Health and Fitness

For about 20 minutes in the early 90′s, I worked at a commercial gym where we had meetings that were supposed to get us fired up about personal training. Not about conducting inspiring and effective sessions, but about selling the sessions as if our lives depended on it. Get people to sign up, doesn’t matter how.

There’s an oft-quoted scene in the movie of Glengarry Glen Ross in which the Alec Baldwin character–an unabashedly venal, ball-busting, heartless jerk–exhorts his staff of low-rent real estate scammers to “Practice the A-B-C’s of sales: Always Be Closing.”

When the sales-team leader guy at my gym quoted that scene sans irony, I realized it was time for me to hit the road.

One of the techniques he encouraged us to use was the old either-or scam.

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A saliva test used to diagnose the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), is comparable in accuracy to the traditional blood test, according to a new study led by the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) and McGill University. The meta-analysis, which compared studies worldwide, showed that the saliva HIV test, OraQuick HIV1/2, had the same accuracy as the blood test for high-risk populations. The test sensitivity was slightly reduced for low risk populations. The study, published in this week’s issue of The Lancet Infectious Diseases, has major implications for countries that wish to adopt self-testing strategies for HIV.

“Testing is the cornerstone of prevention, treatment and care strategies,” says the study’s lead author, Dr.

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Hi. The roof of my mouth on the left side is burning very badly. I am also experiencing sinus pain/pressure, and a fever. What is causing the burning and is there anything I can do to make it stop?

The most likely cause of a localized pain on the roof of the mouth is a trauma injury such as a scrape or a burn. The most common source of a burn is reheating food with a microwave and not waiting until it has cooled a little bit. Some foods heat more quickly than others. the most common example is reheating pizza. The cheese reheats much more quickly than the rest of the pizza.

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HEAT WAVE: Extreme weather, like the deadly heat wave in Europe in 2003, will create some of the public health impacts expected from climate change.

DURBAN, South Africa—Former entomologist Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum of the World Health Organization worries about nosebleeds more than the average person. Thats because hes one of the estimated 12 million people worldwide afflicted with leishmaniasis—a potentially fatal parasitic disease characterized most often by lesions on the skin and/or mucus membranes—caused by the bite of a sandfly.

As the team leader for climate change and health at WHO and an environmental epidemiologist, Campbell-Lendrum is also in a position to worry more about how global warming is going to affect such so-called vector-borne diseases. “Is c

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