BBCWed, 13 Jun 2007 21:48 UTC
The Vatican has urged all Catholics to stop donating money to Amnesty International, accusing the human rights group of promoting abortion.
The Vatican also said it was suspending all financial aid to Amnesty over what it said was the group's recent change of policy on the issue.
Aggressive behavior and bullying, common among schoolchildren, are likely to have multiple causes, one of which may be an undiagnosed sleep-related breathing disorder (SRBD), according to a research abstract that will be presented Wednesday at SLEEP 2007, the 21st Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS).
The study, conducted by Louise M. O'Brien, PhD, of the University of Michigan, focused on children in the second through fifth grades who attended school in an urban public school district. Parents completed two well-validated instruments: the Conner's Parent Rating Scale (CPRS) the Pediatric Sleep Questionnaire SDB Scale. Teachers completed the Conner's Teacher Rating Scale (CTRS). The numbers of discipline referrals in the previous 12 months were obtained from the six elementary schools.
A total of 345 CPRS's and 245 corresponding CTRS's were completed. It was discovered, through both methods, that schoolchildren who bully may be more likely to have an SRBD than their peers.
A decade or so ago, a spate of high profile legal cases arose in which people were accused, and often convicted, on the basis of "recovered memories." These memories, usually recollections of childhood abuse, arose years after the incident occurred and often during intensive psychotherapy.
So how accurate are recovered memories" The answer is not so clear. In fact, this question has lead to one of the most contentious issues in the fields of psychology and psychiatry.
Elke Geraerts, a postdoc of psychology at Harvard University and Maastricht University, the Netherlands, hoped to settle some of the controversy by enacting a large-scale research study examining the validity of such memories.
Recovered memories are inherently tricky to validate for several reasons, most notably because the people who hold them are thoroughly convinced of their authenticity. Therefore, to maneuver around this obstacle Geraerts and her colleagues attempted to corroborate the memories through outside sources.
The researchers recruited a sample of people who reported being sexually abused as children and divided them based on how they remembered the event. The memories were categorized as either "spontaneously recovered" (the participant had forgotten and then spontaneously recalled the abuse outside of therapy, without any prompting), "recovered in therapy" (the participant had recovered the abuse during therapy, prompted by suggestion) or "continuous" (the participant had always been able to recall the abuse).
Food and drinks containing additives linked to behavioural problems in children should carry health warnings similar to those found on medicines, according to experts.
A number of preservatives and colourings, some of which can irritate the skin or cause breathing difficulties, are used in popular brands such as Irn-Bru, Diet Coke, Ribena and Robinsons Orange Squash.
APTue, 12 Jun 2007 21:07 UTC
Health authorities responded Tuesday to reports that 11 people were ill on a flight from Mexico to Miami International Airport.
The Aeromexico flight from Merida, Mexico, landed at the airport and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was meeting with authorities in Miami to assess the situation, said Von Roebuck, a CDC spokesman. He had no further details.
Researchers at the Methodist Neurological Institute (NI) in Houston and Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City used functional MRI to determine that songbirds have a pronounced right-brain response to the sound of songs, establishing a foundational study for future research on songbird models of speech disorders such as stuttering, as reported today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A.
This is the first functional MRI study to determine how vocal sounds are represented within the brain of an awake zebra finch, a well-studied animal model of vocal learning. Because of many similarities between birdsong and human speech, this research could lead to a better understanding of the cause of stuttering and other speech problems.
By using specifically-tailored high-resolution fMRI in awake, mildly sedated zebra finches, scientists were able to look at the activity in the entire avian brain during song stimulation.
"While we found that both sides of the brain were activated by sounds in the songbirds, our research showed that the right side of their brains discriminated sounds better," said Santosh A. Helekar, M.D., Ph.D., lead author of the paper. Helekar is associate research professor of neuroscience at the Methodist NI and Weill Cornell. "If we can link what we find in birds to what we already know about human brains, then we could better understand the causes of speech disorders and, in the long-run, be able to provide treatments to patients."
A "global epidemic" of Alzheimer's disease could take hold by 2050 with the number affected set to quadruple, experts predicted yesterday.
The number of people living with the condition, which is estimated at 26 million worldwide, will grow to more than 106 million by 2050, with about half of them needing high-level care, the researchers said. The Alzheimer's Society said that about 1.7 million people will be living with the condition in the UK by 2050.
There are currently 700,000 people with dementia in the UK and 60,000 people die from it every year.
Twenty-one people in Maple Ridge are being vaccinated for rabies after a cat in the Lower Mainland city was diagnosed with the disease.
It's the first confirmed case of rabies in a domestic animal in B.C. since 1969, say health officials, who suspect the cat was bitten by a bat.
Vietnam veterans who sprayed the herbicides like Agent Orange decades ago in Vietnam are at an increased risk of developing heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and chronic breathing problems, a new study shows.
Agent Orange, a weed killer containing dioxin, was widely used during the Vietnam War, Dr. Han K. Kang of the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington, DC and colleagues note in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine. Overall, two thirds of the herbicides used during the conflict contained dioxin.
Health authorities in Vietnam said Tuesday two new cases of the lethal H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus have been registered in the country.
The head of Vietnam's Health Ministry's disease prevention department, Nguyen Huy Nga, told journalists two women in the country's north had contracted the virus, which makes the total number of cases registered in Vietnam this year four.
Reports in May said poultry, mainly unvaccinated ducks that died before reaching three months, had also been found to be infected with the H5N1 strain in five provinces.
Authorities in Vietnam say more than 100 million birds have so far been vaccinated, but fears of the disease spreading around the country still remains.
