Parents who fail to vaccinate their children should face barriers to enrolling them in school and childcare centres, the Australian Medical Association says.

Only one state, NSW, requires childcare centres to ask for proof of vaccination when children enrol.

And Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory aren't required to ask about immunisation status when children enrol for school, the Federal Department of Health and Ageing has warned.

AMA president Dr Steve Hambleton says parents who don't vaccinate their children should be forced to produce a conscientious objection form.

This extra step is not currently required by schools.

''If they have to fill out a form it means they will have to make a conscious decision about whether they want to vaccinate or not,'' he says.

The act of asking parents to produce the form may be all that is required to prompt them to vaccinate their children, he says.

''We should make it difficult for parents so they do have to think twice about whether they vaccinate their children. As I say they have got a responsibility to their own children and they've got a responsibility to the community's children,'' he said.

The AMA's call came as new data on immunisation shows many local areas in Australia's big cities have such low immunisation rates children are at-risk of catching deadly diseases.

New parents can be overwhelmed taking care of a newborn, but one birth consultant thinks one way to help parents cope is by literally not cutting the cord.

Mary Ceallaigh, a birth consultant and doula from Austin, Texas, is preaching the benefits of "umbilical nonseverance" which involves letting the umbilical cord fall off naturally after birth.Ceallaigh, 47, says the practice is also called having a "lotus birth" can help mothers and babies bond.

"It is a trend getting more notice in western culture particularly among holistically inclined people," said Ceallaigh. "[It's] just as another way to create optimal beginnings for babies."

While the practice may seem like a new-age remedy gone haywire, Ceallaigh says the ritual actually comes from traditional Balinese practices. Parents care for the newborn, while also lugging around the baby's attached placenta.

"A lot of people they don't understand that the baby, the placenta, they're all made from the same cells," said Ceallaigh. "It's not some kind of waste material the body produces separately."

When the umbilical cord is not cut, it naturally seals off after about an hour after birth. The umbilical cord and attached placenta will fully detach from the baby anywhere from two to 10 days after the birth.

Rampant over-prescribing of drugs contributes to a system that is better at producing disorders than rectifying them.

In a recent article on the BBC News website, Professor Peter Kinderman - head of the Institute of Psychology, Health and Society at the University of Liverpool - warns that the forthcoming edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual "will lower many diagnostic thresholds and increase the number of people in the general population seen as having a mental illness".

According to Kinderman, the manual - scheduled for publication in May 2013 - constitutes a dangerous effort to pathologise emotions and other symptoms of human existence and will exacerbate the rampant over-prescribing of drugs that already occurs "despite significant side-effects and poor evidence of their effectiveness".

The practice of attributing emotional distress and other phenomena to alleged cerebral/biological abnormalities rather than to social and psychological causes, writes Kinderman, is particularly problematic: "Standard psychiatric diagnoses... do not correspond to meaningful clusters of symptoms in the real world" and can counter-productively result in "further stigma, discrimination and social exclusion" for their recipients.

France's Ministry for Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy has requested the country's Agency for food, health and occupational health and safety (Anses) to prepare a proposal to restrict the use of bisphenol A (BPA) in thermal receipt paper at EU level. Anses says it is still waiting for a detailed request from the ministry.

The ministry says it will facilitate discussions with stakeholders to support substitution of this application of BPA in order to allow a ban to be effected as quickly as possible.

How Gluten Induced Malnutrition Effects Testosterone Levels

Gluten is known to effect the production of hormones in both men and women. Studies have shown that gluten can disrupt the endocrine system leading to reduced hormone production. Another one of the detrimental mechanisms of gluten is nutritional loss via malabsorption of vitamins and minerals from food. These loses can also lead to hormone disruption as well. The following diagram illustrates some of the commonly known effects of nutritional deficiency on testosterone (test) levels. Many of the male patients that come to visit me are experiencing multiple symptoms of testosterone deficiency.Low libido

• Low energy
• inability to gain muscle even when working out

All these symptoms added up equates to a man without the ability to be Manly. If you have visited your doctor and been identified as having low levels of testosterone, you should insist that your doctor help you investigate the possibility of gluten sensitivity as well as nutritional deficiencies.

Some imported rice has levels of lead high enough to pose health risks, especially to children, scientists found.

An analysis of rice imported from Asia, Europe and South America showed levels far beyond FDA recommendations, researchers said at the National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans on Monday.

"Such findings present a situation that is particularly worrisome given that infants and children are especially vulnerable to the effects of lead poisoning," lead researcher Tsanangurayi Tongesayi said in a press release. "For infants and children, the daily exposure levels from eating the rice products analyzed in this study would be 30-60 times higher than the FDA's provisional total tolerable intake (PTTI) levels. Asians consume more rice, and for these infants and children, exposures would be 60-120 times higher. For adults, the daily exposure levels were 20-40 times higher than the PTTI levels."

