C M G Buttery

A nationwide study of over 280,000 women showed that postmenopausal women who are overweight or obese have advanced breast cancer at significantly higher rates than women of normal weight or less than normal weight. From 1996 to 2005, researchers collected ongoing mammography data on 287,115 postmenopausal women who were not using postmenopausal hormone therapy. They [...]

Google.org’s investment of “More than $14Million for genetic and digital detection” is the title of a blog post that I recently came across. Under a program called Predict and Prevent, Google is working with Healthmap.org and Promed-mail.org to tract the outbreak of infectious diseases across the world through digital and genetic approaches. These three organizations [...]

The new basophil-microarray based allergy assay is the brainchild of researchers in The University of Nottingham’s Schools of Pharmacy and Biosciences. The new technology developed at Nottingham is a lab-based, in-vitro test to mimic human allergic reaction that could be used as an alternative to the traditional skin-prick test. It can test up to 5,000 [...]

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have found evidence of a novel pathway for potential human exposure to antibiotic-resistant bacteria from intensively raised poultry—driving behind the trucks transporting broiler chickens from farm to slaughterhouse. A study by the Hopkins researchers found increased levels of pathogenic bacteria, both susceptible and drug-resistant, on [...]

Although life expectancy is constantly growing in the countries of the EU, living longer isn’t always the same as living well, and knowing to what age someone will live in good health remains a different question altogether. Carol Jagger, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Leicester, is part of the European Health Expectancy Monitoring [...]

The cancer death rate in the United States continues to go down, a new report from the nation’s leading cancer organizations says. What’s more, cancer incidence also appears to be dropping. The findings come from the Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer, 1975-2005, Featuring Trends in Lung Cancer, Tobacco Use and [...]

A federal regulation aimed at preventing mad cow disease from getting into the food supply (a very rare occurrence) could create health risks of its own: many thousands of cattle carcasses rotting on farms, spreading germs, attracting vermin and polluting the water. The new rule could lead farmers to put hundreds of thousands more dead [...]

According to a study in American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine children born in fall have increased risk of developing asthma. The “risk for childhood asthma was higher for babies who suffered from a respiratory tract infection early in life. Further, the risk for developing asthma is about 40 percent if one parent [...]

Today’s NEJM contains a must read editorial discussing the health of presidents and candidates. The issue is whether the media should have access to genetic scans of candidates. The media is incapable of understanding scientific analysis and reporting research correctly. One of the final paragraphs of the editorial states “For the foreseeable future, the examination [...]

HealthDay reported that “in the not-so-distant future, American seniors may turn to helpful, uncomplaining robots to fill the worrisome ‘care gap’ that many face today.” Already, University of Massachusetts researchers have created the uBOT-5, which is “capable of carrying out simple tasks, while it monitors the home environment.” The $65,000 prototype “can even spot trouble [...]