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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.

The WSJ recently wrote about the government’s efforts to bounce Howard Solomon from his seat as Forest Laboratories’ CEO as part of a drive to pin corporate wrongdoing on head honchos, even if they had no direct knowledge of a company’s bad behavior.

Paying for Quality: WellPoint’s Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in 14 states will tie hospital reimbursement increases to quality of care, as measured by a 51-indicator test, the WSJ reports. The assessment is based 55% on health outcomes, 35% on measures of patient safety and 10% on patient satisfaction; the company’s chief medical officer tells the paper that using the formula can save both WellPoint and the overall health-care system money.

If you need any more evidence that the growth in health-care costs is unsustainable, take a look at two reports out this week.

Today, the Medicare trustees issued their annual assessment of the government insurance program’s fiscal health. The prognosis: the trust fund (covering hospital stays) will be exhausted in 2024, as the WSJ reports. That’s five years earlier than they predicted last year; the sluggish economy has led to lower payroll taxes, but health costs keep going up.

A colonoscopy isn’t something you get just for giggles. Beyond the obvious unpleasantness, there’s the small but real risk of complications that in rare cases can lead to hospitalization or even death.

Consumers should be getting mental health benefits on par with those for medical and surgical care, thanks to the 2008 federal mental health parity law.

But whether they are actually getting equal coverage remains a question. Some employers have dropped mental-health coverage altogether to avoid having to beef up their offerings. And many patients don’t know enough about their benefits or parity to ask questions about changes.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is recommending that transplant centers nationwide screen living donors for HIV no longer than seven days before their organs are recovered and transplanted, following a report from the New York state health department that a transplant recipient contracted the virus that causes AIDS from a kidney donor in an unnamed New York City hospital.

Yesterday we reported that the state’s health department had alerted hospitals of the incident.