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The US Preventive Services Task Force finds that some screening protocols don't outweigh the cost, anxiety, and unnecessary medical care that go along with them. The tax force recommends that women at low risk of cancer start bi-annual mammograms at age 50.

Diana Petitti is vice chair of the task force.

Petitti: Very little benefit is lost from waiting to be screened first in the 50s and that the harms of screening women in their 40s are common. That is, that there are a lot of false positive and all the attendant anxiety that comes from having a false positive test.

Some radiologists in the region are not so willing to scale back on screening. Emily Conant is chief of breast imaging at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School.

Conant: We know that screening has an impact. It decreases breast cancer deaths. I think if you look at it from an individual woman's stand point, is we would all like to be the one who if we do have to get cancer we're diagnosed early where we have the greatest options.

Kathy Evers is the director of mammography at Fox Chase Cancer Center. She and Conant will continue to urge women to get mammograms every year at age 40.

Evers: I think there's been a lot of discussion over the years about mammography, about the plusses and minuses of mammography. But I think what we need to keep in mind is mammography is the only test that has been demonstrated to decrease mortality from breast cancer.

The task force says it is not anti-screening, but in favor of more discussion about screening's potential harms.

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Eagles player Brian Westbrook suffered his second concussion in three weeks during Sunday's game. The team now must decide whether the running back should return to the field this season.

Timothy Young is the medical director of brain injury at Magee Rehabilitation Hospital. He says those two concussions put Westbrook at a higher risk for more.

Young: You can't underscore how frustrating some of these post-concussive situations are, because even after you're symptom free and you've passed all the prerequisites for return to sport, there's always the potential you're going to have another head injury.

Young says the long-term impact of multiple concussions is unclear. But he suspects that cognition, memory and emotion are damaged.

The estimates vary on how common concussions are among high school athletes — but doctors say far too many return to play prematurely.

Bob Baly is an assistant director at the New Jersey Interscholastic Athletic Association. He says his group is testing out a program with school trainers to take baseline assessment of a student's cognitive abilities.

Baly: And then when they suffer a concussion or a head injury they would do another assessment to see if it's at the normal range, what it was prior to the concussion.

That way, trainers could better identify if students aren't fully recovered, or if they're suffered long term brain damage.

Baly says his group does not have any authority to ban students from playing.

Baly: If a student in a game suffers a concussion they're removed from the game and can't go back in unless a doctor clears them. Can't be cleared by anybody else except the school physician.

Baly cautions against letting students who have had multiple concussions continue to play.

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The movie takes place at the so-called ground zero of infant mortality: Memphis Tennessee, which has the highest rate in the country.

The public service film follows college students as they reach out to would-be parents at community centers, high schools, and even on college campuses. Tonya Lewis Lee produced the film.

Researchers have long known that infant mortality rates rise as income and education decline. But Lewis says an elevated rate of infant deaths among African Americans persists among college-educated women.

Lee: It really is an issue that goes across all socioeconomic grounds. So it doesn't matter how educated you are, it doesn't matter much money you have, as an African American woman you have a risk of losing your child at a higher rate.

Mary Lou DeLeon Siantz is the University of Pennsylvania nursing school's assistant dean for diversity and cultural affairs. She says racism throughout society plays a role.

Siantz: There has been some research that has provided an association between the stress that is undergone from experiencing racism in your daily life and what that does to your body overall, especially for women.

Lee says being college educated does not extinguish that stress, and likely leads to higher infant mortality.

Siantz says little research has been done on the health factors contributing to low birth weight, pre-term babies and infant mortality.

Brenda Shelton-Dunston is the executive director of Philadelphia Black Women's Health Alliance.

Shelton-Dunston: This information is not widely known. There has not been a great deal of focus on the infant mortality rate and the impact that it is having on the African American population.

Shelton-Dunston says parents can help reduce infant mortality by taking up healthier eating and behavioral habits.

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If you ever so lucky as to get a guided tour of the orthoptera collection at the Academy of Natural Sciences, you might get to see the Lord Howe Phasmid. Jason Weintraub, the entomology collection manager, rolls aside a stack of shelving packed with insects.

Lord Howe Phasmid

Weintraub: The specimens that I'm going to show you are species of walking stick that's native to an island in the South Pacific and it has the distinction of being the world's rarest insect.

Weintraub pulls out a box with 5 tootsie-roll colored insects as long as my hand.

Weintraub: This species was also known popularly as the land lobster, we don't know if anyone actually ate them there, but they're certainly approaching a small lobster in size. Very big stout stick insects.

Entomology collection manager Jason Weintraub shows off a case of insects.

Animals like these make the collection one of the most important for orthopterists – those who study grasshoppers and their relatives. Weintraub says it's rare for a museum to focus on one group of species.

