Health Highlights: Dec. 26, 2006

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

Bush AIDS Effort Hampered by Poor Records

Investigators have found that President George Bush's ambitious $15-billion program to fight AIDS in poor countries has suffered from poor record-keeping in its attempt to push for fast results.

A review of the three-year-old program found that it had both over-counted and undercounted thousands of patients it helped and, in some cases, was unable to verify claims of success by groups that took U.S. money to prevent the spread of disease or care for AIDS victims and their children, theAssociated Pressreported Tuesday. The Bush administration says it has worked to fix the problems that were found in multiple countries and outlined in several audits reviewed by theAP.

Joe Farinella, the assistant inspector general who oversaw the investigations into how U.S. AIDS money was spent overseas in 2004 and 2005, said, "It's not good enough for the auditors to hear from the mission that we did A, B and C but we can't prove it to you, or there's no documentation to prove that we did it."

Farinella toldAPthat many aid recipients failed to keep records that would provide "reasonable assurance that what they say was done was in fact carried out." The inspector general will recommend that the administration clarify its directives and improve reporting methods.

In the case of Guyana, for example, incorrect numbers made it into this year's annual report to Congress. Guyana cited services to 5,200 AIDS orphans, but auditors documented fewer than 300, many of them not even affected by AIDS.

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Schwarzenegger Has Surgery on Broken Leg

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was cleared to resume official duties Tuesday after he had successful surgery to repair a broken right thigh bone, fractured during a weekend family ski trip to Sun Valley, Idaho.

The 59-year-old Schwarzenegger had a 90-minute operation in which cables and screws were used to wire the broken bone back together, theAssociated Pressreported. The former bodybuilder and action-film star was expected to make a full recovery but will probably be on crutches for his second inauguration next month in Sacramento.

Schwarzenegger is expected to stay in the hospital for three days. The leg will take about eight weeks to heal, said a prepared statement by orthopedic surgeon Dr. Kevin Ehrhart, who performed the operation at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica.