A devastating disease caused by airborne fungal spores is colonizing the Southwest in what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls “a silent epidemic.” The disease, coccidioidomycosis, or valley fever, strikes more than 20,000 people per year in the region, 10 times the number it did 15 years ago. The spores live in the soil until wind lifts them […]
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Eddyville, Ky A prison doctor and two other staffers at the Kentucky State Penitentiary have been fired after a mentally disturbed inmate starved himself to death. James Kenneth Embry, 57, who had three years left on a nine-year drug sentence, was found dead in his cell in Eddyville in January. Embry started behaving erratically last spring when he stopped taking […]
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Happiness may be a key to staying healthy in old age. A new long-term study involving nearly 3,200 people ages 60 and older found that those who enjoy life are better able to handle physical activities such as eating, getting dressed, and showering; the} even walk faster. By contrast, the unhappiest people were about 80 percent more likely to have […]
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Anatoli Brouchkov, a scientist whose curiosity and thirst for knowledge drove him to go beyond the standard protocol of his experimentation by injecting himself with an ancient “Eternal Life” bacteria. In 2009, a 3.5-million-year-old bacteria strain called Bacillus F was discovered deep in the permafrost of Siberia’s Sakha Republic. Scientists later found that mice and fruit flies exposed to the bacteria seemed to […]
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■ Tourists at a Los Angeles hotel were distressed to learn they’d been drinking, bathing, and brushing their teeth with water from a rooftop tank in which a dead body had been decomposing. The body was discovered by a maintenance worker who was trying to figure out why the water pressure was so low. “The water did have a funny […]
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It’s official: Abortion for gender selection is widespread in Britain, said Dominic Lawson. An analysis by The Independent shows that women from Indian and Pakistani communities in Britain are aborting their female fetuses at much higher rates than male fetuses, “resulting in the ‘disappearance’ of up to 4,700 girls.” Of course, this is what we should have expected, given that […]
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We all know about the dangers of sleep deprivation, which has been linked to obesity, memory problems, and even early death. But a new study shows that a surprisingly large proportion of Americans are getting too much sleep, and that carries its own health risks, MyHealthNewsDaily.com reports. In surveys that asked participants to record how they spent their time in […]
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(1) The Albany, New York, company Vireo Health told reporters it would soon offer the world’s first certified Kosher marijuana, announcing that the Orthodox Union of New York had authenticated it as having met Jewish dietary laws (e.g., grown with insect-free plants). (Other Kosher-validating officials complained that the approval should apply only to marijuana that is eaten, not smoked.) […]
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