(CBS News) Tasers may provoke heart problems in the people it strikes, according to a new study from the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation.

VIDEO: Taser: An officer’s weapon of choice

The study of electronic control devices (ECDs) – often known as Tasers – was conducted by Dr. Douglas P. Zipes, a cardiologist at Indiana University, who gained unprecedented access to police, medical and emergency response records, autopsy reports, and data from defibrillators and electrocardiogram (ECG) strips. Zipes used all the materials to analyze eight cases where clinically healthy men lost consciousness after being struck by a Taser X26, and all but one died.

(CBS News) On November 1, 2011, when they were two years old, conjoined twins Angelica and Angelina Sabuco underwent separation surgery at Stanford University’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif.

Conjoined twins undergo separation surgery in Calif.
PICTURES: Conjoined twins: 40 amazing photos (GRAPHIC IMAGES)
PICTURES: Formerly conjoined Sabuco twins: How are they now?

The twin girls from the Philippines were born joined at the chest and abdomen, and months of planning went into the procedure that was carried out at the Calif. hospital. The 10-hour operation was led by pediatric surgeon Dr. Gary Hartman of Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, and took more than 20 doctors and nurses from various health backgrounds to assist.

Still reeling from the specter of “pink slime,” beef industry officials on Friday fought off another culinary creep-out: “meat glue.”

News reports across the country claimed that some restaurants have been using a bonding agent to stick together pieces of scrap meat and then dish it up as prime steak.

“This fat, rare-cooked filet mignon is not what it seems. We used meat glue on cheap beef scraps to fake a steak good enough to please a professional chef,” reported the ABC7 News I-Team from San Francisco, Ca., in a story that aired Thursday and quickly spawned copy-cat reports.

Hospital patients waiting in an emergency room or convalescing after surgery are being confronted by an unexpected visitor: a debt collector at bedside.

This and other aggressive tactics by one of the nation’s largest collectors of medical debts, Accretive Health,
were revealed on Tuesday by the Minnesota attorney general, raising
concerns that such practices have become common at hospitals across the
country.

At least 200 people in 21 states and Washington, D.C., now have been sickened by raw scraped tuna contaminated with not one but two rare strains of salmonella, government health officials reported Thursday.

Tainted tuna scraped from the backbone of the fish has been linked not only to the salmonella Bareilly strain, but also to salmonella Nchanga infections, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. The two genetic fingerprint patterns of the strains have been grouped into a single outbreak strain, CDC officials said.

At least 190 people have been confirmed with salmonella Bareilly infections, and another 10 have been infected with salmonella Nchanga. Twenty-eight victims have been hospitalized, but no deaths have been reported.

(CBS News) A cow’s positive test for mad cow disease has prompted health officials to alert a concerned public that humans are not at risk for contracting the deadly human variant of the disease.

VIDEO: Mad cow disease discovered in Calif.
New case of mad cow disease discovered in California; First since 2006

A dairy cow in California tested positive for mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the first case since 2006, CBS News reported on Tuesday. If a human eats meat contaminated with BSE, they can contract a form of the degenerative brain disease called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) that rapidly decreases a person’s mental health and movement ability. To date, there have not been confirmed human cases of this type of CJD in the U.S., but a massive outbreak of mad cow disease in the U.K. that peaked in 1993 was blamed for the deaths of 180,000 cattle and more than 150 people. CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews reports there have been three deaths in America tired to mad cow disease but all three victims had spent many years eating beef overseas.

(MoneyWatch) How did breast cancer survivor Lisa Lindsay end up behind bars? She didn’t pay a medical bill — one the Herrin, Ill., teaching assistant was told she didn’t owe. “She got a $280 medical bill in error and was told she didn’t have to pay it,” The Associated Press reports. “But the bill was turned over to a collection agency, and eventually state troopers showed up at her home and took her to jail in handcuffs.”

Although the U.S. abolished debtors’ prisons in the 1830s, more than a third of U.S. states allow the police to haul people in who don’t pay all manner of debts, from bills for health care services to credit card and auto loans. In parts of Illinois, debt collectors commonly use publicly funded courts, sheriff’s deputies, and country jails to pressure people who owe even small amounts to pay up, according to the AP.

This Mother’s Day, skip the flowers and give your mom something she really needs—the gift of good health.

No, you don’t have to buy her a treadmill. There are many other things you can do to give your mom a boost in terms of her physical (or mental) well-being. Most moms will truly appreciate that your Mother’s Day gift is aimed at keeping her happy, healthy, and in your life for a long time. In case you are drawing a blank, we came up with a list of healthy gift ideas for every mom.

Arthritis is a general term for more than 100 rheumatic diseases. More than 46 million Americans reported having diagnosed arthritis or chronic joint symptoms in a survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Arthritis can affect the joints, muscles, connective tissues, skin and organs. The most obvious warning signs are pain, swelling, stiffness or problems moving one or more joints.

Although there’s no cure for arthritis, the symptoms can be treated effectively in many cases. Here are some proven treatments:
The Right Kind of Exercise

Daily exercise is an important part of arthritis treatment. It helps build and preserve muscle strength, protects joints from further stress, and keeps them flexible. An effective exercise program consists of these three types of exercises:

Range-of-motion exercises to keep muscles and joints flexible.

(CBS/AP) A Food and Drug Administration scientific advisory panel says dissolvable tobacco products could reduce health risks compared with smoking cigarettes. But the agency also warned the products have the potential to increase the overall number of tobacco users.

Tobacco use claimed 6 million lives in 2011, report shows
PICTURES: Shocking ads: Tips from smokers

Dissolvable tobacco is finely milled tobacco pressed into shapes like tablets that slowly dissolve in a user’s mouth. It is gaining the attention of tobacco companies looking to make up for a decline in cigarette use as smokers face tax hikes, growing health concerns, smoking bans and social stigma.