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(Natural News) Most health conscious people know of the positive effects on digestion from using probiotic supplements. Many take probiotic supplements after using antibiotics to replace the good intestinal flora bacteria indiscriminately killed during antibiotic use.

This practice is so well known that MD’s have begun recommending probiotics during and after antibiotics.

But there is new evidence that probiotic benefits go beyond that. One area of investigative research is building the immune system’s resistance to allergies that affect the skin. An obvious example of a skin’s allergic reaction is eczema, which tends occur often with infants.

A recent Dutch study gathered over 150 pregnant women with allergic disease histories in their families. During the last six weeks of pregnancy, they were given either three strains of probiotics or an inactive placebo pill. Neither they nor the doctors knew which was which.

After those pregnant women gave birth, most of their children were monitored by the Dutch researchers. The children continued to receive probiotics or placebos for 12 months. After three months, the rate of eczema occurring among the probiotic subjects was less than half of those given only placebos.

There were no more probiotics or placebos administered to the children after 12 months. However, many were still observed up until age two. As they approached that age, the gap between eczema occurrences between the two groups, probiotic and placebo, narrowed somewhat.

But there was still a substantial difference. The study results were considered evidence that probiotics can have an effect on offspring from allergy-prone mothers, and the report was written up in the Journal of Allergy.

Another recent study published in the Journal of Nutrition involved probiotics administered to mice. This time the focus was on food allergies. The mice all had whey intolerances, and they were fed probiotics and prebiotics while drinking milk. With the help of probiotics, their intolerance to whey showed considerable improvement with almost no skin reactions.

Up to eight percent of children have various chronic food allergies. Extending this study to children may prove probiotics to be a useful natural remedy for eliminating food allergies.

Sources for this article include:
http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE5985G520091009
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1954094/can_probiotics_help_with_allergies.html?cat=5

(NaturalNews) Cholesterol-lowering statin drugs may cause serious and long-term muscle damage that persists even after the drugs are halted, according to a new study conducted by researchers from Tufts Medical Center and the University of Bern, and published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Researchers have known for some time that minor muscle aches and weakness, known as myalgia, occur in between 10 and 15 percent of patients taking statins, while more severe, persistent pain known as myopathy occurs in roughly 2 percent. In the current study, researchers performed muscle biopsies on 83 patients, 44 of whom were taking statins and also suffering from myopathy severe enough to interfere with exercise and daily activities. Twenty-nine of these patients were currently taking statins, while the other 15 had ceased using the drugs at least three weeks before.

Another 19 participants were taking statins but not suffering from myopathy, while the final 20 had never experienced myopathy and never taken statins.

Researchers found signs of muscle damage in 25 of the myopathy patients, including the majority of those who had already stopped taking statins.

“Although in clinical practice, the majority of patients with muscle symptoms improve rapidly after cessation of therapy, our findings support that a subgroup of patients appears to be more susceptible to statin-associated myotoxicity, suffering persistent structural injury,” said senior author Annette Draeger.

The researchers also found that only one of the patients with muscle damage had elevated levels of the enzyme creatine phosphokinase (CPK), widely believed to be a marker of muscle distress.

“This paper is challenging the dogma that if the CPK level is low, it rules out the possibility of muscle damage,” co-author Richard Karas said. “You can have microscopic muscle damage and the level of CPK can still be normal.”

Researchers do not know why statin use leads to myopathy in some patients, although they know that certain factors may raise the risk, including high doses of the drugs, old age, vigorous exercise or taking certain other drugs in conjunction with the statins, including some cancer drugs and antibiotics.

Sources for this story include: www.forbes.com.

(NaturalNews) According to the American Cancer Society (ACS), breast cancer is the most common cancer in women, affecting over 200,000 women in the U.S. each year and killing more than 40,000. For American men, cancer of the prostate is the type of malignancy that strikes with the greatest frequency.

The ACS says an estimated 192,280 men will be diagnosed with the disease in 2009 and around 27,360 men will die from it. Based on the assumption that finding breast and prostate cancers in the earliest stages will make them easier to cure and slash mortality rates, for over twenty years the U.S. medical establishment has pushed for mass screenings for these common cancers.

So after two decades, all this testing must have resulted in a huge decline in deaths from these diseases, right?

Wrong.

In an opinion piece published in the October 21st issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), experts from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the University of Texas (UT) Health Science Center explain that overall breast and prostate cancer rates are higher and far more men and women are being treated. However, the incidence of aggressive or late stage cancers has not been significantly reduced at all. Bottom line: the huge and highly hyped effort to screen the adult population for breast and prostate cancers has not brought about the anticipated decrease in deaths.

