Antibiotic resistance is now a bigger crisis than the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, a landmark report recently warned. The spread of deadly superbugs that evade even the most powerful antibiotics is happening across the world, United Nations officials have confirmed. The effects will be devastating - meaning a simple scratch or urinary tract infection could kill.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a scourge that is threatening to get ugly because TB is usually cured by taking antibiotics for six to nine months. However, if that treatment is interrupted or the dose is cut down, the stubborn bacteria battle back and mutate into a tougher strain that can no longer be killed by drugs. Such strains are scaring the heck out of the medical community for good reason. Tuberculosis is highly contagious, holding the potential to wipe out wide swaths of humanity in the case of an epidemic of these drug resistant strains.

Australia's first victim of a killer strain of drug-resistant tuberculosis died amid warnings of a looming health epidemic on Queensland's doorstep. Medical experts are seriously concerned about the handling of the TB epidemic in Papua New Guinea after Catherina Abraham died of an incurable form of the illness, known as XDR-TB (extensively drug resistant TB) in Cairns Base Hospital. Of course we always get big scares from the mainstream medical press, who are big cheerleaders of big pharmaceutical companies as our governmental medical officials.

Now medical experts are warning that drug resistant tuberculosis is such a problem in the Asia Pacific region that it could overwhelm health systems.

A drug-resistant TB case did touch off a scare in U.S. - "We don't know too much about a Nepalese man who's in medical isolation in Texas while being treated for extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, or XDR-TB, the most difficult-to-treat kind."

XDR-TB is resistant not only to isoniazid and rifampin but also a class of drugs called fluoroquinolones and one or more potent injectable antibiotics. This is one of the nastiest of all antibiotics, which easily destroys peoples' lives by itself.

TB germs become drug-resistant when patients fail to complete a course of treatment. When a partly-resistant strain is treated with the wrong drugs, it can become extensively resistant. There are about 60,000 people with XDR-TB strains like the Nepalese man who's in isolation. That means there are other people with XDR-TB traveling the world at any given time.

Researchers find that with calorie restriction, a less-studied fat tissue releases adiponectin, which is linked to reduced risk of diseases like diabetes.

It has been known for its flavorful addition to soups and as a delicacy for dogs but bone marrow fat may also have untapped health benefits, new research finds.

A University of Michigan-led study shows that the fat tissue in bone marrow is a significant source of the hormone adiponectin, which helps maintain insulin sensitivity, break down fat, and has been linked to decreased risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity-associated cancers. The findings appear in today's online-ahead-of-print issue of Cell Metabolism.

Young adults who exercised vigorously before bed ended up getting better sleep than their peers who reported less strenuous evening activity, a new study found.

The results, based on sleep patterns during a single night, go against the usual advice to avoid being too active before bed.

"We believe that the present study has the potential to shed light on the issue of whether evening exercising should be discouraged," Serge Brand of the University of Basel in Switzerland and his colleagues write.

"The findings may also have practical implications, since, for most employed adults and parents, evening hours often provide the only opportunity for exercise," the researchers add.

They studied 52 Swiss high school students who were an average of 19 years old and played sports two or three times per week.

The participants followed their normal routine on the day and night of the study, including playing sports for 65 to 90 minutes in the evening and ending about one and a half hours before their usual bedtime.

Before going to bed, students rated their mood and hunger levels and filled out a questionnaire that was designed to evaluate how vigorously they had exercised. That night they used a device that measures sleep patterns, called a sleep-EEG.

Brand's team found that students who reported more exertion during sports fell asleep faster, woke up fewer times during the night and slept more deeply than those who had exercised less vigorously.

Health ministers from across western Africa met on Wednesday to plan "drastic action" against the world's deadliest-ever Ebola epidemic as dozens of new cases continued to emerge.

There have been 759 confirmed or suspected cases of the haemorrhagic fever in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday, with 467 people dead.

The new death toll represented a rise of 129 - or 38 percent - since the UN agency's last bulletin given just a week ago.

"This makes the ongoing Ebola outbreak the largest in terms of the number of cases and deaths as well as geographical spread," the WHO said in a statement announcing the two-day conference, which opened in Ghana's capital Accra, with 11 west African health ministers attending.

"Decisions taken at this meeting will be critical in addressing the current and future outbreaks," it said.

