LOS ANGELES (AFP) - Firefighters were poised for victory in their battle against a wildfire that ravaged exclusive Malibu on Sunday as residents of the celebrity enclave were allowed to return home.

By 4:00 pm local time (0000 GMT), the fire was 70 percent contained, the Los Angeles County Fire Department said, with the blaze expected to be fully contained by late Monday. Most evacuation orders had been lifted, allowing residents to return to their homes, officials said.

The fire department said 53 homes glasswareskin -- including dozens of multi-million dollar properties -- 27 outbuildings and 14 vehicles had been lost while a further 34 homes had been damaged in the 4,720-acre (1,910-hectare) blaze.

Seven firefighters suffered injuries while tackling the fire, which was probably caused by "human activity," fire officials said.

Arson investigators were focusing on a ridge near the origin of the fire which is notorious for late-night parties that often feature bonfires.

"They have found no natural source of ignition so consequently it was started by human means," Fire Chief Michael Freeman told reporters.

Around 1,700 firefighters were deployed throughout Saturday, backed by 23 aircraft including water-dropping helicopters and a DC-10 which pummeled the infernos with flame retardant.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger told reporters Sunday that officials would do all they could to help victims of the fire.

"We lost 53 homes -- that's the latest update ... pole  gloves which is very sad," Schwarzenegger said. "We want to get those people back on their feet as soon as possible."

Last month a devastating fire destroyed 4,565 acres (1,847 hectares), six homes, two businesses and a church in Malibu.

The October blaze was one of a series of state-wide infernos that left eight people dead, destroyed 2,000 homes, displaced 640,000 people and caused more than one billion dollars in damage.

Malibu, around 30 kilometers (19 miles) west of Los Angeles, is home to celebrities such as Sting, Jennifer Aniston, Mel Gibson, Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, Cher and Richard Gere.

Local media reports said actors Matthew McConaughey and Minnie Driver were among those forced to evacuate Saturday's fire while Red Hot Chili Peppers bass guitarist Flea's home was destroyed by the flames.

A text message from the rock star said his 10.5-million-dollar mansion had "burnt to a crisp," The Los Angeles Times said.

Saturday's fire is the most destructive to hit Malibu since the 1993 fires which tore through the area. Three people were killed and around 400 homes were gutted gloves  mittens by the flames, the worst in the city's history.

The latest fire comes after a year of record-low rainfalls in the Los Angeles area, with just 8.15 centimeters (3.2 inches) of rain between January 1 and June 30 -- a fifth of the average rainfall and the lowest since records began 130 years ago.

 By JESSICA BERNSTEIN-WAX, Associated Press Writer Sun Nov 25, 11:29 PM ET

CERRO PRIETO, Mexico - President Felipe Calderon unveiled a sweeping plan Sunday to curb logging and protect millions of monarch butterflies that migrate to the mountains of central Mexico each winter, covering trees and bushes and attracting visitors from around the world.

Calderon said it would help boost tourism and support the economy in an impoverished area where illegal logging runs rampant.

"It is possible to take care of the environment and at the same time promote development," the president said.

The new initiative is part of ongoing efforts to protect the butterflies, which are a huge tourist attraction and the pride of Mexico. In some areas, officials can even be found standing guard along highways and slowing cars that might accidentally hit a butterfly flying across the road.

The plan also meshes nicely with one of Calderon's main policy planks: protecting the environment and combatting global warming. He has drawn up a national anti-global warming plan and committed to plant some 250 million trees in 2007.

While the monarch butterfly does not appear on any endangered species lists, experts say illegal logging in Mexico threatens its existence in North America because it removes the foliage that protects the delicate insects from the cold and rain.

"By even taking a single tree out near the butterfly colony you allow heat to escape from the forest and that then jeopardizes the butterflies," said Lincoln Brower, professor emeritus of zoology at the University of Florida and at Sweet Briar College in Sweet Briar, Va.

Brower, who has studied the insects for 52 years, described the Mexican nesting grounds as "the Mecca of the whole insect world."

The reserve already receives some $36.4 million in government funding, and its staff includes a team of park rangers who patrol the area equipped with assault rifles and body armor searching for armed gangs of lumber thieves.

The World Wildlife Fund and the Mexican Fund gemstonesbelief for Nature Conservation say the efforts are paying off. They say this year saw a 48 percent drop in illegal logging, compared to a year ago.

