At 115 she has been around quite a while and has never had a drink, smoked or “fooled around”.  She loves crispy bacon and I hope she got some for her birthday.

Scientists begin recruiting mothers-to-be in North Carolina and New York this week for the largest study of U.S. children ever performed — aiming eventually to track 100,000 around the country from conception to age 21.

“We are embarking on the road to discovering the preventable causes of the major chronic diseases that plague American children today,” Dr. Philip Landrigan of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, one of the lead researchers, declared Tuesday.

Nearly a decade in the planning, the ambitious National Children’s Study tackles a major mystery: How the environment — everything from a pregnant woman’s diet to a child’s exposure to various chemicals — interacts with genetics to affect youngsters’ health and development.  This type of study is great and looks to providing important data for the next generation.

As a father with 2 children I found the story about the Egyptian woman that has given birth to a set of septuplets in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, quite amazing.  In what doctors termed “a miracle,” the official MENA news agency reported on Saturday.  Ghazala Ibrahim Omar, 27, delivered four boys and three girls following a C-section six weeks before her due date in an Alexandria hospital, MENA reported.

“It’s really a miracle, (the mother) had taken no stimulants during ovulation,” said Ahmed Salam, the gynaecologist who headed the team which delivered the babies, quoted by MENA. According to the hospital director, the seven babies weighed between two and three kilograms (4.4 to 6.6 pounds) each at birth and have been put in incubators.  I hope she has a big family to help her with these bundles of joy!

A slew of foreign tourists are heading to Mexican pet shops for a drug used by veterinarians to put cats and dogs to sleep that has become the sedative of choice for euthanasia campaigners.  Tourists from as far as Australia have travelled to Mexico to buy liquid pentobarbital, which causes a painless death in humans in less than an hour, right-to-die advocates say.

Clutching photos of the bottled drug to overcome a lack of Spanish, they have maps sketched by euthanasia activists to locate back-street pet shops and veterinary supply stores near the U.S. border. There they can buy a bottle for $35 to $50, enough for one suicide, no questions asked.

“We have a moral right to a peaceful death. I don’t want to die with a total loss of dignity, incontinent, barely able to see and stand up, suffering as my mother did,” said Bron Norman, a healthy 65-year-old Australian woman who spent $2,860 to fly to Mexico in March to buy pentobarbital.

Used legally across the world to anesthetize and euthanize farm animals and pets, pentobarbital, sometimes known by the trade name Nembutal, is tightly restricted to veterinarians. But lax regulation in Mexico means it can easily be bought.

Euthanasia campaigners call it “the Mexico option” and say they are willing to travel so far because pentobarbital is one of the few drugs that produces a reliable and tranquil death by sending a person to sleep before shutting down breathing.

Exit International has helped 250 people from Europe, the United States, Australia and New Zealand get pentobarbital in Mexico over the past few years. And, it says, interest is growing. Foreign buyers usually fly to U.S. border cities and cross over to Tijuana, Nuevo Laredo or Ciudad Juarez, the group says. A Reuters reporter buying a bottle in Nuevo Laredo was given a range of brands to choose from.

An aging populations in rich nations have sparked a global debate over the legality of euthanasia and the right of terminally ill people to bring forward their own deaths.

Euthanasia is legal only in the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the U.S. state of Oregon and doctors in those countries can use pentobarbital to end human lives. Many Christians around the world oppose so-called mercy killings, saying they go against God’s will.

But the case of Chantal Sebire, a French woman with an uncurable face-distorting tumour, rekindled the pro-euthanasia camp. Sebire was found dead of an overdose in March days after a court rejected her bid for assisted suicide.  In devoutly Catholic Mexico, most terminally ill entrust themselves to family or doctors rather than seek euthanasia.

A Mexican health ministry spokesman said it was working with the agriculture ministry to step up control of veterinary medicines, but declined to give details.  Australian interest in the “Mexico option” grew after the government overruled a state-level euthanasia law in 1997.  The Australian government banned Nitschke’s book, “The Peaceful Pill Handbook,” which gives tips on everything from carbon monoxide to buying pentobarbital in Mexico.

U.S. anti-euthanasia groups also deplore such activism. In the late 1990s, American doctor Jack Kevorkian — dubbed Dr. Death — was convicted of second-degree murder and jailed after he helped at least 130 people end their lives.  I think folks should control the way they live and die.

What a big suprise for doctors in Japan who carried out surgery on a man to remove a “tumour” it seems the “growth” that had been causing him pain was in fact a 25-year-old surgical towel.  The patient had been carrying the cloth since 1983, when surgeons at the Asahi General Hospital in Chiba prefecture near Tokyo left it in him after an operation to treat an ulcer, a spokesman for the hospital said.

