The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a final rule containing a broad set of federal requirements designed to significantly curb access to and the appeal of cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products to children and adolescents in the United States. Read more from this post.

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U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today announced that Minnesota will receive more than $34 million to turn around its persistently lowest achieving schools through the School Improvement Grants (SIG) program. These funds are part of the $3.5 billion that will be made available to states this spring from money set aside in the 2009 budget and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Read more from this post.

Washington - The U.S. Department of Treasury and the Department of Education today announced $11 billion in allocation authority to issue qualified school construction bonds under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act). Qualified school construction bonds can be used to finance the construction, rehabilitation or repair of a public school facility or for the acquisition of land where a school will be built. Read more from this post.

In testimony before the Massachusetts Commissioner of the Division of Health Care Finance and Policy on March 18, 2010, Commonwealth Fund Executive Vice President for Programs Stephen Schoenbaum discussed ways in which health care organizations can create frameworks for high performance. Read more from this post.

The President’s $350 million Transforming Rental Assistance (TRA) initiative, outlined in his fiscal 2011 budget, would enable local housing agencies and private owners to more easily preserve affordable housing, in part by giving them more adequate and sustainable funding to operate it. As a result, TRA would help preserve an estimated 300,000 affordable apartments (both publicly and privately owned) in its first year and more in later years. Most of these apartments house low-income … Read more from this post.

Washington - The U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Education and Health and Human Services are asking the public for ideas to help the Task Force on Childhood Obesity come up with recommendations for public and private sector actions to solve the problem of childhood obesity. The work of the Task Force will complement the efforts of First Lady Michelle Obama as she leads a national public awareness effort to tackle this critical public health issue. Read more from this post.

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Downsizing and demotions at the workplace can be a health hazard for people over age 50, according to research reported in a recent issue of the Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological and Social Sciences. Read more from this post.

UCLA researchers used structural magnetic resonance imaging to show for the first time that individuals whose mothers abused methamphetamine during pregnancy (with or without alcohol abuse) had brain structural abnormalities that were more severe than in children whose mothers abused alcohol alone. The researchers identified what brain structures are vulnerable, which may help predict particular learning and behavioral problems in meth-exposed children. Read more from this post.

Rutgers engineers have modified a popular home video game system to help teenagers with cerebral palsy improve their hand functions. In a pilot trial conducted by the Indiana University School of Medicine, the system improved the teens' abilities to perform a range of daily personal and household activities. The modified system with custom-developed software and games provided exercise routines aimed at improving hand speed and range of finger motion. Read more from this post.

This issue brief examines the provisions in the pending legislation and how each one would work to improve benefits, extend the fiscal solvency of the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund, reduce pressure on the federal budget, and contribute to moving the health care system toward better access to care, improved quality, and greater efficiency. Read more from this post.

Insurance practices that encourage patients to receive care from physicians who keep medical costs low are based on unreliable estimates of doctor performance and may not achieve the intended savings, according to a new study. Read more from this post.

The profession must take advantage of changes in medical education to ensure that all health professionals, but especially gut specialists, are given adequate training in nutrition, urge Dr Penny Nield and colleagues, in the launch issue of Frontline Gastroenterology, the new quarterly companion journal to Gut. Read more from this post.

Researchers at Children's National Medical Center have discovered that African American children with asthma in metropolitan Washington, DC, are significantly more likely to have low levels of vitamin D than healthy African-American children. This study supports recent research that suggests vitamin D plays a greater role in the body than just keeping bones healthy. Vitamin D deficiency has been recently linked to a variety of non-bone related diseases including depression, autoimmune disorders, and now asthma. Read more from this post.