Health, Deaths | featured news

The death toll in China's bird flu crisis stood at 10 on Friday, as Hong Kong authorities announced plans to test all poultry imported from the mainland.

Chinese authorities tried to calm spreading health concerns Wednesday after a third person was reported to have died from a new type of bird flu. The emergence in China of the H7N9 strain of avian flu — a total of nine cases have been reported since it was revealed last weekend — are troubling because the strain has not previously been found in humans.

The fact that it took over a year for the recipient to begin to show symptoms threw investigators off, as usually rabies develops within a month or two. Health officials confirmed Friday that a Maryland man who received a donated kidney more than a year ago contracted rabies and died from it.

With the nation in the grip of a severe influenza outbreak that has seen deaths reach epidemic levels, New York State declared a public health emergency on Saturday, making access to vaccines more easily available.

In 1954, Murray successfully transplanted a healthy kidney from a man and implanted it in his identical twin. He was awarded the 1990 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine.

I was living in comfortable retirement with my wife, Mathilde, when, at the age of 71, she received a diagnosis of Waldenstrom’s disease. The chief danger of this rare cancer of the bone marrow is that it impedes and eventually destroys the production of vital components of the blood supply.

An outbreak of a rare form of meningitis is likely to grow after sickening 26 people in five states, including four who died, health officials warned... All received steroid injections used mostly for back pain that have been traced back to a specialty pharmacy in Massachusetts. The pharmacy issued a recall last week and has shut down operations.

For the first time in 45 years, homicide has fallen off the list of the nation's top 15 causes of death, government health officials said Wednesday.

Virginia health officials say a child has died of a brain infection from a microscopic bug, sometimes called a “brain-eating amoeba,” that lives in stagnant water. State epidemiologist Dr. Keri Hall declined to name the child, but the victim’s mother identified him as 9-year-old Christian Alexander Strickland of Henrico County. The boy died Aug. 5 and Hall received the autopsy results Friday confirming the cause of death as inflammation of the brain and its lining.

The father of a 20-year-old “gamer” – who died after playing a marathon session on his Xbox – has launched a campaign to raise awareness about the health risks of playing video games for extended periods of time.