Patients fasting before surgery may be doing themselves harm, according to a presentation held at the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists (ANZCA) meeting over the weekend. [ + ]

The CSIRO believes it has found the answer to the challenge of vaccine transportation in seashells. [ + ]

VMO to Hospital Documentation Cabrini Health in Melbourne has signed up with secure cloud provider Argus to transmit clinical documents and correspondence between visiting medical officers' (VMOs) practice software and automatically upload them to the hospitals' web-based patient administration system. [ + ]

More than two million Australian adults - over 10% of the population - suffer from a sleep disorder, clinical insomnia or sleep apnea. Sleep disorders cost the Australian economy more than $5.1 billion per year. The reduction in life quality caused by sleep disorders has a further cost equivalent of $31.4 billion a year. [ + ]

Research from the UK has shown the improvement of lung function of Cystic Fibrosis patients through the use of gene therapy in a two year trial, according to The Lancet Respiratory Medicine. [ + ]

The Western Australian government has announced funding for further support of the spiraling mental health problems affecting its mining workers in plans to expand the state’s subacute mental health beds to a total of 60 by 2017. [ + ]

You may have heard that robots are the future of healthcare, but do you know about bionics (or where biology and electrical engineering meet)? Australia is doing some exciting work in medical bionics and while some of the applications are still in development, others are in clinical trials - and others are already in the market place. [ + ]

Australians suffering from focal epilepsy will soon have access to a new treatment, thanks to Melbourne’s Swinburne University. The Magnetoencephalography scanner or MEG located at the university’s Brain Imaging Centre is the only one of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, and offers patients a non-invasive method for pinpointing the centre of seizure activity in the brain. [ + ]

A chain of Sydney dental practices has been found in breach of infection control practices including cleaning and sterilisation. The Gentle Dentist clinics in Campsie and Sussex Street in Sydney’s CBD; Surry Hills and Bondi Junction are listed with Aids Council of New South Wales (ACON) as a provider of  "HIV-friendly" bulk-billed dental work. [ + ]

In a report published by the Medical Journal of Australia, support for Indigenous eye care is improving according to 42 recommendations made in a roadmap aiming to close the gap in health services. University of Melbourne researchers Dr Marian Abouzeid, Mitchell Anjou and Professor Hugh Taylor said that progress has been made to increase services, improve efficiencies and support better Indigenous patient engagement with the eye care system. [ + ]

At current UK government estimates, we could see up to 10 million deaths per year by 2050 from antibiotic-resistant bacteria, taking us back to the days when people died of simple infections. [ + ]

Melanoma drug Keytruda (pembrolizumab) will be available on the Pharmaceutical Benefits scheme from September this year, according to an announcement from the Commonwealth Government over the weekend. [ + ]

Women have been encouraged to freeze their eggs (or cryptopreservation) for a variety of reasons for some time now: as a pre-cursor to fertility-ending treatments, for assistance during long and drawn out fertility treatments, and even for social reasons centred around family planning. [ + ]

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US scientists have developed a microchip that acts as a human organ, lined with human cells and with the ability to move air, nutrients, blood and infection-causing bacteria through its tubes. [ + ]