To mark the World No Tobacco Day, the European Commission launches the second phase of its ?HELP for a life without tobacco? campaign. On 31 May, three new TV spots will be shown on over 100 TV channels across Europe for one month and repeated during the month of September. The TV spots, developed with young people, use humour to deliver three serious messages: don?t start smoking, how to quit smoking and dangers of second hand smoke. The Commission supports the view that pictures speak louder than words, especially in tobacco control.

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A crucial step towards large scale production of a vaccine against swine flu has been completed in the UK by the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control (NIBSC), part of the Health Protection Agency.

A strain of virus suitable for vaccine manufacture has now been produced and is being made available to the pharmaceutical industry and other flu laboratories.

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Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) are reminding Canadians that fresh fiddleheads should be properly cooked before being consumed.

Fiddleheads are the curled, edible shoots of the ostrich fern. They are collected in the wild and sold as a seasonal vegetable in stores and outdoor markets.

There have been cases of illnesses in Canada and the U.S. associated with eating fiddleheads. Scientists believe that the most likely cause for these illnesses is an unidentified natural toxin in fiddleheads.

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The Institute of Medicine has updated its recommendations for weight gain during pregnancy. It is healthier for a woman to be of normal weight prior to getting pregnant, but the trend across the United States has been toward higher BMI?s in the population.

The agency had given earlier guidelines that recommended a weight gain during pregnancy of 15 to 25 pounds for overweight women, 25 to 35 pounds for normal women, and 28 to 40 pounds for underweight women. The latest report adds the recommendation that obese women should gain only 11 to 20 pounds during pregnancy.

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Treating patients with stroke using clot-busting drugs provides better outcomes when the drugs are delivered sooner than later. However, the use of clot busting drugs more than three hours after a stroke has occurred has not been established as a therapeutic norm. Results of a new study shows that the use of clot busting drugs for stroke should be expanded beyond three hours, suggesting that guidelines for immediate treatment of stroke may need to be altered.

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