A MOTHER who helped her autistic son communicate by using their family dog has launched a scheme to help other Scottish children with the condition.
Nuala Gardner's son Dale was severely autistic as a child, but she encouraged him to break his silence by pretending her words were being spoken by the family pet, Henry.
Now she hopes her successful method will allow her to break down the communication barriers in other autistic children using specially chosen gun dogs.
Four persons have died while hundreds have been affected by an unknown disease at Kolti VDC ward numbers 5, 6 and 7 of Bajura district within the past four days.
It has been learnt that all patients suffering from this disease have similar symptoms of fever and pain in the upper and lower limbs, causing the patients to be bedridden. However, due to lack of medical services in these villages, the disease is yet to be identified.
According to Kolti locals, Khante Rokaya, 40, Birjitey Rokaya, 35, Khanti Rokaya, 60, and Kala Rokaya, 45, have died due to the disease.
More and more doctors are fed up with private insurers. It's not just a question of how stingy they are, but how difficult it is to get reimbursed. Paperwork, phone calls, insurers who play games by deliberately making reimbursement forms difficult to interpret...
Some physicians have just said "no" to insurers.
Scientists say they have pinpointed differences in the way the brains of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) work. OCD provokes recurrent irrational thoughts such as fears about contamination or accidents, and compulsion to follow fixed rituals.
Scans revealed less activity in a particular region of the brains of both OCD patients and their close relatives. The Cambridge University study appears in the journal Science.
Blood samples taken from a 13-year-old Siberian boy who brought home a plague-infected ground squirrel have tested negative for the disease, the Russian consumer rights watchdog said on Friday.
The teenager, living in a remote shepherds' community in south Siberia's Tuva Republic, was hospitalized on Tuesday after catching the rodent and bringing it home in his hat. His grandfather immediately killed the animal, and called a doctor.
Commercial venues are very aware of the effects that the environment - in this case, music - can have on in-store traffic flow, sales volumes, product choices, and consumer time spent in the immediate vicinity. A study of the effects of music levels on drinking in a bar setting has found that loud music leads to more drinking in less time.
Results will be published in the October issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.
"Previous research had shown that fast music can cause fast drinking, and that music versus no music can cause a person to spend more time in a bar," said Nicolas Guéguen, a professor of behavioral sciences at the Université de Bretagne-Sud in France, and corresponding author for the study. "This is the first time that an experimental approach in a real context found the effects of loud music on alcohol consumption."
Whether drinking alcohol helps or hurts your chances of avoiding heart disease and stroke may depend on your gender as well as how much you imbibe, a new study finds.
The report, which appears online July 11 in the journal Stroke, looked at the drinking habits and lifestyles of more than 80,000 Japanese men and women over a 14-year period. None had previously experienced cancer, stroke or heart disease prior to the study.
Diet can strongly influence how long you live and your reproductive success, but now scientists have discovered that what works for males can be very different for females.
In the first study of its kind, the researchers have shown that gender plays a major role in determining which diet is better suited to promoting longer life or better reproductive success.
In the evolutionary "battle of the sexes", traits that benefit males are costly when expressed in females and vice versa. This conflict may have implications for human diet, aging and reproduction, says a team of scientists from UNSW, the University of Sydney and Massey University.
Teneshia Naidoo
The TimesFri, 18 Jul 2008 14:02 UTC
A KwaZulu-Natal clinical psychologist has put South Africa on the world map by demonstrating a link between rape and its impact on the immune system.
Prishika Pillay presented the research recently in Wisconsin, United States, at a conference on psychoneuroimmunology, which studies the impact of psychological stress on the immune system, central nervous system and endocrine system.
NEW YORK: Plans for a large human trial of a vaccine against the AIDS virus in the United States were canceled Thursday because federal health officials said the vaccine was unlikely to prove effective and might increase the risk of HIV infection among volunteers.
The decision is another major setback in scientific efforts to develop an HIV vaccine, which health officials contend would be their best weapon to control the AIDS pandemic. A number of other vaccines are in various stages of testing among people in many countries.
