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A study has found that vitamin D supplements may not be an effective option for arthritis. Osteoarthritis is a progressive disease usually caused by aging joints, obesity and injury. Currently, there is no effective treatment for the condition and medication only reduces pain. The condition still progresses with time.

For the study, researchers from Australia examined vitamin D supplements’ effects on knee osteoarthritis and found that it didn’t help patients with the disease. It was ineffective even in those patients who had low levels of vitamin.

The findings suggest that vitamin D supplementation doesn’t help in slowing the disease progression or structural change in knee osteoarthritis, said Dr. Changhai Ding, University of Tasmania professor and lead author of the study.

In an attempt to decelerate the growth of Medicare spending on drugs, the US government has announced to test new ways to cut cost of medicines. The efforts will be made while keeping in mind that they are also encouraging doctors and health experts to select the best and most effective treatments for their patients, as per a statement by the Obama administration on Tuesday.

The announcement by the government came as Hillary Clinton, candidate for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in the 2016 election, and other presidential candidates called for immediate action to help patients against high drug prices in Medicare.

A latest study has shown that special baby formula sold in the UK supermarkets doesn’t reduce the risk of suffering from eczema and allergies. The Food Standards Agency (FSA) funded study has discovered that hydrolysed formula doesn’t offer any advantage to babies vulnerable to allergies. It is a kind of formula treated with heat for the breakdown of milk protein.

The advice of European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (EAACI) is generally followed by British clinicians, and it has said that babies at risk of developing an allergy can be recommended a hypoallergenic formula during the first four months after birth.

In the middle of night, the lights were off, and all the six members of the Nuttall family having a sound sleep. The machinery monitoring the blood sugar levels of 7-year-old Luke Nuttall, a patient of dangerous type 1 diabetes, was very quiet. However, Jedi, the diabetes-sniffing dog of Nuttall Family, wasn’t.

In an attempt to wake the sleeping family member, the dog continuously jumped on and off of the bed shared by Luke and his parents. The dog thumped onto the mattress. On noticing that all the efforts were going in vain, the dog laid on top of Dorrie Nuttall.

On Tuesday, court records showed that three former surgery patients of a Colorado hospital have sued the hospital saying that they were among the roughly 3,000 people who have probably been exposed to blood-borne disease spread by a drug addict former medical technician at the hospital.

The suburban Denver’s Swedish Medical Center has been accused of carelessness in its hiring and supervision of a surgical technologist, who was recently found indulged in a practice wherein he was trying to switch a syringe that contained the powerful opiate fentanyl citrate with other substance during the surgery of a patient in January.

On Tuesday, the World Health Organization warned expectant women against traveling to Zika-affected areas. The same warning was given by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over a month back.

Director General Margaret Chan said they have gone through the reports and investigations from Zika-hit countries in the Americas, and that they all have strongly suggested that sexual transmission is more common than assumed earlier.