Tuesday, Dec 23rd
Last update07:59:57 AM GMT
Health Glance
On top of criticism that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves medical devices with too little oversight comes another troubling finding: Many heart-related devices win FDA approval without being adequately tested on women, despite an agency directive to do so.
This means that heart valves, pacemakers, defibrillators and stents get implanted in women without evidence that they benefit this population, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco say.
Scientists in Europe report they were able to diagnose Down syndrome prenatally by giving a simple blood test to pregnant women, an approach that might one day help them avoid the more extensive procedure used now to detect the condition.
The preliminary report published online Sunday in the journal Nature Medicine is the latest of several recent studies that suggest scientists can spot Down syndrome through fetal DNA that has been shed into the mother's bloodstream.
Children can be exposed to as much as 100 times the recommended limit of cadmium when they mouth or accidentally swallow inexpensive jewelry, toxicologists warn.
Canadian and U.S. product safety authorities are investigating the presence of cadmium in children's jewelry imported from China following an Associated Press investigation in January. It found some Chinese manufacturers have been substituting cadmium for lead in cheap charm bracelets and pendants being sold throughout the United States and possibly Canada.
Kids who fidget, get distracted or bored easily, talk too much (or too little), defy rules, are not as obedient as some adults may like or have mood swings, are liable to be tagged with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, Avoidant Personality Disorder or other such ills. In short, what used to be known as typical child and adolescent behavior has been redefined as mental illness.
Federal health officials Wednesday announced a crackdown on the sale of prescription cold, cough and allergy products that had never been proven to be safe and effective.
About 500 products that had never been formally evaluated by federal regulators will be removed from the market, the Food and Drug Administration announced. The move is the latest in a series of actions by the agency to stop the sale of a variety of products that were being sold without government authorization.
Shocking as it may seem, U.S. government doctors once thought it was fine to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates. Such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.
Much of this horrific history is 40 to 80 years old, but it is the backdrop for a meeting in Washington this week by a presidential bioethics commission. The meeting was triggered by the government's apology last fall for federal doctors infecting prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis 65 years ago.
You may not want to eat genetically engineered foods. Chances are, you are eating them anyway.
Genetically modified plants grown from seeds engineered in labs now provide much of the food we eat. Most corn, soybean and cotton crops grown in the United States have been genetically modified to resist pesticides or insects, and corn and soy are common food ingredients.
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