The biggest challenge to preserving the collection is to protect the bugs from being eaten by others – especially carpet beetle larvae.

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Typically when people gather to talk about health disparities they focus on which groups suffer more than others, and why. The forum at Temple's Law School is asking how the law can step in to solve some of those problems.

Calvin Johnson is the chief medical officer of Temple's health system. He says if health care is a right, but it's not distributed evenly, that could raise legal issues.

Johnson: Some people believe, and quite honestly, can make a convincing argument, that health care and access to health care is a civil right. And we have seen throughout the history of our country many instances where civil rights battles were fought through the courts using the law.

Health inequalities typically fall on people with low income and little education, or on minorities. Johnson says in Pennsylvania, for example, African Americans and Hispanics lack health insurance at far greater rates than others.

The disease is caused by something called the Philadelphia chromosome. It was discovered almost 50 years ago by a graduate student at Fox Chase Cancer Center, and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Joe Testa is the co-director of the cancer genetics and signaling program at Fox Chase. He says the finding was one of the most important in cancer genetics at the time.

Testa: You can imagine how these guys must have felt, the first time…here's a graduate student, he's just getting into science. The first time he saw this under the microscope, how he must have felt, my god! That's a tiny chromosome! And then having another person with the same diagnosis and seeing it again. They must have been ecstatic.

Fast forward several decades, and many more discoveries, and patients with CML now can live nearly normal lives with the development of the drug Gleevec.

Fox Chase is planning a conference next year to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the Philadelphia chromosome.

Pfizer announced it will close six research labs, including South Brunswick, NJ, and reduce the work at others, including Collegeville in Montgomery County. Some employees will shift to the new company's main research facilities in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, California or the United Kingdom. Others will be laid off, as part of the company's 20,000-job reduction.

In a press release, Martin Mackay, the president of PharmaTherapeutics Research and Development at Pfizer said, “Moving forward on our aggressive timeline, we are analyzing the combined portfolio and prioritizing research projects that will address unmet medical need and bring Pfizer’s scientific and competitive advantage to the benefit of patients.”

The Star-Ledger reported that most of the 450 employees in South Brunswick, NJ, who worked on developing Alzheimer's drugs, will be laid off.

Wyeth's Collegeville campus, which is now Pfizer's headquarters for specialty medicine, will remain open.

The House bill includes insurance reforms, such as preventing companies from denying applicants who have pre-existing conditions. Americans would be required to carry insurance, and government subsidies and a government-administered insurance plan (the "public option") would help people find coverage.

Read more from NPR
House Passes Health Care Overhaul
House Hands Health Care Challenge Off To Senate

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Now that Pfizer and Wyeth have merged, and so have Merck and Schering Plough, tens of thousands of employees face layoffs.

On top of that, add the 8000 job cuts that Johnson and Johnson announced last week, and another 7000 cuts from Astra Zeneca. All told…

Staton: You're looking at a blood bath in pharma.

Tracy Staton is the editor of Fierce Pharma. She calculates that drug companies have trimmed more than 100,000 positions in the last eighteen months.

Many of these firms have facilities in this region, but the job loss is spread globally. Staton says many of the positions have been in sales.

Staton: A lot of the companies are going to more high tech methods of sales, where they do drug promotion over the Internet. So you're going to see the kinds of technology-replacing-people things that you've seen in other industries.

Most recently, companies are eying research and drug development jobs for elimination — looking instead to outsource that kind of work. Colleen Hamilton's group, the Life Sciences Career Alliance, is working to find those laid off workers new positions in the Delaware Valley.

Hamilton: I think it's probably the most difficult task for the research and development life science professionals to look to see what their future may be, because typically they would like to try to stay in the same type of company doing the same job.

Bill Ashton is the dean of the Mayes College of Healthcare Business and Policy at the University of the Sciences. He says salespeople, researchers, and even executives are getting the axe.

Ashton: I've got these people, to be frank with you, calling me looking for teaching jobs because there's just nothing out there and typically they want to stay in the area. So this is draconian from what I've seen before.

Job cuts and mergers among pharmaceutical companies have been propelled by the anticipation of top-selling, brand-name drugs like Lipitor losing their patent protection. The upside to this trend is that generic manufacturers, like Pennsylvania's Teva, are considered to be thriving.

AARP represents people over age 50. Stella Hyde is on the executive council for the Pennsylvania branch of AARP. She says one of the appealing provisions in the House bill is a limit on how much more insurance companies are permitted to charge people because of their age.

Hyde: That would have a direct impact on people in this state, absolutely. Especially that 50-64 age group that are not covered by Medicare that have difficulty getting coverage and of finding it affordable.

Hyde says Pennsylvania does not impose limits on so-called "age rating." Under the House plan, insurers could charge older people no more than twice what it charges younger people.

The House may vote on the bill this week.