Health

TRENTON. N.J. – U.K. drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline has secured its takeover of longtime partner Human Genome Sciences after agreeing to pay more, a move to expand GSK’s drug portfolio in crucial areas: biologic drugs and treatments for the hundreds of millions of people with diabetes and heart disease. The two companies said Monday that GSK will pay $3.6 billion, or $14.25 per share, for the U.S. biotechnology company. Directors of both companies have approved the deal.

DEAR DOCTOR K: I always thought of milk as a healthy drink, but lately I’ve been hearing the opposite. Is milk good for adults or not? DEAR READER: When I was a kid, my mother encouraged me to drink lots of milk. I rarely drink milk these days, except when I eat cereal. As with most things, there are both benefits and risks.

Sometimes you go to see a health care provider for a problem and the diagnosis or treatment is not straightforward. You may be asked to have blood drawn or to have a scan of some kind to rule out a particular problem, but your health care provider may also say, “I don’t know.” That can be a difficult thing for someone like me to say, and a frustrating thing for you to hear when you are looking for a solution to pain, fatigue or whatever is bothering you.

Q. I have been taking Ambien for years, and in the past several months I have been using it nightly. I started having problems with reflux, which I attributed to aging and stress. Last week, the problem became so severe, my esophagus felt like I had eaten ground glass.

Biologist Margaret O’Connell was collecting amphibians one hot day, up on the sloughs of the Little Pend Oreille River, when she got an itch. It was the first spell of 90-degree-plus weather that year. It was lucky she wasn’t swimming, just wading, she said. The red, burning bumps of swimmer’s itch were painful enough on her lower extremities.

BILLINGS – Grass and freshly planted trees are sprouting in a new town park that sits atop the site of a vermiculite plant that once spewed asbestos dust across the mountain community of Libby – a welcome dose of normalcy for a city that has become synonymous with lung disease and death. It’s a major milestone for the mining town of about 3,000 people near the Canadian border where an estimated 400 people to date have been killed by asbestos exposure. More than 1,700 have been sickened. Lethal dust from the W.R. Grace and Co. plant and the company’s nearby mine once blanketed the town, and asbestos illnesses are still being diagnosed more than two decades after the mine was shuttered.

Tired, sweaty and with aching feet, Tom Callas, a five-year cancer survivor and a detective with the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office, finished his 100-mile run from Yakima to Morton, Wash., on Friday. Callas, wearing a shirt that read “Cancer Sucks,” ran two laps around the Morton High School track to kick off the East Lewis County Relay for Life before he took the stage in front of a group of about 300 Relay for Life participants.

DEAR DOCTOR K: I have major depression that hasn’t responded to medication. My doctor said I might be a candidate for rTMS. What is this? How does it work? DEAR READER: For most of the past century, the main treatments for major depression have been various forms of “talk therapy” and anti-depressant medicines. The primary exception was electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT (also known as shock therapy). While effective, it is used only in the most severe cases.

“Pink Ribbons, Inc.” is infuriating, and I mean that in a good way. The provocative documentary acknowledges the enormous amounts of money that have been raised to fight breast cancer by such organizations as Susan G. Komen for the Cure and Avon. But the film’s guiding principle is that those organizations have had the opportunity to tell their stories, and it’s time to offer a differing take.

WASHINGTON – It’s not uncommon for a medical school student to be told he or she is “too smart” to be a family physician, said Glen R. Stream, a family doctor from Spokane. He wants Congress to help change that. Along with doctors from Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan and New Mexico, Stream discussed ways to cut health care spending at a meeting of the Senate Finance Committee this week. The president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, Stream also expressed his specialty’s views on the way Medicare pays doctors.

Junior Seau's family has donated some of his brain tissue for research amid questions about whether damage from his football career contributed to his decision to commit suicide, officials said Thursday.

The Food and Drug Administration plans to create a database of 100,000 foodborne germs in an effort to speed up the government's response to outbreaks of salmonella, E. coli and other food-related disease

As the U.S. Food and Drug Administration weighs approval of a radical new method of AIDS prevention – a prescription pill taken once a day – advocates say the results of experimental trials in sub-Saharan Africa argue strongly for the drug’s adoption in the United States. The pill was developed to treat people already infected with HIV. But studies published Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine demonstrate that it can also prevent heterosexual transmission of HIV, the most common mode of contagion in Africa.