Flu forecast

Women who eat a lot of soy-based foods or fiber don’t seem to have fewer menopause symptoms, according to a new study.

The findings add to other studies that have found no benefits from eating extra amounts of soy, a food abundant in dietary estrogen.

“It might be a dead end,” said William Wong, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine who has studied the effects of soy protein on menopause symptoms.

Plant-based estrogens, also called phytoestrogens, are found in foods such as seeds, nuts and soybeans. Their chemical structure is similar to humanestrogens.

To see if women who choose to eat more phytoestrogens have an easier time through menopause, Ellen Gold, the lead author of the study and a professor at the University of Califor-

New research suggests it may be possible to forecast flu outbreaks the same way meteorologists predict weather, a potential boon for public health, one of the authors of a study said.

Using real-time U.S. data gathered by Google, along with a computer model showing how flu spreads, the researchers offered a system that could generate local forecasts of the severity and length of a particular flu outbreak.

If the forecasts are reasonably accurate, they could help officials target vaccines and anti-viral drugs to areas of greatest need, said Jeffrey Shaman of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, co-author of the study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“If you have a six-week forecast with good confidence that you’re going to have an outbreak in New York City and nothing’s going on in LA, you’d send the vaccines (to New York) because there’s enough time to distribute them … before there’s an actual outbreak,” he said.

Study: Soy-based foods no help for menopause symptoms

nia Davis School of Medicine, and her colleagues tracked 1,651 women for 10 years.

Gold’s team could find no consistent pattern between the amount of phytoestrogens eaten and how often or how severely women experienced hot flashes and night sweats.

The same was true for how much fiber they ate.