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

Incompatible Heart Transplants Keeping Infants Alive

More children born with critical heart defects are being kept alive, ironically by giving them transplants once thought to be incompatible with their bodies, the Associated Press reports.

Finding a heart for infants can be difficult, since traditional thinking dictates that the strawberry-sized organ must be harvested from a child of the same blood type who is brain dead -- usually from a car accident or drowning. The average wait is 52 days, the AP reports, and some critically ill infants don't have that long a period to live.

But a few dozen infants have beaten the odds, having benefited from a Canadian researcher's discovery in 2001 that infants haven't yet developed antibodies that reject organs of other blood types.

There is still much reluctance to adopt Dr. Lori West's premise that hearts from "incompatible" donors will also suffice, the AP reports. However, some transplant networks have endorsed her method as a last resort, citing data showing that the procedure's survival rates are statistically the same as traditional infant heart transplant surgery, the wire service says.

West's findings do not apply to children older than 1 year, the AP emphasizes, in whom implanting incompatible organs is often deadly. Last year, Duke University surgeons accidentally implanted an incompatible heart and lungs into a 17-year-old Mexican girl, who died shortly after her body rejected the transplants.

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Seniors' Support for Medicare Law Dropping

Support among seniors appears to be waning for the recently passed Medicare prescription drug law, a USA Today poll finds.

While supporters have hailed the legislation as revolutionary, critics have alleged that the law is fiscally bloated, and provides little benefit to seniors in the long run. Full prescription benefits don't begin until 2006, while drug discount cards will soon be offered to help financially burdened seniors in the interim.

Just 36 percent of seniors now favor the Medicare overhaul passed in November, the poll finds, while 48 percent are opposed. By contrast, 46 percent of elderly survey participants approved of the legislation in December 2003, while 39 percent were opposed.

Asked how the prescription drug provision would help lower-income seniors pay for their medications, 35 percent said it would help, 30 percent said it wouldn't have much effect, 20 percent said it would hurt, and 15 percent offered no opinion.

The survey of 228 adults over age 65 was conducted March 26-28, and has a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

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FDA Approves Injectable Zyprexa

An injectable form of Eli Lilly's best-selling antipsychotic drug Zyprexa has won approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

In injectable form, the drug gives doctors a faster-acting option to control the acute agitation that can cripple people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, sometimes referred to as manic depression, the company says in a prepared statement.

Acute agitation can be characterized by hostility, extreme excitement, and uncooperativeness. A 10-milligram injection of Zyprexa IntraMuscular can calm a patient in as few as 15 minutes, the company says. The product is most likely to be used in hospital emergency rooms.

Zyprexa becomes the second injectable medication in its class to be marketed, following FDA approval of Pfizer's Geodon in 2002.

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Bioethics Council May Seek More Scrutiny of Fertility Clinics

Increased scrutiny of fertility clinics in the United States is expected to be among the recommendations included in a report to be released this week by the President's Council on Bioethics.

The Wall Street Journal, which received an advance copy, says the report advises the federal government to conduct more research on the health of test-tube babies and calls on Congress to ban certain kinds of research, including the mixing of animal and human embryos.

The council's final recommendations have been extensively revised from those contained in a draft report release last year. Critics charged that the earlier draft sought to ban common practices such as selling egg and sperm, and they objected to terminology that suggested laboratory embryos were the same as children.

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Mad Cow Testing Lab Not Secure

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) mad cow disease testing lab is not secure enough to safely store mad cow tissue samples, according to a USDA investigative report.

The lab, located in a strip mall in Ames, Iowa, has limited entrance and exit security and is located close to other businesses in the mall, the report says.

The USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) operates the Ames facility, which in December diagnosed the only known case of mad cow disease in the United States, the Associated Press reports.

While APHIS officials said the mad cow tissue samples posed little risk, they did agree the tissue samples should not be kept in the facility. The samples were moved out of the lab and staff members have been instructed not to store any mad cow tissue samples at the site.

The government plans to relocate the lab as part of a current renovation of the service's National Centers for Animal Health.

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Sunlight May Increase Risk of HPV Infection

Sunlight may suppress women's immune system defenses and increase their risk of infection by the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus (HPV), says an American study.

"The sun is a kind of drug, a drug that influences whether a papilloma infection takes hold or not," researcher Dr. William Hrushesky of the WJB Dorn Veterans Administration Medical Center in Columbia, S.C., told the Associated Press.

He studied the results of more than 900,000 Pap tests done in southern Holland between 1983 and 1998. A Pap test isn't able to directly detect HPV, but it does reveal abnormal cells typically caused by HPV infection.

The study found that the women had higher rates of HPV during the sunniest years and the sunniest months. The Pap tests found twice as much evidence of papillomavirus infection in August -- the sunniest month in southern Holland -- than in winter.

The findings were presented Tuesday at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.

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