Top 5 health stories of the weekend

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It’s summer, so with luck you didn’t spend all weekend indoors glued to the screen. In case you missed these headlines when they broke, here are the biggest health stories of the past two days:

  1. Plan C. The FDA approved a new emergency-contraception pill on Friday. Unlike the existing Plan B, this latest drug — already sold in Europe under the name ellaOne — has been shown to prevent pregnancy if taken as late as five days after unprotected sex.
  2. Infant formula not to blame for early puberty. So says China’s health ministry, which tested 73 samples of milk powder following newspaper allegations that babies as young as four months old had hormone levels typical of an adult woman. The ministry claims it found nothing abnormal about the formula it tested — including samples from the affected infants’ homes.
  3. Whooping cough’s deadly comeback. Seven California babies have died so far this year from whooping cough, amidst the state’s worst outbreak of the disease in 50 years. To date 2,700 cases have been reported in 2010. Whooping cough, also known as pertussis, is vaccine-preventable. But California vaccination rates have been falling in recent years.
  4. Haphazard prep for Obamacare. Some U.S. states don’t yet have legal authority to enforce the consumer protection standards they’re supposed to enforce under President Obama’s new healthcare plan, the NY Times reports. Some states are looking to pass legislation to get that authority. Others, like Arizona, however, may not bother — mounting an additional challenge to the federal law.
  5. Watch your head. NFL football players are suiting up this season with explicit warnings from the league about the dangers of concussion. The warnings mark a major policy shift for the NFL, in the face of mounting evidence about long-term effects of repeated head injury.