Trending News Today: Risk From Thyroid Cancer Could be Underestimated

A federal jury ruled that the Kimberly-Clark Corporation and its spinoff medical technology firm Halyard Health mislead California buyers about the impermeability of their MicroCool surgical gowns, according to The New York Times. The verdict Friday requires the companies to pay $454 million in compensatory and punitive damages. The class-action lawsuit, brought by more than 400 hospitals and health centers in California, claimed that the gowns were falsely represented as providing protection against serious diseases. In a statement Monday, Kimberly-Clark said it would appeal the verdict, calling it baseless and excessive. The company said it has sold nearly 70 million MicroCool gowns without a single injury complaint, the NY Times reported.

The US Preventive Services Task Force has gone back on its original opposition to prostate cancer screening. In a draft recommendation issued Tuesday, the federal task force dropped its controversial opposition to routine prostate cancer, The Washington Post reported. The task force said that men aged 55 to 69 years should discuss the potential benefits and harms of the test with their physicians, and make decisions based on their own preferences and values. “The decision about whether to be screened for prostate cancer should be an individual one,” the task force wrote, as reported by the Post.

Data from 2 new studies reveals that high incidence of thyroid cancer could be more dangerous than previously believed, according to The Wall Street Journal. Findings from a study published last month in JAMA raised new questions regarding why there has been an increase in the number of thyroid cancer cases. A separate study pointed toward flame retardants as possibly being responsible. These results could cause a shift from the long-held beliefs of scientists and physicians that the rapid rate of thyroid cancer cases is solely because of unnecessary diagnoses that involved small tumors that do not lead to death, the WSJ reported.