Health Highlights: Dec. 18 2009
Dec. 19 -- Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by the editors of HealthDay:
Louisiana Residents Happiest in U.S.
People in Louisiana are the happiest Americans, while those in New York are the least cheery, according to researchers who analyzed four years of data from 1.3 million people surveyed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Other sunny, outdoorsy states -- Hawaii, Florida, Tennessee and Arizona -- rounded out the top five happiest places, which also tend to score well on rankings of crime rates, climate, air quality and schools, the Associated Press reported.
Long commutes, congestion and high prices around New York City may help explain why New York ranked at the bottom of happiness, said study co-author Andrew J. Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick in England, the AP reported.
Rounding out the bottom five were Connecticut, Michigan, Indiana and New Jersey. The study was published Friday in the journal Science.
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African, Asian Orphanages Provide Good Care: Study
Orphanages in Africa and South Asia provide care that's at least as good as that given by families who take in orphaned or abandoned children, says a study that challenges the common belief that orphanages in these countries should be regarded as a last resort.
"We are seeing children thriving in institutions" in these countries, said study first author Dr. Kathryn Whetten, director of the Center for Health Policy at Duke University, The New York Times reported. "Institutions are not so bad. Community life can be very hard."
She and her colleagues looked at 83 institutions in Cambodia, Ethiopia, India, Kenya and Tanzania. They compared the health, behavior, physical growth, intellectual functioning and emotional state of 1,357 orphans ages 6 to 12 in the institutions and 1,480 who lived in homes in the community. The results showed that children in the orphanages generally fared as well as those in the community, or even better.
