- MONDAY, Aug. 18 (HealthDay News) — Robert J. Linhardt is a
chemist with a dream: making the blood-thinner heparin by the bucketful
without using animal tissue.

It's a dream that has taken on urgency this year, as the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration attributed more than 80 American deaths and hundreds
of illnesses to contaminated heparin from the [...]

- MONDAY, Aug. 18 (HealthDay News) — Whether it's frizzy or
flyaway, nearly everyone puts up with an unruly head of hair from time to
time. Now scientists have trained their microscopes on hair to find out
why it misbehaves — and how to tame it.

In a new study, said to be the first of its kind, [...]

- MONDAY, Aug. 18 (HealthDay News) — Having epilepsy might put you at a
significantly higher risk for death by drowning, a new report says.

The study, which looked at information compiled from all over the
world, found that epileptics had a 15 to 19 times greater chance of
drowning compared with the general population. Epileptics [...]

- MONDAY, Aug. 18 (HealthDay News) — American teens would be willing to
pay a lot of money to be acne-free, according to researchers who surveyed
266 high school students in San Francisco.

The study found the teens, on average, would pay about $275 to have
never had acne. They also said they'd be willing to pay [...]

- MONDAY, Aug. 18 (HealthDay News) — Teens who don't get enough
sleep or have poor-quality sleep run the risk of elevated blood pressure,
a new study finds.

It's the first study to make such a connection, said study senior
author Dr. Susan Redline, director of the University Hospitals Sleep
Center at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

“In adults, [...]

- MONDAY, Aug. 18 (HealthDay News) — Threading a catheter into the
heart from the wrist rather than the groin reduces the incidence of
bleeding problems during angioplasty, a new study finds.

The approach, using the radial artery in the wrist, is not widely
practiced in the United States, according to an analysis of almost 600,000
catheterizations in a [...]

TRENTON, N.J. - A 1999 Merck & Co. study of its since-withdrawn painkiller Vioxx, touted to participating doctors and patients as meant to show whether Vioxx caused fewer stomach problems than another drug, was primarily a stealth marketing strategy, researchers report.
The true purpose was to get lots of doctors and patients in the habit of [...]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -
DEET, the widely used mosquito
repellent, does not block the insects' sense of smell but
simply stinks to them, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

This in turn could help in the development of better
mosquito repellents, according to the team at the University of
California, Davis.

They managed to record the signals from individual neurons
in the antennae, [...]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -
Patients infected with West Nile
virus can develop long-term symptoms such as fatigue, fuzzy
thinking and movement difficulties but these symptoms go away
after about a year, doctors reported on Monday.

The mosquito-borne virus arrived in the Americas in 1999
and quickly began to sicken patients in New York. It has now
spread across the United States, Canada [...]

A petitioner sleeps with a bus timetable covering his face on a street outside a government office in Beijing July 20, 2008. (David Gray/Reuters)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -
Poor sleep habits can do more than
annoy parents and make teenagers drowsy in school — they can
lead to high blood pressure, U.S. researchers reported on
Monday.

Teens who slept fewer than [...]