[NYT] Poverty is often cited as contributing to poor health. Now, in an unusual approach, researchers have calculated how many people poverty kills and presented their findings, along with an argument that social factors can cause death the same way that behavior like smoking cigarettes does.
In an article published online for the June 16 issue [...]

[nytimes] This could be one glimpse of the future of health insurance.  The UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, is teaming up with the Y.M.C.A. and retail pharmacies to try a new approach to one of the nation’s most serious and expensive medical problems: Type 2 diabetes.
Rather than simply continuing to pay [...]

[AAP] Disability groups are split over a Family Court decision to approve the sterilisation of an 11-year-old girl.
Family Court judge Paul Cronin found that the performance of a hysterectomy on the child, identified only as Angela, was “in the child’s best interests”. Angela has Rett syndrome, making her profoundly disabled and unable to talk or [...]

[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 [...]

Official guidelines are causing a crisis in care of the terminally ill and growing anger among patients’ families, medical experts say.
[BBC] The advice allows food and fluids to be withdrawn from patients, who are then continuously sedated, if they are judged to be close to death.
In a letter to the Daily Telegraph the six doctors [...]

[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 [...]

The acknowledged inspiration for Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper novel about a couple who conceives a child to save the life of a daughter with leukemia, is speaking out now ahead of the release of the new movie starring Cameron Diaz on Friday.
With the help of Denver infertility specialist Dr. William B. Schoolcraft, the Nashes [...]

[NPR] Whether diabetes — or any health condition — should be a factor in the nomination of a Supreme Court justice is being raised by President Obama’s choice of Sonia Sotomayor.
 Sotomayor was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when she was 8 years old. People with the condition have shorter life spans — seven to 10 years [...]

[Rue 89] Although it has been incubating for a long time, the debate on the legalisation of gestational surrogacy has never been so topical : with the 2004 law on bioethics to be revised this year, supporters and detractors of surrogate mothers have been making their voices heard for the last month.
Carrying someone else’s baby is [...]

[WSJ Health Blog] Can a sperm bank be sued for selling sperm that causes a child to be born with a genetic disease? Yes, a federal judge has ruled. Here’s the opinion.
The case was brought on behalf of a 13-year-old girl with fragile X syndrome, a common inherited form of mental retardation.
While the judge dismissed [...]