US medical practices are not prepared for disasters such as hurricanes or bioterrorist attacks according to the results of a survey carried out by the Medical Group Management Association.

The MGMA Center for Research surveyed members enrolled in itsLegislative and Executive Advocacy Response Network during July, 2008 and published the findings at last week’s Annual Conference in San Diego.

84% of survey respondents said their practices had not participated in disaster planning exercises with government agencies during the last year, while 71% indicated they hadn’t participated in drills with nearby hospitals, and 62% said they hadn’t engaged in intramural exercises involving their own practice.

Nearly a third of respondents reported that their practice did not have a disaster plan in place.

Remarkably, 87% of the group believed there was a “moderate or strong” likelihood that a disaster will occur in their community during the next 5 years.

The US Department of Health and Human Services has set aside $1.1 billion to help hospitals, public health departments and other health care organizations develop and practice disaster plans, but according to MGMA almost none of this money has been allocated to medical practices.

Google has settled a pair of copyright infringement suits in a deal that paves the way for a new approach to purchasing and reading books online.

The settlement requires Google to pay $125 million to two plaintiffs, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. Thereafter, Google is free to digitize books that retain copyright protection but have fallen out of print, a practice it began in 2004. Google has digitized more than 7 million books so far.

Until now, the search giant had made available only snippets of text from these books unless the copyright holder gave Google permission to display more. Going forward, Google will display 20% of the digitized books at no charge, but it will charge a fee to individuals who wish to continue reading.

Google will also offer subscriptions to university libraries and other organizations that can in turn share their digital collections as they see fit. Public libraries will receive free access to Google’s digital library.

Google will pocket 37% of the revenues from this endeavor, and distribute the remainder to a Book Rights Registry which will compensate book authors and publishers. Any ad revenues generated from Google’s book sales business will be shared using the same formula.

The settlement still requires approval by a US District Court. This is expected by spring, 2009.

James Gleick, a board member of the Author’s Guild who had popularized Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect in the late 1980s, saw the settlement as a win for everybody. “This huge body of books that were effectively lost to the marketplace is being rescued,” he told the New York Times.

British scientists reported last week that genetically engineered tomatoes, rendered purple by an abundance of cancer-fighting chemicals normally found in dark berries, helped prevent cancer in mice.

In the British study, a special breed of cancer prone mice lived an average of 182 days on a diet containing the purple tomatoes, whereas the same breed of mice lived only 142 days on a standard diet.

Cathie Martin and her team carried out the research at the John Innes Center in the UK, and published their findings in Nature Biotechnology. The study supports the theory that vegetables can be genetically modified to enhance their health promoting characteristics.

“The effect was much bigger than we expected,” Martin told Reuters.

The cancer preventing ingredients in the purple tomatoes are anthocyanins which are normally found in blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, cranberries and concord grapes. The antioxidant compounds have been shown to reduce the risk of cancer, heart disease and certain neurological diseases.

For this study, Martin’s team spliced anthocyanin-producing genes from a snapdragon flower (pictured) into the DNA of a tomato. The resulting phenotype was a purple tomato that contained three times the antioxidant capacity of red tomatoes.

While the results are exciting, Dr. Lara Bennett, a science information officer at Cancer Research UK told Reuters, “It’s too early to say whether anthocyanins obtained through diet could help reduce the risk of cancer” in humans.

It’s also too early to say whether the world is ready for purple pizza.