Ameridose Announces Recall Amid Questions About Drugs’ Sterility

A drug producer linked to the pharmacy at the center of a national meningitis outbreak announced a recall of all of its products Wednesday after federal regulators found that it had not provided enough assurance that all the medicines it made were sterile.

Cj Gunther/European Pressphoto Agency

Ameridose’s sister company is the source of steroid medication linked to 29 meningitis deaths.

The company, Ameridose, which is based in Massachusetts and is a major supplier of sterile injectable medications to hospitals across the country, underscored that there had been no reports of impurities in any of its products and said that it had announced the recall “out of an abundance of caution.”

The company sells more than 2,200 blended drug products, including tranquilizers, anesthetics and antibiotics, according to its Web site. The drugs are pumped into both injectable and oral syringes, as well as intravenous medicine bags. It said it would post the precise list of all the products on its Web site, ameridose.com.

The announcement represented another blow to the family behind Ameridose and its sister company, the New England Compounding Center, whose fungal-tainted steroid medication was responsible for the deaths of 29 people. Ameridose has taken pains to emphasize that it is legally distinct from New England Compounding. But the companies are owned by some of the same people. Federal officials have said Ameridose is part of the investigation because of concerns that it had some of the same business practices as New England Compounding.

Federal and state regulators have suspended operations at Ameridose until Monday. The Massachusetts Department of Public Health said Wednesday that the agreement with the company was “under review.”

Dr. Janet Woodcock, the director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the Food and Drug Administration, said in a telephone interview that the company offered to recall all of its products after federal officials shared the results of their inspection, which found fault with some of its sterility “assurances.”

Ameridose said in a statement that the F.D.A. had notified the company that the agency would “be seeking improvements in Ameridose’s sterility testing process.”

Dr. Woodcock emphasized that the recall was different from that of New England Compounding, where there was known contamination. The agency is not asking health care providers to track down patients who were given Ameridose products, she said, because there have been no reports of problems. Instead, providers are being asked to send the products back to the company.

In a statement, Ameridose said it had shipped more than 70 million “units of product” since its founding in 2006 without problems.

It said it had agreed to recall its products “because customer confidence is paramount to its business.”

Hospitals have reported difficulties in obtaining certain types of injectable medications that Ameridose produces since the company first suspended its operations, and Wednesday’s recall was likely to exacerbate those shortages.

Dr. Woodcock said that the agency was working to mitigate the shortages, in part by asking other manufacturers to increase production. But she added that concerns about lack of sterility were also important.

“We have to balance the risk of lack of sterility assurance against the issues of products not being available,” she said. “That’s a line we walk every day.”

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Modest Jobs Growth in Final Report Before Election

In the last assessment of the job market before the presidential election, the Labor Department announced Friday that the nation’s employers added 171,000 positions in October, and more jobs than initially estimated in both August and September.

The unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 7.9 percent in October, from 7.8 percent in September, as more workers joined the labor force and so officially became counted as unemployed.

The report showed persistent but modest improvement in the American economy, and broad-based gains in just about every industry except the government. It was based on surveys conducted too early in the month to capture work disruptions across the East Coast caused by Hurricane Sandy.

“Generally, the report shows that things are better than we’d expected and certainly better than we’d thought a few months ago,” said Paul Dales, senior United States economist for Capital Economics. “But we’re still not making enough progress to bring that unemployment rate down significantly and rapidly.”

The latest figures are probably good news for President Obama. They officially recorded a net gain in jobs under his presidency, and they allayed widespread suspicion that September’s large drop in the unemployment rate — below 8 percent for the first time since the month he took office — might have been a one-month statistical fluke.

In a statement, Alan B. Krueger, the chairman of Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said Friday’s report provided “further evidence that the U.S. economy is continuing to heal from the wounds inflicted by the worst downturn since the Great Depression.”

Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, said in a statement that the jobs report is evidence of the need to change the nation’s economic policies.

“Today’s increase in the unemployment rate is a sad reminder that the economy is at a virtual standstill,” he said.

The numbers arrived somewhat late in the game to have a huge impact on the election next Tuesday, particularly given the ongoing focus on Hurricane Sandy.

Economists were hopeful that once the election was over and Congress addressed the major fiscal tightening scheduled for the end of this year, job growth could speed up further.

