Health News

A former surgery technician may have exposed thousands of Colorado patients to hepatitis C when she swapped her own dirty syringes for ones filled with a powerful narcotic, federal authorities said Thursday. Read More

When carpenter Greg Douglas rolled his pickup truck, his toolbox hit him and smashed his ribs and collarbone. After a month in the hospital, the medical bills hit him even harder, totaling $165,000. Read More

A federal investigation has found that heart attack survivors enrolled in a study of a controversial alternative medicine treatment were not told enough about potential dangers from the drug being tested, including death. Read More

With swine flu continuing to spread around the world, researchers say they have found the reason it is _ so far _ more a series of local blazes than a wide-raging wildfire. The new virus, H1N1, has a protein on its surface that is not very efficient at binding with receptors in people's respiratory tracts, researchers at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology report in Friday's edition of the journal Science. Read More

The number of U.S. swine flu cases has reached nearly 34,000, and deaths have risen 34 percent in the past week to 170, federal health officials reported Thursday. Read More

Attorney General Eric Holder had emergency oral surgery Thursday to remove a cracked tooth. Read More

In a perverse twist of medical fate, Farrah Fawcett has become the poster girl for anal cancer, a rare disease often linked to a sexually transmitted virus. Read More

When Michael Jackson went into cardiac arrest, rescuers took him to a place known for bringing the dead back to life. A world-renowned surgeon at the UCLA Medical Center has pioneered a way to revive people that most doctors would have long written off, including a woman whose heart had stopped for 2 1/2 hours. Read More

You don't have to be Michael Jackson to have this problem: The odds of surviving cardiac arrest after getting CPR in a hospital are slim and have not improved in more than a decade, a big Medicare study concludes. Read More

A handful of typos in a mysterious region of the human genetic code are connected to a slightly higher risk of schizophrenia, new studies show. Read More

A bone growth agent used in thousands of spinal fusion surgeries for neck pain has been linked to complications and higher cost, according to the first nationwide study of the product. Safety questions arose last year about the protein product, BMP, when used in fusion surgeries in the neck region, a use not approved by federal regulators. Read More

For men with fertility problems, some doctors are prescribing a very conventional way to have a baby: more sex. Read More

The doctor had barely pulled away the needle when a blister appeared on Tracey Berg-Fulton's abdomen: An experimental shot was revving up the 24-year-old's immune system -- part of a bold quest to create a vaccine-like therapy for diabetes. Read More

For the first time, a case of swine flu has proven resistant to Tamiflu _ the leading pharmaceutical weapon against the new virus, international health officials said Monday. Read More

A 9-year-old girl infected with swine flu has died in Britain, the third swine flu fatality in the U.K., a hospital reported Monday. Read More

Two new techniques to preserve and transplant ovaries might give women a better chance to fight their biological clocks and have children when they are older, doctors announced Monday. Read More

The government declared an end to a shortage of a childhood vaccine that protects against bacterial meningitis, pneumonia and other serious infections. Read More

Each day, skeleton crews of doctors, nurses and pharmacists field almost 900 calls a day around California from people such as a mother whose child swallowed flea repellant and an elderly man who accidentally doubled up on his medication. Read More

A celebrity like Apple CEO Steve Jobs scores a rare organ transplant and the world wonders: Did he game the system? The rich have plenty of advantages that others don't. But winning the "transplant lottery" involves more than the size of your wallet _ and true medical need. Read More

People exposed to rabies need only four vaccinations, not the five currently recommended, a vaccine advisory committee said Wednesday. In the past, rabies shots were dreaded almost as much as the disease itself. Until the 1970s, an encounter with a rabid animal led to at least 14 shots in the abdomen. But vaccines have improved, and five shots in the arm or thigh have been the U.S. standard for more than 20 years. Read More