[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 [...]

[Huffington Post]- I am a psychiatrist who has treated patients for over 35 years, run all varieties of psychiatric services and worked in city and state government. But I still cannot bear to read or hear a story of a fatal outcome for a person with a serious mental illness who dies from neglect or [...]

[FirstWord]- The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) publicly listed for the first time the prices it pays individual drug manufacturers for vaccines. UNICEF spokesperson Joan Howe stated that the agency made the decision “in the hopes it will lead to a more competitive market and lower prices, especially for newer vaccines.”
The agency, which spent $757 [...]

[USA Today]- An estimated 15,000 Medicare patients die each month in part because of care they receive in the hospital, says a government study released today.
The study is the first of its kind aimed at understanding “adverse events” in hospitals — essentially, any medical care that causes harm to a patient, according to the Department [...]

[Washington Post]  Federal law protects pharmaceutical companies from lawsuits by parents who claim that vaccines harmed their children, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.
The court ruled 6 to 2 that going before a special tribunal set up by Congress is the only way parents can be compensated for the negative side effects that in rare instances [...]

[NYTimes] On Monday, in a Manhattan town house that once belonged to polio’s most famous victim, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bill Gates made an appeal for one more big push to wipe out world polio.
Although that battle began in 1985 and Mr. Gates started making regular donations to it only in 2005, he has emerged in [...]

[Newswise]  New results from a Baylor University study show that different behaviors and strategies lead some families to cope better and emerge stronger after a weather-related event.
Dr. Sara Alexander, an applied social anthropologist at Baylor who conducts much of her research in Central America, studied different households in several coastal communities in Belize. While climate [...]

Bioethics faculty say the U didn’t do enough to investigate the death of Dan Markingson.
[HuffingtonPost] Eight professors from the University of Minnesota’s Center of Bioethics sent a letter to the Board of Regents on Monday requesting an investigation into the suicide of a former clinical trial patient by an outside “impartial panel of experts.”
The patient, [...]

[AP] China’s plans to vaccinate 100 million children and come a step closer to eradicating measles has set off a popular outcry that highlights widening public distrust of the authoritarian government after repeated health scandals.

Since the Health Ministry announced the World Health Organization-backed measles vaccination plan last week, authorities have been flooded with queries and [...]

[The Hill]  A group of bipartisan senators this week introduced legislation to entice drug makers to focus more intently on cures for uncommon children’s diseases.
Sponsored by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Al Franken (D-Minn.), the Creating Hope Act aims to solve a nagging problem inherent to the market-driven world of pharmaceutical manufacturing: [...]