Health | WPN World People News

The first ever celebration of the United Nations World Food Safety Day, to be marked globally on 7 June, aims to strengthen efforts to ensure that the food we eat is safe.

The National Institutes of Health will fund clinical trials to assess the benefits, applicability and efficacy of applying genomic medicine interventions to improve management of diseases such as high blood pressure, depression and chronic pain. The trials are part of the second phase of the Implementing Genomics in Practice (IGNITE) Network with a total investment of $42 million over five years, pending the availability of funds. The trials will begin in 2020.

A new study has found that not sticking to a regular bedtime and wakeup schedule — and getting different amounts of sleep each night — can put a person at higher risk for obesity, high cholesterol, hypertension, high blood sugar and other metabolic disorders. In fact, for every hour of variability in time to bed and time asleep, a person may have up to a 27% greater chance of experiencing a metabolic abnormality.

The Food and Agriculture Organization and World Health Organization are joining forces to assist countries to prevent, manage and respond to risks along the food supply chain. Pictured above is a marketplace in Kampala, Uganda.

Scanning electron micrograph of Nipah virus (yellow) budding from the surface of a cell. NIAID

On March 30, CDC is reporting 971 cases of measles in the United States thus far in 2019. This is the greatest number of cases reported in the U.S. since 1992, when 963 cases were reported for the entire year.

New cases of diagnosed diabetes in the U.S. decreased by 35 percent since a peak in 2009 – the first sign that efforts to stop the nation’s diabetes epidemic are working, CDC researchers report.

Ahead of World No Tobacco Day (31 May), the World Health Organization is highlighting the damage tobacco causes to lung health: over 40% of all tobacco-related deaths are from lung diseases like cancer, chronic respiratory diseases and tuberculosis. WHO is calling on countries and partners to increase action to protect people from exposure to tobacco.

Youth who said they were teased or ridiculed about their weight increased their body mass by 33% more each year, compared to a similar group who had not been teased, according to researchers at the National Institutes of Health. The findings appear to contradict the belief that such teasing might motivate youth to change their behavior and attempt to lose weight.

The latest Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer finds that, for all cancer sites combined, cancer death rates continued to decline in men, women, and children in the United States from 1999 to 2016. Overall cancer incidence rates, or rates of new cancers, decreased in men from 2008 to 2015, after increasing from 1999 to 2008, and were stable in women from 1999 to 2015. In a special section of the report, researchers looked at cancer rates and trends in adults ages 20 to 49.