Indian Nurses in Iraqi Hospital Wait for Violence to Subside....

Forty-six nurses from the southern Indian state of Kerala are secluded in a hospital in Tikrit, the Iraqi city that was captured by extremists on June 11, unable to leave amid the violence and chaos that have gripped the country.Abandoned by most of the hospital’s Iraqi staff, the nurses, whose homes in Kerala are worlds away from the desert city in which they now live, stayed behind because they had nowhere to go. They have been isolated since the city was taken over by Islamist forces and are now awaiting help. Some want assurances of safe passage.“We don’t know what’s going on outside,” said Tona Joseph, 24, who said her twin sister, Veena, also a nurse, was sitting beside her in a patient’s ward on the second floor of the hospital. “We haven’t stepped outside for the last five days.”Interviewed by telephone, the nurses said they believed that fighters were nearby, perhaps even in front of the hospital. Some patients stayed behind, as well as a few doctors. The nurses said they had been staying in the patients’ wards. On Wednesday, the Indian government announced that 40 Indian construction workers had been kidnapped from the Iraqi city of Mosul.Soumya K.B., a 26-year-old nurse who said she sat beside Tona, said that Iraq was peaceful when she arrived 10 months ago. But the day the violence hit Tikrit, most of the Iraqi staff members in the hospital left and did not come back.“Everyone else has deserted us,” she said.Veena Joseph said that some offered parting words of advice: Leave the country as soon as possible. Things will escalate.The nurses were visited by the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, a humanitarian organization, and were told that fighters were nearby. The Red Crescent charged the nurses’ cellphones, which has enabled them to stay in touch with their families.The nurses said they had stopped watching television, which plays only Iraqi news, because it was dominated by images of gun fighting and its programming was in a language that they could not understand.“We don’t feel like watching it anymore,” said Ms. Joseph, who like many in Kerala is Christian, and now spends much of her time praying. “It was scaring us.”Ms. Joseph said that they heard gunfire and bomb blasts in the evening two days ago, which lasted half an hour and shook the hospital walls. The nurses opened their windows so that the glass would not break, and they took shelter in the hallway to wait out the fighting.“The Red Cross said that they will try to rescue us once the road clears up,” Tona Joseph said. “They said they can’t confirm if the officers in front of the hospital are army or ISIS.” Many of the militants who took control of Tikrit on June 11 are aligned with the extremist group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.Not all of the other staff members abandoned them. A few stayed and are bringing the nurses tea and samoun, a type of Iraqi bread. The nurses said they did not know how they would manage to find food should the kitchen staff leave. Before the Red Crescent arrived, the nurses said, they were running out of water.The nurses made their journey from their villages in Kerala to help pay off their families’ debts, they said. The father of the Joseph twins said that each of his three daughters had taken nursing jobs in Delhi because the salaries in Kerala were very low. An agency in Delhi placed them in Iraq.“We thought about it a lot, but the money was good,” said the father, C.C. Joseph, speaking by phone from his village. “We have debts.”He said that he was unsure if he could marry his three daughters off on the money he makes as a truck driver and that the salaries in Tikrit were too good to pass up.Sumi Jose, a nurse from Kothamangalam, in central Kerala, said that she paid the placement agency 150,000 rupees, or $2,488, for her job. She said she took the position in Iraq to help her father, a farmer, back home.“We knew it was a dangerous country, but we need to look after our families,” she said.The Iraqi Ministry of Health has recruited hundreds of nurses from India, according to the Indian Embassy’s website. Several thousand Indians now live and work in Iraq, and according to the embassy website, the number was growing because extensive reconstruction of the country has created more jobs.The nurses who were interviewed all said they wanted to return home, though they said that others in the group wanted to keep working in Iraq.The nurses said they had been assured by their families, the Iraqi government and the Iraqi Red Crescent that they were safe.“Everyone seems to be saying that nothing will happen to us,” said Ms. Jose. “I hope they turn out to be right.”  

Mango: The New Diabetes & Cancer Buster

The most popular fresh fruit in the world, mangoes are a whole lot more than just a delicious, refreshing treat produced by nature. As evidenced by copious scientific research, mangoes are also a powerful medicinal food, as they contain nutrients that can help clear up skin, promote eye health, stave off diabetes, and even prevent the formation and spread of cancer.

The most popular fresh fruit in the world, mangoes are a whole lot more than just a delicious, refreshing treat produced by nature. As evidenced by copious scientific research, mangoes are also a powerful medicinal food, as they contain nutrients that can help clear up skin, promote eye health, stave off diabetes, and even prevent the formation and spread of cancer.

Research recently presented at a meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), for instance, revealed that eating mangoes every day can help moderate and even lower blood sugar levels, despite their natural sugar content. This is good news for people with type 2 diabetes who may benefit from consuming mangoes regularly as part of a low-sugar diet.

For their study, researchers tested the effects of mangoes on a group of obese animals, some of whom were given 10 grams of freeze-dried mango every day for 12 weeks. At the end of three months, the blood sugar levels of those animals that consumed mango were compared to those that did not consume mango. Based on the data, mango consumption was found to result in a significant decline in blood sugar levels. 

"Although the mechanism by which mango exerts its effects warrants further investigation, we do know that mangoes contain a complex mixture of polyphenolic compounds," says Dr. Edralin Lucas, Ph.D., author of the study. Similar research out of Australia found back in 2006 that eating mango can also help decrease inflammation and resulting high cholesterol, as well as block the formation of various health conditions included under the banner of metabolic syndrome. In essence, mangoes actually work better than cholesterol drugs at naturally balancing and optimizing cellular function throughout the body.

  "We don't know yet how the whole thing's going to play out but we know some of the individual components (of mango) activate these receptors and even inhibit them," said a doctor from University of Queensland about the effects of mango consumption on cellular processes. "That could end up with positive nutritional health benefits for diabetes and high cholesterol." And again in 2011, researchers from Oklahoma State University found that mango consumption helps lower insulin resistance and improve glucose tolerance in test mice. The same study also found that mangoes help normalize lipid levels throughout the blood, which in turn can help prevent the development of cardiovascular disease. 

*Eating mangoes can also help you avoid cancer.* But the health benefits of mango do not stop here. Science has identified more than 4,000 different antioxidant polyphenols in the plant kingdom, and many of these polyphenols are present in mangoes. The primary benefit of these polyphenols is that they scavenge damaging free radicals and protect cells against damage, which is believed to facilitate and even promote cancer.

 "If you look at [mango] from the physiological and nutritional standpoint, taking everything together, it would be a high-ranking superfood," says Dr. Susanne Talcott, who together with her husband discovered back in 2010 that mango compounds target both colon and breast cancer cells.

"What we found is that not all cell lines are sensitive to the same extent to an anticancer agent. But the breast and colon cancer lines underwent apoptosis, or programmed cell death. Additionally, we found that when we tested normal colon cells side by side with the colon cancer cells, that the mango polyphenolics did not harm the normal cells." In other words, mango compounds effectively target and eliminate harmful cancer cells while leaving healthy cells alone, a phenomenon that is unique to nature and nowhere to be found in pharmaceutical-based medicine. Chemotherapy and radiation, for instance, which are the two most popular conventional treatments for cancer, damage healthy cells along with malignant cells, which is why the treatments are a failure as far as long-term survival is concerned.