Health briefs: Will hospitals hire hounds?

In the ongoing battle to control in-hospital bacterial infections, Dutch researchers think they may have come up with a secret weapon: a dog. Turns out that, when properly trained, a dog's highly honed and superior sense of smell can be effectively harnessed to sniff out early signs of a common but problematic infection known as Clostridium difficile, or C. difficile.

Weight training helps black men

A little weight training may go a long way toward helping improve the heart health of black men, new research from the University of Illinois at Chicago suggests. Just six weeks of resistance exercise appears to have a positive impact on the blood levels of key indicators for inflammation, immune response and/or artery shape among black men. Such indicators, or markers, are known to rise in conjunction with tissue damage, infection and stress. But after weight training, levels of two of the markers dropped in these patients, the researchers found.

-- HealthDay