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FRIDAY, Jan. 1 (HealthDay News) -- Potentially historic moves toward health care reform, the emergence of the pandemic H1N1 flu and controversial changes to cancer screening all made 2009 a very busy year for health news.
Here are the top 10 health news stories from this past year, as selected by editors at HealthDay:
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1. Major Health Care Reform Draws Near. After a summer punctuated by raucous "town hall meetings" and battling proposals from both sides of the aisle, House and Senate bills on health care reform were each passed in time for Christmas. The Senate version costs $871 billion but would expand coverage to more than 94 percent of Americans under the age of 65, including 31 million who are currently uninsured.
Voting on the bills was split along party lines, however, and more work needs to be done to hammer out differences between the House and Senate versions before President Barack Obama could sign any bill into law. If a final bill does go into effect, experts agree it would mark the most sweeping change to U.S. health care since the introduction of Medicare in the 1960s.
2. Emergence of Pandemic Swine Flu. Cases of a new, sometimes deadly strain of H1N1 influenza that seemed to target children and young adults first emerged in Mexico in March, and quickly spread to the United States and beyond. The World Health Organization's Director-General, Margaret Chan, warned that "all of humanity" was under threat, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued nearly daily press advisories as the number of ill mounted. Vaccines were rushed into production, and as infections peaked in October public demand for the shot had outstripped supply.
By November, however, the autumn wave of H1N1 began to subside and vaccine supplies were plentiful. As of Dec. 26, the CDC has confirmed 37,090 hospitalizations and 1,697 deaths linked to influenza since the end of August -- a number that is well within rates for prior flu seasons. Experts now worry that a second, winter wave of H1N1 flu is yet to come, although the virus remains tough to predict.
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