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HPV infection is the most common sexually transmitted disease — between 75 percent and 80 percent of females and males in the United States will be infected at some point in their lives. Most will overcome the infection with no ill effects. But in some people, infections lead to cellular changes that cause warts or cancer, including cervical, vaginal and vulvar cancers in women and anal cancers in men and women. A growing body of evidence suggests that HPV also causes throat cancers in men and women as a result of oral sex. HPV infections cause about 15,000 cancers in women and 7,000 cancers in men each year. And while cervical cancer rates have plunged over the past four decades because of widespread screening, anal cancer rates in men and women have been increasing. Head and neck cancers have also been increasing, with the share associated with HPV infection increasing rapidly — perhaps because oral sex has increased in popularity.

The infection was caused by a fungus, a type of yeast called Candida albicans

It is normally found in the vagina, living in balance with bacteria and other microbes. But illness or some medications can disrupt the balance, allowing for a problematic overgrowth of the yeasts.

The surgeons said that since yeasts normally inhabit the genital tract, they could have come from either the donor or the recipient.

Health officials in Oklahoma are notifying 57 patients who tested positive for hepatitis C and three patients who tested positive for hepatitis B after visiting oral surgeon W. Scott Harrington's office in Tulsa and a city suburb, according to a joint statement issued Wednesday by the Oklahoma State Department of Health and the Tulsa Health Department.

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Dentist's former patient: How could you? "This is a complex investigation," state epidemiologist Kristy Bradley said in the statement. "The next phase will include more in-depth interviews of persons who test positive to determine the likelihood that their exposure is associated with their dental surgical procedure at the Harrington practice. We will certainly continue to keep the public informed as we learn more." Mor

The lecithin study, published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, is part of a growing appreciation of the role the body’s bacteria play in health and disease. With heart disease, investigators have long focused on the role of diet and heart disease, but expanding the scrutiny to bacteria adds a new dimension.

“Heart disease perhaps involves microbes in our gut,”

The drug was contaminated with the spores of a common leaf mold — nobody knows how.

Five patients have died.

Compounding pharmacies, which provide up to 10 percent of U.S. pharmaceuticals, are more loosely regulated than traditional drug companies. As is common, NECC is licensed by a state pharmacy board, which doesn't have the staff to conduct regular inspections. The company has been cited for contamination problems in the past, as the Boston Globe reports.

If the report is confirmed, the child born in Mississippi would be only the second well-documented case of a cure in the world

Typically a newborn with an infected mother would be given one or two drugs as a prophylactic measure. But Dr. Gay said that based on her experience, she almost immediately used a three-drug regimen aimed at treatment, not prophylaxis, not even waiting for the test results confirming infection.

Virus levels rapidly declined with treatment and were undetectable by the time the baby was a month old. That remained the case until the baby was 18 months old, after which the mother stopped coming to the hospital and stopped giving the drugs.

The death rate from malaria dropped by 45 percent globally between 2000 and 2012, the World Health Organization reported Wednesday. In Africa, the rate fell by almost half.

Still, he added, taking them doesn’t seem harmful. “It’s a relatively low-cost treatment worth trying if you have a condition like Crohn’s disease,” he said. “But for most conditions, the potential benefit is uncertain.”

There is growing evidence for the role of the appendix in restoring a healthful balance of microbes in the body.

The challenge in taking probiotics is to get the microbes past the stomach, where most are killed by gastric acid, said Robert Dunn, a biologist at North Carolina State University. Once in the intestines, they must compete effectively with the microbes already present.

carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CRE

"They're basically a triple threat."

they are resistant to virtually all antibiotics

"After mosquito spraying programs were cut, we've seen a return of malaria, which the country has kept under control for the past four decades. New HIV infections have jumped more than 200 percent," he noted.

"Greece is an example of perhaps the worst case of austerity leading to public health disasters," Mr. Stuckler explained in a telephone interview.

HIV spiked because government needle exchange programs ran out of clean syringes for heroin addicts. By Stuckler's estimate, the average Greek junkie requires 200 clean needles in a given year. "But now they're only getting three a year each," Stuckler said.

In a roundabout way, the C.I.A. has been blamed for the Pakistan killings.

The killings, with eerie echoes of attacks that killed nine female polio workers in Pakistan in December, represented another serious setback for the global effort to eradicate polio.

Since the vaccine ruse in Pakistan, she said, “Frankly, now, I can’t go to them and say, ‘The C.I.A. isn’t involved.’ ”

In response to Pushpendra jain's comments... I am no longer amazed of anything in pediatrics. In 15 years of primary care suburban practice I have learned the following: I am an antibiotic nazi especially if i do not treat by telephone request, my medical expertise is compromised by my financial gains or relationships with pharmaceutical companies, my patients' parents do more "research" than I do--AKA reading a google searched internet account, I should be available at their whim and see them at a time convenient to their kid's soccer schedule as a walk-in service, and parents that think nothing of texting while driving their kids to said soccer game think that a 1 in 10,000-100,000 risk of a vaccination obviates its well documented scientific benefits. We are in a cycle where people no longer believe in science, but they'll be back when we see resurgences of diseases i haven't seen since medical school.

Dr. Segedy, I can assure you that your sentiments were shared by a majority of the attendees at the AAP conference. It seems as though we have gotten to a point where the element of surprise no longer exists; health care providers (for the most part) are numb to the fact that studies with ulterior motives (ie, Wakefield & vaccines/autism) and "celebrities" seem to have more of an impact on health care decisions than physicians who have dedicated their entire lives studying medicine. And when it comes to self diagnosing via Dr. Google, Offit specifically mentioned that a website like the "National Vaccine Information Center" (NCVIC.org) comes up on the first page of Google for a search for "vaccines" and yet the information on the website is extremely misleading and, in some cases, downright wrong. But that doesn't stop people from treating it as credible; after all, it's on the Internet so it must be true!