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Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by editors of HealthDay:

Mad Cow Feed Traced to 2 Canadian Mills

Canadian officials have traced to two mills the feed that probably caused North America's two cases of mad cow disease, one in Canada last May and the other in the United States in December.

The feed from the Canadian mills, which cannot be identified under Canadian law, could have contained infectious protein from imported British cattle, Dr. George Luterbach, an official working with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, told the Associated Press.

Canada reported a single case of mad-cow disease in a farm in Alberta; the United States followed with an announcement that a cow in Mabton, Wash., had the disease. Both animals had been raised on farms in Alberta, and both ate feed containing meat and bone meal while they were calves.

"Our best hypothesis was the animals were exposed by contaminated feed," Luterbach said, adding that the two infected animals did not eat feed from the same mill.

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Hospital to Seek FDA Probe in Faulty HIV Tests

Maryland General Hospital officials say they will ask the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to investigate the reliability of blood-testing equipment used in generating 460 suspect HIV and hepatitis tests for patients at the 245-bed facility.

"We believe there are possible issues worth investigating with this equipment," hospital officials said in a written statement according to a report in the Baltimore Sun. An FDA spokeswoman said Friday she could not comment because the request had not yet been submitted.

The FDA review request comes as the Baltimore hospital, an affiliate of the University of Maryland Health System, undergoes a review of its laboratory operations by state and federal regulators and a private accrediting agency. The inquiries follow a state review in January that uncovered problems with the HIV and hepatitis testing program.

State inspectors concluded that hospital personnel erased data showing that recently completed test results were suspect. Then, ignoring guidelines calling for an automatic retest, hospital staff sent the results to patients.

The hospital and the manufacturer of the analyzer, Adaltis US Inc., also were hit last week with a multimillion-dollar lawsuit filed by a former hospital laboratory technician who contends she became infected with HIV and hepatitis C as the result of a malfunction of the analyzer, known as a Labotech.

The technician, Kristin Turner, claims thousands of patients could have received questionable HIV test results -- not just hundreds, according to the Associated Press. She estimates that the machine conducted an average of 150 tests weekly for HIV and hepatitis C and B over 14 months -- about 8,400 tests.

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U.S. Issues New Guidelines Limiting Fish Intake

Two U.S. government agencies issued new joint guidelines Friday on the consumption of mercury-tainted fish by women and young children. The recommendations are aimed to balance neurological risks to youngsters with nutritional benefits gained by all who eat fish, HealthDay reports.

The new guidelines, issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Environmental Protection Agency, advise that pregnant women, women who may become pregnant, nursing mothers, and young children avoid eating meat from older, larger fish such as shark, swordfish, king mackerel, or tilefish.

Conspicuously absent from that list, however, is albacore tuna, which activists say may have even higher levels of mercury per serving than other species on the "banned" list.

The latest guidelines now encourage women and young children to eat six ounces -- about one meal's worth -- of albacore tuna per week.

While EPA Assistant Acting Commissioner Benjamin Grumbles called the new rules "an important improvement" over previous guidelines, Richard Wiles, senior vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Environmental Working Group, described them as "a bad day for American moms and their children."

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Doctors Boycott Drug Company Over AIDS Therapy Price Hike

About 250 AIDS specialists and other health-care workers across the United States are boycotting drugs made by Abbot Laboratories in response to the company's price increase for the AIDS drug Norvir.

Those involved in the boycott are also shunning Abbot's sales representatives and severing research ties with the company, the Boston Globe reports.

In December, Abbot increased the wholesale price of a month's supply of Norvir from about $50 for a daily 100-milligram pill to more than $250. Doctors from well-known HIV practices, such as Fenway Community Health Center in Boston and AIDS Healthcare Foundation in Los Angeles, are part of the protest action.

While he does not begrudge Abbot a reasonable profit, Fenway's executive director, Dr. Stephen L. Boswell, says the new fee for Norvir is beyond any reasonable, justifiable increase.

Abbot officials defended the price increase by saying they're trying to get a fair return on a drug originally designed to be taken many times a day, but is now typically taken only once or twice a day.

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Hunting for Primates Exposes Humans to Virus

The African practice of hunting and eating primates is exposing humans to a virus carried by monkeys and apes, Johns Hopkins University researchers write in the journal The Lancet.

The effect of this virus -- called simian foamy virus (SFV) -- on humans is unknown. This study found that 1,100 of 1,800 people from nine rural communities in Cameroon said they'd been exposed to primate body fluids or blood while hunting.

Of those 1,100 people, 10 had developed antibodies to SFV, BBC News Online reports.

"Our findings show that retroviruses are actively crossing into human populations, and demonstrate that people in central Africa are currently infected with SFV," lead researcher Dr. Nathan Wolfe told the BBC.

He and his colleagues say it's possible this may lead to the emergence of a human form of SFV.

It's believed that a virus called simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) was transferred from primates to humans and turned into HIV.

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Experts Warn About Alternative Cancer Therapies

Alternative cancer remedies have not been rigorously tested and could cause patients more harm than good, warn experts attending the European Breast Cancer Conference.

The use of complementary and alternative therapies (Cams) by European cancer patients is on the increase, even though the safety of these Cams is not fully understood, BBC News Online reports.

"Some Cams, as their name implies, complement conventional treatments, but others have the potential to interact dangerously with drug regimes and both doctors and patients need to be aware of this," said Dr. Gillian Bendelow, a medical sociology expert at the University of Sussex.

Harvard University breast cancer specialist Dr. Eric Winer said more thorough and properly conducted studies must be carried out on Cams.

"Relatively few Cams have been tested in conjunction with standard treatments and this is a serous problem," he said. "For instance, some Cams, such as St. John's wort, have been shown to have important and potentially detrimental interactions with standard drugs."

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