As thousands of people pour into emergency rooms and millions line up to be vaccinated, Brazil’s public health officials and recently even its military are fighting to control vector-borne diseases. Mosquitoes are carrying illnesses like dengue and yellow fever into Brazil’s largest cities, including Rio and Brasília, and the tropical disease, chikungunya, previously unheard of [...]

Doctors and health insurers called a tentative truce Tuesday in their long-standing dispute over how health plans rank physicians’ efforts in taking care of patients.
The parties said on Tuesday that they would develop a national set of standards to measure physician performance.
While insurers increasingly have been measuring doctors’ performance through public report cards or designating [...]

Many hospital patients are dissatisfied with some aspects of their care and might not recommend their hospitals to friends and relatives, the federal government said Friday as it issued ratings for most of the nation’s hospitals, based on the first uniform national survey of patients.
The survey was meant to provide a constructive way for patients [...]

Canada’s ban on direct-to-consumer drug advertising probably saved Canadians with high cholesterol and their drug plans $150 million in 2006 alone, suggests a new study comparing sales patterns of a controversial cholesterol lowering drug in the United States and Canada.Canadian sales of the drug Ezetrol – the generic name is ezetimibe – were four times [...]