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A new study raises disturbing questions about the security of medical records that are increasingly being stored on computers.

Canadian researchers were able to extract personal health information from used computers they purchased from second-hand vendors. The computers had not been properly stripped of their data before they were resold.

"Some of the data we found was very startling - and very personal information," said Khaled El Emam, who led the study at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute and the University of Ottawa. The data included information about mental health, addictions, drug prescriptions as well as medical correspondence.

In some cases, the original owners had kept data about their own medical conditions. But in other cases, the computers were used by health care workers - including employees and subcontractors - who may have worked at home on patient files.

For the study, the researchers randomly purchased 60 used disk drives from dealers in several provinces.

They were able to retrieve data from 65 per cent of them. Of these disk drives, 18 per cent contained personal medical information, according to the study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

Dr. El Emam noted that simply deleting a computer file does not actually remove the data from the disk drive. "With special software, you can recover a lot of that stuff," he warned.

That means computers used for sensitive health information should be specially encrypted to prevent the data from being easily accessed by a new computer owner.

Or the drive itself should be destroyed rather than ending up on the second-hand market.

Dr. El Emam fears a security breach could undermine the public's confidence in the health care system. What's more, it could lead to medical fraud, with people getting medical treatment using stolen insurance identification numbers.

"We really have to be sure that personal health information, especially when it is entrusted to other people, is protected and not inadvertently disclosed in this way," he said.

Roll up your sleeve

It will soon be time to roll up your sleeve for the annual flu shot. And a study published this week in The New England Journal of Medicine provides additional evidence that it is a good thing to do - especially for vulnerable seniors.

The U.S. research found that seniors who got an influenza vaccination had a 27 per cent lower chance of hospitalization from the flu or pneumonia (a common complication of the illness) and faced a 48 per cent reduced risk of death compared with those who didn't get a shot and became infected.

These findings should help settle a scientific debate about the true value of the flu shot among the elderly. The vaccine, which primes the immune system to fight the most common strains of the flu, produces a smaller response in older people than in young healthy adults. Some experts have recently questioned whether it does save lives in this group. Another study released this week documents the increasing popularity of the flu shot among Canadians. Influenza vaccination rates have more than doubled in Canada over the past decade, said lead researcher Jeff Kwong, a scientist at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto. About 71 per cent of those over the age of 65 now get a shot, according to the study in Health Reports, a Statistics Canada publication.

Still, other vulnerable groups are missing out. Only 42 per cent of people with chronic illnesses - such as heart disease, diabetes and asthma - are vaccinated. "They are at high risk [of complications from the flu] ... and ideally we should be getting everybody," Dr. Kwong said. The worst of the flu season usually lasts from November to March.

Battling diabetes

A chemical found in red wine could help fight diabetes, according to Chinese researchers.

In a study carried out in mice, they found the chemical - called resveratrol - improves the body's response to insulin.

This could be good news for people with Type 2 diabetes who don't make enough insulin or can't use it effectively - a condition known as insulin resistance. (Insulin is a hormone that plays a key role in moving glucose, or sugar, from the bloodstream into the body's tissues where it's needed for energy.)

A lot more research is needed to confirm resveratrol helps people, not just diabetic mice. But even if it works, diabetics won't be able to simply enjoy an enticing glass of cabernet sauvignon to reap the benefits.

"According to our findings, people might need to drink about three litres of red wine each day to get sufficient resveratrol - about 15 milligrams - for its biological effects," said lead researcher Qiwei Zhai of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Given the health risks of drinking that much wine, a safer option would be supplements or resveratrol-rich foods such as red grapes, blueberries and peanuts, he said in an e-mail.

The study was published in the journal Cell Metabolism.