Health & WellnessS


Pills

Zicam may damage sense of smell - FDA


CNN.com
Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:35 UTC
Shares of Zicam manufacturer Matrixx Initiatives plummet more than 55% after government warns consumers to discontinue use. Stock is halted.

Consumers should discontinue use of Zicam Cold Remedy nasal gel and related products because they can can permanently damage users' sense of smell, the government said Tuesday.

In a press release, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration advised consumers to stop use of three over-the-counter Zicam Cold Remedy products: nasal gel, nasal swabs and the discontinued "kids size" swabs.
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Arrow Up

Tool helps gauge autistic language skills


United Press International
Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:27 UTC
Canadian researchers say a questionnaire could help parents gauge language skills of their autistic children.

A report by a panel of experts commissioned to evaluate the questionnaire by the U.S. National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Md., is published in the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research.
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Magnify

Study: Sinus Infections Tied to Toxic Shock Syndrome in Children


Reuters
Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:07 UTC
Sinus infections may cause more than 20 percent of all cases of toxic shock syndrome in children, U.S. researchers said Monday.

They said doctors treating children for toxic shock syndrome should be aware of the risk.

"Prompt imaging studies of the sinuses is mandatory when no apparent cause of toxic shock syndrome is found," Dr. Kenny Chan of the University of Colorado and the Children's Hospital of Denver, whose study appears in the Archives of Otolaryngology, said in a statement.
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Arrow Up

Study links breastfeeding to high grades, college entry


Reuters
Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:04 UTC
Breastfed babies seem more likely to do well at high school and to go on to attend college than infants raised on a bottle, according to a new U.S. study.

Professors Joseph Sabia from the American University and Daniel Rees from the University of Colorado Denver based their research on 126 children from 59 families, comparing siblings who were breastfed as infants to others who were not.

By comparing siblings, the study was able to account for the influence of a variety of difficult-to-measure factors such as maternal intelligence and the quality of the home environment.
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Health

Sexual diseases 'rampant' in California porn industry

Peter Aldhous
New Scientist
Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:27 UTC
The porn industry of California's San Fernando Valley is under pressure to clean up its act, following the revelation last week that one unnamed female performer has tested positive for HIV. And according to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, she is just the tip of the iceberg.

Since 2004, county health officials say that at least 22 performers have tested HIV positive. The true figure could be higher, as reports depend on people admitting their occupation to testing labs.

Over the same period, there were 2378 positive tests for chlamydia, 1357 for gonorrhoea and 15 for syphilis in Los Angeles County among people describing themselves as adult film performers.

"Sexually transmitted diseases are rampant," says Jonathan Fielding, the county's director of public health.
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Light Saber

The Importance of Food Independence

Dictator Hater
The Frugal Zone
Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:28 UTC
Image
© EatTheView.org
The promise of skyrocketing food costs is being kept by the New World Government. Whether it will be a result of commodity futures speculation, crop blights, biofuel production, rising energy costs or inflation from printing money from thin air, rest assured that we will all be paying more for what we put on our dinner tables as time goes on. So again, I urge you to grow as much food as possible and store as much food as possible. There is no such thing as growing too much food or having too much food in storage as long as it is properly rotated. If you think you have too much food coming from your garden or have more food stored than you can consume before it expires, then share some with those less fortunate than yourself.

This is my third year of vegetable gardening and I am pleased that each year my tiny plot is more productive. I've learned that growing plants that continue to produce for many months is very important in order for me to be able to feed the people who live in this household. Personally, I don't like growing things that are one time only producers, the ones that when pulled from the ground or pot ends the plant's production. If you have a larger growing area, then by all means plant as many different types of veggies and fruits as possible. Since I am an urban prisoner with a very small area in which to grow, these are the crops I am concentrating on these days and why:
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Syringe

Regular flu vaccine little help against new H1N1 strain

Maggie Fox
Ottawa Citizen
Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:24 UTC
The seasonal flu vaccine provides virtually no protection against the new H1N1 influenza strain, federal health researchers confirmed on Thursday. Their study using stored blood samples supports an intriguing theory that people over the age of 60 have some immunity to the new H1N1 strain, perhaps because it resembles an older version of seasonal flu.

The findings are important as U.S. and global health officials grapple with the question of whether to offer a vaccine against the new swine flu virus, which has infected more than 11,000 people globally and killed at least 85.
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Bulb

Fluoridation is the Ultimate Deception

Hesh Goldstein
NaturalNews
Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:38 UTC
The following article is, in essence, my testimony delivered to the Hawaii Senate Health Committee in 2008. It contains facts that anyone can use to oppose water flouridation wherever you live. The good news is that once again we have been successful in keeping fluoride out of our water supply.

Here we go again. Let's take our pure and tasty drinking water, put a medication (fluoride) in it, make the people accept it and make believe we have Freedom of Choice in this country.

I would like to pose some hypothetical questions:

What would you do if you suddenly found out that fluoride was not "safe and effective" at all, but was actually a carcinogenic industrial waste?

What would you do if you learned that the sugar lobby's answer to cavity reduction is more fluoride rather than less sugar in the diet?
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Magnify

Sleepless Brains Work Harder to Function As Well As Normal Ones

Paula Moyer
MedPage Today
Mon, 15 Jun 2009 08:30 UTC
In order to function as well as healthy sleepers given memory tests, people with insomnia need to fire up more neurons, researchers here said.

They compared working memory in 12 adults with chronic insomnia to working memory in nine healthy controls and found little difference in responses, except that functional MRI revealed a higher level of brain activation in the patients with insomnia, said Henry Orff, M.S., a doctoral student in psychology at the University of California San Diego, who reported the findings at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

"On most high-order tasks, we're not seeing much difference," he said, noting that most studies simply measure whether the subject can perform the task, not how hard it was to perform the task. Studying brain activation can help show that difficulty, he said. "We find that it takes more neurophysiological effort to perform the same task."
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Health

Eczema's Link to Asthma Uncovered


BBC News
Sun, 24 May 2009 23:39 UTC
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Eczema causes red itchy patches on the skin
Scientists believe they have found what triggers many children with eczema to go on to develop asthma.

The Public Library of Science Biology study points to a way to stop what is known as the "atopic march".

The US team at the Washington University School of Medicine showed that a substance made by the damaged skin triggered asthma symptoms in mice.

The same substance, thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP), is also produced in the lungs of asthma patients.
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