Health & Wellness
The Health Protection Agency has urged NHS hospitals to step up their infection control measures as a result of the outbreaks of a strain of the superbug Acinetobacter baumannii which is resistant to many types of antibiotics.
Most parents would agree that their kids always seem to grow up too quickly, but now, puberty is hitting young girls earlier than ever.
Nearly half of African-American girls start showing signs of puberty by 8 years old, and some American girls are developing as young as 5, even 4 years old, experts say.
Skyla Jones is an energetic 5-year-old from Georgia who loves to play.
Last year, her mother, Melissa Jones, noticed Skyla was tired all the time, had a body odor, and had blood in her urine.
There is little clinical evidence that the vaccines have an effect on things like hospital stay, time off work, death in healthy adults or even those with conditions like asthma and cystic fibrosis, he said.
Tests on rats show that the appetite hormone ghrelin acts on pleasure receptors in the brain.
He said some sweeteners in diet products were linked with stimulating appetite.
"Aspartame, commonly known as the sweetener NutraSweet, is a neuro-stimulant linked with stimulating appetite, so it can make you hungry," Prof Dingle, associate professor in health and the environment at Murdoch University, said.
"We have confirmed the association of a Mediterranean diet with Alzheimer's disease," said lead researcher Dr. Nikolaos Scarmeas, an assistant professor of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center in New York.
This benefit does not appear to be due to the diet's effect on blood vessels, Scarmeas added. "The diet could be helping avoid Alzheimer's disease by protection from oxidative stress or by reducing inflammation in the brain," he said.
The finding may help in creating better treatments for obesity -- a growing problem in the United States and elsewhere.
An analysis of 68,669 New York City residents infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, found that of those who died between 1999 and 2004, 26.3 percent died of something other than HIV. That is a 32 percent increase from 1999, when just under 20 percent of HIV patients died of other causes.