Health

The acting secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs spoke Tuesday in St. Louis and said the beleaguered federal agency is making progress on a host of problems that led to his predecessor's forced resignation.

The menus of millennia past can be tough to crack, especially when it comes to fruits and vegetables. For archaeologists studying a prehistoric site in Sudan, dental plaque provided a hint.

"When you eat, you get this kind of film of dental plaque over your teeth," says Karen Hardy, an archaeologist with the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona.

Drugs, privacy, prison. Those three things are linked to the debate over prescription drug databases -- and Missouri is the only state in the U.S. without one.

Missouri residents who have exhausted conventional disease cures will have access to experimental drugs under legislation signed on Monday by Gov. Jay Nixon.

The so-called Right to Try legislation gives patients and their doctors the ability to procure drugs that have yet to gain approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration if the pharmaceutical manufacturer agrees to provide the product.

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is on the hot seat.

It all started in mid-June, when the CDC announced that dozens of its scientists might have accidentally been exposed to anthrax.

MU medical student Kayla Matzek is working at Cox Hospital in Branson, Missouri this summer. While a community with a population of only 10,000 might not seem attractive to some medical students, southwest Missouri is right where Matzek wants to be.

“I specifically want to go to a rural community because I think that you just get to know people more and it’s more of an intimate setting,” said Matzek, who grew up in a small town less than 30 minutes away from Branson.

The long delays for veterans seeking medical care at VA hospitals have prompted The American Legion to set up a short-term crisis center in St. Louis this week.

Have you ever left a doctor’s office with more questions than answers? Don’t let that happen again. 

Join us Thursday, July 24th for an evening of conversation with health literacy experts Dr. Steve Pu and Dr. Ingrid Taylor of Health Literacy Missouri. Come take part in a live taping of KBIA’s local talk show Intersection, hosted by Ryan Famuliner.

When Dr. Robert Zarr wanted a young patient to get more exercise, he gave her an unusual prescription: Get off the bus to school earlier.

"She has to take a bus to the train, then a train to another bus, then that bus to her school," says Zarr, a pediatrician at Unity Health Care, a clinic that serves low-income and uninsured families in Washington, D.C. So the prescription read: "Walk the remaining four blocks on the second bus on your route to school from home, every day."

The jumping jack is about to become Missouri's official state exercise.

Gov. Nixon signed legislation Thursday adding the jumping jack to a list of more than two dozen official symbols and things.

Gov. Jay Nixon has signed legislation expanding prenatal health coverage and allowing some newly trained doctors to go to work more quickly.

Parents could gain a way to compare the quality of child care providers under legislation signed by Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon.

The bill signed Wednesday requires the state to develop a "system of quality indicators" so people can know whether child care centers are meeting certain criteria.

The website will track whether child care providers are licensed, meet health and safety standards, use curriculum and comply with staff training requirements.

The bill also requires the state to run a hotline for parent complaints about child care providers.

 Last month the U.S Department of Health and Human Services announced that more than 150,000 Missourians have signed up for health insurance under the ACA and many will be paying $60 or less a month for their plan after tax credits.

I talked with Karen Edison, founding director of the MU Center for Health Policy about why this could be called a success in Missouri.

Scientists cleaning out an old laboratory on the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Md., last week came across a startling discovery: vials labeled "variola" — in other words, smallpox.

Under international convention, there are supposed to be only two stashes of this deadly virus: one at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, and another at a similar facility in Russia.

The CDC swooped in to collect the vials and carted them off to a secure lab at its Atlanta headquarters.

Gov. Jay Nixon has signed legislation directing Missouri regulators to develop their own standards for carbon dioxide pollution from power plants.

In honor of National Parks and Recreation Month, Columbia Parks and Recreation wants Columbia residents to spend quality time outside.

Almost 800,000 uninsured Missourians became eligible for coverage through the federal health insurance marketplace earlier this year. As the state continues to consider extending coverage to even more individuals through Medicaid expansion, the need for primary care doctors will increase as well.

Some people have had it with "natural" food.

For fifteen years, Urvashi Rangan, director of consumer safety and sustainability for Consumer Reports, has been pointing out that "natural" is just about the most misleading label that you'll ever see on a food package. Yet consumers still look for that word, food companies still love to use it and the Food and Drug Administration can't or won't define it.

Missouri home health care workers could be affected by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on union fees in Illinois.

The Supreme Court has ruled that family owned and other closely held companies can opt out of the Affordable Care Act's provisions for no-cost prescription contraception in most health insurance if they have religious objections.

The owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of arts and crafts stores and those of another closely held company, Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp., had objected on the grounds of religious freedom.

The ruling affirms a Hobby Lobby victory in a lower court and gives new standing to similar claims by other companies.

MU Children’s Hospital is trying to make getting better a little more comfortable.

According to the Pew Research Center, hundreds of thousands of Americans could live to see 100 by the year 2050. Women in France, Japan and the United States have already lived past the age of 114. With the now realistic possibility that individuals may live into the triple digits, planning ahead for retirement becomes both more important, and more challenging.

Living Longer

Think about people dying from drinking too much, and you probably think of the classic disease of alcoholics, cirrhosis of the liver. Or perhaps an alcohol-fueled car crash. But there are many more ways to kill yourself with alcohol, unfortunately, and they account for 1 in 10 deaths in working-age adults, according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A University of Missouri task force is finalizing the details of a new health care option that will be available to university employees in the Columbia area. The new option will be offered in 2015.

UM System Spokesperson John Fougere said the new option will have lower premium rates, deductibles, and co-pays than the two options currently available for employees. With the new plan, employees will be limited to medical care within the MU Health Care system.

Regional news coverage from the KBIA Newsroom, including:

Sustainable bus shelters are being discussed in Columbia

Five Missouri hospitals team up for better care

Five hospitals in Missouri have announced the formation of a collaborative network today. The network is an effort to improve health care and access to health care in Missouri.

The newly formed Health Network of Missouri is composed of Bothwell Regional Health Center in Sedalia, Capital Region Medical Center in Jefferson City, Hannibal Regional Healthcare System, Lake Regional Health System in Osage Beach and the University of Missouri Health Care in Columbia.

 Your medical record can be more than just the file in which your doctor scribbles notes during your appointment. With help from movement sensors similar to those in an Xbox Kinect, patient data can be recorded in the home and shared easily with your network of doctors and hospitals, creating a comprehensive and accessible medical file. 

Medicare is preparing to penalize about 750 hospitals that have the highest rates of infections and patient injuries. The sanctions, estimated to total $330 million over a year, will kick in at a time when most infections and accidents in hospitals are on the decline, but still too common.

Thousands of Missourians may have to switch doctors after UnitedHealthcare notified more physicians that they will be removed from the company's Medicare Advantage plan on Sept. 1.

A federal judge has ruled that residents who collect damages from a $6.8 million class-action settlement over the smoldering Bridgeton Landfill in St. Louis County can still pursue separate legal claims related to radiation risks.

A tentative agreement reached in April calls for the landfill's owner to pay an average of nearly $13,000 per household to hundreds of affected residents. But some were prepared to turn down the deal, which required approval by 95 percent of the 400 remaining class members.