Women diagnosed with diabetes before their pregnancy are at a greater risk of giving birth to a baby with a birth defect or multiple defects than their non-diabetic counterparts, according to a new study.

The study carried out by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found diabetic women are three to four times more likely to have a child with single birth defects, while the risk for multiple defects is eightfold

The medical director of the Transplantation Society urged Canada on Wednesday to overhaul its organ donation system. Dr. Francis Delmonico said the system needed to be changed to alleviate the growing number of Canadians who die waiting for an organ donor.

Delmonico urged Canadian hospitals to assess every death for its potential as organ donor and to notify organ donation institutions. At the same time, he stressed the value of a structure and database to match patients in need of organs and donors

Infant deaths directly related to preterm births have increased, especially for non-Hispanic black women, according to the Centers for Disease Control's National Center for Health Statistics.

African-Americans are 2.4 times as likely to die as infants, compared with white newborns. Among white children, the infant-mortality rate rose to 5.73 per 1,000 live births in 2005, compared with 5.66 in the previous year. Overall, the U.S. infant-mortality rate rose to 6.86 per 1,000 in 2005, from 6.78 in 2004, according to the data

While there have been significant gains in preventing new HIV infections in different countries, the epidemic is far from over in any part of the world, according to a United Nations report.

The 2008 report on the global AIDS epidemic, produced by the Joint U.N .Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), released on Tuesday, is the most comprehensive review of the epidemic to date with 147 countries reporting data on HIV

Overweight and obese women need to exercise about an hour a day, five days a week, to lose weight and sustain it, a new study has found.

Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and colleagues tracked 201 overweight and obese women over a two-year period. The participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups based on how much and how intensely they exercised and how many calories they burned