[huffingtonpost] Should sugar be regulated like alcohol?
That’s the premise of a new position paper, published today in the journal Nature by three leading obesity researchers from the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine.

They argue that added sugar in all forms — sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup alike — is as perilous to [...]

[Kaiser] The head of the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which funded “two projects that created a highly pathogenic [H5N1] flu virus mutation, has welcomed a two-month moratorium on further research while defending the value and safety of the experiments,” the Financial Times reports. NIAID Director Anthony Fauci [...]

[theGuardian] Hopes of controlling malaria in Africa could be wrecked by criminals who are circulating counterfeit and substandard drugs, threatening millions of lives, scientists are warning.

They are calling for public health authorities to take urgent action to preserve the efficacy of the anti-malarials now being used in the worst-hit areas of the continent.
There has been [...]

[Reuters] Nothing in Wu Wenyong’s rural childhood hinted he would end up on a hospital bed aged 15, battling two kinds of cancer.
Born to poor farmers in Xiaoxin, a dusty village of low brick houses in southwestern Yunnan province, he paddled in the Nanpan River as a child and later helped his parents tend rice.
About 3 [...]

[Newswise] New research by the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services indicates that including comprehensive tobacco cessation benefits in Medicaid insurance coverage can result in substantial savings for Medicaid programs. The study, titled “The Return on Investment of a Medicaid Tobacco Cessation Program in Massachusetts,” published by the open access journal [...]

[WSJ] The quest to harness the power of DNA to develop personalized medicine is on the threshold of a major milestone: the $1,000 genome sequencing.
Life Technologies Corp., a Carlsbad, Calif., genomics company, plans to introduce Tuesday a machine it says will be able to map an individual’s entire genetic makeup for $1,000 by the end [...]

(PharmPro / AP) — Following fatal shootings in two New York pharmacy robberies, a U.S. senator is warning that a new batch of “super painkillers” now under review could force repeats of recent violent robberies that left six people dead.
“It’s tremendously concerning that at the same time policymakers and law enforcement professionals are waging a [...]

(CBS/AP) Scientists are worried that the government’s unprecedented action to ask two top scientific journals to withhold details of upcoming bird flu studies might impede scientific progress.
The scientists fear a chill may be descending on their field, particularly related to key studies on how viruses that normally infect birds and pigs evolve to infect people. [...]

[New York Times] The randomized clinical trial, long the gold standard of medical research, supposedly provides the most reliable data regarding which drugs, devices and procedures prove effective on real patients and which don’t. But when the people enrolled in the trial are quite different from those who will actually use the drug or device [...]

[NY Times] Medicaid gets much deeper discounts on many prescription drugs than Medicare, in part because Medicaid discounts are set by law whereas Medicare prices are negotiated by private insurers and drug companies, federal investigators said Monday in a new report.
The report, from the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, could [...]