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In a related development: This year's flu season in the U. S. has hit younger-and middle-aged adults harder than in the past three years. This is a result of the resurgence of the H1N1 virus that caused a worldwide pandemic in 2009.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says people aged 18 to 64 represented 61 percent of all hospitalizations from influenza. This age group represented only about 35 percent of all such hospitalizations in the previous three seasons.
Influenza deaths followed the same pattern with more deaths than usual occurring in this age group.
The Center says the event is a sad and difficult reminder that flu can be serious for anyone, not just the very old and young.
It recommends that everyone six months and older gets an annual flu vaccine.
A new study found that flu vaccination may reduce a person's risk of having to go to the doctor for flu illness by about 60 percent across all ages.
This is NEWS Plus Special English.
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You’re listening to NEWS Plus Special English. I’m Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
Australian researchers and melanoma patients have made a great contribution to an international study that is likely to improve the survival rate of people diagnosed with skin cancer.
The 20-year international study has recently been published by The New England Journal of Medicine.
The study found that melanoma patients would benefit from undergoing a sentinel lymph node biopsy.
In future, people with intermediate thickness melanomas will be told to have a sample taken from a lymph node that drains from the cancer site.
If the lymph node has evidence of cancer, removal of all the nodes in the area will be recommended.
This will stop the cancer from spreading to other parts of the body and increase the chance of 10-year survival by 44 percent.
Sentinel node biopsy was a simple treatment method, but it proved to be controversial.
There is now excellent evidence in its favor, and this will lead to a change in the way patients are treated.
Researchers say it would take about a year for Australia's treatment guidelines to be changed, but doctors can start taking the study results into account now.
This is NEWS Plus Special English.
We turn to Cuba. More than 5,000 patients have received stem cell treatment in the country since the procedure was introduced ten years ago.
The stem cell treatment method has been implemented in 13 of the entire 15 provinces of the island country.
Doctor Porfirio Hernandez is a widely acknowledged pioneer of this practice in Cuba. Hernandez indicates that more than 60 percent of patients receiving this treatment had suffered from severe ischemia at lower limbs and other blood vessel related ailments.
The therapy has also been used to reduce the suffering of patients with severe problems in orthopedics and cardiology.
Stem cells are capable of self-renewing, regenerating tissue damaged by diverse disease, traumas, and aging, and stimulating the creation of new blood vessels.
This is NEWS Plus Special English. I’m Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
Should shoppers turn off their smartphones when they hit the supermarket or shopping center? Or does having them on lead to better sales or shorter lines at the check out?
Retailers in the U.S. are using mobile-based technology to track shoppers' movements at some malls and stores.
The companies collecting the information say it's anonymous, can't be traced to a specific person and no one should worry about invasion of privacy.
But consumer advocates aren't convinced. They say it's spying, and shoppers should be informed if their phones are being observed or monitored and then be able to choose whether to allow it.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission held a workshop on the issue, part of a series of privacy seminars looking at emerging technologies and the impact on consumers.
FTC attorney Amanda Koulousias says the commission wants to better understand how companies are using phone-location technology, how robust privacy controls are and whether shoppers are notified in advance.
Here's how the technology works:
Your smartphone has a unique identifier code - a MAC, or media access control address - for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It's a 12-character string of letters and numbers. Think of it like a Social Security or vehicle identification number. In the U.S, this address is not linked to personal information, like your name, email address or phone number. The numbers and letters link only to a specific phone.
When your smartphone is turned on, it sends out signals with that MAC address as it searches for Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Those signals can also be captured by sensors in shops that can tell a department store how often shoppers visit, how long they stay, whether they spend more time in the shoe department, children's clothing section or sporting goods for example, or whether they stop for the window display, and then decide to move on.
Companies that provide "mobile location analytics" to retailers, grocery stores, and other outlets say they capture the MAC addresses of shoppers' phones but then scramble them into different sets of numbers and letters to conceal the original addresses - a process called hashing. This is how they make the data they collect anonymous.
The companies then analyze all the information those hashed numbers provide as shoppers move from store to store in a mall, or department to department within a store. Shopping center managers could learn which stores are popular and which ones aren't. A retailer could learn how long the queues are at a certain cash register, how long people have to wait - or whether more people visit on "sale" days at a particular shop.
That brings us to the end of this edition of NEWS Plus Special English. To fresh up your memory, I'm going to read one of the news at normal speed. Please listen carefully.
