Living-Health & Science

HANOI, Vietnam Babies squirmed and wailed as needles plunged into their chubby thighs at a public health clinic on the outskirts of Hanoi on Friday. Like little ones everywhere, the reaction to the sting was never pretty.

WASHINGTON In a Nov. 17 story about drug interactions between heartburn medications and the blood thinner Plavix, The Associated Press misidentified Johnson & Johnson's Mylanta as part of the H-2 blocker drug family. Mylanta is an antacid.

ATLANTA Four North Carolina patients at a single hospital tested positive for a type of swine flu that is resistant to Tamiflu, health officials said Friday.

GENEVA Scientists switched on the world's largest atom smasher Friday night for the first time since the $10 billion machine suffered a spectacular failure more than a year ago.

BEIJING China's health ministry said it will punish officials who underreport cases of swine flu after a doctor famous for exposing the extent of the 2003 SARS epidemic said he believes the true number of swine flu deaths is being covered up.

A space shuttle is no tinker toy. But is it the most complex machine ever built?

WASHINGTON Suitably opaque, Section 2006 takes up only a few dozen lines in a sweeping health care bill that runs to 2,074 pages and mentions neither Sen. Mary Landrieu nor her state of Louisiana.

Several doctors groups and advocacy groups set guidelines for cancer screening, and they update that advice periodically as new information emerges. Sometimes they agree, sometimes they don't. Last year, a number of groups got together and issued consensus guidelines for colon cancer.

WASHINGTON First mammograms. Now - in an apparent coincidence - Pap smears.

WASHINGTON The White House is on a collision course with Catholic bishops in an intractable dispute over abortion that could blow up the fragile political coalition behind President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.

LINCOLN, Neb. The University of Nebraska's governing board on Friday voted not to place tighter restrictions on embryonic stem cell research than those outlined under federal guidelines, which were expanded after President Barack Obama took office.

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. Asian carp may have breached an electronic barrier designed to prevent the giant invaders from upsetting the ecosystem in the Great Lakes and jeopardizing a $7 billion sport fishery, officials said Friday.

ATLANTA The first county-by-county survey of obesity reflects past studies that show the rate of obesity is highest in the Southeast and Appalachia. High rates of obesity and diabetes were reported in more than 80 percent of counties in the Appalachian region that includes Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia, according to the new research from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

ATLANTA When the nation's swine flu vaccination program began in early October, health officials predicted it was going to be "messy." They were right.

LONDON Health experts say extraordinary measures against swine flu - most notably quarantines imposed by China, where entire planeloads of passengers were isolated if one traveler had symptoms - have failed to contain the disease.

MARIETTA, Pa. In a Nov. 18 story about the vaccine industry, The Associated Press misspelled the surname of a government official quoted in the story. The director of the federal Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority is Robin Robinson, not Robertson.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. Atlantis' astronauts anxiously awaited word on the birth of one crewman's daughter Friday, as they moved more supplies into the International Space Station and geared up for another spacewalk.

WASHINGTON A 20-foot-long crocodile with three sets of fangs - like wild boar tusks - roamed parts of northern Africa millions of years ago, researchers reported Thursday. While this fearsome creature hunted meat, not far away another newly found type of croc with a wide, flat snout like a pancake was fishing for food.

WASHINGTON Federal health experts on Thursday brushed off lingering safety questions about a popular inhaler drug and suggested it carry bolder benefit claims.