When it comes to treating elderly patients in hospitals and nursing homes, Dr. David Dosa, a geriatrician at Brown University, believes doctors should adhere to the mantra “less is more.” In a recent study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, Dr. Dosa and his colleagues analyzed the medical records of 172 residents of two Rhode Island nursing homes who had been diagnosed with urinary tract infections (UTI).

A new study would have you believe that hospital errors are ten times the rate that was once reported. Researchers from the University of Utah tested a new hospital error detection protocol developed by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Massachusetts against an already-established method developed by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHR) and a voluntary reporting system.

Don’t let the Lexington-Herald Leader headline, “Madison County health board bans electronic cigarettes,” fool you. The Madison County Board of Health has actually added electronic cigarettes to their list of indoor smoking restrictions, perhaps due to an FDA warning in 2009 cautioning that the nicotine-delivery devices supposedly contain “toxic” ingredients.

Though measles was officially declared “eradicated” in the United States in 2000, a number of cases are still imported from people visiting countries that cannot or do not vaccinate against the disease. The CDC reports that in the first few months of 2011 alone, seven cases of measles have been imported by U.S. infant travelers aged 6 and 23 months. From 2001 to 2010, that number was 47.

Each year, the effort to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels with alternative energy sources, such as biofuels, leads to an increase in the diversion of staple crops from the bellies of starving nations due to resultant price hikes, The New York Times reports.

A new vaginal gel, containing the hormone progesterone and manufactured by Columbia Laboratories Inc. and Watson Pharmaceuticals Inc., reduces the rate of premature delivery in women with a short cervix by 45 percent.

Blue Mountain School, an alternative education school in Floyd County, Virginia, is learning about public health the hard way as at least 30 people, including 23 of its 45 students, have been diagnosed with pertussis, better known as whooping cough. After the devastating outbreak in California last year that claimed the lives of ten infants, you would think parents in Virginia would know better, but according to Dr.

According to a new report issued yesterday by the Partnership at Drugfree.org, a trend in substance abuse has been on the rise for the past three years among adolescents, following a decade of continuous declines in drug abuse. The number of teenagers who admitted to using marijuana within the past year increased from 32 percent in 2008 to 39 percent in 2010. During the same time period, teens who owned up to using the drug ecstasy climbed from 6 percent to 10 percent.

Recent evidence indicates that the mass media is not too quick on the uptake when it comes to “studies” purporting to link some environmental “toxin” to health effects in rodents or humans. As a soon-to-be-classic example, this week’s news is replete with a second round of breathless coverage of a report that didn’t even warrant its initial coverage: the study in question was first published online March 16 in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.

A new study presented this week at the American College of Cardiology conference in New Orleans and published online in the New England Journal of Medicine has some rather surprising results: bypass surgery does not improve survival for heart failure patients already on optimal drug therapy. Dr.