Stem cell research is on the tip of everyone’s tongue and regularly in the news, but a panel of British health officials warns that a global crop of unlicensed clinics is taking advantage of all the publicity. Clinics in places as varied as Mexico, Thailand, Germany, Russia and China offer stem cell therapies with high [...]
The bed bug — the reviled, bloodsucking ectoparasite (Cimex lectularius) that feeds silently on human beings during the night — has made a thunderous comeback in the U.S., everywhere from New York City to Cincinnati to Denver.
The percentage of babies born by Cesarean section remains high, with one in three first-time moms giving birth via the surgical method according to the latest government study. Scientists belonging to the Consortium on Safe Labor, a research project supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, conducted a [...]
There may be one more reason for expectant moms to think twice before scheduling an elective Cesarean delivery to minimize the time they are pregnant. Researchers report that early or late delivery can increase the chances that a newborn develops cerebral palsy. Cerebral palsy (CP) is a movement disorder that doctors believe originates from an [...]
If you smoke, you know you’re putting yourself at increased risk of lung cancer. But if you boost the variety of fruits and vegetables that you eat, you may be able to lower those odds a bit. Scientists in Europe report in the American Association for Cancer Research’s journal that smokers who consumed the greatest [...]
For years now, people have expected electronic health records to be the next big thing in healthcare. Digitization is supposed save us time and money. It should speed up routine tasks, like booking appointments. It should help prevent duplication of work — stopping doctors from running tests that have already been run in another location, [...]
America’s birth rate was lower in 2009 than at any other time in the past century, the AP reports – and many experts feel that the economic downturn is to blame. In 2009, the total number of births across the country fell for the second year in a row – from 4,247,000 in 2008 to 4,136,000, according to provisional data released [...]
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are revising their estimates of the number of people who die each year from flu. We need good death estimates before we can judge how well our infection-control policies are really working, researchers say – but, according to a new report released this week, earlier flu stats have failed to convey important, “substantial variability in mortality.” That [...]
Twenty percent of Americans 16 and older say that, in the past year, they have gotten behind the wheel within two hours of drinking alcohol. And about two thirds of them said they have done so in the previous month — suggesting that people who drink and drive do so regularly. The U.S. National Highway Traffic [...]
Semagacestat, tramiprosate, tarenflurbil, latrepirdine: These names may not mean a lot to you, but all four of them were high-profile would-be Alzheimer’s drugs that – in the last two to three years – have failed the last phase of clinical trials. They made it through the safety stages okay. They just didn’t work well enough; they didn’t [...]
