Health & Wellness
ProQuad Vaccine Linked to More Convulsions; CDC Panel Amends Preference for Combo
Children suffered higher rates of fever-related convulsions when they got a Merck & Co. combination vaccine instead of two separate shots, according to a new study presented Wednesday.
The results prompted a federal advisory panel on vaccines to water down their preference for the combo vaccine ProQuad, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella as well as chickenpox.
Children who under-achieve at school may just have poor working memory rather than low intelligence according to researchers who have produced the world's first tool to assess memory capacity in the classroom.
The researchers from Durham University, who surveyed over three thousand children, found that ten per cent of school children across all age ranges suffer from poor working memory seriously affecting their learning. Nationally, this equates to almost half a million children in primary education alone being affected.
However, the researchers identified that poor working memory is rarely identified by teachers, who often describe children with this problem as inattentive or as having lower levels of intelligence.
ASUNCION - UNICEF supplied two million anti-yellow fever vaccinations in response to an emergency declared by the Government of Paraguay following an outbreak of yellow fever cases. Approximately 750,000 people have been immunized so far.
Atlanta, Georgia - All children - not just those under 5 - should get vaccinated against the flu, a federal advisory panel said Wednesday. The panel voted to expand annual flu shots to virtually all children except infants younger than 6 months and those with serious egg allergies.
A team of ear, nose and throat specialists and neurosurgeons at the University Hospital of Navarra, led by doctors Manuel Manrique Rodríguez, specialist in ear, nose and throat surgery and Bartolomé Bejarano Herruzo, specialist in paediatric neurosurgery, have successfully operated on a 13 month-old girl from Murcia, who had been born deaf due to the lack of auditory nerves. She is the youngest patient in the world who has received an auditory implant in the brain stem. As a result of the operation, the child has begun to hear and started language development.
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©Basque Research
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Child with her parents. University Hospital of Navarra successfully operated on the youngest patient worldwide to have auditory implant in the brain stem.
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An in-depth interview with
Jeffrey Smith, author of
Seeds of Deception, on Genetically Modified Organisms. What you may hear will surprise you.
Transcript below.
San Luis Obispo, Calif. - On a winter night in 2006, a disabled and brain damaged man named Ruben Navarro was wheeled into an operating room at a hospital here. By most accounts, Mr. Navarro, 25, was near death, and doctors hoped that he might sustain other lives by donating his kidneys and liver.
After the surgical removal of a malignant tumor, the chance that cancer will re-appear in a different location of the body remains high. But new research from Tel Aviv University, in a bold new field called Psychoneuroimmunology, may prevent those cancer cells from taking root again - and the key to the treatment is stress reduction.
A new study led by Prof. Shamgar Ben-Eliyahu, from Tel Aviv University's Department of Psychology, has shown scientifically that psychological and physiological stress prior to, during and after surgery has a biological impact that impairs immune system functioning. This impairment bears down on disease progression, he says, especially at the critical point during oncological surgery when a primary tumor is being removed.
A pair of Johns Hopkins and government scientists have discovered that when jazz musicians improvise, their brains turn off areas linked to self-censoring and inhibition, and turn on those that let self-expression flow.
The joint research, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, and musician volunteers from the Johns Hopkins University's Peabody Institute, sheds light on the creative improvisation that artists and non-artists use in everyday life, the investigators say.
The pharmaceutical industry came under assault from senior figures in medical research yesterday over its practice of withholding information to protect profits, exposing patients to drugs which could be useless or harmful.