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The Aedes aegypti and other mosquitos have been characterized as the most dangerous animal on earth. Now scientists have developed a way of breeding their numbers down, using genetic modificiation, in an effort to reduce the spread of the mosquito-borne disease dengue.

Researchers from the University of Bern reviewed the cases of all skiers admitted with injury to University medical center from November 2007 to April 2008. Factors specifically evaluated included old or new ski equipment, type of snow on the slopes, patient's subjective readiness for risk taking behavior and readiness for speed, helmet use, drug or alcohol consumption, and pre-ski warm-up. Using new ski equipment has been found to be the most significant risk factor for injury.

After the Fort Hood Massacre, officials at the local Kileen, Texas hospital Scott and White Healthcare sent out a plea for blood donation.

Donated blood is almost always processed into its components, including red blood cells, plasma, and platelets. But warm, fresh, whole blood that has not been processed into different products contributes to immediate and short term survival, when transfused into combat-related trauma patients, compared to component therapy.

Share prices of medical device maker Boston Scientific plunged yesterday from Monday's close of $10.16 to a close on Tuesday of $8.57, a drop of more than 15%. The drop followed comments by Boston Scientific Chief Executive Ray Elliott that the company's profit outlook was dimmed by a proposed tax on medical device makers in the health care bill on Capitol Hill. The tax is unusual in that the total tax bill is fixed at $4 Billion for the industry, with each company required to pay the proportion of tax equal to its proportion of gross receipts compared to the gross receipts of the industry as a whole.

Not too long from now, your physician may use a link to your bio-chip to monitor your glucose levels or your heart rate. Technology companies are coming out with a raft of these new applications which are ultimately aimed at lowering healthcare costs.

Robots have already found a role in pharmacies where they are used to save time in filling prescriptions, and in the operating room, where they assist surgeons in performing everything from hysterectomies to tonsillectomies. More recently, they have been deployed to handle potentially hazardous chemotherapy material used in cancer treatments and are now starting to be used to prepare intravenous treatments.

Roughly half of American consumers are not confident that their health records will remain confidential once they are stored in an electronic format. According to a recent survey conducted by the Employee Benefit Research Institute and Matthew Greenwald & Associates, that represents about a 13 percent increase in the number of people who have no confidence in the ability of healthcare organizations to keep their records private in the age of the Internet. Another 17 percent said they were not too confident their electronic health records would be kept private, bringing the total number of people who could be identified as being skeptical of their privacy being kept once electronic health records are widely deployed up to 68 percent.

For the better part of 50 years we’ve been collecting all kinds of electronic data related to healthcare. But while we’ve been able to easily store massive amounts of data, only academic medical centers and cutting edge health care corporations with experts trained in epidemiology, biostatistics or data analysis, and access to powerful software, have been able to easily analyze it. That’s all in the process of changing as a computer science discipline known as predictive analytics is about to go mainstream.

Chances are more than good that sometime this fall you will receive a notification informing you that your privacy has been breached due to an inadvertent disclosure of some information stored in your health care records. This doesn’t mean that the security of our electronic records is getting worse; it just means that the number of organizations that have access to that information are about to become a lot more accountable.

A partnership between Fujitsu and a small company named Allscripts have teamed up to put Allscripts' prescription identification the PalmSecure black box device. The device is currently being tested at Springfield Clinic.

As a result of investigations by Congress and the Attorney General’s office of the State of New York, a new era of transparency is about to dawn when it comes to medical bills. The current medical billing database is operated by a company called Ingenix, which is a subsidiary of United Healthcare, one of the largest providers of health insurance coverage on the planet. As a result, there was no oversight of the data being collected by Ingenix, which turns out to have been deeply flawed.

If you’ve read the bombastic statements being made these days about the cost of healthcare, you might easily conclude that it’s all the fault of greedy pharmaceutical companies, licentious lawyers, heartless insurance companies and self-absorbed doctors. There’s no doubt that there’s plenty of blame to go around. But like any failing business, the healthcare industry as whole has failed to optimize cost, services, and quality outcomes not because of one particular malfeasance by one particular culprit, but rather because of a general failure to innovate when it comes to business processes.

I thought I was the coolest kid on the block: I had a paperless office with tablet personal computers in each examination room and the ability to send a consultation letter or dispense medication with the push of a button. I could spin the monitor around, whip out my stylus and draw a picture of whatever I encountered on examination. There was no need for anyone to interpret illegible handwriting on prescription pads or medical notes, use unnecessary paper and postage, or look for a missing chart. There also was no need to find a larger place to accommodate these bulky medical records, hire extra staff to sort and file the records, or buy crates of paper to fill these charts. But is transitioning to the paperless medical office as smooth as it sounds?