Health Report

THE GOOD NEWS

The antiwrinkle cream Retin-A may have an important side effect: it reverses a condition that sometimes leads to cervical cancer, and it can erase the moles that are precursors of the lethal skin cancer melanoma.

Two new studies say vitamin E decreases the risk of heart disease in men and women who take daily doses of 100 international units.

A cell-growth chemical has been shown to preserve the brain cells lost to Parkinson's disease -- in rats. If it works in humans, it could lead to a new treatment.

Vegetable fats, implicated in breast cancer in research on animals, don't seem to have an effect in humans. And a new drug, Taxotere, appears to shrink breast tumors.

THE BAD NEWS

Even legally permissible levels of air pollution can lead to heart and lung disease. The culprits are tiny particles created in the burning of such carbon-based fuels as gasoline, oil, coal and wood.

People who survived polio in the 1940s and '50s are suddenly experiencing new weakness and even paralysis. A possible explanation is that some nerves have worked harder to compensate for those destroyed in the original disease and are wearing out early.

As many as 1,000 Canadians, most of them hemophiliacs, may have got blood transfusions tainted with the AIDS virus in the 1980s, according to a Canadian government report. Many remain unaware of the contamination.

SOURCES: New England Journal of Medicine; Nature; Science; Journal of the National Cancer Institute