Health News

KAMPALA (AFP) - Uganda will pass a law banning female genital mutilation, which is rampant among pastoralist tribes in the country's eastern region, the president said in a statement Friday.

ATLANTA - In a perverse twist of medical fate, Farrah Fawcett has become the poster girl for anal cancer, a rare disease often linked to a sexually transmitted virus.

THURSDAY, June 25 (HealthDay News) -- A new survey finds that 70 percent of American women have experienced a sexual health issue, and 22 percent felt very or extremely concerned about it.

(HealthDay News) -- Medication used to control asthma may be used every day, without the fear of becoming addicted, the American Academy of Family Physicians says.

(HealthDay News) -- Here are the latest clinical trials, courtesy of CenterWatch and ClinicalConnection.com:

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Although more than 90 percent of patients taking ocular medication reported feeling confident about their eyedrop instillation technique, less than one third actually demonstrated adequate skills, researchers report in the Archives of Ophthalmology.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The combination of two drugs -- Femara (letrozole) and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) -- could be of benefit in infertile women of advanced reproductive age undergoing intrauterine insemination, results of a study indicate.

JOHANNESBURG (AFP) - Thirty-one teenage boys have died from complications after botched traditional circumcision rites in South Africa's rural Eastern Cape region, officials said on Friday.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Since its opening last week, camp counselors at New Jersey's Liberty Lake Day Camp disinfect door knobs, take the temperatures of children as they arrive and remind the campers not to share canned sodas.

FRIDAY, July 3 (HealthDay News) -- Extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis might someday meet its match in two drugs now used to treat Parkinson's disease, suggests a new study.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - An intervention including drug and behavior therapy may help curb frequent nighttime urination or "nocturia" in elderly men, researchers have found.

THURSDAY, July 2 (HealthDay News) -- Middle-aged adults who live alone are twice as likely to develop dementia or Alzheimer's disease later in life compared to those who are married or live with a partner. And the risk is three times higher among those who are divorced or widowed, according to a new study by Swedish and Finnish researchers.

FRIDAY, July 3 (HealthDay News) -- U.S. researchers say they've found a major cellular flaw that may drive the rapid spread of relapsed lung cancer.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - PSA blood tests are often used to screen men for prostate cancer, but there is still no good evidence that they cut death rates from the disease, a new review finds.

FRIDAY, July 3 (HealthDay News) -- Older people in the United States scored better than their counterparts in England on a memory and awareness test, possibly because of differences in levels of depression and education and the fact that American adults receive more aggressive treatment for heart disease, a new study suggests.

SYDNEY (AFP) - People who live on vegetarian diets have slightly weaker bones than their meat-eating counterparts, Australian researchers said Thursday.

WASHINGTON - With swine flu continuing to spread around the world, researchers say they have found the reason it is — so far — more a series of local blazes than a wide-raging wildfire. The new virus, H1N1, has a protein on its surface that is not very efficient at binding with receptors in people's respiratory tracts, researchers at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - PSA blood tests are often used to screen men for prostate cancer, but there is still no good evidence that they cut death rates from the disease, a new review finds.