The mass marketing of plastic surgery is starting to show its age. Lifestyle Lift, a nationwide chain of about 50 cosmetic-surgery centers, abruptly shut its doors earlier this month, laying off nearly 400 employees, its spokeswoman said. Its founder, Dr. David Kent, is "exploring a number of strategies," according to his lawyer, which could include filing for bankruptcy or an infusion of new capital to restart the brand. Fueled by its heavy use of national advertisements, the 14-year-old company with 77 doctors had grown to command a major share of the face-lift market.
The Department of Veterans Affairs says it needs $930 million to finish constructing a new hospital in Denver. Republican Rep. Jeff Miller, chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, says the VA needs to fire senior executives. When the sorely needed project first started, the VA proposed a cost estimate of $328 million, the Washington Post reports. VA executives first drew up plans for a new hospital after realizing the aging Denver VA hospital, built in 1951, could no longer accommodate the growing number of veterans, according to The Denver Post. Veterans often complained that the facility was "threadbare."
The Obama administration in fiscal year 2014 recovered $3.3 billion in fraudulent health care payments, HHS and the Department of Justice announced Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reports. According to HHS, the administration has recovered $7.70 for every $1 spent looking into potential health care-related fraud and abuse over the past three years. In addition, the administration has reduced the amount of time that lapses between when fraud is first identified and when arrests are made in the cases, according to the Journal. Overall, the Medicare Trust Fund has recovered more than $27.8 billion through the fraud and abuse program since it began in 1997.
More than half of the undergraduates at the University of Oregon have not been vaccinated against meningitis, despite the fact that one student has died and five others have been sickened since January. Public health officials are appealing to parents to get the job done during spring break. About 13,000 of the university's 22,000 undergraduates, considered at highest risk for the disease, have yet to be vaccinated. Around campus there are posters featuring smiling student athletes showing off the arm where they were vaccinated and sporting a green or gold adhesive bandage with the school logo.
Tuberculosis, which typically ravages the lungs, is a disease we associate with the past: Mimi, the heroine of Puccini's La bohème, had tuberculosis; so did Fantine in Les Misérables. Many of the great artists who created our favorite fictional characters — Chekhov, Kafka — died from "consumption," as it was known, too. Back then, we didn't have treatments or vaccines for TB. But while medical innovations — like the discovery of antibiotics in the 1940s — helped dramatically reduce the incidence of this bacterial infection, a new threat has emerged: drug-resistant tuberculosis. The World Health Organization now estimates that every year, there are about half a million cases of TB that don't respond to the treatments we have.
Scientists claim to have established a new blood test that can help doctors quickly distinguish between bacterial and viral infections, giving physicians the ability to prescribe antibiotics more accurately. That's according to a study published by PLOS One on Wednesday. Israeli-based company MeMed, along with researchers from other institutes, says that they examined over 1,000 patients and found that their ImmunoXpert blood test could distinguish between immune responses to bacterial or viral infections. The procedure is reportedly fast, taking only hours to complete when alternatives often require days.