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Dr. Leon R. Kass, the Addie Clark Harding Professor Emeritus in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of Chicago and former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics under former President George W. Bush, has written a report entitled “The Meaning of Life – In the Laboratory”. Kass discusses the morality surrounding the US government’s funding of “research on human embryonic stem cells, cells derived from early embryos produced by in vitro fertilization in assisted-reproduction clinics.” According to the report, the use of human embryos is justified by the advancements of science which demands that...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- In light of last week’s revelations that a senior official with Planned Parenthood admitted to working with abortion providers to potentially violate federal and state laws, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sent letters today to Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Cate Dyer, CEO of StemExpress. The letters request documents and additional information from NIH and StemExpress in order to determine their potential involvement in Planned Parenthood’s possible illegal conduct.After sending the letters, Sen. Cruz remarked, “The recent revelation by Planned Parenthood that it encourages its affiliates to perform abortions in certain ways in order to maximize profit is not only abhorrent, it...

The National Institute of Aging, an agency within the National Institutes of Health, has awarded $597,759 in taxpayer funding to the University of Washington to study LGBT aging and health. The study, titled “Older Adults in Vulnerable Communities: Health and Quality of Life over Time,” will examine “the determinants of health impacting LGB older adults to assess change in health and quality of life (QOL) over time.” According to Karen Fredriksen-Goldsen, project leader for the grant, “Currently there are more than 2.4 million LGBT older adults and we estimate that by 2030 this population will account for more than 5...

Could an app motivate marijuana users to exercise? The National Institutes of Health is giving $357,750 in taxpayer dollars through its National Institute on Drug Abuse to State University of New York at Buffalo to find out. “Currently, marijuana (MJ) is the most popular illicit drug, but there are few effective interventions to help young adults (age 18 to 25 years) to reduce their MJ intake and avoid negative consequences, including dependence,” the grant noted. “This study will develop and initially test an intervention [personalized feedback on MJ use + a smartphone app to promote exercise/physical activity (PA) as a...

Plan for lethal-virus laboratories leaves Smalltown USA in uproar By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles 29 June 2003 A network of high-security laboratories for storing and investigating some of the most lethal viruses known to mankind is being built across the US, leaving communities in uproar. They not only fear the risk of the viruses escaping, but also contend that the programme, part of the $6bn (£3.5bn) Project BioShield, is a stunning case of overkill. For none of the germs to be studied is related to bioweaponry. In the tiny town of Hamilton, Montana, campaigners worry that they will become...

US Ebola patient's condition improves: NIH Washington (AFP) - An American healthcare worker in treatment after becoming infected with the Ebola virus in Sierra Leone has improved and is now in serious condition, the National Institutes of Health said Thursday.Yahoo News · 3 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — It took 16 years of twists and turns. Over and over, Dr. Nancy Sullivan thought she was close to an Ebola vaccine, only to see the next experiment fail. “A case of resuscitation more than once,” is how the National Institutes of Health researcher describes the journey.

The precision medicine initiative proposed by President Barack Obama last week would center on a huge new biobank containing medical records and genetic information for perhaps a million Americans. It would not be created from scratch by enrolling new volunteers, however, but would instead pull together existing studies into one giant database. That’s according to several scientists familiar with the broad outlines of the project who spoke on background with ScienceInsider. The biobank would be used for studies ranging from finding new disease-gene associations to working out how to use genomic and other molecular information in routine medical care. On...

A new project from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is using computer simulated training sessions to teach doctors in Minnesota how to talk to fat kids.The nearly $500,000 study using “virtual role play” to coach doctors is the latest attempt by the federal government to combat obesity.“Obesity in the United States is at historically high levels and is an important health problem,” the grant for the project states. “Interventions targeting children are a high priority because children bear the greatest lifetime health risk from overweight and obesity.”“Health professionals in primary care settings are influential in the lives of families,”...

**SNIP** While its long-term effectiveness is still unclear, surgical sterilization seems to be gaining popularity in this white-tailed-rich region. The procedure, less invasive than dog and cat spaying, is an alternative to controlled hunting, which provokes opposition from animal-welfare activists, and to immunization, which requires yearly doses of a dart-delivered contraceptive vaccine. DeNicola has already spayed a herd in a Baltimore suburb, where a population boom has stabilized. And in Fairfax City, he conducted Virginia’s first ovary-removal program when his team operated on 18 female deer in the police garage. The procedures, which cost about $1,000 per doe, are being...

