Your health: Addiction help in the suburbs

Addiction help in the suburbs

Naperville is among police departments in Illinois offering help for heroin addicts instead of arrest. Naperville Deputy Police Chief Brian Cunningham said the "Connect for Life" program will start training officers in mid-March. The goal will be to connect people with treatment.

Since the program launched in June, the police department says it's helped get more than 300 addicts into treatment.

Syphilis outbreak in Las Vegas

Nevada is experiencing the highest rate of syphilis in the Western U.S. following an outbreak in Las Vegas. It's part of a national spike in cases tied to increased testing, a rise in anonymous sex via social media and less consistent use of condoms, health officials say.

Social media's link to syphilis among gay men, which account for a majority of diagnosed cases, has led health officials to take their educational outreach directly to the websites and apps, in some cases creating profiles or buying advertisements.

Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease that's been around at least since the Roman times. It's never really gone away - it just comes in waves and spreads through skin-to-skin sexual contact. Symptoms aren't always apparent and can progress for years, even decades, without treatment. In early stages, it's highly treatable with penicillin.

Contraceptive implant warnings

Federal health regulators plan to warn consumers more strongly about Essure, a contraceptive implant that has drawn thousands of complaints from women reporting chronic pain, bleeding and other health problems.

The Food and Drug Administration added a boxed warning - its most serious type - to alert doctors and patients to problems reported with the nickel-titanium implant.

But the FDA stopped short of removing the device from the market, a step favored by many women who have petitioned the agency in the last year. Instead, the agency is requiring manufacturer Bayer to conduct studies of the device to further assess its risks in different groups of women.

Essure has been sold for more than a decade and is frequently pitched to women as the only nonsurgical option for permanent birth control.

It consists of two nickel-titanium coils inserted into the fallopian tubes, where they spur growth of scar tissue and block sperm from fertilizing a woman's eggs.

Bayer estimates 750,000 women have received the device since 2002.