Hugh Hefner might be postponing any upcoming Playboy parties due to a health epidemic at the mansion.

Hugh Hefner is preparing to marry Playboy playmate Crystal Harris but he has quite a large problem on his hands. It turns out that the Playboy Mansion is under investigation by the Health Department after a recent health epidemic began.

Earlier this month, Hugh Hefner held a party at the famous Playboy Mansion and things did not end so well. It turns out that guests at the party suffered severe respiratory problems and the Health Department is now officially investigating. The source of the epidemic is unknown at the moment but many believe it had something to do with the Grotto or a fog machine that was on site.

Hopefully this health debacle at Playboy HQ is all cleared up in time for the Hugh Hefner - Crystal Harris wedding; we wouldn't want the guests there coughing during the ceremony now would we?

Singapore- The number of flu cases in Singapore has gone higher than the epidemic levels first seen in January.

In the week after Lunar New Year, the number of patients seeking treatment for flu at polyclinics was 21,204 - the highest since the start of the year.

That's 15 per cent more than when the epidemic threshold was first crossed in the second week of January, with more than 18,377 cases.

The Health Ministry said most people with flu recover with rest and treatment.

It has advised flu vaccinations for those in the vulnerable groups, such as very young children, the elderly and patients with chronic diseases.

The parents of a 2-year-old Houston boy who died from a rare infection are suing makers of recalled alcohol prep products, claiming contaminated wipes and swabs transmitted bacteria that caused his fatal case of meningitis.

Sandra and Shanoop Kothari say their lively, dark-eyed toddler, Harrison, was recovering just fine from surgery to remove a benign cyst from near his brain and spinal cord last fall. But the day before he was set to be discharged after a week's stay, he developed a sudden and severe infection that worsened rapidly, causing multi-organ failure that led to Harrison's death on Dec. 1, 2010.


Cultures showed he succumbed to acute bacterial meningitis caused by Bacillus cereus, bacteria typically found in rare food poisoning outbreaks, but not in hospital infections.

This is yet another example of the US medical-industrial complex run amok. Lyme is one of the most serious epidemics of our time. Yet the opinions of 2% of the medical community are dominating the beliefs and practices of the mass majority of practicing Lyme physicians!

The number of Lyme disease cases in the United States has doubled since 1991. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that there are nearly 325,000 new cases each year - making Lyme disease an epidemic larger than AIDS, West Nile Virus, and Avian Flu combined. Yet, only a fraction of these cases are being treated, due to inaccurate tests and under-reporting. Each year, hundreds of thousands go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed, often told that their symptoms are all in their head.

You may well ask, "If it's such a huge epidemic, why are we not hearing anything about it?" The media is silent because doctors and insurance companies alike dismiss it as being a hypochondriacal illness, just as they've done for years to sufferers of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. It can be expensive to treat - untold numbers have it, and there is no protocol that is completely effective for all patients, no sure-fire cure. And at the root of it all, one Lyme disease organization, in its desire for power and control, is pitting doctors against doctors, prompting health insurance companies to deny medical claims at an alarming rate, and leaving suffering patients stuck in the middle.

Lyme disease (named after the town of Lyme, Connecticut, where a number of cases were identified in 1975) is a seriously complex multi-system inflammatory disease that is triggered by the bacterial lipoproteins (BLPs) produced by spiral-shaped bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi, also called Bb. Bb are difficult to isolate, grow, and study in the laboratory. Moreover, there are five subspecies of Bb, over 100 strains in the US, and 300 strains worldwide. This diversity is thought to contribute to its ability to evade the immune system and antibiotic therapy, leading to chronic infection.

This threat to edible corn comes on top of GE alfalfa (a major, major threat to organic agriculture) and GE sugarbeets. Please take action on this vital issue.

Last Friday, the US Department of Agriculture announced it would deregulate a type of industrial corn genetically engineered to produce an enzyme that speeds the breakdown of starch into sugar, which would increase efficiency in making ethanol. The agency concluded the crop does not pose a plant risk.

For once, natural health advocates are voicing the same concerns as the corn industry. The Center for Food Safety says that bio-fuel corn "will inevitably contaminate food-grade corn, and could well trigger substantial rejection in our corn export markets, hurting farmers."

