Cigarette Sales Banned at Boston Pharmacies
Effective today, cigarettes can no longer be sold in Boston pharmacies, as new rules from the city's public health commission go into effect, CBSNews.com reports. Tobacco products also can't be sold on college campuses under the new rules. Only 11 smoking bars remain in Boston, including about a half-dozen hookah bars. The city says it won't issue licenses to any more smoking bars. The regulations, passed by the commission two months ago, also ban colleges from selling tobacco products on campus and will force smoking bars to close within 10 years.
If you're a smoker, it's a good time to think about really quitting smoking. Also, learn the secrets of those who've successfully quit smoking, and consult our list of 12 reasons to quit smoking.
How to Reduce the Cost of Cancer Care
Cancer is one of the most common diseases and one of the most costly to treat. If you get it—and 1 in 3 women and half of all men will—you'd like to feel confident that having health insurance will ensure that you receive the care you need without too much financial pain. But as a new report documents, our private health insurance system is riddled with holes that force many patients either to forgo or to delay care. Others rack up huge bills that put them and their families in financial jeopardy, Michelle Andrews reports. The new report, "Spending to Survive: Cancer Patients Confront Holes in the Health Insurance System," comes from the American Cancer Society and the Kaiser Family Foundation. It describes the difficulties encountered by 20 cancer patients who had private health insurance and who should, by all rights, have been able to count on their health plans to cover most, if not all, of their care. It didn't work out that way. They ran into caps on coverage and bumped up against lifetime benefit limits. Their cancer forced them to quit working, but they couldn't afford to continue their former employers' coverage under COBRA. The specifics varied, but the outcome was often the same: treatment glitches and a mountain of debt to join the weight of worry they already faced over their health.
Consider these four strategies to reduce the cost of cancer care and these four ways to save on your medical bills.
Salmonella Peanut Butter Recalls Spread on Twitter, Facebook
The salmonella-in-peanut-butter recall keeps on rolling: More than 1,000 peanut products have been recalled because they might be tainted, and more join the list every day, Nancy Shute reports. To keep up, you can now track the giant outbreak on Twitter. Yes, there's now a salmonella outbreak Twitter feed, which delivers updates from the Food and Drug Administration on recalled products via the superpopular microblogging and social-networking service. Until now, people had to rely on the FDA getting word out on dangerous products through the media, which is a haphazard method at best. Gabrielle Meunier of South Burlington, Vt., told a congressional committee last week that her 7-year-old son, Christopher, was hospitalized in November after becoming ill with salmonella. Meunier didn't find out until hearing a news report in January that the bacteria were in peanut butter crackers the boy ate on November 25. More of the crackers, and potentially the salmonella, were still in her house.
Some stores have begun calling customers about tainted peanut products. The Peanut Corp. of America plant in Blakely, Ga., that shipped salmonella-tainted food items knew in 2007 that its plant was contaminated with potentially deadly salmonella. This salmonella outbreak may be the scariest one yet because it involves peanut butter and peanut paste that manufacturers bought by the tanker-load and mixed into hundreds of products on supermarket shelves. Here's how to reduce your risk of becoming ill.
—January W. Payne
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