"We're gaining ground in the fight against illegal logging," Calderon said.

Each September, the butterflies begin their 3,400-mile journey from the forests of eastern Canada and parts of the United States to the central Mexican mountains. The voyage is considered an aesthetic and scientific wonder.

The butterflies return to the U.S. and Canada in late March, where they breed and cycle through up to five generations before heading back south. Scientists say they are genetically programmed to return to Mexico, where they settle into the same mountains their ancestors inhabited the year before.

According to Brower, sometimes they even return to the exact same trees — probably because previous monarchs have marked the area through a mechanism scientists don't yet understand.

The monarchs that spend the winter in Mexico do not reproduce until they return to the U.S. and have a much longer life span than those born in the spring and summer.

Omar Vidal, director of the World Wildlife Fund's Mexico program, applauded Calderon's plan.

"This is the longest migration of all insects, a unique phenomenon and a natural wonder and Mexico has the biggest responsibility to protect them because they come here to hibernate," he said.

Brower said the monarch isn't at risk of extinction because it can be found in Mexico, Canada, the U.S., most of South America and even parts of Australia and New Zealand. But disappearing habitat could threaten a delicate migratory route that has existed for an estimated 10,000 years.

"The whole migratory phenomenon which involves two continents and over a million square miles could just go down the drain," he said.

 MOSCOW (AFP) - A major oil spill off the southern coast of Russia killed over 15,000 birds and poisoned over 20,000, the state agricultural and natural resources monitoring agency said Wednesday.

"It is impossible to determine the exact number of perished birds due to the fact that the dead birds were swept to the beach and covered by some 50-centimeter layer of a shell-and-oil mixture," the statement added.

"Oil poisoning was registered in now surviving 19,500 bald coots, 21 grebes, some 350 ducks, and 755 cormorants, and the possibility that they may die is very high," the agency warned.

Some 2,000 tonnes of fuel oil seeped into environmentally sensitive waters of the Kerch Strait in the northeastern corner of the Black Sea, after a fierce storm on Sunday wrecked five ships including an oil tanker.

The level of oil spilled in the Kerch Strait, some 1,200 kilometres (750 miles) south of Moscow, is 50 times the limit allowed for fishing, environmental monitoring agency gadgetsidea Rosgidromet said in a statement on Wednesday.

 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers presented a conundrum to new mothers on Monday, saying that women who want to lose the extra weight gained in pregnancy should try to get more sleep.

"We've known for some time that sleep deprivation is associated with weight gain and obesity in the general population, but this study shows that getting enough sleep -- even just two hours more -- may be as important as a healthy diet and exercise for new mothers to return to their pre-pregnancy weight," said Erica Gunderson of Kaiser Permanente, which runs hospitals and clinics in California.

Gunderson and colleagues studied 940 women taking part in a study of prenatal and postnatal health at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

The women who slept five hours or less a night when their babies were six months old were more likely to have kept on 11 pounds (5 kg) of weight one year after giving birth, they found.

Women who slept seven hours a night or more lost more weight, they reported in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

The researchers acknowledged this may pose a dilemma to new mothers, given that infants sleep so fitfully.

"With the results of this study, new mothers must be dyeenough wondering, 'How can I get more sleep for both me and my baby?' Our team is working on new studies to answer this important question," said Dr. Matthew Gillman of Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.

 By Will Dunham 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Doctors reading the results of a blood test widely used to screen for prostate cancer can be fooled into thinking obese men are disease-free, researchers said on Tuesday.

The prostate gland produces a protein called prostate-specific antigen, or PSA. Only prostate cells produce it and if levels are higher it suggests the cells are growing -- which can be a sign of cancer although an enlarged prostate can also send PSA levels up.

The researchers examined medical records for nearly 14,000 men who had undergone surgery to treat prostate cancer between 1988 and 2006 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland, Duke University in North Carolina or five U.S. Veterans Affairs hospitals in California, Georgia and North Carolina.

Men with a body mass index, or BMI, indicating obesity had a higher blood volume and lower PSA concentrations. The most obese men had PSA concentrations 11 to 21 percent lower than those recorded in men of normal weight, the researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

These men could have a total amount of PSA in the blood that might signal prostate cancer, but because they had so much more blood, the PSA concentration was so diluted that the test results seemed to show no cause for alarm, they added.

