Richard Knox

A few well-placed Botox injections can erase your hard-won character lines. But that may also make you less likely to pick up on other people's emotions.

Like millions of baby boomers, I've always thought I'd stay active into my later years. That's unlike many in my parents' generation who gave up hiking, biking, running, kayaking and other strenuous pursuits (if they ever did these things in the first place) when they developed aches and pains.

So the last six months have been discouraging. First, there was a painful left Achilles tendon. That was brought on by a gentle two-mile run — after not running for a long time due to bone spur pain that took a year to go away.

Scientists report that children exposed before birth to a common class of pesticides can have lower IQ levels when they reach school age. The pesticides, known as organophosphates, are widely used in agriculture.

The new data come from three independent studies published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

One study, from California, involved several hundred women and children who live on or near farms where pesticides are sprayed on crops.

The World Health Organization has brokered a deal resolving a long-running dispute between poorer countries and developed nations over access to emerging flu viruses and vaccines against them.

It's bug season again. And once again, most people won't bother spraying or slathering on repellents.

That bugs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention because biting insects are more than an itchy annoyance. Tick bites cause 30,000 Lyme disease infections every year. Mosquito-borne West Nile virus causes 600 potentially fatal brain infections a year.

People's lackadaisical attitude is due to two things, says Marc Dolan of the CDC's vector-borne infectious diseases laboratory in Fort Collins, Colo.

Everybody over a certain age — say, around 50 — has these moments: The car keys go missing. They can't retrieve a once-familiar name. They stride into a room with purpose and then forget why.

Phyllis Hersch knows about those lapses.

"I go to the store and do five errands and miss the most important one because I've gotten distracted by something else," says Hersh, who just turned 70. Recently she alarmed herself by leaving her car in the garage with the motor running at her home in Massachusetts.

When it comes to health effects from low radiation doses, scientists don't know beans.