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Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by editors of HealthDay:
U.S. Supreme Court to Hear Arguments on Assisted Suicide
Oregon's assisted suicide law is going to undergo the ultimate legal test.
The U.S. Supreme Court has announced that it would hear arguments next October as to whether Oregon's law allowing doctors to help terminally ill patients end their lives is constitutional. The Bush administration has opposed the Oregon statute.
Oregon is the only state with such a law, called the Death With Dignity law, which was enacted in 1997. It allows doctors to prescribe drugs that patients can use to kill themselves. The doctors are not allowed to administer the drugs under the Oregon law.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year that the issue falls under state jurisdiction, not the federal government's.
According to the New York Times, an average of 30 people a year in Oregon have used the law to commit suicide.
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Florida Right-to-Die Case Stayed Until Wednesday
Minutes after a Florida appeals court sided with the husband of a brain-damaged woman in his bid to pull her feeding tube, a Pinellas County Circuit Court judge issued an emergency stay blocking the removal until at least 5 p.m. Wednesday.
Judge George Greer issued the emergency stay Tuesday afternoon as he scheduled a hearing on the matter, the Associated Press reported.
Michael Schiavo has argued for years that his wife, Terri, now 41, did not want to be kept alive by artificial means, despite her leaving no known written instructions. The woman's parents, however, have take exception to the belief of court-appointed medical experts, who testified that she's in a persistent vegetative state with no hope of recovery.
Schiavo has been comatose since 1990, when she collapsed from what doctors said was a chemical imbalance that stopped her heart.
In October 2003, she went without food or water for six days before the state legislature, at the behest of Gov. Jeb Bush, pushed through a hastily passed law giving Bush the right to have her feeding tube reinserted. The state supreme court later ruled the law unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to intervene.
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CDC Chief Moderates Bird Flu Warning
The head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has modified a statement attributed to her about the growing threat of an avian flu epidemic.
On Monday, Dr. Julie Gerberding warned of a worldwide human flu pandemic stemming from the bird flu virus that's been rampant among fowl in Asia. Apparently, that was a bit of an overstatement.
In a clarification issued Tuesday afternoon, Gerberding amended her concern, calling the bird flu, which has caused human deaths in some Asian countries, "a worrisome situation."
In a statement to the news media, the CDC's director said the problem may be more immediate in Asian countries because there are more pigs, people and poultry in that environment, and that is the formula for emergence of new flu strains.
Gerberding's remarks were first made at a national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.
More than 25 people in Vietnam and Thailand have died from the H5N1 strain of avian flu in the past 18 months. Millions of fowl and other birds have been slaughtered throughout Asia in an attempt to prevent the virus's spread.
The U.S. government has ordered 2 million doses of vaccine that would protect people against known strains of avian flu, Gerberding said. She added that this would give vaccine makers a head start in producing the number of shots needed to combat a full-blown pandemic, the Associated Press reported.
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Computer Predicts Operations' Probable Outcome
From the imaginations of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to the stark reality of the operating room:
Stanford University researchers say they've developed a computer that can predict how well an operation is going and where trouble may lurk.
The BBC reports that the electronic program uses digitized photos of a patient's blood vessels, couples them with blood flow information and then predicts how different surgical procedures will turn out.
Charles Taylor, a Stanford University professor whose expertise is in biodesign innovation, invented the program, and he believes it will take the guesswork out of many surgical procedures. Even if a surgeon uses an MRI or CT scan to check out a patient's blood vessels before the operation, it's still a best guess, Taylor told the BBC .
"What if the patient got a little better, but there might have been another way of operating that could have made him or her a lot better?" the BBC quotes him as saying. The computer system can help make those determinations, Taylor says.
More studies are being conducted at Stanford with surgeons doing blood vessel operations.
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