Richard Knox

Dallas Wiens says when he woke up after surgery in March, he asked a nurse if he could touch his new face. Told he could, he gingerly felt his eyelids, nose and mouth — all transplanted from an anonymous donor.

"I said out loud that this should not be medically possible — because it doesn't seem like it should be," Wiens said at a Boston press conference before going home to Texas. "But here I am today."

Suspicions that U.N. peacekeepers brought cholera to Haiti last fall are so incendiary in that beleagured nation that most health experts fighting the outbreak have refused to discuss it.

But an expert panel appointed by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has concluded those suspicions are correct.

For men diagnosed with prostate cancer, uncertainty about what to do remains a big problem, despite years of research on the options.

Now, a Swedish study suggest that radical prostatectomy — complete removal of the prostate gland — is better than "watchful waiting" for the treatment of younger men with low-risk prostate cancer.

A new study shows that women run on a different clock than men.

That is, the biological time-keeper deep in the brain that governs when we sleep and when we wake runs at a faster pace in women. The report, from researchers at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital, appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The results have some interesting implications.

With declarations that a new day is dawning in the treatment of hepatitis C, members of a federal advisory panel unanimously approved the first of two new drugs to treat the stubborn liver infection on Wednesday.

The committee is expected to green light the second hep-C drug today. Few doubt the Food and Drug Administration will clear the new drugs for market, possibly as soon as next month.

Gastric bypass surgery is great for curing type 2 diabetes. It works for up to 80 percent of patients. Now scientists are beginning to figure out why. And weight loss may be the least of it.

State-of-the-art care for people with dangerous heart attacks really saves lives. The latest evidence out of Sweden — which arguably has the world's most complete data on cardiac care — makes that clear in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association.

That study documents a sharp drop in mortality from the most serious heart attacks over a 12-year period as Swedish doctors and hospitals adopted scientifically validated practices.

A few well-placed Botox injections can erase your hard-won character lines. But that may also make you less likely to pick up on other people's emotions.

Like millions of baby boomers, I've always thought I'd stay active into my later years. That's unlike many in my parents' generation who gave up hiking, biking, running, kayaking and other strenuous pursuits (if they ever did these things in the first place) when they developed aches and pains.

So the last six months have been discouraging. First, there was a painful left Achilles tendon. That was brought on by a gentle two-mile run — after not running for a long time due to bone spur pain that took a year to go away.

Scientists report that children exposed before birth to a common class of pesticides can have lower IQ levels when they reach school age. The pesticides, known as organophosphates, are widely used in agriculture.

The new data come from three independent studies published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

One study, from California, involved several hundred women and children who live on or near farms where pesticides are sprayed on crops.

The World Health Organization has brokered a deal resolving a long-running dispute between poorer countries and developed nations over access to emerging flu viruses and vaccines against them.

It's bug season again. And once again, most people won't bother spraying or slathering on repellents.

That bugs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention because biting insects are more than an itchy annoyance. Tick bites cause 30,000 Lyme disease infections every year. Mosquito-borne West Nile virus causes 600 potentially fatal brain infections a year.

People's lackadaisical attitude is due to two things, says Marc Dolan of the CDC's vector-borne infectious diseases laboratory in Fort Collins, Colo.

Everybody over a certain age — say, around 50 — has these moments: The car keys go missing. They can't retrieve a once-familiar name. They stride into a room with purpose and then forget why.

Phyllis Hersch knows about those lapses.

"I go to the store and do five errands and miss the most important one because I've gotten distracted by something else," says Hersh, who just turned 70. Recently she alarmed herself by leaving her car in the garage with the motor running at her home in Massachusetts.

When it comes to health effects from low radiation doses, scientists don't know beans.