Sexual Health News Headlines

(Reuters) - An Indiana company has won temporary court relief from having to provide its employees with coverage for contraceptives and other birth-control procedures, as mandated under the 2010 healthcare overhaul. By a 2-1 vote, a panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago issued an injunction pending appeal …

PARIS (Reuters) - Germany's Catholic Church may approve some so-called morning-after pills for rape victims after a leading cardinal unexpectedly announced they did not induce abortions and could be used in Catholic hospitals. Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne, an ally of German-born Pope Benedict, changed his policy …

WASHINGTON (AP) — Facing a wave of lawsuits over what government can tell religious groups to do, the Obama administration is proposing a compromise for faith-based nonprofits that object to covering birth control in their employee health plans.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration on Friday sought to settle a dispute with religious leaders over whether employees at faith-affiliated universities, hospitals and other institutions should have access to health insurance coverage for contraceptives. The new set of proposals would instead guarantee that employees …

HIV transmission due to needle sharing could be greatly reduced by changing syringe design to ensure less trapped blood. Gretchen Cuda Kroen reports

LONDON (Reuters) - The European Medicines Agency is to review the safety of third and fourth-generation combined oral contraceptives to decide if there is a need to restrict their use. Monday's move followed a request by France, where authorities have already taken steps to reduce use of the drugs in favor of second-generation …

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel's Health Ministry has ordered doctors to review how they prescribe a birth control drug, after accusations it was being used to control the population of Ethiopian immigrants. Suspicions that Ethiopian women had been coerced into receiving Depo-Provera arose in Israeli media a few years ago …

Study Cites Lack of Education, Difficulty in Access to Birth Control

OLEAN, N.Y. (AP) — A second western New York hospital is notifying patients that they may have been exposed to HIV, hepatitis B or hepatitis C through the improper sharing of insulin pens, hospital officials said Thursday.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Doctors should ask teen girls and women whether their partners are trying to force them to get pregnant or otherwise "reproductively coercing" them, according to a group of ob-gyns. That could include pressuring women to have sex - possibly without a condom or other birth control, forcing them …

According to the United States Attorney's Office , District of Colorado, an Indiana man has been sentenced to serve more than 34 years in a federal prison this week after pleading guilty of attempted coercion and enticement to engage in unlawful sexual activity with a minor child and distribution of child pornography in …

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - "Avenue Q" is partnering with Logo on a series of public service announcements designed to create awareness about HIV, the show's producer and the cable channel announced Monday. The campaign will include six on-air spots by Tony Award winner Jeff Whitty, who wrote the book for "Avenue Q," and …

COMMENTARY | Well this is very unsettling news. According to the Centers for Disease Control, gonorrhea may soon become an incurable disease. A new strain of the most common STD appears to be resistant to the only antibiotic known to treat it. The findings were published by the Journal of the American Medical Associati …

(Reuters) - The Supreme Court agreed to consider whether the government can require groups that receive federal funding for overseas HIV/AIDS programs to have explicit policies that oppose prostitution and sex trafficking. The case is one of six that the court on Friday agreed to hear in its current term, with oral arguments …

LONDON (Reuters) - European drug regulators said on Friday there was no reason for women to stop using combined contraceptives like Bayer's Meliane or Yasmin pills since there was no new evidence pointing to safety risks. The move comes after French health regulators said last week they were considering limiting use of …

LONDON (Reuters) - When it comes to protecting millions of people from deadly infectious diseases, Mark Kendall thinks a fingertip-sized patch covered in thousands of vaccine-coated microscopic spikes is the future. A biomedical engineer with a fascination for problem solving, he has developed the so-called "nanopatch" …

WASHINGTON (AP) — For years, doctors have lamented that there's no Pap test for deadly ovarian cancer. Wednesday, scientists reported encouraging signs that one day, there might be.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The only remaining oral antibiotic used for gonorrhea failed to cure the infection in nearly 7 percent of patients treated at a clinic in Toronto, Canadian researchers said on Monday in the first published study of treatment-resistant gonorrhea in North America. The study raised alarm among U.S. health …

While the latest Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer reveals positive news in the fact that the overall death rate from cancer has decreased during the period of 2000 through 2009, the statistics mean little to anyone has lost a loved one to the disease. Physicians and researchers have noted an increase …

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Julia Roberts will star as a paraplegic physician treating patients early in the AIDS epidemic in the stage-to-screen adaptation of the Tony Award-winning drama "The Normal Heart," U.S. cable television network HBO said on Friday. "The Normal Heart," set to air on HBO in 2014, tells the story of …

CHICAGO (Reuters) - An increasing number of younger women in the United States are delaying their first Pap test for cervical cancer until after they reach 21, reflecting new U.S. guidelines, health officials said on Thursday. But 60 percent of U.S. women who have had a total hysterectomy and no longer have a cervix are …

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Unlike women in the U.S., Canada and much of Europe, most women in the world can access the birth control pill without a prescription, according to a new study. As medical organizations and other groups push to ease the prescription requirements for the Pill in the U.S. and elsewhere, "we can …

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Texas can cut off funding to Planned Parenthood's family planning programs for poor women, a state judge ruled Monday, requiring thousands to find new state-approved doctors for their annual exams, cancer screenings and birth control.