Findings from a new global snapshot study show that about half of the world's women and about two-thirds of the world's men are either overweight or obese. The largest study to ever assess global obesity, called "The International Day for Evaluation of Abdominal Obesity (IDEA)," was conducted over two half days and led by Beverley Balkau, director of research at INSERM in France.

Doctors randomly selected looked at 168,159 people (69,409 men, 98,750 women) in 63 countries across five continents in both rural and urban areas

Health and Family Welfare, Water Resources and Religious Affairs Advisor of Bangladesh Major General (rtd) Dr. A S M Matiur Rahman left Dhaka for the United Kingdom on early Wednesday to attend the Women Deliver Conference.

About two thousand world leaders including more than 100 cabinet ministers, heads of United Nations and other multilateral agencies, senior civil servants, health professionals, researchers, economists and reproductive health advocates will attend the two-day long conference beginning on Thursday

The Asia Pacific region will meet its target to reduce extreme poverty by half by 2015, a joint report released Monday by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) said. The region is also ahead of Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa in meeting its goals of primary education, gender parity and its fight against AIDS.

Called The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) 2007, the report is in partnership with the United Nations (UN) Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific

Nearly one third of American men leave the public restrooms without washing up their hands, a new observational study has revealed. When it comes to washing with soap and water, 88 percent of women do lather up.

Reporting their latest findings Monday at a meeting of infectious disease scientists, the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) and The Soap and Detergent Association (SDA), said nearly 77 percent of men and women washed their hands in public restrooms - a six percent decline from a similar study conducted in 2005

Teenage girls who diet are twice as likely to start smoking as their non-dieting counterparts, researchers from the University of Florida have found. After analyzing the dieting and smoking habits of 7,795 teenagers, the study's lead author assistant professor Mildred Maldonado-Molina says dieting was a significant predictor of the start of regular smoking among females.

"We were expecting that this relationship was going to be stronger among females. That has been well-documented, especially because (nicotine) can suppress your appetite," Molina said in a statement