Health & Medicine

  1. Health & Medicine

    A Most Dreadful Pest

    Yellow fever was a deadly scourge that had a devastating effect on lives and economies throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. This engrossing Web exhibit features historical documents from the Walter Reed Yellow Fever Collection at the University of Virginia. It focuses on the work of the Reed Commission, which proved that the Aedes aegypti […]

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  2. Health & Medicine

    Drug Eases Bone Cancer Pain in Mice

    Pain caused by bone cancer in mice can be alleviated somewhat by osteoprotegerin, a drug being tested for osteoporosis, suggesting a possible new treatment for people with this cancer.

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  3. Health & Medicine

    Less Crying in the Kitchen: Tasty, tearfree onions on the horizon

    The discovery of a new enzyme responsible for creating the tear-inducing chemicals found in onions may herald the arrival of genetically modified tearfree onions.

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  4. Health & Medicine

    West Nile Worries Are No Reason to Give Up Breast-feeding

    West Nile virus infections are spreading like wildfire–and not just through bug bites. Although the vast majority of the nearly 2,800 U.S. cases reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) so far this year were picked up from mosquitoes, at least 3 people–and possibly 15–appear to have acquired the virus from infected […]

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  5. Health & Medicine

    Final Word? Breast surgeries yield same survival rate

    Women with breast cancer who undergo partial-breast removal are just as likely to survive for at least 20 years as are women who have their entire breast removed.

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  6. Health & Medicine

    Making Bone: Novel form of vitamin D builds up rat skeleton

    A newly synthesized form of Vitamin D induces bone-making cells to capture calcium and fortify bone mass in rats, suggesting it might work against osteoporosis in people.

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  7. Health & Medicine

    ‘Bubble’ babies thrive on gene therapy

    Gene therapy to repair mutations that thwart development of essential immune cells has helped three babies to overcome severe combined immunodeficiency, in which a child is born without a functional immune system.

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  8. Health & Medicine

    Calcium may become a dieter’s best friend

    Enriching the diet with calcium, especially from dairy products, can switch the body's fat cells from storing calories to burning them.

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  9. Health & Medicine

    Attention Loss: ADHD may lower volume of brain

    Brain-scan data show that the brains of children diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder are slightly smaller than those of their peers who are free of psychiatric disorders.

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  10. Health & Medicine

    Inducing eye-tumor cells to self-destruct

    By restarting the subdued self-destruct signal in cancer cells, researchers studying eye cancers have found a way to stop these cancers in cell cultures and in a rabbit model.

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  11. Health & Medicine

    Move your head, hurt your golf game

    Right-handed golfers using a conventional grip move their head and eyes more during putts than they do when using a cross-handed or one-handed grip, suggesting these alternative grips might work better.

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  12. Health & Medicine

    Making the optic nerve sprout anew

    A compound made during inflammation, a natural reaction to injury, can induce optic nerve regeneration in a lab-dish concoction including rat retinal ganglion cells.

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