Health News

Cigarette smoking rose slightly for the first time in almost 15 years, dashing health officials' hopes that the U.S. smoking rate had moved permanently below 20 percent. Read More

Swine flu has sickened about 22 million Americans since April and killed nearly 4,000, including 540 children, say startling federal estimates released Thursday. Read More

Doctors should give anti-viral drugs to pregnant women, young children and other at-risk groups as soon as they show clinical symptoms of swine flu to prevent them developing serious complications, the World Health Organization said Thursday. Read More

Analysis of a dozen published studies testing possible new uses for a Pfizer Inc. epilepsy drug found that reporting of the results was often misleading, indicating the medicine worked better than internal company documents showed. Read More

Health officials revise the number of Americans who have likely died from swine flu, saying the figure is roughly four times higher than originally thought. The Center for Disease Control now reports the virus has claimed more than 4,000 lives. Read More

Nearly 200 million children in poor countries have stunted growth because of insufficient nutrition, according to a new report published by UNICEF Wednesday before a three-day international summit on the problem of world hunger. Read More

If you're among the hundreds of thousands of Americans with clogged kidney arteries, you might want to consider trying medicines before rushing into angioplasty to open them up. The pricey procedure is no more effective and carries surprisingly big risks, a study found. Read More

Nearly 200 million children in poor countries have stunted growth because they don't get enough to eat, according to a new report published Wednesday by UNICEF. Read More

Male factory workers in China who got very high doses of a chemical that's been widely used in hard plastic bottles had high rates of sexual problems, researchers reported Wednesday. Read More

Health care, a giant in the U.S. economy, may be a gentle giant when it comes to greenhouse gases. Read More

The American Medical Association on Tuesday voted to oppose the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, and declared that gay marriage bans contribute to health disparities. Read More

EDITOR'S NOTE: Ten years and $2.5 billion in research have found no cures from alternative medicine. Yet these mostly unproven treatments are now mainstream and used by more than a third of all Americans. This is one in an occasional Associated Press series on their use and potential risks. Read More

British scientists begin a new study on Tuesday to consider how human DNA is used in animal experiments and to determine what the boundaries of such controversial science might be. Read More

Powerful scans are letting doctors watch just how the brain changes in veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and concussion-like brain injuries _ signature damage of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Read More

In its first study of women's health around the globe, the World Health Organization said Monday that the AIDS virus is the leading cause of death and disease among women between the ages of 15 and 44. Read More

In its first study of women's health around the globe, the World Health Organization said Monday that the AIDS virus is the leading cause of death and disease among women between the ages of 15 and 44. Read More

The chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee wants an investigation into the risk of deadly E. coli getting into school lunches. Read More

In Britain, there are no long lines of people seeking swine flu vaccine. Doctor's offices aren't swamped with desperate calls. And there are no cries of injustice that the vaccine is going to wealthy corporations or healthy people who don't really need it. Read More

Some of New York's biggest companies, including Wall Street giants Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, received doses of swine flu vaccine for at-risk employees, drawing criticism that the hard-to-find vaccine is going first to the privileged. Read More

French scientists mixed gene therapy and bone marrow transplants in two boys to seemingly halt a brain disease that can kill by adolescence. The surprise ingredient: They disabled the HIV virus so it couldn't cause AIDS, and then used it to carry in the healthy new gene. Read More