Reuters Health News Summary

Following is a summary of current health news briefs. As polio goal nears, Pakistan pushes against vaccine misinformation

As Pakistan closes in on eradicating polio, Prime Minister Imran Khan's office has urged the country's telecoms regulator to take action against misinformation spread on social media discouraging vaccination against it and other diseases. "The parental refusals due to misconceptions regarding the vaccine are emerging as the major obstacle in achieving complete eradication," Khan's office said in a letter to the head of the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority, referring to parents who refuse to get their children vaccinated. Americans drinking more gourmet coffee than ever before: survey

Americans are consuming more gourmet coffee than ever, but the outlook for future growth may be threatened by increasing economic worries, survey results from the National Coffee Association (NCA) showed on Saturday. Sixty-one percent of the coffee drank in the United States is described by consumers as gourmet, according to the results of a survey commissioned by the NCA and released during the group's annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. Measles outbreak in New Zealand's Canterbury widens to 20

Thousands of vaccines are being delivered to health centers in New Zealand's Canterbury district as a measles outbreak has widened to 20 confirmed cases with health officials warning the number is expected to rise over the coming days and weeks. Measles cases are rising globally, including in wealthy nations such as the United States and Germany, where some parents shun the vaccines mostly for philosophical or religious reasons, or concerns, debunked by medical science, that the vaccines against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) could cause autism. Eight years on, water woes threaten Fukushima cleanup

Eight years after the Fukushima nuclear crisis, a fresh obstacle threatens to undermine the massive clean-up: 1 million tons of contaminated water must be stored, possibly for years, at the power plant. Last year, Tokyo Electric Power Co said a system meant to purify contaminated water had failed to remove dangerous radioactive contaminants. Dutch join backlash at expensive drugs by making their own

In a radiation-proof room at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, Emar Thomasa sits behind shielded glass as he carefully measures and mixes lutetium octreotate, an intravenous treatment for certain types of cancer. The Dutch hospital has been offering it to patients for more than a decade at 16,000 euros ($18,000) for one course of treatments. Drug firm Novartis, which in 2018 acquired rights to sell it in Europe, is asking more than five times that for its proprietary version, Lutathera. Without vaccine, hundreds of children die in Madagascar measles outbreak

Two months ago, giggles floated through the home of fisherman Dada as his four-year-old son played ball outside with his two younger cousins on one of Madagascar's famed sun soaked beaches. A few weeks later, all three children were dead, victims of the worst measles outbreak on the Indian Ocean island in decades. OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma loses bid to delay opioid epidemic trial

OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma LP and two other drugmakers on Friday lost a bid to delay a landmark trial set for May in a multibillion-dollar lawsuit by Oklahoma's attorney general accusing them of helping fuel an opioid abuse and overdose epidemic in the state. Cleveland County District Judge Thad Balkman's decision was a win for the state, even as one of the lawyers for the state said Purdue had "threatened" to file for bankruptcy rather than face the first trial to result from around 2,000 lawsuits nationally. Roche's Tecentriq notches win in breast cancer with U.S. approval

Roche won U.S. approval on Friday of its immunotherapy Tecentriq to treat a significant number of patients with triple-negative breast cancer, a development hailed by doctors as a promising advance in fighting the aggressive disease. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Tecentriq mixed with the chemotherapy Abraxane to treat inoperable, locally advanced or metastatic triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) in people whose tumors express PD-L1, a protein that may help cancers avoid detection by the immune system. Childhood cancer survivors at high risk for skin malignancies

As adults, childhood cancer survivors have a 30-fold higher risk than the general population of developing common skin malignancies known as basal cell carcinoma, a Dutch study suggests. Compared to other adults, survivors had a more than two-fold higher risk of getting melanoma - the most aggressive and deadly type of skin cancer - and a more than seven-fold risk of squamous cell carcinoma, the second most common form of skin cancer after basal cell malignancies. Suicide games can spread online for months before parents know

Social media posts about suicide games may spread for months online before mainstream media reports help alert parents to the potential threat, a U.S. study suggests. Researchers traced the path of one suicide game, the "blue whale challenge," as awareness of it spread across social media and mainstream news outlets from 2013 to 2017. By the time the first U.S. news article about this suicide game appeared, the game had been circulating in English language social media posts for four months and in other languages for nine months, the study found.

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