• Lifelines

  Breast cancer: New research has found that the hormone-heavy contraceptive pills used 25 years ago may have significantly increased breast cancer risk among women with a family history of the disease. In a study of more than 425 families, researchers in the Mayo Clinic in the US found that oral contraceptive use tripled breast cancer risk among women with sisters and mothers who had the disease. The risk was confined to pill-users prior to 1975. Since then, birth control pills have evolved to include lower doses of oestrogen and progestogen which are safer in terms of breast cancer (Reuters Health). p
  

• Many doctors are not reporting serious infectious diseases

  . . . the searchers of the town, suspecting that we both were in a house where the infectious pestilence did reign, sealed up the doors, and would not let us forth . . . p
  

• A case history

  Julie, a nine-year-old girl from Gorey, Co Wexford was brought by her mother to her GP with a red rash and a slight temperature. She had developed the rash the previous day and had complained of feeling tired and not wanting to eat. Julie's mother was concerned that her child might have measles. p
  

• Notifiable diseases

  Acute polio Acute encephalitis p
  

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