MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia’s leading psychiatric institute has seen a four-fold increase in callers looking for advice since the start of the global financial crisis, its director said on Tuesday.
The Serbsky Institute, best known for incarcerating Soviet-era dissidents, is helping the government tackle the growing problem by rolling out a nationwide network of “anti-crisis centers” [...]

TOKYO (Reuters) - A study group for Japan’s top safety watchdog said cloned animals are safe for food, the first step in a series of decisions needed before the watchdog makes recommendations to the government.
With several meetings pending by a higher-level committee of experts, it will take months before the Food Safety Commission reports its [...]

BEIJING (Reuters) - China has promised harsh punishment for illegal poultry sales after four recent bird flu cases, as a health official said the mother of a toddler infected with the avian virus had died of pneumonia weeks before.
Chinese health authorities on Monday said a 16-year-old boy from southern Hunan province was badly ill after [...]

BEIJING (Reuters) - China will provide two imported HIV drugs to patients who develop resistance to cheaper, domestic alternatives, state media said on Monday, going some way to meeting a key demand of AIDS treatment activists.
The decision to hand out the new drugs means that nine of 20 drugs to combat AIDS are now available [...]

LONDON (Reuters) - A chemical commonly used to make rubber products may cause cancer in people exposed to fumes during the manufacturing process, British researchers said on Tuesday.
Workers exposed to 2-mercaptobenzothiazole, or MBT, at a rubber chemicals plant in North Wales were twice as likely to develop colon cancer and four times as likely to [...]

By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A study tracking a large group of women for a decade casts doubt on the value of testing for a certain genetic trait linked to heart disease to predict one’s chances of illness, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
Knowing a woman had the abnormality on chromosome 9 did not improve cardiovascular [...]

By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two nonsurgical procedures relieve many symptoms of acid reflux disease including heartburn in people who are not helped by the medications typically used to treat it, U.S. researchers said on Friday.
In this chronic condition, also called gastroesophageal reflux disease, or GERD, stomach acid backs up into the esophagus, irritating its [...]

LONDON (Reuters) - Keeping a full social calendar may help protect you from dementia, researchers said on Monday.
Socially active people who were not easily stressed had a 50 percent lower risk of developing dementia compared with men and women who were isolated and prone to distress, they reported in the journal Neurology.
“In the past, studies [...]

By Julie Steenhuysen
CHICAGO (Reuters) - First heart attacks are less likely to kill people in the United States than they used to be, helped by better prevention efforts and better treatments, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
“The severity of heart attacks is decreasing,” said Dr. Merle Myerson of Columbia University in New York, whose study appears [...]

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Children in the United States increasingly are developing serious head and neck infections with a drug-resistant type of “superbug” bacteria called MRSA, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
They said rates of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, are rising in children, and called on doctors to be more judicious in prescribing antibiotics.
“There is a [...]