Health Tips and News Updates

Zika May Be In The U.S. To Stay Public health authorities and infectious disease specialists now say we may not be able to rid the U.S. of the Zika virus. Despite months of intense work — including house to house inspections and aggressive mosquito control — federal, state and local officials have not been able to stop the spread of Zika in Miami. In Miami Tuesday, the head of the CDC, Dr. Tom Frieden delivered what he called the "plain truth" about Zika and the mosquitoes that carry it. "Zika and other diseases spread by Aedes aegypti," he said, "are really not controllable with current technologies." The CDC has upgraded its Zika-related health advisory for Florida. The agency says it now believes there's a risk of local transmission in all of Miami-Dade County. It's advising pregnant women to avoid areas in the county where local transmission is taking place and to consider postponing travel to all parts of the county. Preg...

Flu Season: 10 Things Everyone Needs to Know This Year Doctors continue to recommend getting a flu shot this year, but the nasal spray vaccine is no longer advised. Your family and coworkers are constantly coughing and the communal tissues are running low. There’s no doubt about it: Cold and flu season is here. “The cold and flu season really begins when school starts in September, and continues all the way through the spring season,” said Dr. David Topham, professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Rochester. No one likes getting sick, but the flu is particularly nasty. The virus can be deadly, and even in mild forms it disrupts work and family life while making its victims miserable. Here's what you need to know to protect yourself this season. 1. The best protection against the flu is getting vaccinated. Doctors say this repeatedly, but it can’t be reiterated enough. Despite some spurious conspiracy theories about flu shots and even some...

6 cancer prevention steps suggested in society's report Canadian Cancer Society calls on provinces and territories to expand free HPV vaccination programs to boys. New cancer cases and deaths continue to rise steadily as Canada's population grows and ages, according to a new report. The Canadian Cancer Society and Public Health Agency of Canada released their annual report on cancer statistics on Wednesday. Current estimates suggest an estimated 202,400 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in Canada this year and there will be 78,800 deaths from cancer.

Nobel Prize in medicine awarded to Japan’s Yoshinori Ohsumi for work on ‘cell recycling’ Japanese scientist Yoshinori Ohsumi has won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering and elucidating a key mechanism in our body's defense system that involves degrading and recycling cellular components. Known as autophagy, this process plays an important role in cancer, Alzheimer's, type 2 diabetes, and numerous other devastating diseases. In making the announcement Monday morning, the prize committee in Stockholm said the work involves a series of "brilliant experiments" in the 1990s involving baker's yeast that have helped explain how a cell, the smallest unit of life, adapts in response to stressors like starvation and infection. In studying thousands of yeast mutants, Ohsumi -- an emeritus professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology -- identified 15 genes essential for autophagy. It turned out that virtually identical mechanisms exist in humans as w...