The case of a pregnant Florida woman hospitalized against her will is raising a legal, ethical and medical storm around this issue: Can a doctor’s order to quit smoking and rest in bed trump a woman’s right to control her own body? (St. Petersburg Times)

JAMA (Volume 302; Number 22; December 9, 2009) is now available by subscription only.

Articles include:

• “Relationships of Primary Care Physicians’ Patient Caseload with Measurement of Quality and Cost Performance” by David J. Nyweide, William B. Weeks, Daniel J. Gottlieb, Lawrence P. Casalino, and Elliott S. Fisher; 2444-2450.
• “Eliminating ‘Waste’ in Health Care” by Victor R. Fuchs, 2481-2482.
• “Failure to Report Financial Disclosure Information” by Pascale Barberger-Gateau, 2433-2434.
• “Screening for Intimate Partner Violence” by Achini Jayatilleke, Krishna C. Poudel, and Masamine Jimba; 2434.
• “The Investigator-Participant Relationship” by Henry S. Richardson, 2435.
• “No Easy Answers for Physicians Caring for Pregnant Women with Depression” by Bridget M. Kuehn, 2413-2420.
• “Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio: A History of Mass Media Images and Popular Attitudes in America” by Margaret Humphreys, 2492-2493.
  

The fertility watchdog is to look at offering more generous compensation to egg and sperm donors as a means of tackling the severe shortage of supplies for those desperate for a baby. (BBC)

The Senate took another step forward in the health care debate Thursday, casting its first votes on what is certain to be a long series of politically charged amendments. The chamber approved a Democratic-sponsored amendment to provide women with low-cost mammograms and other preventative tests, while rejecting a GOP proposal to prevent government boards from influencing coverage of screening tests for women. (CNN)

Women can delay having their first Pap test for cervical cancer until they turn 21 and many can wait longer to go back for follow-up screenings, according to new guidelines released Friday by a major medical group. (Washington Post)

In 1997, a federal committee of medical experts recommended against routine mammograms for women in their 40s, sparking a political uproar that led to congressional hearings and a unanimous Senate vote challenging the findings.

Now, 12 years later, a similar drama is playing out around a different federal medical panel, which this week recommended against routine mammograms for women younger than 50, saying it is not worth subjecting some patients to unnecessary biopsies, radiation and stress. (Washington Post)

Three years after embryonic stem cell cloning was legalised in Australia, advocates are finally facing up to the critical issue: where will all the eggs come from? Cloning or somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) is impossible without a continuous – and large - supply of women’s ova. In South Korea, the now discredited Dr Hwang used 2061 eggs taken from 169 women and failed to produce a single cloned embryo. (WA Today)

The Nobel laureate who discovered that human papillomavirus (HPV) causes cervical cancer has called for a worldwide campaign to implement vaccination programmes against the disease. (SciDev)

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) announced in September that it was preparing to conduct a clinical trial of the H1N1 influenza vaccine involving pregnant women. This is welcome news since pregnant women have been identified as a priority group for receiving the vaccine in the United States and in Canada. (Bioethics Forum)

British health officials temporarily suspended a vaccination program in an English city Tuesday after a 14-year-old girl died a few hours after being vaccinated against the virus that causes cervical cancer. (AP News)

Human clones, it is widely assumed, would be monstrous perversions of nature. Yet chances are, you already know one. Indeed, you may know several and even have dated a clone. They walk among us in the form of identical twins: people who share exact sets of DNA. Such twins almost always look alike and often have similar quirks. But their minds, experiences, and personalities are different, and no one supposes they are less than fully human. And if identical twins are fully human, wouldn’t cloned people be as well? (New York Times)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention caused quite a stir last week when word slipped out that the agency was considering, for the first time, making public health recommendations concerning circumcision. In terms of a woman’s health, circumcision makes sense because it lowers a man’s risk of getting infected with HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases and, thus, decreases his likelihood of transmitting them to his female partner. That’s probably why the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle has come out supporting recommendations, expected to be issued by the CDC next year, in favor of circumcision to “curb the spread of HIV and other infections.” But those vehemently opposed to circumcision—who call themselves “intactivists”—have expressed outrage that the government is thinking about recommending that all newborn boys be circumcised. They contend it’s a form of mutilation that destroys a man’s ability to fully experience sexual pleasure. (US News & World Report)

They are usually urged not to drink coffee, sip wine or pop aspirin. But now pregnant women find themselves high atop the federal government’s priority list for those who ought to receive the new swine flu vaccine — a prospect that some mothers-to-be are greeting with caution. (Washington Post)

For the first time since the Food and Drug Administration approved the controversial vaccine in June 2006, schools in the District and Virginia are asking that girls entering sixth grade receive the vaccine designed to protect them against HPV, which causes genital warts and can cause cervical cancer. District schools open Monday while most Virginia schools open Sept. 8. (Washington Post)