California, Health | featured news

By the time his Greyhound bus hissed to a stop on Richards Boulevard in Sacramento on the morning of Feb. 12, James Flavy Coy Brown was in a mild panic. It was 6:30 a.m., 15 hours and 11 stops after a taxi had scooped him up in front of Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas, where he had spent the previous 72 hours, and deposited him at a bus station.

Researchers announced Tuesday the beginning of a FDA-approved clinical trial that uses umbilical cord blood stem cells to ‘cure’ autism. Dr. Michael Chez, director of pediatric neurology at Sutter Neuroscience Institute in Sacramento, Calif., said he and his colleagues have been processing the trial for more than a year now, and they have high hopes it will succeed.

Deaths from pregnancy-related causes, which usually occur around the time of childbirth, have risen dramatically in the United States in the last decade. In a report released Tuesday, a committee investigating such deaths in California cited an increase in caesarean-section births as a major contributor to the disturbing trend.

We’ve been covering the progress of the proposal to ban the inclusion of toys in unhealthy fast food meals.

Phil Plait comments on a recent California Department of Public Health statement that whooping cough "is now officially an epidemic in California." Phil is clear in his criticisms of anti-vax celebrities and other opponents of sound medical science.