New York Times:
Great Drug, but Does It Prolong Life?- An pretty good review for a mainstream media source on whether statins decrease mortality in the patients who take them. The answer may surprise you.
Kidney Thefts Shock India- This seems like something out of a bad horror movie, but almost 500 Indians have reported that they had their kidneys illegally removed. This will certainly be a news story for not only the human rights issues, but also for those who contend that certain plans that aim to increase the rate of transplants will spur illegal activity like this.
Yahoo! News:
Cold meds send 7,000 kids to hospitals- The headline pretty much says it all here. The only other thing of note in here was that 2/3 of these 7,000 kids took the medicines unsupervised.
Hand gels alone may not curb infections- A new study is calling into question the effectiveness of those alcohol-based sanitizers you see all over the place. I don’t find this particularly surprising as I never really considered these methods particularly thorough, but when you have to see 25 patients cutting off a few minutes per patient might seem like a reasonable thing for some.
Costs for elderly diabetics on the rise in the U.S.- Nothing particularly earth-shattering here, but some new figures about diabetes that may surprise you.
New flu vaccine may not need needles- Good news for those of you with a fear of needles. A team of Korean researchers has been experimenting with ways to deliver a flu vaccine without using a needle. There is still a long way to go, but this seems like promising work. It would certainly be a huge boon in pediatrics.
Wall Street Journal:
Wal-Mart Clinics Close in 23 Stores- Well this should certainly add to the Massachusetts in-store clinic debate. . .New York-based CheckUps has closed 23 of its Wal-Mart based in-store clinics in Florida and 3 other southern states. The article doesn’t say whether this was due to failure of the business model or poor financial decisions. The comments by readers show the wide divide in this area.
The Art of Measuring a Doctor’s Quality- Blog post that raises the issue of how we evaluate doctors. The author doesn’t say much here, but it is an interesting point for discussion.
Boston Globe:
British journal retracts article by Harvard author- Some fallout from an article we previously listed in yesterday’s Links of the Day as a British medical journal retracted a review article about rheumatoid arthritis by a Harvard doctor. We wonder if Harvard will react firing Dr. Lee S. Simon, the offending doctor, or just sweep this under their $34.9 billion rug (subject to crash depending on recent investments).
Tags: Cold medicine, Diabetes, Flu vaccine, Harvard, In-store clinic, India, Infection, Kidney, Statin
