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THURSDAY, March 19, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- New treatments for melanoma have dramatically reduced deaths from this often fatal skin cancer. Leaders of a new study report that the death rate from aggressive melanoma that spread to other organs plummeted 18% between 2013 and 2016, after jumping 7.5% between 1986 and 2013. The figures apply to white Americans, the group that accounts for nearly all cases of melanoma in the United States, researchers said. "This is a stunning example of the power of scientific and medical research to identify the weak points in this deadly tumor, methods to boost the immune system and to use this knowledge to develop the highly effective medicines that have led to the sharp reductions in deaths that we have seen, and are continuing to see," said lead...

THURSDAY, March 19, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- When the media report on a celebrity's suicide, especially in a sensationalist way, it may fuel "copycat" tragedies, a new review finds. In an analysis of 20 studies from more than a dozen countries, researchers confirmed a phenomenon sometimes called "suicide contagion." It happens when vulnerable people identify with a person who died by suicide, and then see that route as a viable solution to their own problems. And research shows that media coverage of a celebrity's death by suicide may have a particularly strong impact. Across the studies in the review, suicide rates in the general public rose anywhere from 8% to 18% in the two months following media stories on a celebrity's suicide. The connection was even clearer when that...

THURSDAY, March 19, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Social media is rife with misinformation about the safety of vaccines, according to a new study. Lead researcher Lucy Elkin's team found that false claims about vaccines are readily available on Google, Facebook and YouTube despite efforts to control access to misinformation through computer programming and policy changes. Elkin is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Primary Care and General Practice at the University of Otago in New Zealand. For the study, she and her colleagues searched the internet for information on vaccines by asking questions such as, "Should I vaccinate my child?" Eighty percent of the links Google generated and 75% of YouTube videos were positive about vaccines, but 50% of Facebook pages were negative,...

THURSDAY, March 19, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Diarrhea and other digestive symptoms are the main complaint in nearly half of coronavirus patients, Chinese researchers report. Most patients with the coronavirus have respiratory symptoms, but these findings from the early stages of the outbreak show that digestive problems are prevalent in many patients with COVID-19. "Clinicians must bear in mind that digestive symptoms, such as diarrhea, may be a presenting feature of COVID-19, and that the index of suspicion may need to be raised earlier in these cases rather than waiting for respiratory symptoms to emerge," wrote the investigators from the Wuhan Medical Treatment Expert Group for COVID-19. The researchers analyzed data from 204 COVID-19 patients, average age nearly 55, who were...