Public fluoridation was a big loser Tuesday not only in Grand Island but across Central Nebraska.
Every other Central Nebraska town that had the issue on the ballot -- Aurora, Broken Bow, Central City, Hastings, Ord, Ravenna, St. Paul, Shelton, Stromsburg and Wood River -- voted to opt out of the state's fluoride requirement.
Nowhere was the vote more emphatic than in Hastings, where three fluoride-related ballot issues all passed with at least 66 percent of the vote.
Marvin "Butch" Hughes of Hastings, who led that community's anti-fluoride petition drives, said he was surprised and gratified to see such overwhelming support for the measures.
Pregnant hairdressers may be exposing their unborn children to harmful chemicals that can lead to genital birth defects.
A new study shows that the sons of hairdressers and beauticians frequently exposed to hairspray were more than twice as likely to be born with hypospadias, in which the urinary opening appears on the underside of the penis.
Paul Elliott from Imperial College London, and colleagues, interviewed 471 mothers whose sons had been born with the defect and 490 mothers of children not born with the disorder, to try to find out which chemicals the mothers had been exposed to: including exhaust fumes, printing ink, hairspray, or glues.
Sylvia Manika & Patience Rusere
VOA NewsFri, 21 Nov 2008 23:08 UTC
International and non-governmental organizations were working nonstop in the Glen View and Budiriro suburbs of Harare treating victims of an expanding cholera epidemic, but the death toll continued to mount due to the numbers of patients presenting themselves.
Nurses working without doctors labored to save hundreds at the Budiriro Polyclinic. Medical workers and families said treatment was coming too late in many cases, as reporter Sylvia Manika of VOA's Studio 7 for Zimbabwe reported from Budiriro.
Elsewhere in Zimbabwe's troubled health sector, striking medical workers rejected an offer from the Ministry of Health proposing to provide them with hampers of food, free transport to work and a review of salaries if they would return to their jobs in state hospitals.
When food importer Luciano Sclafani spied a three-liter tin of extra virgin olive oil a couple of years ago selling for $9.99, he could tell without tasting a drop that it wasn't legitimate.
Lab tests proved him right. The oil, which should have sold for $25 or $30, was a cheap knockoff, 90 percent soybean oil and 10 percent pomace, the oil that's collected from the ground flesh and pits after pressing.
"Olive oil is the closest thing to my heart that I sell," said Sclafani, president of his family's 97-year-old food-importing and distribution business in Norwalk, Conn.
A boy of 12 collapsed and died after using 'copious' amounts of deodorant in a cramped bathroom, an inquest heard.
Daniel Hurley was overcome by solvents in the Lynx Vice spray and his heart began to beat irregularly, the hearing was told.
His father Robert found him collapsed in the bath at the family home after spraying on too much of the deodorant.
ASRM 64th Annual Meeting
Treatment with paroxetine was associated with increased DNA fragmentation in sperm, according to study results presented at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine 64th Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
"In volunteer male patients with normal semen parameters, paroxetine induced abnormal sperm DNA fragmentation in a significant proportion of patients. ... The fertility potential of a substantial proportion of men on paroxetine may be adversely affected by these changes in sperm DNA integrity," wrote the researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Weill Medical College of Cornell University.
They enrolled 35 healthy men aged 18 to 65 years in the prospective clinical trial. Volunteers were assigned daily paroxetine for five weeks in varying doses: week one, 10 mg; week two, 20 mg; weeks three and four, 30 mg; and week five, 20 mg. The researchers analyzed semen at baseline, weeks two and four and one month after treatment with paroxetine was stopped.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - New research shows that among the mental abilities that are affected by type 2 diabetes, the speed at which the brain processes information appears to be the most severely impaired, particularly in patients with undiagnosed disease.
Findings from several studies have linked type 2 diabetes with cognitive dysfunction. However, it was unclear which cognitive processes were most affected and how undiagnosed diabetes and abnormal blood glucose (sugar) levels influenced cognitive performance.
To investigate, researchers analyzed data from 1,917 elderly men and women enrolled in the AGES Reykjavik Study - a large population-based study that ran from 2002 to 2006. The AGES study explored genetic and other risk factors for a variety of age-related conditions including cognitive impairment.
In 430 B.C., a new and deadly disease - its cause remains a mystery - swept into Athens. The walled Greek city-state was teeming with citizens, soldiers and refugees of the war then raging between Athens and Sparta. As streets filled with corpses, social order broke down. Over the next three years, the illness returned twice and Athens lost a third of its population. It lost the war too.
An influential psychiatrist who was the host of the popular NPR program "The Infinite Mind" earned at least $1.3 million from 2000 to 2007 giving marketing lectures for drugmakers, income not mentioned on the program.
Ms Grayston spend several hours a day in a pool with the "doctor fish"
A woman with the skin condition psoriasis has travelled to Turkey to sit in water and be nibbled by flesh-eating fish in a bid to find a cure.
Samantha Grayston, 38, from Kent, said she returned from her three-week trip to find the "doctor fish" treatment had worked and boosted her confidence. She spent six hours a day at the spa near Kangal in eastern Turkey.
