[wsj] Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, health adviser to President Barack Obama, is under scrutiny. As a bioethicist, he has written extensively about who should get medical care, who should decide, and whose life is worth saving. Dr. Emanuel is part of a school of thought that redefines a physician’s duty, insisting that it includes working for [...]

[Reuters] A $37 million international collaboration by major research bodies in the United States, Britain and Africa wants to take the fruits of the genetic revolution to a continent it has largely bypassed until now.
The project, named Human Heredity and Health in Africa or “H3Africa,” will use genetic techniques developed in the West to explore [...]

[Medscape] The proportion of organ donors from U.S. minority groups has increased substantially in the past 20 years, following national education efforts to raise awareness of the need, a new study finds.
Kidney transplants, for example, have a greater chance of success when the donor and recipient are as genetically similar as possible. But historically, organ [...]

[BBC] Another Danish pharmaceutical company is withdrawing products from Greece in protest at the government’s decision to cut the prices of medicines by 25%.
The Leo Pharma company says it is suspending sales of two popular drugs because the price reductions will cause job losses across Europe.   The Greek government is struggling with a debt crisis.  [...]

[Medscape] — Recipients of hearts from donors who were homeless die sooner and at a higher rate than those getting hearts from donors who weren’t homeless, based on an analysis of the 2005–2009 experience at a major Los Angeles medical center.
The study, small and inconclusive, nonetheless also showed that three of the five early deaths [...]

[abc] Britain is considering paying organ donors as a way of increasing the number of transplants carried out in the United Kingdom.
A consultation being run by the independent Nuffield Council on Bioethics is canvassing opinions from the public and professionals on different incentives which could be provided to potential donors. 
Ethicists will examine whether laws prohibiting [...]

[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 [...]

[NYTimes] Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline will supply hundreds of millions of doses of their pneumonia vaccines to the world’s poorest countries at heavily discounted prices under a novel agreement announced Tuesday.
But at least one expert maintains that the prices are still too high.
The deal was announced by the GAVI Alliance, a nonprofit organization, which estimated the [...]

[Philly.com] Hey, buddy, can you spare a kidney?
What if you got $10,000 for your trouble? $100,000? Or more?
With 106,131 Americans now on waiting lists for an organ – 83,754 of them for kidneys – researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia VA Medical Center sought to find out whether financial incentives would increase [...]