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We haven't really written much about the insane Theranos scandal, though we discussed it on our podcast. The whole story is pretty crazy -- involving a heavily hyped up company that appeared to basically be flat out lying to everyone about what it could do. The company still exists, but barely. The company's founder and CEO, who was plastered across magazine covers and compared frequently to Steve Jobs, has been banned from running a lab for two years, and the company is now facing a $140 million lawsuit from its biggest partner, Walgreens, who claims that Theranos repeatedly lied to...

Litigator David Boies and the law firm he founded, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, have stopped doing legal work for Theranos Inc. after disagreeing about the strategy for handling ongoing government investigations of the blood-testing company, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Boies, 75 years old, has been one of the country’s best-known litigators since the late 1990s. He became Theranos’s outside counsel after being approached in 2011 by two investors in the Palo Alto, Calif., startup. He fiercely defended Theranos against questions about its technology and operations. Those efforts included threatening to take legal action against The...

Litigator David Boies and the law firm he founded, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, have stopped doing legal work for Theranos Inc. after disagreeing about the strategy for handling ongoing government investigations of the blood-testing company, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Boies, 75 years old, has been one of the country’s best-known litigators since the late 1990s. He became Theranos’s outside counsel after being approached in 2011 by two investors in the Palo Alto, Calif., startup. He fiercely defended Theranos against questions about its technology and operations. Those efforts included threatening to take legal action against The...

It's worth asking why Elizabeth Holmes is still leading the embattled blood testing company Theranos Inc. But there may be a good reason why she still is in charge, one that has little to do with the scandal-ridden company's performance to date. Forget what venture capitalist Tim Draper — one of the first to invest in the Palo Alto company — implied this week that Holmes is being attacked because she's a young, female entrepreneur. The simple fact is that Theranos has not been able to deliver on its technology from a commercial, scientific or regulatory standpoint, and that falls...

2016 has not been too kind to Elizabeth Holmes, the Steve-Jobs wannabe in charge of fraudulent Theranos. She has thus far been banned for 2 years from operating labs, removed from hosting fundraisers for Hillary and lost her entire net worth. And now, the Wall Street Journal has published the "tell-all" story of the whistle-blower, 26 year old Tyler Shultz, who brought the the whole Theranos farce crashing down. It's a sordid tale complete with all the expected twists and turns of a Jason Bourne thriller including intimidation, coercion and private detectives. Tyler Shultz is the grandson of George Shultz,...

Thirteen cases of mumps have now been confirmed at the State University of New York at New Paltz, an increase of four since last week.At least eight members of the school's intercollegiate swim team, along with one athletics staff member, are among the sick. Swim practices and workouts were suspended as a precaution at the onset of the initial outbreak. 2 Mumps Cases Confirmed on SUNY Campuses; Outbreak Expands It's not clear if the additional four cases are connected to the mumps spread on the swim team, which county health officials first learned of a month ago. Last week, college health...

MIAMI (CBSMiami) — Florida health officials have confirmed the first case of locally acquired Dengue fever in Miami-Dade County. The infection is primarily spread through bites of infected mosquitoes. The person infected with the virus has already received medical treatment and is expected to make a full recovery. Health officials are investigating close contacts around the person to make sure more people are not infected. Miami-Dade Mosquito Control says they are conducting aggressive mosquito control efforts in the area of concern. Dengue fever can present itself as a flu-like illness with muscle aches, pain, fever and sometimes a rash. The...

[Puerto Rico] Health Secretary Ana Ríus Armendáriz spoke about the possibility that the mayaro virus, which is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, may arrive to the island. This comes following the reporting of the first case in Haiti, which may result in spreading to the Dominican Republic, and, subsequently, to Puerto Rico. "It has a low incidence [and] produces severe pain. Once this virus reaches the Dominican Republic, it is a matter of time before it gets here," Ríus said during an interview with [radio station] WKAQ 580. The mayaro virus, which is common in the tropical zones of...

JURUPA VALLEY (CBSLA.com) — Parents and students in Jurupa Valley could be dealing with a rare disease from the Middle Ages. Scared parents were demanding more information Tuesday after letters were sent went home to parents saying two students at Indian Hills Elementary in Jurupa Valley “might” be sick with leprosy. School officials say the letter was sent Friday out of what they called, an abundance of caution. Some parents refused to send their children to school Tuesday after receiving the warning from the Jurupa Unified School District. It was unclear whether the students are related to each other. Barbara...

