The Net and nothing but the Net

TEENAGERS in Queensland are breaking out in deadly sun cancers normally found on much older outdoor workers such as farmers.

Alarmed skin cancer specialists are treating people in their late teens and early 20s displaying pre-cancer and cancerous spots usually associated with 60-year-olds.

The worrying trend is backed by research from the Cancer Council of Australia showing that almost a quarter of the countrys teens are getting burnt on any given weekend.

The Cancer Council said young people were heeding the message that it was dangerous to tan but were still getting sunburnt by accident.

THE scourge of alcohol abuse across Australia is far worse than previously thought, with one in five 16- and 17-year-olds now binge-drinking in any given week and nearly 500,000 children living at risk of exposure to an adult drinking at harmful levels.

The figures on cannabis use are equally disturbing, with one in seven secondary school students using the drug within the past 12 months.

The problem has been allowed to reach such plague proportions because most Australians consider drinking and drug use by young people to be a normal activity and “often seen as a rite of passage to adulthood”, Australian National Council on Drugs chairman John Herron warns.

A widow claimed yesterday that a drug designed to help smokers quit may have played a role in her husband’s suicide.Father-of-two Wayne Marshall, 36, was found hanged shortly after completing a 13-week course of Champix, which it is feared may have depressive side effects.

His death is the second in the UK to be linked to the newly-licensed drug.

Mr Marshall’s widow Emma said he was prescribed the drug by his GP last August to help him quit his 20-a-day habit, but quickly went downhill, cutting himself off from his family and friends.

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When Karen McGhee woke up in a hospital bed and saw her teenage daughter looking anxiously at her, she was completely flummoxed. “My arm was bandaged and the left side of my mouth and neck felt numb, as if I had been to the dentist – but I had no idea why I was in hospital,” says the 38-year-old.

“Then Jenna told me I’d tried to kill myself. She said her nine-year-old sister, Aynslie, had found me in the middle of the night hanging from the banisters with the pelmet from the curtains tied around my neck.”

Karen listened in horror as her daughter recalled how she had turned blue through lack of oxygen, and her heart stopped five times in the ambulance on the way to hospital.

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Breastfeeding makes baby smarter | NEWS.com.au

SCIENTISTS have identified a gene which leads children to have higher IQs if they are breastfed.

The study in New Zealand and the UK took a bite out of the nature versus nurture debate by showing that intellectual development is influenced by both environmental and genetic factors.

“There has been some criticism of earlier studies about breastfeeding and IQ that they didn’t control for socioeconomic status, or the mother’s IQ or other factors,” said study co-author Terrie Moffitt, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Duke University and King’s College in London.

“Our findings take an end-run around those arguments by showing the physiological mechanism that accounts for the difference.”

Researchers examined more than 3000 breast-fed infants in Britain and New Zealand and found that the child’s IQ was an average of 6.8 points higher if the child had a particular version of a gene called FADS2.

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