A federal health panel has suggested pneumonia vaccine for smokers due to high risk of the disease for them. The recommendations of the panel are likely to be accepted by the CDC.

The vaccination program would include smokers in the age group of 19 to 64.

Statistical data indicates that smokers are about four times more prone to pneumococcal disease than nonsmokers.

According to CDC spokesman Curtis Allen, nearly one-fifth of U.S. adults smoke cigarettes. Allen said.

Washington, October 24: A research team from The Johns Hopkins University has created water-soluble electronic materials that spontaneously assemble themselves into "wires" much narrower than a human hair.

The researchers say that their work may pave the way for pacemakers that so closely mimic human tissues that a patient''s body cannot discern the difference to devices that bypass injured spinal cords to restore movement to paralysed limbs.

According to medical experts black women die of breast cancer more often than white women. But the numbers in Chicago, are especially alarming.  According to the recent statistics by The Chicago Metropolitan Breast Cancer Task Force, African American women in Chicago are more than twice likely to die of breast cancer than the whites.

The breast cancer death rate of African – American women is 116 percent higher than whites, according to data released Wednesday by the Metropolitan Chicago Breast Cancer Task Force.

Washington, October : A team of Indian-origin researchers in Penn State''s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) says that small hospitals in rural areas can provide patients with the benefits of modern equipment and technology by sharing an IT infrastructure with larger hospitals in the same geographic area.

Assistant Professor Madhu Reddy, Associate Professor Sandeep Purao, and graduate student Mary Kelly conducted interviews with administrators at a regional hospital and three small, rural hospitals in central Pennsylvania.

The researchers said that the three smaller hospitals relied on the regional hospital to manage such things as software, laboratory information, and technical support.

Moscow - A Russian Soyuz space capsule Friday returned to Earth safely, carrying its crew of Russian cosmonauts and a US space tourist.

The capsule with Richard Garriott, a computer games designer and son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, who paid 30 million dollars to follow in his father's footsteps, landed safely around 0330 GMT in the Kazakh steppe.

"Start and landing went according to plan. Now helicopters and search units are flying to the landing site," Valeri Lyndin a spokesman of the flight control near Moscow, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

Washington, Oct 24 : The US has reportedly welcomed the offensive launched by Pakistani security forces in the tribal areas in the recent weeks, saying that as a result of the move, fewer foreign fighters were now slipping into Afghanistan.

In a media briefing, US Defence Department spokesman Geoff Morrell welcomed “stepped-up operations” by the Pakistani military in Peshawar, and in Swat in particular, over the past two months.

“It is stepped up not just in terms of tempo, but in terms of effectiveness. As a result, we have seen some improvement in the flow of foreign fighters across the border into Afghanistan,” the Daily Times quoted Morrell as saying.