A strong earthquake rocked Bhutan on Monday, blocking access roads in the mountainous Asian kingdom and killing at least five people, the country's home minister told CNN. "I heard people might die from it," Smith said. "So I think it's a good idea to help people, by being involved." Lewis and Smith, both from Baltimore, Maryland, were among the first Americans to receive H1N1 flu shots. As part of a trial of 2,400 people, they gave blood samples ...

Human rights groups are asking President-elect Barack Obama to pay early attention to the crisis in Sudan's troubled Darfur region, where government forces have waged a bloody war against militias that some international critics have characterized as genocide. "We've seen the military surge in Iraq. We've seen the development surge that NATO's announced for Afghanistan," said Darfur activist John Prendergast. "What's really needed in Sudan and the broader Horn and East Africa region is a peace surge." Prendergast's ENOUGH organization ...

When the chips are down, the world may one day owe a debt of gratitude to a group of potato farmers high up in the mountains of Peru. Thanks to a new $116 million global fund established this summer, the Quechua Indians are being paid to maintain their diverse collection of rare potatoes and ensure that they will be available to help the world adapt to future climate change. The Quechua are one of 11 communities around the ...

Brazil has confirmed 557 deaths caused by H1N1 flu, the highest total in the world, the nation's Health Ministry says. The United States has counted 522 fatalities through Thursday, and nearly 1,800 people had died worldwide through August 13, U.S. and global health officials said. In terms of mortality rate, which considers flu deaths in terms of a nation's population, Brazil ranks seventh, and the United States is 13th, the Brazilian Ministry of Health said in a news release Wednesday. ...

Officials in Mexico's Chiapas state postponed classes Friday for more than 1 million students in an effort to avoid a resurgence of H1N1 flu, which has sickened thousands throughout Mexico this year. Chiapas Education Secretary Javier Alvarez Ramos and state Health Secretary James Gomez Montes said classes will start August 31 for middle and high school students and September 7 for elementary pupils, the state-run Notimex news agency said. About 1.55 million students will be affected, 850,000 of them in ...

When the body refuses to make insulin, the condition is called type 1 diabetes; when the body mismanages the hormone, it's known as type 2. Now, scientists report new evidence linking insulin to a disorder of the brain: when the brain prevents the hormone from acting properly, the ensuing chemical imbalance may help trigger Alzheimer's disease. The correlation is so strong that some researchers are calling Alzheimer's disease "type 3" diabetes. In the body, insulin helps convert food into ...

A nine-year-old girl has died in Britain from the H1N1 virus, commonly known as swine flu, as authorities reported a jump in the number of cases in the country. The girl is the third person in the UK to die from swine flu, doctors at a children's hospital in Birmingham, England said Monday. A spokeswoman for the hospital said in a statement: "We can sadly confirm that a child died at Birmingham Children's Hospital on Friday evening. "The ...

Calming the tremors of Parkinson's disease remains a challenge for patients and doctors alike, but new research suggests that future therapies for the condition may emerge from an unlikely place: people's sleep habits. Scientists at Sacre-Coeur Hospital at the University of Montreal report in the journal Neurology that Parkinson's can be predicted relatively accurately up to 12 years before the first muscle tremors appear. People diagnosed with an unusual sleep condition called REM sleep disorder, in which they physically ...

A hundred years ago a Brazilian physician, Carlos Chagas, showed that monkeys were susceptible to a rare parasitic illness carried by a particular Latin American bug. Today an estimated 16 to 18 million people are infected with Chagas, as the disease is now known, and it claims some 50,000 lives each year. Yet most people have never heard of it. Chagas disease is exclusive to Latin America, and kills more people there than any other parasitic illness, including malaria. In ...

The 1992 Hollywood movie "Lorenzo's Oil," depicts the true story of Lorenzo, a five-year-old boy who suffered from adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), a rare and incurable disease that slowly destroys the entire nervous system. The movie showed how Lorenzo's grave physical and mental decline was finally stopped when his tireless parents found a treatment based on a mixture of oils, despite skepticism from doctors. The film illustrated perfectly the struggle faced by patients suffering from any of 6,000 known rare ...