“If we can do this kind of job growth with all the uncertainty out there, imagine if we were to clear up those tax issues and hold back the majority of tax increases that are pending at the end of the year,” said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics. “We could do much better in 2013, maybe as well as we appeared to be doing earlier this year.”

Job gains in previous months were revised to show bigger gains. September’s increase of 114,000 new jobs was revised to 148,000, and August’s 142,000 was revised to 192,000, the government said.

In October, the biggest job gains were in professional and business services, health care and retail trade, the Labor Department said. Government payrolls dipped slightly. State and local governments have been shedding jobs most months over the last three years.

One of the lowlights of the report was in hourly wages, which remained flat in October after showing barely any growth in the previous several months.

“Perhaps the decline in real wages is a factor here in being able to employ more people,” Mr. Ryding said. “It’s something to keep in mind when we think about creating jobs and whether we’re maybe creating the wrong sort of jobs.”

A report from the National Employment Law Project, a liberal research and advocacy organization that focuses on labor issues, found that while the majority of jobs lost in the downturn were middle-wage jobs, the majority of the jobs created since then have been lower-wage ones.

There have now been 25 straight months of jobs gains in the United States, but the increases have been barely large enough to absorb people entering the work force. A queue of about 12 million unemployed people remain waiting for work, about two out of five of whom have been out of a job for more than six months.

That is in addition to more than eight million people who are working part-time but really want full-time jobs.

“I’m not just competing against all the other people who are out of work,” said Griff Coxey, 57, of Cascade, Wis., who was laid off in May from his controller job at a small business. “I’m also competing against all those people who are actually working but are underemployed.”

Like two million other idle workers, Mr. Coxey is scheduled to lose his unemployment benefits the last week of the year, when the federal extensions abruptly expire. He said he still has some savings to fall back on, but many workers do not.

Labor advocates and economists are hopeful that Congress will renew the benefits as part of their discussions of the “fiscal cliff” during their postelection session. So far, though, the issue has received little attention, and analysts worry that ending extended benefits could disrupt what modest forward momentum the economy currently has.

“Federal unemployment benefits are one of the most effective stimuli we have,” said Christine L. Owens, the executive director of the National Employment Law Project.

“The recovery is still fragile,” she said, “and to pull that amount of income and expenditure out of the economy — particularly at a time when people thinking about the holiday season — will have a significant impact on not just those individuals and their families but the economy as a whole.”

Friday’s jobs report is unlikely to affect policy from the Federal Reserve, which has pledged open-ended stimulus until the job market improves “substantially.”

“This was not a perfect report by any means,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist for Mesirow Financial. “We would like to see double these kind of gains in jobs. Our benchmark on improvement is still pretty low.”

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Live Coverage: Burdens of Storm’s Damage Ease Slightly

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Apple's Cook fields his A-team before a wary Wall Street

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc Chief Executive Tim Cook's new go-to management team of mostly familiar faces failed to drum up much excitement on Wall Street, driving its shares to a three-month low on Wednesday.

The world's most valuable technology company, which had faced questions about a visionary-leadership vacuum following the death of Steve Jobs, on Monday stunned investors by announcing the ouster of chief mobile software architect Scott Forstall and retail chief John Browett -- the latter after six months on the job.

Cook gave most of Forstall's responsibilities to Macintosh software chief Craig Federighi, while some parts of the job went to Internet chief Eddy Cue and celebrated designer Jony Ive.

But the loss of the 15-year veteran and Jobs's confidant Forstall, and resurgent talk about internal conflicts, exacerbated uncertainty over whether Cook and his lieutenants have what it takes to devise and market the next ground-breaking, industry-disrupting product.

Apple shares ended the day down 1.4 percent at 595.32. They have shed a tenth of their value this month -- the biggest monthly loss since late 2008, and have headed south since touching an all-time high of $705 in September.

For investors, the management upheaval from a company that usually excels at delivering positive surprises represents the latest reason for unease about the future of a company now more valuable than almost any other company in the world.

Apple undershot analysts targets in its fiscal third quarter, the second straight disappointment. Its latest Maps software was met with widespread frustration and ridicule over glaring mistakes. Sources told Reuters that Forstall and Cook disagreed over the need to publicly apologize for its maps service embarrassment.

And this month, Apple entered the small-tablet market with its iPad mini, lagging Amazon.com Inc and Google Inc despite pioneering the tablet market in 2010.

