Geeta Pandey | Delhi | February 9

BBC - India has deferred the commercial cultivation of what would have been its first genetically modified (GM) vegetable crop due to safety concerns.

Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said more studies were needed to ensure genetically modified aubergines were safe for consumers and the environment.

Salynn Boyles | New York | February 7

WebMD - Study Shows Experimental Drug May Build New Bone by Decreasing Serotonin Levels in the Gut

The hormone serotonin may hold the key to new treatments for reversing osteoporosis-related bone loss, new research finds.

When investigators at Columbia University Medical Center treated mice and rats with an experimental drug that stopped the gut from synthesizing serotonin, they were able to reverse severe bone loss and essentially cure osteoporosis in the animals.

February 4

BBC World Service - British scientists said they could communicate with a patient who has not shown any sign of outward consciousness for five years.

They used a new brain scanning technique to 'talk' to the 29 year old Belgian man who damaged his brain in a car accident and has been classified as being in a vegetative state. The patient was able to communicate "yes" and "no" using just his thoughts during a research conducted by a team from Cambridge University. Dr Adrian Owen, who led the team, said this is a rare case.

The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine [full article at link]. The research raises many ethical issues including whether or not to allow patients in a permanent vegetative state to die by withdrawing all treatment.

Dr Ranaan Gillon is professor of medical ethics at Imperial College in London. The World Service has a short radio discussion with Dr Gillon.

Noam N. Levey | Washington | February 4

LAT - Spending was 17.3% of the economy last year. The share paid by the U.S. will soon exceed 50%, a study says.

In a stark reminder of growing costs, the government has released a new estimate that healthcare spending grew to a record 17.3% of the U.S. economy last year, marking the largest one-year jump in its share of the economy since the government started keeping such records half a century ago.

The almost $2.5 trillion spent in 2009 was $134 billion more than the previous year, when healthcare consumed 16.2% of the gross domestic product, according to an annual report by independent actuaries at the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, scheduled for release Thursday.

January 29

UU Service Committee Bulletin - According to the leader of the MPP (Papaye Peasant Movement), UUSC's partner in the Central Plateau of Haiti: "We are supporting the injured in the hospital in Hinche where more than 250 survivors have arrived. We are sending them water, soap, and food, but there is a severe lack of medicine, blood, and surgical materials. "There is a great team of orthopedic surgeons here from Boston working day and night alongside Haitian medical professionals."

The MPP is a peasant organization that has spread appropriate technologies and empowered Haitians throughout the island nation from their training center in Papaye in the Central Plateau. Now as injured and homeless earthquake survivors stream out of Port-au-Prince, MPP leaders are using their considerable organizing skills and all of their resources to attend to those who arrive in the areas of Hinche and Papaye seeking shelter, food, and medical help.

The MPP is focusing on three objectives: supporting the hospital patients in Hinche with food, and what medicine they can buy; providing food to families in the Papaye area who have taken in earthquake survivors; and redeploying their training center in Papaye as a shelter for displaced survivors who continue to arrive daily. more

Eben Harrell | London

TIME - In 1998, Andrew Wakefield, a gastroenterologist at London's Royal Free Hospital, published a study in the prestigious medical journal Lancet that linked the triple Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism and bowel disorders in children. The study — and Wakefield's subsequent public statements that parents should refuse the vaccines — sparked a public health panic that led vaccination rates in Britain to plunge.

Wakefield's study has since been discredited, and the MMR vaccine deemed to be safe. But now medical authorities in the U.K. have also ruled that the manner in which Wakefield carried out his research was unethical. In a ruling on Jan. 28, The General Medical Council, which registers and regulates doctors in the U.K., ruled that Wakefield acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly" during his research and with "callous disregard" for the children involved in his study.

Alexandra Topping | January 28

The Guardian - The Irish government came under increasing pressure to overhaul its ban on abortion today, after it was accused of exposing women to "grossly misleading" information about the procedure.

According to Human Rights Watch, Irish legislation – under which women who have an abortion in Ireland face a life sentence in prison if prosecuted – is putting women's health at risk and exposing them to deliberate misinformation from rogue pro-life agencies.

Washington | January 27

Reuters - Runners who eschew shoes may be less likely to do serious injury to their feet, because they hold their feet differently, Daniel Lieberman of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and colleagues found.

Writing in the journal Nature, they said runners who wear shoes tend to hit the ground with their heels first, whereas barefoot runners put the balls of the feet down first.

"People who don't wear shoes when they run have an astonishingly different strike," Lieberman said in a statement.

Experts are studying a phenomenon that brings a whole new meaning to the term 'unwanted pregnancy.'

Newsweek, By Sarah Kliff, January 26

About a decade ago, Elizabeth Miller remembers seeing a certain teenage girl at a hospital clinic for adolescents in Boston. The patient thought she might be pregnant and asked for a test. When it came out negative, Miller started asking the standard questions, inquiring as to whether her patient wanted to be pregnant (she didn't) and whether she was using contraceptives (she wasn't). So Miller explained all of the birth-control options and, as she describes it, "sent her on her merry way with a brown bag of condoms." It was, by most measures, a pretty routine appointment.

