It has been suggested that schizophrenic patients have a lower risk of cancer than the general population. We therefore investigated the smoking patterns of 100 current chronic schizophrenic in-patients, and the causes of death in 122 recently deceased schizophrenics. We found that schizophrenics are heavy smokers, and that schizophrenics do die from carcinoma of the bronchus. Proportional mortality rates for all malignancies were not significantly lower in schizophrenics than in the general population but there was a significant absence of cancer of the gastro-intestinal tract. Proportional mortality rates for female mammary carcinoma, pneumonia, and suicide were raised, and that for cerebrovascular disease was low. These differences between schizophrenics and the general population warrant further investigation.

We report that hamsters infected with Leishmania infantum are more attractive to female sandflies in bioassays. Entrained odours from infected animals were shown by gas chromatography to contain peaks absent from uninfected individuals. Implications of enhanced transmission, potential for developing novel diagnoses and the significance to epidemiological models are discussed.

What factors increase racial prejudice? Across the United States, increased exposure to Black Americans has been hypothesized to increase White Americans’ prejudicial attitudes toward Black Americans. Here we test an alternative explanation: People living in regions with higher infectious disease rates have a greater tendency to avoid out-groups because such avoidance reduces their perceived likelihood of contracting illnesses. Consistent with this parasite-stress hypothesis, we show that both White and Black individuals ( N > 77,000) living in U.S. states in which disease rates are higher display increased implicit (automatic) and explicit (conscious) racial prejudice. These results survived the inclusion of several individual- and state-level controls previously used to explain variability in prejudice. Furthermore, showing disease-related primes to White individuals with strong germ aversion increased their explicit, but not implicit, anti-Black/pro-White prejudice. Domestic out-groups, not just foreigners, may therefore experience increased overt forms of prejudice when disease rates are high.