The quality agency, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, also has given "urgent" instructions to its departments to step up tests for melamine in livestock feed and feed additives. The order appeared to indicate official concern over possible melamine contamination in the wider agricultural sector.

The administration said the order was aimed at "ensuring the safety of feed and feed additives," according to Xinhua. Even before the milk powder scandal, foreign media investigations had found that melamine was widely used in China to give livestock feed the appearance of higher protein content.

China on last Thursday reported a fourth death in a mounting scandal over tainted baby milk as it ratcheted up its response to the crisis with tighter inspections and the sacking of a city mayor.

The latest death came in the remote northwestern region of Xinjiang, where 86 people fell ill after consuming the milk product that contained the industrial chemical melamine, a notice on the local government's website said.

The Xinjiang fatality adds to three deaths confirmed on Wednesday by Health Minister Chen Zhu, who also said more than 6,000 babies nationwide had fallen ill.

The three deaths were caused by kidney failure after drinking the milk powder containing melamine, and the scandal has caused panicked parents around the country to besiege hospitals seeking medical check-ups for their children.

This was reported Agence France-Presse on 18th. Most Indians support plans to tighten existing laws for a complete ban on smoking in public places, according to results of a survey published Thursday. Some 92 percent of the 1,030 people who answered the survey in Mumbai, New Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata, strongly favoured curbs on lighting up at work or in hotels, bars, restaurants, cinemas, schools and hospitals, it said.

Infants who have been given the common pain reliever paracetamol may have a higher risk of developing asthma and eczema by the time they are 6 or 7, a large study covering children in 31 countries has found.

The findings were published in the journal Lancet together with two other studies, which found that runny noses and wheezing early on in life may be strong predictors of asthma.

In the first study, researchers pored through data provided by parents of more than 205,000 children and found paracetamol use in the first year of life was associated with a 46 percent higher risk of asthma by the time the children were 6 or 7 compared to those never exposed to the drug.

Some tissues continue to stem cells after it become specialized, but these cells are less flexible than embryonic stem cells, Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent Meaning that they are capable to become any of the more than 200 types of speciality cells of our body (heart muscle cells, skin cells, nerve cells) When a tissue get diseased or damaged Stem cells in theory can replace or repair them.

The first step results in a primitive and highly versatile cell. This intermediary is then guided to mature into whatever cell type scientists want. That guiding process has proven difficult to do efficiently, especially for creating insulin-producing cells. In contrast, the new method holds the promise of going directly from one mature cell type to another. So, someday scientists may be able to replace dead nerve or heart cells in people by converting some neighboring cells. At the same time, he stressed that it's still important to study embryonic stem cells and iPS cells.

This research paper published online Article is published in August in the journal Nature.

Scientists have transformed one type of cell into another in living mice, a big step toward the goal of growing replacement tissues to treat a variety of diseases. The cell identity switch turned ordinary pancreas cells into the rarer type that churns out insulin, essential for preventing diabetes. But its implications go beyond diabetes to a host of possibilities, scientists said.

Ayurvedic medicine is an ancient Indian practice that combines the use of numerous modalities, such as herbal medicine, massage and special diets, to promote wellness and prevent illness, according to the U.S. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

There are two common practices in ayurveda — either herbal medicine alone, or herbal medicines combined with metals and gems, a practice known as rasa shastra.

Results of the study are published in the Aug. 27 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

About one in five ayurvedic medicine products purchased on the Internet contain significant levels of lead, mercury or arsenic, a new study finds.

The study was published Aug. 27 in the inaugural issue of the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Interventions.

The Mayo Clinic Risk Score (MCRS) uses seven simple clinical and non-invasive variables to predict in-hospital death for percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), the most widely performed heart revascularization process in the United States.