A mystery disease has killed over 100 people and infected more than 2,000 in northern Uganda.

The disease, first reported in September 2009, has since been dubbed "nodding disease" as it leaves its victims nodding, Xinhua reported.

Spread over the region's five districts, the disease is characterised by head nodding, mental retardation and stunted growth and affects children and young adults. It causes young children and adolescents to nod violently while eating.

Scientists are to launch a series of investigations as the previous efforts couldn't identify the disease's cause.

Older people tend to be happier. But why? Some psychologists believe that cognitive processes are responsible - in particular, focusing on and remembering positive events and leaving behind negative ones; those processes, they think, help older people regulate their emotions, letting them view life in a sunnier light. "There is a lot of good theory about this age difference in happiness," says psychologist Derek M. Isaacowitz of Northeastern University, "but much of the research does not provide direct evidence" of the links between such phenomena and actual happiness. In a new article in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, Isaacowitz and the late Fredda Blanchard-Fields of Georgia Institute of Technology argue for more rigorous research.

Researchers, including the authors, have found that older people shown pictures of faces or situations tend to focus on and remember the happier ones more and the negative ones less. Other studies have discovered that as people age, they seek out situations that will lift their moods - for instance, pruning social circles of friends or acquaintances who might bring them down. Still other work finds that older adults learn to let go of loss and disappointment over unachieved goals, and hew their goals toward greater wellbeing.

It has been revealed that scientists conducting clinical trials for pharmaceuticals and many other medical interventions oftentimes withhold vital data that may be threatening public health.

In a review published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), it was found that scientists frequently engage in fraudulent data withholding - the act of keeping inconvenient and unwanted evidence out of the end result.

The findings bring into question the validity of nearly all clinical drug trials, as previous reports have highlighted the hidden dangers of many common pharmaceutical medications. Tylenol, one of the most popular over-the-counter drugs for a number of common ailments has been the subject of one such study.

For decades now, the general American population has been neurotically avoiding cholesterol-rich foods for fear of developing heart disease, thanks to the promulgation of the unfortunate Diet-Heart hypothesis. ⁽¹⁾

Those of us that follow a paleo diet are well aware by now that dietary cholesterol does not significantly affect cholesterol levels in the blood or risk for heart disease, and that there is no reason to avoid whole foods with naturally high levels of cholesterol.

However, beyond just 'not avoiding' high cholesterol foods, there is a significant reason for us to make a special effort to include many high cholesterol foods in our diet.

The reason? The much under-appreciated B-vitamin called choline, found primarily in cholesterol-rich foods.

Fruiting plants and humans both have reproductive organs called ovaries, and in the case of pomegranate fruit, the anatomical resemblance is absolutely striking:

© GreenMedInfo

© GreenMedInfo

Because our primary relationship to fruit is as a consumer, we are usually too immersed in the joyful act of eating fruit to take notice that it is by definition "the ripened ovary - together with the seeds - from one or more flowers of a plant."

The differences between species are obvious, of course: fruit-ovaries disperse their seeds by being eaten, and then excreted by animals, whereas human-ovaries, remaining intact within the body, disperse their "seeds" (eggs) by way of the fallopian tubes.

© GreenMedInfo

© GreenMedInfo

Observing a cross-section of the pomegranate and the human ovary, side-by-side, you can see the remarkable resemblance. The ancient 'law of signatures' that Nature weaves into herself, and which is recognized by many systems of traditional medicine around the world, makes it so that sometimes a plant (food) will be of unique benefit to the very organ in the body that it resembles. The walnut, for instance, has a skull-like protective casing, enclosing the bi-hemispheric meat of its seed, which strikingly resembles the very human brain that it is known to nourish with omega-3 fatty acids and other neuroprotective compounds.

In the case of pomegranate fruit, which again, is the ripened ovary - together with the seeds (babies) - from the pomegranate flower, it so perfectly resembles the human ovary in structure (and as we will see, function) that the resemblance is unlikely to be accidental. Could this be Nature revealing her gift of healing in a way that is so obvious that you would have to be blind not to see it?

Depression may be the worst emotional experience there is. The causes are many, and it often drives people to zig-zag past everything that matters and into a pill bottle of pharmaceutical 'treatments'. But these solutions offered by the pharmaceutical industry are nothing but a sham, and their antidepressant products only make you more depressed and trigger suicidal thoughts. One study has also found that antidepressants cause your arteries to thicken 400% more than aging - a main factor in the thickening of the arteries.

Antidepressants Linked to Heart Disease and Stroke

A study conducted by the Emory University School of Medicine included over 500 middle-aged male twins, both who served in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. The researchers noted that among 59 pairs of twins where only one brother was on antidepressants, the one ingesting the drugs usually had higher carotid intima-media thickness (IMT) - the thickness of main arteries in the neck.

"One of the strongest and best-studied factors that thickens someone's arteries is age, and that happens at around 10 microns per year...In our study, users of antidepressants see an average 40 micron increase in IMT, so their carotid arteries are in effect four years older," says the first study author Amit Shah, MD.

Vitamin C is generally considered to be an important "nutrient," but its perceived value usually ends there. Only rarely does the public (and the medical profession) glimpse its true potential in the prevention and treatment of disease -- and this because, by legal definition (in the US), only FDA-approved drugs can prevent, treat and cure disease.

