In what would be great news for lovers of dairy products, a new study has found that consumption of dairy foods has no link whatsoever to an increase in a person's risk of heart disease!

On the basis of a comprehensive analysis, researchers from the Department of Community Heath at Brown University in Providence, R. I., have come to the conclusion that there was no statistical difference between the number of heart attacks cases in people who consumed dairy products and those who did not.

The data that the researchers - Stella Aslibekyan, Ana Baylin, and Hannia Campos - analyzed comprised statistics from a Harvard School of Public Health survey of 3,630 Costa Rican men and women, aged less than 75 years.

The new analysis, which divided into five groups based on dairy consumption, found that dairy intake was not linked with the risk of heart attack.

In fact, noting that dairy - which, for the study, included butter, buttermilk, cheese, cottage cheese, cream cheese, cream, ice cream, lactocrema, 1 percent milk, 2 percent milk, whole milk and yogurt - is a rich source of calcium, magnesium, potassium and vitamin D, the researchers said that the effect of dairy products is "likely to involve a balance of factors."

Commenting on the findings, Aslibekyan confirmed: "The overall message of dairy consumption, at least in the levels we studied, is that it is not likely to increase your risk of heart attack"!

The world is experiencing a change in the geographic distribution of diseases. Traditionally, infectious diseases, which claim the lives of so many children, have affected poor countries and non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes, cardiac ailments and cancer, have plagued rich countries.

But the latest statistics released by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on Friday show that the income level of nations is no longer so important, and that all countries now face the burden of both kinds of diseases.

Up to now, non-communicable diseases tended to be identified as the ills of opulence, limited to high-income countries, WHO's director of health statistics and informatics, Ties Boerma, told IPS.

However, due to changes caused by the ageing population, improvements brought about by the global effort to meet the millennium development goals (MDGs), changes in birthrates and other factors, developing countries are now also fighting non-infectious diseases, he said.

Boerma noted that the phenomenon began in urban areas of developing nations, among the most highly educated population groups, but it is now expanding rapidly. That was one of the central conclusions reached by WHO experts on the basis of the World Health Statistics 2011 report published on Friday.

The study confirms that important progress has been made in improving the main health indicators, fighting poverty, bolstering gender equality and education, and moving towards the other goals outlined in the eight MDGs, which were agreed by the international community in the 2000 UN general assembly and have a 2015 deadline, Boerma said.

Over the past 10 years, the rate of improvement of infant and maternal mortality rates - key MDG targets - has been twice as fast as progress made in the 1990s.

Many countries are still lagging, some of them considerably, which means a huge effort is needed over the next five years to meet the MDGs, Boerma said. Nevertheless, the rate of progress is speeding up overall, he added.

In the case of child mortality, the world is only halfway to the MDG target, while in the case of maternal mortality, the world is only one-third of the way there, the WHO expert said.

The question of infant mortality will be evaluated again in September, when WHO and Unicef, the UN children's fund, release new statistics. For now, "we are still standing at 8.1 million" children under five who died in 2009, Boerma said, compared with 12.4 million in 1990.

With respect to the situation in the Americas, he said the statistics show that "very good progress" has been made in many countries.

In Brazil, Argentina and Chile, for example, "there have been steady but relatively fast declines in child mortality, and coverage intervention is high. And they also reduced the inequity between the poorest and the richest. Brazil has been a very good case study of where the poorest have benefited," he said, adding that Mexico has also progressed.

At the other extreme, of course, is Haiti, he said, adding that the health indicators are still worrying in countries like Bolivia and Peru, which have made some advances but "still have a much longer way to go".

Boerma cited the case of Cuba, pointing out that although it is not a rich country, it "spends quite a lot on health" and does so "in a very equitable way.

"Everybody has (free) access to health services," he said. "So in terms of life expectancy it ranks quite high and it has low child mortality and high coverage of intervention. So it is very successful in reaching the whole population and getting good value" for its investment, he added.

The expert noted that the US "is not at the top" in terms of health statistics in the Americas. He said: "They are at the top when it comes to the amount of money they spend on health. But they are not at the top in terms of getting good results for their investments in health services.

"One reason," he said, "may be that coverage of the whole population is not so good. So much of the expenditure goes to relatively expensive curative interventions or interventions that benefit a smaller proportion of the population."

The WHO study reported that average global life expectancy rose from 64 years in 1990 to 68 in 2009. In poor countries, the average is 56 years, while it has climbed to 80 years in wealthy countries.

Life expectancy for women is five years longer on average than for men. That difference has held fairly steady, between four and five years, over the past two decades.

