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 100 employees, will be home to 500 scientists, engineers and support staff by the end of the year.

“The investment is large … and we’re pretty sure that it will bear fruit for Philip Morris USA both in terms of volume and profitability in the years ahead,” Dinyar Devitre, chief financial officer for its parent company, Altria Group Inc., told analysts in a conference call last month on the company’s third-quarter results. Read more » »

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 that weren’t performed.

And on her appendectomy and the second clean-up surgery, Marilyn was charged separately for each item used rather than a set fee for a surgical packet.
Read more » »

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 for Science, concludes that excess weight has become the norm and described Britain as an “obesogenic” society.

Obesity costs Britain the equivalent of $90 million a year already. Obese people have a greater risk for life-threatening conditions, including diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Read more » »

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), and there are at least 300 million obese people on the planet.

In Europe, Britain leads with a 23 percent obesity rate, followed by Germany at 12 percent Read more » »

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. An estimated two-thirds of Americans are overweight and a third of these are obese.
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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 on the costly and deadly explosion of obesity in America.

“It’s so namby-pamby I think people will shrug it off,” said Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington-based advocacy organization.

The three new spots are the latest in a series created by the Ad Council and the U.S. Read more » »

(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 the overall study population being overweight or obese,” lead author Beverley Balkau, director of research at INSERM in France, said in a prepared statement. INSERM is the French equivalent of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Read more » »