Skin Cancer & You

The InterAcademy Council (IAC), a multinational organization of the world's science academies, has been requested to conduct an independent review of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) processes and procedures. The study comes at the invitation of the United Nations secretary-general and the chair of the IPCC, and will help guide the processes and procedures of the IPCC's fifth report and future assessments of climate science...

Nearly 50% Of Food Aid Sent To Somalia Never Makes It To People In Need "As much as half the food aid sent to Somalia is diverted from needy people to a web of corrupt contractors, radical Islamist militants and local United Nations staff members, according to a new Security Council report," the New York Times reports. "The report, which has not yet been made public ...

Congressional Deals: Watching The Sausage Making Politico Legislators need pork to make things happen, especially in an age when chronic obstruction has so weakened the legislative process that policy breakthroughs are almost impossible. This does not excuse all kinds of deal making, nor should we ignore that deals sometimes go too far (Julian E. Zelizer, 3/10). Health Care Reform's Sickeningly Sweet Deals The Washington Post Skipping through the Candy Land of the health-care bill, one is tempted to hum a few bars of "Let Me Call You Sweetheart." What a deal. For dealmakers, that is...

Drug maker GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) "plans to bolster earnings by selling to more people in middle-income countries after cutting prices in the world's poorest nations," Bloomberg/BusinessWeek reports. "Our strategy is to grow our business in middle-income countries by increasing the volume of products we sell," GSK Chief Executive Andrew Witty said by e-mail, according to the news service...

A new study has found that few drug evaluations compare treatments in ways that help doctors make better decisions, Reuters reports. The study, published in today's Journal of the American Medical Association and written by doctors from Harvard and University of Southern California, also found that private firms - the main sponsors of research that compare drugs to placebos - have little interest in drug-to-drug comparisons, and that even when researchers do compare drugs, they often fail to answer questions about safety and improving effectiveness (Fox, 3/9)...

Recent studies show that more women with cancer in one breast are opting for removal of both breasts, even though removal of the healthy breast does little to improve survival rates, New York Times columnist Tara Parker-Pope writes. In 2006, roughly 6% of women who underwent surgery for breast cancer chose to remove both the cancerous and healthy breasts, a procedure known as contralateral prophylactic mastectomy, Pope says...

The Wall Street Journal: FDA is putting on workshops for pharmaceutical manufacturers to increase the pool of applicants for approved "orphan drugs," that treat rare diseases. Currently, there are about 7,000 so-called orphan diseases in the U.S. that have few or no FDA-approved treatments. "Getting an orphan-drug designation opens the door to incentives once the FDA approves a medicine for sale in the U.S., including seven years' marketing exclusivity and tax breaks. Last year, just 250 requests for orphan-drug designation were filed, and 160 received it...

Medill Reports presents a story on community health centers in Chicago that try to fill access-to-care gaps for people too sick to get health care coverage or too poor to afford other care. "Community health centers ... are private, non-profit operations that fill a gap between for-profit health systems and free public health clinics. There are 36 of these federally qualified health centers in Illinois. Financial support comes from federal funds, Medicare, Medicaid, state programs, private insurance and philanthropies...

The Boston Globe: "A group of Massachusetts mayors, fed up with what they say is legislative inaction on skyrocketing municipal health care costs, has launched a ballot initiative for 2012 aimed at giving cities and towns more flexibility in reducing expensive benefits for employees, retirees, and elected officials" (Murphy, 3/10)...

National Nurses Organizing Committee-Florida and National Nurses United today announce that the Florida Hospital Patient Protection Act of 2010 has been filed in the state legislature by authors Rep. Oscar Braynon and Sen. Tony Hill and will be known as HB 1283 and S 2316. The bill will improve conditions and outcomes for patients in hospitals, while also lessening Florida's nursing shortage by drawing RNs to work in safe and therapeutic conditions. The Florida Hospital Patient Protection Act will: - Guarantee a safe ratio of RNs to patients on every unit in every hospital in Florida...