Isn’t there supposed to be a separation of cult and state? Mindfulness is a New Age kind of meditation that focuses on the present moment “non-judgmentally,” tracing its origins to Buddhism. The growing phenomenon was the subject of a 60 Minutes segment on Sunday, for which May and other fans of the practice were interviewed.The segment featured Rep. Tim Ryan (D., Ohio), a so-called “rock star among mindfulness evangelists” who earmarked nearly $1 million to teach mindfulness to preschool students in his district. The $982,000 project provided deep breathing exercises, and “Peace Corners” for kids in Youngstown, Ohio. I’m sure...

Government Waste: The good news is the National Institutes of Health pulled the plug on a national children's health study because it was fatally flawed. The bad news is they wasted 10 years and $1.3 billion before they admitted it. Congress mandated the National Children's Study as part of the Children's Health Act of 2000. The idea was to follow 100,000 newborns across the nation — in places ranging from urban California to the Florida swamps — until they turned 21, and measure how environmental and other factors affected their health. Yet for the past 14 years, all the NIH...

The National Institutes of Health through its National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases has awarded $524,403 in taxpayer dollars to San Diego University to study diabetes and sexual orientation in women. “Type 2 diabetes (T2D) contributes to substantial morbidity, disability, and premature mortality in the U.S.,” the grant said. “Lesbian and Bisexual (LB) women may be at elevated risk for developing T2D because they are more likely than heterosexual women to experience Obesity and other risk factors linked with T2D such as cigarette smoking, Violence victimization, and depressive distress,” the grant added. …

The National Institutes of Health through its National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism has funded a study to uncover the correlation between alcohol abuse and lesbian “intimate partner violence.” The grant, titled “Minority Stress, Alcohol Use, and Intimate Partner Violence Among Lesbians,” was awarded to Old Dominion University. “Alcohol abuse and dependence, and the constellation of problems associated with these disorders, including intimate partner violence (IPV) are a serious health concern for sexual minority women, their partners, their families, and society as a whole,” the grant abstract said. …

President Obama on Tuesday urged the lame-duck Congress to approve roughly $6 billion in emergency funding to fight the deadly Ebola virus, saying “we cannot beat” the disease without a greater financial investment from lawmakers. “The urgency remains. If we are actually going to solve this problem for ourselves, we have to solve it in West Africa as well,” he said after a tour of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. “Let's get it done,” Obama added. “This can't get caught up in normal politics.” Obama's visit to the National Institutes of Health was meant to promote the...

While most Americans put on a few pounds for Thanksgiving, the federal government has been spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars researching why obese girls don’t have sex.The National Institute for Health grant allocated $466,642 to the Magee-Women’s Research Institute to study the sexual habits of obese girls, including how often they have sex and why they are less likely to use protection when they do.“Obese girls consistently report having fewer dating and sexual experiences, but more sexual risk behaviors [i.e., condom nonuse] once they are sexually active,” the study abstract states.Money from the 2014 study will also be...

House Republicans have scheduled two more hearings on the U.S. response to Ebola, focusing on the health system's readiness for more cases and the development of cures and treatments. The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittees on Health and Oversight and Investigations will host the events on Tuesday and Wednesday. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Tom Frieden will appear at one to discuss training for U.S. health workers and other preventative measures against the virus's spread. "The threat of the Ebola outbreak is real and extends beyond its source in West Africa," said Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred...

Man injects himself with Ebola DELIBERATELY in a bid to battle the deadly diseaseA man has revealed he has been injected with the Ebola virus ON PURPOSE in a bid to fight the deadly disease. Peter Hubbard said he hopes the small risk he is taking could help create a vaccine to prevent further outbreaks of the disease, which has claimed thousands of lives in west Africa. Speaking from his apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, Mr Hubbard, a consultant who specialises in natural gas and peer markets, said: "I get a lot of satisfaction out of the fact that this could...

On Monday, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention head Thomas Frieden announced a new policy on health care workers returning from Ebola-plagued West Africa. Parroting President Obama’s Saturday radio address, Frieden cautioned that Americans must be “guided by the science,” not fear. Sorry. The Obama administration’s halfway approach is based on political correctness, not science. And it is a gamble. According to Frieden, about five health care workers fly back from West Africa to the U.S. every day, landing at Chicago, Newark, Atlanta, New York’s JFK or Dulles outside of Washington, D.C. For months, the CDC did almost nothing to...

One of the top doctors leading the government’s response to the Ebola crisis on Sunday slammed policies quarantining healthcare workers who return from treating patients in West Africa. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned that overly aggressive quarantines could make healthcare workers "very, very uncomfortable” and discourage them from volunteering. "The best way to protect us is to stop the epidemic in Africa, and we need those healthcare workers,” Fauci said on "Fox News Sunday.” "So we do not want to put them in a position where it makes it very, very...