TV News LIES

Surgeons may have a new way to smoke out cancer.

An experimental surgical knife can help surgeons make sure they've removed all the cancerous tissue, doctors reported Wednesday. Surgeons typically use knives that vaporize tumors as they cut, producing a sharp-smelling smoke. The new knife analyzes the smoke and can instantly signal whether the tissue is cancerous or healthy.

An extensive new study confirms a long-suspected link between crippling birth defects and the nitrate contamination that threatens drinking water for 250,000 people in the San Joaquin Valley.

The study took place in the Midwest, but its findings hit hard in the Valley, where research last year showed farm-related nitrate pollution is extensive and expanding in the underground water of Fresno, Tulare and Kern counties.

The birth defects involved include spina bifida, cleft palate and missing limbs.

In a dry run of one of the biggest legal battles in public health, an advocate for Australia's tobacco policies has delivered seemingly strong rebuttals of objections likely to be mounted in a landmark case at the World Trade Organization.

Two top academic lawyers presented the arguments at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, a stone's throw from the WTO, where Ukraine, Cuba, Honduras and the Dominican Republic are trying to overturn Australia's radical tobacco packaging law.

The growing antibiotic-resistant infections are a "looming public health issue" for Australia that needs urgent new funding, the country's top scientist warned.

"Antibiotic resistance has the potential to become one of the world's biggest public health challenges, requiring a serious response from our scientists, our industries and the community at large," Ian Chubb, Australia's chief scientist, told the Guardian Australia.

Two men with HIV have been off AIDS drugs for several months after receiving stem-cell transplants for cancer that appear to have cleared the virus from their bodies, researchers reported on Wednesday.

Both patients, who were treated in Boston and had been on long-term drug therapy to control their HIV, received stem-cell transplants after developing lymphoma, a type of blood cancer.

The number of women who died from an overdose of prescription painkillers jumped almost fivefold in the past decade amid an abuse epidemic, U.S. officials said.

Almost 48,000 women died from 1999 to 2010 from overdoses of prescription painkillers such as OxyContin or Vicodin (ABT), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report today. While more men died from painkiller abuse during the period, the increase of fatal overdoses was higher among women and the CDC warned the gender gap is closing quickly.