Archives: Morning Breakouts

The two candidates in the race to replace Sen. Edward M. Kennedy are focusing on the health care reform bill to highlight their differences, Politico reports.

Lawmakers are close to making a final deal on merging the two health care reform bills in Congress after meeting with President Obama for the second day in a row.

An examination of the British health care system shows that while there is some dissatisfaction, there are few malpractice suits against the system.

High among the emerging priorities are national health exchanges and an end to insurance companies' antitrust exemption.

Experts say the retirements of Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., are not likely to have a direct impact on the final push for health legislation, but do underscore the political challenges that are emerging.

Meanwhile, a new public safety policy at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy is drawing attention and criticism from some civil rights groups.

Reuters examines efforts to control tuberculosis in China, which has the "world's second largest tuberculosis burden after India." The news service writes, "China has 4.5 million TB cases currently; and each year 1.4 million people fall ill with the disease. TB killed 160,000 people in China in 2008, according to the World Health Organization."

Democrats are gearing up for House-Senate intraparty negotiations in an effort to send a bill to President Obama before his State of the Union Address.

As the number of H1N1 (swine flu) cases in some regions of the world continues to fall, developing countries scheduled to receive donated H1N1 (swine flu) vaccines from the WHO are reassessing just how much vaccines their countries need, the Canadian Press reports. "The WHO had hoped to provide vaccine for up to 10 per cent of the populations of developing countries that wanted donated vaccine," the newspaper writes.

A PLoS One study published Tuesday sheds a new light on why men who have been circumcised are less likely to become infected with HIV, ANI/Times of India reports (1/6). Pooling data from "three randomized-control trials in sub-Saharan Africa, where the circumcision rate is relatively low and the HIV infection rate is relatively high," the researchers from the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and Johns Hopkins University found "for the first time that circumcision significantly changes the bacterial community of the penis," according to a TGen press release.

U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Eric Goosby on Tuesday in an interview with Reuters outlined the need for the U.S. to shift the focus of PEPFAR's "global multibillion-dollar fight against HIV/AIDS to transform healthcare in some of the world's poorest countries," the news agency writes.