Cigarettes cost the average Australian smoker about $A300,000 ($NZ365,365) in their lifetime, a new calculation shows.
A South Australian infectious disease physician, Dr Ross Philpot, has run new statistics on the physical and financial cost of smoking.
By 65, the average 20-a-day smoker will have puffed on 400,000 cigarettes, and by the time they die 500,000 will [...]
Previous studies of zinc treatment for common cold symptoms have yielded conflicting results, the authors explain.
Dr Ananda S Prasad from Wayne State University School of Medicine, Detroit, and associates investigated the effects of zinc acetate lozenges in treating the common cold in 50 volunteers who had cold symptoms for 24 hours or less. The participants [...]
In little more than five years, Seattle has become an international center for malaria vaccine research and, apparently, will have no trouble finding volunteers willing to get bit by malaria-infected mosquitoes bred in a lab on Westlake Avenue.
“I’ve had to stop answering my phone,” said Dr. Patrick Duffy, chief of the malaria program at the [...]
(Editor’s Note: This story has been changed since it was first published. MRSA is a staph infection resistant to the methicillin and related antibiotics. The original version mistakenly indicated it is resistant to most antibiotics.)In a five-month period, 65 inmates in the King County Jail have been diagnosed with MRSA, a sometimes-deadly bacterial infection resistant [...]
A young woman on a flight March 26 from the Netherlands to Seattle may have exposed other travelers to measles, public health officials said Wednesday.People on that flight, Northwest Airlines Flight 33 (Amsterdam to Seattle), as well as others who may have been in the same areas at Sea-Tac Airport, should be vigilant for any [...]
Running counter to a nationwide overall decline in tuberculosis rates, TB cases in Seattle and King County have increased and, in 2007, reached a 30-year-record high of 161 active disease cases — three-quarters of them among people born in other countries. Tuberculosis, a contagious respiratory disease, today infects one of every three people on the [...]
When it comes to producing healthy babies, the onus is usually placed on moms-to-be. Women hoping to get pregnant are urged to consume a nutritious diet - especially one rich in the B vitamin folate, which has been shown to reduce the risks of certain birth defects. But a new and [...]
Health officials are screening the close contacts of a man who has become
Britains first case of a virtually untreatable form of drug-resistant
tuberculosis.
The man, believed to be a Somali asylum-seeker in his thirties, has a rare
strain, Extremely Drug Resistant TB (XDR-TB), which has a high mortality
rate.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) says that XDR-TB accounts for possibly
only [...]
Feb. 29 (Bloomberg) — Chikungunya, the tropical disease
that spread to Europe from Asia last year, may have turned
deadly, according to scientists who studied an outbreak that
infected about 1.4 million people in India.
[...]
WASHINGTON - It’s a new way to push for patient safety: Don’t pay hospitals when they commit certain errors.
Medicare will start hitting hospitals where it hurts in October, and other insurers are hot on the trail.
That has the nation’s hospitals exploring innovative programs to prevent injury and infection: Hand-washing spies. Surgical sponges that sound an [...]
