Monday, March 3rd, 2008
At a House Small Business Committee hearing on Tuesday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) and Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D) discussed strategies proposed in their states that are intended to lower health care costs and expand coverage, CQ HealthBeat reports.
Pawlenty discussed several proposed pay-for-performance initiatives, including offering incentives to providers ...
Posted in Health Insurance | No Comments »
Monday, March 3rd, 2008
Heath inequities between rich and poor, as well as between different racial and ethnic groups, shrank in the U.S. from 1966 to 1980, then widened from 1980 to 2002, as measured in rates death in the young and in infants. This was reported in a study recently published in PLoS ...
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Monday, March 3rd, 2008
A recent Article published in The Lancet suggests that the criteria for diagnosing diabetes mellitus could need reassessment. This conclusion comes from a study that looks at the connection between diabetes mellitus and a frequent diabetic complication called retinopathy.
Diabetes mellitus is a disorder due to an inability of pancreatic cells ...
Posted in Diabetes | No Comments »
Thursday, February 28th, 2008
The Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) have announced that it has been selected by Blue Shield of California Foundation (BSCF) to participate in a statewide effort to reduce healthcare-associated infections (HAIs).
APIC will join BSCF and other leading health organizations to expand the Foundation's innovative California Healthcare-Associated ...
Posted in Infectious Diseases | No Comments »
Thursday, February 28th, 2008
Leaders of the House and Senate Budget committees on Tuesday said that they might use the fiscal year 2009 budget reconciliation process to pass a Medicare bill with a provision to prevent a scheduled 10% reduction in physician reimbursements, CQ Today reports. According to CQ Today, use of the budget ...
Posted in Medicare | No Comments »
Thursday, February 28th, 2008
It is possible that hospital types of antibiotic resistant Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria may soon infect patients in community settings. This would be a situation similar to that of community-acquired meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), according to a Review published in March in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
Often, these E. coli ...
Posted in MRSA / Drug Resistance | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
The rise of oxygen and the oxidation of deep oceans between 635 and 551 million years ago may have had an impact on the increase and spread of the earliest complex life, including animals, according to a study reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences online Early ...
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Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
Who benefits from antidepressants?
A new study published today in PLoS Medicine suggests that antidepressants only benefit some, very severely depressed patients.
"New generation" antidepressants, such as fluoxetine (Prozac) are widely prescribed for the treatment of clinical depression. However some studies have suggested that these drugs do not help the majority of ...
Posted in Depression | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
University of Utah scientists developed a new crime-fighting tool by showing that human hair reveals the general location where a person drank water, helping police track past movements of criminal suspects or unidentified murder victims.
"You are what you eat and drink - and that is recorded in your hair," says ...
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