More than half of Indian children under the age of five do not get the health care they need, according to a report by Save the Children.

It ranks India alongside Ghana when it comes to providing basic health care to its children under five years of age.

The annual report looks at whether developing countries are delivering health care effectively to children.

It found the Philippines was performing best with almost 69% of children able to get access to health care.

Ethiopia ranks last - only 16% of children under five get health care when they need it.

'Basic measures'

The report, called State of the World's Mothers, says girls die at much higher rates in India than most countries.

Although India has cut child its mortality rate by 34% since 1990, Indian girls are 61% more likely than boys to die between the ages of one and five.

Inequity of health care among male and female children is responsible for this situation, the report says.

The report says experts predict that over 60% of the nearly 10 million children who die every year could be saved by delivering basic health services through a health facility or community health worker.

"A child's chance of reaching its fifth birthday should not depend on the country or community where it is born," said Jasmine Whitbread, Save the Children's chief executive.

"We need to do a better job of reaching the poorest children with basic health measures like vaccines, antibiotics and skilled care at childbirth,"

Women who stop smoking can enjoy major health benefits within five years, but it can take decades to correct respiratory damage and shed the added risk of lung cancer, researchers reported on Tuesday.

Those who stopped had a 13 percent reduction in the risk of death from all causes, including heart and vascular problems, within the first five years, the study found. After 20 years, the risk of death from any cause was the same for those who quit as for those who had never smoked.

For deaths due specifically to respiratory diseases, there was an 18 percent reduction within 5 to 10 years of quitting, reaching the level found in nonsmokers after 20 years.

But while there was a 21 percent reduction in the risk of lung cancer death within five years, it took 30 years for that excess risk to disappear.

The findings are the latest to emerge from a study of more than 121,000 American women in the nursing profession whose health histories were recorded in 1976 and followed during the ensuing years. While the study involved only women, other research has found benefits for men who stop smoking.

“Our findings indicate that 64 percent of deaths in current smokers and 28 percent of deaths in past smokers are attributable to smoking,” Stacey A. Kenfield of the Harvard School of Public Health and colleagues wrote in the report, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

“Quitting reduces the excess mortality rates for all major causes of death examined,” they added.

The report also found that women who started smoking later in life had a lower risk of many lung and heart diseases. The researchers said this was troubling, given recent studies showing that people are taking up cigarettes at early ages. 

There have been marked increases in alcohol consumption and alcohol dependence among U.S. women, particularly among white and Hispanic women born in the U.S. after World War II, new research shows.

"This is particularly disturbing because women with alcohol problems face more severe health-related consequences and possibly more years of life lost than their male counterparts," researchers write in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

Dr. Richard A. Grucza, of Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri, and colleagues analyzed two national surveys about alcohol use that were conducted 10 years apart in age-matched adults.

Compared with women born between 1944 and 1953, women born between 1954 and 1963 were much more apt to drink alcohol and those who drank had a higher risk of alcohol dependence, the researchers report in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

"We found that for women born after World War II, there are lower levels of abstaining from alcohol and higher levels of alcohol dependence, even when looking only at women who drank," Grucza said in a written statement.

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Spring is here, legs have been reacquainted with the razor and women are buying lots of shimmery lip gloss on impulse. But have you heard the buzz that cheap, fun, non-SPF gloss can possibly increase your skin cancer risk?

Here's the theory: Some dermatologists have said that the translucent sheen helps ultraviolet rays penetrate the already fragile skin of the lips -- thereby increasing your risk. These dermatologists may be on to something, according to some of the top experts in the field.

Dr. Jessica Fewkes, a face and neck skin cancer specialist at Harvard, draws a cautious analogy between wearing non-SPF (sun protection factor) lip gloss in the sun and using baby oil to promote tanning. "You might be able to infer that they both enhance UV exposure," she says.

Dr. Kevin Cooper, chairman of the dermatology department at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, explains that any increased penetration of ultraviolet rays would be due to "enhanced optical passage" of the dangerous rays. But the increase, he qualifies, would be small.  

Inflation in the 15 countries sharing the euro eased in April off a March record but confidence in the economy sank anyway to a the lowest point in two-and-a-half years, EU data showed Wednesday.

Annual inflation in the eurozone cooled to 3.3 percent from 3.6 percent in March when consumer prices rose at the fastest rate on record in the bloc, according to a first estimate from the European Union's Eurostat data agency.

Private sector economists had expected inflation to ease in April to 3.4 percent after hitting the March peak, driven by soaring oil and food prices.

Despite the lower rate, inflation remained far above the European Central Bank's comfort level, which it defines as close to but just below 2.0 percent on an annual basis.

Unlike some other major central banks like the US Federal Reserve, the Frankfurt-based ECB has so far opted not to cut interest rates in the face of weakening growth, concentrating instead on keeping a lid on inflation.

