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Breast-feeding is on the rise across America according to a report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The proportion of mothers breast-feeding their infants jumped from 70.3 percent to 74.6 percent from 2000 to 2008 and the proportion of mothers who continued to breast-feed after 6 months jumped from 34.5 percent to 44.4 percent.

With the American Cancer Society advising all women over age 40 to get a yearly mammogram and the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommending that women between the ages of 50 and 74 get a mammogram only once every two years, it is difficult for women to decide which advice is correct, leading to unnecessary confusion on a highly emotional matter.

It seems so easy. In fact, it really is. Infections in hospital intensive-care units were cut by nearly a quarter when patients were washed daily with antiseptic wipes, a new study has found.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is telling a White House doctor who worried about his weight to shut up. Dr. Connie Mariano, the White House physician from 1992 to 2001, told CNN she d like to see Christie run for president but fears he d die in office.

Are viruses alive? Dead? Dead-alive? ACSH's Dr. Josh Bloom posed this question last night on the new ACSH-sponsored Facebook page, Infectious Diseases and Vaccines, with the promise of a Snickers bar for the best answer. He got a ton of responses, including one woman who wrote, They don t contain all of the structures and biosynthetic machinery necessary for reproduction. Their genome is mostly DNA or RNA, but not both like most organisms.

A new international study is suggesting that pregnant women exposed to smog have a greater risk of having a baby with low birth weight.
Researchers led jointly by Tracey J. Woodruff, professor of obstetrics and gynecology and reproductive sciences at University of California San Francisco and Jennifer Parker, of the National Center for Health Statistics at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, published their findings this week in Environmental Health Perspectives.

Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane (DDT) continues to be used in South Africa in the hopes of eliminating the spread of malaria in the country by 2018. DDT has proved to be a vital tool in working to reach this goal, and South Africa was praised for its efforts in dealing with the spread of malaria at an African Union event.

New York Times columnist Mark Bittman isn t content just to scare people on food issues he s now branched out into other topics. Today he writes in The Cosmetics Wars, about how American consumers are purportedly covering their faces, lips and hair with a long list of toxins.
Some 400 hair dyes and lipsticks contain lead ¦ you might not want to kiss your kids if you re wearing lead-tainted lipstick, Bittman warns.

Health care professionals and researchers are scrambling to understand why there is a sharp increase in the number of cases reported of children with type 1 diabetes.
Type 1 diabetes, previously known as juvenile or insulin-dependent diabetes, typically strikes those whose immune systems have killed off insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. The disease tends to start in adolescence, but in light of the rising number of cases in very young children, experts have stated that parents need to be aware that toddlers and preschoolers are also at risk.

Many more individuals with diagnosable mental disorders are smokers as compared to the rest of the population. It turns out that mentally ill adults in the United States smoke cigarettes at a rate 70 percent higher than adults without mental illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

We d also like to give a hat-tip to Caroline Scott-Thomas, whose article on genetic engineering is online at FoodNavigator.
In it, Scott-Thomas discusses how we must remember that genetic engineering is an issue of technology and should not be an ideology.

Men who take vitamin C supplements are at higher-than-average risk of developing kidney stones, a new study from Sweden suggests.
The analysis included 907 men who said they took regular vitamin C tablets and more than 22,000 who didn't use any nutritional supplements.

Although screening for and effective treatment of cervical cancer makes it one of the most preventable types of cancers, it still causes 275,000 deaths each year, 85 percent in developing countries. And this number is predicted to reach 430,000 by 2030. With the 2006 launch of the first vaccine against human papillomavirus (HPV), an infection that causes 70 percent of cervical cancer cases, the death toll has the potential to be reversed, especially if girls in low and middle-income countries can be immunized. (A second vaccine was approved in 2007).

Experts have looked at the evidence condemning the weedkiller atrazine as a carcinogen and found it wanting.

In case you didn t already know, the flu vaccine is the only effective, safe way to protect yourself from contracting the flu. Although it s not completely protective most studies point to an efficacy rate of about 60 percent or more there is no downside to getting the shot, and it offers some degree of protection not only to the recipient, but to those with whom they come into contact, the so-called herd immunity which helps to stifle epidemics.

The Super Bowl is over but the NFL and General Electric are just getting started with a four-year partnership to better detect and study concussions, which have been found to lead to brain injuries that accumulate over time and cause depression and dementia all too often.

Before you pop that multivitamin, take a minute to read this new study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Being that multivitamins are the most commonly used supplements in the developed world, the goal of the study was to determine whether multivitamin-multimineral treatment was associated with increased risk of mortality in adults.

They won t give up, no matter the science or the votes. Anti-technology activists opposed to genetically-engineered food were defeated at the ballot box in California last year, but they re not giving up.

Patients with multivessel coronary artery disease fare better when they receive coronary artery bypass graft surgery CABG - (substituting a healthy artery or vein from the body for the blocked coronary artery and requiring open-heart surgery with bypass), as opposed to percutaneous cardiac interventions PCI - (a non-surgical procedure involving stenting of the coronary arteries via angioplasty, passing a catheter through an artery to the heart). PCI does not require opening the chest and putting the patient on heart-lung bypass.

The next time you see a hedgehog crossing the street, make sure to stay away. There have been seven cases of hedgehog-related salmonella infection reported by the Washington State Department of Health, one being fatal. Poor little varmint.
But if you do happen to come into contact with a hedgehog, maybe on your daily commute to work, make sure to wash your hands after handling. And of course, always wash your pet hedgehog s cage to avoid spreading the bacteria in your house.

Erectile dysfunction (ED) problems maintaining an erection may be a barometer of heart problems and could indicate an increased risk of death, a new study has found. The degree of risk correlated with the severity of the ED, as well as the presence of pre-existent heart disease.

Vegetarians are much less likely to suffer from serious heart disease than their meat- and fish-eating counterparts, British researchers have found.
The new study comes from the University of Oxford, where Dr Francesca Crowe lead author and medical researcher at the Cancer Epidemiology Unit, University of Oxford and colleagues analyzed data from 45,000 volunteers from England and Scotland, recruited in the 1990s and tracked until 2009.

Much of the information taken as fact when it comes to obesity and weight loss has not actually been scientifically substantiated. These myths and unproven assumptions have been repeated so often and with such conviction that even scientists in the field have started to believe them. This doesn t include Dr. David B.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued the first-ever guidelines for type 2 diabetic children between the ages of 10 and 18.

About 48 million Americans are stricken with food-borne illness, of variable severity, every year. A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention examining the data surrounding this unfortunate situation was just released. They analyzed the statistics on foodborne illnesses from 1998 to 2008, and found, to some surprise, that leafy greens and dairy products are largely responsible for these outbreaks.