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Jennifer Wederell, a 27-year-old British woman with cystic fibrosis, died of lung cancer after she received the lungs of a heavy smoker in an organ transplant.

The patient didn’t overdose on medication. She overdosed on grapefruit juice. The 42-year-old was barely responding when her husband brought her to the emergency room. Her heart rate was slowing, and her blood pressure was falling. Doctors had to insert a breathing tube, and then a pacemaker, to revive her. They were mystified: The patient’s husband said she suffered from migraines and was taking a blood pressure drug called verapamil to help prevent the headaches. But blood tests showed she had an alarming amount of the drug in her system, five times the safe level. Did she overdose? Was she...

The Swedish Tax Authority (Skatteverket) scrambled this week to block a personal identification number, linked to Wednesday's date, which could have given a newborn boy a lengthy and somewhat confusing health record. Tolvan Tolvansson (tolv means "twelve" in Swedish) is constantly ill and pops up at hospitals and clinics across the country. At one point, he was both pregnant and suffering prostate cancer, medical journal Dagens Medecin reports. Tolvansson has also been pronounced dead on numerous occasions. Yet he is a completely fictional character, made up for health care staff to learn their way around different databases. He never really...

A deadly bacteria known as Carbapenem-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CRE, is raising concerns in the medical community. Jennifer Hsu in an Infectious Disease Physician at Sanford Health and has been closely studying this 'super bug' which is best known for it's ability to defy even the strongest of drugs. “What has happened over time with increasing exposure to antibiotics the bacteria have developed ways to evade those antibiotics and they become resist to a certain class of antibiotics,” said Hsu. In the United States, the bacteria have been found primarily in healthcare facilities and hospitals and are known to prey on...

Bostwick Laboratories Inc. will lay off 90 of 154 employees in its Orlando lab between now and next August, the company said Friday. In a layoff-warning letter sent to the state, human-resources manager Michael Tenney said the employees would be let go from the south Orlando facility at 7001 Lake Ellenor Drive. Positions being eliminated range from medical technologists, lab specialists and lab assistants to purchasing and distribution specialists. Virginia-based Bostwick, founded in 1999, specializes in diagnosing cancer through such methods as analyzing prostate biopsies and urine tests...

Dr. Jay Friedman relishes his role as dental outcast. Like a pesky younger brother who enjoys watching his siblings squirm, the 86-year-old dentist and public health advocate has for decades been poking and prodding at the oral health community over his personal obsession: wisdom teeth. Friedman has argued for more than 30 years that removing a young person's healthy wisdom teeth -- called "third molars" by professionals -- is an unnecessary and irresponsible practice. While many dentists and oral surgeons have dismissed him as a traitor and a zealot, in 2007, people in the public health arena began to listen....

Geron Corp confirmed it will discontinue development of an experimental drug to treat cancer that has spread to the brain from elsewhere in the body and also cut about 40 percent of its workforce, after patients failed to respond to the drug in a mid-stage study. The company said it will now focus on the development of another drug candidate, imetelstat, as a treatment for blood cancers and some types of solid tumors. The brain cancer drug, GRN1005 and imetelstat's development in blood cancers were the only hopes that Geron's shareholders had after the company warned investors in September that...

The benefits of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) persist years after the first treatment with the drug (also known as ecstasy), according to a follow-up study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology1. The finding gives hope to people with PTSD who do not respond to conventional treatments. However, the results come from a small-scale pilot study, and the outcomes have not been so convincing in other recently published work. In the original trial, 20 patients with PTSD who had not responded to either psychotherapy or to conventional psychopharmacological drugs received MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine) or a placebo during...

Tick bites have long been synonymous with bad news, responsible for transmitting diseases such as Lyme disease, Ehrlichiosis, and Rocky Mountain spotted fever, but this must be a carnivore or BBQ lover's worst nightmare. A growing body of research suggests that bites from a particular tick are causing an unusual allergic reaction to meat. At an allergy meeting last week, for example, a diagnostics lab presented evidence that the highest prevalence of the allergy is in the southeastern United States, where the tick primarily thrives. Yet American BBQ lovers and carnivores elsewhere may not rest easy; the allergy mysteriously afflicts...

AARHUS, Denmark — Carina Melchior is a 20-year-old Danish woman who was plunged in the middle of controversy by two close encounters with death — the first in car crash last year that put her in a coma; the second in a hospital, where doctors persuaded her parents to donate her organs and shut off her life support. But Carina recovered, and she now is at the center of a storm of questions about the criteria for brain death, over-aggressive transplant agencies and the commodification of the human body. What might have been played out quietly in an obscure Danish...

