WICHITA, Kan. - A 35-year-old woman who sat on her boyfriend's toilet for so long that her body was stuck to the seat by the time he called police had a phobia about leaving the bathroom, the boyfriend said.

"She is an adult; she made her own decision," said her boyfriend, Kory McFarren. "I should have gotten help for her sooner; I admit that. But after a while, you kind of get used to it."

The case drew nationwide attention after Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple said it appeared the Ness City woman's skin had grown around the seat in the two years she apparently was in the bathroom.

"We pried the toilet seat off with a pry bar and the seat went with her to the hospital," Whipple said. "The hospital removed it."

McFarren, 36, said he can't be certain how long Pam Babcock stayed in the bathroom because "time just went by so quick I can't pinpoint how long." He said beatings she received in her childhood caused her phobia.

"It just kind of happened one day; she went in and had been in there a little while, the next time it was a little longer. Then she got it in her head she was going to stay — like it was a safe place for her," McFarren said.

But McFarren said she moved around in the bathroom during that time, bathed and changed into the clothes he brought her. He brought food and water to her. They had conversations and had an otherwise normal relationship — except it all happened in the bathroom.

Scientists at Cardiff University have discovered that the brains of male starlings foraging for worms at a sewage treatment works in South-West England have been subtly changed by being contaminated by oestrogen from the contraceptive pill and hormone replacement therapy (HRT).

The female hormones - present in women's urine, and passing through the sewage treatment unaffected - caused the part of the brain that controls their song to grow much bigger, causing them to sing at greater length and with even more virtuosity than usual.

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Researchers at the University of California have found that feeding female finches with a hormone used in HRT has caused them to sing, something hitherto done only by their males.

Studies in more than 20 countries have shown that average amounts [of male sperm] have fallen by well over half in the past 50 years, from an average of more than 150 million per millilitre to 66 million.

The result is that men are now less than half as fertile as hamsters.

The counts are continuing to plunge by two per cent a year, and no end to the decline is in sight. At this rate, the average man will be unable to father children within decades.

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And research at the University of Rochester in New York State has shown that the male children of women exposed to phthalates have smaller penises and other signs of feminisation of their genitals.

Communities exposed to high levels of these and other gender-bender chemicals, from the Great Lakes of North America to the Russian Arctic, have been found to give birth to twice as many girls as boys.

This may offer a clue to the cause of a mysterious shift in the sex of babies worldwide.

Conflict

Normally 106 boys are born for every 100 girls, in what is thought to be nature's way of compensating for the fact that males were more likely to be killed hunting or in conflict.

But increasingly this ratio is slipping - it is calculated that 250,000 babies who would have been boys have been born girls in the U.S. and Japan alone.

An Irishman blinded by an explosion two years ago has had his sight restored after doctors inserted his son's tooth in his eye, he said on Wednesday.

Bob McNichol, 57, from County Mayo in the west of the country, lost his sight in a freak accident when red-hot liquid aluminium exploded at a re-cycling business in November 2005.

The procedure used on McNichol involved his son Robert, 23, donating a tooth, its root and part of the jaw.

McNichol's right eye socket was rebuilt, part of the tooth inserted and a lens inserted in a hole drilled in the tooth.

The first operation lasted ten hours and the second five hours.

"It is pretty heavy going," McNichol said. "There was a 65 percent chance of me getting any sight.

"Now I have enough sight for me to get around and I can watch television. I have come out from complete darkness to be able to do simple things," McNichol said.

One of the most promising developments is the emergence of retail-based "convenient care" clinics that are providing consumers with easier access to high-quality, routine health care at affordable prices. There are about 400 such clinics today and could be several thousand more in the next few years, but their growth is being threatened by burdensome regulations in some states and opposition from some corners of organized medicine.

Convenient care clinics are small health-care facilities with new brand names like RediClinic, MinuteClinic, and Take Care Health Clinics. Most are located in high-traffic retail outlets with pharmacies, such as Wal-Mart, CVS and Walgreen stores. Regional health-care systems have also opened retail-based clinics in their service areas, either directly or in partnerships with independent operators. These clinics generally are staffed by certified nurse practitioners who diagnose, treat and prescribe medications for a limited set of common ailments, such as strep throat and ear infections. They also administer health screenings, medical tests, immunizations, basic physical exams and other preventive care.

