health, can actually cause dangerous kidney failure, US federal health officials warned recently.

The US Centres for Disease Control cited two cases of people who became ill after eating the raw gallbladders of carp they had caught.

"The real cause of the illness and the toxic effects are not known,'' said Dr. Paul Mead, a medical epidemiologist in the CDC's National Centre for Infectious Diseases. "There are a variety of chemicals in the (fish) bile which could potentially be injurious.'' In one case, a Korean immigrant became ill and was treated in hospital for six days after eating carp caught from a tributary of the Susquehanna River in Maryland. In the other, a Cambodian immigrant who ate the gallbladders of three carp he caught at a Maryland reservoir required haemodialysis and was treated in hospital for almost two weeks.

The CDC said similar cases have already been reported in Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea. "Carp are a traditional food source in much of Asia,'' Mead said.

Doctors are being urged to ask patients about food intake and dietary practices when diagnosing illness. "The major point of these cases is not that they are a potentially big health problem in themselves, but they demonstrate we are finding new types of food-borne illness,'' Mead said.

"There are illnesses that people can get from a variety of raw food products including raw beef, raw pork and raw fish. In general, thorough cooking of any sort of meat product seems to be safer.'' *** A common nutrient found in fish and vegetable oils, meanwhile, helps dyslexics see better in the dark and could even help them read, a British researcher reported last week.

The essential fatty acid docosahexanoic acid (DHA), found in fatty fish such as tuna, rapeseed (canola) and linseed oils and marine algae, improved the vision of a small group of dyslexics, the report in the Lancet medical journal said.

Dyslexia, a learning disability, affects millions of people, making reading difficult if not impossible without special training.

Jacqueline Stordy, a nutritionist and researcher at the University of Surrey, said she found many dyslexics also saw poorly in the dark. When she gave them fish oil supplements, their night vision improved.

Some of the dyslexics given the supplement said they also could read better and found mood swings associated with dyslexia improved.

Stordy, who stressed that her findings were preliminary, said she was not surprised. "DHA is a key fatty acid in both retina and brain and is usually present in large quantities in these tissues,'' she said.

*** Is there tofu in your future? If there isn't, maybe there should be.

A new study, conducted by researchers at the Veterans Affairs Medical Centre in Lexington, Kentucky and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggests that the vegetable form of estrogen that's found in the bland spongy white stuff and other soy products may directly lower cholesterol.

"Soy protein,'' said one of the researchers, Dr. James W. Anderson, "is a very valuable asset to the diet. It's grossly underused by the American public.'' Soy is widely available as tofu, in drinks, in meat substitutes that have the consistency of hamburger and as flour that can be used in baking.