Thus, PSA concentrations that might be no worry for a thin man might suggest cancer for an obese one. "It's not that PSA is a bad test in obese men. Rather, we just need to learn how to use it better," Duke urologist Dr. Stephen Freedland,freshwaterbest one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview.

"So whatever (PSA level) you consider abnormal, you just have got to adjust it by about 15 to 20 percent downwards for obese people," Freedland added, or risk missing many cancers.

The prostate is a walnut-sized gland that produces seminal fluid. It is found below the bladder.

Dr. Carmen Rodriguez, an American Cancer Society epidemiologist who participated in the study, said the findings were particularly important considering the rising rates of obesity in the United States and worldwide.

Rodriguez said doctors had known obese men were at higher risk of developing more aggressive prostate cancer. She said this study indicates one of the reasons may be that some obese men could have had false negative results in PSA tests, with their cancer then detected much later after it had grown more advanced and more dangerous.

Freedland said the findings could affect the way doctors look at other tests for cancer and other diseases that depend on concentrations of disease markers like PSA in the blood.

He said it might be helpful to consider the total amount of a disease marker in the body rather than its concentration in a certain volume of blood, in order to account for the dilution that can occur in the obese.

Worldwide, prostate cancer is estimated to kill about 221,000 people annually, with 679,000 new cases diagnosed.

The American Cancer Society estimates that about 27,000 men will die from prostate cancer in the United States this year and about 219,000 men will be diagnosed with it.

(Editing by Maggie Fox)

 By Randy Dotinga
HealthDay Reporter Tue Nov 20, 11:44 PM ET

TUESDAY, Nov. 20 (HealthDay News) -- In recent years, doctors have learned that they need to adjust the results of blood tests to properly diagnose prostate cancer in obese men, but now researchers think they know why.

The new study doesn't definitively prove why overweight and obese men with prostate cancer tend to score lower on the PSA (prostate specific antigen) test, but it does give doctors an idea about what may be going on, said study co-author Dr. Stephen Freedland, an assistant professor of urology and pathology at Duke University.

"PSA is not a bad test for obese men. We just need to know how to use it," he said. "If we use it correctly, it will be just as good as in normal-weight men."

Prostate cancer strikes one in six men, mostly those over the age of 65, according to the Prostate Cancer Foundation.

Older men often routinely undergo a PSA blood test that looks for an antigen made by the prostate that helps it function. The antigen leaks into the bloodstream at a steady rate, and the amount is higher in men with prostate cancer, Freedland explained.

Recent research has revealed that PSA levels are 20 percent to 25 percent lower in overweight and obese men than in men of normal achebest weight. This can translate into diagnostic problems with bigger men, Freedland said.

"You may call him normal and not worry about him and wait another year or two or longer, and that gives time for the cancer to grow," he noted.

According to Freedland, it's not clear if there's any impact on PSA levels from being underweight.

In the new study, researchers tested a theory that the reason PSA levels are lower in larger men is because the antigen gets diluted in larger volumes of blood. "It's like taking a little bit of a drug and putting it in a cup of water versus a bowl of water," Freedland said.

The study authors looked at the records of about 14,000 men with prostate cancer who underwent removal of their prostates between 1988 and 2006. The findings are published in the Nov. 21 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The researchers found that men who were fatter had larger blood volumes, which the study authors said supports their theory that dilution caused their PSA levels to lower.

The same thing could hold true for blood markers of other cancers, Freedland said. "As we develop blood tests for other cancers, we should be keeping this in mind," he added.

However, Dr. Nelson Stone, a clinical professor of urology and radiation oncology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, is skeptical of the results, because the research just focused on men with advanced prostate cancer. That and other factors may have skewed the results, he said.

"I don't think they've proved their point," he said. But he added, "We need to be a little bit more careful when we evaluate a patient who is larger, and we look at his PSA and compare to a patient who is thinner. The PSAs are not the same."

 WEDNESDAY, Nov. 14 (HealthDay News) -- Breast-feeding in the first three months of life appears to help shield children from developing food allergies.

Research has determined a possible role for food allergy prevention strategies in high-risk children, including maternal food avoidance in pregnancy, breast-feeding, maternal food avoidance while breast-feeding, use of hypoallergenic formulas, delayed introduction of allergenic foods and probiotics, noted one expert.