The analysis follows a recent report that more than half a million kids in the United States had blood lead levels of conern in 2010. That report was based on new guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that parents of children with lead levels of 5 micrograms per deciliter should be alerted. In the past, the standard was 10 micrograms per decileter.

The good news? Overall, lead levels in children have dropped. The average fell to 1.3 micrograms per decileter using the data from 2007-2010.

Rice from Taiwan, China, Czech Republic, Bhutan, Italy, India and Thailand had the highest amounts of lead. Researchers are still analyzing samples from Pakistan, Brazil and other countries.

My interest in iron metabolism began around 1986 when I read an article published in The Mayo Clinic Proceedings by Virgil Fairbanks who was then chief of iron metabolism. His article, "Hemochromatosis or Iron Overload - the Neglected Diagnosis" was a scathing attack on the medical profession for ignoring excess iron in the body. Physicians were more interested in anaemias and low iron deficiency and did not really perform the necessary tests of iron metabolism to diagnose the opposite end of the spectrum - iron overload. He described conditions directly related to excess iron in the body such as arthritis, diabetes, psychiatric illness, and liver disease.

These conditions were very common in my medical practice, and I decided to find out how many of my patients had excess iron, and it turned out to be a significant number, as many as 30% of my patients. When I began to lower the iron levels, my patients improved, and I published some research articles on the subject in some rather prestigious medical journals. By 1989, doctors began publishing research which showed that iron was also a risk factor in cancer at levels that were far less than what they had thought safe in the past. In September 1992, a classic article in Circulation by Jerome Sullivan showed that excess iron was also a risk factor in heart disease, second only to cigarette smoking as a cause of heart attacks in men. Sullivan's study sent shock waves through the medical and nutritional communities because doctors have been prescribing supplementary iron, and nutritionists have been insisting that food be fortified with iron, and this was a reminder that excess iron is very dangerous. In the following year, studies were published which showed that vitamin E and vitamin C reduced the rates of heart attacks and angina, and when you put all of these studies together, you realize that iron is capable of inducing free radical or oxidative pathology.

A kindergartner in New York is banned from attending her school until she gets a chicken pox shot, but because her newborn baby sister has a rare condition, she could risk killing her if she received it.

If five-year-old FrankieElizabeth Warner gets the vaccine, doctors say she could kill her newborn sister who has an auto-immune disorder.

The vaccine's pathogens make the baby susceptible to getting the chickenpox, as she is not strong enough to fight it off.

I'm sure many of you have seen reports on a recent study published in the journal Nature suggesting a possible mechanism linking red meat consumption to heart disease. The day after one such report was published in the New York Times, I received numerous emails and numerous Facebook and Twitter messages from concerned red meat enthusiasts. This is understandable, but rest assured it's not yet time to switch over to soy burgers.

The researchers in this study published a paper a while back proposing that a chemical called TMAO (trimethylamine N-oxide) increases the risk of heart disease. In this study, they hypothesized that eating red meat may increase levels of TMAO in the bloodstream, which would in turn ramp up your chances of having a heart attack. Sounds plausible, right?

There's another hypothesis that also seemed plausible for why red meat increases the risk of heart disease (if we even accept that, which I do not; more on this in a moment). It's called the "diet-heart hypothesis", and you're all very well aware of it whether you know it by name or not. It holds that eating cholesterol and saturated fat increase cholesterol levels in the blood, and high cholesterol levels in the blood cause heart disease. This theory became so widely accepted that few people even question it anymore. The problem is it's simply not true. Recent research has shown that dietary saturated fat and cholesterol are not associated with heart disease after all, and even if they were, high cholesterol levels in the blood are not the culprit. I've written about this extensively in the past, and I will be starting a brand new series with updated information this month.

If you're paleo or Bulletproof, by now you may have heard about the New York Times and Forbes articles on a new study about red meat purporting to link it to heart disease. This post is to protect your meat rights with accurate, unbiased science.

Most people know at least one person who has - or will have - heart disease. Hundreds of commercials each day advertise drugs for heart disease. A constant drumbeat of news articles condemns saturated fat and meat as the culprit in heart disease, fueling fear with attention grabbing headlines.

Heart disease impacts all of society, even if we aren't going to get it because we have sky high HDL ("good" cholesterol) and near zero inflammation.

That's why scientists are working on novel ways to understand heart disease, and also why it's so tempting to use breakthrough research to write catchy news headlines demonizing red meat. Let's dig in on the last high profile recent news and see what it actually means for you and your health.