 90 percent, with the ultimate goal of TB elimination as a public health problem by 2050.

But with the TB burden larger than previously thought, growing resistance and a massive gap in funding, experts are skeptical whether this goal is achievable.

Mick Frick, TB/HIV senior project officer at the Treatment Action Group, an independent think tank in South Africa, expressed concern at the decline in funding in the fight against TB, which he blames on a lack of investment by pharmaceutical companies and “anemic political will.”

“Meeting the innovation needs of the groups most affected by TB will be essential for ending the TB epidemic [but] these groups are being left behind,” he says.

Better Nutrition for Women and Girls Is Crucial to Achieve the SDGs

This article originally appeared on the Women & Girls Hub of News Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about issues that affect women and girls in the developing world, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list. By Steve Godfrey

The U.N.'s Sustainable Development Goals make up an ambitious new agenda. But Steve Godfrey of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition writes that unless there is investment in improving the nutritional health of women and girls, many of the goals will never be realized.

The Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals adopted last year during the 70th U.N. General Assembly set a new course for nutrition and human development. For the first time, the international community is committed to “ending malnutrition in all its forms,” as opposed to “halving” malnutrition, as stated in the Millennium Development Goals. This means that we have the opportunity to improve the health and lives of an estimated 800 million people who remain undernourished and of the billions of people who suffer from micronutrient deficiencies or obesity. It is a radical new agenda.

Women and young children are often those most affected by the negative consequences of undernutrition. Around half of all pregnant women in developing countries are anemic, which contributes up to 20 percent of all maternal deaths. In many developing countries, women and girls traditionally eat last and have lower quality food, which often leads to poorer nutritional intake. And when a crisis hits, women are generally the first to sacrifice their food consumption to protect the health of their families.

Women account for over 40 percent of the world’s labor force. Yet malnutrition, including micronutrient deficiencies, can diminish women’s earning power through low energy levels, illness and increased absence from work. It is estimated that tackling anemia alone could lead to increased productivity of up to 17 percent.

Moreover, many adverse health outcomes associated with malnutrition are determined by the health and nutritional status of women and adolescent girls. Without the proper nutrients from pregnancy through to the age of 2 – the critical 1,000 days – infants suffer long-term health and economic consequences. Poor nutrition before and during pregnancy is a major determinant of stunting – meaning that a child does not reach its full potential height – which also has lifelong effects on physical and mental development. Currently, a little less than 160 million children are stunted globally.

At the same time, women are leaders in the fight against malnutrition. First, supporting women to breastfeed exclusively for the first six months of a child’s life, and to continue breastfeeding along with adequate complementary foods until at least age 2, is the best nutrition intervention for mothers and their babies. Breast milk provides the essential nutrients needed for healthy development, as well as the antibodies that help protect infants from common childhood illnesses such as diarrhea and pneumonia, the two primary causes of child mortality worldwide. Exclusive breastfeeding, where this is possible, is also beneficial to the mother and is known to reduce risks of breast and ovarian cancer later in life.

Second, women are the world’s primary food producers. Giving women farmers more resources could bring the number of hungry people in the world down by 100-150 million people. What’s more, when women have greater control over household income, they are more likely to prioritize spending on nutritious foods, improving nutrition for the entire family.

Finally, focusing on women’s empowerment is considered to be one of the best ways to improve nutrition. Education is a proven and important means of achieving gender equality, the effects of which are felt throughout families and communities. This includes better nutritional outcomes. A 2011 hunger and malnutrition report estimated that mothers with 10 or more years of education were less likely to have underweight or stunted children. Educating girls not only increases their earning potential, but may also delay the age of marriage and childbearing, which has a positive impact on childhood stunting.

Although the numerous links between empowering women and improving nutrition are understood, more still needs to be done to address the specific nutritional problems of women, adolescent girls and young children. The barriers for women in accessing nutritious diets are numerous and encompass the cost and availability of healthy foods, knowledge about nutrition, as well as the social, cultural and regulatory barriers that shape behaviors and markets.

Over the last nine years, GAIN has been working with our partners through a combination of proven interventions – such as the protection and promotion of breastfeeding and appropriate complementary feeding – and novel approaches to promote nutrition-related behaviors.

