Health & WellnessS


Attention

Flashback BioWarfare: Mycoplasma - The Linking Pathogen in Neurosystemic Diseases

Several strains of mycoplasma have been "engineered" to become more dangerous. They are now being blamed for AIDS, cancer, CFS, MS, CJD and other neurosystemic diseases.


Red Flag

Deadly virus spreads in China, 21 children die

Beijing - A deadly virus has spread rapidly in eastern China, killing at least 21 children and infecting nearly 3,000, Xinhua news agency said on Friday.

Enterovirus 71 began spreading in Fuyang in the eastern province of Anhui in early March but authorities only reported it publicly on Sunday, saying there had been 789 cases.

By Thursday, the number had risen to 2,946, Xinhua said.

Roses

The man who grew a finger

I think that within ten years that we will have strategies that will re-grow the bones, and promote the growth of functional tissue around those bones.

Dr Dr Stephen Badylak
University of Pittsburgh



Smiley

LSD May Shed Hippie Image With Swiss Medical Study

Four decades after the Grateful Dead and Timothy Leary made acid trips a counter-cultural rite of passage, Rick Doblin is trying to shake the drug's hippie image and reclaim its use as a medicine.

Doblin, who leads a group sponsoring the first study of LSD as a therapy in 36 years, says the new Swiss research may show the drug helps ease anxiety and pain in patients suffering from illnesses such as cancer and multiple sclerosis.

Comment: "We need to adopt a dispassionate and evidence-based approach" - what a fine and novel idea. One that is sorely lacking in modern science where political agendas and a host of dogmas rule the roost.


Arrow Down

More Than Half of US Hospitals Insolvent or Near Insolvency, Study Finds

More than half of U.S. hospitals are "teetering on the brink of insolvency" or have become insolvent because they do not treat an adequate number of patients to provide sufficient revenue, according to a study recently released by Alvarez & Marsal, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Evil Rays

Incubator Electromagnetic Fields Alter Newborns' Heart Rates

The electromagnetic fields produced by incubators alter newborns' heart rates, reveals a small study published ahead of print in the Fetal and Neonatal Edition of Archives of Disease in Childhood. It is not clear what the long term effects might be, but this could have implications for babies born prematurely, who may spend several weeks or months in incubators, say the authors.

The research team assessed the variability in the heart rate of 43 newborn babies, none of whom was critically ill or premature.

The heart rates of 27 of these babies were assessed over three periods of five minutes each, during which the incubator motor was left running, then switched off, then left running again. To see if noise might be a factor, because incubators are noisy, 16 newborns were exposed to "background noise," by placing a tape beside the baby's head, while the incubator motor was switched off.

Info

Tree Lined Streets Have Fewer Young Children With Asthma

Lower rates of asthma are found in children who live on tree-lined streets, according to an article released on May 1, 2008 in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, a BMJ Specialist journal.

Health

Suspected Carcinogenic Chemicals Used To Make Teflon, Scotchgard, Found In Human Milk

Chemicals used to make nonstick cookware and stain-resistant fabrics are spreading around the world and turning up in surprising places, everywhere from wildlife and drinking water supplies to human blood. Now, a team of researchers including Kathleen Arcaro of the University of Massachusetts Amherst has found these suspected carcinogens in samples of human milk from nursing mothers in Massachusetts.

"Perfluorinated compounds, or PFCs, are found in human blood around the world, including the blood of newborns, but this is the first study in the United States to document their occurrence in human milk," says Arcaro, a professor in the department of veterinary and animal sciences and a member of the environmental sciences program. "While nursing does not expose infants to a dose that exceeds recommended limits, breast milk should be considered as an additional source of PFCs when determining a child's total exposure."


Bulb

Young children rely on one sense or another, not a combination, studies find

Unlike adults, children younger than eight can't integrate different forms of sensory input to improve the accuracy with which they perceive the world around them, according to a pair of studies reported online in Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press, on May 1st.

The findings suggest that the perceptual systems of developing children might require constant recalibration - through the use of one sense to fine-tune another and vice versa, according to the researchers. They might also reflect inherent limitations of the still-developing brain.

" Kids have to stay calibrated while they are growing all the time - their eyes get farther apart and their limbs longer," said David Burr of Università Degli Studi di Firenze, who led one of the studies. Under these conditions, "they may use one sense to calibrate the other."

" It could be adaptive for humans not to integrate sensory information while they are still developing," agreed Marko Nardini of the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck College, University of London. "But there might also be constraints on what children can do. It's possible that brain development needs to take place to make integration possible." Nardini led the other of the two studies with colleagues at Oxford University's Visual Development Unit.

Attention

Canada: The 'choking game,' psychological distress and bullying

Ontario's youth are experiencing a different kind of high -- approximately seven percent (an estimated 79,000 students in grades 7 to 12) report participating in a thrill-seeking activity called the "choking game", which involves self-asphyxiation or having been choked by someone else on purpose. The 2007 Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey (OSDUHS) revealed these new data, as well as indicators and trends on the psychological health of Ontario's youth, in the Mental Health and Well-Being Report released today by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) for Children's Mental Health Week.

Other new topics in the 2007 OSDUHS showed that approximately three percent (or 35,000 students) reported a suicide attempt in the past year. About one in ten students rate their mental health as poor, with females more likely to do so than males (16 percent versus 7 percent). About nine percent of students may have a video gaming problem (indicated by symptoms such as loss of control, withdrawal, and disruption to family or school), with males significantly more likely than females to indicate this problem (16 percent versus 3 percent).