Reuters Health News Summary

Following is a summary of current health news briefs. App helps people learn to meditate, improves attention skills

(Reuters Health) - An experimental app may help people learn to meditate, which in turn yields improvements in attention span and working memory, a new study suggests. Over the course of six weeks a group of young adults who used the app, which is designed to tailor the length of sessions through interactions with its user, were able to increase the amount of time spent in meditation. One in four Ebola cases undetected in Congo: WHO

Roughly a quarter of Ebola infections in eastern Congo are estimated to be going undetected or found too late, a World Health Organization (WHO) expert said on Thursday. But the WHO, in a weekly update issued subsequently, said there were "early signs" of an easing of the intensity with which the virus is spreading following weeks of insecurity that curbed access to communities and interrupted vaccination. Missouri secretary of state blocks 'heartbeat' abortion law referendum

A move to authorize a referendum over Missouri's recently enacted ban on abortions after the eighth week of pregnancy hit a roadblock on Thursday when the secretary of state rejected petitions filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri and others to get the issue to the ballot. The rejection of the petitions by Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft was immediately challenged by abortion rights advocates, who sued Ashcroft on Thursday for "trying to deprive Missourians of their right to weigh in on the abortion question with a vote," said Tony Rothert, executive director of the ACLU. Will Europe's clampdown on faulty medical devices hurt patients?

When a Californian company founded by a U.S. veteran wounded in Afghanistan sought to register a new medical device this year, it turned to Europe before the United States. The European approvals system had long been quicker, the company said, but the introduction of new rules is changing all that. "Now it has flipped," said Bill Colone, CEO of San Clemente-based Spinal Singularity, which hopes to launch a 'smart' catheter for men with spinal injuries or disease early next year after squeezing in its application under the old European rules. A million people a day get sexual infections, WHO warns

More than a million people every day worldwide catch a sexually transmitted infection, with rates of chlamydia, gonorrhoea, trichomoniasis and syphilis the most worrying, the World Health Organization said on Thursday. The vast majority of the infections are easily preventable and curable, but some diseases - in particular gonorrhoea - are evolving into super-bug forms and that are increasingly difficult to treat with antibiotics, the WHO said in a report. Living with HIV means increased risk of heart disease

People living with HIV are more likely to get heart disease than those without the virus, making it all the more critical they do things like exercise, eat well, and avoid smoking, U.S. doctors say. In recent decades, antiretroviral therapy has helped transform the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) from a near-certain death sentence into a chronic, manageable disease. As HIV patients are living longer, however, they're also at higher risk for heart attacks, strokes, heart failure, sudden cardiac death and other diseases than people without HIV, according to a scientific statement from the American Heart Association (AHA) published in Circulation. Young adults see less harm in tobacco products, prefer online health information

(Reuters Health) - Young adults may be more likely than older folks to go online to find health information, and less likely to view tobacco products as "very harmful," according to survey results compiled to inform U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulatory policy. "According to this study, young adults are particularly susceptible to E. Cig(s) and, among non-smoking young adults, vulnerable to cigarette smoking," the study's author Dr. Janiper Kwak-Chae of Stony Brook School of Medicine in New York, said by email. International travelers' lung health impacted in polluted cities

(Reuters Health) - When healthy international travelers visit a city with higher levels of particle pollution than at home, their heart and lung function quickly deteriorate, a small study suggests. Travelers with existing respiratory or heart disease in particular may want to plan ahead to protect themselves in highly polluted places, the study authors write in the Journal of Travel Medicine. FDA advisory panel recommends approval of TB Alliance's tuberculosis treatment

Independent experts of an FDA advisory panel voted in favor of the not-for-profit TB Alliance's treatment for drug resistant tuberculosis, as a part of a three-drug combination regimen. The panel on Tuesday voted 14-4 when asked to assess the treatment, pretomanid, in combination with Johnson & Johnson's bedaquiline and linezolid for multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB). Opko Health says over 400,000 customers likely affected by data breach

Opko Health Inc said on Thursday it was notified by its former billing collections vendor about unauthorized access to information on about 422,600 customers, making it the third healthcare company to be affected by the incident. American Medical Collection Agency (AMCA) informed Opko Health that the compromised data may include credit card and bank account information, email addresses and other data such as address, phone number and balance information.