Once touted as a potential godsend for women suffering from menopause-related hot flashes, night sweats and vaginal dryness, the therapy was under investigation through the Women’s Health Initiative until July 2002, when the research was abruptly halted because an elevated number of cases of breast cancer was detected in the study participants.

On Friday came the horrible news that a three-day-old baby in Ohio died after being attacked by a family dog at her grandmother's house; the infant was reportedly in a baby swing with her mother and grandmother nearby when the attack took place.

Hepatitis C is one of those infections I hear about but never really pay much attention to; naively or not, it never has struck me as something I need to worry about, at least on a personal level.

Now, another troubling racial disparity in prostate cancer has surfaced. For reasons that are unclear, black men also fare more poorly during and after prostate cancer surgery than do white men.

Those babyhood staples may seem benign, but they’re implicated in injuries that send about 2,200 children under age 3 to emergency departments every year.

In one study, the CDC and the National Cancer Institute looked at self-reported sun-exposure data for 5,000 people age 18 to 29 collected through the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) for the years 2000, 2003, 2005, 2008 and 2010. Of those participating in the most recent survey, a whopping 50.1 percent of all adults reported having had at least one sunburn during the preceding 12 months. Among whites, the number was worse: 65.6 percent, or about two-thirds, had been sunburned at least once during that time.

Taking a page, so to speak, from J.K. Rowling’s book, a team of chemical engineers at Monash University in Australia has created a new means of testing and documenting people’s blood types that works much like Tom Riddle’s diary.

A new review of 42 studies of IUDs for emergency contraception found that IUDs inserted within five days of unprotected intercourse prevented pregnancy more than 999 times out of 1,000 — a failure rate below 0.1 percent.

Yauch, who helped make the Beastie Boys band a household name in the mid 1980s, revealed three years ago that he had been diagnosed with salivary parotid gland cancer. Richard Smith, director of the Head and Neck Cancer Program at Montefiore Einstein Center for Cancer Care in Bronx, N.Y., says salivary gland cancers come in “a great variety,” affecting different specific glands within the salivary gland system and carrying differing degrees of lethality.

Having contracted polio at age 6 and, at 18, endured a horrific streetcar accident in which her body was pierced by a metal handrail, Kahlo’s life was marked by neurological problems, chronic pain and other ills, among them infertility. Now a physician has linked Kahlo’s infertility to that accident.