Bay State public health officials have discovered that the cardiac catheterization programs at Boston’s vaunted Massachusetts General Hospital and Worcester’s St. Vincent Hospital had unexpectedly high death rates in 2007.

In fact 43 of 1,543 patients undergoing the procedure at the General died and a ridiculous 16 of 112 patients died at St. Vincent.

That was significantly higher than state norms after accounting for severity of illness.

Hospital officials at both facilities attributed the high mortality rates to aggressive treatment strategies involving seriously ill patients, often at the request of family or referring physicians.

Which is better than leaving the old meat cleaver inside the body but it sure sounds like a quality problem in any case.

“Some of these patients are very difficult and quite ill,” St. Vincent’s CMO Octavio Diaz told the Boston Globe.  “Sometimes it’s very difficult to say no to those patients and their families.”

But he and Michael Fifer, director of the General’s cath lab promised to give it the old college try. They’re mandating a second opinion from a cardiologist before green-lighting caths on critically ill patients.

Conveniently, at the time of the announcement Paul Dreyer, the state’s director of healthcare safety and quality already had data in hand for 2008 and the death rates had settled down at both facilities so he saw no need to suspend the programs.

Which is good for everyone because that’s a story that would have gone national in a heartbeat.

So there’ll be a few extra inspections, an outside expert will fly in for a look before catching a Sox game and the shuttle home, maybe some extra documentation here and there and that’ll be the extent of it.

The millions of postmenopausal women who use multivitamins in the belief they prevent cancer, cardiovascular disease and premature mortality can forget about it, according to Marian Neuhouser and colleagues at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

They don’t do any such thing.

To reach this conclusion, the scientists examined data from 161,808 participants in Women’s Health Initiative, an observational trial that enrolled women between 1993 and 1998 and tracked them through 2005.

The findings appear in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Nearly 42% of women in the study took multivitamins.

During the observation period, there were 9,865 deaths, 8,751 cardiovascular events and 9,619 cases of bladder, breast, colon, endometrial, kidney, lung, ovarian or stomach cancer.

The multivitamin poppers tended to be more physically active, more likely to consume alcohol, more likely to be white and less likely to smoke than nonvitamin poppers.

After controlling for these factors, the scientists observed no difference in disease outcomes between the 2 groups.

“Multivitamin use does not confer meaningful benefit or harm in relation to cancer or cardiovascular disease risk in postmenopausal women,” they concluded.

It’s still possible that vitamins and other nutrients obtained from whole foods do impact survival, however.

Earlier this month physicians at a clinic in Udine, Italy withdrew nutritional support from Eluana Englaro, a 38 year-old woman that had been in an irreversible coma for 17 years. She died 3 days later.

Sad though it may be, such an event isn’t particularly newsworthy in most of Europe, but it was huge in Italy.

Pro-choice and pro-life protestors came to blows outside the clinic.

TV programming was interrupted to report the woman’s demise.

And at the time Ms. Englaro passed away, parliament was haggling over a bill to keep her alive.

“Eluana has been killed,” declared a member of Silvio Berlusconi’s ruling coalition.

After trying for 9 years, the woman’s father had secured a ruling from the nation’s highest appeals court that his daughter had a right to die because she had stated a preference not to be kept alive by artificial means before her auto accident.

The Vatican saw the ruling as licensing euthanasia, and since the women had been receiving care at a church-run facility, she had to be transferred.

And Berlusconi himself stepped into the fray. The prime minister, who thinks noblesse oblige is an Italian expression, directed his cabinet to issue a decree forcing the woman’s physicians to keep her alive.

Forget the political process and the polls showing most Italians favored the woman’s right to die. All that had to happen was for President Giorgio Napolitano to sign the decree and it was done.

But he didn’t.

Fallout from the tragedy is that Berlusconi and Napolitano won’t be sipping cappuccinos by the Spanish Steps any time soon, and parliament is making progress on a bill enabling people to draw up living wills.

That’s not something 21 year-olds are prone to do but it’s a start.