TV News LIES

Despite warnings that tanning brings a greater risk of skin cancer, many still tan to excess and U.S. researchers suggest mental health issues may play a role.

Lisham Ashrafioun, a Bowling Green State University doctoral student in psychology, and Dr. Erin Bonar, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan Addiction Research Center and a BGSU alumna, showed some who engage in excessive tanning might also be suffering from obsessive-compulsive and body dysmorphic disorders.

A new approach to killing cancer cells that uses a patient's own immune system has beaten back leukemia in 88 percent of adults, US researchers said Wednesday.

The report by scientists in New York offers more good news for the burgeoning field of cancer immunotherapy, which uses what some describe as a "living drug" that was hailed by Science magazine as the breakthrough of 2013.

The latest trial, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, involved 16 people with a kind of blood cancer known as adult B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).

Toxic chemicals may be behind the rising number of children with autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia, U.S. researchers say.

Co-authors Philippe Grandjean, adjunct professor of environmental health at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, and Philip Landrigan, dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, said the study outlines possible links between newly recognized neurotoxicants and negative health effects on children, including:

-- Manganese associated with diminished intellectual function and impaired motor skills.

-- Solvents linked to hyperactivity and aggressive behavior.

-- Certain types of pesticides might cause cognitive delays.

When anti-smoking advocate La Tanisha Wright looked at the details of an agreement reached last month between the three largest American tobacco companies, the Justice Department and a coalition of anti-tobacco groups, she said her "heart dropped."

Part of the settlement includes a set of "corrective statements," public-service advertisements about the health effects of tobacco use and admissions that tobacco companies knowingly lied about the health consequences of tobacco. These are supposed to run in more than 600 newspapers around the country and on three TV networks.

CHICAGO (AP) -- For many older Americans who lost jobs during the recession, the quest for health care has been one obstacle after another. They're unwanted by employers, rejected by insurers, struggling to cover rising medical costs and praying to reach Medicare age before a health crisis.

These luckless people, most in their 50s and 60s, have emerged this month as early winners under the nation's new health insurance system. Along with their peers who are self-employed or whose jobs do not offer insurance, they have been signing up for coverage in large numbers, submitting new-patient forms at doctor's offices and filling prescriptions at pharmacies.

On an icy night last month, a man entered a grocery store here, walked past the displays of cake mix and paper towels, and went into the bathroom, where he injected himself with heroin.

Hours later, the man was found dead in the bathroom with a needle still in his arm, authorities said. They believe the man was one of more than 80 across the country who have died in recent weeks after injecting heroin laced with fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opiate.