By Stuart Fox Toxoplasmosis, a common food- and pet-borne illness linked to hallucinations, personality alteration, and, since it’s often carried by house pets, the stereotype of the crazy cat lady, infects around 15 percent of the US population. Luckily, a new technique that traps the parasite with gold nanoparticles, and then zaps them with lasers, should help ease the $7.7 billion the disease costs America every year. The treatment, developed at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, uses gold nanoparticles that attach to toxoplasmid-hunting antibodies. The gold carrying-antibodies...

By Clay Dillow Though it’s highly uncertain that they would have anything interesting to say, for some reason we humans agonize over what our babies might be communicating with all those non-verbal cues. But though we’ve golfed on the moon and harnessed controlled nuclear reactions, the various moans, shrieks and squeals of our infant offspring are still more or less a mystery to us. Now a group of Japanese scientists claims to have cracked the infant code. If you’re not already skeptical, read on. Read More…

Ashland University and MedCentral Health System of Mansfield have signed a letter of intent to transfer MedCentral’s College of Nursing operations to Ashland University beginning July 1, 2010. The Boards of Trustees of both institutions have approved the intent to negotiate final agreements, which are expected to be signed later this spring. Located in Mansfield, Ohio, the MedCentral College of Nursing has approximately 380 students enrolled in a traditional nursing education program as well as an accelerated program. “We are very excited about the acquisition of MedCentral College...

Risk of infection among natives is 31 times greater than non-natives; for Inuit, risk is 186 times greater Bill Curry Ottawa — From Thursday’s Globe and Mail It’s been more than 100 years since Peter Bryce, former chief medical officer at Indian Affairs, sounded the alarm over shockingly high rates of deadly tuberculosis in government-funded Indian residential schools. Now, a century later, TB continues to be a major concern in aboriginal communities. A new federal report reveals the TB rate among status Indians to be 31 times higher than that of non-aboriginal Canadians. Among...

A team of researchers, including scientists from Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet, has found that a thyroid-hormone-like substance that works specifically on the liver reduces blood cholesterol with no serious side effects. High cholesterol levels in the blood are primarily treated with a group of drugs called statins, but they are not always sufficiently effective and higher doses commonly cause adverse reactions. The new finding is based on a clinical trial, which showed that a novel drug substance called eprotirome can reduce blood cholesterol effectively in patients who have...

1 in 6 Americans Has Genital Herpes The sexually transmitted strain of herpes simplex virus infects 1 out of every 6 Americans, HealthDay reports. Luckily, the rate of infection is not increasing, according to a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the agency did find that certain groups are more at risk. The infection rate in women, for example, was almost double the rate in men, while three times as many blacks as whites were infected, the report showed. Read More…

A simple method uses stem cells from bone tissue to repair serious injuries quickly and cheaply. By Brittany Sauser A new surgical procedure can repair severe bone injuries and defects more quickly and simply than current methods, which include bone-grafting operations and lengthening procedures that involve inserting pins through the skin to pull bones together. The new technique makes use of a thin tissue called the periosteum, which lines the outer surface of all bones and contains stem cells that develop into bone to repair damage. To repair major bone breaks, or repair serious defects, the...

By Elizabeth Cohen, CNN (CNN) — When Eugenie Smith’s hands started tingling, she figured her biking gloves needed more padding. When she felt out of breath after a short walk on a treadmill, she assumed it was pneumonia. When her chest hurt, Smith chalked it up to indigestion. She was wrong, wrong, wrong. Smith was actually having a heart attack, and needed three stents. She was 46 at the time, and in otherwise perfect health. While it may sound odd to miss the signs of something as monumental as a heart attack, cardiologists say they see it quite often. Read More…

By Ashley Fantz, CNN (CNN) — Healthier men, no matter their age, are going to have better sex more frequently and desire it more often than healthier women. And a healthier sex life could mean a longer life. That’s according to a paper written by University of Chicago researchers that was published Tuesday in the British Medical Journal. While the supposition that men think about sex more than women isn’t new, the paper’s findings have wider implication for attitudes toward public health and how patients respond to doctors’ advice, said Dr. Stacy Tessler Lindau, an...

Men have shorter life spans than women on average, but when it comes to sexual life expectancy, the guys have the advantage. At age 55, men have an average of 15 years of sexual activity ahead of them, while women average just 10, according to a new survey of middle-age and older Americans. “Overall, men were more likely than women to be sexually active, to report a good quality sex life, and to be interested and thinking about sex on a regular basis,” lead researcher Stacy Tessler Lindau, director of the Program in Integrative Sexual Medicine at the University of Chicago, told LiveScience....