About one-third of amphibians are \ncurrently threatened\nWASHINGTON -- Eye of newt and toe of frog may one day be gone from witches grog.\nNot just frogs and newts but amphibians in general are rapidly becoming threatened worldwide, a new study shows.\nAnd while few would miss the evil broth concocted by the witches in Shakespeare's "Macbeth," the rapid decline of animals like toads and salamanders is raising concerns as it worsens, a team of researchers reported Thursday.\n"What we're seeing here is completely unprecedented declines and extinctions," said Simon N. Stuart of the World Conservation Union, lead researcher on the study.\nThese declines are "outside our normal experience," Stuart said in a telephone interview.\nAmphibians have porous skins and narrow environmental requirements, and their decline may be an indication that something sinister is under way in the environment, Simon said.\n"Where amphibians proceed, others may follow, possibly us also," he said.\nThe researchers reported that 1,856 species, 32.5 percent of the known species of amphibians, are "globally threatened," meaning they fall into the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's categories of vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered. By comparison, 12 percent of bird species and 23 percent of mammal species are threatened.\nThe new paper concludes that while exploitation and loss of habitat are factors in some losses, other declines remain enigmatic, occurring for unknown reasons.\nOver-exploited species are concentrated in East and Southeast Asia where frogs are harvested for food, the report says. Habitat loss occurs more widely, but especially in Southeast Asia, West Africa and the Caribbean, it adds.
Study finds low health risks from birth control pills\nPHILADELPHIA -- Women on the birth control pill had surprisingly lower risks of heart disease and stroke and no increased risk of breast cancer, according to the largest women's health study ever done.\nThe findings by the Women's Health Initiative, the biggest study on oral contraceptives, are contrary to what many previous studies have found. Results from nearly 162,000 participants were presented Wednesday at an American Society for Reproductive Medicine conference.\nThe same federal study that led millions of women to abandon use of hormones after menopause now provides reassurance that the pill is safe. Doctors say the type of hormones and the stage of life when they're used may be what makes them helpful at one point and harmful at another.\nOverall, "there's an 8 percent risk reduction of ever having cardiovascular disease" among women who had ever taken birth control pills, said the lead researcher, Dr. Rahi Victory of Wayne State. "If you use oral contraceptives early on, you're probably going to be protected later in life."\nWomen on the pill also had a 7 percent lower risk of developing any form of cancer -- a small benefit that increased with length of use, Victory said. For example, women who took birth control pills for four years or more had 42 percent lower risk of ovarian cancer and 30 percent lower chances of developing uterine cancer.\nThe $625 million Women's Health Initiative study was done at 40 locations around the country and funded by the National Institutes of Health. Wyeth provided the hormone pills for the menopause portion of the study, but no oral contraceptive makers financed any part of that research.
Ovarian and breast cancer are focus of new IU study\nResearchers at IU, Ohio State University and the University of Missouri have combined their resources to begin a five-year, $8 million project to study the damage caused by breast and ovarian cancers. The project is a multidisciplinary effort, bringing together researchers at the IU School of Medicine and the IU Cancer Center in Indianapolis with IU biostatisticians and biomedical informaticians.\nScientists will study the genetic and molecular consequences of DNA modifications in order to ultimately develop better predictive models for ovarian and breast cancer.\nThe project is funded by the National Cancer Institute.
