New grants are available for states to establish health insurance exchanges — a fundamental part of the Affordable Care Act the House voted on Wednesday to repeal — U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced Thursday. Her announcement came on the same day House Republicans introduced several bills aimed at revamping sections of the health care law, since the House bill on repeal is expected to die in the Senate. “The tree is rotten, so you…

The reason why intracerebral hemorrhage, a common cause of stroke, has worse consequences in diabetics than in non-diabetic patients, appears to be because high blood sugar increases the ability of a protein called plasma kallikrein to stop blood from clotting near injured vessels, say US scientists who hope the discovery will lead to new treatments that control such bleeding. You can read about the study, led by the Joslin Diabetes Center, Boston, Massachusetts, in a paper published online on 23…

Developing and developed countries that require children to be vaccinated against rotavirus “have significantly reduced the number of children admitted to hospitals with the disease, a report showed on Thursday,” Reuters reports (Kelland, 1/20). Study findings, published in a special supplement to the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, note significant declines “in the number of children hospitalized due to rotavirus in countries that include rotavirus vaccines as part of their routine immunization programs,” according to a press release issued by CDC,…

RIO GRANDE CITY, Jan. 22 – South Texas College may have to stop providing health insurance for its employees if state lawmakers implement House Bill 1 as it is currently written, says STC President Shirley Reed. Another alternative to be considered by STC’s board of trustees, Reed told the Guardian, is a big increase in tuition fees. She said the elimination of programs would be the last thing to be cut. “The stark option, if the state does not maintain…

No diet had ever worked for Tom Arnold. By the time the Houston resident reached 638 pounds, he was desperate to lose weight. Appearing on a reality show finally did the trick. Arnold lost 162 pounds during his time on “Heavy,” an A&E; series following obese people as they lost weight during a six-month treatment program. Arnold appears in the first episode (9 p.m. Monday). Knowing his successes and failures were being taped for cable helped motivate him, says Arnold,…

AHMADABAD, India (AP) — An Ebola-like hemorrhagic fever has killed three people in western India and dozens of doctors will screen a community of about 16,000 people in efforts to contain the disease, a state health minister said Wednesday. A woman died of the insect-transmitted illness two weeks ago in the Gujarat state village of Kolat and a doctor and nurse who treated her later also contracted the illness and died, state Health Minister Jay Narayan Vyas said. India’s National…

01-18-2011 – Women, nonwhites, and people in the southern United States who were newly infected with HIV and followed for an average of four years experienced greater HIV/AIDS-related morbidity compared to men and people of other races living in other regions of the country. The findings, published in the February 15 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, underscore the urgent need to improve the health of these populations in order to reduce HIV-related morbidity and mortality in the U.S….

In up to 60% of cases, females have been outliving males across Europe because of smoking, researchers revealed in the journal Tobacco Control. For the last couple of hundred years experts have been arguing about why women have been surviving for longer than men in Europe. Some say females are biologically designed to live longer, while others suggest that as women go to the doctors more they probably get treated or cured from diseases more often. However, the authors found…

BERLIN—Livestock feed producers must face stricter controls and Germany and other EU nations must have better, more centralized dioxin monitoring, German officials proposed Monday after high dioxin levels prompted the closure of thousands of farms. Agriculture Minister Ilse Aigner said officials were working nonstop to find out who and what had contaminated the feed sent to thousands of farms and vowed tough legal action against those responsible. “The damage that has been done is immense,” she told reporters after a…

“Eastern Africa is free of polio again, with four countries – Ethiopia , Kenya, Sudan and Uganda – having reported no cases of the crippling disease for more than a year, U.N. and other aid agencies said on Friday,” Reuters reports (7/30). The WHO “said the region had responded fast to the outbreak,” according to the Daily Monitor. The article reports that the four countries now “join neighbouring Somalia which has been polio free for the last three years” (Lirri,…