Health Issue: SHORT CUTS

SHORT CUTS: Now, telescope inside eye to  fight age-related blindness    US health officials have approved a first-of-its-kind technology to counter a leading cause of blindness in older adults - a tiny telescope implanted inside the eye. The implantable Miniature Telescope aims to help in the end stages of incurable age-related macular degeneration, a creeping loss of central vision that blocks reading, watching TV, eventually even recognizing faces. The telescope is surgically inserted into one eye nfor better central vision, while leaving the other eye alone to provide peripheral vision.The brain then fuses two views into a single image. The Food and Drug Administration said 90% of telescope recipients had their vision improve by at least two lines on an eye chart. 'US Songbirds carry low-risk bird flu':    Songbirds such as sparrows and thrushes carry various forms of bird flu and could potentially spread the viruses to pigs and poultry, US researchers reported. The birds carried low-pathogenic avian influenza - the less dangerous form of bir flu - but flu viruses can and do swap genes and mutate into more dangerous forms, the researchers said. A mojor risk is that the birds would infect pigs, which are suspected "mixing vessels" for new strains of influenza - notably the ongoing pandemic of HINI swine flu, researchers wrote in the Biomed Central journal BMC infectious Diseases.