India Awards Iranian Cartoonist
Bosnia to Host Iranian Puppet Shows

TEHRAN (Press TV) - Iran's Simorgh theater troupe is set to take part in the 2011 edition of the International Puppet Theater Festival in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The group will stage All my Friends and Kakoli, written and directed by Mohammad Boroumand, ISNA reports.
Both plays were awarded in the previous edition of Iran's Razavi Puppet Theater Festival.
Led by Mohammad Boroumand, the Simorgh troupe has participated in many international events and is planning to take part in two Indian festivals due to be held in the Indian cities of Delhi and Varanasi in October and November, 2011.
The 19th edition of Bosnia's International Puppet Theater Festival will be held from September 19 to 24, 2011.
Meanwhile, young Iranian cartoonist and graphic designer Mohammad-Ali Khalaji has been awarded at the Eco Cartoon International Exhibition in India.
The 34-year-old artist received the first prize of the festival for his emphasizing the need of protecting green environment through his work.
The artist has won many prizes in national and international cartoon competitions.
Mexico, Poland, Turkey, Iran, china, Syria and Bulgaria were among the 10 countries whose artists were honored during the event.
The Eco Cartoon International Exhibition was presented on the theme of 'Think Green, Grow Green and Go with Green', emphasizing the individual responsibility towards environmental issues.
 Khalaji's work won the first prize of the Eco Cartoon International Exhibition in India.
 

Scientists Discover 12 New Frog Species in India

NEW DELHI (AP) — Years of combing tropical mountain forests, shining flashlights under rocks and listening for croaks in the night have paid off for a team of Indian scientists that has discovered 12 new frog species plus three others thought to have been extinct.
It's a find the team hopes will bring attention to India's amphibians and their role in gauging the health of the environment.
Worldwide, 32 percent of the world's known amphibian species are threatened with extinction, largely because of habitat loss or pollution, according to the group Global Wildlife Conservation.
"Frogs are extremely important indicators not just of climate change, but also pollutants in the environment," said the project's lead scientist, biologist Sathyabhama Das Biju of the University of Delhi.
Many of the newly found frogs in India are rare and are living in just a single area, so they will need rigorous habitat protection, Biju told The Associated Press on Saturday. "Unfortunately in India, conservation has basically focused on the two most charismatic animals — the elephant and the tiger. For amphibians there is little interest, little funding, and frog research is not easy."
Night frogs are extremely hard to find, coming out only at dark and during the monsoon season, living either in fast-flowing streams or on moist forest ground.
Biju said he and his student researchers had to sit in dark, damp forests listening for frog sounds and shining flashlights under rocks and across riverbeds. They confirmed the new species by description as well as genetics.
The 12 new species include the meowing night frog, whose croak sounds more like a cat's call, the jog night frog, unique in that both the males and females watch over the eggs, and the Wayanad night frog, which grows to about the size of a baseball or cricket ball. "It's almost like a monster in the forest floor, a huge animal for a frog, leaping from one rock to another," Biju said.
Three other species were rediscovered, including the Coorg night frog described 91 years ago, after scientists "had completely ignored these animals, thinking they were lost."
The discoveries — published in the latest issue of international taxonomy journal Zootaxa — bring the known number of frogs in India to 336. Biju estimated this was only around half of what is in the wild, and said none of India's amphibians are yet being studied for biological compounds that could be of further use in science.
"We first have to find the species, know them and protect them, so that we can study them for their clinical importance," he said.
Biju is credited with discovering dozens of new Indian frog species during his 35-year career.
 A jog night frog sits in the forests of the Western Ghats in Karnataka.
 

Study: Whooping Cough Vaccination Fades in 3 Years

ATLANTA (AP) — The whooping cough vaccine given to babies and toddlers loses much of its effectiveness after just three years — a lot faster than doctors believed — and that could help explain a recent series of outbreaks in the U.S. among children who were fully vaccinated, a study suggests.
The study is small and preliminary, and its authors said the results need to be confirmed through more research. Nevertheless, the findings are likely to stir debate over whether children should get a booster shot earlier than now recommended.
"I was disturbed to find maybe we had a little more confidence in the vaccine than it might deserve," said the lead researcher, Dr. David Witt, chief of infectious disease at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Rafael, Calif. Witt presented his findings Monday at the American Society for Microbiology conference in Chicago.
The study was done in California, where whooping cough vaccinations are a hot-button issue. The state had a huge spike in whooping cough cases last year, during which more than 9,100 people fell ill and 10 babies died. California schools have turned away thousands of middle and high school students this fall who haven't gotten their booster shot.
Government health officials recommend that children get vaccinated against whooping cough in five doses, with the first shot at age 2 months and the final one between 4 and 6 years. Then youngsters are supposed to get a booster shot around 11 or 12. That means a gap of five to eight years.
Witt's study looked at roughly 15,000 children in Marin County, Calif., including 132 who got whooping cough last year. He found that youngsters who had gone three years or more since the last of their five original shots were as much as 20 times more likely to become infected than children who had been more recently vaccinated. The largest number of cases was in children 8 to 12 years old.
Whooping cough, or pertussis, is a highly contagious bacterial disease that in rare cases can be fatal. It leads to severe coughing that causes children to make a distinctive whooping sound as they gasp for breath.
Marin County has a reputation for anti-vaccine sentiment, and Witt said that when he started the study he expected to see the illness concentrated in unvaccinated people. But more than 80 percent of the children who developed whooping cough in Witt's study were fully vaccinated.
California health officials told doctors last year that they could give the booster to kids as young as 7 in an effort to stifle the outbreak. Federal health officials said that they are still studying the issue and that it is too soon to make that a standard practice.
At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which makes recommendations on childhood shots, officials acknowledged that the vaccine's protection declines, but they said the agency's own studies show the drop-off is not as pronounced as Witt's research found.
The CDC has estimated that the risk of the disease can increase fourfold several years after vaccination, not 10 to 20 times. One reason may be differences in how a case of whooping cough is defined: Witt counted positive test results, while the CDC also requires more than a week of symptoms.
CDC officials stressed that the vaccination is still much better than nothing — it reduces how sick a child becomes. Also, the nation no longer sees thousands of whooping cough deaths each year, as it did before there was a vaccine.
 Nurse Susan Peel draws whooping cough vaccination before giving an injection to a student.
 

