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Central to the drug-shortage issue is a chicken-and-egg question that often leaves legislators scratching their heads at congressional hearings.

Chicken: Are the shortages of crucial drugs caused by factory flaws and shutdowns? Or egg: Are shortages somehow caused by economics, like the thin profit margins of generic drugs?

A federal report to be released Thursday comes down with both feet in the chicken camp.

Venture philanthropy — the model used to accelerate research and drug development in diseases such as multiple myeloma and cystic fibrosis — is now being applied to a new arena: chronic fatigue syndrome.

Scott A. Carlson, executive director of the newly launched Chronic Fatigue Initiative, tells the Health Blog the Hutchins Family Foundation is providing “over $10 million” in funding for projects through 2014, with the possibility of more depending on the findings.

Pulling Fruit: Colorado-based Jensen Farms is recalling cantaloupes sold between July 29 and Sept. 10 on fears that they might be tainted by listeria bacteria, the WSJ reports. A multi-state outbreak of listeriosis has sickened 16 people and killed one of them, but the FDA and Colorado public-health authorities have not indicated whether the farm’s cantaloupes are the source of the outbreak, the paper says.

Reversal of Course: The federal government won’t try to force the resignation of Forest Laboratories CEO Howard Solomon after the company last year plead guilty to drug-marketing misdemeanors, the WSJ reports. Solomon wasn’t named in the criminal action but the government had sought to exclude him from doing business with the government under a clause of the Social Security Act.

Reviewing Infuse Data: Medtronic will give Yale University $2.5 million to supervise two independent reviews of clinical trial and other data on the company’s controversial spinal-fusion product Infuse Bone Graft, the WSJ reports. In June, a paper published in the Spine Journal raised questions about clinical trials of Infuse, including a failure to report some complications.

About half the decline in colon-cancer deaths over the last several years is due to higher screening rates, the CDC says.

Sprouts have now officially been pegged as the cause of the European E. coli outbreak.

We wondered how often the stringy little guys, a symbol of the health-food movement, are involved with food-borne illness. As you can see from this up-to-date record of sprouts-associated outbreaks, they’ve been a lodging place for pathogens including the dangerous E. coli O157:H7 (different from the O104:H4 strain implicated in the current outbreak), but mostly various strains of salmonella.

Frosty Reception: The Obama administration’s proposed guidelines governing how hospitals and doctors can form accountable care organizations are unpopular with many health-care providers, who say they won’t participate in the program unless the financial incentives are improved and the regulatory burden reduced, the WSJ reports. ACOs are intended to coordinate care for Medicare patients, with an aim to improving quality while saving the government and providers money.

Should electronic medical records be rolled out chiefly according to the needs of physicians and other providers?

That’s the question debated by two physicians in this week’s Annals of Internal Medicine. Anwar Hussain, a physician at UHS Hospitals in Johnson City, NY, argues the affirmative in  his commentary.