An Indonesian mother brought her 2-year-old boy to the nation’s capital seeking help for his addiction — to cigarettes, officials said. A video of the toddler inhaling deeply on a cigarette and blowing smoke rings showed up on the Internet last week, turning him into a local celebrity, CNN reported Sunday. His mother Diana, who like many Indonesians goes by just one name, met at the Jakarta airport with Seto Mulyadi, chairman of Indo ... Jump to full article >>

People who are HIV-positive can lower their risk for transmitting the virus to their partners by 90 percent by taking antiretroviral drugs, new research has found. Antiretroviral drug therapy helps reduce HIV levels in the infected person’s blood, which in turn makes the person less infectious to others. The drugs are commonly taken in the United States by people with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. In the new research, published online May ... Jump to full article >>

Rescuers probed the rubble for sounds or movement Friday in a rush to find anyone buried alive more than 48 hours after an earthquake hit western China, killing at least 791 people. Many survivors shivered through a second night outdoors as they waited for tents to arrive in the remote, mountainous Tibetan area. People with broken arms or legs cried in pain as medical teams could offer little more than injections. A doctor at the Qinghai provinc ... Jump to full article >>

Gov. Deval Patrick recently announced more than $2.3 million in federal recovery funds to help smokers quit and prevent youth from becoming addicted to tobacco. Massachusetts received the full amount requested for all three tobacco cessation and prevention grants and is one of only a few states in the nation share that distinction. The two-year award, a combination of three smoking cessation and prevention grants from the U.S. Centers for Disea ... Jump to full article >>

Only 5% to 10% of smokers who try to quit succeed. For the rest, the quick onset of withdrawal symptoms—craving, irritability, hunger, and headache—is too much; the brain begins to raise hell and demand a fresh dose of nicotine, which binds to certain receptors and causes the pleasurable release of dopamine. In the face of 40 years of public-health drumbeating, smoking bans, and social pressure, that’s an amazing failure rate. The prof ... Jump to full article >>

Two recent reports on the health impacts of public smoking bans reinforce the sound policy decision local elected officials made when they limited indoor smoking here in Beaufort County. Two separate analyses released last week found that the rate of heart attacks fell within a year after public smoking bans were put in place. In one analysis, the average rate of heart attacks fell 17 percent after one year. After three years, the rate fell abou ... Jump to full article >>

Available evidence supports the use of online or other computer-based smoking cessation programs for helping adults quit smoking, according to a meta-analysis of previously published studies appearing in the May 25 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. “Smoking is the single greatest cause of preventable disease and premature death,” the authors write as background information in the article. Curr ... Jump to full article >>