health

This week on our roundup of best BOL moments, Lockheed and PBS join the roster of recent victims as hackers motives expand, World Health Organization says cell phones may cause cancer and 'Worms From Hell' unearth possibilities for extraterrestrial life.

Radiation from cell phones could possibly cause cancer, according to the World Health Organization.

In a report issued today, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which is an arm of the WHO, said it now lists mobile phone use in the same category as lead, gasoline engine exhaust, and chloroform. Officially, cell phone radiation is listed as a "carcinogenic hazard."

Until today, the WHO's IARC had said that there were no adverse health effects from the use of cell phones. The wireless industry, including the CTIA lobbying group, and the Federal Communications Commission and U.… Read more

Sometimes we all get so wrapped up in our physical health (see: Four killer iPhone apps that help you lose weight), we forget about our mental health. But take it from a guy who can get mighty moody, it's no less important.

MoodKit is a new app packed with tools designed to improve not just your mood, but also your overall well-being. It's available now for $4.99.

Developed by a pair of clinical psychologists, MoodKit employs acknowledged cognitive-therapy techniques. It's designed to be used on its own or as part of a professional treatment plan.

The … Read more

Someday, your car may be keeping an eye on your heart health.

Ford announced today it has developed a driver's seat that can monitor the occupant's heart function with the help of six embedded sensors on the backrest that detect "electrical impulses generated by the heart" without actually contacting the skin.

The technology was developed at the Ford European Research and Innovation Center in Aachen, Germany, with the help of researchers at the RWTH Aachen University.

Ford said it can envision sending data to "remote medical services" and providing "alerts of imminent cardiovascular issues such as a heart attack."

"As always in medicine, the earlier a condition is detected, the easier it is to treat, and this technology even has the potential to be instrumental in diagnosing conditions drivers were previously unaware they had," Dr. Achim Lindner, medical officer at the Ford research center, said in a statement.

Although not all companies are necessarily jumping on the health-and-wellness bandwagon, the use of driver assistance systems in vehicles is on the rise. Such systems deliver everything from assisted breaking to adaptive cruise control that speeds up or slows down the car based on road conditions. Regardless, they all have the same goal in mind as Ford's heart-monitor offering: improving safety.… Read more

In 2000, the U.S. Surgeon General called out dental health as a "silent epidemic" that afflicts poorer population groups even more disproportionately than the health care divide. Yet in the 10 years since, as the debate over medical insurance has intensified, little attention has been paid to the costs of dental care.

If you're not covered by a dental plan of some sort, you're going to pay a lot more than you need to for almost any procedure. That's because most dental insurance plans that pay dentists are based on discounts from the retail prices of the procedures they do. So dentists set retail prices rather high, and have to charge some patients those fees.

But you can get the lower negotiated rates yourself, even if you don't have insurance. As it turns out, large "cost containment networks" exist that organizations and individuals can sign up for. Some unions and state governments use Careington, for example, which has negotiated discount rates with about a quarter of the dentists in the U.S.

A start-up launching today, Brighter.com, takes the Careington network and offers both paid and free subscriptions to it for individuals. The site packages the discounts alongside Webbish tools to make finding dentists easier, too. If you don't have a dental plan (or a dentist), it appears to be a no-brainer to use--the free version at least.

Brighter is not insurance, mind you. The consumer-patient has to make his own decisions about the procedures he's going to buy, and has to pay the dentist directly. Being a member of Brighter grants the consumer a discount off retail prices; Brighter doesn't pay the dentists itself. … Read more

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is pushing harder than ever for government leaders around the world to increase vaccination investments.

In a keynote address yesterday to the 64th World Health Assembly in Geneva, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates spoke for nearly half an hour to health ministers from 193 countries about the importance of "seeking good health care for every human being."

"I believe we have the opportunity to make a new future in which global health is the cornerstone of global prosperity," he said.

Gates called on the assembly to make this "the Decade of Vaccines," with some basic goals: eradicate polio early in this decade; build a system capable of delivering vaccines to every child; make five or six new vaccines available to all children around the world. With these investments, Gates said, the world "can save 4 million lives by 2015 and 10 million lives by 2020."

Another challenge Gates cited was lowering the cost of antigenic materials, such as pentavalent, pneumococcus, and rotavirus vaccines. The Gates Foundation is working with vaccine manufacturers to cut prices of those inoculations in half by 2016. Lower costs would be beneficial to many countries around the world that are reeling from budget woes. … Read more

MacGourmet Deluxe can help you collect, edit, use, and share your favorite recipes and recipe-related notes in an easy, intuitive, iTunes-style interface, which is much improved over previous versions. This Deluxe version includes all three optional plug-ins for MacGourmet: the Mealplan (to help schedule meals and sync up with iCal), Cookbook (for creating and sharing PDF cookbooks), and built-in nutritional data from the USDA database (which makes it easy to calculate nutritional info for entire recipes). The main recipe interface is highly customizable and includes a large, easy-to-read "Chef View" for laptop-assisted cooking, which you can control with … Read more

The news out of Japan has not been good this week. Officials there raised the severity rating of the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant to the highest level, while the plant continues to dump radiation into the air and water and radiation is found in milk and drinking water in U.S. cities and elsewhere. What does this mean for you and me?

To help make sense of the health and environmental consequences of this crisis, CNET spoke to two experts in the nuclear field. My colleague Martin LaMonica spoke with David Brenner from Columbia University's … Read more

By far, the biggest danger from the disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi power plant is to the workers who are trying to control a still-volatile situation. But with the crisis likely to play out for months, people are beginning to wonder what the release of radioactive material actually means.

Very low levels of radioactive material have been found in the water supply in Tokyo, for example, and those same particles are being carried by the wind elsewhere in the world.

Workers at the plant are being exposed to radiation coming directly from the core and spent-fuel cooling pools. For … Read more