Investor concerns now center around the demand, availability and profitability of new products, including the iPad mini set to hit stores on Friday.

"The sudden departure of Scott Forstall doesn't help," said Shaw Wu, an analyst with Sterne Agee. "Now there's some uncertainty in the management."

"There appears to be some infighting, post-Steve Jobs, and looks like Cook is putting his foot down and unifying the troops."

Apple declined to comment beyond Monday's announcement.

Against that backdrop, Cook's inner circle has some convincing to do. In the wake of Forstall's exit, iTunes maestro Eddy Cue -- dubbed "Mr Fixit", the sources say -- gets his second promotion in a year, taking on an expanded portfolio of all online services, including Siri and Maps.

The affable executive with a tough negotiating streak who, according to documents revealed in court, lobbied Jobs aggressively and finally convinced the late visionary about the need for a smaller-sized tablet, has become a central figure: a versatile problem-solver for the company.

Ive, the British-born award-winning designer credited with pushing the boundaries of engineering with the iPod and iPhone, now extends his skills into the software realm with the lead on user interface.

Marketing guru Schiller continues in his role, while career engineer Mansfield canceled his retirement to stay on and lead wireless and semiconductor teams. Then there's Federighi, the self-effacing software engineer who a source told Reuters joined Apple over Forstall's initial objections, and has the nickname "Hair Force One" on Game Center.

"With a large base of approximately 60,400 full-time employees, it would be easy to conclude that the departures are not important," said Keith Bachman, analyst with BMO Capital Markets. "However, we do believe the departures are a negative, since we think Mr. Forstall in particular added value to Apple."

TEAM COOK

Few would argue with Forstall's success in leading mobile software iOS and that he deserves a lot of credit for the sale of millions of iPhones and iPads.

But despite the success, his style and direction on the software were not without critics, inside and outside.

Forstall often clashed with other executives, said a person familiar with him, adding he sometimes tended to over-promise and under-deliver on features. Now, Federighi, Ive and Cue have the opportunity to develop the look, feel and engineering of the all-important software that runs iPhones and iPads.

Cue, who rose to prominence by building and fostering iTunes and the app store, has the tough job of fixing and improving Maps, unveiled with much fanfare by Forstall in June, but it was found full of missing information and wrongly marked sites.

The Duke University alum and Blue Devils basketball fan -- he has been seen courtside with players -- is deemed the right person to accomplish this, given his track record on fixing services and products that initially don't do well.

The 23-year veteran turned around the short-lived MobileMe storage service after revamping and wrapping it into the reasonably well-received iCloud offering.

"Eddy is certainly a person who gets thrown a lot of stuff to ‘go make it work' as he's very used to dealing with partners," said a person familiar with Cue. The person said Cue was suited to fixing Maps given the need to work with partners such as TomTom and business listings provider Yelp.

Cue's affable charm and years of dealing with entertainment companies may come in handy as he also tries to improve voice-enabled digital assistant Siri. He has climbed the ladder rapidly in the past five years and was promoted to senior vice president last September, shortly after Cook took over as CEO.

Both Cue and Cook will work more closely with Federighi, who spent a decade in enterprise software before rejoining Apple in 2009, taking over Mac software after the legendary Bertrand Serlet left the company in March last year

Federighi was instrumental in bringing popular mobile features such as notifications and Facebook integration onto the latest Mac operating system Mountain Lion, which was downloaded on 3 million machines in four days.

The former CTO of business software company Ariba, now part of SAP, worked with Jobs at NeXT Computer. Federighi is a visionary in software engineering and can be as good as Jobs in strategic decisions for the product he oversees, a person who has worked with him said.

His presentation skills have been called on of late, most recently at Apple annual developers' gathering in the summer.

Then there's Ive, deemed Apple's inspirational force. Among the iconic products he has worked on are multi-hued iMac computers, the iPod music player, the iPhone and the iPad.

Forstall's departure may free Ive of certain constraints, the sources said. His exit brought to the fore a fundamental design issue -- to do or not to do digital skeuomorphic designs. Skeuomorphic designs stay true to and mimic real-life objects, such as the bookshelf in the iBooks icon, green felt in its Game Center app icon, and an analog clock depicting the time.

Forstall, who will stay on as adviser to Cook for another year, strongly believed in these designs, but his philosophy was not shared by all. His chief dissenter was Ive, who is said to prefer a more open approach, which could mean a slightly different design direction on the icons.