Since the region's first ever epidemic of the deadly and highly contagious fever broke out in Guinea in January, the WHO has sent in more than 150 experts to help tackle the regional crisis.

A new pathogen has been discovered by scientists investigating major die-offs of pigeons native to North America, according to studies led by the University of California, Davis, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Scientists were able to implicate this new parasite, along with the ancient parasite Trichomonas gallinae, in the recent deaths of thousands of Pacific Coast band-tailed pigeons. The die-offs occurred during multiple epidemics in California's Central Coast and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges. Scientists named the new pathogen Trichomonas stableri.

Avian trichomonosis is an emerging and potentially fatal disease that creates severe lesions that can block the esophagus, ultimately preventing the bird from eating or drinking, or the trachea, leading to suffocation. The disease may date back to when dinosaurs roamed the earth, as lesions indicative of trichomonosis were found recently in T-Rex skeletons. The disease may also have contributed to the decline of the passenger pigeon, whose extinction occurred exactly 100 years ago.

Latvia may declare a state of emergency in the eastern part of the country, near its border with Belarus and Russia to fight, an outbreak of African swine fever in some wild boars and domestic pigs.

Swine fever was discovered in Latvia at the end of June and earlier in both Lithuania and Poland. The disease occurs among pigs and wild boars, where its effects are devastating and often deadly, and there is no vaccine. It does not affect humans.

So far, a total of eight wild boars and three domestic pigs in Latvia have tested positive.

"Infection has gotten into wild boars and we don't know how long it will continue to spread," said Maris Balodis, the head of the country's Food and Veterinary Service. "Therefore, steps which can be done in an emergency situation are preferable at this moment."

In a new study from California, children with an autism spectrum disorder were more likely to have mothers who lived close to fields treated with certain pesticides during pregnancy.

Proximity to agricultural pesticides in pregnancy was also linked to other types of developmental delay among children.

"Ours is the third study to specifically link autism spectrum disorders to pesticide exposure, whereas more papers have demonstrated links with developmental delay," said lead author Janie F. Shelton, from the University of California, Davis.

There needs to be more research before scientists can say that pesticides cause autism, she told Reuters Health in an email. But pesticides all affect signaling between cells in the nervous system, she added, so a direct link is plausible.

Britain will lead a global fightback against antibiotic-resistant superbugs to prevent the world from being "cast back into the dark ages of medicine", David Cameron is to announce today.

The rise of untreatable bacteria threatens an "unthinkable scenario" where minor infections could once again kill, the prime minister told The Times in a warning about what he described as one of the biggest health threats facing the world.

Tens of thousands of people are already dying of infections that have evolved resistance to common treatments and the World Health Organisation has warned that routine operations and minor scratches could become fatal if nothing is done.

On Monday, Quartz published an article by Devin Cohen titled, There is a Secret Ingredient in Your Burgers: Wood Pulp. Given the headline and people's already present suspicion regarding all of the shady and potentially dangerous ingredients hidden in food items, the article gained a lot of traction.

In subsequent days, most journalists and bloggers have focused on the dangers of this additive (unclear) and whether or not it is pervasive throughout the food chain as opposed to just fast food (it appears to be).

The one angle that has not been explored as much is the overall trend. Let's go ahead and assume that wood pulp is a safe thing to consume, it certainly seems to have no nutritional value whatsoever. So why are companies inserting it into food items?

To mask inflation and earn more profits most likely. This was a major theme I focused on last year in a series of pieces on stealth inflation and food fraud, a couple of which can be read below:

New Study Shows 59% of "Tuna" Sold in the U.S. Isn't Tuna

New Study Shows: Food Fraud Soared 60% Last Year

Saturday, June 14, 2014, around 10AM while having breakfast, this writer was listening to KYW 1060 All News Radio, a CBS affiliate in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, when to her great surprise she heard a news report that caught her off-guard. Why off-guard? Well, it was a report, plus statistic, regarding measles and the percentage of those contracting the disease who are fully vaccinated. Paraphrasing, the report went something like this, since she cannot locate it on the Internet or KYW's home page:

The current all-time-high measles outbreak in California since measles was 'eradicated' due to vaccines and vaccinations, has local health authorities stumped because 85% of those contracting measles were fully vaccinated!

What an admission - and over the airwaves! That's something vaccine safety advocates have warned about but health authorities deliberately ignore while continually contending it is the non-vaccinated who are spreading measles. Wake up, people!