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21 June 2010 5:19 PM | Tagged: spill cleanup
ATLANTA When an Associated Press reporter went scuba diving in the oil-streaked Gulf of Mexico this month, people commenting on websites worried about his health.But at the same time, the oil sure didn't bother some beachgoers in Alabama. I was in the water two hours yesterday, said Robert Theil, a French visitor to Orange Beach, as his sister acted as translator. I'm not worried.It would take

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21 June 2010 1:57 PM | Tagged: people with learning disabilities
People with learning disabilities receive worse healthcare than the rest of the population some doctors and nurses believe, according to a charity.Mencap has found almost half of doctors and a third of nurses from a poll of poll of 1,084 think this is the case.It is urging health trusts to sign a charter which sets out the rights of people with learning disabilities and the responsibilities of ho

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21 June 2010 9:57 AM | Tagged: american college of emergency physicians
CHICAGO Fast decisions on life-and-death cases are the bread and butter of hospital emergency rooms.Nowhere do doctors face greater pressures to overtest and overtreat.The fear of missing something weighs heavily on every doctor's mind.But the stakes are highest in the ER, and that fear often leads to extra blood tests and imaging scans for what may be harmless chest pains, run-of-the-mill head

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19 June 2010 4:47 PM | Tagged: last ditch effort
WASHINGTON After a week of partisan wrangling, the Senate on Friday passed legislation to spare doctors a 21 percent cut in Medicare payments looming for months.But the last-ditch effort came too late.Moments after the Senate acted, Medicare announced it would begin processing claims it has already received for June at the lower rate.The reason: the House cannot act on the fix until next week.Th

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19 June 2010 7:27 AM | Tagged: massachusetts medical school
GAITHERSBURG, Maryland (AFP) An advisory panel for the US Food and Drug Administration Friday voted unanimously against approving a pill that helps boost women's sex drive, described by some as the female Viagra. The FDA's Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee said the evidence presented had not demonstrated the effectiveness or safety of flibanserin, made by the German company Boehringe

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18 June 2010 10:47 PM | Tagged: harvard medical school
Researchers have spent the past decade looking for tiny changes in common genes that predispose people to chronic diseases, such as asthma and diabetes.Now a new approach is starting to pay off: hunting for rare mutations in genes that are crucial to maintaining health. In the latest example of this approach, researchers found faulty copies of a gene called sialic acid acetylesterase (SIAE) in 2

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18 June 2010 7:08 PM | Tagged: growing obesity epidemic
CHICAGO (Reuters) Raising the price of sugary soft drinks will likely prompt thirsty consumers to seek out cheaper, healthier beverages, U.S researchers said on Thursday.They said raising the price of a can of soda by 35 percent cut soft drink sales in a hospital cafeteria by 26 percent, offering some evidence that adding a tax to soda pop may prod consumers into making better choices.Obesity a

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18 June 2010 4:48 PM | Tagged: malaria parasite
HANOI (AFP) Resistance to new anti-malarial medication appears to be spreading beyond the western Cambodia area where it was first detected, according to a US health official.The World Health Organization (WHO) warned early last year that parasites resistant to the drug artemisinin had emerged along the border between Cambodia and Thailand.Artemisinin-based medication has been largely credited i