By Laura MacInnis

GENEVA (Reuters) - Thousands of uprooted Kenyans are not getting the HIV medicines they need to survive, and rising sexual attacks in camps stand to further spread the disease, public health experts say.

About 15,000 of the more than 250,000 people who have fled political, ethnic and revenge attacks in the month since Kenya's disputed presidential election are HIV-positive, according to Kenyan Health Ministry figures cited by UNAIDS.

Of that group, 2,550 were taking anti-retroviral therapy to suppress the virus that causes AIDS before escalating violence forced them out of their homes and cut off their access to the drugs that must be taken continuously to work.

An unknown additional number of HIV patients are marooned in their homes, missing treatments because local health clinics are closed, or because they are too afraid to risk the journey.

"We don't know where our patients are," Florence Muli-Musiime, deputy director-general of the Kenya-based African Medical and Research Foundation, said in a statement.

By Anne Harding

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Obesity's health effects could have more to do with feeling bad about being fat than actually being overweight, a new study shows.

Researchers who looked at a nationally representative group of more than 170,000 US adults found the difference actual weight and perceived ideal weight was a better indicator of mental and physical health than body mass index (BMI).

"The obesity 'epidemic' might have a lot more to do with our collective preoccupation with obesity than obesity itself," the study's lead author, Dr. Peter Muennig of Columbia University in New York City, told Reuters Health. "We still need to focus on healthy diet and exercise as public health officials, but we need to take fatness out of the equation. Were we to stop looking at body fat as a problem, the problem may well disappear."

Some researchers have suggested that stress due to stigmatization could be a factor in the health problems obese people have, such as high blood pressure and diabetes, he and his colleagues note in the March issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

New mothers are too quick to conclude that their children have food allergies when there is nothing wrong with them, new research has shown.

The issue is being 'blown out of all proportion' by anxious mothers mistaking everyday childhood ailments such as colds and tummy trouble for symptoms of intolerances.

More than half of parents questioned admitted cutting out at least one food from their baby's diet diet by their first birthday.

But tests on those children showed that the true rate of allergies and intolerances was lower than four per cent - a rate of barely one in 25.

The government-funded study of nearly 1,000 youngsters by Portsmouth University - one of the largest of its kind - also showed that, contrary to popular belief, the number of people suffering food intolerances and allergies is not on the rise.

Researcher Dr Carina Venter said: "People have become more aware of food allergies, particularly of peanut allergy. Mums tend to put down every rash, tummy ache, diarrhoea and cry to food allergy or intolerance.