Health and Medicine

Temple healing practices may help to improve the symptoms of people with mental illnesses, according to researchers in this week`s BMJ.

The study was conducted at the temple of Muthuswamy in South India, known as a source of help for people with serious mental disorders. From June to August 2000, everyone who came for help was assessed by a trained psychiatrist on the first day of their stay in the temple and again on the day they left to return home, using recognised psychiatric rating scal

Researchers at Stanford University Medical Center have tricked cancer cells into self- destructing by briefly disabling a cancer-causing gene. Although the gene revs back up after deactivation, the brief hiatus gives the affected cells a chance to alter their cancerous destiny. This work in mice could open new avenues for treating some human cancers, researchers believe.

Cancer usually results after a cell accumulates a handful of mutations in cancer-related genes called oncogenes or tumor-

Vienna, Austria: Women who have survived having leukaemia as children should receive fertility counselling because their reproductive life may be shortened even though they have an apparently normal menstrual cycle after treatment, according to Danish researchers.

Dr Elisabeth Larsen, a research assistant from the Fertility Clinic at Copenhagen University Hospital, Denmark, has studied 26 long-term survivors of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) and found that they tended to have smaller ov

In a new comparative study of insect repellents containing the chemical commonly known as DEET and plant-based repellents, products with DEET showed by far the greatest effectiveness in preventing mosquito bites, medical researchers say.

The study, appearing in the July 4 New England Journal of Medicine, found all products tested that did not contain DEET to be significantly less effective. Authors are Drs. Mark S. Fradin, a Chapel Hill, N.C., dermatologist and adjunct faculty member at the

A new vaccination strategy targeting telomerase, one of the enzymes responsible for making cancer cells immortal, has been developed at the Norwegian Radium Hospital. “The vaccine might offer a means of stabilising cancer”, states Professor Gustav Gaudernack at a press conference at the 18th UICC International Cancer Congress in Oslo this week.

A new vaccination strategy targeting telomerase, one of the enzymes responsible for making cancer cells immortal, has been tested by Professor Trond

A natural method of disarming some types of viruses may enable scientists to someday treat infections with HIV, the AIDS virus, according to a virologist at Jefferson Medical College.

Taking the lead from the common fruit fly, yeast and worms, scientists have recently shown that it may be possible to use small pieces of genetic material called short interfering RNAs (siRNAs) to inhibit HIV from making more copies of itself.

The process, called RNA interference (RNAi), was first di