The American Cancer Society - one of the nation’s best known and influential health advocacy groups - is 100 years old this week. (AP)

More and more studies show that being overweight does not always shorten life — but some public-health researchers would rather not talk about them. (Nature)

If online oversharing is a public health problem, then the state’s decision to harness it for its own purposes means that huge, powerful forces within government will come to depend on it. (The Guardian)

IF A new and deadly strain of influenza were to arise, putting together a vaccine against it in the least possible time would be a priority. To test how quickly that could be done a group of researchers have just had a race with themselves. (The Economist)

The study, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a think tank, found that retirement results in a “drastic decline in health” in the medium and long term. (BBC)

The World Health Organization’s annual statistics show progress is being made around the world in cutting child mortality - but it will miss its target of a two-thirds reduction by 2015. (BBC)

The clinical study demonstrates for the first time that the India-developed rotavirus vaccine ROTAVAC- is efficacious in preventing severe rotavirus diarrhoea in low-resource settings in India. ROTAVAC- significantly reduced severe rotavirus diarrhoea by more than half-56 percent during the first year of life, with protection continuing into the second year of life. Moreover, the vaccine also showed impact against severe diarrhoea of any cause. (News-Medical)

Expanding Medicaid to a randomly selected low-income population in one state improved people’s mental health and financial situations but had less of an impact on physical health outcomes, a study revealed. (American Medical News)

Girls who received two doses of human papillomavirus vaccine had immune responses not worse than those who had three doses, Canadian researchers say. (UPI)

The 14 countries with the highest rates of first-day deaths are all in Africa. The top five are Somalia, Congo, Mali, Sierra Leone and Central African Republic. Eighteen out of 1,000 babies in Somalia die the day they are born. (Associated Press)

Most parents who opt-out of vaccinations are being guided by “irrational fears” that are a luxury of living in the developed world, a leading world health expert says. (BBC)

Nanomaterials added to soil via fertilizers and treated sewage waste used to fertilize fields could threaten soil health necessary to keep land productive, says a new report released today by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP). Peer-reviewed scientific research also indicates possible negative impacts of nano-fertilizers on public health and the food supply. (Nanowerk)

Having children improves your quality of life, even if you are a step-parent or have adopted a child, a new study has concluded. (The Telegraph)

Senior author Dr. Gregory Poland, director of the Mayo Clinic Vaccine Research Group, said worldwide vaccination is believed to have eradicated smallpox, but the highly contagious and sometimes fatal illness remains a bioterrorism concern. (UPI)

The American government’s goal of vaccinating young girls against the human papillomavirus has been disappointing, with less than a third of teenagers having completed a full course of HPV vaccine. But now the United States can look to Australia, which six years into a successful nationwide HPV vaccination campaign has experienced a sharp decline in the number of new cases of genital warts among young men and women. (New York Times)

The rate dropped 12% from 2005 to 2011, with improvements among all major racial and ethnic groups, a government report says. (Los Angeles Times)

In 2011, a bioterrorism-preparedness exercise conducted by the U.S. government examined the likely result of a large-scale release of weaponized anthrax spores in a city such as San Francisco. Code-named Dark Zephyr, the simulation was sobering: nearly 8 million people would be affected, nearly a quarter of them children. If such an event occurred, current response plans call for distribution of appropriate antibiotics and vaccination of affected civilian populations using anthrax vaccine adsorbed (AVA). (Bioethics International)

Finding and vaccinating Nigerian nomads may be one of the last obstacles to the eradication of polio. (Nature)

An international scientific collaboration led by Dr Ruth Loos of Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, UK, and Dr Erik Ingelsson of the Uppsala University, Sweden, has reported the discovery of four new loci (the specific place on a chromosome where a gene is located) influencing height and seven new loci related to obesity. (Sci News)

After a crash inspection program, federal regulators said Thursday that they had found numerous unsafe practices at about 30 compounding pharmacies, the same type of facility responsible for the tainted drug that caused a deadly meningitis outbreak last year. (New York Times)

A new Global Action Plan launched today by the WHO and UNICEF has the potential to save up to 2 million children every year from deaths caused by pneumonia and diarrhoea, some of the leading killers of children under five globally. (World Health Organization)