The Canadian Lung Association expressed disappointment in federal Health Committee Chair Joy Smith’s stance on the issue of Air Canada and WestJet’s policy to allow pets to travel in the passenger cabin of airplanes. The Lung Association launched an online campaign for pet-free flights in July following the decision by Air Canada to join WestJet in offering pet-free flights, despite the serious risks it presents to passengers and crew with asthma, COPD and severe animal allergies.

According to a new report based on a government survey in 2007, in the previous 12 months Americans had spent a total of $33.9 billion out of their own pockets on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). The report was compiled by Dr Richard L.

The American Lung Association will tell the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at a public hearing today to adopt even stronger, health-based national air quality standards for nitrogen dioxide (NO2) than what the agency proposed. Lung Association leadership and healthy air advocates will call for tighter standards at the hearing that begins at 9:00 AM at the EPA Potomac Yard Conference Center located at 1 Potomac Yard, 2777 South Crystal Drive in Arlington, Va.

“Three internationally known organizations based in St. Louis - the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, the Washington University School of Medicine and St. Louis Children’s Hospital” - have entered into a partnership, known as the Global Harvest Alliance (GHA), which aims to “create inexpensive, nutritionally complete food to help the world’s hungry and undernourished,” the

People who are more active and exercise harder are less likely to develop cancer and die, suggests research published ahead of print in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. A higher use of oxygen consumption during physical activity is linked to a reduction in the level of illness in a person and their likelihood of dying from cancer.

Farmers are once again being urged to vaccinate their livestock against the threat of bluetongue. The warning from the Joint Action against Bluetongue campaign (JAB) comes as the country enters the height of summer meaning midge activity is reaching a peak period and the risk of a bluetongue incursion increases on a daily basis.

Scientists in the UK who systematically reviewed research from the last 50 years concluded that from a nutritional point of view, organically produced foods are no better than conventionally produced. The study was the work of researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and appears in the 29 July issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Being active at age 5 helps kids stay lean as they age even if they don’t remain as active later in childhood, a new University of Iowa study shows. “We call this effect ‘banking’ because the kids benefit later on, similar to having a savings account at a bank. The protective effect is independent of what happens in between,” said lead author Kathleen Janz, professor of health and sport studies in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

A higher density of blood vessels and other unique physiological features in the flight muscles of bar-headed geese allow them to do what even the most elite of human athletes struggle to accomplish - assert energy at high altitudes, according to a new UBC study. Named for the dark stripes on the backs of their heads, bar-headed geese are native to South and Central Asia.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a Public Health Advisory (PHA) warning consumers to stop using body building products that are represented as containing steroids or steroid-like substances. Many of these products are marketed as dietary supplements. The agency also issued a Warning Letter to American Cellular Laboratories Inc. for marketing and distributing body building products containing synthetic steroid substances.