A trial showing that AstraZeneca Plc's Crestor cholesterol pill prevented heart disease in seemingly healthy people was flawed and may have been biased because of the company's role in the research, according to an article in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Nine of the 14 researchers who conducted the study, dubbed Jupiter, had financial ties to London-based AstraZeneca that may have influenced the way they did their job, doctors led by Michel de Lorgeril wrote in the report published today. The lead Jupiter researcher is a co-holder of a patent on a protein marker of inflammation that would potentially boost royalties from wider use of Crestor, the authors said.

"The possibility that bias entered the study is particularly concerning because of the strong commercial interest in the study," wrote de Lorgeril of the Universite Joseph Fourier and National Center for Scientific Research in Grenoble, France.

Over five years, using Crestor in people with normal cholesterol may prevent 250,000 heart complications in the U.S., AstraZeneca's researchers said when presenting Jupiter findings at the American Heart Association meeting in 2008. AstraZeneca in March 2008 stopped the study early because of "unequivocal" evidence that the pill cut deaths better than a placebo in people who had no evidence of existing heart disease.

U.S. and European regulators this year allowed the drugmaker to broaden Crestor's use to anyone at an increased risk for heart disease, even if so-called bad cholesterol levels are normal. Crestor belongs to a family of drugs known as statins that work by blocking an enzyme in the liver involved in cholesterol production.

An obese doctor comes home to his wife at dinner time carrying yet another bag full of drive-through junk food from a local restaurant.

Worried about his health, his wife asks, "Don't you realize all that junk food you keep eating is destroying your entire body?"

"That's not my concern," the doctor replies. "I'm only an ear, nose and throat specialist."

This joke illustrates an important point: That even the most brilliant scientists, doctors and researchers can seem downright clueless when it comes to their own health. And this joke isn't really a joke at all: It's a sad but true commentary about the blind spots in the knowledge of those who are among society's most intelligent thinkers.

Modern psychiatry went wrong when it embraced the idea that the mind should be treated with drugs, says Edward Shorter of the University of Toronto, writing in the Wall Street Journal.

Shorter studies the history of psychiatry and medicine.

Modern U.S. psychiatry has adopted a philosophy that psychological diseases arise from chemical imbalances and therefore have a very specific cluster of symptoms, he says, in spite of evidence that the difference between many so-called disorders is minimal or nonexistent. These "disorders" are then treated with expensive drugs that are no more effective than a placebo.

"Psychiatry seems to have lost its way in a forest of poorly verified diagnoses and ineffectual medications," he writes.

A new study shows that use of psychotropic medications during pregnancy increase the probability of birth defects. Researchers at the University of Copenhagen have published an article that documents the serious side effects that can be associated with these types of medications.

Between 1998 and 2007, psychotropic medications were associated with 429 adverse drug reactions in Danish children under the age of 17. Researchers from the University of Copenhagen's Faculty of Pharmaceutical Studies have published an article in the open access journal BMC Research Notes concluding that more than half of the 429 cases were serious and several involved birth defects, such as birth deformities and severe withdrawal syndromes.

Professors Lise Aagaard and Ebbe Holme Hansen from the University of Copenhagen studied all 4,500 paediatric adverse drug reaction reports submitted during the study period to find those which were linked to psychotropic medications. The two researchers found that 42 percent of adverse reactions were reported for psychostimulants, such as Ritalin, which treats attention deficit disorder (ADD), followed by 31 percent for antidepressants, such as Prozac, and 24 percent for antipsychotics, such as Haldol.

Supermarkets across Britain are routinely selling food from animals reared on genetically modified crops without having to declare it on labeling, it can be disclosed.

They have acknowledged that meat, fish, eggs and dairy products on their shelves could contain "indirect" GM ingredients.

Every major supermarket in the country said it was unable to provide a guarantee that it was not selling products from animals given GM feed.

Even ''high-end'' retailers said only the more expensive organic ranges were certain to have been produced without any GM involvement.

Hundreds of doctors will this week call for a ban on NHS funding for homeopathic treatments.

Delegates to the British Medical Association's conference are expected to support seven motions opposing the use of public money to pay for remedies which they claim have 'no place in the modern health service.'

They are also calling for junior doctors to be exempt from being placed in homoeopathic hospitals, claiming it goes against the principles of evidence-based medicine.

The conference will also hear calls for homoeopathic remedies to be banned from chemists unless they are clearly labelled as placebos rather than medicines.

The NHS needs to make £20 billion in cuts over the next few years and doctors say the health service cannot afford 'sugar pills and placebos.'

Human beings aren't built to cross time zones. After an international flight, it takes days for the body to overcome the fatigue and nausea of jet lag, the biological price of doing business in the modern world.

That's because every organ keeps time with its own separate clock. Though the brain tries to synchronize all of these clocks on a daily basis, some are more stubborn about resetting than others when adjusting to a new time zone and sleep schedule -- according to a new study of sleep-deprived mice, which have internal clocks similar to ours.

"Jet lag is a big mess of different clocks," said Gregor Eichele of the Max Planck Institute of Biophysical Chemistry in Gottingen, Germany.

Since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded on April 20, spewing untold millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, cleanup crews have been working feverishly to mop up oil at sea and prevent the slick from reaching Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida shores. It's hot, dirty, heroic work, but toxicologists and health professionals say it's not the only work that needs to be done.

This week, dozens of experts in public health and environmental medicine gathered in New Orleans at a symposium hosted by the Institute of Medicine to discuss how to mitigate the human health effects from the Gulf oil spill. As the clean-up effort stretches from weeks into months with no end in sight, experts at the conference warned that little is known about how long-term exposure to oil and fumes can affect human health.

"The current scientific literature is inconclusive with regards to the potential hazards resulting from this spill," said U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin during her opening remarks at the conference. "Some scientists predict little or no toxic effects while others express serious concerns about the potential for short and long-term health impacts," she said.

An advisory panel to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended that every person be vaccinated for the seasonal flu yearly, except in a few cases where the vaccine is known to be unsafe.

"Now no one should say 'Should I or shouldn't I?'" said CDC flu specialist Anthony Fiore.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted 11-0 with one abstention to recommend yearly flu vaccination for everyone except for children under the age of six months, whose immune systems have not yet developed enough for vaccination to be safe, and people with egg allergies or other health conditions that are known to make flu vaccines hazardous. If accepted by the CDC, this recommendation will then be publicized to doctors and other health workers.

The CDC nearly always accepts the advisory committee's recommendations.

The Food and Drug Administration is seriously considering whether to approve the first genetically engineered animal that people would eat - salmon that can grow at twice the normal rate.

The developer of the salmon has been trying to get approval for a decade. But the company now seems to have submitted most or all of the data the F.D.A. needs to analyze whether the salmon are safe to eat, nutritionally equivalent to other salmon and safe for the environment, according to government and biotechnology industry officials. A public meeting to discuss the salmon may be held as early as this fall.

Some consumer and environmental groups are likely to raise objections to approval. Even within the F.D.A., there has been a debate about whether the salmon should be labeled as genetically engineered (genetically engineered crops are not labeled).