Health

Face masks for kids to counter toxic city air

LONDON, England (Reuters) — A London-based designer has developed pollution-busting face masks to protect children from the English capital city’s toxic air. Doodle Masks come in colourful designs, including Disney film themes, designed to attract children, and are sold for £7.50 ($9.41 USD) each online. “The face mask is important because you want to protect your children from taking the pollution into their lungs and affecting them, especially as my son could develop asthma in […]

Study: Fat intake has direct effect on spread of cancer

The amount of fat we eat has a direct link to a cancer’s ability to spread around the body, according to scientists in Spain. The growth of cancerous tumors at secondary sites in the body is called metastasis and is the main cause of cancer related deaths. The researchers say a protein called CD36 absorbs fat from the cell membrane and is the agent that determines whether a cancer metastasizes or not. “When one looks […]

Shanghai expands public smoking ban

SHANGHAI, China (AFP) — Shanghai widened its ban on public smoking Wednesday as China’s biggest city steps up efforts to stub out the massive health threat despite conflicts of interest with the state-owned tobacco industry. Nearly a quarter of adults in the commercial hub of 24 million people are smokers, according to the state-run People’s Daily newspaper, citing data from the Chinese Association of Tobacco Control. Shanghai has had a limited ban on public smoking since […]

Why sitting down may not be as bad for you as you thought

SYDNEY, Australia (Reuters) — Sitting down may not be as deadly as previously thought, according to a new study by researchers at the Charles Perkins Center at the University of Sydney. Previous research has linked sedentary lifestyles to heart disease, type two diabetes and cancer, with sitting branded the “new smoking”. A new study led by associate professor Emmanuel Stamatakis reveals that inactivity alone does not lead to a higher incidence of type two diabetes. […]

WHO puts out first-ever list of antibiotic resistant bacteria

The World Health Organization (WHO) published its first ever list of antibiotic-resistant “priority pathogens” and called on governments to help increase the research and development (R&D) of new antibiotics to address the growing problem. The United National Health Agency said that many of these bacteria have already evolved into deadly superbugs that are resistant to many antibiotics. According to the health organization, the bugs “have built-in abilities to find new ways to resist treatment” and […]

Flu medicines do not harm unborn babies: study

PARIS, France (AFP) — Unborn children suffer no harm when their mothers take flu medication during pregnancy, a study of some 700,000 women said Wednesday. It was the largest study ever to assess the potential risks of taking oseltamivir or zanamivir (better known as Tamiflu and Relenza) — the two main drugs to combat serious flu infections — during pregnancy, its authors said. The team compared almost 6,000 pregnant women in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and […]

1.4 million children face famine in four countries: UNICEF

UNITED NATION, UNITED States (AFP) — Almost 1.4 million children suffering from severe malnutrition could die this year from famine in Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen, the UN children’s agency said Monday. In Yemen, where war has been raging for nearly two years, 462,000 children are suffering from acute malnutrition while 450,000 children are severely malnourished in northeast Nigeria. Fews Net, the famine early warning system, said some remote areas of Nigeria’s Borno state […]

Artificial hearts

Artificial hearts have a hard plastic protective casing and weigh 900 grams. They operate like a natural human heart, have two ventricles and even beat. Implanting an artificial heart involves cutting the failing heart under the auricles, to ensure blood-flow to the organs. A biocompatible interface is sutured to the auricles. The device — comprising two ventricular cavities and four valves — clips onto this interface. Both ventricular cavities are divided into two parts, each […]

Proximity to clogged highways could increase risk of Alzheimer’s, dementia

  (Reuters) — The closer a person lives to a source of pollution, like a traffic dense highway, the more likely they are to develop Alzheimer’s or dementia, according to a study by the University of Southern California (USC) that has linked a close connection to pollution and the diseases. In a mobile lab, located just off of one of Los Angeles’ busiest freeways, USC scientists used a state-of-the-art pollution particle collector capable of gathering […]

Brain damage in former players fuels soccer ‘heading’ fears

LONDON, United Kingdom (Reuters) — Scientists have found signs of brain damage that could cause dementia in a handful of former soccer players, fueling worries about the danger of frequent knocks from heading the ball or colliding with others on the field. The small study was the first of its kind, involving post mortems on six men who died with dementia after long careers playing soccer. All were skilled headers of the ball. The study, […]

Brain damage in former players fuels soccer ‘heading’ fears

LONDON, England (Reuters) — Scientists have found signs of brain damage that could cause dementia in a handful of former soccer players, fueling worries about the danger of frequent knocks from heading the ball or colliding with others on the field. The small study was the first of its kind, involving post mortems on six men who died with dementia after long careers playing soccer. All were skilled headers of the ball. The study, published […]

Small percentage of people spread most Ebola cases: study

MIAMI, United States (AFP) — Most of the people infected with Ebola in the West Africa epidemic that began in 2014 got sick through contact with a small number of “superspreaders” with the disease, researchers said Monday. The study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows such “superspreaders” can be extremely dangerous when it comes to infectious disease outbreaks. The West African Ebola epidemic was the largest in history and killed more than […]