Month: December 2013

By David Lawder and Richard Cowan WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Senate passed a two-year budget deal on Wednesday to ease automatic spending cuts and reduce the risk of a government shutdown, but fights were already breaking out over how to implement the budget pact. By a vote of 64-36, the Senate sent the measure to President Barack Obama to be signed into law, an achievement for a divided Congress that has failed to agree on a budget since 2009. The deal, passed in the House of Representatives last week by an overwhelming margin, restores overall fiscal 2014 spending levels for government agencies to $1.012 trillion, trimming the across-the-board budget cuts that were set to begin next month by about $63 billion over two years. Now, there will be a mad dash by the House and Senate Appropriations committees to cobble together a massive spending bill that implements the deal and carves up the funding pie among thousands of government programs from national parks to the military.

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Leaders of Minnesota's health insurance marketplace said Wednesday they might postpone next week's deadline to enroll for January coverage, after a chaotic rollout of the state program that led to the resignation of its former executive director.

By Gene Emery NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Women who take a common type of antidepressant during pregnancy are not more likely to have a child with autism, according to a new study from Denmark. But children did have a higher than usual risk when their mothers took the drugs – known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) – for depression or anxiety before becoming pregnant. "Our interpretation is that women with indications for SSRI use differ from women who do not use SSRIs because of these indications (depression, anxiety), and some of these differences are somehow related to an increased risk of having children who develop autism," Dr. Anders Hviid said. The findings, combined with a separate analysis of the same database published last month in the journal Clinical Epidemiology, suggest people looking for a link between autism and SSRIs need to look elsewhere, Dr. Mark Zylka said.

By Gene Emery NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – More than eight in 10 U.S. cancer specialists have struggled to find the drugs they need to best treat their patients, a new survey has found. Such drug shortages could affect people with colon cancer, breast cancer and leukemia. They include chemotherapy drugs prescribed after a tumor has spread. “These are drugs used for common and curable cancers,” Dr. Keerthi Gogineni of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia told Reuters Health.

Academy-award nominated actress joins Sens. Roy Blunt (R) and Debbie Stabenow (D) on Capitol Hill.        

U.S. teenagers are smoking more marijuana, but backing away from other harmful drugs and doing less binge drinking, according to a report from federal health researchers released Wednesday. Easier access to marijuana provided by new state laws allowing the drug for medical treatment may be a factor, according to the report from the National Institutes of Health. The survey found that roughly 6.5 percent of high school seniors are smoking marijuana daily compared with 6 percent a decade ago and 2.4 percent in 1993, and nearly 23 percent of seniors said they smoked the drug in the last month. The growing use parallels an increase in the potency of marijuana, so the drug can be even more harmful to developing brains than in the past, she added.

By Kathryn Doyle NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – People with intellectual disabilities in the UK die of preventable causes more often than the general population, according to a new study. They also tend to die a decade or two earlier. People with intellectual disabilities have below-average mental function, which could be due to a range of causes, and a lack of necessary skills for daily living, according to the National Institutes of Health. Intellectual disabilities are diagnosed before age 18 and affect up to three percent of people in the U.S. …

By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) – Scientists have found that the sleep disorder narcolepsy can sometimes be triggered by a scientific phenomenon known as “molecular mimicry”, offering a possible explanation for its link to a GlaxoSmithKline H1N1 pandemic flu vaccine. Results from U.S. researchers showed the debilitating disorder, characterized by sudden sleepiness and muscle weakness, can be set off by an immune response to a portion of a protein from the H1N1 virus that is very similar to a region of a protein called hypocretin, which is key to narcolepsy. Previous studies in countries where GSK’s Pandemrix vaccine was used in the 2009/2010 flu pandemic have found its use was linked to a significant rise in cases of narcolepsy in children. Studies in Britain, Finland, Sweden and Ireland found such a link, and GSK says at least 900 narcolepsy cases associated with the vaccine have so far been reported in Europe.

This Santa might be getting a lump of coal.        

By Richard Valdmanis BOSTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Wednesday said it has fined Harvard Medical School $24,000 for repeated animal welfare violations at its research facilities that resulted in the deaths of four monkeys since 2011. The government’s decision to fine the elite university follows a lengthy probe into mistreatment of primates at its animal research labs in Massachusetts, one of which Harvard announced this year it plans to close. Harvard Medical School said it found the fine “appropriate” but an animal rights group said it was too small. The USDA fine cited Harvard for 11 incidents in 2011 and 2012, including several that noted laboratory personnel handling the animals were not properly trained or qualified.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Consumers anxious over tight insurance deadlines and lingering computer problems during the holidays will get extra time to pay their premiums under President Barack Obama’s health care law, insurers announced Wednesday.

By Reuters Staff U.S. and European drug regulators will work together on joint inspections around the world to try to make sure consumers are buying generic medications that are both safe and effective, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on Wednesday. The European Medicines Agency and France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom are taking part in the initiative, which will focus on the testing stage that precedes generic drug applications. They will cooperate on inspecting facilities used in clinical trials and assess the acceptability or reliability of data obtained in the trials. The FDA last year settled an ongoing legal battle over questionable manufacturing practices and other issues at several manufacturing facilities operated by Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd, a global producer of generic drugs and India’s largest pharmaceutical company.