For Asians, it seems, being young and thin isn't enough to ward off Type II diabetes. Though the disease is typically associated with old age and obesity, a study published May 27 in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that Asia's growing number of diabetics are relatively young and well under weights traditionally matched with the disease. Once considered a 'western' disease, diabetes has become an increasingly a global problem. The International Diabetes Federation ...

Mad cow disease, SARS and now swine flu: some diseases grab the headlines. But thousands of people worldwide suffer from very rare conditions, many of which few people have ever heard of. From the Alice in Wonderland syndrome that might have inspired Lewis Carroll, to the disease that may have sent an English King mad, we take a look at some of these obscure illnesses. Morgellons According to the Morgellons Research Foundation, crawling, biting and stinging ...

The number of swine flu cases in Japan are escalating with surprising speed, and health officials are not sure why. The Japanese government on Wednesday confirmed the first two cases of the disease in Tokyo, the world's most populous metropolitan area. Meanwhile, the number of Japanese who have contracted the new flu has more than doubled since May 18 from 130 to 279, a rate of increase that is "without a doubt" the highest in Asia, says Peter Cordingley, ...

The number of confirmed H1N1 flu cases worldwide surpassed 10,000, the World Health Organization said Tuesday. Commonly known as swine flu, the outbreak has sickened 10,176 people and caused at least 80 deaths, mostly in Mexico, the organization said. The actual number of people affected may be higher, as it takes time for national governments to confirm cases and report them to the global body. In the United States, at least 5,469 cases of swine flu have been ...

Few global health decisions have created quite as much commotion as that on April 29, when the World Health Organization , responding to the escalating spread of the H1N1 flu, raised its pandemic alert level for the first time to phase 5, meaning that a full pandemic was considered imminent. As of May 11, the WHO has reported more than 4,600 cases in 30 countries — including 2,600 cases in nearly every state in the U.S., according to the Centers ...

The World Health Organization on Friday reported 2,500 confirmed cases of swine flu in 25 countries, with 44 deaths from the disease. In the United States, the total number of confirmed cases of the H1N1 virus, as swine flu is officially called, nearly doubled to 1,639 from the day before, with reports coming from 43 states, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. Dr. Sylvie Briand, acting director of the Global Influenza Programme at WHO, told reporters in a ...

Both people who died of swine flu in the United States had pre-existing health problems, federal health authorities said Thursday in a report. The 22-month-old child who died April 27 of the flu, also called H1N1, had neonatal myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disease, said the report, which was written by a virus investigation team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and published online in the New England Journal of Medicine. The child -- who was from Mexico and ...

Roy Braswell was 9 years old when the flu pandemic of 1918 hit. "I know it's a bad feeling, 'cause I had it," said Braswell, 100, who now lives in Cobb County in Georgia. "It makes you have headaches, you be out of your head, you don't know nothing." Margaret Duchez, 94, did not have the flu, but remembers that in 1918 her grandmother locked the door so that she couldn't go outside during the pandemic. In her community ...

As swine flu spreads around the world, China has acted with an aggressiveness that can only come from unpleasant firsthand experience with epidemics. Official cover-ups allowed SARS to spread in 2002 and 2003, eventually killing 349 on the mainland and leading to the sacking of both the Health Minister and the mayor of Beijing. In recent years, the country has waged a steady battle against avian influenza, which has killed two dozen people in China and prompted fears that it ...

Like a patient suffering from a particularly tenacious case of, well, the flu, the H1N1 virus seemed to gain ground and lose it over the weekend, leaving health officials still cautious, but hopeful that the disease might be on the wane. The number of confirmed infections continues to rise, with the World Health Organization reporting 898 infections in 18 countries as of May 3, and the Centers for Disease Control tallying 226 confirmed cases in 30 states. The ...