A 3-year-old cancer patient must undergo chemotherapy over the next 28 days despite the wishes of his parents, a Tampa judge ruled Wednesday afternoon. But she did not make a decision about treatment options after that.

The ruling marks the latest twist in the case of Noah McAdams, who was was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia back in April. After two rounds of chemotherapy, his parents Joshua McAdams and Taylor Bland decided they wanted to try a more natural, holistic approach.

When they failed to show up for a chemo appointment at All Children's Hospital on April 22, authorities tracked them down in Kentucky and brought the family back. Days later, a Tampa judge ordered temporary custody to Noah's maternal grandmother.

After a day's worth of testimony Wednesday, the judge decided that Noah would get chemotherapy for 28 days, but allowed the possibiliy of holistic treatments in conjunction with the chemo. She also delayed any ruling on follow-up rounds of treatment until a later date.

As you've been reading the news these days, have you noticed a new angle on the "anti-vaccine movement?" The same old rhetoric is being employed, but a bit more subtly. It's couched in the context of pseudoscientific inquiry into the "phenomenon and psychology" of anyone critical of the vaccine program. Conveniently, media coverage focused on the "state of being vaccine hesitant" draws the conversation away from the actual concerns of the "vaccine hesitant" - such as vaccine injury, zero liability for vaccine manufacturers, an ever-increasing vaccine schedule (72 doses by age 18!) and no double-blind placebo safety testing for any childhood vaccine on the schedule.

All these pieces depict the "vaccine hesitant" as if they are a singularly minded subgroup characterized by a shared "affliction" which requires intervention. This is a clever pretense, but one that many well intended people have been led to believe is actually in earnest, as suggested by articles such as this piece in the Atlantic.

Some newer diabetes drugs have been linked to a nightmarish "flesh-eating" genital disease that can spread rapidly and kill skin tissue as it grows, according to a new study by US Food and Drug Administration scientists.

Symptoms of the disease known as 'Fournier gangrene' include pain, redness and a foul odor in the genital area. Alarmingly, the infection starts by attacking your genital or anal region, but can also spread rapidly and kill other body tissue along the way.

The rare infection concerns people taking a newer class of diabetes medications known as SGLT2 inhibitors, according to FDA scientists who recently published their findings on the issue.

More U.S. adults are dying from heart failure today than a decade ago, and the sharpest rise in mortality is happening among middle-aged and younger adults, a new study suggests.

Researchers examined data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on deaths from heart failure between 1999 and 2017 among adults 35 to 84 years old.

Between 1999 and 2012, annual heart failure death rates dropped from 78.7 per 100,000 people to 53.7 per 100,000, the researchers found. But then mortality rates started to climb, reaching 59.3 fatalities for every 100,000 people by the end of the study period.

"Up until 2012, we saw decline in cardiovascular deaths in patients with heart failure and this was likely due to advances in medical and surgical treatments for heart failure," said senior study author Dr. Sadiya Khan of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

"However, this study demonstrates for the first time that the cardiovascular death rate is now increasing in patients with heart failure and this increase is especially concerning for premature death in people under 65," Khan said by email.

Norway's newly appointed Health Minister Sylvi Listhaug, no stranger to controversy, has once again stirred the public by claiming that she wants to avoid becoming the "moral police" and instead intends to let fellow Norwegians indulge in bad habits as they please.

Progress Party figurehead and newly-minted Health Minister Sylvi Listhaug has shocked her compatriots with an unorthodox stance on nutrition, alcohol, and tobacco.

"I believe people should be allowed to smoke, drink and eat as much red meat they just want. The authorities may like to inform, but people already know pretty well what is healthy and what isn't, I believe", Listhaug told national broadcaster NRK.

Measles is in the news again. The humble microbe has many faces: scourge of the New World, benign and ubiquitous rite of childhood passage, simultaneous conduit of modern scientific achievement and vexing icon of evasive, unrealized dreams; and most recently, contemporary Rorschach test in the latest American culture war. U.S. measles cases spanning 22 states surged last month to 695 confirmed cases in 2019, marking the highest annual number since the disease was declared eliminated from the U.S. in 2000. The ongoing outbreak began last fall when infected travelers returned from Israel, Ukraine, and the Philippines, triggering clusters in New York, Washington State, and California - and a concurrent wave of proposed legislation to curtail non-medical exemptions for required childhood immunizations in over a dozen states.

