Charlie Hinderliter wasn't opposed to the flu shot. He just didn't think he was at risk of a bad case of the flu since he was healthy and in his 30s.
Turns out, he was wrong. After 58 days in the hospital, a week in a medically induced coma, two surgeries and three weeks in a nursing home, he's now speaking out to encourage everyone to do something he'd never done before: Get a flu shot.
If it’s been awhile since you vacuumed, you might want to open the drapes. Researchers from the University of Oregon decided to test the idea that sunlight is a disinfectant, and found out that, yes, it is.
The researchers set up dollhouse-size rooms and sprinkled in a mix of dust collected from actual homes in the Portland area. They compared what happened in rooms exposed to daylight, to ultraviolet light and those kept dark.
What they found surprised them and confirmed what your grandmother already knew: Rooms exposed to daylight have fewer germs.
Hospitals and health plans are increasingly conducting research with the medical data they collect from patients -- including that gleaned from tissue removed from your body during medical procedures. It's a business worth billions of dollars, and sometimes those discoveries can be the foundation of new profit-making products and companies.
When a company profits from your data (or your cells), should you get a cut?
This isn't just a hypothetical question, as NPR’s Richard Harris reports. When Steven Petrow was 26 years old, back in 1984, he was treated for testicular cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. He later learned the cancer center had granted access to all its patients' data to a for-profit company.
"It really made me wonder, first of all, where are [the tissue samples]? Do they belong to me? ... Do I have any rights over them?” he says. "And the fact that it might have been commercialized — monetized — that's deeply upsetting."
Read on to learn how a start-up company is making the case that personal medical data IS a person's legal property — and is developing an app to give the control back to patients.
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