Today's Globe: health costs, after foster care, trans fat, teen sex, drugs' cancer risk, Walgreen settlement, Vioxx monitoring, William McCabe

Massachusetts businesses yesterday joined with most of the state's health insurers in a new lobbying group aimed at controlling healthcare costs and preventing more universal-coverage expenses from being shifted to employers.

In the first report of its kind on the foster care system, a survey of teenagers who recently left state custody found that nearly half have become pregnant or have impregnated someone, more than one-third have experienced homelessness, and nearly one-third have been threatened or injured with a weapon since going out on their own.

House lawmakers have approved what would be the nation's first statewide legislation banning trans fats in Massachusetts restaurants (third item).

The nation's campaign to get more teenagers to delay sex and use condoms is faltering, threatening to undermine the highly successful effort to reduce teen pregnancy and protect young people from sexually transmitted diseases, federal officials reported yesterday.

US regulators are investigating a possible association between rheumatoid arthritis drugs made by Johnson & Johnson and Amgen Inc. and childhood cancer.

Walgreen Co. will pay Massachusetts' Medicaid program more than $5 million as part of a multistate settlement over alleged improprieties in billing.

Merck & Co. does not have to cover medical monitoring expenses for Vioxx users who aren't claiming injury from the recalled painkiller, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled (sixth item).

William McCabe, a former professor at Boston University's medical school, died May 24 at his home in Virginia Beach, Va. He was 80. An internationally regarded authority on infectious diseases, Dr. McCabe authored 145 publications in peer-reviewed medical journals, his family said. He was a founding member of Infectious Diseases Society of America.