Should boys get HPV vaccine, U.S. health authorities now recommend that girls and young women be vaccinated against human papillomavirus, a sexually transmitted disease that is a known cause of cervical cancer, but that recommendation does not extend to boys and young men.

A debate that's been simmering over whether males also should be vaccinated for human papillomavirus, or HPV, could be resolved in October at a meeting of a key advisory committee of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said CDC spokesman Tom Skinner.

Study finds living alone may increase alcohol death risk, Hospitalizations for alcohol and drug overdoses — alone or in combination — increased dramatically among 18- to 24-year-olds between 1999 and 2008, according to a study by researchers at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institutes of Health.

Led by Aaron M. White, Ph.D. and Ralph W. Hingson, Sc.D., of NIAAA's division of epidemiology and prevention research, the study examined hospitalization data from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample, a project of the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality designed to approximate a 20 percent sample of U.S. community hospitals. The findings appear in the September issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.