Health Statistics

Health authorities have detected the emergence of a rare but deadly lung-destroying form of pneumonia, sparked by the combination of a skin infection and the common flu. The national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 22 deaths among children last year from the dual infection. Numbers from the 2007-2008 flu season won't be released until next month, but officials say deaths have increased. The CDC has just begun tracking cases among all age groups.

The HIV epidemic in the United States is a crisis, federal health officials told a House panel Tuesday, urging additional programs to specifically protect and educate African Americans, Latinos and gay and bisexual men -- the groups hardest hit by the virus that causes AIDS.

Last month, the U.S. received a set of grades from the March of Dimes, the nation's leading organization committed to preventing preterm births, that were nothing short of horrible. The report card on premature births compared preterm birth rates with national objectives. Overall, the nation received a D. Not a single state merited an A, and only one, Vermont, earned a B. Eighteen states and Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., received an F, and California squeaked by with a C.

A second straight year of declining cancer deaths announced Wednesday marks the beginning of what is expected to be a long-term drop as the success of anti-smoking campaigns launched decades ago accelerates progress against the biggest cancer killer -- lung cancer. The American Cancer Society reported that cancer deaths in 2004 dropped by 3,014 -- nearly eight times the number during the previous year -- driven by sharp declines in colorectal cancer fatalities, which totaled 53,380 in 2004.

Raising fresh concerns about a widely used heart-surgery medicine, a study released Tuesday reported that the drug Trasylol increased patients' long-term risk of dying by nearly 50%. An estimated 10,000 deaths worldwide could be avoided over the next five years if Trasylol were not used, according to the report in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. The study, funded by the San Bruno, Calif.

Approximately one in every 150 children in the United States has autism or a closely related disorder -- a figure higher than most recent estimates -- according to a federal survey released Thursday, the most thorough ever conducted. The new data do not mean that autism is on the rise because the criteria and definitions used were not the same as those used in the past.

Think bird flu will become a worldwide threat this summer? Wanna put some money on that? In an unusual effort to better predict the advance of a potential flu pandemic, public health experts will be staked about $100 apiece to bet on the spread of bird flu. This type of grim futures market has also been created to predict hurricanes and temporarily, a few years ago, terrorist attacks.

White teenagers who are the most avid watchers of R-rated movies or who have television sets in their bedrooms are more than twice as likely to take up smoking compared with white teens who don't, according to a report published today. Experts said the study confirmed Hollywood's pervasive influence by showing that even when other risk factors -- such as peer smoking -- were taken into account, media exposure remained a powerful force on white children.

If you have a stroke, try to have it between Monday and Friday. A Canadian study released Thursday found that patients hospitalized for the most common kind of stroke on weekends had a higher death rate than those admitted on weekdays. The "weekend effect" has been identified before in other conditions such as cancer and pulmonary embolism.

IF all babies were born weighing at least 5.5 pounds, the prevalence of later adolescent depression among girls would drop by 18%, suggests a new study published in the March issue of Archives of General Psychiatry. To reach this surprising finding, a team of researchers at Duke University School of Medicine examined more than 1,400 children between 9 and 16 years old, half of them girls.