General Health

US Army service members are increasingly deployed in regions of the world where tuberculosis is rampant, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military now faces a growing medical problem. But it is not TB itself that is on the rise -- instead, the problem lies with the growing number of "pseudoepidemics," or clusters of false-positives.

Black and Hispanic women are less likely than white women to receive the radiation therapy routinely prescribed following surgery for early breast cancer, according to a study led by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

People with schizophrenia from families with no history of the illness were found to harbor eight times more spontaneous mutations -- most in pathways affecting brain development -- than healthy controls. By contrast, no spontaneous mutations were found in people with schizophrenia who had family histories of the illness. The findings strongly suggest that rare, spontaneous mutations likely contribute to vulnerability in cases of schizophrenia from previously unaffected families.

According to a new study, knowledge of potentially toxic household substances among primary caregivers for young children is alarmingly poor.

Golf can be a good investment for the health, according to a new study from the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet. The death rate for golfers is 40 percent lower than for other people of the same sex, age and socioeconomic status, which correspond to a 5 year increase in life expectancy. Golfers with a low handicap are the safest.

Mayo Clinic researchers have developed an animal model that can test the function of two prominent tumor suppressor genes, p16 and p19, in the aging process. Scientists knew that both these genes were expressed at increased levels as humans and mice age, but their role in the aging process was not clear. Findings show that p16 provides gas to accelerate cellular aging, while p19 stops that process.

New research shows that while engineered nanomaterials can be transferred up the lowest levels of the food chain from single celled organisms to higher multicelled ones, the amount transferred was relatively low and there was no evidence of the nanomaterials concentrating in the higher level organisms.

Admissions for the surgical treatment of dental abscess have doubled in the last ten years in the UK despite the fact that these serious, potentially life-threatening, infections are preventable with regular dental care.

In an editorial in this month's PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, the journal's Editor in Chief, Professor Peter Hotez (George Washington University and Sabin Vaccine Institute) proposes that a modest $1 airline or cruise ship tax or a tax on tourist entry could provide a funding mechanism for the Caribbean countries to control these NTDs.

The starting point of the hygiene hypothesis is that the decreasing infection load of infants in the developed countries leads to an increase in allergic and autoimmune diseases. Such development has been observed practically in all industrialized countries after the Second World War. Now an extensive research project begins to establish how the living environment affects the development and maturation of a child's immune system.