“Screening does provide some benefit, but the problem is that the benefit is not nearly as much as we hoped and comes at the cost of over diagnosis and over treatment,” said one of the paper’s authors, Laura Esserman, MD, MBA, in a statement to the media. Dr. Esserman is a professor of surgery and radiology, director of the UCSF Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center, and co-leader of the breast oncology program at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.

“We need to focus on developing new tools to identify men and women at risk for the most aggressive cancers, to identify at the time of diagnosis those who have indolent or ‘idle’ tumors that are not life-threatening. If we can identify groups of patients that don’t need much treatment, or don’t need to be screened, wouldn’t that be great?” she stated. “Screening is by no means perfect. We should want to make it better. For both breast and prostate cancer we need to invest in changing our focus from the cancers that won’t kill people to the ones that do.”

The JAMA article points out that screening costs an enormous amount of money — more than $20 billion is spent annually in the U.S. to check people for prostate and breast cancer. And the sheer number of people convinced to have these tests has resulted in far more early cancers being detected than in the past. For example, because of regular prostate screening antigen (PSA) testing, now considered “necessary” for most middle-aged men, the number of American men diagnosed with prostate cancer has almost doubled since l980. The number of woman being diagnosed with breast cancer has nearly doubled over that time as well.

So why do the authors of the JAMA article write “the contribution from screening is uncertain”? Because while screening increases the detection of slow growing tumors, the JAMA authors point out, it too often misses the most aggressive cancers which grow so fast that they are not detected early enough to be cured in many cases. And the cancer experts also point out that many patients are undergoing treatment from cancers that actually pose minimal risk. That’s right: despite all the fear and scary statistics loudly publicized about these diseases, having breast or prostate cancer doesn’t necessarily mean you have a dangerous disease.

“Without the ability to distinguish cancers that pose minimal risk from those posing substantial risk and with highly sensitive screening tests, there is an increased risk that the population will be over-treated,” the authors of the JAMA article conclude.

“The basic assumption that screening programs that find and treat early stage disease will then prevent late-stage disease, or prevent cancer from spreading, may not always be correct. If a tumor is aggressive, finding it early may not prevent death,” one of the authors, Ian Thompson, MD, said in a statement to the media. Dr. Thompson is professor and chairman of the Department of Urology at the Cancer Therapy and Research Center at the UT Health Science Center at San Antonio and has authored about 400 scientific articles addressing prevention, early detection, and treatment for prostate, kidney, and bladder cancers.

The JAMA authors are not condemning all cancer screening but getting the word out that it is “most successful when pre-malignant lesions can be detected and eliminated” such as during colonoscopies. And they are calling for these specific recommendations for early detection and prevention:

• The development of tests that distinguish between cancers that are lethal and those that are low-risk.

• A reduction in treatment for low-risk disease. “Diagnosing cancers that don’t kill the patient has led to treatment that may do more harm than good,” they stated.

• Developing tools for doctors and patients to help them make informed decisions about prevention, screening, biopsy and treatment. This includes providing individualized treatments tailored to a person’s specific tumor.

• Working to identify those who are at the highest risk for cancer and using proven prevention interventions to keep them from developing a malignancy in the first place.

“Over the years we have worked hard to find new treatments and new ways of finding disease and many of these interventions when appropriately assessed have saved lives,” said Otis W. Brawley, MD, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, and professor of hematology, oncology and epidemiology at Emory University, in the press statement. “It is very appropriate that we occasionally step back, assess and reflect on what we in medicine are doing. In the case of some screening for some cancers, modern medicine has overpromised. Some of our successes are not as significant as first thought. Cancer is a complicated disease and too often we have tried to simplify it and simplify messages about it, to the point that we do harm to those we want to help.”

NaturalNews has previously reported on serious health issues involving mass screenings for breast and prostate cancer, including a study showing that an increase in mammography screenings is associated with an increased incidence of breast cancer (http://www.naturalnews.com/024901.html). In addition, research published recently in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute concluded over a million American men who were told they had prostate cancer following the advent of PSA tests most likely had no real health problem — until they started down the path of side-effect laden treatments and became labeled as “cancer patients” (http://www.naturalnews.com/027193_cancer_Prostate_prostate_cancer.html).

For more information:
http://news.ucsf.edu/releases/experts-issue-call-to-reconsider-screening-for-breast-cancer-and-prostate-c/

 The guys behind Uncharted 2 needs your help. Naughty Dog is currently running a poll on their official site asking fans on what they want to see…

Toilet training your cat. They say it can be done, and CitiKitty has put together a complete Cat Toilet Training Kit to help make it incredibly easy. Now, I haven’t tried this yet myself, but after reading all about the CitiKitty I think I’m going to give it a shot.

