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

Carbon Dioxide Hits Record Levels, Scientists Warn

Carbon dioxide, the gas largely blamed for global warming, has reached record-high levels in the atmosphere after growing at an accelerated pace in the past year.

That's the word from scientists monitoring the sky from a 2-mile-high station atop a Hawaiian volcano. But the reason why remains unclear, according to the Associated Press.

Carbon dioxide, mostly from burning of coal, gasoline and other fossil fuels, traps heat that otherwise would radiate into space. Global temperatures increased by about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) during the 20th century, and international panels of scientists sponsored by world governments have concluded that most of the warming probably was due to greenhouse gases.

Average readings at the 11,141-foot Mauna Loa Observatory on the island of Hawaii, where carbon dioxide density peaks each northern winter, hovered around 379 parts per million on Friday, compared with about 376 a year ago. That year-to-year increase of about 3 parts per million is considerably higher than the average annual increase of 1.8 parts per million over the past decade, and markedly more accelerated than the 1-part-per-million annual increase recorded a half-century ago, when observations were first made, the wire service reports.

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PowerBar Creator Dies of Heart Attack at 51

The 51-year-old founder of the multimillion-dollar PowerBar empire has died of a heart attack, according to friends.

Brian Maxwell, a former world-class marathon runner, collapsed Friday at a post office in San Anselmo, Calif., and emergency personnel were unable to resuscitate him. He was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead, the Associated Press reports.

Maxwell and his wife, Jennifer, a nutritionist, co-founded the popular energy bar company in 1986 and began selling PowerBars out of their kitchen. Over the next decade, the Berkeley, Calif.-based firm grew to $150 million in sales and 300 employees. The couple sold the company to Nestle SA in 2000.

Maxwell represented Canada in many international competitions as a long-distance runner, was part of the 1980 Olympic team that boycotted the games in Moscow and, in 1977, was ranked the No. 3 marathon runner in the world by Track and Field News.

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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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