Health

Elder drug discounts on the way

Federal officials said Thursday they have received 106 applications to sponsor Medicare-approved discount drug cards beginning in June.

The Bush administration has said the drug cards would offer elderly patients discounts of 10 percent to 25 percent off the price of prescription drugs, although critics have said those numbers are inflated.

The drug card was part of the Medicare overhaul President Bush signed in December. The card is intended as an interim measure until the new prescription drug benefit begins in 2006.

The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services expects to announce drug card sponsors in late March. People could begin enrolling in May.

Natural delivery of a second child after a cesarean section is less dangerous to mother and child than has been feared, a large new study presented Thursday indicates.

The findings show that while serious complications are possible during vaginal delivery after a C-section, the absolute risk of these occurring is very small.

"Overall the risk for a serious newborn complication is approximately 1 in 2,000 trials of labor," said Dr. Mark Landon, principal investigator for the study carried out at 19 academic health centers across the country.

The research, sponsored by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, tracked the birth experiences of 46,000 women. Each year, more than a quarter of all births in the United States are cesarean deliveries - up from 5 percent in 1970.

The 1918 flu that killed 20-million people appears to be more birdlike than previously thought, according to findings by U.S. and British researchers that could help explain why it was the deadliest influenza strain ever recorded.

The work doesn't have direct implications for Asia's current outbreak of bird flu, a strain that doesn't seem to easily infect many people. But the findings, published today by the journal Science, highlight how important it is to monitor avian flu because it might take fewer genetic adaptations than once thought for a bird virus to begin spreading among people.

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