That leaves doctors and patients

“From the evidence we’ve seen, inviting patients to general

health checks is unlikely to be beneficial,” lead researcher

Lasse Krogsb?ll of The Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen,

Denmark said in a statement. “One reason for this might be

that doctors identify additional problems and take action

when they see patients for other reasons.”

Preventive screening remains controversial—and confusing—

for health care consumers. The intuitive power of screening

for disease to prevent it is hard to counter, but the latest

evidence, from government health groups such as the United

States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) shows that the

data don’t always support the idea that screening leads to

better health. When factoring things such as the cost of

screening and follow up tests to confirm false positive or

false negative results, the regular checkups aren’t always

beneficial.

MORE: Why Genetic Tests Don’t Help Doctors Predict Your Risk

of Disease

That’s the case with breast or prostate cancer, in which

studies show that mammograms or prostate specific antigen

(PSA) testing can lead to overtreatment of tumors that are

unlikely to cause serious disease during people’s lifetimes,

but cause unnecessary physical and emotional strain instead.

The USPSTF now recommends that women wait until age 50 (not

40) to get yearly mammograms, and that most men not get the

PSA test at all. “It is generally recognized that screening

should be based on evidence from randomized trials showing a

favorable balance between benefits and harms. In our review

we could not find that, and we therefore cannot see any

justification for public health programs pushing for routine

health checks,” says Krogsb?ll in an email response.

(MORE: Prostate Cancer Screening: What You Need to Know)

That leaves doctors and patients with the difficult challenge

of figuring out how much testing is enough. The researchers

are not advising doctors to discontinue screening and

treatment if they believe a patient has a health problem, but

they suggest public healthcare initiatives that

systematically offer general health checks to the public in

general might not make sense. That means that physicians may

need to spend more time with their patients to better

determine their individual risk for certain diseases,

something that may require a bigger investment of resources

initially, but may pay off in health care savings down the

road.

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States where voters are neither reliably Democratic

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With recent gains in the polls for Romney, he and the

president are locked in an exceedingly close race as they

shuttle from one critical state to another and dispatch

surrogates ranging from former President Bill Clinton to ex-

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to locations they cannot

make on their own.

Obama spoke to a crowd of about 14,000 students and

supporters at Ohio University, imploring them to vote early.

"I want your vote. I am not too proud to beg. I want you to

vote," he said.

States where voters are neither reliably Democratic nor

Republican take on added importance in U.S. presidential

elections because the outcome is not decided by the

nationwide popular vote. Instead, candidates compete for each

state's electoral votes. Each state gets one electoral vote

for each of its Congress members.

A little less than three weeks before Election Day, Obama

appears on course to win states and the District of Columbia

that account for 237 of the 270 electoral votes needed for

victory. The same is true for Romney in states with 191

electoral votes.

The remaining 110 electoral votes are divided among the hotly

contested battleground states of Florida (29), North Carolina

(15), Virginia (13), New Hampshire (4), Iowa (6), Colorado

(9), Nevada (6), Ohio (18) and Wisconsin (10).
Thank you Pranabda, for the recent communiqué from

Rashtrapati Bhawan suggesting replacing of age-old honorifics

attached to President’s name with simpler titles. It’s a

welcome and long overdue step.

it studiously noted that nuclear power produces

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President Bush then put taxpayer money behind the idea, signing legislation in 2005 that provided billions in tax credits and loan guarantees to spur construction of the first nuclear plants in years. (The last U.S. reactor had been ordered in 1978.) And it worked. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already received proposals for seven new plants, and many more are in the works.
As the Bush administration pressed its case, it studiously noted that nuclear power produces no greenhouse gases (even as it continued to question the role humans were playing in increasing worldwide temperatures). And, as the prospect of climate change grew more ominous, some environmentalists took another look at nuclear power. In a muchdiscussed conversion, Patrick Moore broke with Greenpeace and argued that "nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet." Liberal legislators and the public began to come around as well. Senator Dianne Feinstein has said, "I've never been a fan of nuclear energy. But reducing emissions from the electricity sector presents a major challenge. And, if we can be assured that new technologies help to produce nuclear energy safely and cleanly, then I think we have to take a look at it." In a 2006 poll by the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg, 61 percent of respondents said they supported building more reactors "to prevent global warming."