Friday, Nov 14th
Last update09:26:32 AM GMT
Health Glance
Surgical errors have attracted widespread attention over the past several years, leading to new laws and policies. In 2007, California started requiring hospitals to report certain errors and fining them if the mistakes killed or seriously injured patients.
The next year, Medicare stopped paying hospitals for the costs associated with certain errors. In 2011, Medicaid announced that it also would stop paying to fix certain preventable mistakes.
A federal crackdown on illicit foreign supplies of human growth hormone has failed to stop rampant misuse, and instead has driven record sales of the drug by some of the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies, an Associated Press investigation shows.
The crackdown, which began in 2006, reduced the illegal flow of unregulated supplies from China, India and Mexico.
The Philippines Congress approved its Reproductive Health Bill, offering government-provided contraception and sex education classes, after heated debate.
The bill, known as the RH Bill, passed the Senate 13-8 and the House of Representatives 133-79 Sunday night. A reconciliation committee will work out differences in the House and Senate versions before the legislation goes to President Benigno Aquino, who is expected to sign it before Christmas, The Philippine Star reported Monday.
The United States has backed a United Nations draft resolution favoring universal healthcare coverage. The nonbinding measure calls on U.N. member states to ensure citizens' access to health insurance, and was approved by the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday.
Supporters say the draft resolution paves the way for the post-2015 development agenda to include universal health coverage.
It was here in this thriving New England town that America’s love affair with beef started to lose its sizzle. It was here a half-century ago that obesity, high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels were all identified as risk factors for heart disease.
Indeed, it was here that scientists coined the term “risk factor,” triggering the deluge of nutrition research that keeps beef from being “what’s for dinner” in many households.
Two kids seriously injured in the Joplin, Mo., tornado in May 2011 showed up at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City suffering from antibiotic-resistant infections from dirt and debris blown into their wounds.
Physicians tried different drugs, but at first nothing seemed to work. Blame the overuse of antibiotics in livestock, according to the doctors familiar with their cases. “These kids had some really highly resistant bacteria that they clearly had not picked up in a hospital,” said Jason Newland, director of the Children Mercy’s antibiotic stewardship program.
Kari: You've been called the new Rachel Carson and a poet with a knife. In 1962, Carson wrote Silent Spring, which has been credited for helping to spark the modern environmental movement with its warnings of the dangers of pesticides.
Fifty years later, the dangers of toxic chemicals, and particularly their health effects on kids, is still an issue and one that you address in your book, Raising Elijah. Why are there dangerous chemicals still on the market? What is broken and how can we fix it?
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