Month: July 2014

By Shereen Lehman NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – The brands of alcohol that underage drinkers choose most often also happen to be the ones advertised in magazines read most often by that age group, according to a new U.S. study. “We’ve got at least 14 long-term studies that have looked at young people’s exposure to alcohol advertising and found that the more exposed they are the more likely that they are to start drinking or if already drinking, to drink more,” David Jernigan, the study’s senior author, told Reuters Health. “So we try to monitor youth exposure to that advertising because it’s a risk factor for underage drinking,” said Jernigan, who is director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) at The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

A vaccine that protects against four strains of the human papillomavirus, which can lead to cervical cancer, does not increase the risk of blood clots in women, researchers said Tuesday. The findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) are based on 500,000 girls and women aged 10 to 44 who received the HPV vaccine between 2006 and 2013. Using data from national registries, researchers in Denmark found no evidence of an increased risk of venous thromboembolism (VTE) in the 42 days after the shot, which they defined as the main risk period. Of the 500,000, there were 4,375 cases of blood clots, and of those, 889 had been vaccinated during the study period.

Study by the National Institutes of Health found levels of arsenic similar to what some people consume caused cancer in mice.

"Can you allow your mind to be quiet?" British philosopher Alan Watts poses the question in his speech on worry, which he describes as "a mind in the grip of vicious circles." Tragedy & Hope wonderfully illustrates the cycle of worry in the video above, layering visual elements with Watts' original speech on the subject. "Once you've learned to think you can't stop.

By Steve Holland and Richard Cowan WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. administration sought on Tuesday to halt a cross-border surge of unaccompanied children from Central America, asking Congress for $3.7 billion in emergency spending and putting in place plans to quicken the youngsters' deportation hearings. It was President Barack Obama's most substantive effort to gain control of a humanitarian crisis along the Texas border with Mexico and fend off Republican Party critics demanding a tougher response. One of those critics, Texas Governor Rick Perry, was due to meet Obama in Dallas on Wednesday during a roundtable Obama has scheduled on the topic with faith leaders and local officials, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.

By Andrew M. Seaman NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – People trying to quit smoking may be more likely to succeed if they combine the patch with a pill, suggests a new study from South Africa. According to the study’s authors, the findings challenge previous research that found no added benefit from combining the smoking cessation drug varenicline, marketed in the U.S. as Chantix by Pfizer, with nicotine patches. “The studies that have been done in the past didn’t show any difference, but they were inadequate to the task both in terms of how long they followed the patients as well as the number of patients involved,” said Dr. Hal Strelnick, a smoking cessation specialist who was not involved in the new study. The new results may encourage some doctors to treat patients who failed with other methods to quit smoking with the combination pill and patch, said Strelnick, division chief of community health and professor of clinical family and social medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, New York.

A government scientist cleaning out an old storage room at a research center near Washington made a startling discovery last week — decades-old vials of smallpox packed away and forgotten in a cardboard box.