Health & WellnessS


Health

Number of Kazakh Children With HIV 96

ALMATY, Kazakhstan - The number of children who contracted HIV in southern Kazakhstan in an outbreak blamed on doctors' negligence has reached 96, health authorities said Thursday. The two most recent victims, aged 3 and 4, were diagnosed with HIV in the Sairam district and the city of Turkestan respectively, said regional health department spokeswoman Ayzhan Umarova.

Health

Town votes to remove fluoride from drinking water

MOUNT DESERT, Maine --The Maine Dental Association expressed disappointment after residents voted to remove fluoride from the local drinking water, making Mount Desert the state's first community to make such a change.

The decision came after the Mount Desert Water District said studies conducted during the past few years call into question the safety of fluoridation. The vote in last week's referendum was 229-to-42 to remove fluoride.

Health

Oscar Meyer recalls 2.8m pounds of chicken

The threat of potentially fatal disease contained in Oscar Meyer/Louis Rich chicken products here and in other countries prompted the recall, and all tainted meat products will be destroyed, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

The recall totals more than 2.8 million pounds of chicken.

Coffee

Common Chemicals May be Feeding Obesity Epidemic

Exposure to a class of chemicals commonly found in soap and plastics could be fueling the obesity epidemic by contributing to abdominal obesity and insulin resistance in men, a new study suggests.

Bulb

Human Perceptual Learning As a Two-stage Process

Using advanced brain imaging techniques, researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center have watched how humans use both lower and higher brain processes to learn novel tasks, an advance they say may help speed up the teaching of new skills as well as offer strategies to retrain people with perceptual deficits due to autism.

In the March 15 issue of Neuron, the research team provides the first human evidence for a two-stage model of how a person learns to place objects into categories discerning, for example, that a green apple, and not a green tennis ball, belongs to "food." They describe it as a complex interplay between neurons that process stimulus shape ("bottom-up") and more sophisticated brain areas that discriminate between these shapes to categorize and "label" that information ("top-down").

Document

Schizophrenia Much More Common In Certain Localities

Research by the World Health Organization (WHO) has suggested that the course and symptomatic expression of schizophrenia is relatively more benign in developing societies.

However, a new study from Current Anthropology challenges this assumption, comparing biological and cultural indicators of schizophrenia in urban, Western societies with study data from the island of Palau, which has one of the highest rates of schizophrenia diagnosis in the world today.

"A 1% average worldwide population prevalence of schizophrenia is routinely interpreted in the medical literature as implying a uniform distribution," write Roger J. Sullivan (California State University, Sacramento), John S. Allen (University of Southern California), and Karen L. Nero (University of Canterbury, New Zealand). "In this sense, the 1% figure is a myth that conceals considerable variability in actual prevalence between settings."

Magic Wand

Level of communication governs how opinions evolve in social networks

Boffins in Europe have developed a computer model that shows how opinions evolve in social networks.

And, the scientific analysis showed that the key to forming opinions lay in how well people can communicate with each other.

As a part of their experiment, researchers led by physicist Renaud Lambiotte of the University of Liege in Belgium used two groups of people.

After initially isolating the two groups from each other, they were gradually brought into contact.

The researchers found that though initially the two groups continued to form opinions independently, when communication gradually increased between them, the final opinions of the two groups were always identical.

Health

CDC's Vaccine Committee Whitewashed Toxic Vaccine Component, Says National Autism Association (NAA)

Parents and health advocates are expressing outrage over the recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) that pregnant women, infants and children continue to be exposed to mercury contained in the flu vaccine despite recommendations from the Institute of Medicine that mercury not be injected into these sensitive populations since 2001.


Bomb

Propaganda! The Genetics of Nicotine Addiction

Researchers at the University of Iowa have identified certain genetic profiles that may be linked to a person's risk for developing nicotine addiction and other psychological behaviors. Using a genome-wide scan, scientists analyzed blood samples from smokers versus nonsmokers and found similar genetic patterns among smokers that may one day be used as a genetic test to determine who may be more vulnerable to nicotine addiction.

Comment: On the other hand, there is Aliens Don't Like to Eat People Who Smoke!


Magic Wand

Nanocosmetics: Buyer Beware

There's a lovely jar of night cream that's been sitting on my dresser for a month. According to the salesperson who spent a half-hour on the phone with me extolling its virtues, the cream will dig up the gunk that's clogging my pores, soak up excess oil, and "teach" my cells to make less of it.

Sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Too bad I'm too scared to use it.