Despite the lower inflation, confidence in the European economy fell more sharply than expected in April, slumping to the lowest point in two-and-a-half years, according to an EU survey.

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A newly published study links the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, or HPV, to lung cancer, adding lungs to the list of organs scientists say are susceptible to cancer as a result of contracting the most common sexually transmitted infection in the United States.

 Recent studies have found connections between HPV and cancers of the mouth and throat, but the University of Louisville study released late last week is the first to associate the infection with lung cancer.

HPV has long been known to result in cancers of the sex organs, particularly the cervix, and a vaccine targeting young women and girls was introduced in the United States in 2006.

Conservative parents and activists have condemned the vaccine, marketed under the name Gardasil, since it was approved by the Food and Drug Administration last year, claiming it would like easily available condoms encourage young people to engage in promiscuous sex.

Those same parents and groups say the news showing a link between the virus and lung cancer, which means it could affect not only their daughters but also their sons, does not change their opposition to the drug.

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Indonesia has launched a massive bird flu drill to prepare for the possibility of a human-to-human outbreak of the deadly virus.

The drill began Friday and involved a simulated outbreak of a pandemic of the disease. The exercise, which ends Sunday, began with a man contracting the disease on the resort island of Bali and will culminate with officials trying to prevent infected travelers from leaving the country and taking the virus overseas.

Most bird flu cases involve contact with infected poultry, but experts fear the virus could eventually mutate and be spread from human contact.

Bird flu has hit Indonesia harder than any other country in the world, and its 107 deaths from the disease account for nearly half of the global total.

The World Health Organization says 240 people around the world have died from bird flu since 2003.

While life expectancy in the United States has risen steadily since the 1960s, a new study [published Tuesday] finds that in certain geographic areas of the country, life expectancy has stagnated, and even declined, especially among women.

From 1960 to 2000, life expectancy in the United States rose by seven years for men and six years for women. However, beginning in the 1980s, large geographic disparities began to appear.

The study analyzed health data from every county in the United States. According to lead author Majid Ezzati, Associate Professor of International health at Harvard School of Public Health  the "worst off" were among lower income Americans concentrated in the southern states.

He says in these communities race did not seem to affect life expectancy. "It is something associated with the way policies are implemented, with the way health systems are providing health services to people in different parts of the country or not providing services to people."

Ezzati points to chronic disease related to increases in smoking, high blood pressure and obesity as factors driving the trend. He says while much is known about how to manage these conditions, care is not reaching the people who need it the most. Women have experienced the most serious declines.

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On Monday, Chinese and U.S. officials butted heads over whether a contaminated blood thinner caused severe allergic reactions linked to dozens of deaths. On Tuesday, lawmakers will investigate whether U.S. inspectors would have even spotted such contaminants at the source.

The House Energy and Commerce subcommittee is examining how thoroughly the Food and Drug Administration inspects overseas manufacturing plants where nearly 40 percent of the medicines sold in the U.S. are made.

The hearing comes less than a month after FDA revealed that more than 60 people have died of side effects seen with a contaminated batch of the blood thinner heparin that was manufactured in China. Previous estimates pegged the number of deaths at about 20.

The FDA can't say for sure what caused the reactions, but the chief suspect is a contaminant that the agency discovered in supplies of raw heparin coming from China.

However, on Monday Chinese officials raised the possibility that the problems started in the U.S., and said they plan to visit a Baxter International plant in New Jersey to get a better picture of how the finished product is developed. Raw heparin is derived from pig intestines, often processed by small, unregistered workshops in China. The raw ingredient for Baxter's recalled heparin came from Wisconsin-based Scientific Protein Laboratories, which in turn owns a Chinese factory Changzhou SPL and buys additional raw heparin from other Chinese suppliers.

FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach is expected to highlight the agency's plans to open a new office in China next month during Tuesday's hearing, which begins at 10 a.m. EDT.

Lawmakers will also hear from FDA's science advisers, who recently said the agency needs at least $375 million in new funding next year to repair its understaffed, outdated inspection program. 

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this flu season was the worst in four years. They blamed the rough flu season on the fact that the vaccines were largely ineffective.

The CDC stated that one of the big reasons for the rough flu season was the fact that the vaccine did not target all of the strains of influenza.

They found that the vaccine was only 44% effective, which makes it the worst vaccine in a decade.

The peak of the flu season was in the middle of February, but cases are still being reported now, well into April.

The CDC also warned in their report of bacterial staph infections which can occur with the flu, especially in children.

The flu vaccine is made every year from three viruses which are believed to be that year’s strains of the flu.

During normal years, the flu vaccine is effective at a rate of around 80%. This year though, it was only at 44%, far too low.

This comes as scientists have discovered the origins of the new strains of the flu.

They have managed to determine that the new strains of the flu begin in East and Southeast Asia, before making their way to Europe and North America, and they dying out in South America.