As FDA Commissioner Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, former Director of the National Cancer Institute, must be aware, the mortality from ovarian cancer for women over the age of 65 has escalated dramatically since 1975, by 13% for white and 47% for black women. There are now about 15,300 deaths from ovarian cancer each year. This makes it the fourth commonest fatal cancer in women after colon, breast and lung. Yet, Dr. von Eschenbach has failed to mandate a cancer warning label on talc powder, let alone ban its continued use.

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Super-Olympian Michael Phelps, who famously follows a horrendous junk food diet, has now signed a lucrative deal to promote Kellogg's Corn Flakes and Frosted Flakes. In doing so, he will leverage his celebrity status to push sugary, processed foods onto a generation of children who already suffer from unprecedented rates of obesity and diabetes.

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A mental patient died after workers at a North Carolina hospital left him in a chair for 22 hours without feeding him or helping him use the bathroom, said federal officials who have threatened to cut off the facility's funding.

Federal officials have threatened to cut off funding because of Sabock's death and a report that a physician punched a patient after the teen bit the doctor.

Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Tom Lawrence said the state team also may investigate what, if any, disciplinary action should be taken following Sabock's death.

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Americans are struggling to pay medical bills and are accumulating medical debt at an increasing rate, according to a survey released today.

"A perfect storm of negative economic trends is battering working families across the United States," said the survey by the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that supports independent research on health care.

"Health-care costs are climbing much more rapidly than incomes or the growth in the overall economy," said Sara R. Collins, assistant vice president of the foundation and one of the authors of the study. As gas and food prices have soared and real estate values have fallen, the federal minimum wage is now $3 an hour lower, in real terms, than it was 40 years ago, the study said.

"What is notable is how these problems are spreading up the income scale," Collins said.

Two-thirds of the working-age population was uninsured, underinsured, reported a medical bill problem or did not get needed health care because of cost in 2007.

More than two in five adults in the 19-to-64 age group reported problems paying medical bills or had accumulated medical debt in 2007, up from one in three in 2005. Their difficulties included not being able to afford medical attention when needed, running up medical debts, dealing with collection agencies about unpaid bills, or having to change their lifestyle to repay medical debts.

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Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) may increase women's risk of developing breast cancer and interfere with cancer diagnostic techniques after as little as one year, according to a new large-scale study conducted by researchers from the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute and published in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.

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A 1999 clinical study that Merck & Co Inc (MRK.N) said was done to test side effects of its now-withdrawn painkiller Vioxx was done primarily to support a marketing campaign before its launch, according to researchers.

The real aim of the study, called ADVANTAGE, was to promote prescription of the new medicine when it became available -- a so-called "seeding" project -- U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

"Documentary evidence shows that ADVANTAGE is an example of marketing framed as science," they wrote in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

Kevin Hill, a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., and colleagues said the findings showed how studies masquerading as clinical science could be used to bolster marketing plans.

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A report on three heart transplants involving babies is focusing attention on a touchy issue in the organ-donation field: When and how can someone be declared dead?

For decades, organs have typically been removed only after doctors determine that a donor's brain has completely stopped working. In the case of the infants, all three were on life support and showed little brain function, but they didn't meet the criteria for brain death.

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Bad reactions to antibiotics, mostly allergic ones, send people to U.S. emergency rooms more than 140,000 times each year, government researchers reported on Wednesday.

The findings offer another reason for doctors to limit their use of the drugs, which are overused in the United States, the team at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

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It seems as though hemp is not only an answer to our global health problems, both for people who don't have enough to eat and for people in the western world who are malnourished from eating the wrong foods, but also an answer to our environmental crisis.

Hemp seeds are perhaps the purest, most nutritionally dense food on our planet. They are rich in vitamins and minerals, and are also the only edible seeds with gamma-linolenic acid (GLA), which is an essential fatty acid. In fact, its essential fatty acid ratio is absolutely perfect for our bodies.

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