The kit includes a training seat that is placed underneath the toilet seat to transition your cat from the litter box to the toilet. There’s also a training guide and a tip sheet, plus a packet of CitiNip catnip for use during the training process. The training guide has explicit instructions on how to first move your cat from using the litter box to using the toilet with litter, and then to using just the toilet with no litter. It’s a multi-step process that can be used with any cat that is healthy, at least three months old, and already successfully litter-box trained. It is also possible to train multiple cats at once.

According to CitiKitty, the benefits of toilet training your cat include:

• NO MORE LITTER MESS Toilet trained cats do not use kitty litter, eliminating the mess and smell of a litter box from your home.
• BETTER FOR YOUR CAT Because your cat is toilet trained they will no longer be exposed to chemicals and silica dust found in many litter brands, which has been proven to cause respiratory and other health-related problems in cats.
• SAVE $$$ Toilet trained cat owners have the luxury of not having to purchase kitty litter, saving them thousands of dollars.
• BETTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT Each year more than 4 billion pounds of kitty litter is sent to landfills in the United States. Most of that litter is made from strip mined clay which is a non-renewable resource. By toilet training your cat you help preserve precious resources.
• MORE TIME FOR YOUR CAT Why spend endless hours cleaning up a litter box when you can be spending it playing with your cat!

Now, this may not be for every cat, but there are an awful lot of comments from satisfied customers on the CitiKitty website, and there seem to be quite a few success stories, so it just might work for your cat.

A few words about flushing cat feces

This is a controversial topic, as we found out last year during Litter Week. I uncovered some important information, first read this post about the problems that can be caused by flushing cat feces, then make sure to read the follow-up post about how it can be quite safe to flush in most situations.

Enter to Win a CityKitty Cat Toilet Training Kit PLUS one of Two $100 Shopping Sprees at CitiKitty.com!

CitiKitty not only makes the toilet training kit, but they also offer a wide variety of other cat-related products on their newly re-designed website CitiKitty.com and this is your chance to win a $100 shopping spree! Two winners will be selected in a random drawing and each will receive a CitiKitty Cat Toilet Training Kit plus a $100 credit to spend on any products at CitiKitty.com. To enter, please leave a comment on this post with your thoughts about toilet training your cat. Have you ever tried it before? Are you thinking about making the transition? The drawing will take place on November 18 and the winners will be notified via email. One entry per person. This giveaway is limited to addresses in the US and Canada.

I vaguely recall a similar story a couple years ago, though now I can’t find it, but the Nieman Journalism Lab has an article about how PR folks are starting to use targeted Google AdWords buys to respond to negative press coverage. It doesn’t seem like this sort of thing would really be all that effective, but the article discusses a PR guy who bought up AdWords on a variety of related keywords for the New Zealand Seafood Industry Council, after the NY Times came out with a negative story about overfishing. Of course, it looks like the guy also went over the line, claiming in one ad that the NY Times “apologizes for story,” when the truth is that it just apologized for its use of a photograph it didn’t have the rights to — not the story itself. Amusingly, the guy also buys the reporters’ own names as keywords in running his ads. I could see how that might intimidate the journalists (if they’re particularly thin-skinned) but it’s not really clear how that actually helps get the “other side” out.

What was potentially more interesting is that the NY Times (unlike many other newspaper websites) actually linked to the Council’s website within the story, and the Council changed the page that clickers ended up on to a rebuttal to the NY Times story, whereas before it had just been a page about the type of fish in question. That seems like a smart move by the Fish Council, though it makes you realize why some publications might be skeptical about linking out, especially when whoever operates the site being linked to has the opportunity to change the site.

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Homebrew coder Richard Quirk has recently released a new version of Bunjallo, a free web browser that can display simple pages on your Nintendo DS. Th…

Kaiser Health News staff writer Julie Appleby reports on the details of the House bill’s abortion restrictions. “The House-passed health bill bars insurers from selling policies that cover abortion to anyone who gets a federal subsidy. But it does allow insurers to offer optional abortion coverage that consumers could purchase with their own money. Based on some states’ experiences, it’s unlikely insurers would sell such coverage” (11/10). Read entire story.  

Kaiser Health News offers a fresh take on health policy developments with Randy Bish’s “Nyuk, Nyuk, Nyuk.”

Newsdemon loves to love you, baby. They’re offering two months of Usenet access for $2 starting right now and ending at 11:59 PST tomorrow. You can sign up here.

