Concerned about drug-resistant pathogens, medical professionals push to limit antibiotic use in animal farming

The evening's menu featured grass-fed, antibiotic-free beef over pasta, fresh seasonal vegetables and fresh organic peaches - items right at home in the city's finest restaurants.

Instead, the dishes were prepared for visitors, staff and bed-bound patients at Swedish Covenant Hospital.

The Northwest Side hospital is one of 300 across the nation that have pledged to improve the quality and sustainability of the food they serve, not just for the health of their patients but, they say, the health of the environment and the U.S. population.

For many of these institutions, the initiative includes buying antibiotic-free meats. Administrators say they hope increased demand for those products will reduce the use of antibiotics to treat cattle and other animals, which scientists believe helps pathogens become more resistant to drugs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that antibiotic-resistant infections kill 60,000 Americans a year.

Scientists unveil an innovative and cheap method of delivering vaccines without the need for needles or medical experts

A revolutionary way of vaccinating against infectious diseases has been invented by scientists who have developed a skin patch containing an influenza vaccine.

The patch does away with needles and syringes and could transform the battle against future pandemics by painlessly inoculating patients with vaccines that could be sent out in the post and self-administered in the home by somebody with no medical experience.

In the developing world, the skin patches could eliminate the need for the costly medical infrastructure of mass-vaccination campaigns, which require trained medical personnel to inject vaccines, and expensive storage equipment. Skin patches also bypass the hazards of dirty needles.

The skin patch is "armed" with an array of microscopic needles made of biodegradable plastic that painlessly scratch the surface of the skin and dissolve harmlessly without trace after delivering the vaccine safely inside the body.

Tests have shown that the patch works just as well and possibly even better than conventional vaccines injected into the body with needles and syringes. The skin patches are biodegradable and, unlike dirty needles, there is no risk of accidental skin pricks and cross-contamination.

A few days ago I was standing in line at the post office, just behind a young mother and her daughter. The little girl looked to be about 2 years old - she was still speaking that language that only a mom can understand. She was a chubby little blonde child, wearing a tee shirt that promoted Coca Cola. As I watched her, she was happily smearing a chocolate bar all over her face.

It was 9 o'clock in the morning, by the way. So, I'm not sure whether this little girl was eating her breakfast or a mid-morning snack. As she alternately licked her candy bar and babbled at her mother, I realized that this was a child who already knows how to plan ahead to her next meal; the one word coming out of her chocolate-coated mouth that I could understand clearly was 'McDonald's.'

The food industry spends billions of dollars each year on child seduction, with carefully-conceived advertising directed specifically at children. Just like drug dealers, fast food and snack food purveyors understand the importance of hooking them young and building life-long, loyal customers for their products. Eric Schlosser writes in his eye-opening book Fast Food Nation "...market research has found that children often recognize a brand logo before they can recognize their own name."

A new report from the Center for Science in the Public Interest argues that synthetic dyes should be banned because they pose "A Rainbow of Risks" without any real benefits.

Every year, manufactures pour about 15 million pounds of eight common synthetic dyes into American's food. Yet, tests have shown that a number of these compounds have health risks ranging from powerful allergic reactions and hyperactivity in children to cancer.

Abnormal brain growth and function are features of autism, an increasingly common developmental disorder that now affects 1 in 60 boys in the US. Now researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Thoughtful House Center for Children in Austin, Texas, have found remarkably similar brain changes to those seen in autism in infant monkeys receiving the vaccine schedule used in the 1990's that contained the mercury-based preservative thimerosal.

The group's findings were published yesterday in the journal Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis. They used scanning techniques that assessed both brain growth and brain function in the same animals over time. The research team was able to see differences in the way the brains of vaccinated and unvaccinated animals developed. Scans were performed before and after the administration of primary MMR and DTaP/Hib boosters that were given at the human equivalent of 12 months of age.

If you're feeling sleepy, it might be thanks to your astrocytes. This group of brain cells, long assumed to play a mere housekeeping role, may actually be responsible for controlling when we fall asleep, by releasing a chemical called adenosine.

"One of the leading theories of sleep generation comes from the observation that there is an accumulation of adenosine [in the brain] during waking, and that this adenosine decreases during subsequent sleep," says Tommaso Fellin at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa. Adenosine is thought to suppress neurons which usually stimulate the cortex and keep it, and so us, awake. However, he says, "the cellular source of this adenosine has long been overlooked".

