Today's Globe: headphones and heart devices, vitamins and heart disease, cholera in Congo, genetically engineered food

If you have a pacemaker or an implanted defibrillator, don't keep your iPod earbuds in your shirt pocket or draped around your neck - even when they're disconnected.

Vitamins C and E, pills taken by millions of Americans, do nothing to prevent heart disease in men, one of the largest and longest studies of these supplements has found.

Doctors struggled yesterday to contain an outbreak of cholera in a sprawling refugee camp near Congo's eastern provincial capital of Goma, as renewed fighting ignited fears that patients could scatter and launch an epidemic.

"Largely unnoticed due to the mayhem of the markets and the presidential race, the FDA recently proposed rules that would allow, for the first time, the marketing of foods from genetically engineered farm animals," Rick Weiss, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, writes on the op-ed page. "The good news is that the agency wants to regulate gene-altered animals under its strict 'new animal drug' provisions. The bad news is that the drug approval process in this country is extremely secretive."