H1N1 Mutations Found In China
Health officials in China say they've found eight cases of swine flu mutation in the country, the Associated Press reports. The announcement comes nearly a week after the World Health Organization said it was investigating two deaths in Norway linked to a mutated form of the virus. A WHO spokeswoman tells the AP that the organization sees no indication of a global spread of the mutated virus found in Norway and other countries, including Brazil, Mexico, the United States, and Japan, but is investigating whether it is more virulent. Meanwhile, the director of China's National Influenza Center says that the recent mutations were isolated cases and were not drug resistant, according to the AP. Such cases, Director Shu Yuelong told the Xinhua News Agency, can be prevented with the usual vaccination against H1N1.
[Read Swine Flu Declining in Some Parts of the United States and Swine Flu Frustrations: Too Little Vaccine, Too Many Scare Tactics.] [Slide show: 10 Do's and Dont's to Protect Yourself From Swine Flu.]
Video Workouts: Turns Out They're Not So Sweaty
By getting gamers up on their two feet, Nintendo's Wii workouts are a healthier take on video games than anything that came before. In medical journals these days, early case reports of "Wii knee" and other orthopedic traumas have been fast followed by serious efforts to understand just how much our bodies stand to gain from Wii workouts, U.S. News contributor and physician Ford Vox writes.
It is already known that in a duel between real and virtual sports, virtual doesn't cut it. But how about basic fitness—can the Wii provide your daily dose of physical activity? Yes—and no, Vox writes. As it turns out, the Wii offers the real deal for some and little more than virtual fitness for others.
Motohiko Miyachi, a scientist employed by Japan's National Institute of Health and Nutrition, unveiled the latest and most definitive Wii research at the American Heart Association's scientific conference last week. Miyachi's study team had 12 gamers perform each of 68 different activities included in Wii Sports, where players mimic sports like boxing and bowling, and Wii Fit Plus inside a metabolic chamber. Read more.
[Read Wii Sports Beats Sofa but Loses to Real Athletics and The Power of Wii: Getting in Shape with Video Games.]
Arsenic in Playgrounds Remains a Children's Health Threat
Children are exposed to arsenic in school playgrounds, despite the fact that the poison was banned in 2003 from use in play structures, U.S. News contributor Nancy Shute reports. Researchers at Tulane University in New Orleans tested 38 playgrounds for arsenic in that city and found it in the soil at 36 percent of them.
Arsenic is a neurotoxin and a carcinogen; neither is something you want anywhere near your child, Shute writes. Because many wooden play structures built before 2003 were treated with the wood preservative known as chromated copper arsenate, or CCA, it's not a big surprise that the ground around those play sets would contain arsenic. The median arsenic concentration in the soil of the contaminated playgrounds studied was 57 parts per million, more than four times the legal level for arsenic in soil in Louisiana. Given that children are active on school playgrounds day in and day out, that exposure is no small deal.
But the risk of arsenic exposure doesn't come just from wooden play sets—the playground with the worst contamination didn't have one. Exposure can also come from wood chips made from CCA-treated wood spread around equipment to serve as cushioning. Read more.
[Read Dangerous Toys Still on Store Shelves, Report Finds and Curbing Mom's Smoking, Childhood Lead Exposure May Be Key to Preventing ADHD.]
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