HEALTH AND WELLNESS

A newborn baby shrieks in a hospital in Madrid, Spain. A nurse frantically tries to pacify him but to no avail. The baby is suffering the agony of heroin withdrawal. Worse still, he is HIV positive. His mother was hooked on heroin. A Los Angeles mother inadvertently drives her car onto a street controlled by a gang of drug dealer. She is greeted by a barrage of bullets, which kill her infant daughter. Thousands of kilometers away, in Afghanistan, a peasant cultivates a field of poppies. It has been a good year; production is up 25 percent. Opium poppies pay well, and the peasant’s family is struggling to survive. But these pretty poppies will be converted into heroin, and heroin destroys lives. A shy teenage girl in Sydney, Australia, goes to a discotheque every Saturday night. She used to find it hard to mix with the crowd, but recently a pill called ECSTASY has given her new confidence. The pills she takes were smuggled into Australia from the Netherlands, although local laborator

        CHILD HEALTH: DOG, EPILEPSY AND HEART DISEASE . Some dogs that have been household pets for more than a year can foresee epileptic attacks in the children with whom they live. Researchers reached this conclusion after carrying out a study of 45 families. Several parents with epileptic children noticed that prior to an attack; their dog began to behave in a “peculiar way.” It would force the young one to sit down or would lean against the child’s side so that if he fell, the dog would break his fall.                                 Childhood experiences of physical or psychological hardship increase the child’s risk of suffering from heart disease later on in life. This conclusion was reached by researchers in Atlanta, Georgia, and San Diego, California, U.S.A., who examined the medical records of 17,337 adults. Science News explains that the participants were assessed according to “which of them, as children, had witnessed domestic violence, experienced mental or p