[NYT] CHICAGO (AP) — Should parents of extremely obese children lose custody for not controlling their kids’ weight? A provocative commentary in one of the nation’s most distinguished medical journals argues yes, and its authors are joining a quiet chorus of advocates who say the government should be allowed to intervene in extreme cases.
It has [...]

[The Guardian] CIA organised fake vaccination programme in Abbottabad to try and find Osama bin Laden.
The CIA organised a fake vaccination programme in the town where it believed Osama bin Laden was hiding in an elaborate attempt to obtain DNA from the fugitive al-Qaida leader’s family, a Guardian investigation has found.
As part of extensive preparations [...]

[NYT] When poor people are given medical insurance, they not only find regular doctors and see doctors more often but they also feel better, are less depressed and are better able to maintain financial stability, according to a new, large-scale study that provides the first rigorously controlled assessment of the impact of Medicaid.
While the findings may [...]

[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 [...]

[Princeton]- APS-A loved one loses a parent to cancer; on television, a football player breaks his leg in a tackle; in the newspaper, a mother on the other side of the world cradles the body of her injured child. How do people react when others are in distress? Much of the time, we feel pain [...]

[RWJF]- First report showing longitudinal change demonstrates differing trends across geographic regions and individual hospitals and academic medical centers.
Chronically ill Medicare patients spent fewer days in the hospital and received more hospice care in 2007 than they did in 2003, but at the same time there was an increase in the intensity of care for [...]

[LATimes] — A degenerative nerve disease has left 57-year-old California inmate Edward Ortiz semi-paralyzed in a private Bay Area hospital for the last year. The breathing tube in his throat tethers him to a ventilator at one end of the bed; steel bracelets shackle his ankles to safety rails at the other.
Still, California taxpayers are [...]

[Courier-Journal]-U.S. government doctors once thought it was acceptable to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates, including giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.
Much of this occurred 40 to 80 [...]

[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 [...]