Month: February 2013

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Chicago area voters went to the polls on Tuesday to choose a Democrat to succeed former Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. in a primary election partly bankrolled by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a champion of tighter gun control. The special election is to fill the seat of Jackson Jr, who resigned last November citing health problems, and pleaded guilty in federal court last week to using campaign funds for personal enrichment. …

INDIANAPOLIS (Reuters) – The Indiana state Senate on Tuesday approved Republican-backed legislation to require women seeking to end pregnancies through use of the so-called abortion pill to have an ultrasound examination. If it becomes law, the proposal would make Indiana the ninth state to require an ultrasound prior to an abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. …

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Malians in the country's vast desert north are scared and in desperate need of aid, traumatized at the hands of Islamist extremists and fearful of ethnic reprisals by government troops, a senior U.N. humanitarian official said on Tuesday. John Ging, director of operations for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said a U.N. appeal for $373 million to fund aid operations in the West African state had so far only received $17 million. …

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – More young women are being diagnosed with advanced, metastatic breast cancer than were three decades ago, a new study suggests – although the overall rate of cancers in that group is still small. One in 173 women will develop breast cancer before she turns 40, researchers said, and the prognosis tends to be worse for younger patients. In the new study, a team led by Dr. …

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – A Medicare policy limiting where people can undergo weight-loss surgery to so-called "centers of excellence" was not responsible for reducing complications from the procedures, according to a new study. In 2006, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) said it would only pay for bariatric surgery done at hospitals that had certain equipment and medical teams in place and were certified by the American College of Surgeons or the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery (ASMBS). …

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal health regulators have halted Amgen’s studies of its drug Sensipar after the death of a 14-year-old patient in a company trial.