Culture

A new study shows the employment and sociodemographic characteristics involved in the exposure of pregnant women to workplace hazards. Of these, 56% say they often work standing up or have to lift heavy objects, 63% are exposed to workplace stress and 62% say they are frequently exposed to some physical risk in their place of work.

Individuals with more education suffer less from asthma. Researchers writing in BioMed Central's open access journal Respiratory Research have found that having less than 12 years of formal schooling is associated with worse asthma symptoms.

Does flower water harbour potentially deadly bacteria?Do bedside blooms compete with patients for oxygen?Do bouquets pose a health and safety risk around medical equipment?

These are some of the reasons given by many hospital wards in the UK to ban, or at least discourage, bedside bouquets. But is this anxiety justified, and what do patients feel about flower policies?

What happens when the families of sick and dying hospitalized children ask their physicians to pray with them, or for them? How do pediatricians respond to such personal requests? While increasing numbers of physicians say that religion and spirituality help some patients and families cope with serious illness, a new study reports that it is almost always the families and patients who raise the issue of prayer, not the doctors themselves.

Athletes' superstitions and rituals can help them get psyched up for contests, but when these rituals involve non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), which many athletes gobble down before and during events, they could be causing more harm than good.

SAN FRANCISCO—According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, the 66.4 percent increase in myopia in Americans since the 1970s, as reported in the recent National Eye Institute (NEI) study, is significant and will impact healthcare costs as well as vision quality.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A large study of family child care providers shows that while nutrition standards are often met, most children ages 2 to 5 are not getting enough physical activity and are exposed to the television for most of the day.

A study of about 300 home-based child care providers by Oregon State University's Stewart Trost, an internationally-recognized expert on childhood obesity issues, sheds light on both positive and negative aspects of family daycare providers. The findings are published in the December issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The northwards spread of human Rhodesian sleeping sickness in Uganda is likely due to the movement of infected livestock, according to new findings from an interdisciplinary research group including members from the Centre for Infectious Diseases, University of Edinburgh; the Ministry of Health, Uganda; and the Universities of Oxford and Southampton.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – A new study co-written by a University of Illinois expert in math education suggests that incorporating technology in high school-level geometry classes not only makes the teaching of concepts such as congruency easier, it also empowers students to discover other geometric relationships they wouldn't ordinarily uncover when more traditional methods of instruction were used.

Your kids won't wear their seatbelts, take their vitamins or brush their teeth? A new study by Tel Aviv University offers a simple formula that will get better compliance in the kid department –– and has implications for health specialists and consumer marketers all over the world.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A University at Buffalo researcher has invented a statistical method that can detect payola-like corruption in the music industry, a system that gives law enforcement an inexpensive statistical guide to identify potential music corruption and to better target more traditional and much more costly hands-on evidence-gathering.

ATLANTA, GA—December 15, 2009—Do good-looking people really benefit from their looks, and in what ways? A team of researchers from the University of Georgia and the University of Kansas found that yes; attractive people do tend to have more social relationships and therefore an increased sense of psychological well-being. This seems like common sense, and might be why we spend billions of dollars each year trying to become more attractive.

London, ON – A new study published by The University of Western Ontario reveals that couples who share the responsibility for paid and unpaid work report higher average measures of happiness and life satisfaction than those in other family models.

The 'shared roles' category, where each partner's unpaid work is within 40-60 per cent of the total unpaid work, is a growing category that now represents more than 25 per cent of respondents. Couples are more likely to be in a shared roles model when women have more resources and when the couple is less religious.

Influenza is circulating in Africa, but virtually no information or attention is evident, says a new essay in this week's PLoS Medicine. Maria Yazdanbakhsh and Peter Kremsner argue that the lack of adequate surveillance means that the burden of influenza in Africa is incorrectly believed to be negligible. But sporadic reports from various regions in Africa indicate that influenza is circulating and may be regularly causing epidemics.

In this week's PLoS Medicine, Jonna Mazet (University of California, Davis) and colleagues describe their work in the Tanzania-based HALI Project, which adopts the "One Health" approach to address emerging zoonoses, recognizing the interconnectedness of human, animal, and environmental health. There is a strong need for integrated health approaches, the authors argue, because explosive human population growth and environmental changes have resulted in increased numbers of people living in close contact with wild and domestic animals.