Raising the amount of vitamin D in the blood appears to help some people — at least those deficient in the vitamin — reduce their risk of heart disease by about 30%, researchers announced Monday. The findings, though preliminary, support further investigation of the interplay between vitamin D and heart health.
Vitamin D linked to lower [...]

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There is an epidemic of vitamin D deficiency sweeping across our modern world, and it’s an epidemic of such depth and seriousness that it makes the H1N1 swine flu epidemic look like a case of the sniffles by comparison. Vitamin D deficiency is not only alarmingly widespread, it’s also a root cause of many other [...]

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The “Spanish flu” of 1918 had four waves of greatly differing deadliness, spread over two years. The “Asian flu” of 1957, like the current H1N1 strain, had a late-spring and a fall wave — followed by a third in late winter of 1958. It then took a year off before peaking again in 1960. The [...]

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Wear the face mask? Don’t wear the face mask? The question may seem moot now — what with a decline in H1N1 cases and pharmacies now publicly trumpeting the availability of vaccine against the influenza strain — but a few months back, it was anything but academic.
Researchers at the University of Michigan have been studying [...]

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But while First World philanthropists and rock-star do-gooders were out to conquer AIDS and malaria, they left a far more ancient killer to fester. Tuberculosis has been traced back as far as the Egyptian mummies. It still kills 5,000 people every day—more people than swine flu has killed in the past year. And right now, [...]

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The question now on health officials’ minds is: Will there be a second wave of cases in the new year? The answer depends on whom you ask. “We took an informal poll of about a dozen of some of the world’s leading experts in influenza,” Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control [...]

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Early roots of the virus that causes AIDS might be found in a tiger that lived thousands or millions of years ago, new research suggests.
It appears the virus took on a bit of a tiger’s genetic material, scientists say, and a remnant of that cat remains in the virus to this day. That tiger, in [...]

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Is Gene Therapy Finally Ready for Prime Time?
At first it sounded like science fiction, curing genetic diseases by giving people new genes. Then it seemed like simple fiction: while theoretically possible, gene therapy appeared unlikely to become a true therapeutic option, the field having suffered years of complications and high-profile setbacks. But over the past [...]

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Anxious health officials in Saudi Arabia say that for the first time in recorded history, a global pandemic could affect the hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. The H1N1 virus is a major concern for authorities in Saudi Arabia, who are gearing up to host some 2.5 million Muslim pilgrims from 160 countries later [...]

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The best-selling author of Outbreak has an exclusive tale for FP about a catastrophe of global proportions. And by the way, it’s not fiction.
Today, there is a crying need for a new such socially conscious novel to shake up the complacent public about the high risk of an imminent, serious pandemic. And I don’t mean [...]

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