Health & Medicine
Health Watch: Vaccine Ovation
More children are getting vaccinated than ever before, federal officials said last week. About 81 percent of kids get all the recommended shots by 36 months, up from 73 percent in 2000. The vaccines protect children against a host of once common and deadly diseases, including polio, measles, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, and meningitis. Coverage varied by state, ranging from 68 percent of children in Nevada being immunized to 89 percent in Massachusetts. Rates for two newer vaccines, against chicken pox and pneumococcal bacteria that can cause pneumonia, also rose.
"These results show that parents have high levels of confidence in our vaccination recommendations," says Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Groups questioning vaccine safety have become more vocal in recent months, calling for the CDC to investigate whether mercury preservatives used in some vaccines could be linked to autism. Manufacturers stopped using mercury in children's vaccines starting in 1999. All vaccines aside from flu shots are now mercury free.
Health Watch: Take Two M&M's And Call Me...
For years, dark chocolate has been getting much praise. The flavanols, or natural antioxidants, in cocoa beans improve blood flow and prevent blood platelets from clumping together. Last week, Mars, maker of M&M's and Snickers, said it hopes to develop prescription drugs based on cocoa flavanols to treat diabetes, stroke, and dementia. "We've learned we can customize them [flavanols] to treat specific diseases," says Mars's Marlene Machut. Before you run to the doctor for a prescription Milky Way, keep in mind that it's dark chocolate that is high in flavanols, not milk chocolate used in most candy bars. But Mars may be on to something. A recent study in the journal Hypertension showed that flavanols in some dark-chocolate bars can significantly lower blood pressure in people with hypertension.
Health Watch: Turning Back the Biological Clock
It's a basic assumption: A woman is born with all her eggs. But reproductive biologist Jonathan Tilly and his team at Massachusetts General Hospital made the splashy claim last year that mice make eggs throughout their lives. Now, he says in last week's journal Cell that the eggs are made not in the ovaries but in the bone marrow. In one experiment, researchers destroyed the mouse ovaries with chemotherapy drugs. But after bone-marrow transplants from other mice, the ovaries appeared to contain eggs again. If the same is true in humans, this would suggest new treatments for infertility. But there's much skepticism. "It's a far cry from restoring fertility," says ovarian biologist David Albertini at the University of Kansas Medical Center. Unless, he says, Tilly can prove that these cells are eggs. Some baby mice would help.
Health Watch: Avoiding Not-So-Tame Video Games
The Federal Trade Commission last week rolled out a cheat sheet ( ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/alerts/videoalrt.htm) for video game ratings. The acronyms (like "AO" for adult only) help signal things like blood, gore, and sex. For more details, the Entertainment Software Rating Board website ( esrb.org ) describes specific games.
This story appears in the August 8, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.