Month: July 2014

Ashik Gavai, 17, sought medical help for a swelling on the right side of his lower jaw and the case was referred to the city's JJ Hospital, where they found he was suffering from a condition known as complex odontoma, head of dentistry Sunanda Dhivare-Palwankar told AFP. The youngster's father, Suresh Gavai, said that the family had been worried that Ashik's swelling was a cancerous growth. "I was worried that it may turn out to be cancer so I brought him to Mumbai," Gavai told the Mumbai Mirror newspaper. "I think it could be a world record," she said.

Nestled among the bars and strip clubs of Sydney's Kings Cross is a service which not only saves lives, but continues the pragmatic approach which prevented a HIV epidemic among drug-users in Australia. Behind a nondescript shopfront is the Sydney Medically Supervised Injecting Centre — the only place in the southern hemisphere where users can inject heroin and other drugs under the care of registered nurses. "We know the evidence behind needle syringe programmes and the benefits they have in terms of prevention," says the centre's medical director Marianne Jauncey. "In Australia, for instance, they have very clearly prevented an epidemic of HIV among people who inject drugs.

A Chinese town sealed off after a man died of plague re-opened on Thursday after authorities found no further cases of the illness, state media said. Authorities barred 30,000 people living in Yumen in the northwestern province of Gansu from leaving, while road blocks prevented others from entering, after a 38-year-old died from plague last week. "We have not discovered any new plague cases," the state-run China News service cited Gansu's health bureau as saying. It added that authorities had exterminated rodents and fleas in designated quarantine zones, while 151 close contacts of the man had been kept in isolation for nine days without showing symptoms.

BEIJING (AP) — A nine-day quarantine imposed on parts of a northern Chinese city where a man died of bubonic plague has been lifted, China’s official news agency reported Thursday.

(Reuters) – U.S. health insurers will send out about $330 million in rebates to employers and individuals this summer under President Barack Obama's healthcare law, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said on Thursday. The law, often called Obamacare, requires insurance companies to refund customers when they spend less than 80 percent or 85 percent of healthcare premiums they collect for medical care. The rebates will go to about 6.8 million people and have a value of about $80 per family. They are to be sent by Aug. 1 either directly to consumers or to the employer providing the health coverage, who is required to pass the savings onto employees, the agency said in a report.