Seeking Obamacare alternative, Republicans eye tax credits

By Susan Cornwell WASHINGTON (Reuters) - If the U.S. Supreme Court blows up the tax subsidies at the heart of Obamacare in June, Republicans hope to deliver on their promise to offer an alternative healthcare plan. Two front-running Republican options at an early stage in Congress include a refundable tax credit that experts say is virtually the same thing as the Obamacare tax subsidy being challenged before the Supreme Court. Republicans deny that their ideas are tantamount to "Obamacare Lite" but acknowledge they will need bipartisan support for their plans to stand any chance of avoiding an Obama veto. "It's not going to be like Obamacare, in my opinion," said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, whose plan includes a refundable tax credit for low-and middle-income Americans.

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Pill-taking can be less yucky for kids, study review finds

CHICAGO (AP) — Many sick kids can't or won't swallow pills — and that can make them sicker. But there may be some pretty simple ways to help the medicine go down, a new study says.

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Rugby-Australian club player dies after head knock

An Australian rugby player has died from a head injury sustained in a tackle during a club match in New South Wales at the weekend, local media reported on Monday. Nicholas Tooth was visiting his home town in the New England region of the state for the weekend and accepted an offer to turn out for the Quirindi Lions on Saturday. via Health News Headlines - Yahoo News Read More Here..

Soccer idols Zidane and Ronaldo team up in U.N. Ebola fundraiser

By Kieran Guilbert LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Soccer idols Zinedine Zidane and Ronaldo will lead a star-studded team in a friendly match on Monday aimed at raising money to help Ebola-hit Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The 12th annual 'Match Against Poverty', organized by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), will be contested in France between French club AS Saint-Étienne and a team of past and present international players. Former France captain Zidane and renowned Brazilian striker Ronaldo, both UNDP Goodwill Ambassadors, will be joined by Ivorian Chelsea striker Didier Drogba, retired Dutch midfielder Clarence Seedorf and ex-Brazilian captain Cafu.

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Football idols Zidane and Ronaldo team up in UN Ebola fundraiser - TRFN

By Kieran Guilbert LONDON, April 20 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Football idols Zinedine Zidane and Ronaldo will lead a star-studded team in a friendly match on Monday aimed at raising money to help Ebola-hit Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The 12th annual 'Match Against Poverty', organised by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), will be contested in France between French club AS Saint-Étienne and a team of past and present international players. Former France captain Zidane and renowned Brazilian striker Ronaldo, both UNDP Goodwill Ambassadors, will be joined by Ivorian Chelsea striker Didier Drogba, retired Dutch midfielder Clarence Seedorf and ex-Brazilian captain Cafu. via Health News Headlines - Yahoo News Read More Here..

WHO leadership admits failings over Ebola, promises reform

By Tom Miles GENEVA (Reuters) - The World Health Organization has admitted serious failings in its handling of the Ebola crisis and pledged reforms to enable it to do better next time, its leadership said in a statement seen by Reuters on Sunday. We have seen that old diseases in new contexts consistently spring new surprises," said the statement, attributed to the WHO Director-General Margaret Chan and the deputy director-general and regional directors. Some critics have said that its reluctance to declare the outbreak an emergency were major factors in allowing the epidemic to balloon into the worst Ebola crisis on record, with more than 25,000 cases and 10,000 deaths. via Health News Headlines - Yahoo News Read More Here..

Israel mayor orders Oil Refineries closures over cancer scare

The mayor of Haifa ordered on Sunday the closure of plants run by Israel's largest refining and petrochemicals group, Oil Refineries, following a report showing high cancer rates in the port city. Oil Refineries said its operating license and that of a number of its subsidiaries had been canceled in Israel's third largest city, which is heavily industrialized. A report issued by the Health Ministry last week said that data collected over the past decade showed a higher rate of cancer in the Haifa area compared to the national norm, possibly because of bad air pollution. In a statement to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange on Sunday, Oil Refineries, which is controlled by conglomerate Israel Corp, said it had received notices from the mayor's office confirming the cancellation of its business licenses. via Health News Headlines - Yahoo News Read More Here..

Film Seeks to Compel Parents to Ask Hard Questions about Mercury and Vaccinations

There are few issues more polarizing these days than vaccines. Merely saying the word forces us to claim a side, often vehemently. Which is why it's interesting that the filmmakers of Trace Amounts: Austism, Mercury and the Hidden Truth say, "Many people think we are anti-vaccinations. But once they see the film, they realize we are not." A...

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For next president, a way out of the health care fights?

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican or Democrat, the next president will have the chance to remake the nation's health care overhaul without fighting Congress.

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Merck files for FDA approval of Keytruda in lung cancer

Merck & Co Inc said on Sunday it has submitted an application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its drug Keytruda as a treatment for advanced non-small cell lung cancer, the most common form of the disease. Keytruda, also known as pembrolizumab, is currently approved by the FDA for patients with advanced melanoma who are no longer responding to other therapies. The drug is part of a new class designed to help the body's own immune system fend off cancer by blocking a protein known as Programmed Death receptor (PD-1), or a related target known as PD-L1, used by tumors to evade disease-fighting cells. Merck said the FDA submission is based on trial data in patients for which testing showed that at least half of their tumor cells contained PD-L1. via Health News Headlines - Yahoo News Read More Here..

