Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by editors of HealthDay:

New Law Strengthens Mad Cow Disease Safeguards

Certain cattle materials that carry the highest risk of mad cow disease cannot be included in any animal feed, including pet food, says a U.S. Food and Drug Administration final regulation announced Wednesday.

The prohibited materials include the brains and spinal cords from cattle 30 months of age and older. The entire carcass of cattle not inspected and passed for human consumption is also prohibited, unless the cattle are less than 30 months old, or the brains and spinal cords have been removed, the FDA said.

It's believed the risk of mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy -- BSE) is extremely low in cattle less than 30 months old.

The final rule is effective a year from now in order to give the livestock, meat, rendering, and feed industries time to adapt their practices to the new regulation, which is designed to strengthen existing safeguards against mad cow disease, the FDA said.

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Atlantic City Bans Smoking in Casinos

Many employees of Atlantic City casinos felt like they won the jackpot after city council voted 9-0 Wednesday to plug a loophole in a statewide ban on smoking in public places that excluded casinos.

The casino smoking ban takes effect Oct. 15, but customers will still be allowed to smoke in unstaffed smoking lounges away from the table games and slot machines -- if individual casinos decided to build such lounges, the Associated Press reported.

Casino workers who attended the council meeting burst into applause and chanted, "Thank you, thank you, thank you," when the votes were counted. Many of the workers wore T-shirts with the slogan "Nobody deserves to work in an ashtray."

The city council tried in January 2007 to ban smoking in casinos. But intense pressure from the casino industry forced council to adopt a compromise law that restricted smoking to no more than 25 percent of the casino floor. But the smoking areas aren't walled off from nonsmoking areas, and secondhand smoke still drifts throughout the casino floor, the AP reported.

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Acupuncture Relieves Hot Flushes Caused by Breast Cancer Drug

Acupuncture helped relieve hot flushes in women taking the drug tamoxifen after breast cancer surgery, says a Norwegian study.

It included 59 patients randomly selected to receive either 10 weeks of traditional Chinese acupuncture or sham acupuncture. The women who received traditional acupuncture had a 50 percent reduction in daytime and nighttime hot flushes, United Press International reported.

"Acupuncture is increasingly used in western countries to treat the problem of hot flushes in healthy postmenopausal women, so we wanted to see whether it was effective in women with breast cancer suffering from hot flushes as a result of their anti-estrogen medication," study author Jill Hervik, a physiotherapist and acupuncturist at Vestfold Central Hospital in Tonsberg, said in a prepared statement.

Tamoxifen can cause hot flushes and many other symptoms experienced by women going through menopause, UPI reported.

The study was presented at the European Breast Cancer Conference in Berlin.

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Wisconsin Leads U.S. in Drunken Driving: Survey

Wisconsin has the highest incidence of drunken driving in the nation, a new federal report finds.

More than a quarter of adult drivers in Wisconsin, noted for its beer breweries, reported driving under the influence of alcohol, according to the just-released survey from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Completing the worst five were: North Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, and South Dakota, the Associated Press reported. Nationwide, 15 percent of adult drivers said they drove under the influence.

Utah had the lowest drunk driving rate, followed by West Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky, and North Carolina.

The agency, part of the National Institutes of Health, also found that blacks had significantly lower drinking rates than whites, the AP reported.

And the number of drivers with blood alcohol levels of 0.08 percent or higher involved in alcohol-related crashes remained about the same over a decade -- from 12,348 in 1996 to 12,491 in 2006.

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Rate Doubles for Nasty Infection Among Hospital Patients

The number of U.S. hospital patients stricken with a nasty infection called Clostrdium difficile soared by 200 percent between 2000 and 2005, a new federal report finds.

Commonly called C difficile or "C diff," the infection can cause severe diarrhea, blood poisoning, and even death, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality said in a statement to coincide with its weekly AHRQ News and Numbers report. The infection often results when antibiotic use suppresses the bacteria normally found in the colon.

The report also found:

  • There were more than 2 million cases of the illness in U.S. hospitals from 1993 to 2005.
  • Two of three infected patients in 2005 were elderly.
  • People with the illness were hospitalized an average of about three times longer than uninfected people.

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Social Bullying Linked to Adult Depression

The psychological effects of social bullying -- shunning a child or spreading rumors rather than threatening physical violence -- can last well into a person's adult life, a new University of Florida study concludes.

The research involving 210 college students found that victims of social bullying were more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety in early adulthood. Lead author Allison Dempsey, a doctoral student, graduated from Colorado's Columbine High School one year before the 1999 shootings at the school. It was widely reported that the two boys who committed the murders were largely shunned by classmates.

Dempsey and her colleagues found no difference between boys and girls in this type of bullying and its link to depression and fear, the university said in a prepared statement. In a surprising finding, they also found that having friends and other positive social relationships didn't dampen the tendency to develop depression and anxiety in adulthood.

Results of the research are published in the journal Psychology in the Schools.