Convenient care clinics have been embraced by consumers, who give them consistently high marks for patient satisfaction: 97% of the more than 4,000 RediClinic patients surveyed this year said they would recommend RediClinic to their relatives and friends. This is because the clinics are delivering something that is all too rare in our system — convenient and affordable health care.

The quality of care at convenient care clinics stems from their use of nationally certified nurse practitioners, who are registered nurses with master's degrees or comparable advanced training. Research over the past 30 years has consistently shown that the primary care provided by nurse practitioners is comparable in quality to that provided by physicians, though nurse practitioners are still required to collaborate with local physicians in most states.

Patients who have conditions that are outside of convenient care clinics' limited scope of practice, or who need ongoing care, are referred to local physicians, and nurse practitioners use evidence-based treatment protocols and electronic medical-record systems to standardize care and facilitate continuity of care when other clinicians are involved. According to a recent study conducted by the RAND Corporation, Americans receive evidence-based care only 55% of the time at conventional health-care delivery outlets. MinuteClinic's recent analysis of 58,000 sore-throat cases seen at their clinics showed that the diagnosis and treatment conformed to evidence-based guidelines 99.15% of the time.

Convenience is assured through the location of the sites and the fact that they are open seven days a week, including extended hours on weekdays. No appointments are necessary, and visits take only about 15 minutes due to the clinics' limited set of services. The clinics' location in stores with pharmacies provides additional convenience because patients can go across the aisle to get their prescriptions filled rather than having to make separate trips for this purpose.

Thanks to the rapid pace of research on the BMI, one day these and other individuals may be able to feed themselves with a robotic arm and hand that moves according to their mental commands.

"Our work has shown how important the learning process is when using brain-controlled devices," says Andrew Schwartz, PhD, of the University of Pittsburgh. "By permitting the subject to adaptively recode the generated neural activity, the overall performance of the device is dramatically increased.

"Furthermore, as we have progressed in this work, it has become apparent that the basic idea of 'intention' during learning is very important and can be addressed by the direct observation of the neuronal transformations taking place during this fundamental processing," Schwartz says.

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In the Pittsburgh lab's latest studies, macaque monkeys not only mentally guided a robotic arm to pieces of food but also opened and closed the robotic arm's hand, or gripper, to retrieve them. Just by thinking about picking up and bringing the fruit to its mouth, the animal fed itself.

The monkey's own arm and hand did not move while it manipulated the two-finger gripper at the end of the robotic arm. The animal used its own sight for feedback about the accuracy of the robotic arm's actions as it mentally moved the gripper to within one-half centimeter of a piece of fruit.

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The animal's thoughts emitted electrical signals that were recorded by tiny electrodes that the scientists had implanted in the monkey's motor cortex. A computer-decoding algorithm translated the signals into the robotic arm and gripper's movements.>

In a study published in October's Experimental Neurology, Dr Paul Kingham and his team at the UK Centre for Tissue Regeneration (UKCTR) isolated the stem cells from the fat tissue of adult animals and differentiated them into nerve cells to be used for repair and regeneration of injured nerves. They are now about to start a trial extracting stem cells from fat tissue of volunteer adult patients, in order to compare in the laboratory human and animal stem cells.

Following that, they will develop an artificial nerve constructed from a biodegradable polymer to transplant the differentiated stem cells. The biomaterial will be rolled up into a tube-like structure and inserted between the two ends of the cut nerve so that the regrowing nerve fibre can go through it from one end to the other.

This 'bionic' nerve could also be used in people who have suffered trauma injuries to their limbs or organs, cancer patients whose tumour surgery has affected a nearby nerve trunk and people who have had organ transplants.

With a clinical trial on the biomaterial about to be completed, the researchers hope the treatment could be ready for use in four or five years.

Dr Kingham said: "The differentiated stem cells have great potential for future clinical use, initially for treatment of patients with traumatic injuries of nerves in the arms and legs.

"This work will also help to develop a similar surgical approach for organ transplant, to give full functional recuperation to the transplanted tissue.

The Committee for Economic Development proposes replacing the current system with one that would provide universal coverage and remake the way health insurance is bought and sold.

"What we need is not to tinker at the edges," said Robert Chess, co-chair of the group's subcommittee on health care and chairman of Nektar Therapeutics, a drug-delivery company based in San Carlos, Calif. "We need to look at a fundamentally different solution."

• Establish a system of mandatory coverage in which people would receive a fixed-dollar credit from the government to buy health insurance from a menu of approved health plans. People could buy a more expensive plan by paying the extra cost.

