Month: June 2013

By Jane Wardell and Jackie Range SYDNEY (Reuters) – A looming crisis in Asia as women delay giving birth, leading to low fertility rates that have dire implications for economic growth, is opening huge opportunities for the fast-growing in-vitro fertilization (IVF) industry. The successful debut of Australia's Virtus Health Ltd, which this week became the first IVF specialist to list on a stock exchange, is the latest sign that investors are eager to back fertility companies that have plans to expand into Asia's vast developing markets. …

NEW YORK (AP) — President Barack Obama's administration can go forward with its new plan to make the morning-after pill available to buyers of any age without prescriptions, but it needs to do it promptly or face potential sanctions in the long-running dispute over access to the emergency contraceptives, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

By Karen Freifeld and Bernard Vaughan NEW YORK (Reuters) – A U.S. district court judge on Wednesday approved a U.S. Food and Drug Administration plan to allow unrestricted sales of Plan B One-Step, a one-pill version of the emergency contraception drug. Judge Edward Korman of the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, New York, said the FDA proposal was "sufficient" to comply with his order to make emergency contraception widely available. …

The 10-year-old girl whose family successfully fought a rule preventing her from qualifying for an adult lung was in recovery after she received a lung transplant from an adult donor, according to a family statement.        

By Jane Sutton GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) – U.S. military doctors should refuse orders to force-feed hunger strikers at the Guantanamo detention camp because it violates their ethical obligations, two doctors and a medical ethics professor wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday. "Force-feeding a competent person is not the practice of medicine; it is aggravated assault," the trio said in an article posted on the website of the respected medical journal. …

By Jonathan Stempel (Reuters) – A South Dakota meat processor that sued ABC News over a series of reports that called its signature product “pink slime” has won the right to move its $1.2 billion defamation and product disparagement lawsuit back to the state court where it began. Wednesday’s decision to move the case by U.S. District Judge Karen Schreier in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is a defeat for ABC News, a unit of Walt Disney Co, and returned the lawsuit by Beef Products Inc (BPI) and two affiliates back to the Union County Circuit Court in that state. …

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A 10-year-old girl whose efforts to qualify for an organ donation spurred public debate over how organs are allocated underwent a successful double-lung transplant on Wednesday, a family spokeswoman said.