This does not mean, however, that essential nutrients like Vitamin C cannot in fact prevent and treat disease, i.e. only because it is illegal to speak truthfully about something, doesn't mean that that something isn't true. The National Library of Medicine, in fact, contains thousands of studies demonstrating vitamin C's ability to significantly improve health, with 220 disease applications documented on the research site GreenMedInfo.com alone. The best thing 'we the people' can do, despite our lack of medical degrees and licensure, and without the FDA's iron-fisted legal and regulatory apparatus on our side, is to use the peer-reviewed research at our disposal to inform and protect our treatment decisions.

Perhaps we must revisit an important moment in history to regain a sense of how profoundly vitamin C deficiency and vitamin C therapy can affect health. James Lind (1716-1794), pioneer of naval hygiene in the British Royal Navy, conducted the first ever clinical trial proving that citrus fruits cured scurvy. Lind's discovery saved tens of thousands of seamen from the ravages of scurvy, spurring England's naval supremacy, putatively changing the course of world history.

On a cold Saturday in early 2009, Glenn Black, a yoga teacher of nearly four decades, whose devoted clientele includes a number of celebrities and prominent gurus, was giving a master class at Sankalpah Yoga in Manhattan. Black is, in many ways, a classic yogi: he studied in Pune, India, at the institute founded by the legendary B. K. S. Iyengar, and spent years in solitude and meditation. He now lives in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and often teaches at the nearby Omega Institute, a New Age emporium spread over nearly 200 acres of woods and gardens. He is known for his rigor and his down-to-earth style. But this was not why I sought him out: Black, I'd been told, was the person to speak with if you wanted to know not about the virtues of yoga but rather about the damage it could do. Many of his regular clients came to him for bodywork or rehabilitation following yoga injuries. This was the situation I found myself in. In my 30s, I had somehow managed to rupture a disk in my lower back and found I could prevent bouts of pain with a selection of yoga postures and abdominal exercises. Then, in 2007, while doing the extended-side-angle pose, a posture hailed as a cure for many diseases, my back gave way. With it went my belief, naïve in retrospect, that yoga was a source only of healing and never harm.

At Sankalpah Yoga, the room was packed; roughly half the students were said to be teachers themselves. Black walked around the room, joking and talking. "Is this yoga?" he asked as we sweated through a pose that seemed to demand superhuman endurance. "It is if you're paying attention." His approach was almost free-form: he made us hold poses for a long time but taught no inversions and few classical postures. Throughout the class, he urged us to pay attention to the thresholds of pain. "I make it as hard as possible," he told the group. "It's up to you to make it easy on yourself." He drove his point home with a cautionary tale. In India, he recalled, a yogi came to study at Iyengar's school and threw himself into a spinal twist. Black said he watched in disbelief as three of the man's ribs gave way - pop, pop, pop.

After class, I asked Black about his approach to teaching yoga - the emphasis on holding only a few simple poses, the absence of common inversions like headstands and shoulder stands. He gave me the kind of answer you'd expect from any yoga teacher: that awareness is more important than rushing through a series of postures just to say you'd done them. But then he said something more radical. Black has come to believe that "the vast majority of people" should give up yoga altogether. It's simply too likely to cause harm.

Mental dexterity and brain power deteriorates earlier than thought, according to study of 7,000 civil servants.

As all those of middle age who have ever fumbled for a name to fit a face will believe, the brain begins to lose sharpness of memory and powers of reasoning and understanding not from 60 as previously thought, but from as early as 45, scientists say.

Their evidence comes from a large study of more than 7,000 civil servants aged between 45 and 70. The 5,000 men and 2,000 women agreed to undergo verbal and written tests on three occasions over a 10-year period.

A deterioration in the memory and thinking powers of the oldest volunteers might be expected, but in fact the researchers, led by Archana Singh-Manoux from the Centre for Research in Epidemiology and Population Health in France and University College London in the UK, found that the brains of even the youngest were already on the slide. Over the decade, there was a 3.6% decline in the mental reasoning of men and of women aged 45 to 49. The process appeared to have speeded up in the older age groups. Men aged 65 to 70 have a decline of 9.6% while women fared a little better, at 7.4%.

Over the course of the past few years, we have been gathering studies from the US National Library of Medicine on the adverse, unintended health effects of vaccination, in an attempt to offset the one-sided propaganda foisted upon the public, namely, that all vaccines are unequivocally "safe" and "effective," a priori.

Along the way, we happened upon a 2010 study published in the Journal of Pediatric Infections & Diseases which has been shared more than any other article on our database, and which suggests that breastfeeding should be delayed in order to prevent immune factors within breast milk from inactivating vaccine-associated antibody titer elevations and "vaccine potency." The authors concluded the study with the following statement:

"INTERPRETATION: The lower immunogenicity and efficacy of rotavirus vaccines in poor developing countries could be explained, in part, by higher titers of IgA and neutralizing activity in breast milk consumed by their infants at the time of immunization that could effectively reduce the potency of the vaccine. Strategies to overcome this negative effect, such as delaying breast-feeding at the time of immunization, should be evaluated."

It is not difficult to comprehend what caused the flurry of interest in this study. Readers were obviously disturbed by the suggestion that women in the underdeveloped world temporarily stop breast feeding (often the only source of infant nutrition) in order to increase the vaccine's purported "efficacy." Are we to assume that these breast milk deprived infants should consume formula* in the interim? And to what end? So that the vaccine can generate a temporary spike in antibody production, which is no measure of real-world effectiveness?

*Note: Infant formula has been linked to 48 adverse effects, including increased mortality.