If online oversharing is a public health problem, then the state’s decision to harness it for its own purposes means that huge, powerful forces within government will come to depend on it. (The Guardian)

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

People were 20 percent more likely to choose DNR if it was phrased as “allowing natural death;” 25 percent if they were told it’s what most other people choose. (The Atlantic)

The parents of a severely disabled boy have lost a $10 million case against an IVF specialist who failed to properly warn them of the likelihood their son would inherit a blood-clotting condition, but are considering appealing against the decision. (Sydney Morning Herald)

In refusing to discuss mentally ill patients’ conditions with family members or caretakers, physicians could be misinterpreting federal privacy rules, witnesses told a House panel April 25. (American Medical News)

James Brown, who has been diagnosed with psychosis, spent three days at Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital, in Las Vegas, in February 2012. Depressed and thinking of suicide, Brown ended up there after problems at his group home. But just three days after he was admitted, the doctors felt James was stable enough to go. (ABC News)

Privacy experts have identified participants in the Personal Genome Project using “de-identified” data. (MIT Technology Review)

There is worldwide concern in the biomedical research community that enrollment in clinical trials is lagging, putting clinical research and consequent benefits to society in jeopardy. Experts explore ways to embed patient voices and values in clinical research in the current issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings. (Medical Xpress)

Two pioneering researchers of brain disease among athletes in violent sports recommended Saturday that investigators conduct special autopsy tests on amateur boxer Tamerlan Tsarnaev to determine whether the Boston Marathon bombing suspect could have been affected by boxing-related brain damage. (Boston.com)

Yesterday, on the Hastings Center Bioethics Forum, Carl Elliott pondered the question of why a petition asking the governor of Minnesota to investigate ethically problematic research at the University of Minnesota has gathered hundreds of signatures from scholars in bioethics, clinical research, medical humanities, and related disciplines — but only a handful of signatures from scholars and researchers at the University of Minnesota. (Scientific American)

Days after they were badly hurt in a car accident, Jacinto Cruz and Jose Rodriguez-Saldana lay unconscious in an Iowa hospital while the American health care system weighed what to do with the two immigrants from Mexico. (Associated Press)

Women are turning their backs on the health system after being traumatised by childbirth in hospitals, according to a new paper from University of Sydney researchers. (Sydney Morning Herald)

In 2011, a bioterrorism-preparedness exercise conducted by the U.S. government examined the likely result of a large-scale release of weaponized anthrax spores in a city such as San Francisco. Code-named Dark Zephyr, the simulation was sobering: nearly 8 million people would be affected, nearly a quarter of them children. If such an event occurred, current response plans call for distribution of appropriate antibiotics and vaccination of affected civilian populations using anthrax vaccine adsorbed (AVA). (Bioethics International)

Many of us have friends and relatives who have born children via IVF. But the process as described by the couples who have been through the complicated and expensive procedures, can be more than a little dismaying. (Forbes)

The federal agency that protects patients in U.S. clinical trials has concluded that leading universities didn’t adequately inform parents of the risk of death or blindness in a study of how much oxygen should be given to very premature infants. (Wall Street Journal)

Mr Dunn said staff failed to tell him that his wife had been put on the end-of-life plan, only becoming aware of it when he overheard a doctor talking to a nurse. (The Telegraph)

Public health officials say a big increase in the demand for MMR vaccinations in south Wales suggests parents’ “legacy of mistrust” over the jab is being overcome. (BBC)