Month: August 2013

By Genevra Pittman NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Children who have an older sibling with autism are seven times more likely than other kids to be diagnosed with the disorder themselves, according to a new study from Denmark. That extra risk is smaller than had been suggested in earlier studies. Researchers also found a higher-than-average risk among children whose older half-sibling had an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) – especially if the two kids shared the same mother. …

Sniffing Out New Strategies in the Fight against Alzheimer s Disease

The rate of obesity for men has jumped six percentage points in the past decade.        

By Kiyoshi Takenaka and James Topham TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan's nuclear crisis escalated to its worst level since a massive earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima plant more than two years ago, with the country's nuclear watchdog saying it feared more storage tanks were leaking contaminated water. The U.N. …

When the American Red Cross called Mayor Evan Low of Campbell, Calif., to ask him to host a blood drive, he couldn’t help but feel conflicted. Low, who is openly gay, said he knew he needed to do his job as mayor and host a drive…

COLOMBO (Reuters) – A Sri Lankan court on Wednesday issued a summons to Fonterra Brands Lanka, the local company of New Zealand's Fonterra and four of its top officials to face contempt of court charges for not adhering to an earlier ruling that banned sales and advertising of all Fonterra milk products. The district court in Gampaha earlier had banned the sale and advertising of all Fonterra milk products for two weeks, following a complaint by a health sector trade union that the company's marketing was misleading. …

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – The head of the United Nations chemical weapons inspectors in Syria said on Wednesday reports of a nerve gas attack killing more than 200 people near Damascus should be investigated. Swedish scientist Ake Sellstrom told news agency TT that while he had only seen TV footage, the high number of casualties reported sounded suspicious. "It sounds like something that should be looked into," he told TT by phone from Damascus. "It will depend on whether any UN member state goes to the secretary general and says we should look at this event. We are in place. …

CHICAGO (AP) — New research suggests giving patients easier-to-take medicine and no-copay medical visits can help drive down high blood pressure, a major contributor to poor health and untimely deaths nationwide.

By Gabriela Baczynska MOSCOW (Reuters) – Yulia endured three years of almost daily rapes and beatings before she fled her husband with her four children, living for the next year in constant fear he would find them. "I couldn't live in my flat, even though I owned it," the Moscow hairdresser said, too scared to give her full name. "For a year I rented, but then we ran out of money," she told Reuters at Moscow's only public shelter for battered women, Nadezhda ("Hope"). …

GENEVA (Reuters) – Syrian refugees continue to stream over the border into northern Iraq, where the Kurdistan regional government has put in place a daily quota of 3,000, aid agencies said on Tuesday. About 30,000 refugees, believed to be mainly Syrian Kurds, have poured into Iraq since Thursday, and up to 3,000 are lined up to cross on Tuesday, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said. "The Kurdistan regional government authorities have put a daily quota for those refugees who will be allowed in. …

By Jonathan Kaminsky TACOMA, Washington (Reuters) – A U.S. army soldier who in June admitted the slaughter of 16 Afghan civilians declined to withdraw his guilty plea in a military court on Monday. U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales made his decision in advance of legal arguments set to begin Tuesday that will determine whether his life sentence will come with the possibility of parole. "I'm just trying to do the right thing," he said in a hearing Monday to establish ground rules for the roughly week-long sentencing proceedings. …

By Yoko Kubota and Yuka Obayashi TOKYO (Reuters) – Contaminated water with dangerously high levels of radiation is leaking from a storage tank at Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, the most serious setback to the clean up of the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl. The storage tank breach of about 300 tons of water is separate from contaminated water leaks reported in recent weeks, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co said on Tuesday. The latest leak, which is continuing, is so contaminated that a person standing 50 centimeters (1. …