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 – [...]

“I took on the conventional wisdom that an aging population is driving U.S. hospital bills higher. The truth is that a combination of spending on new construction and hi-tech equipment pushed the nation’s hospital bill to $648.2 billion in 2006 —up 7 percent from 2005. The uptick was part of a trend:  since 2000, outlays [...]

Financially strapped states are looking to take away government health insurance and benefits from millions of Americans already struggling with a souring economy.An Associated Press review of the budgets in all 50 states reveals coverage would be eliminated for hundreds of thousands of poor children, disabled and the elderly. More than 10 million people would [...]

MPs are planning a change in the law to allow babies to be conceived from artificial sperm, a move described by opponents as playing God with human DNA.
A furious debate is building over how far to leave the door open to its use in IVF treatment, ahead of a Commons vote due shortly on the [...]

A woman dying of Alzheimer’s has a fever. Should she be given antibiotics? Many people would say yes. But a provocative new study suggests that antibiotics are overused in people dying of dementia diseases and should be considered more carefully because of the growing problem of drug-resistant superbugs.
The study raises ethical questions about when it’s [...]

The state Board of Medicine has suspended a Hurricane doctor for six months after he gave a dying patient a muscle-paralyzing drug as part of “end of life” care.
Dr. Sean DiCristofaro will start serving his suspension Friday. DiCristofaro told the medical board he administered the drug after the patient was gasping for breath and his [...]

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 [...]

There are a lot of good reasons for people to lose weight and stop smoking — but saving money on lifetime health care costs isn’t one of them, according to a study out of the Netherlands.
The researchers found that healthy people cost governments more in the long run because they live years longer: an average [...]

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 [...]

Watching her tend her ill son, there is no doubting the love Clare Ginns feels for her ten-year-old son Joshua. “Are you comfy?” she asks as she gently props up her boy with pillows on the sofa. “Now, let’s give you your lunch,” she says. She even manages to handle the pumping of liquidised food [...]