"A review of 18 studies demonstrates a significant protective effect of exclusive breast-feeding for at least three months for children with high risk for atopy (genetic tendency to develop allergic diseases) against the development of atopic dermatitis and early childhood asthma-like symptoms," Dr. Robert Wood, international health director for pediatric allergy and immunology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, said in a prepared statement.

He offered a number of recommendations for children at high risk of allergic diseases:

• Women should avoid peanuts and tree nuts during pregnancy and while breast-feeding.
• Mothers should supplement breast-feeding with a hypoallergenic formula (extensively or partially hydrolyzed).
• Delay feeding these children solid foods until they're six months old.
• Delay introduction of milk and egg until age 1 and peanut and tree nuts until age 3.
• Start early intervention when signs of food allergy appear (secondary prevention).

In a plannedmaritimeguide martialarts massageguide  presentation about allergies and dietary restrictions, another expert noted that a person may have an allergy to one member of a food family, but may be able to eat other members of the same food family.

For example, one study on nine common fish found cross-reactivity and allergenicity were highest among cod, salmon and pollack and lowest among halibut, flounder, tuna and mackerel. Another study on edible nuts found cross-reactivity was strong among walnut, pecan and hazelnut; moderate among cashew, pistachio, Brazil nut and almond; and extremely low between peanut and tree nuts.

"You may be allergic to a particular part of a food, but not to another part," Dr. Sami Bahna, chief of allergy and immunology at Louisiana State University in Shreveport, said in a prepared statement.

Another expert said doctors need to consider food allergy as a potential cause of gastrointestinal or dermatological symptoms in patients.

"The eosinophilic gastrointestinal disorders (EGID) which may affect the esophagus, stomach, colon and rectum are mostly chronic and recurrent disorders that adversely impact quality of life for patients and families," Dr. Amal Assa'ad, director of the Food Allergy & Eosinophilic Disorders Clinic at Cincinnati Children's Medical Center, said in a prepared statement.

"Patients with EGID have a high rate of sensitization to food and environmental allergens, and many of them have a high rate of clinical symptoms with various food ingestions. A subset of patients respond to removal of major food allergens from their diet," Assa'ad said.

"EGID management often requires multiple specialists, including the primary physician, allergy and immunology, gastroenterology, nutrition and psychology," she noted.

 By LINDSEY TANNER, AP Medical Writer Tue Nov 13, 6:12 PM ET

CHICAGO - A troubling case in which a high-risk organ donor infected four patients with the AIDS virus and hepatitis has led medical ethicists to warn that patients need to know more about whose organs they're getting.

It's also the first ever known instance in which one organ donor has spread hepatitis C and HIV at the same time, said Dr. Matt Kuehnert of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC and other public health officials are investigating the Chicago cases.

But they emphasized that the risk of getting any disease from transplanted organs is less than 0.01 percent. Noting that more than 400,000 transplants have occurred nationwide in the past two decades, they called the transplant system safe.

But it's not 100 percent safe: Standard testing failed to detect HIV in the Chicago case. People waiting for organs should be told as much pertinent information as possible about potential donors, said University of Pennsylvania medical ethicist Art Caplan.

Transplant surgeons leathercraftguide lodgingguide makeupguidegenerally decide what information is given to patients and their families. Sometimes it's not much because of the circumstances — patients are very sick, organs are scarce and usable for only a short time, Caplan said.

"You really have to put your faith in the transplant surgeon," agreed Ronald Taubman, who received a kidney-pancreas transplant six years ago.

The suburban Los Angeles man said he rejected one kidney because of concerns raised by his doctor, and was lucky that a better one became available.

But Caplan noted that not all patients have that choice.

"It's obviously very, very difficult because the availability of organs is such that if you pass, there's a possibility you won't get one," he said. Still, the Chicago case shows that to make an informed decision, patients "have a right to more information" than doctors often give, Caplan said.

Not every aspect of a potential donor's life is fair game, but patients have a right to know "if a donor dropped dead in a bathhouse with a needle in his arm," Caplan said.

It's not clear why the donor in the Chicago case was considered high-risk, or how much the four patients were told. But University of Minnesota ethicist Jeffrey Kahn said it underscores the importance of the consent process "and an individual's right to decide what's right for them."

Officials declined Tuesday to identify the Chicago patients, the donor or what organs were transplanted.

The four patients got their organs in January at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Rush University Medical Center and the University of Chicago Medical Center. Two had their operation at the University of Chicago hospital.