"There is no one else who has that kind of (design) focus on the team," the person said of Ive. "He is critical for them."

(Additional reporting by Alistair Barr; Editing by Edwin Chan and Ken Wills)

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NBC holding a benefit concert for Sandy victims

NEW YORK (AP) — NBC is doing a benefit concert for victims of Hurricane Sandy featuring some artists native to the areas hardest hit.

Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi of New Jersey and Billy Joel of Long Island are scheduled to appear at the concert Friday.

The telecast will benefit the American Red Cross and will be shown on NBC and its cable stations including Bravo, CNBC, USA, MSNBC and E! Other networks are invited to join in.

The concert will be hosted by Matt Lauer. It will air at 8 p.m. Eastern and will be taped-delayed in the West.

Other performers include Christina Aguilera, Sting and Jimmy Fallon.

The telethon will be broadcast from NBC facilities in Rockefeller Center in New York City.

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Live Updates

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In hurricane, Twitter proves a lifeline despite pranksters

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - As Hurricane Sandy pounded the U.S. Atlantic coast on Monday night, knocking out electricity and Internet connections, millions of residents turned to Twitter as a part-newswire, part-911 hotline that hummed through the night even as some websites failed and swathes of Manhattan fell dark.

But the social network also became a fertile ground for pranksters who seized the moment to disseminate rumors and Photoshopped images, including a false tweet Monday night that the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange was submerged under several feet of water.

The exchange issued a denial, but not before the tweet was circulated by countless users and reported on-air by CNN, illustrating how Twitter had become the essential - but deeply fallible - spine of information coursing through real-time, major media events.

But a year after Twitter gained attention for its role in the rescue efforts in tsunami-stricken Japan, the network seemed to solidify its mainstream foothold as government agencies, news outlets and residents in need turned to it at the most critical hour.

Beginning late Sunday, government agencies and officials, from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo(@NYGovCuomo) to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (@FEMA) to @NotifyNYC, an account handled by New York City's emergency management officials, issued evacuation orders and updates.

As the storm battered New York Monday night, residents encountering clogged 9-1-1 dispatch lines flooded the Fire Department's @fdny Twitter account with appeals for information and help for trapped relatives and friends.

One elderly resident needed rescue in a building in Manhattan Beach. Another user sent @fdny an Instagram photo of four insulin shots that she needed refrigerated immediately. Yet another sought a portable generator for a friend on a ventilator living downtown.

Emily Rahimi, who manages the @fdny account by herself, according to a department spokesman, coolly fielded dozens of requests, while answering questions about whether to call 311, New York's non-emergency help line, or Consolidated Edison.

At the Red Cross of America's Washington D.C. headquarters, in a small room called the Digital Operations Center, six wall-mounted monitors display a stream of updates from Twitter and Facebook and a visual "heat map" of where posts seeking help are coming from.

The heat map informed how the Red Cross's aid workers deployed their resources, said Wendy Harman, the Red Cross director of social strategy.

The Red Cross was also using Radian6, a social media monitoring tool sold by Salesforce.com, to spot people seeking help and answer their questions.

"We found out we can carry out the mission of the Red Cross from the social Web," said Harman, who hosted a brief visit from President Barack Obama on Tuesday.

SPREADING INFORMATION

Twitter, which in the past year has heavily ramped up its advertising offerings and features to suit large brand marketers like Pepsico Inc and Procter & Gamble, suddenly found itself offering its tools to new kind of client on Monday: public agencies that wanted help spreading information.

For the first time, the company created a "#Sandy" event page - a format once reserved for large ad-friendly media events like the Olympics or Nascar races - that served as a hub where visitors could see aggregated information. The page displayed manually- and algorithmically-selected tweets plucked from official accounts like those of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, who was particularly active on the network.

Agencies like the Maryland Emergency Management Agency and the New York Mayor's Office also used Twitter's promoted tweets - an ad product used by advertisers to reach a broader consumer base - to get out the word.

The company said offering such services for free to government agencies was one of several initiatives, including a service that broadcasts location-specific alerts and public announcements based on a Twitter user's postal code.

"We learned from the storm and tsunami in Japan that Twitter can often be a lifeline," said Rachael Horwitz, a Twitter spokeswoman.

Jeannette Sutton, a sociologist at the University of Colorado who has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security to study social media uses in disaster management, said government agencies have been skeptical until recently about using social media during natural disasters.

