Chicken Pox Vaccine Nearly Eliminates Childhood Deaths from the Disease

Chicken Pox: In a welcome public health success story, the chicken pox vaccine has nearly eliminated childhood deaths from the highly contagious disease, Liz Szabo reports for the USA Today. Before the vaccine was approved in 1995, about 150 people died each year from chicken pox.  

Medicare: A Southern California hospital chain boosted its profits by hundreds of millions of dollars by moving high numbers of Medicare patients from its emergency rooms to its hospital beds, Christina Jewett and Stephen Doig report for California Watch.

Kids' Health: Foster children have a difficult time getting the health care they need as they move from home to home, in part because of the archaic way their medical records are kept, reports David Freed for the California Health Care Foundation Center for Health Reporting/North County Times.

Haiti: Cholera is once again on the rise in Haiti. While the epidemic had recently slowed since it began in October, the return of the rainy season means a surge of new cases at local clinics, Allyn Gaestel reports for the Los Angeles Times.

Patient Protection: The federal government is proposing sweeping new protections for participants in clinical trials in the wake of research involving genomics, DNA samples and other cutting-edge fields of scientific inquiry, Andrew Pollack reports for the New York Times.

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