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.

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.

A new technique for cervical cancer has developed which can locate the cancer at early stage. Nandita de Souza and her team has developed this technique at the Institute of Cancer Research and London’s Royal Marsden Hospital. The new technique called as 'Diffusion weighted imaging'.

This technique allows the doctors to carry out precise surgery to remove the tumours. The team observed 59 women with cervical cancer aged between 24 and 83 over a period of 22 months and they found that 88% of cancer cases were detected by using the new technique as compare to 77% who were detected by using external scans.

Dr. Geoffrey Hackett, an urologist claims that erectile dysfunction is an early warning sign (two to three years) of an impending heart attack.

In a letter published in the online edition of British Medical Journal, Hackett writes that it is often ignored as doctors feel uncomfortable asking about it, thus treating it more like a ‘recreational or lifestyle issue’.  However, it is no longer acceptable to ignore the issue, and it is clinical negligence on the part of doctors to treat impotence as a socially embarrassing afflicition.

In what is a surprising finding, a new study on babies shows that those cute and cuddly bundles of joy, exhibit signs of jealousy even as young as three months old.

Prof. Maria Legerstee, Department of Psychology, York University and her team studied 50-babies aged 3-months and 6-months with their mothers on hand.  They found interacting with the babies that if the babies were not responded to, they looked sad and looked away.  However, when she took a drink and didn’t engage with them, they didn’t seem to mind, indicating that even babies can sense the reason behind uncommunicative behaviour.

A study carried out by researchers from the Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University have discovered 26-new genes that are linked to the development of lung cancer.

Looking at 188-patient donated samples of lung adenocarcinoma, a very common and deadly form of lung cancer, 623-different genes were studied as possible suspects, and then compared to genes in healthy tissue in patients.  The researchers found that a total of 26-genes were linked to this type of lung cancer that affects 40% of the 1-million lung cancer deaths each year.