[Prehospital and Disaster Medicine]  There have been great efforts on the federal and local levels to prepare for the specter of a severe influenza pandemic, however knowledge gaps and operational challenges remain. It is critical to assess if current top-down efforts actually are improving and/or likely to improve the ability of on-the-ground clinicians to respond [...]

[NYTimes] — Perhaps the only consistent thing about Britain’s socialized health care system is that it is in a perpetual state of flux, its structure constantly changing as governments search for the elusive formula that will deliver the best care for the cheapest price while costs and demand escalate.

Even as the new coalition government [...]

[SeattleTimes]  A simple bowl of white rice sits on a conference table inside the Seattle headquarters of global-health nonprofit PATH.  What looks and tastes like ordinary rice is actually the product of two decades of research and development.

For every 100 grains of rice, the bowl contains one grain of Ultra Rice. It’s actually not rice [...]

[NYTimes] On a clear and mild March day in 1993, the Operation Rescue leader Randall Terry spoke at a rally in southern Florida against abortion. “We’ve found the weak link is the doctor,” he told the crowd. “We’re going to expose them. We’re going to humiliate them.” A few days later, Dr. David Gunn, an [...]

[reliefweb] A new position paper by three human rights organizations, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-IL), Al-Mezan and Adalah, reviews Israel’s exit policy at the Erez Crossing regarding Gaza patients seeking medical treatment unavailable in Gaza. The paper argues that there is a consistent Israeli policy of distinguishing between life-threatening cases and cases that affect quality [...]

[Reuters] Brain scans may be able to predict what you will do better than you can yourself, and might offer a powerful tool for advertisers or health officials seeking to motivate consumers, researchers said on Tuesday.
They found a way to interpret “real time” brain images to show whether people who viewed messages about using sunscreen [...]

[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 [...]

[NYT] ON a Tuesday evening this spring, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at a NASA campus for a nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University, saw it happen.

While the flesh-and-blood version of Mr. Brin sat miles away at a computer capable of remotely steering [...]

[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.  [...]