[NYTimes]- Last October, in Foshan, China, a 2-year-old girl was run over by a van. The driver did not stop. Over the next seven minutes, more than a dozen people walked or bicycled past the injured child. A second truck ran over her. Eventually, a woman pulled her to the side, and her mother arrived. [...]

[Bloomberg]- Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) said it reached an agreement to settle a misdemeanor criminal charge related to marketing of its antipsychotic drug Risperdal.
The U.S. has been investigating its Risperdal sales practices since 2004, including allegations the company marketed the drug for unapproved uses, J&J said in its quarterly filing yesterday. The Justice Department and [...]

[Forbes]- Patients may think they’re going to a high quality hospital when in fact they’re not, according to an analysis of Medicare data appearing in USA Today by reporters Steve Sternberg and Christopher Schnaars. The USA Today website also contains an interactive graphic with a user-friendly interface to help readers compare hospital death rates and [...]

[MinnPost]- In July, the federal government proposed new rules governing the protection of human participants in medical studies.
But as University of Minnesota bioethics professor Carl Elliott notes in a commentary published Friday in the New York Times, those rules will do nothing to protect people who volunteer for medical studies from an unethical marketing ploy [...]

(Reuters) – Drug companies that had medicines tested by contractor Cetero Research might have to reevaluate results, U.S. regulators warned after the firm was found faking documents and manipulating samples.
The Food and Drug Administration said on Tuesday two 2010 inspections, an internal company investigation and a third-party audit uncovered “significant instances of misconduct and violations” [...]

[The Economist]- HEALTH care’s biggest firms keep getting bigger. Hospitals are consolidating. Insurers are beginning to provide health care as well as pay for it. And on July 21st Express Scripts, a giant pharmacy-benefit manager (PBM), announced that it would acquire a rival, Medco. The deal would give the combined company about one-third of America’s [...]

[Tampabay]-State Rep. Richard Corcoran recalled a day last year when a doctor recommended an MRI test for his wife’s back pain.
When they asked how much it would cost, “nobody knew,” Corcoran said. “No one would tell me.”
They called around, and found that the price of an MRI varied from $350 to $1,200.
That experience was a [...]

[FierceHealthcare]- With a compensation that totals nearly $21 million in 2010, CEO Wayne Smith of Community Health Systems, Inc. (NYSE: CYH) in Tennessee, ranks number six on the list of overpaid CEOs, according to Business Insider.
Examining companies whose share prices fell but their CEOs made more than $11 million in 2010, Smith’s above-average paycheck follows [...]

[Bloomberg]- Biologists have replaced parts of the E. coli bacterium DNA using a new process that hits many targets at once, a feat that may enable scientists to significantly alter or re-engineer genetic material.
A research team, led by Farren Isaacs and George Church of Harvard University Medical School, was able to make precise changes to [...]

[Bloomberg]- Research using human embryonic stem- cell lines approved under President Barack Obama is accelerating, boosting a scientific field that’s been dogged by legal and political threats.
The U.S. allowed 37 embryonic stem-cell lines for taxpayer- funded research in June, the most of any month this year, according to the National Institutes of Health. The total [...]