With people eager to get in line for the H1N1 or Swine Flu vaccine, it’s important to remember about the rest of the immunizations you can protect yourself and your children from with routine visits and inoculations. I should know, I just recently got whooping cough and it wasn’t as serious as it would have been if I was a young child, but nonetheless my childhood vaccination wore off and I was susceptible to nasty viruses yet again. August is National Immunization Awareness Month (NIAM) and in my opinion, a great way to end the summer and start a new school year…protected.

Each year the goal of NIAM is to provide sufficient awareness to communities across the United States so they are able to schedule routine shots they may have been overlooking. In protecting yourself, you are also protecting the community from spreading potentially dangerous strains of viruses. Although babies, young children, and the elderly are often the most at-risk and the biggest set of age groups receiving shots, NIAM makes sure every adult is aware of the importance of immunization.

With colleges starting up again soon, dorms are notorious for spreading disease because of cramped living quarters, un-sanitized common rooms, and communal showers. Before I started college, my school encouraged the meningococcal shot as the fear of meningitis in residence halls was spreading like wildfire.

Imagine enjoying a regular day’s routine full of dog walking, carpooling, and playing with your kids until you are suddenly crippled with pain. Now imagine not knowing when this can happen and that it can affect major joints required for walking and doing normal activities. This is a day in the life of someone who suffers from a disease called gout. This is a disease that concentrates arthritic attacks in specific parts of the body and it is like living with the unknown, and require staing away from certain trigger foods and beverages, and adopting a lifestyle change.

Gout is primarily a man’s disease with 90 percent of the diagnoses being men over the age of thirty. To date, there are over 2 million sufferers throughout the United States. Gout, as a form of acute arthritis, comes about suddenly caused by an increase of uric acid in the blood. Gout can be spurred on by an excess of alcohol, causing the spike in uric acid  prescription drugs or post-surgery complications can also invite a case of gout. Some gout sufferers go asymptomatic for years between attacks, others have a harder time getting rid of it and multiple attacks over time can create chronic pain or disfigurement.

Despite aggressive public efforts to curb the rise in obesity, Americans in most states are becoming more obese with each passing year, according to the most recent in a series of annual reports from the Trust for America’s Health   and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation  .

This discouraging trend emphasizes the failure of policies aimed at healthful nutrition and physical activity, and suggests the country is unlikely to achieve the health goals set forth by Healthy People 2010 an effort aimed at reducing the prevalence of overweight and obesity to less than 15 percent among adults and to less than 5 percent among children by the year 2010.

As in years past, states in the South were found to have particularly high obesity levels, with the region accounting for eight of the top 10 most obese states. Mississippi had the highest adult obesity rate at 32.5 percent, making this the fifth year in a row that the state achieved the dubious honor. Four states, including Mississippi, now have rates above 30 percent

West Virginia at 31.2 percent, Alabama at 31.1 percent, and Tennessee at 30.2 percent. Colorado continued to have the lowest rate, with only 18.9 percent of the adult population classified as obese, and remains the only state in which the adult obesity rate is less than 20 percent.

There has been a breakthrough in terms of drawing attention to the obesity epidemic, now we need a breakthrough in terms of policies and results.

An estimated 30,000 women undergo in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments each year. The possibility of a continuing pregnancy being achieved by IVF has improved dramatically from a nearly 0 percent chance to 1 chance in 4 to 6 at IVF centers worldwide.  success rates continue to vary in predicting the probability of an IVF pregnancy. IVF treatments yield unpredictable results due to their success being dependent upon such variables as the age and reproductive health of both the hopeful mother and father.

IVF is a process by which egg cells are fertilized by sperm outside the womb in a controlled environment. A fertilized egg is then transferred to the woman’s uterus in hopes of establishing a successful pregnancy. IVF is an infertility treatment that couples turn to when other methods of assisted reproductive technology have failed. Now, new research may have identified genetic predictors for the potential outcome for IVF patients.

Researchers from the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin, Ireland presented their findings at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology . They said that the newly discovered genetic markers showed activity patterns in over 200 genes and that those in women whose IVF treatment had succeeded were different from those in women for which the treatment had failed.