Astrocytes play a key role in providing neurons with nutrients and aiding cell repair. In addition, unlike neurons that control immediate brain activity, astrocytes are thought to modulate longer-term activity by regulating communication between neurons. Because sleep pressure - the physiological mechanisms that result in the need to sleep - also builds up over a prolonged period of time, Fellin and Michael Halassa, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and colleagues, decided to investigate whether astrocytes might be the source of the adenosine that may drive the urge to sleep.

"I don't know what I've done wrong," the patient told me.

She was an intelligent and articulate woman in her early 40s who came to see me for depression and anxiety. In discussing the stresses she faced, it was clear that her teenage son had been front and center for many years.

When he was growing up, she explained, he fought frequently with other children, had few close friends, and had a reputation for being mean. She always hoped he would change, but now that he was almost 17, she had a sinking feeling.

I asked her what she meant by mean. "I hate to admit it, but he is unkind and unsympathetic to people," she said, as I recall. He was rude and defiant at home, and often verbally abusive to family members.

Along the way, she had him evaluated by many child psychiatrists, with several extensive neuropsychological tests. The results were always the same: he tested in the intellectually superior range, with no evidence of any learning disability or mental illness. Naturally, she wondered if she and her husband were somehow remiss as parents.

In 1982, researchers affiliated with the Cooper Institute in Dallas surveyed a large group of well-educated, affluent men. The researchers were interested in the men's exercise habits, but they also asked, almost incidentally, about their indolence. Specifically, they inquired about how many hours each day the men spent watching television or sitting in a car. (This was before you could do both at once.) Over the years, the survey's main results were used to reinforce a growing body of science about the health benefits of regular exercise.

But the information about the amount of time the men spent being inactive remained largely unexplored. Recently, however, scientists from the University of South Carolina and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., parsed the full data. In a study published in May in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, they reported that, to no one's surprise, the men who sat the most had the greatest risk of heart problems. Men who spent more than 23 hours a week watching TV and sitting in their cars (as passengers or as drivers) had a 64 percent greater chance of dying from heart disease than those who sat for 11 hours a week or less.

What was unexpected was that many of the men who sat long hours and developed heart problems also exercised. Quite a few of them said they did so regularly and led active lifestyles. The men worked out, then sat in cars and in front of televisions for hours, and their risk of heart disease soared, despite the exercise. Their workouts did not counteract the ill effects of sitting.

Scientists claim to have found a certain kind of cells in the brain that might play a key role in controlling breathing, a discovery which they believe could lead to new treatment for serious respiratory disorders.

In laboratory rats, researchers at the University College London found that the star-shaped cells, known as astrocytes, can sense changes in blood carbon dioxide levels and then signal other brain networks to adjust breathing -- taking in vital oxygen and expelling waste carbon dioxide.

"This research identifies brain astrocytes as previously unrecognised crucial elements of the brain circuits controlling fundamental bodily functions vital for life, such as breathing, and indicates that they are indeed the real stars of the brain," said lead researcher Alexander Gourine.

The researchers believe it could be possible that these brain cells or others like them contribute to disorders associated with respiratory failure such as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), LiveScience reported.

New York - People with celiac disease and others who avoid gluten should beware that foods that are supposed to be naturally gluten-free are often contaminated, warns a new study.

Gluten is a kind of protein found in wheat, barley, and rye. In people with celiac disease - a condition that affects up to about 1 percent of the U.S. population - gluten triggers an immune reaction that causes damage to the small intestine and keeps the body from absorbing nutrients.

Grains such as oats, millet, and rice don't have this protein. But in a new survey of grains, seeds, and flours that should be gluten-free, researchers found that some of these products had picked up traces of gluten - probably from being grown or processed near grains that do naturally contain gluten.

"There was some general assumption (among people with celiac disease) that those naturally gluten-free grains and flours weren't contaminated," Tricia Thompson, a nutrition consultant on celiac disease and the lead author on the study, told Reuters Health.

Thompson and her colleagues analyzed 22 naturally gluten-free grains, seeds, and flours off supermarket shelves, only looking at products that weren't specifically advertised as being gluten-free. They tested the amount of gluten in those products against a proposed Food and Drug Administration limit for any product labeled gluten-free, 20 parts contaminant per million parts product.

Seven of the 22 products wouldn't pass the FDA's gluten-free test - and one product, a type of soy flour, had a gluten content of almost 3,000 parts per million, the authors found. Other products from the sample that weren't truly gluten-free included millet flour and grain, buckwheat flour, and sorghum flour.