For example, a program in East Java, Indonesia, in partnership with the Ministry of Health’s Directorate of Community Nutrition, seeks to improve the dietary practices of pregnant mothers and children under the age of 2 years. Understanding what influences women when feeding their children and the barriers they face has been crucial to developing motivational messages that empower women to make healthy choices. We found that the whole community – members, friends and neighbors – needs to be involved, as everyone plays a big role in determining the choices that mothers make about what they and their children eat. One major component of the program is a behavior change campaign called Rumpi Sehat (Health Gossip), which comprises of national TV ads; “Emo-Demos” (emotional demonstrations), community activation designed to provoke an emotional response; social media; and interpersonal communication.

Another example is our project in rural Rajasthan, India, where women’s groups have been trained to produce fortified blended foods. These foods are purchased by the state’s social welfare program, which then distributes take-home rations to mothers and children. This project is giving tens of thousands of women access to nutritious complementary foods for their babies, aged 6 to 23 months, which are needed in addition to breastmilk. Currently, similar women’s groups are being set up in the Indian states of Karnataka and Bihar.

Adequate nutrition is important for women not only because it helps them be productive members of society, but also because of the direct effect maternal nutrition has on the health and development of the next generation. Maternal malnutrition’s toll on maternal and infant survival prevents countries from achieving most of the Sustainable Development Goals. While there is no silver bullet or single model to follow, putting women and children at the heart of tackling malnutrition is the right thing to do, a core investment for the success of the Sustainable Development Goals.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Women & Girls Hub.

In bid to aid homeless women, New York passes bill requiring shelters to provide tampons

I'll be 100 percent honest: Until this week, this issue never even crossed my mind. It never dawned on me that homeless women face the same monthly period as every other woman in the world. In the following story, Kailah Willcuts gives her testimony on how being on her "time of the month" only exacerbated the everyday struggles of homelessness. Her words moved me. She opened my eyes to a widespread issue facing millions of American women; an issue that isn't discussed enough.

Now, we need to work together to support these homeless women. We need local, state and federal law to recognize the risks and shame that homeless women face and to take measurable steps to aid their health. Stand with me and stand up for them.

-Victoria Mendoza

nytlive.nytimes.com - For the 50,000 homeless women living in the U.S., having their period is more than an inconvenience. Lacking access to sanitary pads or even a place to shower, homeless women are often forced to improvise by using socks, paper towels, plastic bags, or even their limited clothing items.

“Not only is it terrible, but it’s also embarrassing,” admitted Kailah Willcuts, 27, who said she had been homeless for more than eight years. “Not to mention that now you have this stain on your pants. I only have the clothes that I’m wearing, so I’m standing there half naked, bloodied, you know, washing my clothes out.”

As far as dealing with her period goes, things might be getting easier for Willcuts. New York City, where Willcuts currently resides, recently became the first city in the country to require public schools, jails, and homeless shelters to provide free pads and tampons.

“You shouldn’t have to decide between a pad and having lunch,” said Council Member Julissa Ferreras-Copeland, who helped champion the legislation. “It’s about dignity and women understanding that there is absolutely nothing wrong with this process. Once we take the taboo away from this product, then we are really empowering women.”

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This Teen Is Giving Tampons to Homeless Women

Periods can be a challenge for any woman--but for homeless woman, they can be devastating. Without access to feminine-hygiene products, nowhere reliable to keep items for later use and extremely limited resources; women often have nowhere to turn. One Portland teen is trying to change that by providing homeless girls and women with feminine-hygiene products. Read below to learn more about Camions of Care, and remember to do what you can to reach out to one another--because no one should suffer for stigma.

allure.com - When you get your period, you probably know where you're going to get tampons or pads. For homeless women, basic feminine-hygiene products are harder to come by. Camions of Care, a nonprofit organization founded by Nadya Okamoto, an 18-year-old from Portland, Oregon, is hoping to change that. (If you're curious, a camion is sturdy cart or wagon designed for bulky loads.) So far, Okamoto and her organization have helped deliver 27,243 period care packages to women and girls in need all over the world.

When Okamoto was 15, her family was declared legally homeless. During that time, she was living at a friend's house two hours from her school. During her commute, she tells Allure that she'd encounter underserved women who didn't have reliable access to feminine-hygiene products. Because shelters can't keep up with the demand for tampons and pads, the women would get industrious, using newspaper, socks, and brown paper grocery bags instead. "What scared me was that it made so much sense. You can find [brown paper grocery bags] anywhere around Portland," Okamoto says. "But it's so unsanitary because women were getting these bags from recycling bins or trash cans." Besides being stressful and ineffective, nonsterile alternatives could lead to dangerous infections and toxic shock syndrome .

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