As state legislatures considered bills tightening immunization requirements, U.S. Representative Adam Schiff formally requested censorship of vaccine-critical speech across social media platforms. The Congressional Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) also scheduled hearings designed to reinforce and amplify conventional wisdom blaming "vaccine hesitancy" for recurring outbreaks; witnesses were carefully selected to censure "anti-vaxxers" and quash safety concerns. That strategy was echoed in increasingly heated, polemical news reports and editorials condemning vaccine skepticism. This climate set the stage for two successive and unprecedented executive orders in Rockland County and Brooklyn, New York which sought to mandate vaccination under threat of criminal penalty for non-compliance. The trend culminated in President Trump - who has notably expressed concern over vaccine safety and considered spearheading a vaccine safety commission - urging citizens in no uncertain terms to "get the [Measles, Mumps, and Rubella] shot."

Germany's health minister is proposing fines for parents of school-age children who haven't been vaccinated for measles amid concern that the highly contagious and potentially deadly disease could make a comeback.

In an interview published Sunday with German weekly Bild am Sonntag, minister Jens Spahn said parents who can't prove their children have been vaccinated for measles should have to pay up to 2,500 euros ($2,790).

The minister also proposed that children without measles vaccinations be banned from going to daycare facilities, to protect others who are too young or medically unable to receive a measles immunization.

Compulsory medical procedures, including vaccinations, are a politically sensitive issue in Germany and it's unclear whether Spahn's proposal, which has yet to be discussed by Cabinet, will be implemented.

Amid the worst measles outbreak since the eradication of the disease, more US states are scrambling to amend the laws allowing for religious and other exemptions from vaccination. Oregon is the latest to join the push.

Faced with a health scare in the form of measles, a highly contagious and easily transmitted respiratory infection, lawmakers have been in a hurry to pass laws that would limit or outlaw any exemptions from vaccination that are not rooted in medical reasons.

On Monday, a bill aimed at ending non-medical exemptions passed the Oregon House after weeks of fierce debate. The bill will now have to go through the Senate before it can be signed into law. Oregon has not been at the center of the outbreak, with only 14 reported cases as of April 22, but it did not stop lawmakers from sounding an alarm over the issue, amid the general spike in cases.

Out of 764 reported cases in the US, the majority originated from the state of New York, having hit predominantly Orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn's Williamsburg County, Rockland County and Queens where residents are averse to vaccinations. New York City and nearby Rockland County have declared emergencies over the outbreak, which saw officials shut down schools and introduce a range of punitive measures, including fines and public bans in a bid to combat the rapid spread of the disease.

Dentists help repair or remove broken, damaged, and diseased teeth. Dentists also help replace missing teeth, correct bite and airway problems, and create beautiful smiles. And dentists help treat the results of many acute and chronic infections in the mouth. Unfortunately, dentistry fails the public in several other critical areas.

Here is my take on 3 Failures in Dentistry:

1. Not informing patients of potentially toxic elements that are used in dental treatment and their potential consequences in the body.
2. Not educating patients adequately and in-depth about the obscure and underlying causes of dental diseases.
3. Not emphasizing the causal relationships between the gut, the mouth, and the overall health of patients.

Hundreds of crew members and passengers aboard the Church of Scientology cruise ship Freewinds must remain under quarantine in the Caribbean until blood samples come back negative for measles, a health official in the ship's home port of Curacao told ABC News.

The ship, carrying a female crew member who had tested positive for measles but is now healthy, had been quarantined in St. Lucia before arriving in Willemstad, Curacao, Saturday morning, at which point its 216 crew members and 102 passengers were again prevented from disembarking, according to Izzy Gerstenbluth, the head of the Epidemiology and Research Unit at Curacao's Ministry of Health.

On Saturday, a team led by Gerstenbluth -- an epidemiologist and public health physician leading Curacao's response -- boarded the ship and spent the day interviewing passengers and crew members. The team gathered documentation from those who could prove they had been previously vaccinated or were immune to the disease from a prior diagnosis.

At least 31 crew members and 10 passengers were able to provide proof, while health officials took blood samples from 277 people and sent them to the Netherlands to test for measles, Gerstenbluth said.