Health & Wellness
AFPTue, 02 Oct 2007 01:11 UTC
OTTAWA - A judge on Monday acquitted four doctors and a US pharmaceutical company who were accused of negligence in the distribution of blood contaminated with HIV in Canada's worst health scandal.
It was the first criminal trial in the case, in which more than 20,000 people contracted human immunodeficiency virus and hepatitis C in the 1980s and 1990s. At least 3,000 people died, including 800 from AIDS.
University researchers have shown that micro-needles are a safer and less painful way of delivering vaccines and other medicines than a conventional hypodermic syringe.
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©Cardiff University
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The scale of an array of micro-needles shown against a 1p piece.
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©unknown
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Topps Meat. Co. is recalling some of its hamburgers after a cluster of illnesses in the Northeast caused by E. coli bacteria.
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It sounds like science fiction but it's true: A killer amoeba living in lakes enters the body through the nose and attacks the brain where it feeds until you die.
Even though encounters with the microscopic bug are extraordinarily rare, it's killed six boys and young men this year. The spike in cases has health officials concerned, and they are predicting more cases in the future.
"This is definitely something we need to track," said Michael Beach, a specialist in recreational waterborne illnesses for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
WASHINGTON - Congressional Democrats have chosen an unlikely source to pay for the bulk of their proposed $35 billion increase in children's health coverage: people with relatively little money and education.
The program expansion passed by the House and Senate last week would be financed with a 156 percent increase in the federal cigarette tax, taking it to $1 per pack from the current 39 cents. Low-income people smoke more heavily than do wealthier people in the United States, making cigarette taxes a regressive form of revenue.
The Food and Drug Administration does very little to ensure the safety of the millions of people who participate in clinical trials, a federal investigator has found.
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In a report due to be released Friday, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, Daniel R. Levinson, said federal health officials did not know how many clinical trials were being conducted, audited fewer than 1 percent of the testing sites and, on the rare occasions when inspectors did appear, generally showed up long after the tests had been completed.
As clear-thinking people, natural health consumers sometimes look at the actions of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and wonder what planet its decision makers seem to be from. It's like the FDA is living in a completely different world than the rest of us -- a world where nutrients are dangerous, but synthetic chemicals are perfectly safe for human consumption.
In fact, the idea that FDA bureaucrats and modern medicine promoters are living in a different reality is not far from the truth. I my view, FDA decision makers have no connection with reality. They're simply operating on a system of false beliefs and circular reasoning that justifies their efforts to protect Big Pharma profits by exploiting, misleading and directly harming the public.
A large US study suggests that it did not matter whether women drank beer, wine or spirits, they all raised the risk of breast cancer to the same extent. And more than three alcoholic drinks a day raised breast cancer risk by 30 per cent, compared to women who had less than one drink a day, said the researchers.
Rochelle Schwartz-Bloom, a Duke University pharmacology professor who left the lab bench to focus on science education, has developed a tactic for keeping students hands in the air at the end of class.
"What does get students' attention?" she and her co-authors asked in their new research article on fostering science literacy. "Sex, drugs and rock-n-roll, of course."
This will come as little surprise to most parents: Children who have older brothers tend to become more aggressive than those with older sisters, according to a new study.
The study generated a host of nuanced findings: