If you gave or received a Build-A-Bear this holiday season, you may want to check it over.

Nearly 300,000 Colorful Hearts teddy bears from Build-A-Bear Workshop sold in the U.S. and Canada have been recalled.

The teddy bear's eyes can fall out and become a choking hazard for children, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. Company spokeswoman Jill Saunders tells Shots in a statement that Build-A-Bear hasn't received any reports of injuries or deaths from the teddy bears.

A quick check of the company's website shows that three other Build-A-Bear products — an inner tube, a lapel pin and a beach chair — have been recalled because of potential safety problems.

"That we have conducted three product recalls this year despite the fact that we have not received a single injury report related to any of those three products clearly demonstrates how seriously we take product safety," Saunders says.

Before hitting stores, the Colorful Hearts bear passed an independent laboratory evaluation in line with regulations set by CPSC and Health Canada.

Why are the eyes popping out? "We have observed that certain production runs of this bear utilized substandard fabric which may tear around the bear's eyes," Saunders says. "This may cause the stuffed animals eyes to loosen and fall out, which could pose a potential choking hazard."

Earlier this month, the St. Louis-based firm agreed to pay a $600,000 fine to settle allegations by the CPSC that the company didn't immediately report problems with a folding beach chair.

The CPSC alleged that sharp edges on the chairs could cause injuries when they were folded. The chairs were sold through the company's website from early 2001 until October 2008.

Under the settlement, Build-A-Bear denied the allegations concerning a "defect or hazard" involving the chairs and that the company broke the law. The company recalled 260,000 beach chairs in May 2009.

As for the Colorful Hearts bears, parents should take them from their kids and return them to any Build-A-Bear store for a coupon good for any available stuffed animal, the company says. Consumers can also call 866-236-5683 for more information.

When the New Year's parties end, a lot of us are left with some tough promises to keep.

This year, I'll lose weight. Smoking? History! And, of course, I'll start working out, too. Really, I mean it this time.

So with the day for fresh starts looming, we resolved to ask Americans about their New Year's resolutions, past and future, in the latest NPR-Thomson Reuters Health Poll.

First, if you're thinking about committing to improving your health in 2012, you'll have plenty of company. A little over half of the people we surveyed said they'll resolve to exercise more. More than a third will resolve to lose weight. And 13 percent say they'll commit to either quitting smoking or reducing how much they smoke.

Some people have had a lot of practice with their vows to do better. A little more than a third of people have resolved to lose weight at least once in the past five years. Among those who have promised themselves they'd shed a few pounds, 38 percent made that resolution five years in a row.

How much did people want to lose? Almost half of people with dieting in mind wanted to drop 10 to 29 pounds. About 21 percent wanted to shed between 30 and 49 pounds.

Making a resolution is the easy part. How well do people actually do? Overall, 57 percent of respondents who wanted to lose weight in the past told us they'd reached their goal.

Quitting smoking is more challenging. Among people who had vowed to quit smoking at least once in the past five years, only 36 percent said they had succeeded.

The telephone poll of more than 3,000 adults across the country was conducted during the first half of December. The margin for error is plus or minus 1.8 percentage points. Click here to read the questions and complete results. You can find the previous polls here, or by clicking on the NPR-Thomson Reuters Health Poll tag below.

Now, we have to admit that we wondered how accurate people's reports of success on their goals might be. The folks at Practice Fusion, a supplier of electronic medical record systems for doctors' offices, gave us another way of looking at things.

The company combed through a sample of real-world data from doctors' records, including the weights of more than 21,000 patients measured in 2010 and again in 2011. "There's a lot of people who are losing some weight," Jake Marcus, a data scientist at Practice Fusion, tells Shots. Overall, about 46 percent of people lost some weight. On average, it was about 7 pounds from one year to the next.

Now the Practice Fusion data are from people who saw their doctors regularly, and we don't know how that lines up with respondents to our poll. After looking at our poll's findings and his own company's data, Marcus says you might not reach your ambitious New Year's health goal, but it's still worth a try. You may lose a little weight, which is better than none at all.

If there's a medical advance that seized the public imagination this year, we'd venture to say it was facial transplant surgery.

Three transplants gave severely injured patients completely new faces in 2011. Now the doctors involved have revealed details about the complex cases in the New England Journal of Medicine.

In March, Dr. Bohdan Pomahac and a team at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston performed the first full-face transplant in the U.S. Soon afterward, they did it two more times.

The first patient, Dallas Wiens, suffered extensive burns in 2008 when he brushed up against a high-tension power line while painting a church. The accident essentially erased all of the features on his face. The second patient also suffered burns from a power line after a car crash. The third patient was Charla Nash, who was mauled by a chimpanzee.

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Cancer-fighter Avastin just came up short as a treatment for ovarian tumors.

Two studies found that the drug, which blocks the formation of new blood vessels, didn't extend the lives of patients with ovarian cancer.

Avastin did slow the progression of the cancers a little bit. But the patients getting Avastin as part of treatment with several medicines had more side effects, including blood clots and high blood pressure, than the people who didn't get it.

Sound familiar? The Food and Drug Administration recently withdrew the approval for Avastin as a treatment for breast cancer concluding, in the words of Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, that "there is no benefit to breast cancer patients that would justify its risks."

As it happens, Roche's Genentech unit, maker of the Avastin, just got approval from European regulators for use of the drug in treating advanced ovarian cancer.

But after talking things over with the Food and Drug Administration Genentech isn't rushing to do the same in the U.S., the Associated Press reports. "We do not believe the data will support approval," a Genentech spokeswoman told the AP. Still, the company hasn't made a final decision.

Despite these setbacks, Avastin remains a stalwart in the treatment of colorectal and lung cancer. The drug, which can cost up $100,000 for a year of treatment, is also approved in the U.S. for brain and kidney cancers.

The studies, published in the latest New England Journal of Medicine, can be found here and here.

The standard advice for losing weight often comes up short for people who are obese.

If they switch to a healthful diet and exercise more, they might lose a bit. But the pounds have a way of creeping back on.

Now some provocative research suggests that a part of the problem might be that obesity could change the area of the brain that helps control appetite and body weight.

And those changes might start within a day of eating a high-fat meal, according to scientists who are trying to figure out why it's so hard to lose weight. They report seeing changes in the brain after just one day on a fatty diet.

"That was quite a shock," says Michael Schwartz, a professor and director of the Diabetes and Obesity Center of Excellence at the University of Washington. "This might reflect fundamental biological changes in how the brain works that help explain why it's so hard to keep weight off."

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Opposition to the administration's overhaul of health care has almost become an article of faith with every Republican running for president.

Candidates promise to repeal the law and its less-than-popular requirement for most Americans to either have health insurance or to pay a penalty starting in 2014.

"It is wrong for health care. It's wrong for the American people. It's unconstitutional. And I'm absolutely adamantly opposed to ObamaCare," former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said at a debate in Des Moines, Iowa, earlier this month.

"I am for the repeal of Obamacare," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich echoes in a video on his website. "And I'm against any effort to impose a federal mandate on anyone, because it is fundamentally wrong and I believe, unconstitutional."

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