Partnerships with multinational companies like Coca-Cola in child health programs can work to help save lives but decades of well-funded public relations campaigns against corporations by NGOs has turned letting companies fund programs into an ethical minefield.

ColaLife, a charity formed by British couple Simon and Jane Berry, worked with Coca-Cola to learn about the distribution channels the company uses in developing countries. With this knowledge, they devised a system to ensure life saving treatments reach children with diarrhea in remote parts of Zambia.

In a new study, older women who lived in places with higher air pollution had significantly reduced white matter in the brain. For the study, a research team took brain MRIs of 1403 women who were 71 to 89 years old and used residential histories and air monitoring data to estimate their exposure to air pollution in the previous 6 to 7 years.

The findings suggest that ambient particulate air pollutants may have a deleterious effect on brain aging.

New measures introduced by the UK government in April linking applications for residence permits to up-front payments for potential use of NHS hospital services, and proposals to further restrict access to NHS services for migrants, will not reduce the strain on NHS resources - and may end up costing more in the long run.

Some of the nation's largest businesses encourage employees to travel to large U.S. medical centers for complex elective surgical procedures. As part of these medical travel programs, companies negotiate lower prices for patients to receive high-quality surgical care at some of the nation's premier hospitals.

But many participants must travel long distances - sometimes hundreds of miles from home - to reach destination hospitals, meaning it can be difficult to return should complications arise.

Using Twitter and Google search trend data in the wake of the very limited U.S. Ebola outbreak of October 2014, a team of researchers from Arizona State University, Purdue University and Oregon State University have found that news media is extraordinarily effective in creating public panic.

Because only five people were ultimately infected yet Ebola dominated the U.S. media in the weeks after the first imported case, the researchers set out to determine mass media's impact on people's behavior on social media.

Following a decade of steady growth, use of bisphosphonates—medications that are effective for treating osteoporosis—declined in the United States by more than 50% from 2008 to 2012.

The sudden drop seemed to occur after media reports highlighted safety concerns, such as the development of certain fractures that occurred rarely in long-term users, despite the fact that the US Food and Drug Administration and the American Society of Bone and Mineral Research did not recommend any specific safety restrictions on bisphosphonates. The findings are published in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research.