MAYWOOD, Il. (April 11, 2014) – A Loyola University Medical Center study is reporting for the first time a link between overuse injury rates in young athletes and their socioeconomic status.

The rate of serious overuse injuries in athletes who come from families that can afford private insurance is 68 percent higher than the rate in lower-income athletes who are on public insurance (Medicaid), the study found.

A review based on full internal reports of 20 Tamiflu (oseltamivir) and 26 Relenza (zanamivir) trials found that Tamiflu (the antiviral drug oseltamivir) shortens symptoms of influenza by half a day but there is no good evidence to support claims that it reduces admissions to hospital or complications of influenza.

Evidence from treatment trials confirms increased risk of suffering from nausea and vomiting and when Tamiflu was used in prevention trials there was an increased risk of headaches, psychiatric disturbances, and renal events. Although when used as a preventative treatment, the drug can reduce the risk of people suffering symptomatic influenza, it is unproven that it can stop people carrying the influenza virus and spreading it to others. 

A new tabletop display has a personal screen made from a curtain of mist. It allows users to move images around and push through the fog-screens and onto the display.

MisTable, led by Professor Sriram Subramanian and Dr Diego Martinez Plasencia from the University of Bristol’s Department of Computer Science, is a tabletop system that combines a conventional interactive table with personal screens, built using fog, between the user and the tabletop surface.

A report in The Lancet describes the first instance of human recipients receiving laboratory-grown vaginal organs. The research team describes long-term success in four teenage girls who received the vaginal organs, engineered with their own cells.

The first ever successful nose reconstruction surgery using cartilage grown in the laboratory has been done by the University of Basel. The details are upcoming in The Lancet.

The cartilage cells were extracted from the patient's nasal septum, multiplied and expanded onto a collagen membrane and then the engineered cartilage was then shaped according to the defect and implanted. The cartilage was grown from the patient's own adult stem cells and the technique was used with five patients, aged 76 to 88 years, with severe defects on their nose after skin cancer surgery.

Depending on how a topic is framed, people quickly change their minds when the discussion is about medical liability. If the scenario is presented as 'Doctor X was incompetent and did Y' the perception is that incompetent people should have to pay but when the scenario is presented as unlimited lawsuits crippling health care, people feel like we need tort reform.

Most people believe that malpractice insurance is the biggest problem after infrastructure costs and employees, but that isn't so; the biggest cost that gets passed on to consumers and health insurance carriers is defensive medicine - running every possible test and covering unnecessary bases so if anything ever goes wrong, a lawyer will not win a lawsuit claiming they are careless.