Q. When a fellow worker recently came down with hepatitis, our entire office went mad trying to figure out what had to be done. It seemed as if each of us has different information from our private physicians, some required globulin shots, others did not. We are still wondering if we are facing a lurking threat to health.
A. To start with, hepatitis is a common disease, cause by several different viruses, and probably attacks more than a million Americans each year.
To add to the confusion, there is more than one kind of hepatitis. Type A generally affects children and used to be called infectious hepatitis. Type B was formally known as serum hepatitis. There is a Type D, which only can infect individuals who already are infected by Type B.
Confused enough? Well, then there was once the term non-A, non-B hepatitis, for a type of the infection that had no identifiable virus. It is now known as hepatitis C, and the virus has been identified. Type A hepatitis is found in fecal material, and direct contact with infected foods (raw clams, oysters mussels) or drinking water and contaminated dishes can spread the disease quickly. Type B is transmitted by the virus that is found in all body fluids of an infected individual, by transfusion, contaminated needles, tatoos, ear piercing and the like.
Without exact knowledge of the diagnosis of your workmate, all the physicians (including myself) would find it difficult to recommend the exact procedure to follow. The use of immune globulin is still debated, yields variable results and is expensive. As a general rule, if there was no close personal contact with the infected person, no sharing of personal items, the chances of transmission are small.
Q. I have this terrible shaking problem, mostly in my hands, and my doctor said that it was something called "essential tremor." Please provide information about this condition.
A. Essential tremor is a shaking for which no cause can be found, although some researchers feel it may be inherited. It can come on at any age, but usually occurs in older people and frequently runs in families.
The only symptom of essential tremor is the tremor itself, a gentle shaking of the hands, arms or head.
The usual treatment for essential tremor is a drug called propranolol hydrochloride (Inderal), which also is used in treating high blood pressure and migraine headaches. An anticonvulsant drug called primidone (Mysoline) or a tranquilizer called clonazepam (Klonopin) also can be effective.
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