In more interesting news, they’ve also unearthed the original memo from Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis about the foundation of Usenet. It begins:

Invitation
A group of UNIX systems at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, have established a uucp-based computer communication network. Admission to the net is open to all UNIX licensees. In addition to providing the “uu” services available in the Seventh Edition of UNIX (remote mail, file transfer, job execution), it will provide a network news service. A prospective node must have a call in facility, call out facility, or some other means of communication with another UNIX net system. The node must have, or be able to legitimately obtain, uucp and related software..
Systems which do not call-out to the net must be polled occasionally. We will poll any system that so requests, and will bill the polled system for phone costs. The phone costs are expected to be $10-20/month. Requests for an application should be sent to
James Ellis
Department of Computer Science
Duke University
Durham, NC 27706

They also have a great little interview with some of the greats of Usenet. Check it out.

Boy, I remember the days of play spy gear in the past. Crappy motion detectors, fingerprint kits that were nothing more than flour and tape, and mirrored sunglasses — never anything like this. And I remember thinking, too, when Ethan Hunt had those camera-glasses in the first “Mission: Impossible,” I scoffed, thinking yeah right, there’s no way. Now, a mere decade later (actually that’s quite a long time, but bear with me), you can get one for pocket change. And by pocket change I mean quite a bit of money. And by quite a bit of money I mean $150, which really isn’t that bad.

The pen has a pinhole camera, as you can see, which shoots at 640×480. The monitor is actually a fully functioning PMP, with support for a million formats (the controls are on the side; it’s not a touchscreen device) and has an SD slot and built-in speaker. I’m assuming it can record the video from the pen-cam, though that’s not specifically stated.

I know, I know, there are lots of these sorts of things. But this one looks solid, and $150 is a pretty good deal. Brando’s got lots of great stuff like that.

This could be awesome: Aspex, a company that makes scanning electron microscopes for those among us who need them, says you can send in stuff and they’ll put up pictures of it. Pictures they took through their scanning electron microscope. Ever wondered what coffee looks like up close? How about dustballs? Bananas?

Well, send ‘em on in. If they can take Pharyngula’s traffic, they can take ours too. Follow the guidelines, please. You do have to fill out forms and stuff.

Blockbuster, observing the popularity of services like RedBox (a DVD rental kiosk), has decided they’re going to skip a step and start offering movie rentals that come on an SD card. The new kiosks would load a DRMed movie onto your own SD card, and the content will expire after X viewings or days. They’re hoping that the better quality of the movies (vs. streaming ones or regular DVD) will bring users back. You might have picked a format that’s actually supported by media devices, guys.

SD cards are everywhere, indeed, but there are precious few DVD players, TVs, and personal media players that support them. Your computer has an SD card reader, or else you’ve bought one by now, but I don’t think people want to rent things to play them on their computers if they can stream them so incredibly easily. Sure, working out how to get an SD card’s content onto your TV may be easy for tech-oriented people like you and me, but for the people grabbing a movie on the way out of the grocery store… not so much.

With luck, Blockbuster will wise up and allow a USB drive to be plugged in. I mean, why didn’t they do that first thing? Everybody has those sitting around. And not that many people have high-capacity SD cards. If the movies are over 2GB, a lot of people are sunk because they only have the card that came with their camera (likely 512MB or thereabouts). Oh well, it’s a step in the right direction. Although I guarantee you’ll see a Blockbuster DRM-stripping app out there within a few weeks of these hitting the street.

Alan Gerow was the first of a few folks to send in the news that some independent filmmakers not only discovered that their film, Ink, had ended up being widely available via Bittorrent, but that they were quite happy about the exposure. Alan sends over the email that the filmmakers sent out:

Dear Fans and Friends,

Over the weekend something pretty extraordinary happened. Ink got ripped off. Someone bit torrented the movie (we knew this would happen) and they posted it on every pirate site out there. What we didn’t expect was that within 24 hours Ink would blow up. Ink became the number 1 most downloaded movie on several sites having been downloaded somewhere between 150,000 to 200,000 times as far as we can tell. Knowing there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it, we’ve embraced the piracy and are just happy Ink is getting unprecedented exposure.

As a result, Ink is now ranked #16 on IMDb’s movie meter and is currently one of the top 20 most popular movies in the world.

This all started as a result of the completely underground buzz that you’ve each helped us create. We’ve had no distributor, no real advertising and yet the word of mouth that you’ve generated has made the film blow up as soon as it became available worldwide. So many of you came to see the movie multiple times, bringing friends and family and many of you have bought the DVD and Blu-ray from us. All of this built up and built up and suddenly it exploded.

