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Colorado’s legal marijuana dispensaries generated over $1 billion in sales during the first eight months of 2017 — a 21 percent year-over increase putting the Centennial State on path to having its best year yet in terms of retail pot sales. Licensed pot shops in Colorado sold a total of about $1.02 billion worth of marijuana products between January and August 2017, including $733,057,112 in recreational sales and $291,978,141 in medical sales, according to data released Wednesday by the state’s Department of Revenue and analyzed by The Cannabist, the Denver Post’s marijuana news portal.

Dozens of transgender teenagers are freezing their sperm or preserving their eggs on the NHS so that they can have babies after changing sex, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. Adolescent boys – some as young as 12 – who believe they are female are having their sperm frozen before receiving powerful hormone treatment that halts the onset of puberty and shuts down their reproductive system. They then have the option to use the frozen sperm so that they can father their own biological children after having sex-change surgery. 

A group of climbers had to be rescued from the top of a mountain after getting so stoned they couldn’t get back down. The four walkers got stuck on top of the 3,209ft Scafell Pike in Cumbria’s Lake District – the highest peak in England. After successfully reaching the top, however, they found themselves ‘incapacitated’ from having taken cannabis. Cumbria Police confirmed that mountain rescue and air ambulances had to be scrambled in order to rescue the climbers. ‘Persons stuck on mountain after taking cannabis. Now having to deploy mountain rescue, air support and ambulance to rescue them,’ Cumbria Police...

Hepatitis A Hepatitis A is a highly contagious liver disease caused by the hepatitis A virus. Mild cases can last a few weeks while severe cases can last several months. Los Angeles County is experiencing an outbreak of hepatitis A. The majority of cases are occurring in individuals who are homeless and/or use illicit drugs. Outbreaks of hepatitis A in persons who are homeless and/or use illicit drugs are also occurring in San Diego and Santa Cruz counties.

Mothers who experience an infection severe enough to require hospitalization during pregnancy are at higher risk of having a child with autism. Two new studies from MIT and the University of Massachusetts Medical School shed more light on this phenomenon and identify possible approaches to preventing it. In research on mice, the researchers found that the composition of bacterial populations in the mother’s digestive tract can influence whether maternal infection leads to autistic-like behaviors in offspring. They also discovered the specific brain changes that produce these behaviors. “We identified a very discrete brain region that seems to be modulating all...

Do I smoke too much pot? It’s a question I’ve asked myself over the years, and it raised its uncomfortable head this week as I absorbed the results of the latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The first thing to note about the report is the good news. One of the major and legitimate fears of those who have opposed legalization is that teen use would increase. Weed is genuinely harmful to the developing adolescent brain and those of us who passionately advocated legalization argued that making it legal would actually make it harder for teens to get...

Eaze is moving into recreational marijuana delivery with $27 million in new funding The cannabis industry has lit up in the last year, including weed delivery startup Eaze, which just raised $27 million in Series B financing and claims a 300 percent year-over-year increase in gross sales. But the weed delivery startup has come under scrutiny recently for burning through at least $1 million in cash per month. In contrast, other software-based pot delivery startups like Meadow have played it lean, focusing more on improving the software and logistics. Eaze has gone hard on marketing spend, using aggressive growth tactics...

Sarai was 25 years old when she died of Wilson’s disease, an inherited disorder that causes liver failure. A liver transplant could have cured her, but she was uninsured and was denied an appointment at two prominent Chicago transplant hospitals, including my own. Sarai’s plight was brought to my attention when a local religious group held a hunger strike advocating transplant access for Sarai and other uninsured patients. When she died, her congregation marched seven miles, holding her photograph and lugging coffins emblazoned with her name, to launch a sit-in in front of Northwestern University Hospital. Her death certificate named...

(Medical Xpress)—A team of researchers from the U.S., Germany and Israel has found that mice are able to ward off fungal lung infections because their immune systems cause fungal spores to die. In their paper published in the journal Science, the team describes the means by which they discovered how mice are able to ward off fungal lung infections and what their findings might mean for human patients. Fungus is all around us, so much so that most people breathe in approximately 1000 fungal spores every single day. But the means by which people ward off fungal infections in the...

"We take a virus, learn how it works and then we leverage it," said Dr. Michael Diamond, a professor of molecular microbiology, pathology and immunology. "Let's take advantage of what it's good at, use it to eradicate cells we don't want. Take viruses that would normally do some damage and make them do some good."

