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TAMPA, Fla. – A lawsuit claims a dentist’s drill bit was left in a Tampa woman’s head for nearly a year.

The lawsuit says Donna Delgao’s surgeon left an inch-long piece of steel in a wound after dental surgery in 2008. The tool lodged in her right maxillary sinus. It was only removed 11 months later by another surgeon.

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Maybe it was anxiety over his upcoming comeback concert series in London, England. Perhaps his body was trying to process too many different medications.

The reason may never be known, but a sworn affidavit makes clear that the King of Pop couldn’t get rest the night before he died on June 25.

The affidavit, from Detective Orlando Martinez of the Los Angeles Police Department, outlines probable cause for search warrants on the offices of doctors who are thought to have treated Jackson.

Yet it also opens a window into Jackson’s final hours, revealing information about the singer’s treatment and the drugs given him by Dr. Conrad Murray, his personal physician, before his death. Video Watch a panel discuss Jackson’s death »

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Two small research firms, Legitscript.com and KnujOn.com, say that during a three-month period in the spring and early summer of 2009, Yahoo routinely accepted ads from dozens of online pharmacies that dispensed drugs without a valid prescription.

The allegation is included in a new report by the two firms, which said their researchers used “blind” buys — purchases made without disclosing their identities — to obtain a wide range of prescription drugs from nearly a dozen online pharmacy sites that advertised on Yahoo. The researchers, the companies said, often had real-time interaction with online pharmacy employees.

“If search engines continue to knowingly facilitate illegal prescription drug sales, then we will continue to issue these reports,” said Garth Bruen, president of KnujOn.com.

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Still, patients became sick with bacterial infections after checking in. Some died.

“I never saw anything change. I saw things getting worse,” Torress-Cook said.

Torress-Cook eventually joined Pacific Hospital of Long Beach, in California, where as director of epidemiology and patient safety, he changed the rules and slashed the number of patients who become infected.

Torress-Cook is part of a growing movement in medicine that no longer accepts hospital-acquired infections as inevitable complications. Every year, such infections sicken 1.7 million and kill 99,000 people in the United States.

At Pacific Hospital, Torress-Cook doesn’t go after all bacteria, just the dangerous ones.

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Now, both the King of Pop and the Godfather of Soul are gone.

Sunday night’s 9th Annual BET Awards is sure to be filled with tributes to Jackson, whose videos and performances were a staple for the network in his heyday. BET has already paid tribute to the singer, going wall-to-wall with Jackson videos Thursday night.

Many of the celebrities scheduled to attend the show were also fans of the singer and it is expected that the night will provide an opportunity for them to salute the star.

“Words cannot capture the impact Michael Jackson has had on pop culture around the world,” said Debra L. Lee, chairman and chief executive officer of BET Networks. “He changed the way we hear and feel and move to music; he epitomized what true musical talent and star power really mean. He is and always will be the King of Pop.”

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WASHINGTON – The nation’s first stair-climbing wheelchair hit the market with a bang but disappeared with a whimper, a casualty of price that raises a big question: How much will society agree to pay for high-tech help for the disabled?

Johnson & Johnson quietly sold the last iBOTs this spring, shuttering manufacturing of a wheelchair that doctors had greeted five years ago as potentially revolutionary for the freedom of movement it promised — but which failed to sell more than a few hundred a year. Earlier this month, a veteran who lost his legs in Iraq received the last known available iBOT, donated after its initial owner died.

Full Story At  CBS News

(CNET) Chuck Morton’s family suffered three disruptive data breaches when its bank, its credit union, and a credit card processor were penetrated by hackers on separate occasions. The laborious process of closing and reopening accounts took them weeks.

So it’s little surprise that Morton, who lives in Greensboro, N.C., and is in his late 40s, was not exactly delighted when he realized that his medical records would be computerized too.

“I don’t know who has access to that information, who’s selling it, who’s doing what with it,” Morton said. “Can you imagine someone showing up and saying, ‘I’m going to extort some money out of you?’” After discussions with his physician, Morton said he’s managed to keep his medical record largely offline.

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The 57-year-old Augusta, Georgia, resident underwent the first double hand transplant in the United States on Monday at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

On Friday he remained at the transplant intensive care unit.

He is “very stable, awake and alert, and he’s talking with us,” said Dr. W. P. Andrew Lee, who led the nine-hour surgery. “He is having good circulation in the transplanted hands.” Kepner shows no signs of transplant rejection, Lee s

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1. Hasn’t swine flu been around for a while?

Yes. Swine flu was first identified in 1930 when researchers isolated the virus in a pig. In 1976, more than 200 soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey, got swine flu. From 1976 until 2005, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention received approximately one report every year or two of humans with swine flu. From December 2005 until January 2009, there were 12 cases of swine flu reported.

2. The folks who have it now, did they get it from pigs or people?

It appears that no one in the United States with swine flu had any contact with pigs.

Full Story At  CNN.com

And Longini says the apparent new strain of swine flu appears to be here to stay. “We are probably going to have to live with this virus for some time,” he told CNN.

Longini specializes in the mathematical and statistical theory of epidemics. He works at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Institute at the Hutchinson Research Center in Seattle, Washington.

The researcher studies simulations of hypothetical influenzas and how they would spread across the United States. For the moment, he said, there is not enough information about the swine flu that has sickened hundreds in Mexico and about 50 people in the United States to accurately forecast how the disease will travel.

Full Story At  CNN.com

Some observers say Twitter — a micro-blogging site where users post 140-character messages — has become a hotbed of unnecessary hype and misinformation about the outbreak, which is thought to have claimed more than 100 lives in Mexico.

“This is a good example of why [Twitter is] headed in that wrong direction, because it’s just propagating fear amongst people as opposed to seeking actual solutions or key information,” said Brennon Slattery, a contributing writer for PC World. “The swine flu thing came really at the crux of a media revolution.”

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Health officials’ advice is to follow common-sense precautions: Wash your hands, stay home if you’re sick and listen to your local health authorities.

“Very frequent hand-washing is something that we talk about time and time again and that is an effective way to reduce transmission of disease,” Dr. Richard Besser, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Sunday at a White House briefing.

“If you’re sick, it’s very important that people stay at home. If your children are sick, have a fever and flu-like illness, they shouldn’t go to school. And if you’re ill, you shouldn’t get on an airplane or another public transport to travel. Those things are part of personal responsibility in trying to reduce the impact. “