After months during which the media have been speculating about Apple Incorporated’s Chief Executing Officer (CEO) Steve Jobs’ health, the company has recently announced that Jobs was actually dealing with some serious health issues.

Previously, Jobs’ struggle with pancreatic cancer in 2004 and his loss of weight had rendered everybody to believe that his cancer had recurred and the rumors started spreading like wildfire, while Apple did nothing to put an end to them.

Now, Steve Jobs said that his health issues had turned out more serious that he had initially thought and that he had been consequently forced to take a five-month leave of absence from Apple, thus handing over the daily operations to Chief Operating Officer (COO) Tim Cook.

Not surprisingly, Jobs’ announcement triggered a chain reaction that resulted in Apple’s shares to drop, leaving many wondering what further aftermaths the CEO’s health issues would entail concerning the company.

Although Jobs said that he was only facing some hormonal imbalance, speculations about his condition are focusing on a recurrence of the pancreatic cancer that he managed to fight off back in 2004. At that time, he told his employees that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer only after the tumor had been surgically removed and he had been cured.

Ever since last summer, rumors about Steve Jobs’ health have been popping up out of nowhere, while in August 2008, Bloomberg inadvertently published Apple CEO’s obituary.

The 17-page document reporting his death was immediately pulled from the newswire, but Gawker.com was able to save it and publish it in its turn.

In October, an 18-year-old teenager posted a report to CNN's iReport website, stating that Apple Incorporated’s Chief Executing Officer Steve Jobs had suffered a heart-attack, a story that turned out to have been nothing more than maybe a practical joke. Nevertheless, the news rendered Apple’s stock price to go down by 5 percent.