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Medical and military leaders have come together today to warn that climate change not only spells a global health catastrophe, but also threatens global stability and security.

Each year, the cost of health care pushes some 39 million people back into poverty, according to a study published in the Lancet medical journal. Patients shoulder up to 80 percent of India's medical costs. Their share averages about $66 (3,000 rupees) annually per person - a crippling sum for the 800 million or so Indians living on less than $2 a day.

Since 2010, insurance companies had been turned essentially into public utilities with the feds setting strict minimum benefits requirements. The health reform bill also limited the administrative costs of insurers, which has ended up basically guaranteeing their profits. With competition all but outlawed, the increasingly consolidated insurance industry has had very little incentive to pay for new treatment regimens outside those specified by government standard-setting agencies. Federal government health agencies have been reluctant to authorize newer treatments because they often lead to higher insurance premiums that then must be subsidized by higher taxes. The seen aspect of health care reform is that it has had some success in providing more Americans with access to vintage 2010 medical therapies. The unseen aspect is that more people are suffering from and dying of diseases that might well have been cured had the Obama version of health care reform never been enacted. As a result of health care reform, Americans forfeited 2020 medicine in favor of more equal access to 2010 treatments.

Microactuators are critical components for industrial applications such as MEMS, micro-medical devices, and microrobotics. However, the fabrication of increasingly sophisticated, millimeter sized microactuators is complicated and proving to be a challenge.

Medical ethicist Harvey Fineberg shows us three paths forward for the ever-evolving human species: to stop evolving completely, to evolve naturally - or to control the next steps of human evolution, using genetic modification, to make ourselves smarter, faster, better. Neo-evolution is within our grasp. What will we do with it?

Daily temperature fluctuations, not just high temperatures, play a significant role in the transmission of dengue, a deadly mosquito-borne disease that strikes millions of people in tropical and subtropical countries, according to ground-breaking research led by French, Thailand and U.S. scientists and conceived by medical entomologist Thomas Scott of the University of California, Davis.

The high cost of health care is deterring parents from taking their children to the doctor or buying prescription medication, regardless of how much money they make or whether they have health insurance, according to a study to be presented Sunday, May 2, at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Denver.