Tag: health

Health News

Raising Awareness About Prader-Willi Syndrome

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Dante’s dad wants people to know about Prader-Willi Syndrome.

People with Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS) feel hungry all the time. That’s hard for most of us to imagine. We’re used to eating a meal and then feeling full for about two hours.

But kids with Prader-Willi don’t feel full. After they’ve eaten, they want to eat again. But of course if they do that, they’ll eat too much—not just three meals a day. That can lead to obesity—being overweight—which can lead to health problems.

Dante, who is now seven-and-a-half, was born with PWS. His dad, Keegan Johnson, wants to make people aware of the condition in order to raise money for research and, eventually, a cure.

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Breaking News News Sports

Canadian Sets World Record At Boston Marathon

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April 16 was a very hot day in Boston, Mass. It was a record-setting 27 degrees Celsius.

It was the day of the 116th Boston Marathon.

A marathon is a long-distance race, covering just over 42 kilometres. On this day, many runners (16 per cent of them, in fact) decided to pass on the event because it was too hot. Many other racers posted slower than usual race times.

Except for one participant. Canadian Josh Cassidy, 27, set a world record.

Cassidy won the men’s wheelchair division. He raced in a three-wheel, high-tech wheelchair; he uses his arms to power it.

Cassidy finished with a record time of 1:18:25 (one hour, 18 minutes and 25 seconds). His time was two seconds faster than the previous best time, set by South Africa’s Ernst Van Dyk in 2004.

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Kids News

How Reading The News Helped Craig Kielburger Change The World

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One morning when I was 12, I was munching on cereal and flipping through the newspaper in search of the comics.

I couldn’t get past the front-page story. It was about a young boy in Pakistan, a child labourer named Iqbal Masih.

When he was just four years old, Iqbal went to work in a cramped, dusty room for 12 hours a day, six days a week, weaving carpets in a factory.

Iqbal was 12. I was 12.

I knew I had to do something for him. But what?

I hadn’t been looking to make a big difference in the world. I was looking for Calvin and Hobbes!

Still, I tore out Iqbal’s story and brought it to school.

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Health News Science

Canadian Awards Predict Nobel Prize Winners

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The Gairdner Foundation recently announced the winners of its 2012 awards.

The Canada Gairdner Awards are given to people who have made a new scientific discovery to combat disease or ease human suffering. It is one of the most important medical awards in the world.

As the Gairdner website puts it, “we’re dedicated to recognizing the world’s most creative and accomplished biomedical scientists.” Biomedical scientists work in medicine and biology (the study of living organisms).

The late James A. Gairdner established the Gairdner Foundation in 1957. Since then, 300 awards have been given. Seventy-three of those award winners have gone on to win a Nobel Prize in either medicine or chemistry.

The awards are selected by Canadians, but they are given to scientists throughout the world.

This year’s seven award winners include three people who broke through mysteries of the human circadian clock, the internal mechanism that controls our sleep and wakefulness, body temperature, and many other functions.

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Health Lighter News Science

Chocolate May Be Good For Your Heart

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Chocolate – eaten in moderation – may actually be good for you, according to a new study.

The study, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, said that people who ate small amounts of dark chocolate instead of other high-fat treats, had slight improvements in the health of their heart.

For some participants, their blood pressure came down slightly. Some people had lower insulin levels.

The researchers, at the Norwich Medical School in the UK, studied more than 1,000 people. They asked people to eat chocolate (or not eat chocolate) and then they monitored them to check for changes in their blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Cholesterol is a type of waxy fat; too much of it can cause damage to the heart.

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Health News Sports

Skiing, Snowboarding Cause Most Winter Sports Injuries In Canada

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Last winter, more than 5,600 Canadians ended up in the hospital with an injury from hockey, skiing or another winter sport.

That information comes from a new report by the Canadian Institute for Health Information.

Most of the injuries were from skiing and snowboarding. More than 2,300 Canadians went to the hospital after they had an accident in either of those sports.

Hockey (1,114 injuries) and snowmobiling (1,126) were next on the list of injury-causing sports.

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Health News

No More Cases Of Polio In India

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India made history this month when it announced that there were no more cases of polio in the country.

The victory came after years of work by India’s public-health workers. They travelled to the most remote places and the poorest areas in the country. They gave vaccines—medicine that prevents diseases—to 172 million children.

Polio is a viral infection that can paralyze (stop movement in) the body, especially in people’s arms and legs. It can also make people’s breathing difficult is if they have very bad asthma. It can even be fatal.

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Kids News Politics

Toronto Kids Learn Lessons At City Hall

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Yesterday, some schoolkids in Toronto learned first-hand what democracy is all about.

Toronto’s mayor, Rob Ford, was proposing some cuts to the city’s budget.

He said many of the city’s services should go on the chopping block to balance the city’s budget, including closing down services at: 10 arenas, three daycares, three shelters, a city zoo and a farm on Toronto Island.

The city also proposed cutting services like swimming lessons at five swimming pools in Toronto schools. That could potentially lead to the pools being closed in the future.

The parents and kids at those schools went into action to try to prevent the budget cuts.

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Breaking News News

Attawapiskat: Canada’s “Fourth-World” Community

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Nearly a month ago, the northern Canadian First Nations community Attawapiskat declared itself to be in a “state of emergency.”

This week, as winter sets in and snow is on the ground in the remote community, they are finally getting some attention–and some help.

In Canada, a state of emergency is normally declared when something terrible happens to a place, such as an earthquake, flood or large fire.

It’s a signal to the country’s government that “we need help, immediately.”

In this case, the state of emergency is that the people of Attawapiskat, in northern Ontario are living in conditions that are worse than those in many third-world countries.

One reporter described going to Attawapiskat as, “like stepping into the fourth world.”

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Health Technology

Remote Community Gets High-Tech Pharmacy

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Curve Lake is a First Nations community half an hour north of Peterborough.

People who live there no longer have to go all the way into the city when they run out of their medicine and need a prescription filled.

They can get their medicine from a machine, similar to a bank machine – except that what comes out isn’t money, it’s pills.

Curve Lake gets a lot of snow in the winter.

In bad weather, it can be difficult for the community’s residents to get to the nearest pharmacy if they run out of their medication.

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