“Bao” began his journey at St. Louis, Missouri, took a connecting flight at St. Paul, Minnesota, for Tokyo, Japan on May 7th, according to Xinhua state-run news agency.

On May 8, according to the Health Ministry, he flew from Tokyo on flight NW029 and arrived at Beijing Capital International airport on May 9 at 1:30 a.m. At the time of his arrival in Beijing, he had no symptoms and had a body temperature of 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

Soon after, he took a flight onwards to Chengdu and felt feverish, with throat pain, coughing, and a stuffy and slightly running nose and was confirmed with human swine flu on Monday, the Health Ministry said.

The patient is in isolation and is being treated at the Chengdu Infectious Diseases Hospital where he’s listed as having recovered with a normal body temperature, the Health Ministry said.

Most of the passengers aboard the same Beijing-Chengdu flight have been tracked down in 21 different provinces and sent to medical observation, according to the Health Ministry.

The case comes more than a week after a 25-year-old Mexican man with the H1N1 virus arrived in Hong Kong from Mexico via Shanghai, leading to the weeklong quarantine of more than 340 people in the Chinese special administrative region.

There have been 4,657 confirmed human cases of H1N1 in the world as of Sunday.

China confirms mainland swine flu case

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Air pollution from car fumes is the likely culprit, suggest Annette Peters, PhD, and colleagues at the Institute of Epidemiology, Helmholtz Center, Munich, Germany.

In a previous study, Peters and colleagues found that a sizeable proportion of heart attacks — about 8% — could be attributed to being in traffic.

To follow up, the researchers interviewed 1,454 people who survived heart attacks. In the hour before their heart attack, many of the survivors had been in heavy traffic.

Analysis of the data showed that these heart-attack-vulnerable people were 3.2 times more likely to suffer a heart attack if they’d been in heavy traffic in the previous hour.

“One potential factor could be the exhaust and air pollution coming from other cars,” Peters says in a news release. “But we can’t exclude the synergy between stress and air pollution that could tip the balance.”

Making it less likely that stress was involved was the fact that patients didn’t have to be driving; the risk was the same whether they were driving or taking the bus.

Traffic appeared to be five times more dangerous to women than to men in the study, although the relatively small number of women in the study (325) may have made this calculation less accurate.

To nail down the true culprit, Peters and colleagues are working with University of Rochester researchers to determine exactly what it is about traffic that raises heart attack risk.

In that study, 120 healthy volunteers are driving to work and running errands wearing heart monitors, while other instruments measure their exposure to air pollution and to noise. The data and findings from this trial are not yet available.

Traffic Triples Heart Attack Risk

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In an exclusive interview airing this Monday on “Good Morning America,” the possible father said Suleman brought him to the clinic at which she received in vitro fertilization to donate sperm, and that he made donations on two other occasions. He now believes Suleman was married at the time.

Tune in to ABC News’ “Good Morning America” Monday, Feb. 23 to learn the identity of the man who possibly fathered the Suleman octuplets.

Suleman has denied that the man is the father, but he said his multiple sperm donations are cause for a paternity test.

The donor said he was “shocked [and] surprised” when he first learned that Suleman, who he said he dated from 1997 to 1999, had delivered octuplets on Jan. 23.

“[I] just really want to know if these are [or] these are not my kids,” said the man, who was in his early twenties when he started dating Suleman.

Regardless of the children’s paternity, the man said he is willing to help Suleman raise the children because he does not believe she can handle it on her own.

“Either which way, you know, know that if she needs it I’ll lend a helping hand,” he said.

The man said that at the time she first approached him about donating sperm, Suleman told him that she had cancer and was unable to conceive without the help of a doctor.

The man said he twice made donations at home. In at least one instance, he said, Suleman kept the sperm sample warm by placing the cup containing the sample between her breasts.

“I just remember her saying when I donated that the doctor told her that she had to keep it warm by putting it between her — between her breasts — just to keep it warm, keep it room temperature until she took it in,” he said.

Though he said they dated for three years, the man now believes Suleman was married at the time.

ABC News has learned through San Bernardino Superior Court Records that Suleman, 33, divorced her husband, Marcos Gutierrez, in January 2008.

The divorce document indicates “no children of the marriage,” suggesting that Gutierrez was not the father of Suleman’s previous six children.

When asked if Suleman, who lives with her parents and collects food stamps, could handle raising another eight children, the possible biological father said, “No.”

Suleman made headlines in late January when news that she delivered eight viable babies was heralded as a medical marvel.

In the days that followed the Jan. 23 delivery, critics raised a host of questions about the single mother who had previously given birth to six other children, all of whom had been conceived through artificial insemination, and about her ability to financially support 14 children.

Suleman is unemployed and lives in a three-bedroom home with her parents, who have publicly criticized their daughter’s decision to have so many children.

Property records show Suleman’s mother, Angela, owns the home and is $23,225 behind in her mortgage payments. The house could be sold at auction beginning May 5.

Suleman told NBC that she does not intend to go on welfare. Earlier this month, her then-publicist said Suleman already receives $490 a month in food stamps and child disability payments to help feed and care for her six other children.

At least one of those children is believed to have autism.

Critics also have attacked a fertility doctor for implanting eight embryos in Suleman’s womb during her attempts to get pregnant.

“I’m really angry about that,” Angela Suleman told RadarOnline. “She already has six beautiful children. Why would she do this? I’m struggling to look after her six. We had to put in bunk beds, feed them in shifts and there’s children’s clothing piled all over the house.”

Suleman and her parents have not publicly named the sperm donor or the fertility doctor who implanted her with the embryos.

Earlier this month, Suleman told NBC’s “Today” that a single doctor helped her conceive all 14 children.

While she did not reveal the identity of the doctor, a 2006 report by television station KTLA shows a grateful Suleman praising the work of Beverly Hills physician Michael Kamrava, who runs a fertility practice. In the report, he says that he used a controversial procedure that he claims makes it much easier to implant women with embryos.

Since the birth of the octuplets — who were born nine weeks premature at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Bellflower, Calif. — a number of fertility experts and bioethicists have criticized Suleman and her physician for dangerously implanting so many embryos.

“Anyone who transfers eight embryos should be arrested for malpractice,” said University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan.

Studies have shown that the tendency toward premature delivery and low birth weight in multiple-birth babies puts them at greater risk for a variety of complications, including respiratory problems at birth, cerebral palsy, birth defects, sensory disorders and even death. These risks increase as the number of babies in the multiple birth increases.

A California-based nonprofit called Angels in Waiting has offered Suleman round-the-clock care and a place to stay with her 14 children. It would cost about $135,000 a month to provide the 12 caretakers necessary for the children, money that would have to come from public donations.

Man Gave Sperm 3 Times, Believes He May Be Octuplets’ Dad

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If a man has smoked marijuana on a weekly basis or has been exposed to hashish for an extended period of time, the chances of testicular cancer double compared to someone who has never smoked marijuana.

The study found that marijuana could also decrease sperm quality, decrease testosterone levels and cause impotency, since these are similar side effects of testicular cancer.

Men already produce a “cannabinoid-like chemical,” which protects the reproductive system from cancer, but marijuana use could reverse that protective chemical and instead work against the body. The marijuana link is somehow associated with “nonseminoma,” malignant germ cell tumors, and is increasing the risk.

The study has prompted more research as it has open up a bevy of questions, said Stephen Schwartz, a member of the Public Health Sciences Division at the Hutchinson Center.

Testicular cancer linked to marijuana use

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Testicular cancer is relatively rare — a man’s lifetime chance of developing the disease is about 1 in 300 (and dying of it is about 1 in 5,000). Frequent or long-term marijuana smokers could have about double the risk of nonusers, according to the report in the February 9 issue of the journal Cancer.

