Scientists have bred cows that produce skimmed milk and hope to establish herds of the cattle to meet the demands of health-conscious consumers.
The milk is also high in omega3 oils, claimed to improve brain power, and contains polyunsaturated fat. The saturated fats found in normal milk are linked to increased risk of heart disease. The cows, which have a particular genetic mutation, were bred from a single female discovered by researchers when they screened milk from millions of cattle in New Zealand.
Some cancers seem to be linked to extremely low frequency electromagnetic fields, suggests research published ahead of print in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
The findings are based on more than 20,000 Swiss railway workers, who were monitored for 30 years.
The researchers opted to study this group, because railway workers in Switzerland tend to change jobs infrequently and are exposed to much higher levels of electromagnetic field radiation than the general population.
The researchers checked the full employment records of 20,141 Swiss railway workers in employment or retired from post between 1972 and 2002. Information on deaths among the employees was obtained from national data.
Researchers have identified a "critical period" during which new nerve cells in adult brains have the same capacity to learn as those in developing brains. The finding in mice, reported in this week's Neuron, provides the promise of therapies that may one day limit or perhaps even reverse the damage of neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's.
Scientists first observed neurogenesis - the creation of new neurons in the adult brain - in animal brains in the 1960s but did not find evidence of it in humans until the late 1990s, says senior study author Hongjun Song, an assistant professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.
Four people have tested positive for bird flu linked to a low-risk strain found in chickens which died on a farm in north Wales, as samples were being taken Saturday from another farm in the area.
Doctor Christianne Glossop, chief veterinary officer for Wales, has said that the chickens at the first farm died from the H7N2 low pathogenic avian influenza strain, not the most virulent H5N1 strain.
The Health Protection Agency (HPA) "confirmed infections in four" of the samples taken from nine people who were associated with the infected or dead birds and reported flu-like symptoms, its chief executive Pat Troop said.
"These test results confirm that human infection with the avian flu virus has occurred. The cases so far have been associated with the infected birds," Troop said.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has announced that three children outside Vietnam have died after receiving vaccinations from two batches of hepatitis B vaccine produced by Korea's LG company.
Karen Collier and Jane Metlikovec
News.com.auTue, 22 May 2007 10:19 UTC
FEDERAL Health Minister Tony Abbott and health authorities have urged parents not to panic over reports that dozens of teenage girls have been sickened by a new cervical cancer vaccine.
Event Reports Obtained from FDA Detail 1,637 Adverse Reactions to Gardasil
Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, today released documents obtained from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, detailing 1,637 reports of adverse reactions to the vaccination for human papillomavirus (HPV), Gardasil. Three deaths were related to the vaccine. One physician's assistant reported that a female patient "died of a blood clot three hours after getting the Gardasil vaccine." Two other reports, on girls 12 and 19, reported deaths relating to heart problems and/or blood clotting.
An outbreak of mumps in eastern Canada appears to have spread to Manitoba.
Public health officials have confirmed two reported cases of mumps in Winnipeg, both in people in their 20s. Neither has been hospitalized.
Exposure to toxic materials in the womb can cause health problems later in life, an international panel declares.
In a strongly worded declaration, many of the world's leading environmental scientists warned Thursday that exposure to common chemicals makes babies more likely to develop an array of health problems later in life, including diabetes, attention deficit disorders, prostate cancer, fertility problems, thyroid disorders and even obesity.
At four months, babies can tell whether a speaker has switched to a different language from visual cues alone, according to a University of British Columbia study.
Researcher Whitney Weikum found that infants are able to discern when a different language is spoken by watching the shapes and rhythm of the speaker's mouth and face movements.
The findings suggest that older infants, raised in a monolingual environment, no longer need this facility. However, babies growing up in a bilingual environment advantageously maintain the discrimination abilities needed for separating and learning multiple languages.
In a paper to be published in the May 25 issue of the journal Science, Weikum explores whether babies use visual speech information to tell the difference between someone speaking their native language(s) and an unfamiliar language. Weikum is a UBC Neuroscience doctoral student working with Canada Research Chair and Psychology Prof. Janet Werker.
The researchers tested three groups of infants - ages four, six and eight months - from monolingual English homes and two groups of infants - ages six and eight months - from bilingual homes. They showed each group silent video clips of three bilingual French-English speakers, who recited sentences first in English or French, and then switched to the other language.