Five major US trade associations whose member companies process and export corn and corn products agree. They say the product - if inadvertently commingled with general commodity corn at even very low levels - will have significant adverse effects on food product quality and performance.

The Haitian cholera epidemic appears to be subsiding, just as a United Nations' fact finding mission is due to arrive in Port-au-Prince. The U.N. group is charged with investigating the origins of the outbreak and reporting to the Haitian government and the United Nations sometime in March 2011. Genetic testing of cholera from Haiti suggested a close relationship to cholera outbreaks in South Asia. The U.N. has troops from Nepal stationed in the region where the Haitian cholera epidemic originated and they have been accused of being the source of the contagion.

According to the Haitian Government's Ministère de la Santé Publique et de la Population (MSPP) as of Feb. 2 there had been 220,784 cases of cholera since the outbreak began in October 2010, and 4,334 related deaths. The number of new cases has fallen from a high of 4,000 per day in mid December to less than 1,000 per day. The number of deaths per day has fallen, as well, from over 120 per day to fewer than 10.

The United States has provided over $44 million in aid thus far for the cholera epidemic. One year after the Great Haitian Earthquake, the U.S. has provided $1.17 billion in aid for quake assistance and relief.

A dramatic increase in brittle-bone diseases is forecast to hit a generation of British women at massive cost to the National Health Service. Clinicians report increasing numbers of younger women suffering low bone density, exposing them to higher risk of developing the porous bone disease osteoporosis in later life.

The shift comes as the number of people with the condition is already increasingly rapidly, due to the UK's ageing population.

Lifestyle issues such as dieting, lack of exercise, excessive drinking, smoking, contraceptive injections and high-factor sun block are being considered as contributing to a significant increase in the risk of contracting osteoporosis.

Experts fear all these factors could create a surge of fragile-bone disease when this generation of young women hits the menopause. Fractures are already at "epidemic proportions". Osteoporosis affects both sexes but is much more common in post-menopausal women, as it is often brought on by a lowering of oestrogen levels.

Hip fractures - frequently a symptom of brittle-bone disease - have increased by 17% in a decade in England, and there are about 230,000 fragility fractures in the UK every year. At present the cost of osteoporotic hip fractures to the NHS is an estimated £2bn a year. That is expected to rise to £3bn by 2020.

The disease, which is often only discovered after a serious fracture in older age, can be fatal. Almost one in 10 women over the age of 55 who are admitted with a hip fracture do not make it out of hospital alive.

Washington - Many food activists and public health researchers are ready to pin a substantial portion of blame for the nation's obesity epidemic on the skyrocketing consumption of high-fructose corn syrup, widely used to sweeten processed foods and beverages in the U.S. since the 1980s. But food and beverage makers are fighting back.

Glucose and fructose are both simple sugars - and equal parts of each is the recipe for table sugar. (High-fructose corn syrup is a bit more intensely sweet because it's made up of 55 percent fructose.) But scientists have long suspected there are differences in the way the human body processes these two forms of carbohydrate. But much of that research has been conducted on animals, leading many to question whether the human body makes any distinction between glucose and fructose.

More research on humans would help. And while a study published online in the March issue of the journal Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism raises more questions than it answers, it's a start.

Researchers at Oregon Health and Science University scanned the brains of nine healthy, normal-weight subjects in the minutes after each got an infusion of equal volumes of glucose, of fructose and of saline. The brain scans aimed to capture activity in a relatively small swath of the human brain in and around the hypothalamus, which plays a key but complex role in setting appetite levels and directing production of metabolic hormones.

As the mother of a child with food sensitivities and the owner of a store specializing in health and bulk foods, Liza Lukashevsky is relieved the federal government is strengthening ingredient-labelling rules.

It will make for a healthier population, says Lukashevsky, who runs the Nuthouse on Bloor St. W.

"Currently, a lot of food contains ingredients that are dangerous and a lot of people are unaware of that," she says.

The federal government announced Monday that food-labelling regulations are being revised to require manufacturers of prepacked products to clearly identify allergens and gluten sources. The aim is to help Canadians with food allergies, sensitivities and celiac disease to make more informed choices.