"There's a big problem with whether it's valid, accurate information out there," Sutton said. "But if you're not part of the conversation, you're going to be missing out."

As the hurricane hit one of the most wired regions in the country, news outlets also took advantage of the smartphone users who chronicled rising tides on every flooded block. On Instagram, the photo-sharing website, witnesses shared color-filtered snapshots of floating cars, submerged gas stations and a building shorn of its facade at a rate of more than 10 pictures per second, Instagram founder Kevin Systrom told Poynter.org on Tuesday.

Many of the images were republished in the live coverage by news websites and aired on television broadcasts.

LIES SLAPPED DOWN

But by late Monday, fake images began to circulate widely, including a picture of a storm cloud gathering dramatically over the Statue of Liberty and a photoshopped job of a shark lurking in a submerged residential neighborhood. The latter image even surfaced on social networks in China.

Then there was the slew of fabricated message from @comfortablysmug, the Twitter account that claimed the NYSE was underwater. The account is owned by Shashank Tripathi, the hedge fund investor and campaign manager for Christopher Wight, the Republican candidate to represent New York's 12th District in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Tripathi, who did not return emails by Reuters seeking comment, apologized Tuesday night for making a "series of irresponsible and inaccurate tweets" and resigned from Wight's campaign.

His identity was first reported by Jack Stuef of BuzzFeed.

Around 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Tripathi began deleting many of his Hurricane Sandy tweets. Tripathi's friend, @theAshok, defended Tripathi, telling Reuters on Twitter: "People shouldn't be taking "news" from an anonymous twitter account seriously."

Tripathi's @comfortablysmug's Twitter stream, which is followed by business journalists, bloggers and various New York personalities, had been a well-known voice in digital circles, but mostly for his 140-character-or-less criticisms of the Obama administration, often accompanied by the hashtag, #ObamaIsn'tWorking.

On Tuesday, New York City Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr. appeared to threaten Tripathi with prosecution when he tweeted that he hoped Tripathi was "less smug and comfortable cuz I'm talking to Cy," presumably referring to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.

For its part, Twitter said that it would not have considered suspending the account unless it received a request from a law enforcement agency.

"We don't moderate content, and we certainly don't want to be in a position of deciding what speech is OK and what speech is not," said Horwitz, Twitter's spokeswoman.

But Ben Smith, the editor at Buzzfeed, which outed Tripathi, said Twitter's credibility would not be affected by rumormongers because netizens often self-correct and identify falsehoods.

"They used to say a lie will travel halfway around the world before the truth puts its shoes on, but in the Twitter world, that's not true anymore," Smith said. "The lies get slapped down really fast."

For Smith, the ability to disseminate information via Twitter and Facebook on Monday night became perhaps even more important than his Web publication, which enjoyed one of its better nights in readership but went dark when the blackout crippled the site's servers in downtown Manhattan.

Buzzfeed's staff quickly began publishing on Tumblr instead, and Smith personally took over Buzzfeed's Twitter account to stay in the thick of the conversation.

"Our view of the world is that social distribution is the key thing," Smith said. "We're in the business of creating content that people want to share, more than the business of maintaining a website."

(Reporting By Gerry Shih in San Francisco and Jennifer Ablan and Felix Salmon in New York; Editing by Robert Birsel)

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Hosts Underwood, Paisley ready for 5th CMA Awards

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Spend a lot of time with a guy over five years and you get to know him pretty well. In the time Carrie Underwood has spent co-hosting the Country Music Association Awards with Brad Paisley, she's learned there's nothing fake about the man with the white hat.

Paisley's not projecting the family first, fun-loving, good-guy persona that's made him one of country music's most popular stars. That's who he is, and he's found an uncommon balance Underwood really didn't believe existed in show business.

"He's not a different person in front of the camera and a whole different person away from the cameras," Underwood said in a recent interview. "He is the way you think he is. It's really great to see how somebody has balanced family life and doing this, you know, being in our crazy world. Because a few years ago I was wondering how on Earth anybody could make that work. And seeing him and (wife) Kimberly (Williams-Paisley) — she's superbusy, too — being able to juggle that is very encouraging."

That doesn't mean Underwood's ready to start a family just yet.

