A vitamin considered so beneficial that pregnant women are instructed to take it and many foods are laced with it, may be too much of a good thing: scientists have found folic acid at elevated levels can cause cancer in a rat’s offspring. “There’s a concern,” said Young-In Kim, staff gastroenterologist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. “But we don’t want to panic the general public about this.” Published in the February edition of the journal Cancer Research, the study found that rats given folic acid supplements before conception, during pregnancy and while breastfeeding,...

Chicken bought at major supermarkets across Canada is frequently contaminated with superbugs — bacteria that many antibiotics cannot kill — an investigation by CBC TV’s Marketplace has found. Marketplace researchers — along with their colleagues at Radio-Canada’s food show L’Epicerie — bought 100 samples of chicken from major grocery chains in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. The chicken included some of the most familiar label names in the poultry business. The 100 samples were sent to a lab for analysis. Two-thirds of the chicken samples had bacteria. That in itself...

British team’s success with jab that targets proteins common to every type of flu virus Scientists at Oxford University have successfully tested a universal flu vaccine that could work against all known strains of the illness, taking a significant step in the fight against a disease that affects billions of people each year. The treatment – using a new technique and tested for the first time on humans infected with flu – targets a different part of the flu virus to traditional vaccines, meaning it does not need expensive reformulation every year to match the most prevalent virus that...

In early 2010, Medicare paid $135,000 to a discount pharmacy in Hialeah, Fla. for drug prescriptions written by four doctors. There were only a few problems. First, two of the doctors were dead. A third doctor was alive, living in Portland, Ore., but he never wrote the prescriptions. The fourth doctor was a few months into a three-year prison sentence, according to federal court records, for conspiracy to commit Medicare fraud. In October, Renier Vicente Rodriguez Fleitas, 60, owner of Pirifer Phamacy and Discount and a former lieutenant colonel in the Cuban military, pleaded guilty to conspiring...

The symptoms for men and women differ. Many heart attacks begin with symptoms that are so mild they are often mistaken for indigestion or muscle ache. How can you tell if you or someone you know is having a heart attack? Sometimes the symptoms can be surprisingly subtle. “They can be very different from person to person, between women and men and even within an individual who has more than one heart attack,” says Dr. David Rizik, director of Interventional Cardiology for Scottsdale Healthcare Hospitals, in Scottsdale, Ariz. Men and women may experience atypical heart attack symptoms. In...

The quality is deemed good enough for doctors to make diagnoses from MRIs and other medical images on an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Reporting from Washington — Add diagnosing soft-tissue injuries to online banking, e-mail, video games and thousands of other applications available for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. The Food and Drug Administration ushered in the era of mobile diagnostic radiology Friday, approving software for viewing images and making medical diagnoses from MRIs and CT, PET and SPECT scans on several of Apple Inc.’s popular hand-held devices. Read more…

Having smartphones like Blackberry is fun for some people. With smartphones, the activity of exchanging e-mails, chatting, or surfing the internet can be done simultaneously, anytime and anywhere. But think carefully before using this technology. Cosmetic doctor stated that smartphone users will get old faster characterized by premature wrinkles. Wrinkle as a sign of one being old is usually experienced by someone in their middle age 30. However, younger women are now having wrinkles more quickly due to overuse of smartphones. Dr Jean-Louis Sebagh says that staring at the phone screen which has...

By Kate Kelland (Reuters) – About a third of all common cancers in the United States, China and Britain could be prevented each year if people ate healthier food, drank less alcohol and exercised more, health experts said on Friday. Estimates from the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR) and the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) suggest that making simple lifestyle changes could prevent some 40 percent of breast cancers alone in Britain and the United States, as well as tens of thousands of colon, stomach and prostate cancers. “It is distressing that even in 2011, people are...

By Charles Bankhead, Staff Writer, MedPage Today A four-gene signature accurately distinguished high-risk prostate cancer from low-risk disease in a series of experiments involving mice and human tumor specimens. In studies involving archived human prostate cancer specimens, the test demonstrated 83% accuracy for identifying cancers that led to fatal metastatic spread. Combining the test result with Gleason score increased the accuracy to 90%, researchers reported online in Nature. The results indicate the test has potential to help reduce unnecessary treatment of prostate cancer by distinguishing...

By Lisa Lerer Sarah Palin, a potential 2012 presidential candidate, said the U.S. is at a “crisis point” as the Obama administration pursues policies that will lead to “decline and defeat.” “If President Reagan were alive today” the hills in California “would echo with his outrage” over the enactment of President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul, she said last night at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara, California. The 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee and former Alaska governor gave the keynote address at a Young America’s Foundation tribute to the centennial...