Twelve countries have reported suspected cases of narcolepsy linked to swine flu jabs, the World Health Organisation said on Tuesday as its scientists said the findings warranted more investigation.

The WHO said in a statement that such sleep disorders, mainly in youngsters, had not been seen with vaccines in the past, and were more frequent in Sweden, Finland and Iceland than in other countries.

However, the UN health agency decided to keep its advice in favour of vaccination, including with the Pandemrix vaccine highlighted in the study, because it still felt the benefits outweighed a relatively small risk, spokeswoman Alison Brunier said.

Narcolepsy is a sleep disorder which causes extreme fatigue and often results in the patient falling soundly asleep without warning, even in the middle of an activity.

The Pandemrix vaccine made by GlaxoSmithKline was used in 47 countries worldwide during 2009-2010, according to WHO, and was included by the agency in donations made to poor nations during the flu pandemic.

City council has voted to eliminate fluoride from the city's drinking water.

In doing so, aldermen decided not to put the issue to plebiscite or to an expert panel being offered up by the University of Calgary.

Ald. Druh Farrell, who has spearheaded the effort to get the additive out of Calgary's water, said it is a matter of ethics.

She said there are other alternatives to fluoridating water that gives people a choice.

Farrell points to Europe where the additive is not in the water, but the fluoridated salt can be purchased instead.

Sugar-free fizzy drinks could lead to a greater risk of a heart attack or stroke, research revealed today.

The study of more than 2,500 people found that those who consumed diet drinks every day had a 61 per cent higher chance of experiencing vascular problems than those who did not have any kind of carbonated drink.

Hannah Gardener, who led the study, said: 'If our results are confirmed with future studies, then it would suggest that diet soda may not be the optimal substitute for sugar-sweetened beverages for protection against vascular outcomes.'

The research, presented at the American Stroke Association's international stroke conference in Los Angeles, was carried out by the University of Miami.

The 2,564 participants had to state whether they drank diet fizzy drinks, regular fizzy drinks, a mixture of the two or none at all.

Researchers said the survey did not include data on the types of diet and regular drinks consumed however, which could have given further information on how drinking different brands affected participants.

Dr Gardener, an epidemiologist at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, said further studies would have to be carried out to explore how consuming diet drinks potentially raised the risk of vascular problems.

Significant study published in journal Cancer.

An inadequate amount of sleep has been associated with higher risks of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and death. Now colon cancer can be added to the list.

In a ground-breaking new study published in the Feb. 15, 2011 issue of the journal Cancer, researchers from University Hospitals (UH) Case Medical Center and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, found that individuals who averaged less than six hours of sleep at night had an almost 50 percent increase in the risk of colorectal adenomas compared with individuals sleeping at least seven hours per night. Adenomas are a precursor to cancer tumors, and left untreated, they can turn malignant.

"To our knowledge, this is the first study to report a significant association of sleep duration and colorectal adenomas," said Li Li, MD, PhD, the study's principal investigator, family medicine physician in the Department of Family Medicine at UH Case Medical Center and Associate Professor of Family Medicine, Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. "A short amount of sleep can now be viewed as a new risk factor for the development of the development of colon cancer."

A new study from Utrecht and Cambridge Universities has for the first time found that an administration of testosterone under the tongue in volunteers negatively affects a person's ability to 'mind read', an indication of empathy. The findings are published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In addition, the effects of testosterone administration are predicted by a fetal marker of prenatal testosterone, the 2D:4D ratio. The study has important implications for the androgen theory of autism (testosterone is an androgen) and confirms earlier rodent research that shows that testosterone in early brain development organizes the activation of the very hormone in later life.

Professor Jack van Honk at the University of Utrecht and Professor Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge designed the study that was conducted in Utrecht. They used the 'Reading the Mind in the Eyes' task as the test of mind reading, which tests how well someone can infer what a person is thinking or feeling from photographs of facial expressions from around the eyes.

A group of Cambridge scientists have successfully identified the mechanism that drives our internal 24-hour clock, or circadian rhythm. It occurs not only in human cells, but has also been found in other life forms such as algae, and has been dated back millions of years. Whilst the research promises a better understanding of the problems associated with shift-work and jet-lag, this mechanism has also been proven to be responsible for sleep patterns, seasonal shifts and even the migration of butterflies.

The study from the Institute of Metabolic Science at the University of Cambridge discovered that red blood cells contain this 24-hour rhythm. In the past, scientists assumed this rhythm came from DNA and gene activity but unlike most cells, red blood cells do not contain DNA.

During this study, the Cambridge scientists incubated healthy red blood cells in the dark at body temperature for several days, sampling them at regular intervals. It was discovered that the levels of peroxiredoxins (proteins that are produced in blood), underwent a 24-hour cycle. Virtually all known organisms contain peroxiredoxins.

"The implications of this for health are manifold," said Akhilesh Reddy, lead author of the study. "We already know that disrupted clocks - for example, caused by shift-work and jet-lag - are associated with metabolic disorders such as diabetes, mental health problems and even cancer. By furthering our knowledge of how the 24-hour clock in cells works, we hope that the links to these disorders - and others - will be made clearer. This will, in the longer term, lead to new therapies that we couldn't even have thought about a couple of years ago."

