Tuesday, Dec 02nd
Last update09:17:53 AM GMT
Health Glance
The frozen pot pies that sickened an estimated 15,000 people with salmonella in 2007 left federal inspectors mystified. At first they suspected the turkey. Then they considered the peas, carrots and potatoes.
Increasingly, the corporations that supply Americans with processed foods are unable to guarantee the safety of their ingredients.
Bird flu may not have become the threat to humans that some predicted because our noses are too cold for the virus to thrive, say UK researchers.
Tests in a laboratory recreation of the environment in the nose found that at 32 degrees Celsius, avian flu viruses lose function and cannot spread.
Men really do have an excuse for supposedly being wimpy about coughs and colds - their immune systems are not as strong as women's, research suggests.
A Canadian study indicates that the female sex hormone oestrogen gives women's immune systems added bite at fighting off infection.
Are Cheerios a drug or a breakfast cereal? That's what General Mills will have to decide, following a warning letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration accusing the company of misbranding the health benefits of eating Cheerios.
Cheerios packaging claims that eating Cheerios "can Lower Your Cholesterol 4% in 6 weeks." In order to make that type of claim, the cereal-maker will have to apply for approval as a new drug.
Largely between 1997 and 1999, genetically modified (GM) ingredients suddenly appeared in 2/3rds of all US processed foods. This food alteration was fueled by a single Supreme Court ruling. It allowed, for the first time, the patenting of life forms for commercialization. Since then thousands of applications for experimental genetically-modified organisms, including bizare GMOs, have been filed with the US Patent Office alone, and many more abroad. Furthermore an economic war broke out to own equity in firms, those which either have such patent rights or means to control the genetically modified organisms to which they apply. This has been the key factor behind the scenes of the largest food/agri-chemical company mergers in history.
Long-term use of drugs like ibuprofen, naproxen and high-dose aspirin is so dangerous, the panelists said, that elderly people who can’t get relief from alternatives like acetaminophen may be better off taking opiates, like codeine or even morphine.
Flu vaccine studies that are funded by industry are significantly more likely to be published in prestigious journals and to later be cited in the scientific literature than studies without such funding, according to a survey of 274 studies conducted by researchers from the Cochrane Vaccine Field in Italy, and published in the British Medical Journal.
Overall, the authors also found that most flu vaccine studies were of poor quality, with only 18 percent of them reporting conclusions that were actually supported by their findings (concordance).
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