Today's Globe: BIDMC pledge, drug costs, teen depression, prostate cancer genes, abortions, cold medicines, drug study publication, BiDil maker cuts, hip implants, revolutionary doctor

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has launched an ambitious quality-improvement effort aimed at eliminating within four years all harm to patients that it considers preventable, such as falls, infections caused by intravenous lines, and medication errors.

A coalition of groups involved in the healthcare debate, called the Massachusetts Prescription Reform Coalition, will today unveil a new effort to rein in the pharmaceutical industry's marketing efforts, which they say contribute to the rising cost of medical care.

The Needham family of Michael Haas (left), a teenager diagnosed with depression almost two years ago, has not only chosen to talk about his struggles, but they also appeared yesterday in a new educational documentary about teenage depression that debuted before nearly 300 people at the State House.

A combination of common and minor variations in five regions of DNA can help predict a man's risk of getting prostate cancer, researchers are reporting.

The number of abortions being performed in the United States has dropped to 1.2 million a year - the lowest level since 1976, according to a new report.

Parents should not give sniffling babies and toddlers over-the-counter cough and cold medicines - they're too risky for children so small, the government will declare today.

The makers of antidepressants such as Prozac and Paxil never published the results of about a third of the drug trials that they conducted to win government approval, misleading doctors and consumers about the drugs' true effectiveness, a new analysis has found.

The maker of BiDil, the first medication approved for use by a specific racial group is halting marketing of the blacks-only heart drug, laying off most of its staff, and exploring a sale of the company.

Federal regulators have ordered medical device maker Stryker Corp. to fix a host of longstanding problems in its manufacturing of hip replacement parts that have triggered multiple patient complaints and forced some follow-up surgeries.

A few years ago Dr. Judah Folkman (left) posted a notice from the National Institutes of Health - announcing angiogenesis would be a major research topic in several institutes - right next to a rejection note that earlier dismissed his ideas as worthless. He liked the irony, Robert Cooke writes on the op-ed page about Folkman, who died Monday.