A rare but difficult-to-treat bacterial infection that usually strikes people with impaired immune systems is showing up for the first time in healthy individuals getting tattoos, the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported today.

Two cases of skin infections caused by this bacterium, called Mycobacterium haemophilum, have occurred in individuals receiving tattoos in the Seattle area, the CDC said.

These bacteria are in the same family as those that cause tuberculosis and leprosy. Symptoms of the infection include small bumps at the site of infection, in addition to redness, pain, swelling and discharge, the researchers said.

The infection is not responsive to traditional antibiotic treatments, and even with the right drugs, can take months to heal.

Because of the rarity of the infections, tattoo aficionados shouldn't be too worried, the researchers say.

But the researchers want to increase awareness of these infections so doctors know to look for them, said study researcher Meagan Kay, a CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer with the public health department in Seattle and King County.

"Clinicians should consider this bacterium as a potential cause of skin infections in persons who have recently received a tattoo," Kay said.

Every mom wants a little peace and quiet. But some moms are taking drastic measures to get it.

In our TODAY Moms and Parenting.com poll of more than 26,000 mothers, one in five admitted to giving their children medicine such as Benadryl or Dramamine to get through a big event, like a long car ride or plane trip.

More disturbing: One in 12 moms confessed to regularly dosing their kids with sleep-inducing medication, just to get some peace and quiet on a normal night.

Moms wrote to us anonymously:

"I give my younger daughter Benadryl and Tylenol almost every night - she loves the taste and begs for it."

"I gave my child Benadryl to go to sleep - years later now, I am still embarrassed to admit it."

"I gave my child Benadryl when he was mildly congested to guarantee he would fall asleep on time so I could get to bed at a decent hour."

"I suspect that one in five is low," said Dr. Nancy Snyderman, NBC's chief medical editor, who says parents should talk to their pediatricians about proper dosage. (She adds that every doctor she knows who's also a parent has tried this trick at some point, so don't feel shy about telling your doctor.)

A hit of Benadryl before a long trip is pretty standard practice, though it may not win you Mother of the Year award (except maybe from your fellow passengers on a cross-country flight).

People from different economic classes have fundamentally different ways of thinking about the world, according to research recently published in Current Directions in Psychological Science.

The authors of the study said the findings have important, but overlooked, implications for public policy.

"Americans, although this is shifting a bit, kind of think class is irrelevant," said Dacher Keltner of the University of California-Berkeley, who cowrote the article with Michael W. Kraus of UC-San Francisco and Paul K. Piff of UC-Berkeley.

"I think our studies are saying the opposite: This is a profound part of who we are."

A study published in Psychological Science in November, for instance, found that people of upper-class status have trouble recognizing the emotions other people are feeling. People of lower-class status do a much better job.

"What I think is really interesting about that is, it kind of shows there's all this strength to the lower class identity: greater empathy, more altruism, and finer attunement to other people," Keltner said.

When are our adult food preferences formed? According to new research they are ingrained in us very early in the womb.

New research by the Monell Chemical Senses Center finds that mothers can influence a baby's palate and food memories before it is born by introducing foods to her unborn child. In the womb, the baby is surrounded and nourished on the amniotic fluid, which is filled with the flavors of what the mom has eaten.

"Things like vanilla, carrot, garlic, anise, mint -- these are some of the flavors that have been shown to be transmitted to amniotic fluid or mother's milk," Julie Mennella, a researcher at Monell, told National Public Radio (NPR).

At 21 weeks after conception, a developing baby weighs about as much as a can of soda and he or she can taste it, too. Still in the womb, the growing baby gulps down several ounces of amniotic fluid daily.

That fluid surrounding the baby is actually flavored by the foods and beverages the mother has eaten in the last few hours, forming memories of these flavors even before birth. These memories result in preferences for these foods or odors for a lifetime.

To study this theory, researchers gave women garlic capsules or sugar capsules before taking a routine sample of their amniotic fluid and then asked a panel of people to smell the samples.

"And it was easy," says Mennella. "They could pick out the samples easily from the women who ate garlic." The sense of taste is actually 90 percent smell, she added, so they knew just from the odor that the babies could taste it.

In a recent article I wrote on my other blog, 9 Steps to Perfect Health - #1: Nourish Your Body, I explained that saturated (SFA) and monounsaturated fats (MFA) are the preferred fuel source of the body. Another important benefit of LCSFA, and to a lesser degree MFA, is that they are stable at high temperatures and thus the safest fats to cook with.

With this in mind, here's a list of my favorite cooking fats. Not just because they're safe to cook with, but because they taste so good.

The following picture displays some of the more common manifestations of gluten induced diseases. Problem is, many people, doctors, nutritionists, and the media are mostly in the dark when it comes to the different diseases linked to this food protein.

The history of medicine has more skeletons in its closet than causalities from all wars combined. All deadly medical "innovations" begin with good intentions, conceived and promoted on seemingly logical, reasonable, and scientific principles. Only after millions of deaths does it become obvious that the logic was wrong, the reasoning - opportunistic, and the science - pure quackery. If it could have happened before, it can still happen today. And it does...

You may recall that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) was all the rage until the summer of 2002. Then, in a flash - after 15 million women were told to stop it - the rage turned into outrage: HRT had been found to increase the risk of breast cancer by 26%, heart attack by 29%, stroke by 41% [1], and ovarian cancer by 58%[2].

- Oh, boy!

