Four children who were using combustible materials in a chemistry experiment at a Northwest Washington elementary school were injured yesterday morning, two of them critically, when the materials exploded.

It’s hard not to be scared when you’re being “medevacked” to a hospital with another child next to you screaming and a paramedic telling you not to move.

Last week the nation’s doctors finally confessed: They haven’t been washing their hands often enough.

Medical insiders say the problem has existed for years, but the doctors’ admission at the American Medical Association convention in Chicago is still hard to believe.

Reminding doctors to wash their hands should be like reminding lawyers to bill their clients. A no-brainer. If they can’t master basic hand washing, then they probably didn’t get much else out of medical school.

After all, experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the Mayo Clinic call hand washing the single most important way to stop infectious diseases …

The battle is on to see if there will ever be a tobacco road in cyberspace.

As the White House leads a campaign to lower underage smoking rates by placing sweeping restrictions on cigarette advertising, giddy anti-smoking activists hope to stub out the tobacco industry’s on-line efforts before they can take root. But tobacco companies have started to claim their little acre of the Internet.

Nearly 37 percent of on-line Americans are under the age of 18, according to a study commissioned by HotWired, the on-line version of Wired magazine. That’s the same age group that President Clinton said on Aug. 10 …

RU-486, the abortion pill recommended for approval by a regulatory panel, isn’t the only new abortion option for American women. Two other pharmaceutical methods for ending or preventing pregnancy may soon come into wider use — in large part because they involve drugs already on the market for other purposes.

The abortion pill cleared a major hurdle on Friday when an advisory panel recommended that the Food and Drug Administration approve the product. The FDA could approve RU-486, also known as mifepristone, for use in the U.S. by early fall.

Three weeks ago, the same FDA advisory panel ruled that certain combinations …

The nation’s drug users are getting younger, according to reports released Tuesday.

Teenage drug use has more than doubled since 1992, the Department of Health and Human Services said. Nearly 11% of 12-year-olds to 17-year-olds used drugs on a monthly basis last year, and that number has climbed steadily from a low of 5.3% in 1992.

While teenage drug use has increased, usage by older Americans has declined in the same period, and overall levels of drug use have remained flat, the reports said. An estimated 12.8 million Americans used illegal drugs last year, the same rate as in 1992.

At campaign stops …

President Clinton signed legislation Wednesday that will guarantee health insurance to people who change jobs.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act extends new protections to an estimated 25 million Americans in so-called "job lock," a situation in which employees don’t switch jobs for fear of losing coverage due to pre-existing medical conditions.

The legislation includes a phased-in 80% tax deduction for health-insurance premiums for the self-employed by 2006, up from the current 30%. It also allows for the creation of 750,000 medical savings accounts that, much like individual retirement accounts or 401(k) savings plans, would enable individuals to set aside tax-free …