Call it a genetic patch job for worn lungs: Canadian researchers took donated lungs deemed too damaged to transplant and repaired them with outside-the-body gene therapy. It will take lots more research to see if the fix lasts, to find out if the lungs work as well back inside a body as they do inside [...]

[medscape] H1N1 influenza has turned flu death statistics upside down, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed today.
In a normal flu season, 90% of deaths are in elderly people. But since September, 88% of deaths have been in people under age 65 — with almost a quarter of the deaths in young [...]

[healthfreedomalliance] Florida health officials are drawing up guidelines that recommend barring patients with incurable cancer, end-stage multiple sclerosis and other conditions from being admitted to hospitals if the state is overwhelmed by flu cases.
The plan, which would guide Florida hospitals on how to ration scarce medical care during a severe flu outbreak, also calls for [...]

Total health care expenses for Americans age 45 to 64 in 2006 ($370 billion) were about double the inflation-adjusted total for 1996 ($187 billion), according to the latest News and Numbers from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. AHRQ’s study covers all Americans age 45 to 64 other than those residing in nursing homes [...]

Step aside Jack Kevorkian, there’s a new “Dr. Death” in town.
Ten years after the notorious Michigan doctor was ultimately jailed for killing a patient — one of 130 he helped die through lethal injection — Philip Nitschke, a new renegade physician, is spreading the gospel of assisted suicide — and he’s coming to the United [...]

[WSJ] Editors of some of the world’s top medical journals will soon begin to demand more stringent, uniform reporting of conflicts of interest by researchers.
The requirements will go beyond existing disclosure rules at many medical journals to include items such as financial relationships involving spouses, partners or minor children. Also required will be disclosure of [...]

[The Independent] All research involving the controversial creation of animal-human “hybrid” embryos has been refused funding in Britain and one of the three scientists licensed to carry out the work has left the UK for a job in Australia.
Every one of the three projects to develop embryonic stem cells from cloned embryos created by fusing [...]