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When George W. Bush was stumping as a "compassionate conservative" in the closing days of the 2000 presidential campaign, he went to Florida and repeated a campaign promise to double the funding for the National Institutes of Health. "I will lead a medical moon shot to reach far beyond what seems possible today and discover new cures for age-old afflictions," Bush said. After he won Florida by a famously narrow margin -- and thus was elected president despite losing the nationwide popular vote -- Bush basically made good on his funding promise. In fiscal 2000, the NIH spent $15.415 billion;...

In a study published online on Feb. 8 by the journal Tobacco Control, researchers from the University of California at San Francisco—using taxpayer funding from the National Cancer Institute—argued that the tobacco industry helped create the Tea Party Movement through a process the researchers called “astroturfing.” “Rather than being purely a grassroots movement, the Tea Party has been influenced by decades of astroturfing by tobacco and other corporate interests to develop a grassroots network to support their corporate agendas, even though their members may not support those agendas,” said the researchers. … Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots,...

What this has to do with health is beyond me. Perhaps they are thinking metaphorically; the Tea Party is a cancer on the country, or something. Regardless, your tax dollars were spent funding a study that purported to show a link between the Tea Party and tobacco companies. It’s all very academic and complicated — not to mention laughably bogus. Fox News: The charge that the Tea Party is a tool of broader corporate interests is one often leveled by Democratic critics. House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi was fond of calling the movement “astroturf” in the run-up to the 2010...

Forty-three hospital patients starved to death last year and 111 died of thirst while being treated on wards, new figures disclose today. There were 558 cases last year where doctors recorded that a patient had died in a state of severe dehydration in UK hospitals The death toll was disclosed by the UK Government amid mounting concern over the dignity of patients on NHS wards. They will also fuel concerns about care homes, as it was disclosed that eight people starved to death and 21 people died of thirst while in care. Last night there were warnings that they must...

In a move that could alter the way that breast cancers are treated, researchers have redefined the disease into four main classes and determined that one type of breast cancer has more in common with an aggressive form of ovarian cancer than other breast cancers. The finding that a form of breast cancer may be genetically similar to a type of ovarian cancer underscores a new way thinking about cancer that moves away from defining cancers by the organ of origin. The findings are the result of the largest and most comprehensive study of the genetics of breast cancer to...

A deadly, drug-resistant superbug outbreak that began last summer at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center claimed its seventh victim Sept. 7, when a seriously ill boy from Minnesota succumbed to a bloodstream infection, officials said Friday. The boy was the 19th patient at the research hospital to contract an antibiotic-resistant strain of the bacterium Klebsiella pneumoniae that arrived in August 2011 with a New York woman who needed a lung transplant. But his case marked the first new infection of this superbug at NIH since January — a worrisome signal that the bug persists inside the huge brick-and-glass...

A deadly germ untreatable by most antibiotics has killed a seventh person at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Maryland.

WASHINGTON (CBSDC/AP) - James Holmes, the alleged gunman in the recent theater shooting that left 12 dead in Aurora, Colo., was previously awarded a $26,000 federal grant. WNEW News reports that Holmes was awarded a prestigious grant from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. NIH is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It gave the graduate student a $26,000 stipend and paid his tuition for the highly competitive neuroscience program at the University of Colorado in Denver. Holmes was one of six neuroscience students at the school to get the grant money. http://washington.cbslocal.com/2012/07/24/james-holmes-received-26k-grant-from-bethesda-based-national-institutes-of-health/

DENVER –  The University of Colorado says shooting suspect James Holmes had a federal grant to study neuroscience. University spokeswoman Jacque Montgomery said Saturday that Holmes was one of six neuroscience students at the school to get National Institutes of Health grant money. She didn't know how much money he got. The NIH says the university decides who gets the grants. Criteria for receiving the grant weren't immediately clear. Montgomery says Holmes took an oral exam at the end of the semester that all students must pass to continue in the program. She says privacy laws prevent the school from...

The National Institutes of Health has spent millions of dollars over the past decade to fund the construction of an HIV-prevention website that, among other sexually explicit features, includes a graphic image of homosexual sex and a Space Invaders-style interactive game that uses a penis-shaped blaster to shoot down gay epithets. The grant money went to a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota that created a site called Sexpulse. The goal was to draw in what are termed MISM -- or "men who use the Internet to seek sex with men" -- in order to educate them and...

