[USN] The University of Nebraska’s Board of Regents took a stand on a controversial issue on Friday, voting down a resolution that would have restricted the amount of stem cell research done in university facilities. The resolution, which needed five votes from the board and only got four, would have followed former President George W. [...]

[dailymail] A car crash victim has spoken of the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time.
Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them [...]

[NYTimes] The role of public hospitals in America has been remarkably consistent over the decades, in spite of health care policy debates, insurance trends and shifting medical advice. They were centers of last resort, where the quality of care could be inconsistent and the finances often a disaster, but where the poor could always be [...]

[Special to The Birmingham News]  At the end of December 2000 on a cold night, my brother Bob called.
“Dad’s not doing very well,” he said. “If you want to see him before he dies, you’d better fly up here.”
I didn’t believe him. At age 88, my dad had weathered crises before, and he had told [...]

[msnbc] Analysis of a dozen published studies testing possible new uses for a Pfizer Inc. epilepsy drug found that reporting of the results was often misleading, indicating the medicine worked better than internal company documents showed.
According to the report, when a company-funded study’s primary finding wasn’t favorable, that result was usually buried and something else [...]

[AP] Britain is using genetic tests on some African asylum seekers in an effort to catch those who are lying about their nationality, drawing criticism from scientists and provoking outrage from rights groups.
The United Kingdom Border Agency launched the pilot project in September amid suspicions there might be a large number of asylum applicants lying [...]

[WSJ] The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged health officials around the country Thursday to ensure swine-flu vaccine is getting to high-risk groups, after criticism erupted over distribution to some Wall Street firms. Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and Citigroup Inc. are among several large New York City employers that [...]

[medscape] Every day, doctors face pressure to choose between practicing defense medicine or trying to lower healthcare costs.
Your patient comes in, and even if you think the treatment is ‘wait and see,’ you can’t do that. If you miss diagnosing a disease and the patient sues, his attorney will hammer you for not having done [...]

[Advocate] During a signing ceremony for the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Extension Act, President Barack Obama announced Friday that the federal government would end its ban on travel and immigration to the U.S. by people who are HIV-positive, as first reported by The Advocate. Obama made the announcement in the Diplomatic Room of the White [...]

[NYTimes] William Hsiao is a professor of economics at the Harvard School of Public Health and co-author of the 2004 book “Getting Health Reform Right.” He served as a health care adviser to the Taiwan government in the 1990s, when officials decided to reform that country’s health care system and to introduce universal coverage. He [...]