Health News - Sunday, January 14, 2007
While people estimate that they make about 15 food and beverage decisions each day, they actually make more than 200 such choices, Cornell University researchers say. Their study, published in the January issue of Environment and Behavior, surveyed 139 Cornell staff and students to estimate how many decisions they make about food each day.
On average, the participants estimated they made about 15 food decisions per day. But, when they answered specific questions about when, what, how much and where they ate, and who made decisions about meals, the participants actually made an average of 221 food-related decisions each day. Continue reading
Shortly after hiking the Grand Canyon with his wife in 1988, Michael Manson, the co-founder of PetSmart Inc., came down with what felt like the flu. So did business partner Jim Dougherty. The illness changed their lives. In both men, the flu-like symptoms triggered a more debilitating condition known as chronic fatigue syndrome for which there is no known cure, and no known cause. Its symptoms range from fatigue and vertigo to nausea, pain and cognitive confusion.
Many in the medical community don't believe chronic fatigue syndrome is a real disease. There is no diagnostic test for it. Patients are often referred to psychiatrists on the assumption that their symptoms are psychosomatic. But for those who suffer its symptoms, including Manson and Dougherty, a former marine who served twice in Vietnam, the condition is all too devastatingly real. Continue reading
A team at the institute that cloned Dolly the sheep have made a genetically engineered chicken that produces cancer drugs in its eggs. The chickens produce the cancer drugs in their egg whites, the team at the Roslin Biocentre in Edinburgh reported.
The drugs include a monoclonal antibody -- themselves lab-engineered immune system proteins -- and a human immune system protein used to treat cancer and other conditions, the researchers report in the upcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These drugs are not easy to make in the lab. "Many human therapeutic proteins, such as monoclonal antibodies, are produced in industrial bioreactors, but setting up such systems is both time-consuming and expensive," the researchers wrote. Continue reading