Month: February 2014

By Ronnie Cohen NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – After a desperate mother in South Wales, UK, posted a video of her baby having a seizure on Facebook, one of her friends provided the diagnosis that had eluded the boy’s doctor. The discovery that Evan Owens suffers from reflex anoxic seizures, a rare but treatable disease, provided a happy ending and is just one example of the public health benefits of digital media, says a new perspective in the Journal of Public Health. Evan’s story, published in the UK’s Daily Mail, illustrates how people are turning to the Internet for healthcare advice and how important it is for healthcare professionals to participate in the discussion, the perspective’s lead author, Amelia Burke-Garcia, told Reuters Health. (The Daily Mail story is online here: http://dailym.ai/1eWaEl6.) “There’s always the risk of misinformation or false information floating around on these channels,” Burke-Garcia said.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said on Friday he would sign a controversial anti-gay bill into law, warning that those who promoted homosexuality would be dealt with harshly. Museveni last month indicated he was planning to shelve the bill, which has attracted fierce criticism from Western donors and human rights groups since its inception in 2009. Homosexuality is taboo in African countries and illegal in 37. During a conference held by Uganda's ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) party, a group of scientists presented their findings on homosexuality to Museveni.

By Shereen Jegtvig NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Young men know even less about emergency contraception than young women do, which may be limiting access to an effective means of preventing unwanted pregnancies, researchers say. “The big finding in our study is that young men had a lot less knowledge about emergency contraception than the young women that we surveyed, and even among the young women, knowledge wasn’t great,” Sheree Schrager, a member of the study team, told Reuters Health. “About half of the women understood basic facts about emergency contraception, how you get it, how you use it, and the fact that male partners were also able to buy it over-the-counter for their female partners,” added Schrager, a researcher at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, California. “But young men had significantly lower knowledge then the young women did, and this is an opportunity for providers to reach out to young men in the hopes of reaching more young women to use emergency contraception,” she said.

By Svea Herbst-Bayliss (Reuters) – Top U.S. hedge fund managers in the fourth quarter focused on the consumer sector, with investment plays ranging from high-end auction house Sotheby's to eBay Inc, the multinational Internet consumer-to-consumer corporation. General Motors also became the flavor of the quarter with many hedge funds as the U.S. government exited its position. The quarterly disclosures of manager stock holdings, in so-called 13F filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, are always intriguing for investors trying to divine a pattern in what savvy traders are selling and buying. As a result, the public filings don't always present a complete picture of a manager's stock holdings.

When I talk about meditation, I get lots of skeptical looks and hear loads of ridiculous reasons for why people aren’t doing it. Here are my top three.        

(Reuters) – Aveo Oncology and Astellas Pharma Inc said they would end an agreement to develop Aveo's lead experimental drug that has seen a string of failures in multiple cancer indications. Aveo, which cut 62 percent of its workforce last year to focus on developing the drug, tivozanib, as a treatment for breast and colon cancers, said in December that the drug was not likely to succeed in a mid-stage trial testing its use in colon cancer. A mid-stage trial testing tivozanib as a treatment for breast cancer was stopped last month due to insufficient enrolments. Tivozanib was rejected by U.S. health regulators in June for use in kidney cancer, citing inconsistent study results.