She and husband Mike Fisher, a star player for the NHL's Nashville Predators, are at the peak of their respective careers. The former "American Idol" winner's latest album, "Blown Away," was a multiweek No. 1 on the country albums chart. She's in the midst of an arena tour and also is up for female vocalist of the year at Thursday night's awards, airing live on ABC at 8 p.m. EDT from Nashville's Bridgestone Arena.

Children are in the plan "eventually," though.

"It's so funny, I still think of myself I guess being much younger than I actually am," Underwood said. "I'm like, I'm too young to have kids when I'm 29 years old, so I'm really not. My mom had a couple in her early 20s and a lot of people do. I don't know, I guess it's a sign of my immaturity in that area. I've only been married two years. I really want to enjoy that and really figure that out a little better before we start throwing so much responsibility into that."

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ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Co.

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For the latest country music news from the Associated Press: http://twitter.com/AP_Country. Follow AP Music Writer Chris Talbott: http://twitter.com/Chris_Talbott.

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My Story: Let Me Tell You What’s Wrong With Me

If you’re over 50, there’s something wrong with you. Actually, there are probably several things wrong with you. Nothing too serious, I hope. But you don’t reach our age without having your own unique set of aches and pains.

I’ve got tinnitus, plus a touch of endometriosis. And from time to time, my back goes out. I’ll rise from my bed in the morning, expecting to have an ordinary day and — I can’t stand up without excruciating pain. Ha! The joke’s on me: back to bed! Bring on the ice pack, heating pad, noodle soup and Percocet.

I’ve become used to all of this. Ringing ears, aching ovaries and a bum back can’t slow me down. Well, actually, they do slow me down just a little. But I cope.

In our youth, when we hurt, it rarely lasted. You would pull a muscle or twist an ankle or fall off a horse on your family’s idiotic dude-ranch vacation (Jews on horseback? Whose bright idea was that?) and be out of commission for a bit. But soon you would be good as new.

The ailments we get these days stick around. Once your back goes out, it will probably keep going out. You know darn well that your first hot flash won’t be your last. And once that floater starts grooving around in your left eye, it’s there to stay. (My sister has even named her floater. She calls it Marvin, after the eye doc who told her there was nothing he could do, so she had better learn to live with it.)

It’s a shame that our boomer bodies are deteriorating. On the other hand, if they weren’t, what would we talk about?

Any boomer social gathering is cause to compare all of our fascinating little health-related glitches. Julie has a bum knee. Janet has arthritis in her neck. The hamstring Steve pulled doing yoga has yet to heal properly. Deb’s bone density stinks. Rick finds it a challenge to practice law with a torn rotator cuff. And my brother-in-law plays weekend basketball with a group that includes a bunch of younger dudes who can seriously whip up on him, resulting in a smorgasbord of injuries to complain about.

In our youth, we smoked pot and talked about the bands we loved. As we became older, we sipped wine and talked about our children. Now that they are grown, we drink green tea (all those antioxidants) and talk about our bone density.

Doctors, cholesterol, coenzyme Q10: we boomers never run out of cool stuff to talk about. At 20, who cared about your blood pressure? At 50, I can’t wait to hear all about it. In fact, I’m all ears. (Mine even ring.)

Chitchat has certainly changed. The answer to “How are you?” used to be “Great: I met a cool guy and didn’t get home till three in the morning.”

Now, it’s “Great: I’ve been doing those exercises my physical therapist recommended, and things are much better.”

What constitutes a spellbinding story has also changed. I used to tell people about the August day of my 16th summer when my best friend and I sneaked out of overnight camp and hitchhiked to Cleveland to see “It’s A Beautiful Day.” It was the first time I smoked pot, the first time I hitchhiked on the Interstate, and the first time I ever kissed a married man.

These days, for a good story, I tell people about the day my sister and I had our colonoscopies together. We had both been putting it off, so we figured we would book back-to-back appointments at the same clinic. The nurses thought it was hilarious. “You two are sisters? Nobody has ever done that before.” My nephew drove us over and picked us up afterward. All we had to do was promise not to tell him anything about it.

Ask Deb to tell you about the miracle of cataract surgery: “When I went in, I could barely see. Hours later, everything was crystal clear. It’s amazing.” This will lead to a lively chat about deteriorating vision. Bifocals, trifocals, rose-tinted trifocals. Trifocals that turn into sunglasses when you step outdoors. And before you know it, you’re talking skin cancer. “You had a squamous? That’s nothing! I had a squamous AND a basal.”

