Medicine Posts

Australia’s major alcohol brands on Tuesday launched voluntary health warnings on their labels targeting children, pregnant women and excessive boozing in a country famed for its binge-drinking culture. DrinkWise, an industry body representing 80 percent of Australia’s big alcohol names by volume, said new labels would be phased in on beer, wine and spirits carrying [...]

The Medicare federal health insurance program has proposed removing its requirement that kidney dialysis providers keep patient hemoglobin levels above a set minimum, which could lead to lower use of Epogen, the anemia drug sold by Amgen. The government health plan said last month that it had no plans to change its reimbursement terms for [...]

The Netherlands, famous for its liberal soft drugs policies, said on Friday it may label some highly concentrated forms of cannabis as a hard drug on a par with cocaine or heroin, because of the risk of addiction. With many coffee shops openly selling cannabis to customers and a tolerance of home-cultivation of marijuana plants, [...]

A mutated strain of scarlet fever more resistant to antibiotics has killed a second child in Hong Kong, the first deaths from the illness in the southern Chinese city in at least a decade, authorities said Wednesday. Certain characteristics of the new strain likely make it more contagious, and it may be responsible for an [...]

Preschool children with symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have a smaller-than-normal structure in the brain that plays an important role in cognitive and motor control, new research shows. The finding may help efforts to develop ways to treat the common behavioral disorder in the early stages, according to the researchers at the Kennedy Krieger Institute [...]

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said on Friday that the Medicare healthcare program will be part of any bipartisan agreement to reduce the U.S. deficit and increase the debt limit. “Medicare will be part of the solution,” McConnell told reporters, rejecting suggestion that his party may back off from changing Medicare after it became an [...]

People who have psoriasis and hypertension are more likely to have more severe high blood pressure, requiring more medications to control it, a new study suggests. About 4 percent of the U.S. population has psoriasis, which causes itchy, thickened, dry, red patches on the skin. Researchers from the University of California, Davis Health System examined [...]

It makes for a grabby headline, but are gay men really more likely to develop cancer? A new study published in the journal Cancer found that gay men were nearly twice as likely to report a diagnosis of cancer than straight men. But why? The study did not answer that question. It’s not clear, for [...]

Colonoscopy is significantly better than the less expensive screening procedure called sigmoidoscopy at detecting colon cancer in older patients, a new study says. “We imagined there would be some difference, but there’s a four-fold difference” between the two screening tests when it comes to detecting cancer, said study lead author Dr. Yize Richard Wang, a [...]