On September 16, the FDA did something completely expected: it declared the chemical Bisphenol-A (BPA) safe for human consumption. This announcement flies in the face of the overwhelming majority of the scientific literature on this chemical, including the recent and highly-publicized studies out of the National Institutes of Health and a report released this week from the American Medical Association linking BPA and heart disease.
Earlier this year, Canada said it would ban the u... (more)
Elderly people with dementia are 'wasting' the lives of those who have to care for them, one of the country's most influential experts on medical ethics said yesterday.
Baroness Warnock said that for the old and sick who are contemplating dying, 'there is nothing wrong with feeling you ought to do so'.
Her remarks in an interview with a church journal were the first public suggestion from any expert with close links to Whitehall that euthanasia should not only be le... (more)
Immigrants seeking permanent legal residency in the U.S. are now mandated to take an expensive and controversial vaccine that has been linked with thousands of serious complaints and several deaths.
The Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine — known as Gardasil — is one of five the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services recently added to the required list, reports Fox 8 News.
Schools will soon have to ensure all pupils have access to brain-enhancing 'smart drugs', according to officially funded experts.
They said teachers risk claims of bias against poorer children if they fail to give all pupils the same chance to take a new generation of pills which boost attention, concentration and memory.
Researchers predict that within a generation, cognition enhancing drugs - or 'cogs' - will be so advanced that parents and teachers will be able t... (more)
Children as young as five should be taught to understand the pleasures of gay sex, according to leaders of a taxpayer-funded education project.
Heads of the project have set themselves a goal of 'creating primary classrooms where queer sexualities are affirmed and celebrated'.
The ambition was revealed in documents prepared for the No Outsiders project run by researchers from universities and backed with £600,000 of public money provided by the Economic and So... (more)
Pregnant women are being urged to stop using perfumes or scented creams after research suggested the products could cause unborn boys to suffer infertility or cancer in later life.
It found the reproductive systems of male foetuses were damaged at as early as eight weeks' gestation by chemicals found in cosmetics.
Professor Richard Sharpe, who led the research at the Medical Research Council's Human Sciences Unit, said that he had discovered a 'time window' of eight... (more)
Ministers went ahead with the programme to vaccinate schoolgirls against cervical cancer despite government-funded research concluding that parents were widely opposed to the move, with many fearing it would give their daughters a licence to be promiscuous.
Schools across the United Kingdom last week began offering all 12- and 13-year-old girls the vaccine against the human papilloma virus (HPV), blamed for causing 70 per cent of incidences of cervical cancer. Scottish schoolgirls... (more)
Last week, hard plastic baby and water bottles were not considered harmful.
Now, in the eyes of many users, they are toxic. Yesterday, CVS said it will join Wal-Mart, bottle-maker Nalgene, and other companies in pulling tens of thousands of the shatter-proof, transparent products off store shelves. Some parents are tossing hiking bottles into the trash, feeding their babies with glass containers, and searching for a safer alternative to see-through sippy cups.
Artificial wombs and experiments on human embryos grown in the lab will be commonplace and no big deal ethically in 30 years, several scientists predict.
They envision a scenario just like test-tube babies, which shocked us 30 years ago but now are fairly routine and acceptable to most people.
That is one of many predictions about the future of assisted reproduction and other baby-related medical advances in a special news report, "Making Babies: The Next 30 Ye... (more)
ARE men the new endangered species? According to a Melbourne bio-ethicist, they're way up there with pandas and polar bears.
In a speech titled Should human beings have sex?, Dr Robert Sparrow yesterday told the Australian Medical Students Association convention that females could soon rule the world as hermaphrodites without any biological use for men.
With the help of some frozen sperm at first, females could procreate on their own until stem-cell technology meant... (more)
TIRUNELVELI: An 85-day old boy died hours after he received the second dose of oral polio vaccine and DPT vaccine at the Alangulam Primary Health Centre on Wednesday.
