Two 9-month-old conjoined twin boys have been successfully separated at Santa Rosa's Children's Hospital here.

The rare medical procedure was carried out successfully by a team of seven doctors who spent 14 hours preparing for the surgery while the surgery itself took four hours. The twins' prognosis looks good, and doctors believe the babies should make a full recovery

The close of 2007 witnessed almost 3 million people in developing nations receiving anti-retroviral (ART) treatment, but nearly twice that number still require life-saving medicines, a United Nations study said.

Almost one-third of the estimated 9.7 million people in need of ART received it by the end of 2007, leaving nearly 7 million without access, The study report, entitled "Towards Universal Access: Scaling Up Priority HIV/AIDS Interventions in the Health Sector," added

- Researchers released conclusive evidence Tuesday linking children who have been exposed to lead to being more likely to commit crimes as adults.

According to USA Today, the report, issued by the University of Cincinnati, said that elementary school aged children are especially affected when exposed to lead because it interferes with normal cognitive development. Another study of lead's affect on children conducted by the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center showed that lead exposure was harder on children at about 6 years of age than it is on toddlers

Some AIDS expert have recently said that condoms and testing for HIV are not the solution to eliminating the disease in Africa and are just a waste of money, while others say that doing those things has helped but there is a need to do more.

An estimated 22.5 million people in Africa had HIV at the end of 2007. Health experts say about 1.7 million new people became sick with HIV last year while the disease killed 1.6 million people during the same period

Nordic countries dominate the top while countries in sub-Saharan Africa dominate the bottom levels of the best and worst places to be a mother and a child.

The Mother's Index of US-based global humanitarian organization Save the Children highlighted in the organization's State of the World's Mothers 2008 report compares the well-being of mothers and children in 146 countries