TV News LIES

In the fall of 1999, the drug giant SmithKline Beecham secretly began a study to find out if its diabetes medicine, Avandia, was safer for the heart than a competing pill, Actos, made by Takeda.

Avandia’s success was crucial to SmithKline, whose labs were otherwise all but barren of new products. But the study’s results, completed that same year, were disastrous. Not only was Avandia no better than Actos, but the study also provided clear signs that it was riskier to the heart.

One of the side effects of chemotherapy is, ironically, cancer. The cancer doctors don't say much about it, but it's printed right on the chemo drug warning labels (in small print, of course). If you go into a cancer treatment clinic with one type of cancer, and you allow yourself to be injected with chemotherapy chemicals, you will often develop a second type of cancer as a result. Your oncologist will often claim to have successfully treated your first cancer even while you develop a second or third cancer directly caused by the chemo used to treat the original cancer.

There's nothing like cancer-causing chemotherapy to boost repeat business, huh?

Deadly yet easily preventable bloodstream infections continue to plague American hospitals because facility administrators fail to commit resources and attention to the problem, according to a survey of medical professionals released Monday.

An estimated 80,000 patients per year develop catheter-related bloodstream infections, or CRBSIs -- which can occur when tubes are inserted into a vein to monitor blood flow or deliver medication and nutrients are improperly prepared or left in longer than necessary. About 30,000 patients die as a result, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accounting for nearly a third of annual deaths due to hospital-acquired infections in the United States.

Several little-known provisions of the new health care overhaul law take effect in coming months that could have a lasting impact on the nation's health care system.

They include eliminating co-payments for certain preventive services such as mammograms, giving the government more power to review health insurers' premium increases and allowing states to expand Medicaid coverage to low-income adults without children.

Here's a quick look at some of the changes that are occurring this year:

Two antibodies, VRC01 and VRC02, identified in HIV-infected blood, attach to the CD4 binding site of HIV and appear to prevent the virus from attaching to and infecting T cells, according to new research.

Peter D. Kwong, PhD, with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, and colleagues reported the findings online today in Science.

After decades of pushing nations to surrender more power to Brussels, the European Union is about to throw in the towel on one highly contentious issue: genetically modified foods.

On Tuesday, the European Commission will formally propose giving back to national and local governments the freedom to decide whether to grow crops that many Europeans still call Frankenfoods.