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New research from Los Angeles, a city defined by the automobile, adds to a pattern of public health studies in recent months on the surprising impact of air pollution from tail pipe exhaust. Lee Hotz has details on Lunch Break.

Go here to read the rest:  How Auto Pollution Impacts Your Health/a>

The world’s biggest selling drug of all time — the cholesterol medicine Lipitor — goes generic at the end of the month. Will the world’s leading maker of generic drugs be selling no-name Lipitor pills?

A lot of tongues are wagging.

As our colleagues at the WSJ’s Law Blog report, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bunch of new laws into effect over the weekend, including one banning the use of tanning beds by minors.

Previously Golden State teens were able to use commercial tanning beds with a parent’s consent; now they’re out of luck, even if Mom and Dad approve, Reuters reports. (That puts tanning in the same bucket as purchasing cigarettes and getting a tattoo.)

Immunizations, emergency preparations for hurricanes, and restaurant inspections are among local public-health services being cut back or eliminated amid budget constraints.

Some 55% of the nation’s county and city health departments reduced or eliminated at least one program between July 2010 and June 2011, and the public-health workforce continued to shrink, according to a new survey by the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

There was plenty of love for New York City this week from delegates at a high-level United Nations meeting on chronic diseases. But it wasn’t all about the city’s restaurants or Broadway shows.

The problem of antibiotic resistance tends to reach public consciousness in a scattershot manner — when ground turkey is recalled because it’s tainted with salmonella that can’t be treated by common drugs, for example. But it’s hard to get a comprehensive picture of the extent to which certain infections have become impervious to treatment.

Tainted Fruit: Cantaloupe from Jensen Farms in Colorado has been linked to an outbreak of listeriosis that has sickened 12 people and killed two of them, the WSJ reports. The FDA is warning consumers not to eat the cantaloupes, which were recalled by the farm on Wednesday. Jensen Farms says tests have turned up listeria bacteria on a cantaloupe but says that it’s not yet known whether it’s the same strain as is implicated in the outbreak.

Last September, an HHS advisory committee recommended that all newborns be screened for critical congenital heart disease — a leading cause of death in infants younger than one year of age. The head of HHS, Kathleen Sebelius, hasn’t yet adopted the recommendation, requesting input on how to actually implement screening.

Salmonella is the chief baddie of the food pathogen world, accounting for 35% of foodborne disease hospitalizations in the U.S. and 28% of related deaths each year.

And now a particularly nasty, antibiotic-resistant type of the bacteria, Salmonella Heidelberg, has infected 77 people, killing one in California, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Ground turkey is being investigated as the source, the CDC says.