“Ob-gyns should routinely screen all women between the ages of 19 and 64 for HIV, regardless of their risk factors”, according to a Committee Opinion, paper issued August 1, 2008 by The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG).
“Women represent the fastest growing population of persons infected with HIV in this country, and heterosexual [...]

[Friday's Globe and Mail] Unlike doctors, scientists don’t have an ancient moral code like the Hippocratic oath. But graduate students beginning their careers in medical research at the University of Toronto now have their own solemn ceremony in which they pledge to conduct themselves in an ethical fashion.
Karen Davis, graduate co-ordinator at the Institute of [...]

How will the world look in the year 2058? Sixty thinkers from around the world rise to that challenge in “The Way We Will Be 50 Years From Today,” a collection of essays edited by longtime journalist Mike Wallace.

The consensus view is that we’ll muddle through many of the issues that vex us today – [...]

Canada’s ban on direct-to-consumer drug advertising probably saved Canadians with high cholesterol and their drug plans $150 million in 2006 alone, suggests a new study comparing sales patterns of a controversial cholesterol lowering drug in the United States and Canada.Canadian sales of the drug Ezetrol – the generic name is ezetimibe – were four times [...]

As a former chairman of George W. Bush’s President’s Council on Bioethics, Leon Kass is well acquainted with controversy, and with the treacherous terrain at the nexus of science and politics. The council, tasked with advising the president on such hot-button issues as stem cell research and cloning, has sometimes been dismissed as a vehicle [...]

CRAIG VENTER recently announced that his research institute had synthesized the genome of a bacterium. Upon hearing this, observers across the world anxiously suggested that he was on the verge of “synthesizing life.”
But Venter has not done what most people mean by “synthesizing life.” It is true that he has helped to create a new [...]

Computer power will match the intelligence of human beings within the next 20 years because of the accelerating speed at which technology is advancing, according to a leading scientific “futurologist”.
There will be 32 times more technical progress during the next half century than there was in the entire 20th century, and one of the outcomes [...]

It’s a new way to push for patient safety: Don’t pay hospitals when they commit certain errors. Medicare will start hitting hospitals where it hurts in October, and other insurers are hot on the trail.
That has the nation’s hospitals exploring innovative programs to prevent injury and infection: Hand-washing spies. Surgical sponges that sound an alarm [...]

Nonnie Hawkins remembers standing beside her daughter’s hospital bed, steeling herself for a final goodbye.
She turned to physicians at DeKalb Medical Center, who minutes earlier had disconnected a machine that was breathing for 18-year-old Tara Bottoms-Hawkins. Hawkins thought her daughter was in a coma, as she had been for four months. But doctors said the [...]

In a search for what could be the ultimate cure for drug addiction, scientists have developed a vaccine which prevents the body from getting high.The hope is that it can stop people from falling back into a spiral of addiction if they have a relapse.
The most promising results so far have been with cocaine, but [...]