With the Holiday season over, spring allergies are right around the corner. Even though it may seem as if you’ve just put away the Holiday decorations (or maybe your Christmas…

Liver cancer is the fifth most common cancer in the world with a poor prognosis. About three quarters of the cases of liver cancer are found in Southeast Asia, including China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, India, and Japan. The frequency of liver cancer in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa is greater than 20 cases per 100,000 population. Moreover, recent data show the frequency of liver cancer in the U.S. overall is rising.

A detailed study of the first year of operation of a midwifery-led rural maternity service in Mareeba, North Queensland, provides hope that more rural maternity units can remain viable if there is optimum cooperation and coordination of local health workforce and resources. The study is published in the latest edition of the Medical Journal of Australia.

Scientists have developed a potentially powerful new tool in the fight against deficiencies in dietary vitamin A, which cause eye diseases, including blindness, in 40 million children annually, and increased health risks for about 250 million people, mostly in developing countries.

In the last few years, “personalized medicine”- using genetic or other molecular biology-based diagnostic tests to customize treatment for a particular patient - has emerged as a powerful new tool for health care.Therapy guided by genetic testing has proven highly successful in treating some types of leukemia and breast and lung cancer. Similar “personalized” therapies are on the horizon for other types of cancer, as well as diabetes, heart disease and other deadly disorders.

Dulling a heart failure patient’s overactive immune system may reduce his/her chances of dying from any cause, or being hospitalized in future for cardiovascular reasons, according to an article published in The Lancet. Such IMT (immunomodulation therapy) has potential for treating a large number of heart failure patients.

Pepsinogen (PG) is a precursor for pepsin, a digestive enzyme specifically produced in the gastric mucosa. Human PG can be classified into two different biochemical and immunological properties, PGI and PGII. Serum PG levels seem to be related to the morphologic and functional changes in the stomach, and used as “serological biopsy.

A study carried out by researchers at the Peninsula Medical School and the Institute of Child Health (UCL) has revealed that families from an ethnic, non-English speaking background with a child with Down’s syndrome do worse from the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) system than families facing the same issues who come from a white, English-speaking background.

Cadmium comes from a wide variety of sources in the environment and from industry and is extremely toxic to humans. Environmental exposure can occur via the diet and drinking water. In chronic exposure, it also accumulates in the body, particularly in the kidneys and the liver. The liver acts as a detoxification organ.

When asked about the state of today’s youth, former president Jimmy Carter recently mused “I’ve been a professor at Emory University for the past twenty years and I interrelate with a wide range of students⬦I don’t detect that this generation is any more committed to personal gain to the exclusion of benevolent causes than others have been in the past.”Now research is beginning to support this notion.