While the developed world wrestles with curbing carbon emissions from luxuries like personal automobiles and the multi-megawatt power plants that keep homes and offices at a comfortable 72 degrees, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is engineering an ambitious bottom-up approach to reduce emissions in the third world: providing cleaner cooking stoves. Clinton aims to introduce 100 million clean stoves to poor people the world over by 2020. With two military entanglements cooking up trouble in volatile parts of the world, the threat of international terrorism omnipresent, and the budget stretched...

Why swallow your vitamins when you can huff them? That’s the general thinking behind the world’s first breathable vitamin, called LeWhif Vitamin, which launched in the UK earlier this month and is expected to hit the US market this week. The creation of Harvard biomedical engineer David Edwards, inventor of inhalable insulin, inhalable chocolate and inhalable coffee, LeWhif Vitamin is a lipstick-like delivery device that works a lot like a miniature pipe, only instead of inhaling smoke with each toke, you inhale a fine powder of healing supplements (a sort of anti-smoke) that dissolves in...

Substance Abuse Ranked According to Harm to User and Society By Tim Locke Nov. 1, 2010 — Alcohol abuse is more harmful than crack or heroin abuse, according to a new study by a former British government drug advisor and other experts. Neuropharmacologist David Nutt, MD, of Imperial College London, and colleagues rated 20 different drugs on a scale that takes into account the various harms caused by a drug. Drugs are rated on nine harms a drug causes an individual and seven harms a drug causes society. The scale, developed by a panel of experts called the Independent Scientific Committee on...

A Brazilian court has ordered McDonald’s to pay a former franchise manager $US17,500 ($18,000) because he gained 29kg while working there for 12 years. The 32-year-old man says he was forced to sample food products each day to ensure that quality standards remained high because McDonald’s hired “mystery clients” to randomly visit restaurants and report on the food, service and cleanliness. The man also says McDonald’s offered free lunches to employees, adding to his kilojoule intake while on the job.

October 29, 2010 — The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the atypical antipsychotic lurasidone (Latuda tablets; Sunovion Pharmaceuticals Inc) for the once-daily treatment of patients with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a chronic, severe, and disabling brain disorder that affects about 2.4 million US adults. It is characterized by positive symptoms (eg, hallucinations, delusions, thought, and movement disorders), negative symptoms (eg, flat affect and lack of social interaction), and cognitive symptoms (such as poor executive functioning, attention span, and working memory). “Schizophrenia...

The Associated Press LOS ANGELES—The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is warning parents to closely inspect children’s Halloween treats after finding increasing amounts of marijuana-laced cookies, candies, cereal snacks and even bottled soda in circulation. Narcotics detectives said Friday that edible marijuana products contain several threats, including concentrated amounts of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in pot, chemical solvents used to extract THC from the marijuana plant, and unsanitary conditions in which the products are prepared. Jonathan Fielding, LA County director...

Vivus Obesity Drug Not FDA Approved – On Thursday it was announced that the United States Food and Drug Administration has rejected an obesity drug brought to their attention by Vivus Inc. The drug, Qnexa, is not the first obesity drug to be rejected this week, as the drug Lorcaserin was also rejected. According to Vivus Inc. the US Food and Drug Administration sent a letter to them saying that they could not approve the Qnexa drug in its current form. According to reports, the drug is made up of two different drugs which were banned in the nineteen nineties because they caused heart problems...

Barbers who offer BP checks help customers beat hypertension, study finds TUESDAY, Oct. 26 (HealthDay News) — Offering black men blood pressure checks while they’re having their hair cut could help them keep hypertension at bay, a new study finds. This could be a new way to help reduce rates of uncontrolled high blood pressure, one of the leading causes of premature disability and death among black men in the United States. “Compared with black women, men have less frequent physician contact for preventive care and thus substantially lower rates of hypertension detection, medical...

A birth control gel that is applied to the skin could offer woman an alternative to the Pill, say experts presenting latest trial data. Used once daily, it delivers hormones to prevent a pregnancy in the same way as oral contraceptives do. Early studies show the gel is effective and well tolerated, with none of the typical side effects associated with the Pill, like weight gain and acne. The Nestorone gel is being developed with drug firm Antares Pharma. Researchers told the American Society for Reproductive Medicine how they hope to bring the product to market if clinical trial results continue...

A woman’s ability to conceive in early middle age may be influenced by her blood type, according to research. The US study of 560 women undergoing fertility treatment found that those with type “O” blood had chemical signs linked to low egg numbers. There is no clear explanation for the results, presented to the American Society of Reproductive Medicine conference in Denver. Approximately 44% of the UK population has type “O” blood. The researchers, from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and Yale University, looked at the levels of a chemical called...