Bayer to pay at least $110 million in settlement: report

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Japan market watchdog recommends $2.5 million fine for Olympus

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Triplets Owe Lives to Super Surrogate Who Birthed 15 Babies

"PHOTO: Brooke, Megan and Nicholas -- were delivered by gestational carrier Meredith Olafson in 1999. Megan is in remission undifferentiated embryonal sarcoma." title

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U.S. agency warns of skin lesions from goats, sheep

Reuters – 4 hrs ago ATLANTA (Reuters) - People can contract skin lesions from goats and sheep infected with the Orf virus through household meat preparation or when slaughtering the animals, a federal agency said on Thursday in a report aimed at doctors in ethnically diverse communities.

The Orf virus - sometimes misdiagnosed as a more serious disease such as anthrax - is most commonly transmitted to humans on farms. It has also been reported in children who visited petting zoos and livestock fairs, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

But the CDC said people could also contract Orf by preparing infected sheep or goat meat for household use or when slaughtering the animals, and detailed four such cases in the report.

"In ethnically diverse communities, health-care providers might be unaware of patients having this type of animal contact and of the seasonal increases in contact associated with religious events," the report said.

"The popularity of hobby farming and home butchering also increases opportunities for household Orf exposures."

The report said that in 2010, a 42-year old man in Massachusetts assisted in a lamb sacrifice for the Muslim feast holiday Eid al-Adha, holding the animal's head with his left hand. Five days later, a small lesion appeared on one of the fingers of his left hand.

In another case, a 35-year-old man of Ethiopian descent cut his left thumb with a knife while slaughtering a lamb as part of Easter festivities and later suffered a thumb lesion.

Orf lesions often heal within a few weeks, CDC veterinarian Danielle Tack told Reuters. Doctors, particularly in urban areas, can sometimes misdiagnose Orf, she said.

(Editing By Cynthia Johnston and Eric Walsh)

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Menthol smokers have more strokes: study

Reuters – 4 hrs ago (Reuters) - Among smokers, people who prefer mentholated cigarettes tend to have more strokes than non-menthol smokers - and this seems to be especially true for women and non-African Americans, according to a North American study.

The author of the study said that while no cigarettes are good for the health, the findings - published in the Archives of Internal Medicine - suggest people should especially stay away from mentholated varieties.

"They're all bad, but having said that, from a harm-reduction perspective this study does lend to the view of avoiding - at a minimum - mentholated types," said Nicholas Vozoris, a clinical associate at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto.

For the study, Vozoris used information taken from U.S. health and lifestyle surveys that included 5,028 adult smokers. The surveys were conducted from 2001 through 2008.

Overall, about 26 percent of those participants said they usually smoked mentholated cigarettes, and the rest smoked non-mentholated ones.

Some experts say menthol makes it easier to start smoking and harder to quit because its taste masks the harshness of tobacco.

Of menthol smokers, 3.4 percent said on the surveys they'd had a stroke. That compared to 2.7 percent of the non-menthol smokers.

After taking into account smokers' age, race, gender and number of cigarettes smoked, Vozoris found mentholated cigarette smokers had more than double the risk of stroke compared to those who opted for non-mentholated cigarettes.

The difference was especially clear in women and people who reported a race other than African American on their surveys. Among those study participants, strokes were over three times more common in menthol smokers.

Vozoris told Reuters Health that the study couldn't prove that the mentholated cigarettes themselves caused the extra stroke risk, rather than some unmeasured difference between menthol and non-menthol smokers.

He added that women and non-African Americans seemed to be driving the link between mentholated cigarettes and strokes, but he wasn't sure why and the study didn't answer that either.

Choosing mentholated cigarettes wasn't tied to an increased risk of high blood pressure, congestive heart failure, chronic lung disease or heart attack compared to standard cigarettes.

Gordon Tomaselli, president of the American Heart Association and chief of cardiology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said it was interesting that the study showed an association between smoking mentholated cigarettes and strokes but not high blood pressure.

Vozoris said it's possible the menthol in cigarettes has an effect on the blood vessels that supply the brain in particular.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, smoking any type of cigarettes increases a person's risk of heart disease two- to four-fold compared to non-smokers.