• Prohibit insurance companies from setting rates based on age or pre-existing medical conditions. The "fine print" in the plans also would be standardized to protect consumers.

• Finance the new system through payroll taxes or other taxes.

There also are significant differences in the proposals.

Healthy Wisconsin included an option in which the state would set up a plan similar to Medicare.

The Committee for Economic Development, in contrast, contends that a single-payer, or "Medicare for all," plan run by the government would not work.

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The Committee for Economic Development came to the same conclusion. But the group also said that merely expanding coverage under the current system would not solve the core problem: the unsustainable rise in health care costs.

At the same time, the report was critical of the contention that high-deductible health plans combined with health savings accounts - commonly called consumer-driven health care - will solve the problems facing the health care system.

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Giving people incentives to choose less-expensive health plans could prod health plans to contract with hospitals and doctors that offer the best combination of price and quality.

"We are not letting market forces do their job now in the way they do in every other industry," said Chess, the co-chair of the group's subcommittee on health care.

The group's report notes that the health care market doesn't work to close the large gaps between the most efficient providers of health care and the inefficient ones, something that takes place in the rest of the economy.

Bush, who wanted a $5 billion increase, told Lancaster-area business leaders that he would offer more money if Congress agrees to focus the program strictly on low-income children.

"Poor kids first," Bush said. "I believe in private medicine, not the federal government running the health care system."

In a message to Congress, Bush wrote that the government's role should be to promote private coverage, "not to move children who already have private health insurance to government coverage."

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers from both parties bemoaned Bush's veto and vowed to work together to bypass him. "If we're truly compassionate, it seems to me we will want to endorse this program," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, accused the White House of not working with Congress. "Every effort was made to bring them in," he said. "I think they decided to veto the bill before it was written."

TIPTON, Iowa - Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards said on Sunday that his universal health care proposal would require that Americans go to the doctor for preventive care.

"It requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care," he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. "If you are going to be in the system, you can't choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK."

He noted, for example, that women would be required to have regular mammograms in an effort to find and treat "the first trace of problem." Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, announced earlier this year that her breast cancer had returned and spread.

Edwards said his mandatory health care plan would cover preventive, chronic and long-term health care. The plan would include mental health care as well as dental and vision coverage for all Americans.

"The whole idea is a continuum of care, basically from birth to death," he said.

When Louis Brandeis praised the 50 states as "laboratories of democracy," he didn't claim that every policy experiment would work. So we hope the eyes of America will turn to Wisconsin, and the effort by Madison Democrats to make that "progressive" state a petri dish for government-run health care.

This exercise is especially instructive, because it reveals where the "single-payer," universal coverage folks end up. Democrats who run the Wisconsin Senate have dropped the Washington pretense of incremental health-care reform and moved directly to passing a plan to insure every resident under the age of 65 in the state. And, wow, is "free" health care expensive. The plan would cost an estimated $15.2 billion, or $3 billion more than the state currently collects in all income, sales and corporate income taxes. It represents an average of $510 a month in higher taxes for every Wisconsin worker.

Employees and businesses would pay for the plan by sharing the cost of a new 14.5% employment tax on wages. Wisconsin businesses would have to compete with out-of-state businesses and foreign rivals while shouldering a 29.8% combined federal-state payroll tax, nearly double the 15.3% payroll tax paid by non-Wisconsin firms for Social Security and Medicare combined.

This employment tax is on top of the $1 billion grab bag of other levies that Democratic Governor Jim Doyle proposed and the tax-happy Senate has also approved, including a $1.25 a pack increase in the cigarette tax, a 10% hike in the corporate tax, and new fees on cars, trucks, hospitals, real estate transactions, oil companies and dry cleaners. In all, the tax burden in the Badger state could rise to 20% of family income, which is slightly more than the average federal tax burden. "At least federal taxes pay for an Army and Navy," quips R.J. Pirlot of the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce business lobby.

As if that's not enough, the health plan includes a tax escalator clause allowing an additional 1.5 percentage point payroll tax to finance higher outlays in the future. This could bring the payroll tax to 16%. One reason to expect costs to soar is that the state may become a mecca for the unemployed, uninsured and sick from all over North America. The legislation doesn't require that you have a job in Wisconsin to qualify, merely that you live in the state for at least 12 months. Cheesehead nation could expect to attract health-care free-riders while losing productive workers who leave for less-taxing climes.