The first confirmed case of swine flu in Ohio has been found in a 9-year-old Ely Elementary School third-grader. The school will be closed all week, Superintendent Paul Rigda said late Sunday night.
The boy, whom officials did not identify, traveled to Mexico during spring break. While there, he spent time at a farm, a fair, a couple of different cities and in Mexico City, according to Elyria City Health District officials.
He got back from the trip last Monday and started having symptoms Wednesday. He went to EMH Regional Medical Center in Elyria on Friday with an elevated temperature and cold- and flu-like symptoms, Elyria City Health District Commissioner Kathryn Boylan said.
Mexican authorities sought to reassure citizens Saturday over a deadly new multi-strain swine flu, as the World Health Organization warned that the virus had “pandemic potential.”
The outbreak of the new virus transmitted from human to human that has killed up to 60 people and infected hundreds in Mexico and infected eight in the United States is a “serious situation” with a “pandemic potential”, the head of the World Health Organization said Saturday.
Scientists have found important genetic differences that significantly raise the risk of stroke, and they are found in millions of people.
The study is the first to identify common genetic variants influencing stroke risk in the United States and may lead to better treatments, they reported on Wednesday.
While other stroke-related genes have been discovered, none involved such a wide portion of the population, said Eric Boerwinkle of The University of Texas Health Science Center.
More than half of the newly diagnosed patients with type 1 diabetes who got an experimental treatment for the disease did not need insulin injections for at least a year.
Patients also showed improvements in the functioning of the insulin-producing cells that are attacked and destroyed in patients with type 1 diabetes.
Four of the 23 patients who took part in the study remained insulin free for at least three years and one patient went without insulin injections for more than four years.
A drug that boosts the body’s production of stem cells appears to “jump-start” the bone-healing process to a point that older adults’ bones heal as fast as young people’s, suggest preliminary results released Tuesday by U.S. researchers.
Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York gave teriparatide (Forteo) to 145 people who had bone fractures that had not healed, many for six months or more. They found that 93 percent of them showed significant healing and pain control after eight to 12 weeks.
Energy drinks may boost performance during exercise by activating the brain, new research suggests.
Apparently, brain areas can be activated by titillation of unknown and mysterious receptors in the mouth, according to a study in the latest issue of the Journal of Physiology.
These receptors are independent of ordinary taste buds, says Ed Chambers, PhD, of the University of Birmingham in England and lead author of the study.
Chambers tells WebMD by email that the “study suggests that the human mouth may have receptors sensitive to carbohydrate that are independent of the ‘sweet’ taste receptor. This supports research performed with rodents that suggests these mammals have taste receptors that are responsive to carbohydrate.”
Provenge, an experimental treatment vaccine for advanced prostate cancer, met researchers’ goal in a key trial needed for FDA approval.
That news comes from Dendreon, the company that makes Provenge.
“We believe this is truly a breakthrough for the prostate cancer community and a testament to the promise of the field of cancer immunotherapies,” Dendreon’s president and chief executive officer Mitchell Gold, MD, said in a conference call today.
The second-largest pistachio processor in the nation yesterday significantly expanded its recall of nuts after federal investigators found salmonella bacteria in “critical areas” of its California facility.
Setton Pistachio of Terra Bella, Calif., said it was recalling all lots of roasted in-shell pistachios, roasted shelled pistachios and raw shelled pistachios that were produced from nuts harvested in 2008.
Last week, the company recalled a small portion of that harvest — about 2 million pounds — on the theory that it may have been contaminated by a sanitation mistake that affected just one or two production lines.
