Adapted from the week's postings on The Checkup, The Post's health blog. Cat survives swine flu

Adapted from the week's postings on The Checkup, The Post's health blog. Cat survives swine flu

A 13-year-old cat in Iowa has tested positive for the H1N1 virus, "marking the first time a cat has been diagnosed with this strain of influenza," the American Veterinary Medical Association said in a statement. "The cat, which has recovered, is believed to have caught the virus from someone in the household who was sick with H1N1. There are no indications that the cat passed the virus on to any other animals or people," the statement said.

State health officials said two of the three people who own it had suffered influenza-like illness before the cat got sick. They recovered, too.

The association is tracking all instances of H1N1 in animals and posting updates on its Web site, http://www.avma.org.

-- Rob Stein

Thardman writes:

I don't know about all of this sanitation stuff, like the hand-sanitizing every time you touch anything (including the bottle of hand sanitizer). Most of the time cats are not asleep, they're cleaning themselves. Yet they still got the flu!

Cancer linked to excess body fat

Newly compiled data suggest that "excess body fat alone is responsible for more than 100,000 cancer cases in the U.S." The report comes from the American Institute for Cancer Research, which said its data included cases of endometrial, esophageal, pancreatic, kidney, gallbladder, breast and colorectal cancer. No one has pinned down exactly how body fat might increase cancer risk. Researcher Laurence Kolonel explains that fat isn't just sitting around waiting to be drawn on when your body's starving. In fact, he says, there are "all kinds of things going on in fat tissue," including production of estrogen and other cancer-promoting hormones. Fat tissue also contributes to inflammation, an established cancer precursor, he says.

-- Jennifer LaRue Huget

laura33 writes:

There's nothing new here at all. These numbers are based on taking percentages in a February report and doing the math. The February report was a summary that came from a 2007 study. The 2007 study was a review of 7,000 earlier studies from around the world. It's just packaging and repackaging things we already knew. But, of course, you don't make headlines if you just tell people that being fat, eating poorly and being out of shape is bad for you, do you?