We don’t know exactly where this will all lead, but the exposure is unquestionably a positive thing.

Ink hits Netflix, Blockbuster, iTunes and many more tomorrow! Remember to get your signed copies, t-shirts and posters at the Ink Store.

Thank you so much for the constant love and support.

Jamin and Kiowa
Double Edge Films”

Again, we’ve seen this with other films as well, but it’s always nice to see filmmakers who realize it doesn’t make sense to freak out, but to look for ways to take advantage of this as a promotional opportunity.

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While the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is often seen as being inherently in favor of stronger intellectual property rights, every so often, the organization shows itself open to more reasonable approaches. A few years back, for example, it questioned the evidence on patents, and had trouble finding any real evidence that stronger patents resulted in greater innovation. Now, via Slashdot, we hear about a discussion at WIPO concerning “enforcement” issues where a number of papers were presented that pushed back on excessive pro-IP positions. These included a paper by WIPO Chief Economist, Carsten Fink, which calls out many of the previous studies on “losses” due to counterfeiting and piracy, and notes how misguided many of them are. While I think Fink uses some outdated and since disproved economic theory in his paper, overall it’s nice to see at least some acknowledgment of moving more towards evidence based policy setting, rather than the maximalist’s default “more is better” position.

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Having a blast playing Modern Warfare 2(PC, PS3 and Xbox 360)? Well it looks like Infinity Ward is already working on the next iteration of the game, …

I suck at GoldenEye. There, I’ve said it. I get schooled every time I play, even if I’m Odd Job. And chances are, everyone who reads this is better than me at Halo, Killzone, and pretty much every other console FPS. That’s just an upfront disclosure in case you want to skip this post and get right to the flaming. After all, I’m just writing this because I’m bad at these games, right?

The thing is, I would probably ruin you in Counter-Strike or Team Fortress 2. In fact, it seems to me that every time I read about a PC team going up against a console team in the same game, the console team gets manhandled. Why is that? Well, probably because a mouse and keyboard is a better way of controlling a first-person shooter. You know it, I know it, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends.

Here’s the thing: the gaming world isn’t governed by players and their preferences. It’s a business, subject to market forces, development pressures, and all that sort of thing. Remember when Halo was going to be a Mac exclusive? That didn’t happen for a reason: because there was more money to be made in launching it with a new console. Was it a better or worse game for it? I don’t know, I’m not a freaking oracle. And that’s not the point of this post anyway.

Look, making a big game is a nightmare. A studio needs to get a return on a huge investment, and where are the sales? In the piracy-ridden, heterogenous PC market, where you have to cater to every possible hardware configuration? No, but the game will probably be at its best on a high-end PC, so you kind of want to hit that anyway. But the main thing is to get a game onto the PS3 and 360 in as playable a form as possible. That way you have a guaranteed base of 40 or 50 million units that will all run it perfectly and work together just the way they’re designed to. Maybe they won’t have a mouse, but so what?

So you get AAA FPS titles like Modern Warfare 2 on a console, where people can play the game just fine against each other and enjoy the full experience — with a dual shock. Is the PC version the “definitive” version of the game? With MW2 I would suggest not, but with others it may be the case (GTA4 for instance). To make a blanket statement on this would be to commit a pretty foolish error. At the same time, don’t take someone to task for saying that Borderlands is better on the PC. I mean, what? It is!

Besides, I don’t think it’s an insult against console gamers or their games to say that a mouse and keyboard is the better control method. It’s like saying a wheel controller with pedals is a better controller for racing games. It just is! It doesn’t mean that everyone sucks without one, or that games that don’t support wheels are garbage. It’s just presenting an ideal. Can there be great FPSes on consoles? Sure! But let’s be honest about it and qualify that by saying that there’s auto-aim, the enemies shoot slower, and they generally have a more horizontally-orientated environment. It just makes it a better game on the console. They switch it up for the PC version, if they make one; if I can get headshots 90% of the time in Gears on PC, versus 10% on console, they better damn sure make it so that doesn’t break the game.

The console versus PC debate, which is what the mouse vs. controller thing is really about, ends up being a kind of silly one. There are fantastic games on both platforms, and some just work better on one or the other. Platformers are best with a specific controller, joystick sensitivity, and button layout. Real-time strategy demands a level of versatility, precision, and resolution that’s only available on PCs. And if we’re honest, so do FPSes in their ideal format. But that’s not always possible; the convenience and standard hardware of consoles often means a better deal for developers, and sometimes a better game for the consumer.

I may never be good at GoldenEye, but I could never say that game sucked. So let’s stop being such prideful bastards about our games and just agree to say “whatever works for you.”