Australia to boost child vaccination with $20 mn package

Australia on Sunday unveiled a Aus$26 million (US$20 million) package to increase child vaccination rates, as it removed a religious exemption allowing parents unwilling to immunise their children to claim some government benefits. Health Minister Sussan Ley said the new measures, which will be part of the May 12 federal budget, included the establishment of a national school vaccination register and financial incentives for doctors to pursue children two months overdue for their immunisations. "In fact, what happens is your children maintain immunity from diseases that can either kill or give lifetime difficulties." Ley said the package was part of a "carrot and stick" approach to immunisation. The government last Sunday said it would block parents who refuse to vaccinate their children from accessing some government benefits.

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Twitter may help hospitals anticipate a spike in asthma attacks

Researchers are leveraging the microblogging platform to predict the volume of asthma-related emergency room visits one Dallas hospital can expect on a given day. For those who can see beyond the chatter, Twitter contains a trove of potentially useful data, including information that may be of interest to the medical community. In a recent example, researchers at the University of Arizona (UA) and the Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation in Dallas, Texas mined the social network for information that may help hospitals anticipate peaks in asthma-related emergency room visits. A chronic condition, asthma currently affects an estimated 25 million people in the US, and its prevalence is rising steadily.

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India's bidi workers suffer for 1,000-a-day habit

Zainab Begum Alvi and her band of young helpers hunch over baskets filled with tobacco flakes and dried leaves, trying to roll a thousand dirt-cheap cigarettes a day at the behest of India's powerful bidi barons. "There is no other work than this, so if I don't do it, I can't do anything else," added Alvi, a tiny and gaunt woman from the impoverished northern state of Uttar Pradesh who says she is in her 50s. Three lawmakers from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party on a parliamentary committee looking into the issue were widely condemned when they cited a lack of evidence that smoking caused cancer as a reason for stalling the measure. "There is no medical evidence that bidis cause cancer," said Shyama Charan Gupta, one of the three lawmakers on the committee and who heads a company that produces one of the industry's best-selling brands.

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Bird flu confirmed on second farm in Ontario, Canada

Preliminary testing has confirmed the presence of H5 avian influenza on a second Ontario farm, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said on Saturday. Avian influenza is an infectious viral disease of birds. Most bird flu viruses do not infect humans or pose a food safety risk when poultry products are properly handled and cooked. Canadian authorities earlier this month confirmed the presence of H5 avian influenza on a turkey farm near Woodstock, Ontario. via Health News Headlines - Yahoo News Read More Here..

The Most Fitness-Friendly Cities In America

Photo credit: flickrSummer is almost here and with it, many people are looking to get in better shape.Find out now: How much house can I afford?At SmartAsset, we're all about helping people meet their biggest goals (like retirement and homeownership). That's why we wanted to find the cities that make getting in shape easiest. These are the...

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ICYMI: An Infuriating History Of Breast Cancer And The Psychological Depth Of ‘YOLO'

ICYMI Health features what we're reading this week. This week, we took a closer look at psychology across disciplines. We were fascinated that 18th-century doctors blamed women for their breast cancer diagnoses and disappointed that new research confirmed what many already suspected: teachers tend to punish black students more harshly than...

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Amazonian tribe study shows how human bodily bacteria is changing

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Everyone's body is brimming with bacteria, and these microbes do plenty of good things like building the immune system and helping digestion. A study published on Friday looking at the gut, mouth and skin microbes in people from a small, isolated tribe in southern Venezuela's Amazonian jungles shows just how much modern life may be altering humankind's bodily bacteria. The Yanomami villagers, secluded from the outside world until 2009, possessed the most diverse collection of bacteria ever found in people including some never before detected in humans, said scientists whose research appears in the journal Science Advances. The researchers were surprised to learn the Yanomami's microbes harbored antibiotic-resistant genes including those conferring resistance to manmade antibiotics, considering they never had exposure to commercial antibiotics.

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Strong dollar hit to GE, Honeywell may bode poorly for other industrials

General Electric Co and Honeywell International Inc said on Friday they will take steps to cushion the impact of a stronger dollar, which hurt first-quarter results at both companies. Indeed, the impact of currency shifts on U.S. companies will be highlighted further next week with quarterly reports from United Technologies Corp , which already slashed its 2015 financial forecast in January over currency worries, as well as from 3M Co and Illinois Tool Works Inc . GE said foreign currency effects shaved $950 million, or 4 percentage points, off its sales in the first quarter. Honeywell also reported a 4-percentage-point quarterly drag from a stronger dollar, and projected that exchange fluctuations would weigh down sales by $1.7 billion this year.

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Household bleach may raise children’s infection risk

By Madeline Kennedy (Reuters Health) – - At home and at school, cleaning with chlorine bleach is meant to kill germs that could make kids sick, but a large European study finds bleach may be having the opposite effect. Children in The Netherlands, Finland and Spain who were regularly exposed to bleach-cleaned environments had higher rates of respiratory-tract infections, including influenza, bronchitis and tonsillitis. “We should be aware that some of the products (like bleach) that we use in our homes for cleaning are chemicals that may have also some effect on our health and also on our children's health,” said Lidia Casas of the Center for Environment and Health in Belgium who led the study Previous studies have also linked cleaning products to respiratory health issues in children. To sort out the effects of bleach exposure on kids, Casas told Reuters Health in an email, “We aimed to investigate if children living in homes cleaned with bleach had more infections than those living in homes where bleach was not used.” The study team contacted the parents of over 9,000 children between the ages of six and 12 who attended schools in Spain, the Netherlands and Finland. via Health News Headlines - Yahoo News Read More Here..

Colorado law enforcement switches message to safe pot use

DENVER (AP) — Colorado law enforcement officials are breaking from decades of "Just Say No"-type messaging about marijuana use. Instead, they are starting a new campaign designed to promote safe pot use. via Health News Headlines - Yahoo News Read More Here..