That’s according to a study published May 24 in the New England Journal of Medicine, which found that adolescent and adult women who use birth-control pills, vaginal rings or transdermal patches as contraceptives are far more likely to unintentionally become pregnant than those using IUDs or subdermal implants.

According to a recent legal judgement, no, it is not.

The Federal Trade Commission had asked a judge to rule on its claim that POM was misleading consumers with its health-benefit claims. On May 17, the judge ruled that POM lacked sufficient scientific support for many of the claims it makes in print ads and on its Web site and told the company to cease and desist.

Once touted as a potential godsend for women suffering from menopause-related hot flashes, night sweats and vaginal dryness, the therapy was under investigation through the Women’s Health Initiative until July 2002, when the research was abruptly halted because an elevated number of cases of breast cancer was detected in the study participants.

On Friday came the horrible news that a three-day-old baby in Ohio died after being attacked by a family dog at her grandmother's house; the infant was reportedly in a baby swing with her mother and grandmother nearby when the attack took place.

Hepatitis C is one of those infections I hear about but never really pay much attention to; naively or not, it never has struck me as something I need to worry about, at least on a personal level.

Now, another troubling racial disparity in prostate cancer has surfaced. For reasons that are unclear, black men also fare more poorly during and after prostate cancer surgery than do white men.

Those babyhood staples may seem benign, but they’re implicated in injuries that send about 2,200 children under age 3 to emergency departments every year.

In one study, the CDC and the National Cancer Institute looked at self-reported sun-exposure data for 5,000 people age 18 to 29 collected through the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) for the years 2000, 2003, 2005, 2008 and 2010. Of those participating in the most recent survey, a whopping 50.1 percent of all adults reported having had at least one sunburn during the preceding 12 months. Among whites, the number was worse: 65.6 percent, or about two-thirds, had been sunburned at least once during that time.

Taking a page, so to speak, from J.K. Rowling’s book, a team of chemical engineers at Monash University in Australia has created a new means of testing and documenting people’s blood types that works much like Tom Riddle’s diary.

A new review of 42 studies of IUDs for emergency contraception found that IUDs inserted within five days of unprotected intercourse prevented pregnancy more than 999 times out of 1,000 — a failure rate below 0.1 percent.

Yauch, who helped make the Beastie Boys band a household name in the mid 1980s, revealed three years ago that he had been diagnosed with salivary parotid gland cancer. Richard Smith, director of the Head and Neck Cancer Program at Montefiore Einstein Center for Cancer Care in Bronx, N.Y., says salivary gland cancers come in “a great variety,” affecting different specific glands within the salivary gland system and carrying differing degrees of lethality.