(REUTERS) 16 April 2008:

Great news for consumers who want natural food but find the cost to be prohibitive: Wal-Mart has announced that the milk sold in its stores under the “Great Value” label will be free of artificial growth hormones like recombinant bovine somatotropic (rbST).

The US FDA insists that milk with rbST does not pose a threat to human health, but consumers feel otherwise. Many of them feel that we just don’t know enough about it. The children raised on rbST milk haven’t aged enough for us to know if the growth hormone  has had an effect.

(NEWS.COM.AU) 24 March 2008:

A study of newlyweds published in the Journal of Family Psychology found that men who marry women who are better looking than them are happier than men who are better looking than their wives. In marriages where the wife is more attractive, both partners tended to be very content.

The study authors believe the reason for this is evolution. Women are less picky about their mates’ looks as long as he can make babies. Men, on the other hand, are hardwired to choose a partner who will pass on genes for health and beauty.

(BBC) 18 January 2008:

It’s the belief of many that shift work (whether we define it as regular but evening and night hours, or changeable hours) is detrimental to health. However, a Danish study has found that it is much more dangerous for women than it is for men.

Men who did shift work were no more likely than other men to claim a disability pension. But women who did were one third more likley to do so than women who did not.

Why this is so is still the subject of some controversy: the explanation most strongly put forward at the moment is that women were more likely to have household responsibilities, like childcare, that were not as time flexible as their working hours, thus increasing the stress upon them.

(CNN.COM) 3 January 2008:

“Health officials have touted the Gardasil vaccine as an important new protection against a cancer-causing sexually transmitted virus.  In recent months, they’ve also noted reports of pain and fainting from the shot.

During its first year of use, reports of girls fainting from vaccinations climbed, but it’s not clear whether the pain of the cervical cancer vaccine was the reason for the reaction.

“This vaccine stings a lot,” said Patsy Stinchfield, an infectious disease expert at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota, speaking at a recent meeting of vaccination experts in Atlanta, Georgia.”

Would the fact that most people receiving the vaccine happen to be teenage girls have ANYTHING to do with the fainting?

(NATION) 1 January 2008:

One of the great puzzles of epidemiology is that we know that marriage increases mens’ general good health and lifespan. However, only happy marriages (as opposed to all) do that for women. Now reseachers think they have found the mechanism.

By measuring cortisol levels (a stress hormone) they were able to show that married men bounce back from the pains and griefs of the working day better than single men do. But for women this was only true if they were in a happy marriage. And of course we already know that stress is an indicator of general good health.

Now all we have to do is work out why cortisol levels react this way to a happy or unhappy marriage….

(MSNBC.COM) The Male Biological Clock

Unlike women, who have a marked decline in fertility in their 30s, men’s biological clocks appear to wind down gradually and progressively over the course of their lives. One study, for instance, found that sperm motility — their ability to be strong swimmers capable of reaching and fertilizing an egg — decreased by a steady 0.7 percent per year for men between the ages of 22 and 80.

Sperm from older men also may be more likely to contribute to health problems in children. Recent studies have linked older fatherhood with increased risks of schizophrenia, autism, Down syndrome and other disorders in children. And in this case, “older” means as young as 40

(DALLAS NEWS) 6 June 2007:

Some people believe that men won’t listen to advice while women will. It’s less well known that this leads to the death of some men. Research shows that the strong silent guy stereotype does indeed exist, and it’s this type that tends not to listen to what people, even doctors, are saying about his health.

This not listening is what leads to men being greater risk takers and thus at greater risk from such things as car crashes, the effects of smoking and stress related illnesses.

Some might say that women’s greater willingness to listen leads to their similar and opposite lower risk of such diseases as they modify their behavior.