That hospital issued a statement Tuesday saying the donor died after "traumatic injury" but wouldn't provide more detail.

The cases came to light within the past two weeks after one of the patients was evaluated for a possible "re-transplant" and had blood tests, the hospital said.

A screening questionnaire revealed that the donor had engaged in high-risk behaviors, said Alison Smith of Gift of Hope Organ & Tissue Donor Network, the Elmhurst, Ill., group that procured the organs. She declined to elaborate, citing privacy concerns.

High-risk behaviors include gay men having sex within the past five years, people having sex for money or drugs within the past five years, and intravenous use of recreational drugs within the past five years. The CDC says people in any of these categories should be excluded as organ donors unless the need outweighs the risks.

The Chicago hospitals were told that the donor was high-risk, but none would say what information was relayed to the patients or their families.

Initial tests on the donor for HIV, hepatitis and other conditions came back negative, most likely because the donor had acquired the infections in the last three weeks before death.

It takes 22 days from the time of exposure to HIV for antibodies to be picked up in the standard HIV test. During that time, a person can still be infectious.

Because of that lag, there's growing support for a newer costlier test that can detect the virus earlier but takes several hours longer to get results.

Not many centers use it, including the Gift of Hope. Because of the Chicago cases, momentum favoring it likely will grow, said Dr. Michael Millis, chief of transplantation at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

"We have to reassure the person that's coming in for a transplant tomorrow that the transplant system is safe," said Millis, who supports use of the newer test. "Can we do better? I think we can."

 TUESDAY, Nov. 13 (HealthDay News) -- In mice, a low-carbohydrate diet slowed prostate tumor growth, possibly because fewer carbohydrates leads to a drop in insulin production, U.S. researchers say.

Previous studies linked insulin and a related substance called insulin-like growth factor (IGF) with the growth of prostate tumors in mice. Freedland and his colleagues theorized that reducing levels of these substances might slow prostate tumor growth.

They compared tumor growth in mice eating either a low-carbohydrate diet; a low-fat but high-carbohydrate diet; or a Western diet high in fat and carbohydrates.

Mice fed the low-carbohydrate diet had the smallest tumor size and longest survival, the team found.

""Low-fat mice kitchenguide knittingguide lacrosseguide had shorter survival and large tumors , while mice on the Western diet had the worst survival and biggest tumors. In addition, though both the low-carb and low-fat mice had lower levels of insulin, only the low-carb mice had lower levels of the form of IGF capable of stimulating tumor growth," Freedland said.

The study is published in the Nov. 13 online edition of the journal Prostate.

Freedland is currently organizing a clinical trial to examine the impact of a low-carbohydrate diet on prostate tumor growth in men.

 NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Mothers who breast feed and have high levels of a protein secreted by lipids in their milk may be increasing the risk that their child will be overweight, German researchers report.

The significance of these findings remain unclear, Dr. Matthew W. Gillman and Dr. Christos S. Mantzoros, Harvard Medical School, Boston, point out in an editorial accompanying the study, because infants may not be able to absorb the adiponectin contained in breast milk.

Also, they add, high levels of adiponectin in adults actually reduce heart disease and diabetes risk, making it "counterintuitive" that high levels would contribute to excess weight in children.

The jury homedecor huntingguide iceskating is still out on whether nursing does protect children from becoming overweight, Weyermann and her team add.

The researchers investigated how breast-feeding might influence obesity risk by looking at adiponectin and another protein secreted by fat cells, leptin, which regulates appetite as well as the body's use of energy from food.

Adiponectin is involved in metabolism of fats and sugars. The fetus and placenta produce both proteins at high levels, the researchers point out, raising the possibility that they play a role in fetal development.

The levels of both proteins were measured in the breast milk of the mothers of 674 children when the infants were six weeks old. Among the children who were breast-fed for at least six months, obesity risk rose in tandem with breast milk adiponectin levels. However, leptin levels showed no association with whether or not a child would be overweight.

"Our data provide evidence that the possible protective effect of breast-feeding against childhood obesity might depend, at least in part, on low levels of breast milk adiponectin," Weyermann and her team write.

More research is needed before it's possible to determine the health implications of the research, if any, Gillman and Mantzoros add. "The best advice remains that all women should strive to breast-feed their children for at least 12 months, with the first 4- to 6- months consisting of exclusive breast-feeding."