First Lady Michelle Obama President Preventative Health Care Preventive Health Care Coverage Under Health Reform First Lady Michelle Obama, Dr. Jill Biden, and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius discuss the new preventive health care coverage made available under the Affordable Care Act at an event at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, DC.

When it begins to rain it is time to pay attention to your skin which starts behaving weirdly. It suddenly erupts into pimples and blackheads; it becomes dry and oily at the same time. What do you do? Don’t worry, use some simple and safe home remedies to make your skin behave itself.

Cleansing your skin in the monsoons: Because of the moisture that is prevalent in the air, your skin is constantly clammy and damp. This attracts more grime and dust than usual; which is the reason you will see your skin erupt into blackheads and whiteheads during this season. You need to be extra careful about cleansing your skin without stripping it of its natural moisture….. (more…)

In a certain period of every girl’s life, the word “diet” becomes embedded in her head. Whether it was a result of a mean insult she got at school, a hot girl at the beach that she envied so much or even a size 6 dress that she didn’t fit into, this girl automatically thinks of this four letter word that totally turns her into another person.
We all go on diets, we have tried FAD diets, calorie based diets and recently the chocolate diet but nothing seems to shed that extra couple of kilos we need to kick off for the summer. What are we doing wrong then?  We pretend to be nutritionists….. (more…)

It’s common knowledge that Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. A lucky wind blew a few spores into his Petri dish, and the rest is history.

That’s true as far as it goes, author Lauren Belfer says, but what people forget is that Fleming couldn’t do much with his miraculous discovery because penicillin was so tough to produce. It lay dormant until the outbreak of World War II, and in the meantime, people continued to die from causes as tiny as a scratch on the knee.

Belfer’s new novel, A Fierce Radiance, picks up the story of penicillin just after the outbreak of the war, when pharmaceutical companies were racing to perfect mass-production of the drug.

Belfer tells NPR’s Lynn Neary that the story of penicillin is a family story for her. “For all the years that I knew her, my elderly aunt kept on her bureau a photograph of her brother when he was about 10 years old, sitting in a canoe with his father, having a wonderful time on a summer vacation.”

A year later, Belfer says, the boy was dead. “He died on the Fourth of July, in the 1920s, of a fast-moving infection, and there was nothing his doctors could do.”

Penicillin was notoriously difficult to make. Belfer estimates that when the war broke out in 1939, there were only a few teaspoons of the drug in the entire country. But the pace of development picked up when scientists began looking for new ways to treat infections in battlefield wounds.

“What they found was that the mold, the penicillium mold, grew best in a flat surface. And they just didn’t have the technology to create huge flat surfaces, so they used what was at hand,” Belfer says. “It was very much an at-home kitchen process” using milk bottles and bedpans to grow the precious mold. By 1944, every soldier going ashore on D-Day had penicillin in his kit………

Penicillin was a major military priority, Belfer says, since it was considered a weapon of war. “The United States government took over the production,” she says, “and penicillin was made under the supervision of the same group that was supervising the Manhattan Project for the atomic bomb.”

Because the government controlled the production, it also took over the patents on penicillin, forbidding pharmaceutical companies from profiting from their work on the drug. Much of the intrigue in A Fierce Radiance comes from those companies’ behind-the-scenes race to develop what they call the “cousins” — relatives of penicillin that weren’t subject to government restriction. “This became a billion-dollar industry,” Belfer says. “It did not exist in 1940.”

On top of this tale of war and scientific intrigue, Belfer layers the story of glamorous Life magazine photographer Claire Shipley, who’s been assigned to cover the development of penicillin. “I read every single issue of Life magazine, from 1939 to 1945,” Belfer says, part of an effort to put herself in the shoes of people living through the war.

“I realized that Americans expected that their cities would be bombed. Life magazine gave people advice on what to do during bombing raids. I remember an article about what to do with your pets during bombing raids, because pets weren’t allowed in the shelter. That really brought the war home to me.”

via:Health

For quiet sometime now, I’ve been reading and writing articles on how to improve your body, tone your legs and get in shape for the summer, but so far I haven’t read any about how I can learn to love my body just the way it is. Some people might perceive this as a way to surrender to the fact that you don’t have the figure you’ve always hoped for , but in my opinion I think that to get what I want, I must accept what I have.

 I’ve admired the bodies of lots of girls around me, some of which that happen to be heavier than I am but to me they appear slimmer somehow.
When I was a size 10, I hoped for an 8 and got what I hoped for. When I was an 8, I went after a 6 and also got what I hoped for. Now I’m a 4 (or at least I say I am) and hoping to lose a couple extra pounds to reach my ideal goal. The problem is weight loss goals are like Facebook, once you’ve finally figured it out, it changes….. (more…)

Parents have some homework to do, according to new findings presented at the Pediatric American Society meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii, this past Sunday. The research shows that 31% of U.S. parents know very little about the pace of a typical infant’s development, whether it’s when a child should start talking or begin potty training.

 The data is based on an analysis of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study’s Birth Cohort, a nationally representative sample of more than 10,000 9-month-old babies and their primary caregivers. Parents were asked to answer 11 questions, where those who got four or fewer correct were considered to have low-level knowledge. While it may not sound like a big deal, experts say that this lack of knowledge can negatively affect parents’ interactions with their babies….. (more…)

There is no specific cure for migraine headaches. The goal is to prevent symptoms by avoiding or changing your triggers. A good way to identify triggers is to keep a headache diary. Write down: When your headaches occur ? How severe they are ? What you’ve eaten ? How much sleep you had ? Other symptoms and other possible factors. (women should note where they are in their menstrual cycle)

For example, the diary may reveal that your headaches tend to occur more often on days when you wake up earlier than usual. Changing your sleep schedule may result in fewer migraine attacks. When you do get migraine symptoms, try to treat them right away. The headache may be less severe. When migraine symptoms begin:….. (more…)

A migraine is a common type of headache that may occur with symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, or sensitivity to light. In many people, a throbbing pain is felt only on one side of the head.

Some people who get migraines have warning symptoms, called an aura, before the actual headache begins. An aura is a group of symptoms, usually vision disturbances, that serve as a warning sign that a bad headache is coming. Most people, however, do not have such warning signs.

Vision disturbances, or aura, are considered a “warning sign” that a migraine is coming. The aura occurs in both eyes and may involve any or all of the following….. (more…)