In the study, a team led by Dr. Janet R. Daling of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, interviewed 369 men between the ages of 18 and 44 from the Seattle-Puget Sound area whose testicular cancer had been diagnosed. They compared those men with 979 men who lived in the same area, but did not have cancer.

Overall, 26 percent of the testicular cancer patients were pot smokers (15 percent who used daily or weekly) at the time of diagnosis, compared with 20 percent of men without cancer (10 percent who used daily or weekly). Health.com: Is there a link between drugs, alcohol, and ADHD?

Marijuana users had 2.3 times the risk of a type of testicular cancer known as a nonseminoma as those who were not. Testicular cancer is divided into two types, pure seminomas (60 percent of cases) and nonseminomas (40 percent of cases.) The link was much weaker in men with seminomas.

These types of studies have one important caveat — cancer patients may be more likely to remember – or may be more honest about – past drug use than men in the general population.

Because marijuana use was more closely associated with one type of tumor, rather than testicular cancer in general, it reduces the chances that the study participants were less than honest, Daling said. “That certainly makes us feel better that the associations are true associations,” she said.

Still, the results are considered preliminary and need to be confirmed with more research. “There have been studies done on testicular cancer, but ours is the first to look at marijuana,” said Daling. Health.com: Dogs sniff out clues in the fight against cancer

Scientists believe that most cases of testicular cancer actually get their start in early fetal life. Having an undescended testicle – a relatively common birth defect – a key risk factor for the disease.

There has been an increase in testicular cancers in the last half of the 20th century, however, which spurred the team to examine other factors that might explain the rise. Marijuana use increased over the same period, and chronic use has been shown to affect sperm formation and fertility, they note. Health.com: Boost your mood naturally

Some experts say the association is a tenuous one, particularly because seminomas have increased 64 percent from 1973 to 1998, while nonseminoma rates rose only 24 percent.

“These researchers have an association that they’ve picked up on, but it’s a weak association,” said Steve Shoptaw, a professor in the department of family medicine and psychiatry at UCLA. “Marijuana tends to be one of those firebrand issues were people can make statements to get airtime, so I’d like to see these findings replicated.”

The authors note that nonseminoma rates did go up in a couple of places in the world in recent decades. One is Norway and the other is the Netherlands, a country where cannabis use is tolerated. The next step, said Daling, is to collect tumor tissue, evaluate it for marijuana receptors, and study how those relate to tumor development. Visit CNNhealth.com: Your connection for better living

“Certainly we’re going to continue forward with this,” she added.

Without stronger proof, critics say the study should be taken with a grain of salt. “There’s always been the thought that cannabinoids had some interaction with the reproductive systems, so maybe they’re onto something. Who knows?” said Shoptaw. “But now we need to isolate the actual physiological responses.”

For patients using cannabis for medicinal purposes, the improvement in quality of life may outweigh any potential risk of testicular cancer, said Shoptaw.

“The bottom line is that I would not start warning my marijuana smokers that they are going to get testicular cancer,” he said. “I don’t think there’s enough here to go forward with that message, at least not yet.”

Could smoking pot raise testicular cancer risk? – CNN.com

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Angela Suleman is caring for the six older children while her daughter is hospitalized after giving birth Jan. 26 to the octuplets.

“She already has six beautiful children, why would she do this?” Angela Suleman said in the videotaped interview with celebrity news Web site RadarOnline.com. “I’m struggling to look after her six. We had to put in bunk beds, feed them in shifts and there’s children’s clothing piled all over the house.”

The Web site posted photographs from inside Angela Suleman’s disheveled three-bedroom home, where Nadya and her brood also live. Heaps of clothing pour from an open closet door and a carpeted bedroom, where a bedsheet serves as a curtain, is cluttered with cribs.

Nadya Suleman’s publicist Mike Furtney said that his client has been away for nearly two months, so shouldn’t be held responsible for the home’s current condition.

Furtney said his client planned to move into a larger home once the octuplets were healthy enough to leave doctors’ care.

