Clinic turns down woman for face, hand transplants

Clinic turns down woman for face, hand transplants

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — An Ohio hospital has told the family of a Connecticut woman mauled and blinded by a chimpanzee a year ago that she is not a candidate for face and hand transplants.

Charla Nash’s family is looking into alternative facilities after the Cleveland Clinic said it could not do both transplants, family attorney Bill Monaco told The Associated Press on Monday. He said the transplants have to be done simultaneously and come from the same donor.

Emergency session to try to save N. Ireland coalition

HILLSBOROUGH, Northern Ireland — The British and Irish governments launched a round-the-clock mission Monday to save Northern Ireland’s unraveling administration, a Catholic-Protestant coalition that was supposed to forge a lasting era of nonviolent compromise.

The British and Irish prime ministers, Gordon Brown and Brian Cowen, arrived together at Hillsborough Castle and brought together local leaders who are threatening to pull the plug on power-sharing.

At stake is the central achievement of the U.S.-brokered Good Friday accord of 1998: a cross-community government for Northern Ireland drawn equally from the Protestant majority and Catholic minority.

High blood pressure linked to dementia

WASHINGTON — If the cardiologist’s warnings don’t scare you, consider this: Controlling blood pressure just might be the best protection yet known against dementia.

In a flurry of new research, scientists scanned people’s brains to show hypertension fuels a kind of scarring linked to later development of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. Those scars can start building up in middle age, decades before memory problems will appear.

The evidence is strong enough that the National Institutes of Health soon will begin enrolling thousands of hypertension sufferers in a major study to see if aggressive treatment — pushing blood pressure lower than currently recommended — better protects not just their hearts but their brains.

Actor Pernell Roberts dies

LOS ANGELES — Pernell Roberts, the ruggedly handsome actor who shocked Hollywood by leaving TV’s “Bonanza” at the height of its popularity, then found fame again years later on “Trapper John, M.D.,” has died. He was 81.

Roberts, the last surviving member of the classic Western’s cast, died of cancer Sunday at his Malibu home, his wife Eleanor Criswell told the Los Angeles Times.

Although he rocketed to fame in 1959 as Adam Cartwright, eldest son of a Nevada ranching family led by Lorne Greene’s patriarchal Ben Cartwright, Roberts chafed at the limitations he felt his “Bonanza” character was given.

Study: Girls may learn to fear math from teachers

WASHINGTON — Little girls may learn to fear math from the women who are their earliest teachers.

Despite gains in recent years, women still trail men in some areas of math achievement, and the question of why has provoked controversy. Now, a study of first- and second-graders suggests what may be part of the answer: Female elementary school teachers who are concerned about their own math skills could be passing that along to the little girls they teach.

Young students tend to model themselves after adults of the same sex, and having a female teacher who is anxious about math may reinforce the stereotype that boys are better at math than girls, explained Sian L. Beilock, an associate professor in psychology at the University of Chicago.

Teen pregnancy rate rises

The pregnancy rate among teenage girls in the United States has jumped for the first time in more than a decade, raising alarm that the long campaign to reduce motherhood among adolescents was faltering, according to a report released today.

The pregnancy rate among 15- to 19-year-olds increased 3 percent between 2005 and 2006 — the first jump since 1990, according to an analysis of the most recent data collected by the federal government and the nation’s leading reproductive-health think tank.

Combined dispatches