Create your own free news widgets.

As many as one-third of female smokers in Alberta are lighting up while pregnant with numbers that easily eclipse the national average, a new provincial study says.

A national alcohol research group is concerned that the media's misinterpretation of a recent British research study could encourage pregnant women to be more at ease with temperate alcohol consumption.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Among premenopausal women taking steroids for lupus, various treatments preserve bone mineral density and 'should be considered' for preventing the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis, advise researchers in a report published this month. (Source: Reuters: Health) MedWorm Message: Find out how you can get your message across here by sponsoring this MedWorm news feed.

Title: Health Tip: Risk Factors for EndometriosisCategory: Health NewsCreated: 12/26/2008 2:00:00 AMLast Editorial Review: 12/26/2008 (Source: MedicineNet Osteoporosis General)

About a week ago, the New York Post published a portfolio of photographs of Barack Obama that had been taken on the campus of Occidental College in 1980. . . .It is less than self-evident why Mr Obama's forgoing the cigarette he sneaks every few weeks should be a matter of national importance. There is no consistent relationship between smoking and performance of official duties. It is true, according to the historian Michael Oren, that Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli chief of staff, was taken to hospital with nicotine poisoning at the height of the six-day war, but he was on 100 a day. Cigars buoyed Churchill in the second world war. Whether or not smoking makes you think more clearly, the former German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, who celebrated his 90th birthday last week, must count as one of the sharpest thinkers and heaviest smokers among world leaders of the last half-century.Although smoking does not pose any obvious risks to good government, stopping smoking might. . . .One

OAKLAND, California, Dec 12 (IPS) - For a president who had little to do but pardon turkeys on Thanksgiving and throw the switch on the national Christmas tree, little to look forward to but packing his bags and evacuating the White House, and less positive accomplishments to look back on than most presidents, this year's World AIDS Day was clearly a high point. And Pastor Rick Warren was there to share the spotlight with him.