New York City hospitals could lose more than $1 billion in state and federal funds for physician training as a result of federal Medicaid changes scheduled to take effect May 25, according to an analysis released Tuesday by the city’s Independent Budget Office, the New York Times reports.

Doctors at the General Hospital in the Greek city of Larissa said yesterday, Thursday, that they had successfully removed an embryonic parasitic twin from the stomach of a 9-year-old girl.The girl, whose family asked that she not be named, was suffering from stomach pains, which the doctors established were due to a tumour growing on the right side of her belly. She has since made a full recovery, said the hospital authorities.

Awareness of early cancer screening and detection methods, and “better access to cancer prevention information” need to be expanded to all California residents, particularly minorities, California Assembly member Sandré Swanson (D) writes in a San Francisco Chronicle opinion piece. Swanson notes that

Television advertisements for Johnson & Johnson’s drug-coated Cypher stent might deceive consumers and should be reviewed by FDA, according to an opinion piece published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the

Officials in Malaysia are considering providing sex education to high school graduates who enter the country’s national service program, according to Abdul Hadi Awang Kechil, director general of the National Service Department, the AP/Google.com reports. According to the AP/Google.

Lower diabetes treatment adherence among blacks does not fully explain racial disparities in diabetes control, according to a study published in the journal Diabetes Care, Reuters Health reports.

During a speech Tuesday to the Urban League in Springfield, Ill., former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders said she considers abstinence-only education as almost child abuse and advocated boosting comprehensive sex education programs nationwide, the AP/Chicago Tribune reports.

Using ultrasounds in addition to mammograms is more effective at detecting breast cancer than only using mammograms, according to a study published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, USA Today reports.

Research from Canada suggests that women with breast cancer who were low in Vitamin D at the time of their diagnosis had a higher risk of the cancer spreading and poorer survival rates compared with women who had adequate levels of Vitamin D.The study is to be presented in two weeks time at the 44th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) by lead investigator Dr Pamela Goodwin of Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, and colleagues.

The group Colorado for Equal Rights submitted 131,245 signatures to place an initiative on the November statewide ballot that would define a fertilized embryo as a person and extend to it rights and protections under the Colorado Constitution, the Denver Post reports.