He declined to comment on any of the remarks Angela Suleman made about her daughter in the interview.

“Those are very personal issues between a mother and a daughter,” he said.

Angela Suleman said Nadya’s boyfriend was the biological father of all 14 children, but that she refused to marry him.

“He was in love with her and wanted to marry her,” she said. “But Nadya wanted to have children on her own.”

Nadya Suleman, a divorced single mother, told NBC’s “Today” show that the same fertility specialist provided in-vitro fertilization for all 14 of her children.

Angela Suleman seemed to contradict that account, saying the fertility specialist who helped her daughter give birth to the octuplets was a different doctor from the one who aided in the birth of her first six children.

Angela Suleman said she and her husband pleaded with Nadya’s first fertility doctor not to treat their daughter again, so Nadya found another doctor to work with.

“I’m really angry about that,” Angela Suleman said of the doctor’s decision to perform the procedure.

A Medical Board of California spokeswoman said Friday that it was investigating the doctor — who has not been identified — to see if there was a “violation of the standard of care.” The spokeswoman did not elaborate on the nature of the potential violations.

Angela Suleman also challenged her daughter’s remarks in the NBC interview that she always wanted a large family to make up for the loneliness she felt as an only child.

“We raised her in a loving family and her father always spoiled her,” Angela said.

The Associated Press: Octuplets’ grandmother criticizes daughter

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The report said the twins, both boys, were seven weeks prematurely delivered by caesarean section. Though one is breathing with the help of special equipment, doctors said the twins are doing well but will be kept in hospital until they gain weight and both can breathe on their own.

The woman, originally from India, traveled back to that country for in vitro fertilization using donor eggs after being refused the treatment in Canada because of her age. The CBC said she had tried for years to get pregnant but had miscarried three times, even after surgery to correct a problem with her womb.

While unusual, a 60-year old woman giving birth is nowhere near a record. ABC News reported in July that a 72-year-old woman in India, who already had five grandchildren, gave birth to twins after in vitro fertilization, making her the world’s oldest mother.

The CBC report said the Calgary woman’s obstetrician thought it was a joke when she was referred to him before she showed up at his office. He is still questioning the implications of someone having children at an advanced age.

“I couldn’t imagine if I was 65 having two five-year-olds running around crazily. The energy to do that is incredible,” the CBC quoted the doctor as saying.

60-year-old gives birth to twins?

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Treating Alzheimer’s with the hormone insulin, or with drugs to boost its effect, may help patients, they claim.

The journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports insulin could protect against damage to brain cells key to memory.

UK experts said the find could be the basis of new drug treatments.

The relationship between insulin and brain disease has been under scrutiny since doctors found evidence that the hormone was active there.

The latest study, joint research between Northwestern University in the US and the University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, looked at the effects of insulin on proteins called ADDLs, which build up in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients and cause damage.

They took neurons – brain cells – from the hippocampus, a part of the brain with a pivotal role in memory formation.

These were treated with insulin and a drug called rosiglitazone, given to type II diabetics to increase the effect of the hormone on cells.

After this, the cells were far less susceptible to damage when exposed to ADDLs, suggesting that insulin was capable of blocking their effects.

Treatment hope

Professor William Klein, from Northwestern, said that drugs to boost the brain’s sensitivity to insulin could provide “new avenues” for treating Alzheimer’s disease.

“Sensitivity to insulin can decline with aging, which presents a novel risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease – our results demonstrate that bolstering insulin signalling can protect neurons from harm.”

His colleague, Professor Sergio Ferreira, from Rio de Janeiro, said: “Recognising that Alzheimer’s disease is a type of brain diabetes points the way to novel discoveries that may finally result in disease-modifying treatments for this devastating disease.”

A spokesman for the Alzheimer’s Research Trust said that the study shed light on how insulin interacted with toxic proteins linked to the disease.

