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A new study offers compelling genetic evidence that head and body lice are the same species. The finding is of special interest because body lice can transmit deadly bacterial diseases, while head lice do not. The study appears in the journal Insect Molecular Biology. Scientists have long debated whether human head and body lice are the same or different species. The head louse (Pediculus humanus capitis) is a persistent nuisance, clinging to and laying its eggs in the hair, digging its mouthparts into the scalp and feeding on blood several times a day. The body louse (Pediculus humanus humanus) tends...

Can the Playboy Mansion make you ill? Hugh Hefner's iconic bachelor pad is under investigation after more than 80 guests at a conference and party there became sick with a suspected strain of Legionnaires' disease. Scores of attendees at the Domainfest conference in Santa Monica, held Feb. 1 to 3, came down with symptoms including fever, respiratory infections and violent headaches. Four Swedish guests were diagnosed with Legionellosis or pontiac fever -- a milder form of Legionnaires' caused by bacteria that thrives in warm air-conditioning systems.

At first May thought that her husband had heat rash. “We were staying at a smart hotel in Cape Cod. Then I developed these hive-like welts on my back and legs.” May (not her real name; she is terrified of giving me that) is middle class, in her late fifties and lives on the Upper West Side, New York, in a well-maintained four-room apartment. When she and her husband returned to the city, one doctor prescribed antihistamines, surmising the couple had reacted to shellfish. She called a dermatologist. “He took one look and said, ‘You both have bedbug bites’. My...

Rush and Malloy’s Gossip column in the New York Daily News reports today that Bill Clinton’s offices are infested with bed bugs, and employees have been evacuated during treatment: "Bedbugs have sent Bill Clinton and his staff fleeing the former President’s offices, a source tells us. No word on whether WJC actually has a bed in his Harlem suite, but the infestation is said to have been so bad that exterminators told Clintonistas to take a few days off." That’s all we know so far. I do not wish bed bugs on anyone, but one positive outcome is that high...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Wash your hands, folks, especially you ladies. A new study found that women have a greater variety of bacteria on their hands than men do. And everybody has more types of bacteria than the researchers expected to find. "One thing that really is astonishing is the variability between individuals, and also between hands on the same individual," said University of Colorado biochemistry assistant professor Rob Knight, a co-author of the paper. "The sheer number of bacteria species detected on the hands of the study participants was a big surprise, and so was the greater diversity of bacteria...

Barack Obama returned to Chicago Sunday and made an appearance before the UNITY minority journalists' convention (including the whole soup of black, Latino, Asian, and Native American journalist solidarity groups.) The Chicago Tribune's Swamp blog found some journalists were restrained, and some were not: At UNITY, the applause was restrained, after organizers reminded conference participants that the appearance was being nationally broadcast and they should make every effort to maintain "professional decorum." Still, Obama received a standing ovation from many in the audience at the start and end of his appearance. There was also a rush toward the stage after...

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — Got crabs? If so, please pass on to one desperate museum. A dutch museum said Friday it is having trouble getting its hands on a parasite that just about everybody else is anxious to avoid: crabs. The Rotterdam Natural History Museum has appealed for somebody — anybody — to give it a single crab louse for its collection, amid fears they may be dying out. The donor's anonymity, said curator Kees Moeliker, is guaranteed.

Hotel-room surfaces can harbor viruses Nathan Seppa From San Francisco, at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy Rhinovirus, which is responsible for roughly half of all common colds, survives on surfaces in hotel rooms for hours and can be transferred from there to people, a study shows. J. Owen Hendley, a pediatrician at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville, and his colleagues obtained mucus samples from 15 people who had active rhinovirus infections. The scientists then invited each participant to spend a night in a hotel room. Each person was instructed to remain awake in...

