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Doctors revealed at an infectious diseases conference in Washington, that Merck & Co.’s Rotateq, a vaccine introduced in 2006, has significantly reduced hospitalizations and emergency room visits for kids with the rotavirus, the leading cause of diarrhea in infants.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “before the vaccine, more than 200,000 U.S. children were taken to emergency rooms and more than 55,000 were hospitalized each year with rotavirus, which causes vomiting and diarrhea, mostly from January through May. Worldwide, the virus kills 1,600 young children each day.”

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There are three main breast cancer screening tools. There are others, but these are generally the three main ones:

• Mammography – X-ray of the breast.
• Clinical Breast Exam – Careful physical exam by a doctor or other health official.
• Breast Self-Exam – An exam to check your own breasts for lumps or unusual changes.

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For mothers with infants, this may be some comforting news. A new study indicates that Babies who sleep in rooms with a fan have a dramatically lower risk for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). However, SIDS continues to be the leading cause of death among infants in the first year of life.

This is one of the latest findings by researchers to suggest that a baby’s sleeping environment weighs heavily in the risk for SIDS, which is diagnosed when the sudden death of an infant can’t be explained by other health concerns.

The study, published recently in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, “found that simply having a fan in the room lowered a baby’s risk of SIDS by 72 percent. The gains were even greater if the baby slept on the stomach or was sleeping in a warmer room, both of which are risk factors for SIDS.”

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I did write a post about tainted milk from China ending up in ethnic stores in the U.S. Now news coming from China health officials, indicate that over 6,200 babies have been sickened by tainted milk formula and dozens of infants are suffering from acute kidney failure. Yes, sometimes fatal kidney failure. In fact they report that 3 babies are confirmed dead from the tainted infant formula.

The chemical involved is melamine, the chemical additive that was at the center of a major pet food scandal last year in which 1,500 dogs and cats died. Chinese health officials believe that some of the dairy companies added melamine to watered-down milk to make it appear higher in protein. I guess that is the greed motive and the pressure to keep prices low. At the center of the crisis, is milk produced by Sanlu Group Co.

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You are about to go through or have just gone through cancer treatment and you are wondering what all the various imaging tests mean. For one, let’s start with PET scans. A PET scan is used to diagnose cancer early, detect cancer spread, watch for recurrences, and monitor cancer response to treatment.

PET (position emission tomography) scans use whole-body imaging to look at abnormal increase in sugar consumption in any part of the body and correlates it with other abnormalities seen on other imaging tests such as CT scans. This helps to differentiate benign from malignant growth. In the process, the person is injected with a radioactive glucose, which goes out into tissues and organs, which the body gets rid off soon after the scan.

Since cancer cells grow rather fast, they need lots of fuel, or sugar, so they take in large amounts of the radioactive substance, and this activity can be clearly seen on the PET scan.

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