Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by editors of HealthDay:

Nonprofit Hospitals Get Renewed Congressional Scrutiny

Members of the U.S. Congress who have oversight into charitable institutions have begun to take a look at whether nonprofit hospitals are doing enough charity work.

The New York Times reports that Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who heads the Senate Finance Committee, is expanding his committee’s oversight of tax exempt organizations such as the United Way and American Red Cross to the operations of nonprofit hospitals to determine whether those medical institutions’ tax exempt status is justified.

The goal would be for the government to adopt legislation that would clarify and enforce tax exempt standards for nonprofit hospitals, the Times reports. The newspaper quotes the U.S commissioner of internal revenue Mark Everson as saying that federal tax officials have often found little difference between nonprofit and for-profit hospitals “in their operations, their attention to the benefit of the community or their levels of charity care.”

The companies question of reviewing nonprofit hospitals’ tax exempt status was begun in 2005 by U.S. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.). Thomas contends that “less and less has been required for hospitals to maintain tax-exempt status” since 1969, the newspaper reports.

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Egyptian student loan calculator Woman’s Death Attributed to H5N1 Bird Flu

A day after Israel confirmed its first outbreak of the deadly H5N1 bird flu, initial tests on the body of an Egyptian woman indicate the same disease killed her.

The Associated Press reports that a spokesman for the World Health Organization attributed the death, which occurred Friday, to the H5N1 strain. The official said that many people who had been in contact with the woman were also being tested to see if they were ill. But there were no indications that the virus had been transmitted to the human victim by another human, a possibility health officials believe could lead to a worldwide pandemic.

WHO statistics put the number of human deaths at 97, excluding the Egyptian woman, since avian flu w as first discovered in 2003, the wire service reported. Two-thirds of those deaths have occurred in Indonesia and Vietnam, the A.P. cites the WHO as saying.

Meanwhile, according to Radio Israel, the Agriculture Ministry confirmed that H5N1 caused the deaths of more than 11,000 turkeys on two farms in the Negev Desert and another farm near Jerusalem.

Israeli officials have ordered the slaughter of tens of thousands of turkeys and imposed quarantines around all three farms as part of the effort to control the spread of the virus, the Associated Press reported.

Five people have been admitted to hospitals and are being observed for symptoms of bird flu, but officials said they did not think the patients had contracted the disease.

The H5N1 virus was detected in Egypt last month and it’s possible that the disease may have entered Israel from that country, said Israeli Agriculture Minister Zeev Boim.

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Two More U.S. Women Die After Using Abortion Pill

Two more women have died after using the RU-486 abortion pill, U.S. health regulators said Friday in warning doctors to watch for a rare but deadly infection implicated in earlier deaths of four others who used the pill.

Since 2000, at least six women in the United States have died after taking RU-486, but the Food and Drug Administration can’t prove the drug was to blame in any of those cases, the Associated Press reported.

In four cases in California, women who took the pill died from sepsis, an infection of the bloodstream. Those women did not