TV News LIES

Canada says it will increase the size of anti-smoking warnings on cigarette packages to cover three-quarters of the surface of the packs.

The federal government says the new health warnings will feature images of an iconic Canadian cancer victim covering 75 percent of the packages of cigarettes and little cigars, Postmedia News reported Wednesday.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost or misplaced more than $8 million in property in 2007, losing track of items including computer and video equipment, government auditors say. Agency officials said Wednesday they have corrected the lapses that led to that amount of waste.

The report was released this week by the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services, the parent agency of the CDC. In 2007, the auditors checked on 200 randomly sampled items and found 15 were lost or not inventoried, including a $1.8 million hard disk drive and a $978,000 video conferencing system.

Animals in factory farms are given doses of antibiotics -- both to keep them alive in stressful, unsanitary conditions, and to make them grow faster. The practice leads to new strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, such as the now-widespread form of staph (MRSA) known as ST398.

Federal regulators have in the past refused to release estimates of just how much antibiotics the livestock industry uses. But recently the FDA released its first-ever report on the topic. And the amount? Twenty-nine million pounds of antibiotics in 2009 alone.

Hundreds of herbal medicinal products will be banned from sale in Britain next year under what campaigners say is a "discriminatory and disproportionate" European law.

With four months to go before the EU-wide ban is implemented, thousands of patients face the loss of herbal remedies that have been used in the UK for decades.

In April 2009, Pfizer reportedly reached a tentative agreement on lawsuits regarding the vaccine trials it had conducted in 1996. Pfizer tested Trovan, an oral antibiotic, on children of Nigeria’s Kano state. To avoid the lengthy clinical trial process required by the Food and Drug Administration, Pfizer decided to expedite the production of Trovan.

A new commentary calls on doctors to disclose when they're deprived of sleep and not perform surgery unless a patient gives written consent after being informed of their surgeon's status.

There currently aren't any rules about the number of hours that fully trained physicians may work. The proposed new rules would change how doctors handle their own fatigue, the authors of the editorial pointed out.