Friday, Dec 05th
Last update07:50:16 AM GMT
Health Glance
An interagency panel tasked with studying how the U.S. spends money in the study and prevention of breast cancer said on Tuesday that more money should be spent to study environmental causes of the disease as well as how women can prevent it.
According to the New York Times, the group has concluded that funds devoted to breast cancer are being spent inefficiently and without much coordination between agencies tackling the disease.
It is illegal to sell medical marijuana through private shops, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled Friday in a decision one lawyer called “the end of the road” for the hotly debated issue.
In a 4-1 decision, the state’s highest court affirmed an Appeals Court finding that Michigan’s 2008 medical marijuana law does not allow people to sell pot to each other, even if they’re among the tens of thousands who have state-issued marijuana cards.
Shoddy practices and unsanitary conditions at three large-scale specialty pharmacies have been tied to deaths and illnesses over the past decade, revealing that the serious safety lapses at a Massachusetts pharmacy linked to last fall’s deadly meningitis outbreak were not an isolated occurrence, records and interviews show.
The series of safety failures happened long before national attention focused on the New England Compounding Center, whose contaminated steroid shots were linked to 45 deaths and 651 illnesses.
In the next two decades, deaths from cancer, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes and a host of other illnesses are poised to soar as the American population ages. Medical advances have already sliced the pie of disease into smaller and smaller biological slivers, making it possible to target a growing range of niche medications to specific subsets of illness.
But at the same time that science is identifying a growing number of potential new cures, the public is providing a smaller number of people willing to volunteer to help test the drugs needed to treat disease.
Europe is failing to control a burgeoning industry in microscopic materials, prompting claims that it has failed to heed the lessons from millions of asbestos deaths, according to a hard-hitting new report. Despite early warnings of the damage some nanomaterials could cause, EU governments are still reacting too slowly to signs of potentially deadly environmental hazards.
Nanomaterials – tiny particles as small as a billionth of a metre – are not currently governed by any regulations specific to them in Britain or the EU, despite concern about the possible effect some may have on health.
Those who wonder why large parts of North America seem to be skipping winter have a new answer in addition to climate change: big city life.
A study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that the heat thrown off by major metropolitan areas on America's east coast caused winter warming across large areas of North America, thousands of miles away from those cities.
In testimony before a Senate subcommittee, Ken Cook spoke passionately about 10 Americans who were found to have more than 200 synthetic chemicals in their blood.
The list included flame retardants, lead, stain removers, and pesticides the federal government had banned three decades ago. "Their chemical exposures did not come from the air they breathed, the water they drank, or the food they ate," said Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, a national advocacy group.
Page 53 of 233
