Orshe

A federal judge’s ruling earlier this week that some patents on human genes are invalid because they were related to isolated DNA “found in nature” is being watched closely by other holders of such patents of human genes. (Read more from the WSJ about the case.)

The genes in dispute involve BRCA1 and BRCA2, two genes that many geneticists say are particularly important because they are such powerful markers for diagnosing risk of a hereditary form of breast cancer.

African-Americans are twice as likely as Caucasians to have Alzheimer’s and related memory-robbing diseases, and Hispanics, the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, are 1.5 times as likely, according to a new report released this morning by the Alzheimer’s Association.

The higher risk is likely linked to factors like high blood pressure and diabetes, which are risk factors for dementia and more common among those minority groups than among Caucasians.

It’s a tough job market, but if you’ve won a Nobel Prize and run the NIH, we may have a gig for you.

Harold Varmus, the guy with the intimidating CV who has run Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center for the past decade, has asked Sloan-Kettering’s board to start looking for his successor.

What causes cavities — bacteria that form a film on and eat away at teeth — is the same in kids and adults, but how prone an adult is to cavities is usually set in childhood, according to Burton Edelstein, a dentistry professor at Columbia University and president of the Children’s Dental Health Project in Washington, D.C.

Folks from Sciele Pharma stopped by Health Blog HQ recently to talk about the company’s potential treatment for premature ejaculation. They were making the rounds at newspapers and magazines in an effort to raise awareness of the condition and their product, even though the company hasn’t asked regulators for approval yet.

Here are a few threads from around the world on what’s happening with the H1N1 swine-flu pandemic.

Four patients in the past six weeks had Tamiflu-resistant flu at Duke University Hospital. In at least two of the cases, patients contracted the resistant bug before they had been treated with Tamiflu, a Duke infection-control doctor told the Health Blog. All of the patients were on a cancer ward, and had suppressed immune systems.

There aren’t enough bodies to go around for everyone who needs a steady supply of cadavers for training and experiments. That shortage is helping turn the process of procuring cadavers into a functioning market, says a Harvard professor.

Rising medical costs, higher unemployment and a rapidly aging population are putting the health-care system under tremendous financial strain. This all sounds close to home but a story in today’s WSJ says those problems are confronting health care in Germany, whose system is often held up as one of the world’s models.

Drug and device companies, along with other industry players, spend about $1 billion a year to fund the continuing medical education classes doctors have to take to keep their licenses current. We may soon get more insight into how that money flows: A little-discussed provision in the House health care bill would require drug makers to disclose their spending on CME, the WSJ reports.

Researchers are studying whether swine flu can be transmitted in the blood, as part of an ongoing effort to keep the blood supply safe from infectious disease. That’s the subject of my latest column.

There’s also another new effort underway to improve the safety of blood transfusions by monitoring adverse reactions and errors through a collaboration between the federal government and organizations involved in blood collection, transfusion, and tissue and organ transplantation.