Anyone who has seen Louis Gossett Jr. on the big screen knows him to be a strong character actor, from his award-winning role as the unflinching Marine Gunnery Sergeant in 'An Officer And a Gentleman' to the example of a longtime happily married man in 'Why Did I Get Married, Too.'

So it is unfathomable to think that nearly two years ago, doctors told him he had only six months to live. Gossett suffered from deadly toxic mold poisoning from his home. Later, he discovered he had prostate and kidney cancer through routine screening. The actor writes about triumphing over death in his newly released life-affirming memoir, 'An Actor and A Gentleman.'

In an effort to fight the AIDS epidemic, President Barack Obama this week unveiled a new national strategy to help reduce the number of newly infected people and improve access to health care for those living with the disease and the HIV-virus.

"The United States will become a place where new HIV infections are rare and when they do occur, every person, regardless of age, gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, or socio-economic circumstance, will have unfettered access to high quality, life-extending care, free from stigma and discrimination,'' reads a portion of the introduction of the report, "National HIV/AIDS Strategy: Federal Implementation Plan,'' released following more than 10 months of input from people around the nation.

The strategy calls for an annual reduction of new HIV infections by 25 percent (from 56,300 to 42,225) by 2015. Also within the next five years, the administration plans to increase the proportion of newly diagnosed patients linked to clinical care within months of their HIV diagnosis from 65 percent to 85 percent (from 26,824 to 35,078 people). Additionally, officials aim to increase the proportion of blacks with undetectable viral load by 20 percent.

Lupus. Those five letters hurled Wendy Rodgers' life into a tailspin 10 years ago when she was first diagnosed with the chronic autoimmune inflammatory disease that causes the immune system to mistakenly attack the body's own healthy cells and tissue as if they were bacteria or viruses.

At 27, she lost her hair, suffered from painful and swollen joints, kidney problems and outsized fatigue, among other symptoms. She was so crippled by the disease that she quit work. Her husband left, unable to care for sick wife after just a year-and-a-half of marriage, she said. And Rodgers, who taught sixth-grade math and science, had lost her will to live.

But in an epiphanic moment, she embraced life like a newborn baby when she thought of her daughter whom she had at 16.

"I lost the ability to walk,'' she told Black Voices. "I even planned my funeral. I had doctors tell me that it was my last night on earth and I should just make myself as comfortable as possible. But when I thought about my daughter and realized I wanted to be here for her, I made it through. I found my strength through her. My teenage pregnancy turned out to be a blessing in disguise.''

Today, Rodgers tells her compelling story as the spokeswoman for the Lupus Awareness Campaign called "Could I have Lupus,?' a partnership with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service's Office on Women's Health and the Ad Council.

The residue of certain pesticides found on fresh produce in the United States and Canada increase the odds of children developing attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) by 35 percent, according to a recently released study.

About 4.5 million children, ages 5 to 17, have been diagnosed with ADHD, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and rates of diagnosis have risen by 3 percent a year between 1997 and 2006. The prevalence of medication treatment for ADHD is highest among children aged 9 to 12.

Exposure to the pesticides, organophosphates, has been linked to behavioral and cognitive problems in children in the past, but previous studies have focused on communities of farm workers and other high-risk populations, according to CNN.com.

Obese children in grades 3 to 6 are likely to be bullied because of their weight, even if they have good social skills, according to CNN Health, citing a new study.

Obese children were 65 percent more likely to be bullied than their peers of normal weight; overweight kids were 13 percent more likely to be bullied, although that finding was not statistically significant, according to the article, which quotes a study released last week in the journal Pediatrics.

Researchers from the University of Michigan in Ann Harbor, who conducted the study, followed over 800 children from 10 cities across the nation born in 1991.

"When we started this study, I really suspected that we might find that obesity or being overweight might not be the driving force,'' said Julie Lumeng, M.D. a professor of pediatrics and lead author of the study to CNN Health. "What we found is that it didn't matter. No matter how good your social skills, if you were overweight or obese you were more likely to be bullied.''

Pregnant women negotiating the rocky landscape of poverty tend to gain weight and endure more medical complications, particularly gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) than those who are better off financially, according to a recent study in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

Household food insecurity which is the inability to obtain nutritious and safe foods on a regular basis, is increasingly recognized as an independent risk factor for many poor women. Prior studies have demonstrated that paradoxically, women living in food insecure households report higher rates of being overweight and related health complications, the report says.

School breakfast, lunch, summer programs and subsidized meals for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) are vital to the health and well-being of the nation's children and adolescents, despite claims of links to obesity, according to an updated report.

Approximately one in six infants, children and adolescents live in homes that experience limited food supply, and half of all children participate in at least one nutrition assistance program during their first five years of life, according to the American Dietetic Association (ADA), which last week published an updated position paper on nutrition assistance for children to review the program's effectiveness.

"Without these programs, millions of infants, children and adolescents in the U.S. may not reach their full developmental potential," says the report, written by Jamie Stang, Ph.D., associate professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota and Cynthia Taft Bayerl, nutrition coordinator at the nutrition physical activity and obesity program, Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

Headache? Sneezing? Wheezing? Itchy and watery eyes?

You are not alone.

This spring is turning out to be one of the worst allergy seasons in years because of high pollen counts in cities across the nation, according the Associated Press.

The unseasonably cold winter is a likely culprit of the extreme allergy season, according to AccuWeather.com. Many plants may have bloomed later than usual, and this late blooming has overlapped the normal blooming of other plants. Right now, some areas in the deep South are seeing double the normal amount of pollen.

When a Web site reported that a recent government study erroneously reported that African American women have the highest rate of herpes infections in the United States, word spread across cyberspace with the speed of Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt. The unspoken message: The mainstream media were caught again painting African Americans in a bad light.

But the government agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), quickly stood by its March report that Hiphopwired's facts actually were erroneous.

"We at CDC want to make it clear that CDC has not changed its position on the recently released HSV-2 data and firmly stands by the important findings of that report based on the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey-- or NHANES -- a nationally representative survey of the U.S. household population that assesses a broad range of health issues,'' an official said in an statement released Thursday.

The practice of going from doctor to doctor to fraudulently obtain prescription drugs is not just a habit of the rich and famous. Most recently, the alarming practice was thrust into the spotlight when former child star Corey Haim was reportedly found to have as many as "553 prescriptions for dangerous drugs in the last year of his life,'' and it was the result of doctor shopping,'' according to CNN.com.

He was not alone. Doctor shopping reared its head in a number of recent celebrity deaths, including Michael Jackson and Anna Nicole Smith, according to some news reports.

But people from all walks of life doctor shop. Just ask Dr. Rani G. Whitfield, who said patients come to his practice in Baton Rouge, La., seeking prescriptions for addictive painkillers such as Oxycontin and Vicodin, also known as Lortab. The telltale signs of drug-seeking behavior are that patients need a certain drug because they are allergic to this drug or that drug, he said. It's not just crackheads, he said. It's lawyers, athletes and doctors, too.