Babies exposed to high levels of pesticides while in the womb may suffer from learning problems, a new study suggests.

The study focused on a chemical called permethrin, one of the pyrethroid pesticides, commonly used in agriculture and to kill termites, fleas and household bugs, says lead author Megan Horton of the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health. Most of the pregnant women in this New York-based study were exposed by spraying for cockroaches.

Permethrin - among the most commonly detected pesticides in homes - is being used more often today as older organophosphorous pesticides are phased out because of concerns that they harm brain development, says Horton, whose study is being published today in Pediatrics.

Safeway Mix-Up Could Cost Woman Her Unborn Child

She is six weeks pregnant and when she went to the pharmacy to pick up an antibiotic her doctor had prescribed, the pharmacist gave her an abortion drug by mistake.

Mareena Silva might lose her unborn child because of the prescription drug error, which occurred last Thursday.

People who spend more time in the sun and those with higher vitamin D levels may be less likely to develop multiple sclerosis (MS), according to a study published in the February 8, 2011, print issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. MS is a chronic disease of the brain and spinal cord, usually with recurrent flare-ups of symptoms. It is often preceded by a first episode (or event) of similar symptoms lasting days to weeks.

"Previous studies have found similar results, but this is the first study to look at people who have just had the first symptoms of MS and haven't even been diagnosed with the disease yet," said study author Robyn Lucas, PhD, of Australian National University in Canberra.

"Other studies have looked at people who already have MS - then it's hard to know whether having the disease led them to change their habits in the sun or in their diet."

The multi-site study involved 216 people age 18 to 59 who had a first event with symptoms of the type seen in MS. Those people were matched with 395 people with no symptoms of possible MS who were of similar ages, of the same sex and from the same regions of Australia.

Toddlers who have a diet high in processed foods may have a slightly lower IQ in later life, according to a British study described as the biggest research of its kind.

The conclusion, published on Monday, comes from a long-term investigation into 14,000 people born in western England in 1991 and 1992 whose health and well-being were monitored at the ages of three, four, seven and eight and a half.

Parents of the children were asked to fill out questionnaires that, among other things, detailed the kind of food and drink their children consumed.

Three dietary patterns emerged: one was high in processed fats and sugar; then there was a "traditional" diet high in meat and vegetables; and finally a "health-conscious" diet with lots of salad, fruit and vegetables, pasta and rice.

When the children were eight and a half, their IQ was measured using a standard tool called the Wechsler Intelligence Scale.

Of the 4,000 children for which there were complete data, there was a significant difference in IQ among those who had had the "processed" as opposed to the "health-conscious" diets in early childhood.

The 20 percent of children who ate the most processed food had an average IQ of 101 points, compared with 106 for the 20 percent of children who ate the most "health-conscious" food.

New research from Warwick Medical School published today in the European Heart Journal shows that prolonged sleep deprivation and disrupted sleep patterns can have long-term, serious health implications. Leading academics from the University have linked lack of sleep to strokes, heart attacks and cardiovascular disorders which often result in early death.

Professor Francesco Cappuccio from the University of Warwick Medical School, explained: "If you sleep less than six hours per night and have disturbed sleep you stand a 48 per cent greater chance of developing or dying from heart disease and a 15 per cent greater chance of developing or dying of a stroke.

"The trend for late nights and early mornings is actually a ticking time bomb for our health so you need to act now to reduce your risk of developing these life-threatening conditions."

Professor Cappuccio and co-author Dr Michelle Miller, from the University of Warwick, conducted the research programme which followed up evidence from seven to 25 years from more than 470,000 participants from eight countries including Japan, USA, Sweden and UK.

Over the decades, Americans have become riddled with disease, obesity and cancer. Most of these problems stem from the lack of unaltered food in our diets and nothing is being done to stop additives, and genetically modified foods that are massed produced for American consumption. Keep in mind that the United States is one of the only civilized nations that does not have strict regulation on nutrition labeling. Which gives companies free reign to lie about what goes into their food. The European Union (EU) recently placed regulations on labeling food dyes to inform consumers of the health risks he/she will take by ingesting food dyes: "the European Union required foods sold in Europe to include a warning label if they contain artificial food dyes, which said have been linked to health and behavioral problems, especially in children." Please don't take this as a promotion of the EU as a whole, the EU itself is a debate of it's own. The EU is presently in the process of banning the growth/sale of many beneficial medicinal herbs. All in all, the EU and the UN are a big problem for the world as a whole. But for the sake of the article at hand, we will continue.

