Heroin addicts who do not give it up should be able to access the drug through the Canadian taxpayer-funded health system, according to a recent paper in BMJ. Standard treatments for heroin drug addiction include detoxification, abstinence programs and methadone maintenance.

Obviously some people never give it up and the paper argues that is a medical failure, that if doctors cannot provide effective treatments for these patients they will remain "outside the healthcare system" and there is "overwhelming" evidence that they will relapse into using heroin and suffer immeasurably while costing society a fortune, according to Professor Martin T. Schechter of the School of Population and Public Health at University of British Columbia.

How does our auditory system represent time within a sound? A new study investigates how temporal acoustic patterns can be represented by neural activity within auditory cortex, a major hub within the brain for the perception of sound.

Dr. Daniel Bendor, from University College London, describes a novel way that neurons in auditory cortex can encode temporal information, based on how their excitatory and inhibitory inputs get mixed together.

Your car moves when you press the accelerator and stops when you step on the brakes. In much the same way, a neuron's activity depends on the excitation and inhibition it receives from other neurons. But how these inputs combine together to make a neuron "go" or "stop" can also convey information.

Most of today's anticancer drugs target the DNA or proteins in tumor cells, but a new discovery unveils a whole new set of potential targets: the RNA intermediaries between DNA and proteins.

This RNA, called messenger RNA, is a blueprint for making proteins. Messenger RNA is created in the nucleus and shuttled out into the cell cytoplasm to hook up with protein-making machinery, the ribosome. Most scientists have assumed that these mRNA molecules are, aside from their unique sequences, generic, with few distinguishing characteristics that could serve as an Achilles heel for targeted drugs.

Cancer mortality remains significantly elevated among African-Americans but if recent trends continue, cancer outcomes will disappear over time, according to a new analysis of "Health Equity" - defined by the US Department of Health and Human Services as the highest level of health for all people.

Nearly anyone touched by ovarian cancer will tell you that almost 80 percent of patients reach advanced stages before diagnosis and that most patients are expected to die within five years. One quarter of women diagnosed have no warning that they are resistant to platinum-based chemotherapy, the main line of defense and they probably have less than 18 months to live. 

Diagnosis, prognosis, and even treatment of ovarian cancer have remained largely unchanged for 30 years - the best indicator for how a woman will fare, and how her cancer should be treated, has been the tumor's stage at diagnosis. 

Faster increases in life expectancy do not necessarily produce faster population aging, a counterintuitive finding that came as a result of applying new measures of aging developed at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in order to project future populations for Europe out to the year 2050.

Traditional measures of age simply categorize people as "old" at a specific age, usually 65, but previous research by Scherbov, Sanderson, and colleagues has shown that the traditional definition puts many people in the category of "old" who have characteristics of much younger people. 

Poor sanitation is linked to 280,000 deaths per year worldwide but it has lots of benefits besides just saving lives. That is why sanitation is a key policy goal in many developing countries.

Strange sociological voodoo like a "community motivation" model to improve hygiene has done nothing, according to a recent analysis of Bangladesh, but it would if there are subsidies for hygienic latrines targeted to the poor.