Medicaid programs in seven states have reported declines in enrollment during the past year that they attribute to new federal rules requiring beneficiaries and applicants to provide documentation proving their U.S. citizenship, the New York Times reports. [click link for full article]

A new study finds that while “expert centers” with extensive experience in managing cancer have higher overall costs, the approach is more cost-effective over time than referring patients to a less experienced medical center. [click link for full article]

Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine’s (D) announcement on March 1 that he would sign a bill (HB 2035) that would require sixth-grade girls to receive a human papillomavirus vaccine beginning Oct. 1, 2008, unless their parents opt out of the requirement “brought some much-needed sense” to the “increasingly irrational national debate” about mandating HPV vaccines, a [click link for full article]

CDC Director Julie Gerberding said on Friday at a hearing of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, HHS, Education and Related Agencies that the federal government should spend more on disease prevention “but admitted under Democratic questioning that President Bush’s budget proposal shortchanges the effort,” [click link for full article]

The following highlights recent state news related to human papillomavirus vaccines. Merck’s HPV vaccine Gardasil and GlaxoSmithKline’s HPV vaccine Cervarix in clinical trials have been shown to be 100% effective in preventing infection with HPV strains 16 and 18, which together cause about 70% of cervical cancer cases. [click link for full article]

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday announced that the fiscal year 2008 House budget resolution will include a reserve fund to cover the cost of enrollment of all eligible children in SCHIP, CQ HealthBeat reports. According to congressional analysts, about six million eligible children are not enrolled in SCHIP. [click link for full article]

The “raging hormones” of puberty are known to produce mood swings and stress for most teenagers, making it difficult to cope with this period of life. Until now, the specific causes of pubertal anxiety have not been identified, making it harder to understand and treat adolescent angst.In the current edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience, researchers led by Sheryl S. [click link for full article]

Although 18- to 25-year-olds are the “least Republican generation” and “less religious than their elders,” they are “slightly to the right of the general public” on abortion-related issues, the New York Times Magazine reports. [click link for full article]

Nearly 530,000 women and girls in South Africa have had abortions since a law passed in 1996 that allows the procedure until 12 weeks’ gestation, and deaths related to unsafe abortions have dropped by 91% during the time period, according to data presented on Thursday by the reproductive rights group Ipas, the [click link for full article]

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine have discovered that common inhaled anesthetics increase the number of amyloid plaques in the brains of animals, which might accelerate the onset of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. Roderic Eckenhoff, MD, Vice Chair of Research in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care, and his co-authors, report their findings in the online edition of Neurobiology of Aging. [click link for full article]