There may actually be some good news coming out of academia. “This really is a profession that has run amok,” Robert Whitaker, author of Anatomy of an Epidemic said of psychiatrists in a recent interview with Celeste McGovern which appeared in Citizen magazine. “People are beginning to question its legitimacy and they are beginning to mistrust its values, its diagnoses and its treatments.” McGovern writes that, “Even medical students are avoiding it, he adds, as the average age of psychiatrists is now 57.” Citizen is published by Focus on the Family. McGovern is based in the United Kingdom. “Every day...

Just in case the unaffordable price tag and rising costs don't quite do the trick, America's spiraling dearth of doctors will contribute heavily to the collapse of our re-engineered health care system, according to a new study:   The United States will require at least 52,000 more family doctors in the year 2025 to keep up with the growing and increasingly older U.S. population, a new study found. The predictions also reflect the passage of the Affordable Care Act -- a change that will expand health insurance coverage to an additional 38 million Americans. "The health care consumer that values...

The United States will require at least 52,000 more family doctors in the year 2025 to keep up with the growing and increasingly older U.S. population, a new study found. The predictions also reflect the passage of the Affordable Care Act — a change that will expand health insurance coverage to an additional 38 million Americans. "The health care consumer that values the relationship with a personal physician, particularly in areas already struggling with access to primary care physicians should be aware of potential access challenges that they may face in the future if the production of primary care physicians...

PM2.5 air pollution is generated by combustion © ShutterstockThe US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finds itself in an unusual position. Two prominent Republican politicians, who have repeatedly accused the EPA of killing jobs through overregulation, are condemning the agency for lax oversight of its ongoing human research studies involving concentrated airborne particles.Representative Paul Broun, who chairs the investigations and oversight subcommittee of the House of Representatives’ Science Space and Technology Committee, has asked the EPA Inspector General (IG) to investigate a series of EPA studies. Conducted in 2004, they involved exposing humans to fine particulate matter around or smaller than...

I’ve generally stayed quiet during this election season, but as the election draws near and I’m seeing posts saying that voting for Romney is a step backwards for the country…I am going to speak why I’m not supporting reelecting Obama—probably different than what you’re hearing. I honestly fear for the future of my job if he is reelected. His moves against the Catholic Church with the contraception mandate frustrate me—for my Church, as well as for me personally. You may or may not know that I have not prescribed or referred for contraception, abortion or sterilization for 16 years. That...

The Physicians Foundation has completed one of the largest and most comprehensive physician surveys ever conducted in the United States. The new survey covers a number of topics, ranging from what they think about ObamaCare to how satisfied they are in their careers, from whether they will continue to accept Medicare and Medicaid patients to what they think about the current state of the medical profession. The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a few highlights: A whopping 61 percent of doctors said they would retire today if they had the ability to do so. That's up...

"Poop transplants" are an effective way to treat people with one type of intestinal bacteria infection, a new study shows. Researchers transplanted fecal matter from healthy people into the colons of people infected with the notoriously hard-to-treat Clostridium difficile bacteria, which causes severe, watery diarrhea. The researchers found that 46 out of 49 patients got better within a week of the treatment.

-Excerpt- Nearly 14,000 patients may have received the fungus-contaminated shots distributed by the New England Compounding Pharmacy in Framingham, Mass., since May. -Excerpt- A second pharmacy connected to the NECC is also being investigated. Ameridose LLC said on Friday that it has agreed to extend a temporary shutdown while state and federal regulators continue an investigation into the company. Ameridose, based in Westborough, Mass., shares some common ownership with NECC. Investigators launched an investigation on Oct. 10.

The number of U.S. deaths from fungal meningitis linked to potentially contaminated steroid injections rose to 19 with confirmation of two new fatalities in Tennessee and one each in Florida and Virginia, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday. The deadly outbreak of the rare disease showed no signs of abating, as 14 new cases of meningitis were reported, bringing the national total to 245, plus two peripheral infections in joints.

Was it some moldy ceiling tiles? The dusty shoes of a careless employee? Or did the contamination ride in on one of the ingredients? There are lots of ways fungus could have gotten inside the Massachusetts compounding pharmacy whose steroid medication has been linked to a lethal outbreak of a rare fungal form of meningitis. The outbreak has killed at least 15 people and sickened more than 200 others in 15 states. Nearly all the victims had received steroid injections for back pain. Federal and state investigators have been tight lipped about any problems they may have seen at the...