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Throughout history, atrocities have been committed in the name of medical research. Nazi doctors experimented on concentration camp prisoners. American doctors let poor black men with syphilis go untreated in the Tuskegee study. The list goes on. To protect people participating in medical research, the federal government decades ago put in place strict rules on the conduct of human experiments. Now the Department of Health and Human Services is proposing a major revision of these regulations, known collectively as the Common Rule. It's the first change proposed in nearly a quarter-century. (Stein, 11/25)

Around the country, prisoners are clamoring to be cured of a potentially deadly disease, while prison administrators are reeling from the treatment’s price tag. Hepatitis C, a virus that can eventually cause cirrhosis, liver cancer, and other serious outcomes, affects some three million Americans, one-third of whom pass through U.S. prisons and jails each year. One 12-week treatment course can cost upwards of $90,000. With a constitutional obligation to provide medical care to inmates, prison officials—whose health-care budgets are a zero-sum proposition—are struggling to treat even a fraction of those with the disease. (Schwartzapfel, 11/24)

Every year before influenza itself arrives to circulate, misinformation and misconceptions about the flu vaccine begin circulating. Some of these contain a grain of truth but end up distorted, like a whispered secret in the Telephone game. But if you're looking for an excuse not to get the flu vaccine, last year's numbers of its effectiveness would seem a convincing argument on their own. By all measures, last season's flu vaccine flopped, clocking in at about 23 percent effectiveness in preventing lab-confirmed influenza infections. But that's not the whole story, said Lisa Grohskopf, a medical officer in the influenza division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Haelle, 11/24)