By LEE BOWMAN, Scripps Howard News Service

More than four years after Katrina left the deadliest toll for a tropical storm in the United States in nearly a century, most Americans remain convinced that hurricanes pose a greater threat to human life than in the past.

Does your doctor talk to you about money?

Chances are, he or she does not. But it is a lost skill of medicine that many providers are finding they need.

Increasingly, patients are finding they need to know how much a particular diagnostic test or prescription or procedure will cost because some or all of the expense will come out of their own pockets.

Bystander CPR.

Whether you or your neighbor is ready and willing to do it may quadruple the odds of survival for someone down on the street in cardiac arrest.

Health-reform legislation approved by the House last weekend would add tens of millions of Americans to the ranks of the insured.

And it would begin to address some of the deficiencies in the way family doctors are paid and trained so that there may be at least a few more primary-care physicians available to care for all those newly insured patients.

Just before Thanksgiving, officials of the international drug company Novartis will be joined by a gaggle of local, state and federal officials in a business park on the edge of Holly Springs, N.C.

That extra hour of sleep last weekend doesn't begin to make a dent in tired for most Americans.

WASHINGTON - In a move that marks the first federal attempt to aid tens of thousands of homeowners with properties containing potentially toxic Chinese drywall, lawmakers have acted to make them eligible for the same low-interest loans available to disaster victims.

Heart disease is the number one killer of both men and women.

But conventional wisdom has been that older men die of heart attacks, while women die of old age.

Checking in at a doctor's office or hospital increasingly requires at least two documents -- an insurance card and a photo ID.

Don't take it too personally.

The providers are simply trying to protect themselves -- and you -- from joining the growing ranks of medical identify theft victims.

Since bursting onto the world health stage last spring, the novel H1N1 flu has become one of the most-studied pathogens ever.

Scientists have tracked how it spreads, how it infects, how it behaves in animal and human hosts, the symptoms it creates and why some people have much nastier experiences with it than others.