Tomaselli, who wasn't part of the study, added: "(This) reminds us that the effects of cigarette smoke is pretty broad-based and (it affects) a number of organ systems." SOURCE: http://bit.ly/I6DHPs

(Reporting from New York by Andrew Seaman at Reuters Health; Editing by Elaine Lies)

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Many tests follow surgery for early breast cancer: study

Reuters – 4 hrs ago (Reuters) - Women who have early breast tumors surgically removed may often go through repeat mammograms and invasive procedures for years afterwards, with two-thirds having at least one more invasive procedure over the next decade, according to a U.S. study.

The study, which covered nearly 3,000 women, focused on so-called ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS - abnormal cells in the milk ducts that are considered the earliest stage of breast cancer. The most common treatment involves removing only the abnormal tissue and conserves the breast.

But researchers said the findings, which appeared in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, pointed to a downside of breast-conserving surgery for DCIS.

"Women making treatment decisions about DCIS need to understand that many women will need additional surgery or invasive intervention after breast-conserving surgery," said Joshua Fenton, an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, who co-wrote an editorial published with the study.

The most common invasive procedure is usually a biopsy to remove abnormal tissue in the same breast.

Of the 2,948 women in the study, all of whom had breast-conserving surgery for DCIS between 1990 and 2001, 41 percent had at least one mammogram to check out symptoms or a suspicious lump. And 66 percent had at least one invasive procedure.

But only eight percent actually had a DCIS recurrence and another eight percent were found to have invasive breast cancer.

Larissa Nekhlyudov at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates in Boston, who led the study, said women should be aware that breast conserving surgery can come with a long follow-up.

"We're not suggesting that women have a mastectomy instead," she said.

"The good news is that the majority of these women will not have a (cancer) recurrence. But the work-ups for a possible recurrence are likely to continue for years."

The findings fit into the bigger issue of the pros and cons of mammography screening. In the United States, the government-backed U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends screening women ages 50 to 74 every other year. Some medical groups, though, call for regular mammograms for all women from age 40.

Since mammograms came into widespread use in the 1980s, the number of DCIS diagnoses has shot up. About one in five newly-diagnosed breast cancers is DCIS.

The problem is that DCIS may or may not progress to tumors that invade the breast tissue, and currently there is no way to predict which cases will progress.

So women with DCIS almost always receive treatment, which for some may be unnecessary.

When it comes to early prostate cancer, which is also usually caught through screening, men have the option to delay treatment and choose "active surveillance" - where the cancer is monitored to see if it's progressing.

That's because prostate cancer is frequently slow-growing and may never threaten a man's life.

But this is not an option for DCIS yet since there's no way of telling which tumors might progress quickly, although it could become one if researchers find certain tumor characteristics that strongly predict it's benign, Fenton said.

This will also probably take a "cultural shift," Nekhlyudov noted, since people typically want aggressive treatment for cancer, even if it's early stage. SOURCE: http://bit.ly/IEYv3o

(Reporting from New York by Amy Norton at Reuters Health; editing by Elaine Lies and Bob Tourtellotte)

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Problems Alcohol Can Help You Solve

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Analysis: Heart device troubles cloud St Jude's outlook

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Alternative Therapies Aren't Used as Substitutes for Asthma Meds: Study

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Health Tip: When It's Wise to Have Wisdom Teeth Removed

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Health Tip: Have a Safe Picnic

HealthDay – 2 hrs 31 mins ago (HealthDay News) -- Food poisoning can do more harm to your family picnic than a family of red ants.

The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics offers these picnic-safety suggestions:

Bring a food thermometer to your barbeque and make sure all foods are cooked to their recommended guidelines for minimum internal temperature.Store raw foods and ready-to-eat foods in separate containers to avoid possible contamination.Pack perishable foods separately with an ice pack, making sure they are stored at a minimum of 40 degrees Fahrenheit.Throw away any food that has been sitting out for more than two hours, or one hour in temperatures of 90 degrees Fahrenheit or higher.

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Mental Illness Tied to Higher Rates of Physical Problems: Report

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