The outgoing Minister for Agriculture has said that the sale of food products made from genetically modified ingredients will be tolerated in Ireland.

Brendan Smith has said today in a statement that Ireland had "altered its voting position" and will back proposals from the EU Commission "aimed at authorising the placing on the market of food, food ingredients and feed containing, consisting of, or produced from genetically modified maize and cotton".

Smith also said that Ireland would now tolerate "the low-level presence of, as yet, unauthorised GM varieties in imports of animal food".

The statement of the U-turn on the attitude towards GM food products came after a meeting of the EU Standing Committee on the Food Chain and Animal Health in Brussels today.

Children brought up on healthy diets are more intelligent compared with their junk food eating counterparts, new research suggests.

Toddlers fed a diet packed high in fats, sugars, and processed foods had lower IQs than those fed pasta, salads and fruit, it was found.

The effect is so great that researchers from the University of Bristol said those children with a "healthier" diet may get an IQ boost.

Scientists stressed good diet was vital in a child's early life as the brain grows at its fastest rate during the first three years of life.

This indicated head growth at this time is linked to intellectual ability and "it is possible that good nutrition during this period may encourage optimal brain growth".

Scientists tracked the long term health and wellbeing of around 14,000 children born in 1991 and 1992 as part of the West Country's Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC).

After last week's article many of you asked about a natural alternative to sugar and artificial sweeteners: stevia. It is widely used in the low carb community to satisfy sugar cravings or simply add a touch of sweetness to a hot beverage or dessert, but should it be? What is stevia? Is it safe? What is its effect on insulin, if any, and does it have a place in a Primal Blueprint eating strategy? Let's investigate.

Stevia is an herbaceous family of plants, 240 species strong, that grows in sub-tropical and tropical America (mostly South and Central, but some North). Stevia the sweetener refers to stevia rebaudiana, the plant and its leaves, which you can grow and use as or with tea (it was traditionally paired with yerba mate in South America) or, dried and powdered, as a sugar substitute that you sprinkle on. It's apparently quite easy to grow (according to the stevia seller who tries to get me to buy a plant or two whenever I'm at the Santa Monica farmers' market), and the raw leaf is very sweet.

Most stevia you'll come across isn't in its raw, unprocessed form, but in powdered or liquid extract form. The "sweet" lies in the steviol glycosides - stevioside and rebaudioside - which are isolated in these extracts. Some products use just one, while others use both stevioside and rebaudioside. Stevioside is the most prevalent glycoside in stevia, and some say it provides the bitter aftertaste that people sometimes complain about; rebaudioside is said to be the better tasting steviol glycoside, with far less bitterness. Most of the "raw or natural" stevia products use the full range of glycosides, but the more processed brands will most likely isolate one or more of the steviol glycosides. The popular Truvia brand of stevia products uses only rebaudioside, as do both PureVia and Enliten. Different brands provide different conversion rates, but compared to sucrose, stevioside is generally about 250-300 times as sweet and rebaudioside is about 350-450 times as sweet.

If you're looking for the name of a new pill to "ask your doctor about," as the ads say, the Mayo Clinic Health Information site is not the place for you. If you're shopping for a newly branded disorder that might account for your general feeling of unease, Mayo is not for you either. But if you want workaday, can-do health information in a nonprofit environment, plug your symptoms into Mayo's Symptom Checker. What you'll get is: No hysteria. No drug peddling. Good medicine. Good ideas.

This is very, very rare on the medical Web, which is dominated by an enormous and powerful site whose name - oh, what the hay, it's WebMD - has become a panicky byword among laysurfers for "hypochondria time suck." In more whistle-blowing quarters, WebMD is synonymous with Big Pharma Shilling. A February 2010 investigation into WebMD's relationship with drug maker Eli Lilly by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa confirmed the suspicions of longtime WebMD users. With the site's (admitted) connections to pharmaceutical and other companies, WebMD has become permeated with pseudomedicine and subtle misinformation.

Because of the way WebMD frames health information commercially, using the meretricious voice of a pharmaceutical rep, I now recommend that anyone except advertising executives whose job entails monitoring product placement actually block WebMD. It's not only a waste of time, but it's also a disorder in and of itself - one that preys on the fear and vulnerability of its users to sell them half-truths and, eventually, pills.

But if careering around the Web doing symptom searches is your bag (and, come on, we've all been there), there's still MayoClinic.com. Where WebMD is a corporation that started as an ad-supported health-alarmism site with revenues of $504 million in 2010, the Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit medical-practice-and-research group that started as a clinic. Mayo's storied past as the country's premier research hospital, in Rochester, Minn., and its storied present as one of Fortune's "100 Best Companies to Work For" surface in the integrity of the site itself, which - though not ad-free - is spare and neatly organized, with the measured, learned voice of the best doctors. The byline for most entries is "Mayo Clinic staff." The integrity of the whole institution is on the line with this site, and the Mayo Clinic has every motivation to keep its information authoritative and up to date.