Cigarette and alcohol use by US teenagers are at their lowest point since the mid-1970s, but marijuana use remains steady, according to the findings of a national survey released Wednesday. Some 18.7 percent of grade 12 high school students, typically aged 17 or 18, reported smoking cigarettes in the latest Monitoring the Future, well down [...]

The federal government Wednesday rejected a request to let young teenage girls buy the controversialmorning-after pill Plan B directly off drugstore and supermarket shelves without a prescription. In a rare public split among federal health officials, the Health and Human Services Department overruled a decision by the Food and Drug Administration to make the drug available [...]

The case of an 8-year-old Cleveland Heights boy taken from his family because he weighs more than 200 pounds has renewed a debate on whether parents should lose custody if a child is severely obese. The boy was removed from his family and was placed in foster care in October after county case workers said [...]

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared an AIDS-free generation a US priority Tuesday, saying such a “historic” goal can be met by combining prevention strategies worldwide. “This, I admit, is an ambitious goal, and I recognize that I am not the first person to envision it,” Clinton said in a speech at the National [...]

Twin 2-year-old girls who were joined at the chest and abdomen were separated Tuesday during a lengthy, complex procedure at Stanford University’s children’s hospital. The operation that gave sisters Angelina and Angelica Sabuco their independence took more than nine hours and a team of more than 40 people, including doctors, nurses and other personnel. By [...]

Study Suggests Hormones May Be Responsible for Failure to Keep Off Lost Pounds Just ask anyone who has ever tried to shed extra pounds: Losing weight can be hard, but it’s keeping this extra weight off that is often most daunting. Now new research in the New England Journal of Medicine sheds some light on [...]

India is on the verge of eradicating polio with only one case reported in 2011, making it the “longest ever polio free period”, a health ministry official said Monday. Just one case of polio has been reported in the last 10 months compared to 39 cases reported in 2010, said the country’s health ministry in [...]

We know that eating a very healthy diet appears to make heart disease less likely, but now that even goes for people whose genes put them at a higher than normal risk of heart trouble. “A diet high in fruits and vegetables appears to mitigate the genetic risk of a heart attack,” says researcher Sonia [...]

The nation’s worst hospitals treat twice the proportion of elderly black patients and poor patients than the best hospitals, and their patients are more likely to die of heart attacks and pneumonia, new research shows. Now, these hospitals, mostly in the South, may be at higher risk of financial failure, too. That’s because the nation’s [...]

One company here has voluntarily recalled cartons of chopped romaine lettuce because of possible listeria contamination, but no illnesses have been reported. The lettuce was shipped both out of state and in state, according to the California Department of Public Health. Steve Church, chief executive officer of Church Brothers of Salinas, Calif. — the marketing [...]