The man, now 49, went in to another hospital in late May after suffering abdominal pain. When examinations found what was believed to be an eight-centimetre (3.2-inch) tumour, he underwent the operation to remove it. It was only then that surgeons realised it was a towel. “The towel was greenish blue although we are not sure about its original colour,” the Asahi General Hospital spokesman said, adding it had been crumpled to the size of a softball.

Asahi hospital officials visited the man and apologised, he said. The former patient has no plans to sue the hospital, which is in talks with him over compensation or other measures, the official said. Japanese media reports said the man, who was not identified, still had his spleen removed.  I am sure he will end up with a few hundred thousand bucks!

Government regulators said Friday the connection between Pfizer’s anti-smoking drug Chantix and serious psychiatric problems is “increasingly likely.”

Government regulators said Friday the connection between Pfizer’s anti-smoking drug Chantix and serious psychiatric problems is “increasingly likely.” The Food and Drug Administration began in November investigating reports of depression, agitation and suicidal behavior in patients taking the popular twice-daily pill.

The agency’s announcement comes two weeks after Pfizer added stronger warnings to the drug. In doing so, the company stressed that a direct link between Chantix and the reported psychiatric problems has not been established, but could not be ruled out.  Since most anti-smoking drugs are typically used as anti-depressants this should come as no surpise to anyone.

The price of fruits and vegetables is climbing faster than inflation, while junk food is actually becoming cheaper, the findings of a new study suggests. Using retail prices at major supermarket chains in Seattle, researchers at the University of Washington found that low-calorie, nutrient-rich foods — mainly fruits and vegetables — were far more expensive, calorie for calorie, than sweets and snack foods.

Moreover, the average price of the lowest-calorie foods — including green vegetables, tomatoes and berries — increased by almost 20 percent over 2 years. In contrast, in the same time period there was a 2-percent dip in the cost of the most calorie-laden fare, such as butter, potato chips, cookies and candy bars.  This is really no suprise, you just have to go to McDonalds for a value meal to see the low price of unhealthy food.

Corruption and poor oversight have undermined South Africa’s fight against HIV/ Aids, a new report says .  The authors, the Institute of Security Studies and Transparency International, say there has been a “potentially lethal cocktail of mismanagement”.

They blame South Africa’s president for questioning the link between HIV and Aids and say his stance has had an impact on the whole health system.  South Africa has the highest incidence of Aids in the world.  The report, titled A Lethal Cocktail, says 30% of the population is infected.

Politicisation of the disease has created numerous channels for abuse and is undermining attempts to counter it, the report says.  The authors conclude that it has become difficult to disentangle corruption from mismanagement and system failure as the root causes of the poor response to Aids.

Much of the responsibility is laid at the door of President Thabo Mbeki, whose well-known questioning of the link between the HIV virus and Aids has resulted in activists labelling him an “Aids denialist”.  The report says that his stand has had an impact throughout the health system, creating numerous channels for abuse.

The authors cite an example of a doctor dismissed for allowing a rape charity to use a disused hospital, because they were distributing anti-retroviral drugs.  Over-all it is a bad report for all of South Africa and brings up some glaring problems.

Let’s get fit, or at least help someone you love get fit. Seriously the holiday season is almost here and it is a great time to start your fitness program. My sister live in Orange County and asked me to help her find a trainer. I began my search by typing in Orange County personal training and complied a list for my sister to contact and get some personal one-on-one feedback. She has not been feeling well for the last few months and has been off work so I was very concernced about her and wanted to help. Sometimes all someone needs to get fitness-motivated is a friendly helping hand from a loved one. Now she works out weekly with help from Chris McCombs who is a local Orange County fitness trainer and by this time next year she intends to meet her goal of weight loss and fitness. I am glad I could be involved in this important part of her life.

This past year has been a real rollercoaster for me and my goal of weight loss. I was going to the gym on a regular basis but was not able to lose any weight. The truth is that I know my diet was the culprit because I have two young kids and we tend to have fast food 2 or 3 times a week. There is also a lot of fatty snacks around the house and even though I buy them for the ‘kids’ I always break-down and find myself munching on them late at night.

Here is what I did to drop 10 pounds over the course of two months and have kept it off so far (6 months later):

I was going to the gym two and sometimes three times per week and riding the stationary bike for 35 minutes and working out for half an hour with weights once a week. Since that level of exercise combined with my current diet kept me stabilized but unable to lose weight I added 1 extra workout a week and made sure to stuff the fridge with a lot of tasty fruit and low fat yogurt and low-fat pretzels for snacking. In just two months I lost 10 pounds and probably also added a couple of pounds of muscle. Most importantly I feel great and now have the confidence that I can lose more weight and eventually get down to my targeted weight goal.

I guess the moral of my story is that sometimes small changes can have enormous effects over the long-term and losing weight does not always involve a strict weight loss diet but can be achieved by making common sense decisions combined with healthy eating and exercise choices.