Fresh off its successes in the green-energy patch, the Obama team is turning its investment skills to the life sciences. Last Friday, President Obama announced his intention to increase the federal government’s involvement in the business of biotechnology. His plan is for a new federal center inside the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that would be focused on the development and commercialization of new drugs. The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) would engage in early drug-development work, eventually handing off programs to private companies for completion. In return, the government would take a guaranteed royalty stream on drugs...

A new tick-borne disease that may be stealthily infecting some Americans has been discovered by Yale researchers working with Russian scientists. The disease is caused by a spirochete bacterium called Borrelia miyamotoi, which is distantly related to Borrelia burgdorferi, the spirochete that causes Lyme disease. B. miyamotoi has been found — albeit relatively rarely — in the same deer tick species that transmit Lyme, and the Yale researchers estimate that perhaps 3,000 Americans a year pick it up from tick bites, compared with about 25,000 who get Lyme disease. But there is no diagnostic test for it in this country,...

PESN associate Hank Mills, composed this for PESN. To preserve intellectual property and trade secrets, Andrea Rossi is being forced to design a self destruct mechanism to be built into every E-Cat (Energy Catalyzer) used by the public. This could delay the public (non-industrial) launch of the technology. Andrea Rossi's cold fusion E-Cat (Energy Catalyzer) technology is based on hard science, but is nothing short of a miracle. It provides a technology that could completely solve the world's energy crisis. The E-Cat consumes tiny amounts of cheap fuel (nickel and hydrogen), and produce huge amounts of energy for long periods...

Since a group of researchers published a paper in Science last year suggesting the retrovirus XMRV is linked to chronic fatigue syndrome, scientists have been debating the accuracy of that finding. Now a study designed to address that issue once and for all is moving forward. Clinicians who treat CFS patients, scientists and others convened recently in New York, where virus hunter Ian Lipkin is based. Lipkin was asked by NIH and NIAID to head up the study. At least three labs have agreed to test fresh blood samples for XMRV. Two labs, at FDA/NIH and the Whittemore-Peterson Institute, have...

Not all of the hundreds and hundreds of $billions our rulers have been looting from future generations and flushing away in the name of "stimulus" has been as flagrantly wasted as the $30 million spent to enhance the living conditions of rodents in Nancy Pelosi's district. For example, $800,000 was spent teaching Africans how to wash their genitals: The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), spent $823,200 of economic stimulus funds in 2009 on a study by a UCLA research team to teach uncircumcised African men how to wash their genitals...

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), spent $823,200 of economic stimulus funds in 2009 on a study by a UCLA research team to teach uncircumcised African men how to wash their genitals after having sex. The genitalia-washing program is part of a larger $12-million UCLA study examining how to better encourage Africans to undergo voluntary HIV testing and counseling – however, only the penis-washing study received money from the 2009 economic stimulus law. The washing portion of the study is set to end in 2011... Because AIDS researchers have been...

NIH Tells Some Embryonic Stem Cell Researchers to Ignore Judge's Ruling Washington, DC -- A federal judge has struck down the executive order President Barack Obama issued forcing taxpayers to fund embryonic stem cell research. The Obama administration has appealed the decision, but the National Institutes of Health has issued new guidelines that have pro-life advocates concerned. http://LifeNews.com/bio3159.html

(CNSNews.com) - The federal government has spent $550,496 on a project that involved conducting “focus groups and in-depth interviews” with American long-haul truck drivers to learn about their sex lives in order to assess their risk of contracting HIV or other sexually transmitted infections. The project has failed to find any instances of HIV among the truck drivers studied. “Several international studies have documented substantial levels of sexual risk behaviors and high rates of STI and HIV amongst long-distance truck drivers living in diverse settings including India, Bangladesh, South Africa and Thailand,” says the abstract for the grant published by...

Two groups of researchers studying a potential link between chronic-fatigue syndrome and a virus called XMRV have reached contradictory conclusions, according to people familiar with the findings. One group found a link, and the other didn't. Their reports were held from publication after being accepted by two science journals—a rare move that has caused a stir among scientists in the field. ------ Scientists at the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, including NIH infectious-disease specialist Harvey Alter, recently finished research that came to a conclusion similar to that of the Science paper—that XMRV, or xenotropic murine...

A report that a respected NIH expert supported an association between the XMRV virus and chronic fatigue syndrome is causing a buzz among CFS patient activists, researchers and clinicians. According to a press release issued by a Dutch magazine, one of the slides presented at a recent workshop in Zagreb by Harvey Alter, chief of the infectious disease section at the NIH’s clinical center, supports the link between XMRV and CFS reported last year in Science. This is significant because studies published later by other groups have produced conflicting results. Alter is a well-known figure in the infectious-disease world; his...