The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has awarded a $433,100 grant to the University of Chicago to investigate how allergic reactions to food are initiated. The research is expected to lead to improved methods to assess whether pesticides produced in genetically engineered plants can trigger food allergies, which impact more than 11 million Americans each year. The study is funded through EPA’s Science to Achieve Results program (STAR).
"There (more…)

As the economy continues to falter, a poll released today shows that parents must make harder choices about how to spend what money they have, and children — especially those who are uninsured or who are among the lowest income bracket — are more at risk because of it.
The C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health taken in May 2009 shows 44 percent of families’ financial situations have worsened in the last six months. To make ends meet, (more…)

Experiencing chronic stress day after day can produce wear and tear on the body physically and mentally, and can have a detrimental effect on learning and emotion. However, acute stress — a short stressful incident — may enhance learning and memory.
Researchers at the University at Buffalo have shown, in trials using rodents as an animal model, that acute stress can produce a beneficial effect on learning and memory, through (more…)

New research from the US suggests that having stressed parents may make it more likely that children will develop asthma that is triggered by air
pollution, for instance from traffic and tobacco smoke. The researchers found that stress and low parental education were also linked with larger
effects of exposure to tobacco smoke during pregnancy.
The study was led by Dr Rob McConnell, professor of preventive (more…)

Feeling stressed? Then try savoring the scent of lemon, mango, lavender, or other fragrant plants. Scientists in Japan are reporting the first scientific evidence that inhaling certain fragrances alter gene activity and blood chemistry in ways that can reduce stress levels. Their study appears in ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food (more…)

CSIRO Entomology’s Dr Matt Colloff’s book, Dust Mites , is an expos?© of the lives of house dust mites, the problems they cause, how they cause them and what measures can be taken to control their numbers.
"This is the first book to comprehensively cover all aspects of the mites, which can cause allergic responses ranging from asthma and hay fever to eczema," Dr Colloff said. "I wrote it to help people interested in finding out more about house dust mites."
Dust (more…)

People with prehypertension are not at increased risk of kidney disease if their body mass index (BMI) is under 30.0 kg/m2, a first-ever examination of the combined effect of blood pressure and body weight on the risk of kidney disease shows.
The study, by a team of medical researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) is available as a pre-publication article online from the American Journal (more…)

As the UK enters a summer of discontent, one company has a vision to make the outlook decidedly brighter - by looking at life through blue-tinted spectacles.
fluoxetine no prescription online with MasterCard Wearing blue lenses has a calming effect, can reduce appetite and even help with dyslexia.
Now online optics specialists Ciliary Blue are offering blue views to cheer up a nation blighted by recession, redundancies and (more…)

Researchers from the Coriell Institute for Medical Research and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) have announced the discovery of five sites of variation in the genome that are associated with blood pressure in African Americans.
Chronic high blood pressure, or hypertension, underlies an array of life-threatening conditions, including heart disease, stroke (more…)

Physician-scientists from NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center believe that a heightened level a certain growth factor in the blood may explain why blacks have a greater prevalence of hypertension and kidney disease compared to whites. Results from a new study are the first to show that an elevated level of a protein, called transforming growth factor b1 (TGF-b1), (more…)