Health Report

THE GOOD NEWS

-- Nursing a baby can significantly lower chances of getting breast cancer later in life, a new study shows. Mothers who begin breast feeding in their teens and continue for at least six months reduce the risk of cancer before menopause almost by half.

-- Spinal-tissue injuries frequently lead to paralysis, but researchers in Japan say they have cut the spinal cords of newborn rats and reattached the severed ends without inflicting permanent damage. After a few months, these rats were running and climbing nearly as well as uninjured ones.

-- Rats navigating a maze make only half as many errors when given a new "smart" drug called BDP, which affects receptors in the brain. If proved safe, the drug could be used to treat Alzheimer's patients.

THE BAD NEWS

-- Thirty years after the Surgeon General's first warning about the hazards of smoking, cigarettes and other tobacco products still kill more than 420,000 Americans each year.

-- Health officials report that the deadly hantavirus that last year killed 32 people in the Southwest has made its first appearance east of the Mississippi, in a Florida drug-treatment center.

-- The number of foster children in the U.S. has doubled, to 442,000 in the past 10 years. As a group, they receive the worst health care of any American children.

-- Elderly Americans who have many sex partners or are otherwise at risk to contract aids are one-sixth as likely to use condoms as a comparable group in their 20s.

Sources -- GOOD: New England Journal of Medicine; Nature; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

BAD: Coalition on Smoking or Health; Florida Department of Health; Archives of Internal Medicine; American Medical News