The WHO figures show there is still a huge gap in health spending between low and high-income countries, averaging an annual $32 per capita in the former and $400 per capita in the latter.

The study reports that high-income countries have, per capita, 10 times more doctors, 12 times more nurses and midwives and 30 times more dentists, on average, than low-income countries.

Experts in Australia have suggested that anesthesia during surgery is not that effective since a large number of patients regain consciousness at some part during the surgery, leading to long-term post-traumatic stress disorder in some patients.


Researchers led by Professors Andrew Davidson and Kate Leslie, from Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital, found that at least one in 1,000 patients had some sort of awareness during surgery while they number doubled among children with one in 500 saying that they were awake during surgery.

Professor Davidson said that the awareness differed from being vaguely aware among some patients while others were fully aware of what exactly was happening during the surgery. He went on to add that at least a quarter of the patients from the latter category suffered from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder including nightmares and depression.

"It seems to be the people that are most traumatized are the ones that are paralyzed and in pain and wide awake and unable to move and terrified about doing anything", Professor Davidson added.

Parsley and celery, usually used as a decorative accent to a scrumptious meal, can stop certain breast cancer tumor cells from multiplying and growing, suggests a new study.

In his study, Salman Hyder, a University of Missouri researcher, exposed rats with a certain type of breast cancer to apigenin, a common compound found in parsley, celery, apples, oranges, nuts and other plant products.

The rats that were exposed to the apigenin developed fewer tumors and experienced significant delays in tumor formation compared to those rats that were not exposed to apigenin. Hyder believes this finding could impact women who are taking certain hormone replacement therapies.

"Six to 10 million women in the United States receive hormone replacement therapy (HRT)," Hyder said.

"We know that certain synthetic hormones used in HRT accelerate breast tumor development. In our study, we exposed the rats to one of the chemicals used in the most common HRTs received in the United States - a progestin called medroxyprogesterone acetate (MPA) - which also happens to be the same synthetic hormone that accelerates breast tumor development."

Hyder also found that the compound reduced the overall number of tumors. However, while apigenin did delay tumor growth, it did not stop the initial formation of cancer cells within the breast.

Hyder said, "Researchers have not identified a apigenin dosage for humans yet."

"However, it appears that keeping a minimal level of apigenin in the bloodstream is important to delay the onset of breast cancer that progresses in response to progestins such as MPA," Hyder said.

It's probably a good idea to eat a little parsley and some fruit every day to ensure the minimal amount," he added.

The study was published recently in Cancer Prevention Research.

Researchers found that taking antibiotics with sugar could dramatically improve their effectiveness against stubborn infections such as tuberculosis.

Laboratory tests showed that glucose and fructose - a type of sugar found in plants - stimulated bugs and made them more vulnerable to drug treatments.

Professor James Collins, from Boston University, said: "You know the old saying: 'a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down? This is more like 'a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine work'."

Chronic and recurrent infections often occur when bacteria shut down and become metabolically dormant.

This allows the bugs, known as "persisters", to dodge the effects of antibiotics.

Over the course of weeks or months, the bacteria return to life, often stronger and more aggressive than they were before, and the patient relapses.

Persistent bugs are different from those that develop antibiotic resistance through genetic mutations, but may be just as much of a problem.

Bacterial resistance can stretch illnesses out over months and cause infections to spread to kidneys and other organs.

The scientists looked at a new way of tackling persistent bacteria by rousing them from hibernation using a simple weapon, sugar.

They found that sugar acts as a stimulant that switches on normal bacterial responses, rendering the bugs vulnerable to antibiotic attack.

Testing the strategy on Eschericia coli (E. coli) bacteria, a common cause of urinary infections, the researchers were able to eliminate 99.9 per cent of persisters within just two hours.

Without sugar, the drugs they used had no effect.

The approach, reported in the journal Nature, was similarly effective against persistent Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, which can produce serious infections.

Prof Collins now plans to investigate whether sugar additives can improve the effectiveness of drugs against tuberculosis (TB).

TB is a chronic lung infection responsible for more deaths worldwide than any other infectious disease.

Each day around 4,700 people die from the effects of TB, according to the World Health Organisation.

"Our goal was to improve the effectiveness of existing antibiotics, rather than invent new ones, which can be a long and costly process," said Prof Collins' Boston University colleague, Kyle Allison, who was the first author on the study.

The findings have the potential to improve the lives of untold numbers of people who struggle with nagging infections, while also reducing healthcare costs substantially, he added.