Jurupa Unified School District officials received an unconfirmed report that two Indian Hills Elementary School students were diagnosed with leprosy, which prompted them to send a letter home to parents Friday, Sept. 2. Though the information has not been confirmed, said Superintendent Elliott Duchon, school district officials decided to send the letter home as a precaution. “We wanted parents of the students to know, we wanted to get ahead of any rumors and make sure they had access to ample information,” Duchon said in a phone interview Sunday evening. Duchon would not say where the report came from, but did...

Libertarian presidential candidate and former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson is newly in favor of mandatory vaccination, he says, after learning more about the science of immunization. In 2011, Johnson tweeted “No to mandatory vaccines,” but asked in an interview with VPR Wednesday about his position, Johnson said he now believes that vaccinations should be mandatory.

Concerns over the Zika virus have focused on pregnant women due to mounting evidence that it causes brain abnormalities in developing fetuses. However, new research in mice from scientists at The Rockefeller University and La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology suggests that certain adult brain cells may be vulnerable to infection as well. Among these are populations of cells that serve to replace lost or damaged neurons throughout adulthood, and are also thought to be critical to learning and memory. "This is the first study looking at the effect of Zika infection on the adult brain," says Joseph Gleeson,...

Nearly 500 New Yorkers — including 49 pregnant women — have tested positive for the Zika ­virus, a more than tenfold increase since April, city officials said ­Tuesday. Five of the 483 victims contracted the virus through sex. The others are believed to have been infected from mosquito bites while traveling outside the United States — a majority in the Dominican Republic.

Military conventional wisdom, in addition to ACSH President (and former Army officer) Hank Campbell, likes to remind us, “Governments are always fighting the last war.” They have a good point. Fifteen years after 9/11, we still ban non-ticketed passengers from entering airport terminals. Ten years after a failed attack in 2006, we cannot bring more than 3.4 oz of liquids onto an airplane, a policy that has resulted in TSA confiscating gigantic piles of 4-oz cups of applesauce. We continue to remove our shoes 15 years after the Shoe Bomber, but thankfully the Underwear Bomber didn’t provoke a similar “remove...

Areas of Miami, Florida, are now being sprayed with the insecticide naled in an attempt to eradicate the Aedes aegypti mosquito — carrier of the zika virus. Naled, a potent neurotoxin that kills mosquitoes on contact, is perfectly safe, or so the Environmental Protection Agency insists, despite Puerto Rico’s rejection of its use to combat the spread of zika there — due to concerns about its safety.To keep naled airborne where it would be most effective, the agent is sprayed in very fine aerosol droplets — about two tablespoons can be dispersed to cover an area the equivalent of...

Ronald Reagan famously said, “One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine.” He believed that government programs ostensibly meant to address public health crises would inevitably chip away at our personal liberties. For evidence that Reagan was right, one need look no further than Obamacare’s mandate requiring all Americans to buy government-approved insurance. The pretext for that travesty involved the alleged menace to public health posed by the uninsured. This year’s Democrat Party Platform has identified another public health threat against which the government must take action — gun...

he rate at which Colorado children were exposed to marijuana began increasing in 2009, when the U.S. government first announced it would not prosecute residents who complied with the state's new medical marijuana laws. Dr. Genie E. Roosevelt, an associate professor of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Denver Health Medical Center, expected that rate to go up even more when Colorado voters decided to legalize the recreational use of marijuana in 2012, the Times reports — but she never could have predicted the rate would increase as much as it did. Since 2014 (when...

This date marks the fourth time since the start of the epidemic 2 years ago that Liberia has reported zero cases for at least 42 days. Sierra Leone declared the end of Ebola human-to-human transmission on 17 March 2016 and Guinea on 1 June 2016 following the last flare ups.

A partial federal ban on gay men donating blood is "discriminatory" and hurtful in that it turned away potential donors after the June 12 massacre that killed 49 men and women at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, 24 U.S. Senators said in a letter Monday. Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., were among 23 Democrats and one Republican -- Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Illinois -- who signed the letter to U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr. Robert Califf. ... "Yet, some of those most touched by this tragedy -- members of the LGBT community, who are especially eager...

... Blood supply experts say the FDA will need to determine whether the move to a one-year waiting period for gay and bisexual men made the blood supply less, more or just as safe. That effort will take several years, and only then would the agency be able to consider relaxing its restrictions further, said Brian Custer, who has led a number of studies on the nation's blood supply and is associate director of the Blood Systems Research Institute (BSRI) in San Francisco. Removing the waiting period altogether would also likely require a large-scale study that tested blood samples of...