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 …
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 Safety …
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 …
New research on viruses may translate into new therapies to beat cancer, scientists say.
Molecular biologists at the Salk Institute have uncovered a previously unknown mechanism that allows adenoviruses — culprits behind the common cold as well as other illnesses — to beat the body’s immune system. Since adenoviruses and tumor …
Spend enough time with someone and you’ll grow to be just like them, the conventional wisdom goes. But is it really true? A new study from Michigan State University suggests not.
Instead, those researchers say, most people simply choose to marry like-minded others. In data covering more than 1,200 Minnesota couples, men and women who …
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Cigarette ads that would not be allowed on television are now popping up on YouTube, according to a new study this week in the journal Tobacco Control.
Researchers from New Zealand searched the popular post-your-own-video site for references to five major cigarette brands — …
Women who suffer from depression or anxiety may be more likely to have underweight babies — even when those babies are born at full term, after a normal-length pregnancy — a new study shows. This study adds to a body of research that gives conflicting evidence about the role of mental health in pregnancy.
They knew it was coming. Last March, the federal health-care reform bill warned all U.S. chain restaurants that, before long, they would need to start posting calorie counts for each of their menu items. Yesterday the Food and …
You may remember Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs. The popular pyramid (first published in 1943 and still a regular fixture in classrooms and corporate teambuilding exercises) puts forth a basic argument about humans psychology: that we satisfy our needs in a well-defined order. First come the basic bodily needs, things like …
The number of maltreated children in the U.S. has fallen steadily in the last two decades, according to a report this week from the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.
Overall, physical-abuse cases per capita fell 3% between and 2007 and 2008 (the most recent year for which stats are available). …
Women who say they feel stressed early in their menstrual cycle are more likely to report the cramping, bloating and mood swings of PMS — premenstrual syndrome — later in the month, a new study shows.
Researchers from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, along with researchers from …
Federal researchers have uncovered a mysterious link between chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) — a debilitating disorder in which fatigue does not go away with rest — and a virus that’s known to infect mice.
CNN reports:
The researchers found that the blood of 32 of 37 patients (86.5 percent) diagnosed with CFS contained murine
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There’s a mountain of evidence to show that frequent and thorough hand-washing helps to stop the spread of disease: from diarrhea in the developing world to drug-resistant germs in the world’s first-rate hospitals. But could hand hygiene make you a more efficient worker as well?
That’s a question that German researchers set out to …
