Female genital mutilation, the cutting of sexual organs, is thought to affect 66,000 women in the UK. (BBC)

A 33-year-old Polish man received a life-saving total face transplant just three weeks after being disfigured in a workplace accident, in what his doctors said Wednesday is the fastest timeframe to date for such an operation. (AP)

A research program that should eventually allow all cancer patients to have access to genetic testing has been launched with £2.7 million ($4 million) funding from the Wellcome Trust. (Medical News Today)

If you land in an intensive care unit sick enough for doctors to consider withdrawing life support, be warned. Whether and when to pull the plug may depend in large part on the practices and culture of the ICU itself — perhaps more than your needs or wishes, a new study finds. (NBC News)

Researchers at King’s College London scanned 55 premature infants and 10 babies born at full term, using a novel type of MRI scan. The brain scans showed arrested development in the premature babies at a key stage of maturation. (BBC)

With this as my background, I am hardly a disinterested reviewer of a new anthology of essays by 21 nurses. It is beautifully wrought, but more significantly a reminder that these “semi-invisible” people, as Lee Gutkind calls them in this new book, are now the “indispensable and anchoring element of our health care system.” (New York Times)

A pioneering programme to test cancer patients for nearly 100 risk genes is to start in London and could represent the future of treatment in the NHS. (BBC)

Upcoming paper in ‘Science’ pushes back against recent recommendations from the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics. (News-medical)

A coolie in Kanyakumari district has sought permission for euthanasia of his infant son, who has been suffering from an unknown disorder since his birth. (Times of India)

Since the heart is such a delicate and critical organ, clinicians usually opt not to intervene with the dead cells that remain after a heart attack or cardiac disease. (Phys.org)

In the old days, sales representatives from drug companies would chat up local pharmacists to learn what drugs doctors were prescribing. Now such shoulder-rubbing is becoming a quaint memory — thanks to vast databases of patient and doctor information being used by pharmaceutical companies to market drugs. (New York Times)

Bereaved parents agonising over whether to subject their dead child or stillborn baby to a full post-mortem now have an alternative that is potentially far less traumatic. For fetuses and infants under the age of one, MRI scans combined with minimally invasive procedures including blood tests are as effective as an autopsy at revealing the cause of death. (New scientist)

Admissions to U.S. hospital intensive care units jumped 50 percent from 2002 to 2009, but researchers are not sure why. (UPI)

Nurses will use extreme measures to save their patients and parents; but if they were dying, they prefer less aggressive ones for themselves, according to results from an international survey on nurses’ end-of-life preferences. (News-medical)

An eight-year old British girl of Indian descent was allegedly murdered by health care workers in India so they could harvest her organs, her grieving parents claim. (International Business Times)

A study finds a gap between learning ethical terms and using them in a clinical setting, which can lead to a lack of shared understanding. (American Medical News)

The adoptive parents of a child born with male and female organs say South Carolina mutilated their son by choosing a gender and having his male genitalia surgically removed. (CNN)

The clinical study demonstrates for the first time that the India-developed rotavirus vaccine ROTAVAC- is efficacious in preventing severe rotavirus diarrhoea in low-resource settings in India. ROTAVAC- significantly reduced severe rotavirus diarrhoea by more than half-56 percent during the first year of life, with protection continuing into the second year of life. Moreover, the vaccine also showed impact against severe diarrhoea of any cause. (News-Medical)

Dr. Tria may be an outlier, but gifts and payments to physicians from drug and medical device companies have been rampant in medicine for decades. Over a two-and-a-half-year period, device and drug companies shelled out over $76 million just to physicians licensed in Massachusetts, according to a study published online this month in The New England Journal of Medicine. That amount does not include outlays of less than $50, which are exempt from disclosure. (New York Times)

MY MOTHER fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was. (New York Times, op-ed by Angelina Jolie)

Revenge plastic surgery is becoming more common. A 2011 survey by the Transform Plastic Surgery Group in the United Kingdom found that over a quarter (26%) of their patients were recently divorced women, while 11% were newly single men. (CNN)