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36 lakh Iraqi children at risk, due to surge in violence: Unicef The grievous rise of conflict in West Asian country --   Iraq   has left 36 lakh children, which is one in five of the country’s   children   at   risk   of death, injury, sexual violence or abduction, according to a recent report by United Nations Children's Emergency Fund (Unicef). In a report titled   A Heavy Price for Children,   the UN children's agency said that the number of children in Iraq were at serious risk of   death   or wartime exploitation had increased by 13 lakh in the past 18 months. The report said that 47 lakh Iraqi children --- a third of all, need humanitarian aid, with deteriorating conditions following the fierce military operations in Fallujah and around Mosul. As the scale and complexity of the humanitarian crisis in the country, reeling from nearly four decades of conflict, insecurity and neglect, where the impact on children worsens ev...

Smoking puts your sperm at risk Do you smoke? You could be unwittingly lowering your   sperm   quality, a new study warns. The research that included 20 nonsmoking men and 20 men who smoked found that that sperm of smokers has a greater extent of DNA damage than that of non-smokers. Researchers also assessed 422 proteins in participants' sperm. One protein was absent, 27 proteins were underrepresented, and 6 proteins were over-represented in smokers. Analyses of these proteins suggest that cigarette   smoking   may promote an inflammatory response in the male reproductive tract. "More and more studies are demonstrating a harmful effect of smoking on male fertility. Our results point in the direction of important semen alterations: semen of smokers presents an inflammatory nature, associated with decreased capacity of sperm to achieve fertilization and generate a healthy pregnancy," said senior author Dr Ricardo Pimenta Bertolla. Bertolla added that in t...