Real-Time Tracking of Diseases Improves Diagnosis

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The doctor doesn't think your sore throat is bad enough yet to order a strep test — unaware that a dozen people across town were diagnosed with strep throat just last week.
Doctors rarely know what bugs are brewing in the neighborhood until their own waiting rooms start to fill. Harvard University researchers report Monday that getting them real-time information on nearby infections could improve patient care — for strep throat alone, potentially helping tens of thousands avoid either a delayed diagnosis or getting antibiotics they didn't need.
"The risk you have is based on where you live and what the people around you have," explains Dr. Kenneth Mandl of Children's Hospital Boston, affiliated with Harvard. His analysis of 82,000 patient visits found that knowing how much strep throat is circulating can help improve the accuracy of the next patient's diagnosis.
Today, hundreds of hospitals, clinics and health departments automatically report certain symptoms and diagnoses to the government. That practice has a wonky name — biosurveillance — but it's how officials track the spread of flu, detect the latest whooping cough outbreak, and watch for weird symptoms that might signal a brand-new disease or even bioterrorism.
But until there's an outbreak, that information is a one-way street. There's no easy way for doctors to learn what their colleagues nearby diagnosing. Instead, doctors often call the health department to ask if anyone's heard of a case of this or that disease as they puzzle over a patient's symptoms, says Dr. Alfred DeMaria of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
Giving doctors a fast, ongoing snapshot of disease "would be very helpful," says DeMaria, who wasn't involved in Mandl's research but praises the approach. "The key is to make the system entirely automated and real-time."
Work is beginning on technology to do just that, trying to link local biosurveillance to electronic health records, maybe even mobile apps.
First, the question is whether such tracking could make a real difference. So Mandl and his colleague Dr. Andrew Fine, an emergency medicine physician, examined strep throat, an infection frequently misdiagnosed in adults.
Because strep throat is more common in young children, those with red, sore throats are given either a while-you-wait rapid test or, because that test sometimes misses the bug, a throat culture that can take a day or two for results.
For anyone 15 or older, guidelines say doctors shouldn't order a test or prescribe antibiotics unless sore-throat sufferers rise to a certain level of suspicion because of other symptoms: fever, enlarged lymph nodes, tonsils with swelling or pus, and a lack of coughing. People with none or just one of those symptoms probably have a virus and are supposed to be sent home. A patient with a lot of those symptoms often are given antibiotics automatically, and those in between get tested.
Mandl and Fine turned to records from CVS MinuteClinics in six states where all sore-throat patients are tested and symptoms are recorded. What the government-funded study found: Knowing how prevalent strep is in a particular area is a strong enough predictor to count as an extra symptom in the test-or-treat decision.
 

3-D 'Lion King' Roars to Grand Opening

LOS ANGELES (AFP) — A re-release of an old movie topped several new offerings at the box office, with "The Lion King 3-D" making $30.2 million in its debut.
Monday's final figure surpassed the Sunday studio estimate of $29.3 million.
The Disney animated musical favorite, now rendered in 3-D, features the voices of Matthew Broderick, Nathan Lane, James Earl Jones and Jeremy Irons. It was the rare family film in a sea of challenging and R-rated fare this past weekend.
Last week's top movie, the Warner Bros. thriller "Contagion," dropped into second place with $14.5 million. It's now grossed $44.3 million over two weeks.
 

ADHD Doubles Kids' Injury Risk

NEW YORK (AFP) - Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have a double risk of experiencing severe injuries that need medical attention.
ADHD is one of the most common developmental disorders in children which include symptoms such as difficulty staying focused and paying attention, difficulty controlling behavior, and over-activity.
Researchers studied 4,745 school children to know if the ADHD children's behaviors put them at higher risk of injuries, HealthDay reported.
Scientists asked parents to fill in a questionnaire about their children through which scientists could identify kids that were more likely to be with ADHD or conduct disorder.
Conduct disorder is a repetitive and persistent pattern of behavior in children and adolescents in which the rights of others or basic social rules are violated. It is characterized by aggression, bullying, property damage, hurting animals and law-breaking activities.
According to the report published in Academic Pediatrics, parents of children who scored in the 90th percentile for symptoms of ADHD were nearly twice as likely to report their child had been injured in the previous year.
Kids who scored high for conduct disorder had 1.5 times the risk of injury as kids in the 10th percentile but when researchers excluded other elements that interfered with the analysis, the results showed that only ADHD symptoms were significantly associated with injury.
A recent study by Schwebel and colleagues has suggested that children with ADHD are more likely to take risks when crossing the street.
While the kids with ADHD were just as likely to remember to look both ways when put into a simulated street crossing, they tended to dart across the road leaving less time to spare in front of oncoming traffic and having more close calls.
“You're going to see kids with ADHD taking risks. When it becomes scary is when they dive into the pool headfirst, or they dart across the street and get hit by a car,” Schwebel said.
“The parents of kids who demonstrate these symptoms need to be even more vigilant in terms of injury prevention, and primary care doctors need to counsel parents about the increased risk,” Delamater said. “Parents need to teach children to be cautious, to think about what they're doing and to recognize situations than can be dangerous.”