By MICHAEL FELBERBAUM, Associated Press
RICHMOND, Va. – With waning cigarette sales due to concerns about health, smoking bans and price increases, Philip Morris USA is staking its future in a new research center meant to develop products to reduce the risk of tobacco use.
The addition of the $350 million, 450,000-square-foot Center for Research and Technology, with its facade of large windows, nearly doubles the company’s research space and gives the Richmond company’s scientists and engineers one facility to collaborate on new projects.
The center, which is currently occupied by about …

Don’t assume that your complicated medical bill is correct. Errors on bills for doctors, medical tests or hospitals can result in overcharges that run from a few dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.
Husband and wife Ron and Marilyn Hess, from Homer, Alaska, were left facing a bill of about $10,000 from a hospital after Marilyn needed an appendectomy. The hospital bill was about $45,000, of which her insurer agreed to pay $35,000.
After obtaining an itemized bill and with the help of a medical-billing advocate, the couple uncovered procedures billed …

Most British citizens could be obese by 2050, a new government report warns, and the nation’s health secretary called Wednesday for a fundamental shift in the way the nation tackles obesity.
Health Secretary Alan Johnson didn’t blame British eating habits, calling obesity “a consequence of abundance, convenience and underlying biology.”
“As this report starkly demonstrates, people in the U.K. are not more gluttonous than previous generations and individual action alone will not be sufficient,” he said in a speech to Parliament.
The obesity analysis by the Foresight program, run by the Office …

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Some 1,800 researchers will gather in New Orleans this weekend to discuss efforts to treat and contain the worldwide obesity epidemic.
More than 300 studies will be presented during the annual conference, organized by the Obesity Society, a US scientific association created 25 years ago to study the phenomenon.
Between 64 percent to 66 percent of adults in the United States are overweight, of whom 60 million are obese with the epidemic on the rise.
More than a billion adults worldwide are overweight, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), …

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – People are getting fatter in all parts of the world, with the possible exception of east Asia, doctors found in a one-day global snapshot of obesity.
Overall, 24 percent of men and 27 percent of women seeing their doctors that day were obese, and another 30 percent of men and 40 percent of women were overweight, the researchers found.
That puts the rest of the world close to par with the United States, long considered the country with the worst weight problem. …

ATLANTA – Drunks swimming in gin, smokers in body bags and dopers living with their parents deep into adulthood. Those are among the public service ads shown in the past. But the government’s new batch of obesity spots declines even to show a fat person, let alone wag a finger for gluttony or sloth.
No one is advocating public service announcements that ridicule fat people; experts say such spots would do more harm than good. But critics complain that the three new spots premiering this month are a wimpy attack …

(HealthDay News) — Worldwide, 40 percent of men and 30 percent of women are now overweight, and 24 percent of men and 27 percent of women are obese, say researchers who looked at data from 63 countries.
The study included information on more than 168,000 men and women ages 18-80 (average age 48), living on five continents. All of them were evaluated by their family doctors.
The findings are published in this week’s issue of the journal Circulation.
“The study results show that excess body weight is pandemic, with one-half to two-thirds of …