Except that, two weeks later, the same patient was back at the hospital, in the emergency room after her partner pushed her down the stairs. "That was the wake-up call where I started thinking there might be a relationship between the two situations," says Miller, now an assistant professor of pediatrics at University of California, Davis. "She was coming in for a pregnancy test, not wanting to be pregnant, and not wanting to use birth control. And now I'm wondering what's going on for her, knowing she was in a physically and sexually violent relationship. I started wondering whether I needed to be asking her about why [she isn't using birth control] at that visit."

Anemona Hortocollis | January 24

NYT - [snips] While Congress has been haggling over covering as many as 15 million uninsured Americans, five prestigious [NY] hospitals and UnitedHealthCare have been in bitter contract negotiations, not just over rates but also over UnitedHealthcare’s demand that the hospitals notify the insurance company within 24 hours after a patient’s admission. If a hospital failed to do so, UnitedHealthcare would cut its reimbursements for the patient by half.

Emanuella Grinberg & Lena Jakobsson | Wichita, KS | January 22

CNN - Opening statements are expected to begin Friday morning in Wichita in the murder trial of a man who admits fatally shooting one of four doctors in the United States who performed late-term abortions.

Scott Roeder, 51, has said he justifiably killed Dr. George Tiller while trying to save unborn children. Roeder gunned down the doctor as Tiller served as an usher at Sunday church services in May 2009 in Wichita.

With Roeder's beliefs expected to be the focal point of his defense, the trial could become the next forum in the fierce national debate over abortion rights.

Sarah Boseley | New York | January 20

The Guardian - Exclusive: GSK boss says drug companies must balance need to satisfy shareholders with social responsibility

The chief executive of the world's second biggest pharmaceutical company will today announce that he is putting into the public domain thousands of potential drugs that might cure malaria.

San Francisco | January 19

PA - Fish oil may be the true elixir of youth, according to new evidence of its effect on biological ageing. Omega-3 fatty acids from fish oil preserve the genetic "fuse" that determines the lifespan of cells, say scientists.

The discovery, made in heart disease patients, may explain many of the claimed health benefits of omega-3.

Taking fish oil supplements is said to protect against heart disease, improve survival rates after a heart attack, reduce mental decline in old age and help to prevent age-related changes in the eye that can lead to blindness. Research has also shown that rodents live one-third longer when given a diet enriched with fish-derived omega-3.

The Independent, By Hugh O'Shaughnessy, January 17

After 40 years of defeat and failure, America's "war on drugs" is being buried in the same fashion as it was born – amid bloodshed, confusion, corruption and scandal. US agents are being pulled from South America; Washington is putting its narcotics policy under review, and a newly confident region is no longer prepared to swallow its fatal Prohibition error. Indeed, after the expenditure of billions of dollars and the violent deaths of tens of thousands of people, a suitable epitaph for America's longest "war" may well be the plan, in Bolivia, for every family to be given the right to grow coca in its own backyard.

The "war", declared unilaterally throughout the world by Richard Nixon in 1969, is expiring as its strategists start discarding plans that have proved futile over four decades: they are preparing to withdraw their agents from narcotics battlefields from Colombia to Afghanistan and beginning to coach them in the art of trumpeting victory and melting away into anonymous defeat. Not surprisingly, the new strategy is being gingerly aired in the media of the US establishment, from The Wall Street Journal to the Miami Herald.

Julie Bindel | Jan 17

The Observer - The reasons why many men pay for sex are revealed in the interviews that make up a major new piece of research

'I don't get anything out of sex with prostitutes except for a bad feeling," says Ben. An apparently average, thirtysomething, middle-class man, Ben had taken an extended lunchbreak from his job in advertising to talk about his experiences of buying sex. Shy and slightly nervous, he told me, "I am hoping that talking about it might help me work out why I do it."

I, too, was hoping to understand his motives better. Ben was one of 700 men interviewed for a major international research project seeking to uncover the reality about men who buy sex. The project spanned six countries, and of the 103 customers we spoke to in London – where I was one of the researchers – most were surprisingly keen to discuss their experiences.

The men didn't fall into obvious stereotypes. They were aged between 18 and 70 years old; they were white, black, Asian, eastern European; most were employed and many were ­educated beyond school level. In the main they were presentable, polite, with average-to-good social skills. Many were husbands and boyfriends; just over half were either married or in a relationship with a woman.

Research published in 2005 found that the numbers of men who pay for sex had doubled in a decade. The ­authors attributed this rise to "a greater acceptability of commercial sexual contact", yet many of our ­interviewees told us that they felt ­intense guilt and shame about paying for sex. "I'm not satisfied in my mind" was how one described his feelings after paying for sex. Another told me that he felt "disappointed – what a waste of money", "lonely still" and "guilty about my relationship with my wife". In fact, many of the men were a mass of contradictions. Despite finding their experiences "unfulfilling, empty, terrible", they continued to visit prostitutes.

