Chicago

Medical group adopts anti-bullying measure

The American Medical Assn. on Wednesday adopted an anti-bullying measure urging doctors to be vigilant at identifying at-risk patients.

The policy includes tips to help doctors and parents question children on whether they’ve been victimized. It also means the AMA will work to change attitudes that tolerate bullying and push for federal research into prevention programs.

While bullying has been viewed as an “inevitable part of growing up,” accumulating research suggests many youngsters who bully have psychiatric or emotional disorders that may be overlooked by physicians, the measure suggests.

Kentucky

Health board keeps contraceptive funding

A Kentucky public health board narrowly voted Wednesday night to retain federal funding used to dispense birth control pills, rejecting an effort by some abortion foes to turn down the money.

In a tense vote that capped nearly three hours of discussion, board Chairman Greg Kennedy broke a 13-13 tie.

Some hard-line anti-abortion activists had wanted the Northern Kentucky Independent District Health Board to cut off Title X funding, claiming the pill can cause the equivalent of an abortion.

“I believe it was going to disrupt services to the people that need and rely on the health department the most,” Kennedy said afterward. “When you mix politics with medicine, you get very bad medicine.”

Title X provided nearly $170,000 this fiscal year to the health board. The money was used to provide contraceptives and reproductive health care services to poor women.

Washington

Genetic analysis fails in anthrax investigation

Sophisticated genetic fingerprinting that investigators hoped would help crack the anthrax case has yet to yield results. With the most promising avenue gone, the FBI is expanding its scientific probe, law enforcement officials said Wednesday.

Eight months after the attacks by mail killed five people, standard investigative techniques have yet to produce a breakthrough in the case. The hope was that genetic matching could help determine which of about a dozen laboratories that have the Ames strain of anthrax, the type used in the attacks, was the source of the deadly microbes.

Scientists say it’s still possible that genetic analysis will help, but they are increasingly pessimistic. “I did think this would be a fairly straightforward case when this first came out,” said Mark Whellis, a microbiologist at the University of California-Davis who serves on the Federation of American Scientists’ Working Group on Biological Weapons. “Now, seven or eight months out from attacks, with no apparent forward movement in the case, it is quite distressing. It makes me pessimistic about ever resolving it.”

California

Space shuttle lands; reunions must wait

The three men who spent six months on the international space station came home Wednesday aboard space shuttle Endeavour, which set down in the Mojave Desert after three straight days of bad weather in Florida.

Because of the cross-country detour, the space station crew members’ reunion with their loved ones had to be delayed: Their families were left waiting for them at Cape Canaveral, Fla., more than 2,200 miles away.

During their stay aboard the space station, NASA astronauts Daniel Bursch and Carl Walz and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Onufrienko traveled nearly 81 million miles and circled Earth 3,100 times. The three logged their 196th day in orbit Wednesday. The Americans broke NASA’s 188-day space endurance record last week.