Health & WellnessS


Clock

Turning your clock back Sunday may help your heart

Stephanie Nano
Associated Press
Thu, 30 Oct 2008 08:00 UTC
time to fall back
© AP
New York - Turning your clock back on Sunday may be good for your heart. Swedish researchers looked at 20 years of records and discovered that the number of heart attacks dipped on the Monday after clocks were set back an hour, possibly because people got an extra hour of sleep.

But moving clocks forward in the spring appeared to have the opposite effect. There were more heart attacks during the week after the start of daylight saving time, particularly on the first three days of the week.

"Sleep - through a variety of mechanisms - affects our cardiovascular health," said Dr. Lori Mosca, director of preventive cardiology at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, who was not involved in the research. The findings show that "sleep not only impacts how we feel, but it may also affect whether we develop heart disease or not."
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Display

Microsoft offers reward for missing Xbox gamer

Michel Comte
Agence France Press
Thu, 30 Oct 2008 07:08 UTC
US software behemoth Microsoft has doubled a cash reward for information on the whereabouts of a Canadian boy who ran away from home after his father took away his Xbox game console, it said Tuesday.
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Bulb

The brain's clever way of showing us the world as a whole

Barbara Isanski
Association for Psychological Science
Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:14 UTC
Whether we choose to admit it or not, we all experience memory errors from time to time. Research has suggested that false memory may be a result of having too many other things to remember or perhaps if too much time has passed. However, previous studies have indicated that a specific type of false memory known as "boundary extension" occurs for different reasons. Boundary extension is a mistake that we often make when recalling a view of a scene - we will insist that the boundaries of an image stretched out farther than what we actually saw. Although this error is very common and occurs in people of all ages (from young children to the elderly), few studies have been done examining how quickly boundary extension occurs. That is, it was unknown how long a scene needs to be interrupted before the viewer experiences boundary extension and is convinced they saw more than they actually did.
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Health

Toxic bug has meat-eaters in its sights

Ewen Callaway
New Scientist
Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:04 UTC
Just when it seemed that contaminated vegetables posed a bigger risk of food poisoning than eating meat, along comes a pathogen that will only attack those of us who are carnivores.

The bacterium - a strain of Escherichia coli - makes a toxin that does its worst by latching onto a sugar molecule that humans don't have naturally. We can, only acquire it by eating red meat or dairy products.

"This toxin originally evolved to attack cattle or some other animals," says Ajit Varki, an expert in molecular medicine at the University of California, San Diego, who was involved in the study. By eating the toxin's intended target we made ourselves vulnerable too, he says.

When unlucky meat-eaters ingest this particular E. coli strain, its toxin kills the cells that line the gut, eventually causing bloody diarrhoea, Varki says. It also heads for blood vessels and the kidneys.
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Sherlock

Doctors seek answers on mould mystery


stuff.com.nz
Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:55 UTC
Fungus expert Joan Bennett did not believe in so-called toxic mould - the cause of "sick building syndrome" and many lawsuits - until her New Orleans home was flooded during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

When she got a whiff of the foul air that the black goo had created in her home, she decided to change her research focus and try to find out how and if the fungi that took over most of the flooded homes on the Gulf Coast might make people ill.
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Health

Guinea-Bissau cholera epidemic seen lasting months


Reuters
Tue, 28 Oct 2008 09:21 UTC
The death toll in Guinea-Bissau's rapidly spreading cholera epidemic is rising and the outbreak may continue for months, United Nations agencies said on Tuesday.

The death toll is now 213, with 12,785 people known to be infected, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs told a news briefing in Geneva.
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Health

Canada: Links in new E. coli outbreak unclear

Josh Wingrove
The Globe and Mail
Tue, 28 Oct 2008 08:56 UTC
Eleven cases connected to single Niagara restaurant, but officials concerned about source of four other incidents

Ontario's second E. coli outbreak this month continues to grow, and although a restaurant has been pinpointed as a possible source, officials fear "something broader" could be behind it.
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Red Flag

Zimbabwe: Catastrophic Cholera outbreak in Bulawayo


ZimEye
Tue, 28 Oct 2008 08:53 UTC
Bulawayo-At least 8 people have died of cholera and 30 have been hospitalised in Esigodini, 40 kilometres outside of Bulawayo on the Johannesburg-Bulawayo highway.
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Attention

Fifth case confirmed in South African viral outbreak


CITRAP
Tue, 28 Oct 2008 08:49 UTC
A fifth case has been confirmed in the recent outbreak of febrile illnesses caused by a mysterious virus in South Africa, and preliminary tests have supported earlier suspicions that it is new member of the arenavirus family, South African health officials announced recently.

A worker who fell ill and died after cleaning a hospital room where the first case-patient in the outbreak had stayed was confirmed to have the virus, South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) said in an Oct 24 update.
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Info

Brain's 'Hate Circuit' Identified


Science Daily
Wed, 29 Oct 2008 08:24 UTC
hate circuits
© iStockphoto/Valentin CasarsaNew research has found that people who view pictures of someone they hate display activity in distinct areas of the brain that, together, may be thought of as a 'hate circuit.'
People who view pictures of someone they hate display activity in distinct areas of the brain that, together, may be thought of as a 'hate circuit', according to new research by scientists at UCL (University College London).

The study, by Professor Semir Zeki and John Romaya of the Wellcome Laboratory of Neurobiology at UCL, examined the brain areas that correlate with the sentiment of hate and shows that the 'hate circuit' is distinct from those related to emotions such as fear, threat and danger - although it shares a part of the brain associated with aggression. The circuit is also quite distinct from that associated with romantic love, though it shares at least two common structures with it.

Comment: Seems to be the circuit that Sarah Palin is trying to activate during her rallies.

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