The health benefits of owning a pet are well known: Having a furry friend around the house can lower your blood pressure, help you maintain healthy cholesterol and triglyceride levels, and make you feel less lonely, boosting your mood and sense of well-being. But as anyone who finds herself wheezing, sneezing, and rubbing her itchy, itchy eyes at the first whiff of dander can tell you, pets can make you miserable from a health standpoint as well.

Sadly, a new study adds a new health twist for people who are longing to adopt a cat for the first time: If you've never owned a cat and you adopt one as an adult, you are almost twice as likely to develop an immune reaction to your kitty than people who owned cats when they were kids. The rates of response are even higher in people who have other allergies, prompting the researchers to recommend that those people consider avoiding cats altogether.

When E! News host Giuliana Rancic announced she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, many of us were seriously dumbfounded by the news. This poor woman! Given her struggles with infertility and all the attention that's been paid to her weight, it seemed like she had already been through enough already!

But after having gone through a double lumpectomy as part of her breast cancer treatment last month, it turns out she's in really high spirits. She says she has "good days and bad days," but she's "hanging in there," and she credits her fans for that. She says she's grateful they've continued to tell her through blogs, tweets, and emails, "'Be strong. You're strong.'" I could see why that would make an amazing difference. In fact, it seems her entire experience -- from announcing the diagnosis to recovering from her surgery -- has ironically done a very positive number on Giuliana.  

When I saw the new Kleenex commercial about the disgusting array of germs that can hide in the average home's hand towels, I couldn't resist going online and putting my own set under the microscope of the Kleenex Hand Towel Analyzer. It's easy enough: Answer a few questions about how many people live in your home, your family's handwashing habits, and whether or not you have pets, and voila! The Analyzer instantly tells you where your home's hand towels fall on the gross-out spectrum.

As a germaphobe with less-than-great housekeeping skills, I was neither pleased nor surprised with the Hand Towel Analyzer's results.

Does your partner ever claim to feel sick after he ejaculates? I mean really sick, with fever, fatigue, and itchy eyes, like he has the flu.

Well, he may be telling the truth, that he has the man-flu, and not just trying to find an excuse to lay around in bed because he’s worn out from your love-making session. He may actually be allergic to his own semen.

Huh? Come again?

The results of a new Dutch study of this semen allergy, known as post-orgasmic illness syndrome (POIS), confirms the cause of this sickness. The study was conducted by pricking the subjects' skin with their own diluted semen and recording their bodies' reactions, which ran the gamut of flu-like symptoms.

On last night's Glee, Mr. Shue came down with a nasty virus that almost led to him losing his gig as club director of New Directions. When he first starts feeling hot and woozy, he tries to shrug it off and "power through" teaching the glee kids. But it doesn't work. He ends up sick as a dog, in bed, being taken care of by his looney-tunes ex-wife.

We've all been there, right? The feeling of "coming down" with a bug is disgusting. Usually we're quick to conclude that we have a cold or the flu, but what if it's not?

Here, a few sneaky symptoms that pose as a cold or the flu ... but are really something else completely. 

Welcome to winter, when everyone and their sister start scratching that red spot on their elbow and declares they've had it up to here with this blasted eczema.

Excuse me while I cough a little something into my napkin that rhymes with "mull bit."

Sure, you itch. But the chances are you don't have eczema.

If you've ever joked that you're allergic to working out while huffing and puffing through a class at the gym, you're in luck: Both sweat and exercise are among a number of strange and unusual allergies that people actually have.

An allergic reaction happens when our immune system decides that some neutral substance, called an allergen, is actually harmful. As we inhale, swallow, touch, or inject, we take in allergens and our immune system responds by attacking.

When Brittany Murphy and Simon Monjack died within months of each other, it was widely suspected that drugs were involved. Then last week a report came out that determined they both died from the same cause -- pneumonia and acute anemia -- which was curious.

Now officials are investigating if mold in their Hollywood Hills home might have played a role in their deaths, according to TMZ.