Richard Knox

Soy pills for the hot flashes and bone loss menopausal women may endure seemed like a great idea – a cheap way of getting the benefit of estrogen without the risks.

But alas, a new study concludes they don't work.

Woman who took a daily soy pill had no less bone loss after two years than others who took a sugar pill. (Women in both groups didn't know which pill they got.)

The United Nations says that sometime around Halloween the seven-billionth person will be born into this world — most likely in India, which is on track to overtake China as the most populous nation in just 16 years.

This latest milestone may not come as a surprise. But it is remarkable nonetheless. It took Earth 50,000 years to reach the one billion mark. By 1960 there were three billion souls. Since then we've added another billion every decade, or less.

Everybody knows there's a dire shortage of kidneys (and other organs) for transplant. The math: Over 80,000 on the kidney waiting list, but only 17,500 transplants are performed annually.

But there's another side to that coin. Thousands of patients with kidney failure have willing donors lined up among family members and friends. But they're just about impossible to transplant.

It may have seemed that the bureaucrats at the Transportation Security Administration turned a deaf ear to Americans who objected to the virtually naked images created by whole-body airport scanners. But it turns out, they heard.

Over the next few months TSA says it will retrofit 241 of its 488 airport scanners with software that's so unrevealing anybody, including passengers, can look at the pictures.

Lately the good news about HIV/AIDS just keeps rolling in.

Cholera is back in Haiti.

AIDS researchers are excited — to use their word — about two new studies that seem to nail down the effectiveness of a daily antiviral pill to protecting heterosexual men and women against HIV.

The emergence of a strain of gonorrhea that can thwart the last antibiotic effective in treating the common sexually transmitted disease was bound to happen, experts say.

The new, super-resistant strain is called H041, and so far, only a handful of cases are known in Japan. But don't count on it staying that way. Experience has shown that once a resistant strain of gonorrhea appears, it steadily displaces those that can be killed with antibiotics.

When she was 19 weeks pregnant, Sarah White went for a routine ultrasound and got a shock.

"I could tell that something was wrong because the ultrasound tech got real quiet," White says.

White's male fetus had spina bifida — a hole in his lower back that exposed the vulnerable spinal cord.

"When they said, 'Your baby has spina bifida,' I knew it wasn't good," says Joe Hensley, White's husband. "But I didn't have a sense of what was involved."

In a milestone for the fast-evolving field of tissue engineering, a 36-year-old geology student from Africa is breathing through a synthetic windpipe created in a laboratory from plastic and his own bone marrow cells.

Andemarian Teklesenbet Beyene was discharged today from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, one day short of a month since he had his cancerous windpipe replaced with the custom-made spare part.

Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is taking a page from TV anchor Katie Couric by going public about colonoscopy.

Three years ago Couric, whose husband died of colon cancer, had her colonoscopy on camera as a way of encouraging others to have one too. It was so effective that epidemiologists named the resulting increase in colonoscopy tests "the Couric effect."

Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital have disciplined three faculty members in a long-running conflict-of-interest case that became a prime exhibit in the debate over the federal Physician Payments Sunshine Act of 2010.

The kidney-destroying E. coli strain called O14:H4 has struck again, this time in France. And the latest outbreak is giving disease detectives more clues about how the germ is getting into Europeans' food.

It's the fenugreek seeds, they think.

Ever since scientists began to sequence the entire genomes of individuals --beginning with those of Nobelist James Watson and scientific entrepreneur J. Craig Venter in 2007 — skeptics have wondered just how useful this elegant and expensive trick would become.

This was almost one for the medical history books — a full face transplant and double hand transplant on the same patient.

Charla Nash, a Connecticut woman who lost her face and hands in early 2009 when she was attacked by an angry chimpanzee, is the patient.

The fact that 80 daily milligrams of simvastatin (brand name Zocor) can cause serious muscle damage has been known for years. So why did it take the Food and Drug Administration so long to tell doctors and patients they should avoid that dose?

The answer reveals a lot about the FDA's reluctance to restrict use of a popular drug — much less move to take it off the market — even when there are safer alternatives.

The Food and Drug Administration is warning that a popular cholesterol drug can cause muscle damage at high doses. The FDA is telling patients to see their doctor if they're taking the highest dose of Zocor, known generically as simvastatin.

On any given day, more than 130,000 Americans endure the miseries of what we often call food poisoning. It might be from salmonella in the salad, campylobacter in the chicken or vibrio in the shellfish.

The nation's record in preventing foodborne illnesses is decidedly mixed, according to the latest annual report card from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Christopher Braden, the chief of food- and waterborne diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, doesn't expect the Escherichia coli bug causing serious illness in northern Europe to leapfrog the Atlantic anytime soon.

Still, Braden tells Shots, "I am concerned about something similar that could happen in the United States."

It's a quest that never seems to end — the search for a safer birth control pill.

Some thought it might be at hand almost a decade ago when a new generation of oral contraceptives came on the market. They contained a hormone called drospirenone, which some thought would be less likely to cause dangerous blood clots.

Two new studies may not be the final nails in the coffin of the hypothesis that a mouse retrovirus called XMRV causes chronic fatigue syndrome. But the hammering is certainly getting louder.

Well over a million U.S. men are thought to get prostate biopsies every year – a test that involves firing needles into a man's prostate gland from a probe stuck into his backside.

For the vast majority the test isn't fun, but it's not dangerous.

But specialists are worrying about an increasing risk of complications from prostate biopsy, especially hard-to-treat bloodstream infections that can send men to the ICU and require weeks of heavy-duty antibiotic treatment.

For a long time scientists have wondered whether coffee might lower the risk of prostate cancer.

Previous studies have been relatively small and have shown mixed results.

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.