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THURSDAY, Jan. 6, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday announced that pre-departure tests for people traveling to the United Kingdom will no longer be required because restrictions meant to contain the international spread of the highly contagious Omicron variant are now meaningless. The change should come as welcome news to people who had refrained from traveling overseas for fear they would get stuck in a foreign country.Johnson also announced measures to loosen testing rules for its own citizens.Starting Jan. 11, British residents who are asymptomatic but test positive for COVID-19 using a rapid test will not need to confirm that with a follow-up PCR test, the U.K. Health Security Agency said. This will likely reduce self-isolation time.“While...

THURSDAY, Jan. 6, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Far fewer kids might develop asthma if there were less traffic pollution, suggests a new study that researched the issue worldwide."Our study found that nitrogen dioxide puts children at risk of developing asthma and the problem is especially acute in urban areas," said study author Susan Anenberg, a professor of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. "The findings suggest that clean air must be a critical part of strategies aimed at keeping children healthy," she said in a university news release.Two million new worldwide cases of childhood asthma a year may be caused by nitrogen dioxide, or NO2, according to the study.The researchers studied ground concentrations of NO2, a pollutant emitted...

THURSDAY, Jan. 6, 2022 (HealthDay News) – Cities worldwide are shrouded with air pollution – and it’s killing people. A new modeling study found that 86% of people living in cities throughout the world – a total of 2.5 billion people – are exposed to fine particulate matter at levels that exceed the World Health Organization’s 2005 guidelines. In 2019, this urban air pollution led to 1.8 million excess deaths, according to the study published Jan. 5 in The Lancet Planetary Health journal. PM2.5, a fine particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less, is the leading environmental risk factor for disease. Inhaling this increases the risk of premature death from cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, lung cancer and lower respiratory infection, researchers...

THURSDAY, Jan. 6, 2022 (HealthDay News) – Dogs don't speak a human language, but they do know when you switch from one tongue to another, an intriguing new study finds.“We know that people, even preverbal human infants, notice the difference," said study co-author Laura Cuaya of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. But, she wondered after taking her dog Kun-Kun from Mexico to Hungary for her postdoctoral studies, do dogs? Do they even bother? After all, she said, folks don't draw their dog's attention to how a specific language sounds. Would Kun-Kun recognize that people in Budapest spoke Hungarian, not Spanish?She and her colleagues decided to use brain imaging to check it out. And the images that resulted were ground-breaking. They revealed that dogs' brains show...