Families urged to track medical history
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WASHINGTON - Medical officials are urging families to talk not just turkey this Thanksgiving but also medical history - generations of it â-o help identify breast, heart and other problems early enough to prevent them.
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Yasser Arafat&#39;s nephew has turned over the late Palestinian leader&#39;s medical records to a committee investigating the cause of his uncle&#39;s death.
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Families and doctors are often in the dark about the genetic abnormality known as Klinefelter's syndrome.
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Screening relatives of middle-aged people who suffer heart attacks would save lives, say experts.
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Online symptoms searches can be useful. They can also give you acute misinformation.
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NEW YORK  - The stress of having a child go through a life-threatening event may have long-term health consequences for parents, a new study suggests.
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Doctors and their patients in many countries are facing increasing problems receiving lifesaving isotopes for treating a range of illnesses.
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Sometimes it's tough for patients to tell the whole story.
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Amricans are kindly asked to trace their family medical history, as one of the best way to ensure oneâs longevity. US health officials are asking Americans this Thanksgiving to try to find out what their
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Growing number of U.S. families beset by medical problems are exceeding lifetime benefits caps.
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Despite advances in genetic testing, the U.S. surgeon general on Monday urged Americans to track down and record cases of cancer, heart disease and other diseases prevalent in their families.
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Medical records are frequently  incomplete or missing during patient visits to the doctor,  posing potential danger and wasting time, a survey of  physicians said on Tuesday.
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For doctors, searching out disease before it appears can also carry risks.
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Officials at Kings County Hospital Center said that they were âclosely examiningâ why doctors there failed to detect a drug-resistant staph infection in a boy who died this month.
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The head of the U.K. National Health Service has defended plans to build a centralized database of patient records following another embarrassing loss of personal information by the government.The U.K. Department of Health admitted this weekend that nine of its regional NHS trusts have reported losing patient data. One of the trusts, the City and Hackney Primary Care Trust, in east London, lost the medical records for about 160,000 children, according to newspaper reports. The total number of records has not been disclosed.The losses emerged as part of a wider review following similar government blunders, and have revived questions about the security of building a centralized patient records database, part of the U.K.&#39;s National Programme for IT (NPfIT). But David Nicholson, chief executive of the NHS, said the project is essential and should go ahead.&quot;It&#39;s vitally important that when a doctor is sitting in front of a patient they have all the information they need at their fingertips, and that&#39;s what&#39;s been driving us through all this,&quot; Nicholson told BBC Radio 4&#39;s Today program on Monday.The proposed system will not be a single large records database, but a series of interconnected regional databases, he said. And the security system will be more rigorous than that used with most Internet banking systems, according to Nicholson.&quot;You&#39;d need a user name, a password and a smart card [to access patient records] and you would have role-controlled access,&quot; he said. &quot;So a nurse on a ward with a smart card and a password could only access a relatively small number of patient records.&quot;The information that was reported lost over the weekend was encrypted and so not vulnerable to misuse, Nicholson said.But Ross Anderson, a security expert at the University of Cambridge, told Radio 4 that whether the data is encrypted is not the main issue.&quot;One of the questions you have to ask here is not whether the data was encrypted or password protected, but why someone was able to have access to 160,000 children&#39;s records,&quot; he said. &quot;In private industry ... if someone tried to make off with hundreds of thousands of records the alarms would sound.&quot;Opposition leaders pounced on the latest misstep as evidence that the Labour government can&#39;t be trusted with its citizens&#39; data. They called for further studies to show how the proposed patient records system would protect privacy.The incident comes after the U.K.&#39;s HM Revenue and Customs lost personal records for 25 million Britons, and the Driving Standards Agency lost records for more than 3 million learner drivers.&quot;The power of technology means it can be very easy to use the information, but also very easy to lose the information,&quot; the Information Commissioner Richard Thomas said on the Today program. &quot;The events of the last few weeks have woken up everybody to the importance of taking these matters seriously.&quot;&#160;
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By Donna Borak, Associated Press  WASHINGTON -- For every generation in this country there has been a war. And with wars come millions of records that can shed light on family history, detailing everything from the color of soldiers' eyes to what their neighbors may have said about them.
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Advances in genetic testing are placing strains on the principle of doctor-patient confidentiality, as doctors grapple with whether to tell a patient&#39;s relatives