NEW YORK (Reuters) - In the city that never sleeps there is one increasingly busy nocturnal resident who New York wants to evict -- the bedbug.

The city announced plans on Wednesday to spend $500,000 raising awareness of the tiny bloodsucking mites in a bid to kill them off after bedbug complaints grew by 40 percent in the past three years.

"Everyone wants to come to New York, including bedbugs," said New York City Councilwoman Christine Quinn. "But we have a message for them ... drop dead."

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton has battled an outbreak at his Harlem office, along with lingerie outlet Victoria's Secret, teen clothing store Hollister and countless hotels who have lost thousands of dollars in revenue fighting the bedbug.

By Maggie Fox

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers have developed an implantable sensor that measures blood sugar continuously and transmits the information without wires -- a milestone, they said, in diabetes treatment.

 The device worked in one pig for more than a year and in another for nearly 10 months with no trouble, they reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

It takes the diabetes field a step closer to development of an "artificial pancreas" -- a device that can replace natural functions to control how the body handles blood sugar.

The statistics for 2009 compiled and published by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare showed both Japanese women and men extended their average life expectancy to new records — 86.44 years for women and 79.59 years for men. Average life spans rose by almost five months for women and nearly four months for men compared to the previous year.

Japanese men, however, saw their average life expectancy slip to fifth from fourth in the world ranking, according to a ministry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing department rules.

FRIDAY, July 23 (HealthDay News) -- This summer's exceptionally hot weather means children are at increased risk for dehydration, a pediatric expert warns.

"It's always important to keep your kids hydrated, but when you're dealing with this kind of heat it can be especially dangerous," Dr. Sean Cahill, an associate professor in the pediatrics department at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine, said in a Loyola news release.

"Dehydration puts kids at risk for heat-related illnesses like heat stroke. They can suffer from rhabdomyolysis, which is when their muscles break down and this process leads to kidney failure and damaged muscle cells from crystals in the urine," Cahill noted.

Three key studies in Africa in 2005 and 2007 showed that HIV transmission rates were decreased in men who were circumcised. These clinical trials were conducted on heterosexual males in Uganda, Kenya and areas of sub-Saharan South Africa. All three random trials showed that circumcision reduced the risk of female-to-male HIV transmission by 50 to 60 percent.

The success of these trials offered hope that similar trials for homosexual men in the U.S. would reveal similar results.

Eating less meat may be the key to keeping a healthy weight, say researchers.

A European study of almost 400,000 adults found that eating meat was linked with weight gain, even in people taking in the same number of calories.

The strongest association was found with processed meat, such as sausages and ham, the Imperial College London team reported.

It suggests that high-protein diets may not help slimmers in the long run.

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Researchers have identified three fragments in gluten that appear to trigger a disorder in people who are allergic to the wheat protein.

The findings, published on Thursday in the journal Science Translational Medicine, may lead to a more targeted cure instead of what sufferers practice now -- life-long abstinence from food containing gluten, such as cereal, pasta, cookies and beer.

"If you can (narrow down) the toxicity of an allergen to a few components, that enables you to make a highly targeted therapy in a way that you no longer need to target the whole immune system," said researcher Robert Anderson of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Victoria, Australia.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. researchers have developed a formula that can predict whether fertility treatment will succeed more accurately than using age alone, and used it to develop a commercial test.

They said their test, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, could save couples the agony and expense of multiple attempts to have babies using in vitro fertilization, also known as IVF.

Surprisingly, they said, the test showed that couples who would have been discouraged from trying again using traditional assessments were actually likely to succeed.

In IVF, egg and sperm are united in a lab dish and resulting embryos are implanted into the mother's uterus to grow. Predicting whether it will work is tricky and doctors rely heavily on a woman's age.

By Kate Keiland

VIENNA (Reuters) - The number of people receiving medicines for the AIDS virus leapt by a quarter last year but more patients need to be brought into treatment before they are too sick, the World Health Organisation said on Monday.

Presenting the data at an international conference on AIDS in Vienna, the WHO said an estimated 5.2 million people were being treated for the AIDS virus at the end of 2009 after an extra 1.2 million people started treatment during the year.

It described the increase -- the largest in a single year -- an "an extremely encouraging development" but called for more programs to help patients receive treatment before the virus starts to make them very sick.

"Starting treatment earlier gives us an opportunity to enable people living with HIV to stay healthier and live longer," said Gottfried Hirnschall, WHO director of HIV/AIDS.

An estimated 33.4 million people now live with HIV/AIDS around the world. The United Nations says 15 million people need AIDS drugs, so the latest increase means that only just over a third are getting them.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Roche's blockbuster Avastin in 2008 based on early-stage trials showing it shrank tumours caused by breast cancer. The decision was controversial because drugs for cancer patients who have never been treated before must usually show evidence they extend lives.

Avastin's so-called "accelerated approval" was based on the condition that later studies would show a survival benefit.

But in briefing documents posted online, FDA reviewers said two followup studies recently submitted by Roche failed to show that Avastin significantly extended lives compared to chemotherapy alone.

Additionally, the FDA said more recent data did not confirm the tumour shrinkage seen in earlier studies. Patients taking Avastin showed significantly more side-effects, including high blood pressure, fatigue and abnormal white blood cell levels.