“People with diabetes are at higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s. It is well known that insulin affects how the brain works, and this research adds more evidence to the possibility that Alzheimer’s could be a type of brain diabetes.

“The most exciting implications are that some diabetes drugs have the potential to be developed as Alzheimer’s treatments.”

BBC NEWS | Health | Alzheimer’s ‘is brain diabetes

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Two of the babies were still receiving supplemental oxygen but were inhaling and exhaling on their own.

“They’re doing amazingly well,” said Socorro Serrano, spokeswoman for Kaiser Permanente’s Bellflower Medical Center, where the babies were born nine weeks premature.

The mother, whose identity remains a secret, had not yet been able to hold any of the delicate babies — six boys and two girls — who were born weighing between 1 pound, 8 ounces and 3 pounds, 4 ounces. However, she was able to see them in their incubators Tuesday night.

In lieu of names, the babies have been assigned letters A through H, in the order of their birth Monday morning. The babies’ incubators were being kept near one another in the same room for bonding, said Miriam Khoury, clinical director of inpatient obstetrical nursing at the hospital.

Four of the babies were receiving tube-feedings of donated breast milk, said Khoury.

The stomach of a fifth baby didn’t absorb the milk he was given Wednesday and now was being fed intravenously, said Khoury. Two of the babies that were receiving milk also were being fed through a vein.

The mother has begun pumping breast milk in anticipation of eight hungry babies, said Serrano.

Doctors were surprised by the birth of the eighth baby, because they were only anticipating seven, said Dr. Harold Henry, one of 46 staff members who delivered the babies by cesarean section.

Khoury said the addition of eight babies to the neonatal unit had not stressed the hospital.

“This is history for us, so of course we’re happy,” said Khoury, who helped coordinate the materials needed for the labor.

Details about how the octuplets were conceived have not been released, but doctors not involved in the delivery believe the mother was likely on fertility treatment.

Dr. Daniel Mishell, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, recommends carefully monitoring pregnancies involving fertility drugs by ultrasound.

Multiple births can be dangerous for babies and their mother, and in some cases, may result in lasting health problems. However, in cases where a woman insists on having multiple births, there’s a limit to a doctor’s role.

“You can’t mandate a reduction of pregnancies,” Mishell said. “You can advise them, but you can’t mandate them.”

The babies were expected to remain hospitalized for several weeks and could face serious developmental delays because of their small size.

The nation’s first live-birth octuplets were born three months premature in Houston in 1998. The tiniest baby, who was born at 10.3 ounces, died of heart and lung failure a week after being born. The others survived.

Mother Nkem Chukwu and father Iyke Louis Udobi had used fertility drugs in the pregnancy.

The Associated Press: Hospital: Calif. octuplets doing ‘amazingly well

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As with Lisa Strong and Brazilian beauty queen Mariana Bridi da Costa, who died Saturday, sepsis can develop when any type of infection in the body invades the bloodstream, where it can take over the body and threaten death.

The invaders often are bacteria or viruses from pneumonia, skin abscesses, meningitis or internal infections. In Brida da Costa’s case, it was a urinary tract infection. The elderly, infants and people with chronic disease or weak immune systems are most at risk.

The immune system goes on high alert, sending out legions of antibodies to kill the attackers. The result: inflammation, fever, rapid heart rate and rapid breathing. In healthy people, the body wins.

But sometimes the battle itself causes collateral damage. In sepsis, or septicemia, small blood clots can develop that block blood flow, threatening heart attack or stroke. The blood may fill with so many attacker toxins and antibodies that blood pressure drops dangerously low, a condition called septic shock. If treatment doesn’t work, organs can fail.

Overall, 85 percent of sepsis patients recover. But in septic shock, 45 percent to 60 percent die.

Many cases cannot be prevented, but the best protections are: Wash hands often. Get immunizations. Seek prompt care for infections, especially in babies. Alert your doctor about redness, swelling or pus near broken skin.

Davie woman, Brazilian beauty queen both victims of septic shock

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