Homeless Health Concerns

Poor health can contribute to being homeless, and being homeless can lead to poor health. Limited access to health care can make it worse. That's why the health of homeless people in the United States is worse than that of the general population. Common health problems include

* Mental health problems
* Substance abuse problems
* Bronchitis and pneumonia
* Problems caused by being outdoors
* Wound and skin infections

Many homeless women are victims of domestic or sexual abuse. Homeless children have high rates of emotional and behavioral problems, often from having witnessed abuse.

Mental and emotional signs of abuse and addiction

Abuse and addiction also affect mood, as drugs are abused for the temporary good feelings they provide. These feelings can vary depending on the drug used. Some mental and emotional signs include:

* Cycles of being unusually talkative, “up” and cheerful, with seemingly boundless energy.
* Increased irritability, agitation and anger
* Unusual calmness, unresponsiveness or looking “spaced out”
* Apathy and depression
* Paranoia, delusions
* Temporary psychosis, hallucinations
* Lowered threshold for violence

Drug Specific Symptoms

Marijuana:
Glassy, red eyes; loud talking and inappropriate laughter followed by sleepiness; a sweet burnt scent; loss of interest, motivation; weight gain or loss.

Alcohol:
Clumsiness; difficulty walking; slurred speech; sleepiness; poor judgment; dilated pupils; possession of a false ID card.

Depressants:
(including barbiturates and tranquilizers) Seems drunk as if from alcohol but without the associated odor of alcohol; difficulty concentrating; clumsiness; poor judgment; slurred speech; sleepiness; and contracted pupils.

Stimulants:
Hyperactivity; euphoria; irritability; anxiety; excessive talking followed by depression or excessive sleeping at odd times; may go long periods of time without eating or sleeping; dilated pupils; weight loss; dry mouth and nose.

Inhalants:
(Glues, aerosols, and vapors ) Watery eyes; impaired vision, memory and thought; secretions from the nose or rashes around the nose and mouth; headaches and nausea; appearance of intoxication; drowsiness; poor muscle control; changes in appetite; anxiety; irritability; an unusual number of spray cans in the trash.

Hallucinogens:
Dilated pupils; bizarre and irrational behavior including paranoia, aggression, hallucinations; mood swings; detachment from people; absorption with self or other objects, slurred speech; confusion.

Heroin:
Needle marks; sleeping at unusual times; sweating; vomiting; coughing and sniffling; twitching; loss of appetite; contracted pupils; no response of pupils to light.

Tobacco/Nicotine:
Smell of tobacco; stained fingers or teeth.

Drugs

Drug in injections
































Cocaine and Crack














Cocaine Powder

Renal disease

Your kidneys are two bean-shaped organs, each about the size of your fists. They are located near the middle of your back, just below the rib cage. Inside each kidney about a million tiny structures called nephrons filter blood. They remove waste products and extra water, which become urine. The urine flows through tubes called ureters to your bladder, which stores the urine until you go to the bathroom.

Damage to the nephrons results in kidney disease. This damage may leave kidneys unable to remove wastes. Usually the damage occurs slowly over years. There are no obvious symptoms, so you don't know it is happening.

Many things can cause kidney disease. You are at risk if you have

* Diabetes
* High blood pressure
* A close family member with kidney disease

Virtual private network (VPN)

A virtual private network (VPN) is a computer network in which some of the links between nodes are carried by open connections or virtual circuits in some larger network (e.g., the Internet) instead of by physical wires. The link-layer protocols of the virtual network are said to be tunneled through the larger network when this is the case.

One common application is secure communications through the public Internet, but a VPN need not have explicit security features, such as authentication or content encryption. VPNs, for example, can be used to separate the traffic of different user communities over an underlying network with strong security features.

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (commonly abbreviated as "the Web") is a very large set of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a Web browser, one can view Web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them using hyperlinks. Using concepts from earlier hypertext systems, the World Wide Web was begun in 1992 by the English physicist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, now the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, and Robert Cailliau, a Belgian computer scientist, while both were working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

In 1990, they proposed building a "web of nodes" storing "hypertext pages" viewed by "browsers" on a network, and released that web in 1992. Connected by the existing Internet, other websites were created, around the world, adding international standards for domain names & the HTML language. Since then, Berners-Lee has played an active role in guiding the development of Web standards (such as the markup languages in which Web pages are composed), and in recent years has advocated his vision of a Semantic Web. Cailliau went on early retirement in January 2005 and left CERN in January 2007.