Word: flu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Researchers suggest that such distant health problems may be linked to early exposure to the flu - as early as in the womb - according to a new study that analyzed federal survey data collected from 1982 to 1996. Researchers found, for instance, that people who were born in the U.S. just after the 1918 flu pandemic (that is, people who were still in utero when the disease was at its peak) had a higher risk of a heart attack in their adulthood than those born before or long after the pandemic. (See pictures of thermal scanners hunting for swine flu...
...between 1915 and 1923. Overall, these populations had roughly the same rate of heart attack year to year - about 200 heart attacks per 1,000 people - when they were studied some 60 years later. But among the subset of people born between October 1918 and June 1919, when the flu pandemic was at its worst, the number of heart attacks increased more than...
...study's authors, including Caleb Finch, a professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California, also combed through U.S. Army enlistment data for about 2.7 million men born between 1915 and 1922 and found other trends among flu babies. "Men born in 1919 were shorter by about 0.05 in. relative to surrounding cohorts," says Finch. That's only about a millimeter's difference, or the thickness of a credit card, but he thinks that's significant and somehow related to maternal flu exposure. "I am confident because it's only restricted to that one year," Finch says. (See what...
More on fat, flu, and Facebook after the jump...
Your social networks, and in particular how popular you are, may also affect how good a candidate for a flu vaccine you are. Vaccinating an entire population may be less efficient than choosing people at random, asking them to name their friends, and then vaccinating those friends. The friends are likely to come into contact with many people, so vaccinating them might do the most good, the authors argue. "You can achieve the same level of protection for the population at one-third the cost doing an intervention like this," Fowler said, according to CNN. He and Christakis hope...