A round-up of other stories in brief
MOTHERS ON THE BOTTLE:Mothers are reaching for the bottle as a way to cope with their children during the long school holidays, according to new research.
For many, finding a way to have the odd tipple has become a much-needed stress-buster for pressurised modern-day mothers who have to be vigilant and provide entertainment for their children.
Mothers have reported seven tell-tale signs, according to the Lynwode Manor residential alcoholism treatment centre, based in North and South Yorkshire, Worcester and Lincolnshire.
These include when an evening glass of wine becomes a nightly bottle of wine, or if you put the children to bed earlier to allow your drinking to start earlier. Taking alcohol with you on family trips but disguising it as a soft drink should ring alarm bells.
RIGHT OPERATION; WRONG ARM:An engineer has described his shock when he woke up in hospital to find surgeons had operated on the wrong arm.
Simon Savage went into theatre at Rotherham General Hospital with arrows drawn on him to indicate where tendon material should be taken from his right wrist and used to fix his injured left elbow.
But surgeons performed the procedure on the 26-year-old the other way around - operating on his healthy right arm. Hospital chief of surgery Roger Jones admitted a mistake had been made and said an investigation had already begun into the "serious incident".
OBESITY DOWN UNDER:More than two-thirds of Australians living outside major cities are overweight or obese, and extremely obese corpses are creating a safety hazard at mortuaries, according to two new studies.
Nearly three-quarters of men and 64 per cent of women were overweight in a study of people in rural areas. Just 30 per cent of those studied recorded a healthy weight, said research published in the Medical Journal of Australia.
"Urgent action is required at the highest level to change unhealthy lifestyle habits by improving diet, increasing physical activity and making our environments supportive of these objectives," wrote the lead researcher, Prof Edward Janus. The figures were much higher than for the general population, where statistics show about 3.2 million of Australia's 21 million people are obese.
CHEAP DETECTION:A cheap method to detect cervical cancer using vinegar, cotton gauze and a bright light could save millions of women worldwide, a new report has claimed.
Researchers from the International Agency for Research on Cancer in France, together with colleagues from Tamil Nadu in India, said a visual screening test to look for the early signs of cervical cancer reduced the number of cases by a quarter.
"This is a landmark study," said Dr Harshad Sanghvi, medical director at JHPIEGO, an affiliate of Johns Hopkins University in the US, which has worked on preventing cervical cancer in poor countries. Dr Sanghvi was unconnected to the study, published in The Lancet.
Cervical cancer causes about 250,000 deaths every year and is the second-most common cancer in women. Nearly 80 per cent of those women are in the developing world.
The test by washing a woman's cervix with vinegar and gauze using a speculum to hold it open. After one minute, any precancerous lesions turn very white and can be seen with the naked eye under a halogen lamp.
PRINTING DANGER:That laser printer sitting on your desk could be emitting high levels of potentially hazardous particles, according to a new study. Some printers release almost as many ultra-fine particles as a smoldering cigarette, the study authors said.
The current research on the health hazards of printing, appearing in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, provides the most extensive look yet at particle emissions of office printers, including Canon, Hewlett-
Packard, Ricoh and Toshiba models.
Inhaling fine particles can cause health problems ranging from respiratory irritation to cardiovascular problems and cancer, depending on the particle composition, said study author Lidia Morawska, a physicist at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia.