Afghans head to remote mountains in polio battle
Afghan health workers battling polio will set off into remote mountains next week hoping to reach about two million children who missed an immunization drive because they were cut off by heavy snow.
Afghanistan is on the verge of eradicating polio with only one case reported so far this year compared with 27 in 2000.
“The campaign is a vital step in ensuring that no children are missed in the nationwide effort,” Edward Carwardine, a spokesman for the U.N. Children’s Fund, said on Thursday.
China wages “people’s war” on spreading drug abuse
China has launched a people’s war on drug abuse, offering rewards for information on traffickers, a top official said on Thursday, tackling a problem that was wiped out after the Communist Party came to power in 1949.
China, which borders the “Golden Triangle” opium-producing region where the borders of Myanmar, Thailand and Laos meet, has about a million registered addicts and many more who are not registered.
House majority seeks vote on drug importation
A bipartisan majority of House members has signed a letter made public on Thursday urging a vote on legislation that would allow Americans to save money by importing drugs from foreign countries.
The bill passed the House by a wide margin two years ago but died in the Senate. Sponsors say support has grown to well over the 221 signatures on the letter. A majority is 218 votes.
The backers of the legislation told a news conference they do not currently plan to take aggressive procedural measures to force a vote - but didn’t rule out that option down the road.
Fewer Americans smoking, study finds
Fewer Americans are smoking, but their numbers are not dropping as quickly as U.S. health officials would like, according to a report issued on Thursday.
The survey finds that 21.6 percent of U.S. adults said they smoked in 2003, down from 22.5 percent in 2002 and 22.8 percent in 2001.
For the second year in a row, more people are former smokers than current smokers, the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds, with nearly 46 million now having kicked the habit.
China hails bird flu vaccine amid prophesies of doom
China has developed vaccines that block the spread of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu among birds and mammals, Xinhua news agency reported, as scientists in the west warned of a possible global pandemic killing millions.
Scientists fear that avian flu, which is infectious in birds but does not spread easily among humans, could mutate into a form more capable of passing from animals to people.
The H5N1 strain first surfaced in poultry in Hong Kong and China eight years ago and has killed 37 people in Vietnam, 12 in Thailand and four in Cambodia.
Antibiotic might stop diabetic eye damage
Experiments in rats suggest that minocycline, an antibiotic, could curb a common cause of vision problems in people with diabetes.
Minocycline is a “strong candidate for further consideration as a therapeutic drug in reducing the retinal complications of diabetes,” Dr. J. Kyle Krady and colleagues from the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine in Hershey write in the medical journal Diabetes.