In the rich world, cancer therapy is expensive. In the developing world, it may not be available at all. Not only is cutting-edge technology in short supply, but so are things like electricity and medical personnel. The lack of necessary resources for basic healthcare is made obvious by the fact that, if diagnosed with cancer, a person in the developing world is more likely to die from it than a person in the developed world. To help alleviate this problem, cheap, uncomplicated, portable, and preferably non-surgical treatments that do not require electricity are needed. Now, a team of researchers from...

Dear AMSA, The Charlottesville travesty was a direct affront to both AMSA and American values. As the AMSA(American Medical Student Association) Fellow, I strongly condemn and denounce racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and white supremacist ideology, or any such ideals that seek to embrace racial or ethnic superiority at the expense of equality, social justice, and health, civil, and human rights. AMSA believes that these rights are essential to the protection of human dignity and are applicable to all individuals. We also respect the primacy of civil rights, even in the heightened need for security, and therefore condemn hate crimes. From Tamir...

BERLIN (AP) — A male nurse who was convicted of killing patients in Germany with overdoses of heart medication is now believed to have killed at least 86 people — and the true scale of the killings could be even larger, investigators said Monday. Many of the deaths could have been prevented if health authorities had acted more quickly on their suspicions, said Johann Kuehme, police chief in the northwestern city of Oldenburg.

Two days after his advisers said otherwise, President Trump said Thursday that he does plan to formally declare the opioid addiction crisis an emergency — as the commission he appointed to study the epidemic had recommended. “I’m saying officially right now it is an emergency,” he told reporters at his golf course in Bedminster, N.J., where he has been vacationing. “We’re going to spend a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money on the opioid crisis. We’re going to draw it up and we’re going to make it a national emergency.” New Jersey Gov. Chris...

The damaged immune systems of diabetics can be ‘retrained’ to stop them destroying insulin, scientists believe, following successful trials of a pioneering new therapy. Researchers at King’s College London and Cardiff University showed that injecting patients with tiny protein fragments prevented immune cells from targeting vital insulin. Type 1 diabetes develops when a patient's immune system mistakenly attacks the insulin producing beta cells in the pancreas. Without treatment the number of beta cells will slowly decrease and the body will no longer be able to maintain normal blood sugar (blood glucose) levels, leading to patients needing daily injections. But a...

The horrific treatment of Dr. Paul Church has become a nightmare – affecting him, of course, but ultimately all of us as well. Because he told the medical truth and refused to bow to political correctness on this critical public health issue, he has now been banned from four prominent Boston area hospitals and a urology clinic. This is the frightening state of today’s medical profession. Dr. Church is a urologist who was on the staff of several major Boston area hospitals and clinics for nearly 30 years. He was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. He has done...

Researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Ohio State's College of Engineering have developed a new technology, Tissue Nanotransfection (TNT), that can generate any cell type of interest for treatment within the patient's own body. This technology may be used to repair injured tissue or restore function of aging tissue, including organs, blood vessels and nerve cells. Results of the regenerative medicine study published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. "By using our novel nanochip technology, injured or compromised organs can be replaced. We have shown that skin is a fertile land where we can grow the elements...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The betting was that law-and-order Attorney General Jeff Sessions would come out against the legalized marijuana industry with guns blazing. But the task force Sessions assembled to find the best legal strategy is giving him no ammunition, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. The Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety, a group of prosecutors and federal law enforcement officials, has come up with no new policy recommendations to advance the attorney general’s aggressively anti-marijuana views. The group’s report largely reiterates the current Justice Department policy on marijuana.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Jesus Aponte pushes a door open to reveal hundreds of aromatic, spiky green plants, a crop that Puerto Rico hopes will help it ease a grinding economic crisis by generating millions in revenue and tens of thousands of jobs. Aponte, a 29-year-old biologist and chemical engineer, had been thinking of joining the wave of young Puerto Rican professionals heading to the U.S. to seek work — an exodus that has aggravated the U.S. territory’s woes. But then he saw the saw the island’s medical marijuana industry start to expand, and found one of the...

New finding by UCLA expert is sure to stoke the debate over how to decide if someone’s really “dead” or notThree years after being declared brain dead following an ill-fated throat surgery at Children’s Hospital in Oakland and subsequently kept on life support, Jahi McMath continues to occupy a central role in the legal and philosophical debate over when a family should remove a loved one from life support. In the latest twist to the drama, a well-known neurologist has reviewed videos of McMath and says they prove she’s still alive after all, even if her brain is not functioning...