And don’t get us started on Lasik. We can talk Lasik forever.

For my 60th birthday party, I’m designing Bingo cards that will add an extra level of fun to the health chat. Each square will represent a different minor ailment that can plague a Boomer: insomnia. high blood pressure, sinus problems, snoring. When that ailment comes up in conversation, you cover the square. The first person to cover a row wins, except that instead of yelling “Bingo!” you yell, “Oy, my back is killing me!”

If you don’t think that sounds like a hoot, you aren’t old enough to be reading this column.

Of course, in the future, most of these little health glitches will be easily fixable. When Marvin turns up in your eye, they’ll just zap him with the Eyeball Fixer. Get a hot flash and take a pill to ensure that you’ll never have another. No need for a colonoscopy; every five years, we’ll all get brand-new colons at the Colon Replacement Drive-Thru.

But then what will we talk about?

Maybe we’ll discuss the great questions of philosophy. Instead of kvetching about our lower backs, we’ll all be quoting Schopenhauer. Instead of seeking the best physical therapist, we’ll seek the meaning of life.

Until that happy day arrives, we’ll continue to keep one another entertained with tales of our minor medical woes. Because we’re Boomers — everything that happens to us is fascinating.

So: What’s wrong with you?

You can follow Booming via RSS or visit nytimes.com/booming.

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Wall Street Reopens With a Mild Gain

After a historic two-day closing spurred when Hurricane Sandy flooded Lower Manhattan and knocked out its power and public transit, Wall Street reopened Wednesday with slight gains in stock prices.

Trading was expected to be volatile following the first multiple-day closing of the stock market since 1888 for weather-related reasons.

Travel into and around New York City remained limited, and wide-scale power failures meant many would be unable to work even from home.

By late morning, the Dow Jones industrial average was up only 0.1 percent, or about 16 points. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index turned from a gain to a small loss and the Nasdaq composite index fell 0.6 percent. The mayor of New York City, Michael R. Bloomberg, rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, which was running on generator power.

Some analysts said an overreaction and higher-than-normal volume was possible as a result of pent-up demand. The two-day shutdown came during the busy corporate earnings season and at the end of the fiscal year for some funds.

Chris Bertelsen, chief investment officer at Global Financial Private Capital in Sarasota, Fla., said the day would be marked by “the compression effect,” marked by above-average volume as “one day of trading basically represents three.”

“However, that’s volume to the upside since we’ve had some positive underpinnings with strong earnings from Ford and BP and good news out of Europe,” he said. “If we had been open over the past two days, that would have been reflected in the market, but since we were dark, all that is going to come out today.”

Stocks moving in early trading included Ford (up 5.5 percent), Advanced Micro Devices (up 2.4 percent) and Home Depot (up 2.8 percent).

Home Depot, a Dow component, is viewed as a company that may benefit from the storm as people buy rebuilding supplies. Insurance companies, which may have to pay billions of dollars of damage relating to the storm, will also be in view, as will airlines, which canceled thousands of flights in the Northeast because of Hurricane Sandy and its aftereffects.

All of the American stock market operators took part in coordinated testing Tuesday for trading on the New York Stock Exchange’s backup system, in case it needed to be used.

The exercise was also aimed at allowing member trading firms, many of which were operating on backup systems because of complications from the storm, a chance to ensure they were ready to resume trading.

Ford posted a third-quarter profit that trounced analysts’ forecasts on Tuesday, driven by higher vehicle prices and record profit margins of 12 percent in North America. General Motors reported earnings Wednesday that beat expectations.

In Europe, stocks were generally ahead before Wall Street joined in. The Euro Stoxx 50 was up 0.1 percent in late trading, the DAX in Frankfurt was up 0.1 percent and the CAC 40 in Paris fell 0.2 percent. The FTSE 100 in London was down 0.6 percent.

Other companies, including Pfizer, delayed the release of results because of the impact of the storm.

Walt Disney agreed to buy filmmaker George Lucas’s Lucasfilm and its “Star Wars” franchise for $4.05 billion in cash and stock, a blockbuster deal that includes the surprise promise of a new film in the series in 2015. Disney, a Dow component, opened higher but soon fell 0.4 percent.

Investors will be looking ahead to Friday’s report on United States unemployment, the last before Tuesday’s presidential election. Economists forecast a gain 125,000 jobs in October, up 11,000 from the previous month.

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