People who get less than 7 hours of sleep per night are 3 times more likely to catch a cold than those who rack up 8 or more, according to a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Sheldon Cohen and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University recruited 153 healthy adults and paid them $800 if they’d agree to have rhinovirus sprayed up their schnozz and wait to see what happened. 

The scientists had obtained detailed sleep histories for each participant before the experiment began.

Five days after the rhino-squirt, immunologic testing revealed evidence of rhinovirus infection in 135 of the participants, yet only 54 developed symptoms of a cold.

The correlation between sleep duration and risk of getting sick was independent of known risk factors such as lack of exercise, stress and smoking.

Cold symptoms are caused by the body’s response to the virus, not the virus itself according to Cohen. People who make just the right amount of anti-virus proteins called cytokines can handle the infection without symptoms.

Those who overproduce cytokines develop the clinical syndrome. Sleep, says Cohen, probably helps the body fine-tune its immune response.

Prior studies have linked lack of sleep to coronary artery disease, weight gain, stroke and high blood pressure, not to mention grouchiness.

Some things people will not give up no matter how bad it gets out there, and chocolate is one of them.

But times have been far from rosy in the industry ever since large chocolate producers started dipping  into the premium market and putting the squeeze on niche players.

Last year, chocolate sales in supermarkets, pharmacies and convenience stores totaled $4.99 billion, an increase of 2.2%. 

That’s healthy growth during an economic crisis and newly released premium products by the big dogs, Hershey and Barry Callebaut are largely responsible for driving those numbers, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Even Mars entered the fray, and the world will never be the same thanks to mint chocolate and raspberry almond M&Ms.

Still, when all things economic started getting really nasty in Q4 2008, “growth in the premium chocolate segment slowed,” according to Josiane Kremer, a spokesperson for Barry Callebaut.

So the little guys’ livelihood is threatened, the big dogs’ investors are howling about timing and the resulting competition could scare the clothes off Lady Godiva.

There are consumers who prefer to stick with known brands like Hershey’s but others “want to support small and local producers and that’s where their loyalties are going to lie,” said Krista Faron a senior analyst at Mintel.

And there are consumers who, if chocolate were wine would happily drink Thunderbird. They could care less about cocoa sourcing and the relation between confectionary production methods and product finish.

Or, as Faron summarized, “chocolate may very well be recession-proof — it’s just a matter of how much consumers want to pay for it.”

In letters to thousands of physicians that cared for at least one affected patient, Quest Diagnostics has acknowledged providing incorrect results on Vitamin D tests carried out at its facilities between early 2007 and mid-2008.

Quest is the nation’s largest lab testing company with $7 billion in annual revenue.

Company spokespeople indicated the problem affected less than 10% of all Vitamin D tests done during the period, and that the problem has been resolved. The company is offering free do-overs for affected patients.

Most of the errors involved overstating the true Vitamin D level, which could mean that some patients did not receive supplements as they should have, according to the New York Times.

It’s “the largest patient test recall I’m aware of in my 20 years in the business,” Robert L. Michel told the Times.

Michel edits the Dark Report, a newsletter that broke the story.

The inaccuracies came after Quest shifted to a new Vitamin D assay that relied on mass spectroscopy. The new test had been adopted to improve accuracy and offer more information.

Wael Salameh, a medical director for endocrinology at Quest traced the problem to faulty materials used to calibrate the spectroscopes and to occasional failures to follow proper calibration procedures.

In recent years, Vitamin D testing has surged in response to studies showing that deficiencies of the fat-soluble vitamin are more widespread than had been thought, and are associated with increased risk of bone disease, immune deficiencies, cancer and cardiovascular disease.