According to Anantharaj and Vasantha of Kidaarakulam, they took their son A.P. Selvam to the PHC, where the vaccine was administered at 11.30 a.m. as per the records. The boy, after being vaccinated, developed breathing trouble, and they took him to the PHC again. As per PHC records, the child was brought in at 1:40 ... (more)
CLERMONT COUNTY, Ohio -- Target 5 has discovered that an alarming number of U.S. troops are having severe reactions to some of the vaccines they receive ... (more)
WEDNESDAY, July 23 (HealthDay News) -- Eating half a serving of soy food a day lowers sperm concentrations and may play a role in male infertility, particularly in obese men, Harvard University researchers report.
The reason for this relationship between soy and sperm count isn't clear. However, researchers speculate that soy increases estrogen activity, which may have a negative affect on sperm production and also interfere with other hormonal signals.
... (more)
"Laboratory rats, fed with a genetically engineered (GE) maize produced by Monsanto, have shown signs of toxicity in kidney and liver, according to a new study.(1) This is the first time that a GE product which has been cleared for use as food for humans and animals has shown signs of toxic effects on internal organs.
The study, published today in the journal “Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology”, analysed results of safety tests submitted by Monsant... (more)
LONDON, England (CNN) -- A group of experts from around the world will hold a first of its kind conference Thursday on global catastrophic risks.
They will discuss what should be done to prevent these risks from becoming realities that could lead to the end of human life on Earth as we know it.
Speakers at the four-day event at Oxford University in Britain will talk about topics including nuclear terrorism and what to do if a large asteroid were to be on a collisi... (more)
Buenos Aires, Jul 10, 2008 (EFE via COMTEX) - At least 12 babies who were part of a clinical study to test the effectiveness of a vaccine against pneumonia have died over the past year in Argentina, the local press reported Thursday.
The study was sponsored by global drug giant GlaxoSmithKline and uses children from poor families, who are "pressured and forced into signing consent forms," the Argentine Federation of Health Professionals, or Fesprosa, said.
WASHINGTON, July 10 (Xinhua) -- Nearly 70 percent of U.S. residents who get water from community water systems now receive fluoridated water, according to a report published Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The proportion of the U.S. population receiving fluoridated water, about 184 million people, increased from 65.8 percent in 1992 to 69.2 percent in 2006, said the report.
The percentage of people served by community w... (more)
London, July 5: The government's plan to impart compulsory sex education in primary school classes has sparked a row in Britain, with family campaigners claiming that the views of parents and teachers are being ignored.
Government advisors argue the basic sex education that children receive in science classes does not go far enough. It has been revealed that children as young as four are set to be given compulsory sex education in primary school classes.
NEW YORK — News of a cluster of at least 17 pregnant teenagers at a Massachusetts high school recently made headlines around the world, but it came at a time when teen pregnancies and abortions in the United States actually are at their lowest points in 30 years.
Pregnancies — whether they end in birth, miscarriage or abortion — among women age 15 to 19 dropped to 72.2 per 1,000 women in 2004, down from a peak of 117 per 1,000 women in 1990, according to the late... (more)
Has eugenics faded away with time, or has the pseudo science morphed and cloaked itself under new auspices? Were some of the original founders of population control efforts themselves eugenicists? How and when did eugenicists shift from Galton era ideals to Malthusian population control? ... (more)
An exhibition of the history of those scientific ideas that gave a grimy intellectual veneer to the Nazi genocide opened recently at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. The collection centres on eugenics, the notion that humanity can be improved and perfected by selective breeding and the elimination of individuals and groups considered to be undesirable. Entitled Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race, it reveals how it was not thoughtless right-wing thugs as much as writers and scientists, t... (more)
Toronto, May 29 : Canned foods commonly served to Canadian children contain the estrogen-mimicking chemical bisphenol A at concentrations twice as much as the levels that made many consumers to stop using plastic baby bottles and water bottles made from the controversial material, a new study has shown.
The highest amounts were in tomato sauce - a food often consumed by children - which had 18.2 parts per billion.
But the news organizations tested 13 other canned g... (more)