- Yes, a classical case of wishful thinking turning into a Faustian bargain...

But the initial reasoning in favor of hormone replacement therapy seemed well-intentioned and bulletproof:

This method of qualitative analysis is called deductive reasoning, made famous by the immortal character of Sherlock Holmes. Deductive reasoning uses a core assumption - low hormones cause aging and diseases - to arrive at the end result - replacing lost hormones [with patch or pill containing estrogen and progesterone - ed.] will defer aging and prevent disease.

Deductive reasoning works well only when the core assumptions are correct. In this case the core assumption (that low hormones are villains) was wrong, and so were the results - more deaths and disease, not less. The investigators had also reported that there were "no clear benefits for those taking estrogen plus progestin on any of the quality of life measures"[3], that "older women taking combination hormone therapy had twice the rate of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease."[4], and that women over fifty had "two-fold higher" [5] risk of developing venous thrombosis. Venous thrombosis is the precursor to pulmonary embolism - the blockage of return blood flow to the lungs by wayward blood clots.

As expected, the renouncement of HRT was a huge success - by 2003, breast cancer rates alone were down 7%, and have kept dropping ever since. And, ironically, for the first time in many years the life expectancy of American women nudged up as well - a stern lesson to those would-be Gods so eager to challenge Mother Nature.

This catastrophic outcome of hormone replacement therapy brings up a troublesome question: If well-meaning doctors, top-flight researchers, meticulous pharmacists, inquisitive media, and stringent government overseers - irony implied and intended - could get it so wrong on HRT, can they get it wrong again on another, even grander-scale health improvement scheme?

By the end of this page, I'll prove to you beyond reasonable doubt that they can. I will also explain why. Obviously, the scheme in question is omnipresent dietary fiber. This time around, though, it isn't just middle-aged postmenopausal women who are hooked "on fiber." It's almost all Americans, of both genders and of all ages.

Strange but true: the brain is shaped by bacteria in the digestive tract

People may advise you to listen to your gut instincts: now research suggests that your gut may have more impact on your thoughts than you ever realized. Scientists from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the Genome Institute of Singapore led by Sven Pettersson recently reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that normal gut flora, the bacteria that inhabit our intestines, have a significant impact on brain development and subsequent adult behavior.

We human beings may think of ourselves as a highly evolved species of conscious individuals, but we are all far less human than most of us appreciate. Scientists have long recognized that the bacterial cells inhabiting our skin and gut outnumber human cells by ten-to-one. Indeed, Princeton University scientist Bonnie Bassler compared the approximately 30,000 human genes found in the average human to the more than 3 million bacterial genes inhabiting us, concluding that we are at most one percent human. We are only beginning to understand the sort of impact our bacterial passengers have on our daily lives.

Moreover, these bacteria have been implicated in the development of neurological and behavioral disorders. For example, gut bacteria may have an influence on the body's use of vitamin B6, which in turn has profound effects on the health of nerve and muscle cells. They modulate immune tolerance and, because of this, they may have an influence on autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis. They have been shown to influence anxiety-related behavior, although there is controversy regarding whether gut bacteria exacerbate or ameliorate stress related anxiety responses. In autism and other pervasive developmental disorders, there are reports that the specific bacterial species present in the gut are altered and that gastrointestinal problems exacerbate behavioral symptoms. A newly developed biochemical test for autism is based, in part, upon the end products of bacterial metabolism.

In last 4 yrs, 1,725 persons have died in clinical trials; weak law compounds risks

New Delhi, India: For the first time since 2010 when six tribal girls from Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh involved in the clinical trials of anti-cervical cancer HPV vaccine died, the government has admitted that 1,725 persons have lost their lives to drug trials in the last four years.

The number of deaths has risen from 132 in 2007 and 288 in 2008 to 637 in 2009 and 668 last year, indicating the complete ineffectiveness of regulatory controls over the $400 million sector. Last year, the government gave compensation in just 22 cases out of the 668 that resulted in deaths due to "serious adverse events" during drug trials, Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad told Parliament this week.

Currently, 1,868 clinical trials are going on as per the Clinical Trial Registry of India maintained by the office of the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI). Many of the drugs being tested are not even of specific relevance to the country and could have been tested anywhere. Equally shocking is the fact that the rules, under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, entirely trust the trial investigator with the reason attributed for the death of a subject. This is resulting in gross under-reporting of actual deaths during clinical trials.

Washington - Three-dimensional movies might not be worth their high ticket price.

Moviegoers who watch 3-D films do not experience more intense emotional reactions or a greater sense of "being there" than those who watch 2-D movies, a new study finds. The 3-D versions also don't help you remember the movie better than 2-D versions.

The 3-D movies did, on the other hand, come with a risk of discomfort. Compared with 2-D movie watchers, 3-D movie-watchers were about three times more likely to have eyestrain, headache or trouble with vision, the study showed.

Some people may still prefer to see 3-D movies because they like the movie for other reasons, such as snazzy special effects, the researchers said.

But "all other things being equal, I would say you're increasing your chances of having some discomfort," said study researcher L. Mark Carrier, of California State University, Dominguez Hills, who studies the affects of technology on psychological processes.

Consumers should know "they're aren't going to be any benefits in terms of understanding the movie better or making the movie more meaningful, as far as we can tell," Carrier said.

Carrier presented his work here on Sunday (Aug. 7) at the America Psychological Association's annual meeting. The work has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.