Today's Globe: Children's cost plan, E. coli illnesses, doctor's husband's thanks, inmate flu shots, health-care timetable, cereal pitch, public option

Children’s Hospital Boston has agreed to limit increases in fees it charges the state’s major health insurers next year as part of a larger push to control the rise in pediatric health care costs.

At last count, about 30 students and staff members from Lincoln Middle School had been diagnosed with laboratory-confirmed cases of E. coli poisoning, said Annemarie Beardsworth, spokeswoman for the Rhode Island Department of Health. Disease investigators have blamed their illnesses on tainted ground beef supplied to the camp by South Shore Meats Inc. of Brockton.

The husband of the Massachusetts General Hospital psychiatrist who was stabbed last week in a Boston medical office building has publicly thanked the security guard who fatally shot her assailant, saying the quick action saved her life.

The White House sought yesterday to quash a budding controversy over terrorism detainees at Guantanamo Bay getting swine flu vaccine sooner than many Americans.

In a blow to the White House, the Senate’s top Democrat signaled yesterday that Congress might fail to meet a year-end deadline for passing health care legislation, leaving the measure’s fate to the uncertainties of the 2010 election season.

"Cocoa Krispies to fight the flu? Hardly. But Kellogg’s wants it in your medicine cabinet anyway. A bright yellow banner on boxes of Cocoa Krispies and Rice Krispies blares that each cereal 'NOW HELPS SUPPORT YOUR CHILD’S IMMUNITY.' " a Globe editorial says. "Kellogg’s deserves no immunity from public scorn."

"A government-run health insurer would radically tilt the health-insurance playing field," columnist Jeff Jacoby writes on the opinion page. "It would amount to a new entitlement program, able to undercut the price of private insurance by squeezing hospitals and doctors, reimbursing them at below-market rates."