Katherine Harris Has Cooties OoohNooo! COOTIES? Yep. Cooties. OohNoooo... Sounds like a vey series medical matter. Sounds like A CASE FOR HILLARY....and Healthy People 2010, courtesy of HillaryCare. OooohNoooo..... OooohYesssss. But she's not a Doctor! Yes she is! She's a Witch Doctor! And she's the smartest woman in the world! (cackle) I'll get you, my pretty! Okay, tell me where it hurts. It doesn't hurt at all. I don't even HAVE cooties! Only Democrat girls and RINO girls get cooties. Sorry, I can't release you until I consider you cured. Fill out all these quadruplicate HillaryCare Forms. Four hours...

She can't win. No one likes her. Her car is ugly and her horse can't talk. And now, the most damning evidence of all is being whispered and murmured from sea to shining sea: Katherine Harris has cooties. News-99 has obtained exclusive footage of a private meeting between Ms. Harris and her doctors in which the 49-year-old Harris is told the horrifying results of a recent series of blood tests. "You have cooties," the video shows the doctors saying.

ATLANTA — After waking up one night in sheets teeming with tiny bugs, Josh Benton couldn't sleep for months and kept a flashlight and can of Raid with him in bed. "We were afraid to even tell people about it at first," Benton said of the bedbugs in his home. "It feels like maybe some way you're living is encouraging this, that you're living in a bad neighborhood or have a dirty apartment." Absent from the U.S. for so long that some thought they were a myth, bedbugs are back. Entomologists and pest control professionals are reporting a dramatic increase...

They're the scourge of hobo encampments and hot-sheet motels. To impressionable children everywhere, they're a snippet of nursery rhyme, an abstract foe lurking beneath the covers that emerges when mommy shuts the door at night. But bedbugs on Park Avenue? Ask the horrified matron who recently found her duplex teeming with the blood-sucking beasts. Or the tenants of a co-op on Riverside Drive who spent $200,000 earlier this month to purge their building of the pesky little thugs. The Helmsley Park Lane was sued two years ago by a welt-covered guest who blamed the hotel for harboring the critters. The...

The quaint bedtime saying "sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite" has become a grim mission statement for even the finest hotels in the United States amid a resurgence of the tiny bloodsucking pests. Rising complaints about these unwelcome guests that bite in the night are leading to red faces at reception desks and an increase in the number of help calls, according to pest control firms and entomologists. Hotels battling infestations typically request discreet and immediate service, and for good reason. Even though they don't pose a health threat, bed bugs, which live off human blood, can take...

John Schulz, Marriott International's director of quality control, had something to discuss last November at one of the hotel industry's biggest conventions -- something that really makes people squirm. At the International Hotel/Motel and Restaurant trade show in New York, Mr. Schulz spoke at a symposium called "Stop the Spread of Bedbugs." The pamphlet advertising the event, printed by pest-control company Ecolab, promised a discussion of "the reasons behind the resurgence of these unwelcome pests." Mr. Schulz declined to comment on his presentation, and Marriott said it doesn't have a bedbug problem. But people in the hotel industry are waking...

Earth's defences may need to be boosted against risk of potentially deadly microbes returning on spaceprobes.Earth must take precautions to avoid contamination from lifeforms that must now be proved to exist on Mars, leading scientists gave warning yesterday.

<p>NEW YORK - (KRT) - This is going to make your skin crawl.</p> <p>Bedbugs - those tenacious, bloodsucking little critters that once were so successfully eradicated from the United States that parents teased small children about them at bedtime - are making a comeback. A big, itchy, coast-to-coast comeback.</p> <p>In New York, in one Queens apartment building, all residents had to throw out their mattresses and have their entire wardrobes doused in scalding water.</p> <p>In Madison, Wis., dozens of homes were found to be swarming with the bugs.</p>

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. STATESBORO, Ga. - Like a tiny gilded menagerie, 3,000 gold-covered ticks stand upright in active positions on dime-sized platforms. Nearby is one of the most complete repositories of written knowledge on the tick, dating back to Homer, 800 B.C. Hundreds of thousands more of the bloodsucking creatures are tucked away in government-issue metal filing cabinets. The Smithsonian's little-known U.S. National Tick Collection is stored in a former home-economics demonstration house at Georgia Southern University. The collection's curators, the world's foremost authorities of tick identification, are in charge of more than 1...