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Vitamin 'may block MS disability'

From an article of the same title on BBCNews.com:

Vitamin shots may help protect multiple sclerosis patients from severe long-term disability, a study suggests. Currently, there is no effective treatment for the chronic progressive phase of MS, when serious disability is most likely to appear. Researchers cut the risk of nerve degeneration in mice with MS-type symptoms by giving them a form of vitamin B3 called nicotinamide. The Children's Hospital Boston study appears in the Journal of Neuroscience. MS, which affects about 85,000 people in the UK, is a disease of the central nervous system. It causes the break down of the myelin sheath, a fatty protein, which coats nerve fibres, disrupting the ability to conduct electrical impulses to and from the brain. Many patients develop a form of the disease called relapsing-remitting MS, in which bouts of illness are followed by complete or partial recovery. In this early phase anti-inflammatory drugs can help. But eventually patients can enter the chronic progressive phase, for which there is no good treatment.

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Love, Sex and Marriage

Church of Christ minister Joe Beam is getting national media attention for his frank discussion of sexuality. See the article by Brian Alexander on MSNBC.com titled "One preacher's message: Have hotter sex".

Beware of Bagged Spinach

From an article titled "E. coli outbreak traced to spinach in 8 states, including Michigan" by Andrew Bridges in the Detroit News:

An outbreak of E. coli in eight states has left at least one person dead and 50 others sick, federal health officials said Thursday in warning consumers not to eat bagged fresh spinach. The outbreak of the sometimes deadly bug killed one person in Wisconsin, said Dr. David Acheson, of the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. The outbreak has sickened people -- eight of them seriously -- in Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon and Utah as well. FDA officials do not know the source of the outbreak, other than it appears to be linked to bagged spinach. "We're advising people not to eat it," Acheson said.

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Antiabortion Centers Offer Sonograms to Further Cause

From an article of the same title by Michael Alison Chandler in The Washington Post:

On June 6, Cheryl Smith took her last $600 and drove her teenage daughter from Baltimore to Severna Park to get an abortion. When they got there, a receptionist told them the clinic had changed hands. The abortion provider had moved a few miles away, she said, but the new clinic would offer a pregnancy test and sonogram for free. The Smiths stayed. After they saw a picture of the fetus at 21 weeks with arms and legs and a face, their thoughts of termination were gone. "As soon as I seen that, I was ready. It wasn't no joke. It was real," Makiba Smith, 16, said. "It was like, he's not born to the world yet, but he is inside of me growing." With its ultrasound machine and its location, the Severna Park Pregnancy Clinic demonstrates two of the most important tactics in an intensifying campaign to woo women away from abortion clinics. Antiabortion organizations in recent years have added medical services to hundreds of Christian-oriented pregnancy counseling centers nationwide. Many of these antiabortion clinics have opened in or near places where women go to end pregnancies... By many accounts, the ultrasound exams have proven effective in convincing women to stay pregnant. A 2005 survey by Care Net, a Sterling-based network of about 1,000 antiabortion pregnancy centers in the United States and Canada, found that 72 percent of women who were initially "strongly leaning" toward abortion decided to carry their pregnancies to term after seeing a sonogram. Fifty percent made the same choice after counseling alone. Such results have led antiabortion forces to buy more ultrasound machines, which can cost as much as $50,000 each. In the past 2 1/2 years, the evangelical organization Focus on the Family, based in Colorado Springs, estimates it has helped 200 pregnancy centers buy the machines... Defending the decision to locate antiabortion pregnancy centers near abortion clinics, Hartshorn said abortion foes are not seeking "to be deceptive or to trick people, but to be right where they are when they are making decisions." Some Feel Deceived But many women say they have felt duped. The National Abortion Federation has received hundreds of calls and e-mails from women who say they went into pregnancy centers with vague or confusing names, many of them found under "abortion services" headings in the phone book. Rather than receiving unbiased counseling on all of their legal options, these women said, they found themselves listening to frightening, sometimes false, information... For Cheryl and Makiba Smith, ending up at the wrong clinic was a mistake they say they are deeply glad to have made. "God sent me to that clinic," Cheryl Smith said.

Study: U.S. Christians Guilty of "Overgrazing"

From an article of the same title on beliefnet by Daniel Burke of the Religion News Service:

On the way to the church picnic, some Christians may not be sidestepping one of the seven deadly sins: gluttony. A new study surmises that among Christians in the U.S. -- particularly Baptists, Pentecostals and Catholics -- there is a significant relationship between being religious and being obese. The study tracked about 2,800 religious Americans of various denominations for eight years. Baptists, according to the study, were most likely to be obese, followed by Pentecostals, Catholics, Methodists and members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Denominations that stress physical health, such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Seventh-day Adventists, show low levels of obesity, according to the study. There is also a very low percentage of obese Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists in the U.S., the study found. Because religion is often associated with positive health factors, such as lower blood pressure, stronger immune systems and less depression, the results of the study were somewhat surprising, said Purdue University sociology professor Kenneth E. Ferraro, a leader of the research.

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