Scripps research prompts potential concerns
[San Diego Union Tribune] Scientists in San Diego and in other parts of California are working on numerous projects related to stem cell research, and some of that research is showing promise, at least in the early stages. At a time when the state’s finances are bordering on distress, this research [...]

A third man has died of pneumonic plague in north-western China where a town of more than 10,000 people has been sealed off, officials say.

 
[BBC] The 64-year-old man was a neighbor of the first two people to die from the plague in Ziketan in Qinghai Province.
Police have set up checkpoints around Ziketan, as medics are [...]

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Visiting the Cleveland Clinic this week,President Obama held up that well-known hospital as a model for the rest of the country. But for most of the nation’s nearly 6,000hospitals, copying the Cleveland Clinic would be like asking the Durham Bulls, a minor league team, to copy the New York Yankees.

Articles in this series are analyzing [...]

Congress can encourage competition within an increasingly important class of prescription drugs.
[Washington Post] With a name like the Affordable Health Choices Act, you’d think the health-care reform bill that passed the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee this month would have made an effort to provide affordable health choices. But instead, the bill includes [...]

[NPR] In a widely watched case in Florida this week, a jury ruled that a hospital acted “reasonably” when it sent an undocumented immigrant who had no health insurance back to his native Guatemala. The case highlights a rare but growing problem, and it could affect how hospitals treat such patients in the future.
The case [...]

Donors may get up to $10,000, an amount critics say could induce women to take unnecessary medical risks.
 
[American Medical News] The board that administers New York’s stem cell research funding program recently approved using state money to pay women who donate fresh oocytes for an experimental technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, also known as [...]

 
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida [Reuters] – A Canadian astronaut aboard the International Space Station said on Sunday it looks like Earth’s ice caps have melted a bit since he was last in orbit 12 years ago.
Bob Thirsk, who is two months into a planned six-month stay aboard the station, said he is mostly in awe when he looks [...]

[NYT] Baseball scouts are agog over Miguel Sano’s hands — strong, supple and deft. But he still had to place them under a bone-scan machine, just in case.
Sano, a shortstop roundly considered the best unsigned prospect from the talent-rich Dominican Republic, twice underwent such a procedure to help assess whether he actually is 16 years old [...]

[Huffington Post] Just a little while ago, GOP Rep. Steve Scalise from Louisiana was riven with concern over the terrifying prospect of government intervention in health care. He came armed with a sob story that really just goes to show the lengths to which people will go to obfuscate the underlying issues.
SCALISE: When you look [...]

[NYT] PETER SINGER – You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much?
The costs of the current [...]