Settlement bars Airborne from saying any of its products prevents colds unless it can back up claims with evidence
Airborne Health, makers of a top-selling product marketed as a cold prevention and treatment remedy, signed a $7m (£4.5) settlement on Tuesday to settle false advertising claims levelled by 32 state attorneys general and the District of Columbia.
The settlement bars the company from claiming that any of its products fights germs, treats cold symptoms or prevents colds, flu and infections unless it can back up those claims with "reliable and competent scientific evidence".
Airborne was not able to supply such evidence, according to Washington attorney general senior counsel Robert Lipson.
Sydney - Sarcasm may be the lowest form of wit, but Australian scientists are using it to diagnose dementia, according to research published on Friday.
Researchers at the University of New South Wales found that patients under the age of 65 suffering from frontotemporal dementia (FTD), the second most common form of dementia, cannot detect when someone is being sarcastic.
The study, described by its authors as groundbreaking, helps explain why patients with the condition behave the way they do and why, for example, they are unable to pick up their caregivers' moods, the research showed.
"This is significant because if care-givers are angry, sad or depressed, the patient won't pick this up. It is often very upsetting for family members," said John Hodges, the senior author of the paper published in "Brain".
Martyn Brown and Anil Dawar
Daily ExpressMon, 15 Dec 2008 08:38 UTC
Millions face being struck down by a deadly winter vomiting bug sweeping the country. Scores of hospitals have been forced to close wards to new patients as they struggle to cope with the influx of norovirus sufferers.
One of London's leading hospitals has even had to turn away 999 emergency patients after being overwhelmed with cases of the virus, while another hospital has drafted in GPs to cover for staff hit by the bug.
As the crisis deepens, health campaigners are warning that hospitals face going into "complete meltdown" over Christmas and New Year.
I have referred more than once to the preeminent work of Judi Vance and her 1990s book,
"Beauty to Die For". This work began the trail of other that have slowly come forward to report on the very same concerns - there are
toxic chemicals in health and beauty products (HABA).
Now the information is coming from the medical establishment.
Even so-called 'natural brands' sold in health stores contain some of these questionable ingredients. And again I encourage you to read labels. Even if the FDA approved a single ingredient they do not test or approve mixtures of ingredients, and this is one place where problems start.
China has published a list of 17 acids, chemicals and other substances that have been banned as food additives, amid a four-month safety campaign following a scandal over tainted milk.
Illegal items posted on the Chinese health ministry's list include boric acid, a chemical used as an insecticide or flame retardant that is known to be added to noodles or the skin of dumplings to increase their elasticity.
Formaldehyde, applied to dried seafood to improve its appearance, but also commonly used as a disinfectant, was another dangerous substance on the banned list, published on the ministry's website late on Monday.
Some of the substances, such as the carcinogenic dye Sudan Red 1, had already been banned by the government, but this was the first official compilation of illegal food additives in China.
The crackdown comes after a scandal involved dairy products contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine.
U.S. scientists say they have developed a method of "fooling" a bacterium's evolutionary machinery into programming its own death.
Researchers at the University of Illinois and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst said their achievement shows a synthetic "hole punching" anti-microbial depends upon the presence of phosphoethanolamine -- a cone-shaped lipid found within Gram-negative bacterial membranes.
"The basic idea is for an antimicrobial to target something in a bacteria that, in order to gain immunity, would require the bacteria to kill itself through a suicide mutation," said UI Professor Gerard Wong, corresponding author of the study.
Chinese authorities have begun destroying and vaccinating poultry after an outbreak of bird flu was discovered in the east of the country, the agriculture ministry said Tuesday.
The deadly H5N1 strain of the virus was discovered on a chicken farm in Dongtai city and in another farm in Haian county both in eastern Jiangsu province, the ministry said in a statement posted on its website.
The discovery had prompted local agricultural authorities to step up vaccinations, while culling 377,000 chickens in the area around the farms.
The spread of the virus had not been detected in any other areas around the two farms, it added.
"Preliminary expert analysis from tests have found... The farm poultry could have been infected by migratory birds," it said.
Sinks installed in hospital rooms to prevent infections actually turned out to be the source of a superbug infection in a Toronto hospital that killed 12 people, a journal article says.
The deaths occurred in the surgical intensive care unit of Toronto General Hospital between December 2004 and March 2006. A total of 36 patients either became sick or carried the bacteria without illness.
The ICU had recently been renovated when patients started getting sick with a multi-drug-resistant strain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, but doctors couldn't figure out how it was being spread. The bacteria thrive in drains, where they form sludges called biofilms.
Australians traveling to Bali are being warned about an outbreak of rabies.
The Indonesian island was considered to be rabies free until the disease was diagnosed last week in two dogs in Kuta, a beach frequented by Australians. Rabies affects the brain and is almost always fatal without treatment. The usual incubation period for the disease is three to eight weeks.
The NT Department of Health and Families has issued a statement warning people visiting the island to avoid dogs, cats and monkeys.
When it comes to ordinary maladies, if you name it they will come
New terms for familiar ailments can result in more people seeking medication, says a study released Monday by researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
The study looked at the effect of using impressive-sounding medical terms for common conditions.
Someone who is told she has hyperhidrosis, for instance, may be more concerned than if her doctor calls it excessive perspiration. Similarly, pityriasis capitis sounds a lot scarier than dandruff.
Co-author Meredith Young says that conditions previously considered to be on the fringes of normal health, or associated with the normal aging process, are becoming seen as diseases that need to be treated.
Young, a graduate student, says this may be a direct result of what some medical professionals refer to as "disease-mongering," accusing pharmaceutical companies of creating new diseases in order to sell drugs. For example, if someone who may be going bald is convinced that he has a disease called androgenic alopecia, he may be more likely to seek a drug to treat it.
