Health News

Baby Riley Matthews wheezed noisily on the exam table. "He's belly-breathing," the emergency-room doctor said worriedly _ Riley's little abdomen was markedly rising and falling with each breath, a sign of respiratory distress. Read More

The United Nations may need more than $1 billion this year to help poor countries fight the global swine flu epidemic, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Monday. Read More

As President Barack Obama pushes to overhaul the American health care system, the role of government is at the heart of the debate. In Europe, free, state-run health care is a given. 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