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Why? Males can't get cervical cancer. But they do contribute to it by spreading HPV to women through sexual activity. So vaccinating boys and young men against the virus will help prevent its transmission to women. Vaccination will also help prevent some of the 7,000 HPV-related cancers that occur in men each year....

As vaccines go, the flu shot is no exemplar. A comprehensive new review of the research, published online by The Lancet Infectious Diseases, finds that the vaccine prevented illness in 59% of adults aged 18 to 64, and in eight of 12 flu seasons studied.

A new study found that an overwhelming majority of vaccination "naysayer" parents surveyed were influenced by friends, family and other non-medical peer recommendations when deciding whether or not to vaccinate their child. . . .

. . . changing parents' attitudes about vaccines may be a matter of influencing the people who are influencing parents in the first place.

Offit gives Vioxx as a case in point. Vioxx, approved in 1999, was a huge hit for treating arthritis pain. It's a more refined version of the drugs in the same class as aspirin and ibuprofen, without causing the stomach bleeding that can make them dangerous. Tests showed it could raise the risk of heart attacks and Vioxx's maker pulled it off the market. "So which is more dangerous: Vioxx or vitamins? Indeed, both have dangers," Offit writes. "The better question is, why does everybody know that Vioxx can cause heart disease and nobody knows that megavitamins can cause cancer? The answer is that we have chosen not to know."

The "autism biomed movement is almost all pseudoscience and quackery and ... much of it 'amounts to uncontrolled experimentation on children.'"

No, these two women were, as far as I can tell, offered help but refused it because it was standard conventional therapy. From what I can tell from various blog and Internet articles, they appear to have subjected Alex to biomedical quackery and were unhappy that if Alex were transferred to a psychiatric hospital's long-term care ward he would no longer be able to receive "autism biomed" treatments. Time and investigation by the authorities will tell if that was the case.

LONDON - One of the grimmest legacies of the war in the Pacific is still being fought 70 years on, but a victory over dengue, the intensely painful "breakbone fever" which that conflict helped spread around the world, may be in sight. The U.S.