Coins DIG

H1N1 flu may be the most talked about bug, but the old-fashioned seasonal flu -- which kills more than 33,000 Americans annually -- is still a threat, and vaccines for the seasonal flu are running low in some places in metro Detroit.

Oakland County health officials said that they exhausted their supply of seasonal flu vaccine Thursday.

By late Thursday afternoon, Macomb County had about 4,400 vaccines left out of 17,000 ordered, said Tom Kalkofen, director of the county health department. Wayne County was down to a couple hundred doses, though officials there have administered most of their yearly allotment.

Anxiety over a potential H1N1 epidemic is rising, as a majority of Americans believe the virus is a serious health hazard, according to a new survey.

About 58 percent of Americans think that the swine flu poses a serious threat to their health, according to the survey from Burlington, Mass.-based Silverlink Communications Inc., a health care communications firm.The results mark an increase compared to May 2009, when about 47 percent of Americans considered the swine flu to be a serious health threat.

More than one in three U.S. teen girls has had at least one shot of Gardasil, a CDC survey shows, but only 18% of girls got the three shots needed for protection.

The survey includes girls vaccinated through 2008, two years after Gardasil's approval. A second HPV vaccine, GlaxoSmithKline's Cervarix, is expected to be approved this year.

The West Nile virus was found in mosquitoes from two locations in Brookline this week, according to the Massachusetts Department of Health, bringing the tally of communities with confirmed cases to 18.

The wet weather in early summer, followed by hot weather in August, resulted in more mosquitoes than usual, said Jennifer Manley, spokeswoman for the state Department of Public Health. While last year’s West Nile counts were higher - disease-carrying mosquitoes were identified in 59 municipalities and 11 counties - people can be bitten for several more weeks before chilly weather kills the bugs.

Many magazine photos show babies sleeping in unsafe positions, according to researchers at Children's National Medical Center.

Sudden infant death syndrome researcher Dr. Rachel Moon analyzed pictures of sleeping babies in 24 magazines that are widely read by 20- to 40-year-old women.

More than one-third of the photos had problems, according to a news release on the work.

Researchers have found a genetic mutation in two people who need far less sleep than average, a discovery that might open the door to understanding human sleep patterns and lead to treatments for insomnia and other sleep disorders.

The finding, published in the Friday issue of the journal Science, marks the first time scientists have identified a genetic mutation that relates to sleep duration in any animal or human.

Officials have sealed off an isolated town of 10,000 people in rural west-central China after an outbreak of pneumonic plague killed two residents, the state-run Xinhua news service reported on Monday.

Cigarette smoking is one of the most addictive substances there are. It does nothing to add to your life. It had a foul odor, stinks up the house and your clothes, yellows your teeth and causes wrinkles around your mouth.

The survey released Tuesday, involving over 33,000 households, showed that 1.275 million people have had a spinal cord injury and over 5.6 million Americans live with some form of paralysis. The highest previous estimates were 250,000 and roughly four million, respectively.

The study was initiated by the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation and conducted by the University of New Mexico's Center for Development and Disability. More than 30 experts from 14 leading universities and medical centers and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set the parameters for the survey. The development of the survey, acquisition and analysis of the data took over three years.