Your health: Working from home linked to insomnia

Working from home linked to insomnia

While some see being able to work from home as a job perk, it can actually lead to excess stress and insomnia, FOX Business reports.

A United Nations study looked at the impacts of working remotely and found that the pressures of signing on outside of the traditional 9-5 work day is causing workers across the globe to have high stress levels and more incidents of insomnia.

The study took the pulse of workers from 15 countries - including the United States - and found that overall 41 percent of highly-mobile employees say they felt some degree of stress, compared to 25 percent of office workers.

Kate Lister, president of Global Workplace Analytics, who also participated in the U.S. portion of the study, says for American workers, working from home isn't the problem - but instead it is not knowing when to stop.

"We love the ability to work everywhere and anywhere, but it has a dark side. Some employers are beginning to recognize this and enforce downtime," Lister said.

Illinois sees decline in HIV infections

New calculations to better track HIV infections confirm that the United States is seeing a strong and steady decline, The Associated Press reports.

The number of new cases has been falling for years. But health officials wanted a clearer picture of how the epidemic was behaving. They count people when they were diagnosed with the AIDS virus - not when they actually contracted it, which can be months or years earlier.

Counting infections instead of diagnoses is a more ideal gauge - a kind of speedometer that tells how fast the epidemic is actually moving, said David Holtgrave, an HIV researcher at Johns Hopkins University. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used blood test results to help date the infections. Their calculations showed new infections dropped by nearly 18 percent over six years, the CDC reported.

Officials also said they were able to estimate annual HIV infections in 35 states. No state saw an increase. Seven saw significant decreases - Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, North Carolina and Texas.

Though health experts expected a decline, they welcomed the confirmation.

"It's very exciting to see this kind of drop," said Ron Brookmeyer, a statistician at the University of California, Los Angeles.

It suggests that stepped-up efforts to diagnose and treat infections are paying off, he added.