House Democrats on Sunday announced that they will unveil draft legislation within the next several days that would increase SCHIP funding by $50 billion over five years and make revisions to Medicare, the New York Times reports. [click link for full article]

A recent Wall Street Journal article about the findings of the five-year, $725 million NIH-sponsored Women’s Health Initiative on the effects of hormone replacement therapy included some “misperceptions,” Jacques Rossouw — chief of the WHI branch at the [click link for full article]

An agricultural researcher at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University has developed a simple process to make allergen-free peanuts. The new process — believed to be a first for food science — could provide relief to millions of peanut allergy sufferers, and be an enormous boon to the entire peanut industry.Doug Speight of the N.C. [click link for full article]

A study of Medicare patients with osteoarthritis provides additional evidence that non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) such as aspirin reduce the risk of colorectal cancer. Earlier investigations of the drugs’ impact on tumor development could not rule out the possibility that an observed protective effect was caused by other preventive health care measures. [click link for full article]

Couples are more likely to support proposed moves to single embryo transfer (SET) ifNHS services are properly funded, says a report published by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Infertility (APPGI). Putting back only a single embryo can have a dramatic effect on the number of twins arising from IVF, reducing morbidity for both mother and child. It is therefore a desirable step to take. [click link for full article]

The National Infertility Awareness Campaign (NIAC) has welcomed the publication today of a report by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Infertility, which highlights the need for greater funding for infertility treatment on the NHS. [click link for full article]

Bellevue Woman’s Hospital in Niskayuna, N.Y., which was ordered by a state commission last year to close, will remain open for an undetermined amount of time under the management of Ellis Hospital in Schenectady, N.Y., officials from both hospitals announced Thursday, the [click link for full article]

Cochlear implants — electronic devices inserted surgically in the ear to allow deaf people to hear — may restore normal auditory pathways in the brain even after many years of deafness.The results imply that the brain can reorganize sound processing centers or press into service latent ones based on sound stimulation. [click link for full article]

The woman’s condition, known as prosopamnesia, is extremely rare and has only been found in a handful of people around the world, according to University of Queensland cognitive neuroscientist Professor Jason Mattingley.”For many years, scientists have been interested in how people learn to recognise new faces, and people who have difficulty with faces often have trouble interacting in social settings,” he said. [click link for full article]

Cancer patients don’t have time to waste. Many go through several different treatments, however, to find one that is more effective against their particular type of tumor.Thus, an algorithm that could help rapidly sort molecular information about a patient’s particular tumor and could help match this information to the right drug treatment would be a breakthrough of enormous value. Dan Theodorescu, M.D., Ph.D. [click link for full article]