Sarah Boseley | London | January 14

The Guardian - Fifty years after the one of the worst disasters in medical history, hundreds of survivors of the thalidomide scandal today got an apology from the government and a new £20 million compensation package.

There are 466 thalidomiders, as they call themselves, all of them in middle-age, born between 1958 and 1961 to mothers who unwittingly took the drug Distaval for morning sickness in the early months of pregnancy. The babies suffered a variety of deformities, mostly to both arms, both legs, or all four limbs. Some also suffered damage to their internal organs.

Leigh Dayton | Jan 14

The Australian - PEOPLE who are chronically sleep deprived but manage a good night of shut-eye still do not function at their best, according to researchers.

Even a long sleep-in cannot compensate for the brain drain of too many nights of too little sleep, US and British researchers report in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

That is because the catch-up sleep may "hide" the effects of chronic sleep loss, says the team leader, physician and neurologist Daniel Cohen of Boston's Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre.

"They may falsely feel they have quickly recovered," he said. "However, they are vulnerable to a more rapid deterioration in performance when wakefulness is extended into the late night when they pull the next all-nighter."

I am so screwed! The upside is I have an excuse now...:D

Jeannine Stein | Victoria, Australia | January 12

LAT - Watching television for hour upon hour obviously isn't the best way to spend leisure time -- inactivity has been linked to obesity and heart disease. But a new study quantifies TV viewing's effect on risk of death.

Researchers found that each hour a day spent watching TV was linked with an 18% greater risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, an 11% greater risk of all causes of death, and a 9% increased risk of death from cancer.

New York Times, By Ethan Watters, January 8

Americans, particularly if they are of a certain leftward-leaning, college-educated type, worry about our country’s blunders into other cultures. In some circles, it is easy to make friends with a rousing rant about the McDonald’s near Tiananmen Square, the Nike factory in Malaysia or the latest blowback from our political or military interventions abroad. For all our self-recrimination, however, we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

BBC - A novel - and natural - way of creating new bones for humans could be just a few years away. Scientists in Italy have developed a way of turning rattan wood into bone that is almost identical to the human tissue. At the Istec laboratory of bioceramics in Faenza near Bologna, a herd of sheep have already been implanted with the bones.

The process starts by cutting the long tubular rattan wood up into manageable pieces. It is then snipped into even smaller chunks, ready for the complex chemical process to begin. The pieces are put in a furnace and heated. In simple terms, carbon and calcium are added. The wood is then further heated under intense pressure in another oven-like machine and a phosphate solution is introduced. After around 10 days, the rattan wood has been transformed into the bone-like material.

The AP reports from Oslo that the protocol that Norway adopted against MRSA (Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus) has been a wild success. Story at the link.

Sarah Boseley | January 6

Guardian Online - Thousands of elderly people are being forced to have tubes fitted so they can be artificially fed if they want to be admitted to a care home, a major report warns today.

There is no evidence that tube feeding prolongs life, and it deprives patients of the pleasure and social contact involved in normal eating and drinking, says a Royal College of Physicians working group which recommends that artificial nutrition should only be used as a last resort.

The report found that many care homes across the country are making it a condition of residence that people, often in the advanced stages of dementia, have a tube fitted into their abdomen.

David Lightman | Washington, DC | January 6

McClatchy Newspapers -
WASHINGTON — More money for community health centers. Immediate help for the uninsured. No more lifetime limits on coverage.

Under the health care legislation that's moving through Congress, these and other benefits would take effect quickly and should produce a noticeable impact on consumers, according to many independent analysts and Democrats.

"This would be a substantial package that could probably be quite helpful," said John Holahan, the director of the health policy center at Washington's Urban Institute, a research group.

Paul Ginsburg, the president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, called help for Medicare prescription-drug beneficiaries and people with pre-existing medical conditions "highly visible improvements for individuals already highly aware of the shortcomings of the existing system."

Steve Connor | Jan 5

The Independent - The United States yesterday lifted a 22-year ban on HIV-positive foreigners travelling to its shores, a restriction described by President Barack Obama as "rooted in fear rather than fact".

It has been clear for many years that the Aids virus is not spread easily by casual contact – the original rationale for the travel ban, introduced in 1987.

"We talk about reducing the stigma of this disease, yet we've treated a visitor living with it as a threat," Mr Obama said last October when he announced his intention to revoke the ban.

It covered tourists as well as foreigners seeking to live in the US, although short-term visitors could apply for a waiver, a procedure so complicated and bureaucratic that many people concluded that it was not worth the effort involved.

The lifting of the ban now means that even asylum-seekers and people applying to become residents in the US no longer have to take a mandatory HIV test. For some families, it will mean the end of painful separations between family members living in the US and abroad.

Mr Obama said it would also now be possible to organise an international Aids conference on American soil in 2012 without fear of foreign participants being refused entry or detained for long periods at the airport, which had occurred before an Aids conference in 1989.

Jupiter, FL | January 1

BBC - Scientists have shown for the first time that "lifeless" prion proteins, devoid of all genetic material, can evolve just like higher forms of life.

The Scripps Research Institute in the US says the prions can change to suit their environment and go on to develop drug resistance.