Food dyes are one of the most widely used and dangerous additives that have been around for a long time, and took a turn for the worse in the early 1900s. They are often added to foods to mask poor product quality or spoiled stock; 'natural' variations in color; protecting foods from color loss; temperature; moisture; air; and storage conditions. "The bulk of chemically synthesized colors were derived from aniline, a petroleum product that in pure form is toxic. Originally, these were dubbed "coal-tar" colors because the starting materials were obtained from bituminous coal". The following website describes the Toxicity of Aniline which is a man-made chemical that is still widely used in food dyes today. As you scroll through the site, nothing indicates that this chemical is safe in any regards for human consumption at any level. Food dyes are used in baked goods, beverages, candies, gelatin, sodas, juice, pet food and things you would not suspect such as Florida oranges and salmon.

Over the past two months, I have read many articles exclaiming that journalist Brian Deer's article in the British Medical Journal is the final deciding "evidence" that vaccines do not cause autism. As I have written in prior articles, we know that Brian Deer's document does nothing of the sort.

My initial understanding of autism and biomedical symptoms begins with a 2004 study at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in Baltimore. According to an article in the November 15, 2004 Independent, Carlos A. Pardo-Villamizar, M.D., at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, stated that his 2004 study's findings

"...open possibilities for understanding the dynamic changes in the brain. Although they may lend themselves to the development of new medical treatments for autism, much more research is needed."

Pardo and fellow researchers conducted post-mortem examinations of the brains of 11 people with autism aged from five to 44, who had died in accidents. Specifically, they found that proteins called cytokines and chemokines were present in higher amounts than in those of normal controls, which indicated inflammation. Professor Pardo related, '"This ongoing inflammatory process was present in different areas of the brain ... The pattern of cellular and protein findings indicate they are part of the innate immune system in the brain and do not appear to be caused by immune abnormalities from outside the brain." All of this research can be found online in the Annals of Neurology. Most of the information cited from the Annals article can be seen here.

There's still no cure for macular degeneration, an incurable eye disease that is the leading cause of blindness among older people.

Is that about to change?

Scientists at the University of Kentucky have made a key discovery regarding the abnormal deposits that cause the condition - and are already testing ways to block the formation of these yellow deposits, which are called "drusen."

The scientists, led by Dr. Jayakrishna Ambati, associate professor of ophthalmology at the university, found that people with "dry" macular degeneration are more likely to progress to the potentially blinding "wet" form when their drusen contain certain chemical components known as C3 and C5.

By screening patients for C3 and C5, doctors might be able to determine whose vision is at risk. And if researchers can find a way to keep C3 and C5 from forming in the first place, they may be able to halt the progression of macular degeneration.

And guess what: Ambati's lab is already testing such substances. Human trials of these substances could start by the end of the year, the Telegraph reported.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that a study of prescription patterns in 2009, conducted by IMS Health, showed that 25 percent of children in the U.S. were on regular medication.

IMS Health is a firm that provides marketing intelligence to pharmaceutical companies. The firm's job is to keep the $800 billion per year global pharmaceutical industry on a continued pattern of growth. Hopefully these consultants accomplished something quite different this week. Hopefully they provided our citizens with an overdue wake-up call.

One in four children in the U.S. are on chronic prescription medications. This doesn't even include all the prescriptions we write to treat acute illness, or the use of over-the-counter products. It is an astounding number. We either have the sickest pediatric population in the world, or there is something very wrong with the way therapies are driven in our health care system.

Life-threatening bacterial infections are likely to become dramatically more common over the next 10 years as antibiotics lose their remaining effectiveness against man's age-old enemy.

A summit of infectious diseases experts has heard warnings that antibiotic-resistant superbugs are spreading quickly around the world, and for the first time in decades there is no new generation of more powerful drugs waiting in the wings that can stop them.

Experts are calling on the federal government to formulate a national strategy to deal with the challenge. They say that, unless met, it could set the world back towards the medical experience of the 1930s -- when operations and infections now considered routine often proved fatal because of unstoppable infections.

Tom Gottlieb, the president of the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases, said he and his colleagues were seeing patients with untreatable infections more often -- yet there were no effective monitoring systems to track their location and frequency.