Category: Public Health

Another Day, Another Study Proving Antivaxxers full of It

No Comments

Parents worried about getting young children vaccinated against infectious diseases have fresh cause for reassurance, researchers say.

A new review of existing scientific evidence has concluded that childhood vaccines are safe and don’t cause serious health problems such as autism or leukemia.

“Our findings support that vaccines are very safe for children, and add to a substantial body of evidence that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the very low risks,” said senior author Dr. Courtney Gidengil, an associate physician scientist at RAND Corporation and an instructor at Harvard Medical School. “Hopefully, this will engage hesitant parents in discussions with their health care providers.”

The review found strong evidence that the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine is not associated with autism, which is consistent with previous reviews of this rumored link.

Some parents have chosen not to have their children vaccinated because of a now-debunked and retracted study published in 1998 that suggested that the MMR vaccine might cause autism. It was later reported that the study’s author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, had altered some of the study’s results.

The researchers behind the new study also found no link between childhood leukemia and vaccines for MMR, DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis), tetanus, influenza and hepatitis B.

Overall, vaccines given to children 6 or younger are safe, causing few side effects, the review concluded. The findings are published in the July 1 online edition and the August print issue of the journal Pediatrics.

The fact that Andrew Wakefield is still a free man, when the death toll of his fraud numbers in the thousands, dishonors both the justice system and the scientific community.

Insurance Companies Go Postal on Advair, Sales Collapse

No Comments

It appears that pharmacy managers have decided that spending 5x as much as a French patient does is stupid:

Hallelujah. I never thought I’d see the day that I’d praise an insurance company. But the proverbial Atlas just shrugged.
Insurance company pharmacy benefit managers, who have apparently had it with drug companies charging American consumers ridiculously high, and ever-increasing, prices for prescription drugs, are starting to say “enough.”

 At the top of the list is my asthma drug, Advair.

 Some big insurance company pharmacy benefits managers are simply no longer permitting their plans to cover Advair. Or at best, they’ve relegated Advair to the lower “third tier,” which means the patient has to pay so much of the price that they simply won’t buy the drug at all.
As a result, Advair sales plummeted 30% this year in the US.

(emphasis mine)

It’s a battle between two groups of parasites, and I hope that there is a way for both of them to ose.

Come to think of it, there is, it’s called Single Payer, bitches.

Lovely

No Comments

In Japan, the children exposed to the fallout from the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown are developing thyroid cancer at 40 times the normal rate:

Some 39 months after the multiple explosions at Fukushima, thyroid cancer rates among nearby children have skyrocketed to more than forty times (40x) normal.

More than 48 percent of some 375,000 young people—nearly 200,000 kids—tested by the Fukushima Medical University near the smoldering reactors now suffer from pre-cancerous thyroid abnormalities, primarily nodules and cysts. The rate is accelerating.

More than 120 childhood cancers have been indicated where just three would be expected, says Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project.

The nuclear industry and its apologists continue to deny this public health tragedy. Some have actually asserted that “not one person” has been affected by Fukushima’s massive radiation releases, which for some isotopes exceed Hiroshima by a factor of nearly 30.

Why are children still in the area, and why are they not receiving large doses of KI would displace radioactive iodine from their thyroids.

I’m beginning to think Tokyo Electric Power Company strategy is to channel the Bobby McFerrin song, “Don’t Worry Be Happy.”

Remember the that Miracle Hepatitis B Cure?

1 Comment

You knwo, the one that costs $1,000.00 a pill, Solvaldi?

Well, it turns out that, in addition to being priced at larcenous expensive, the evidence of its efficacy is simply not there:

The German agency performed this assessment based on a dossier submitted by the drug manufacturer (presumably Gilead).  The assessment found some reason to think the drug beneficial, but that the evidence was sparse, left many questions unanswered, and was inadequate to assess the drug for some important patient populations.  At this point, only a summary is available in English.  It includes links to further information in German.

………

Thus the assessment concluded that the drug company dossier included at best irrelevant data that it tried to pass off as important, and inexplicably left out other data that might have been relevant.

………

Summary

It is even bloodier money if the assumption that the drug is a “well-tolerated and effective cure,” which  Dr Huyler held, proves not to be true.  It is clear that most of the money that Gilead is now scooping up in the US is not to pay retrospectively for research and development or drug production. Instead, it seems likely to be supporting marketing, public relations, some investors’ profits, and huge executive compensation.  When the public realizes that the money may not be buying miracles, the outrage should increase.  


 The Sovaldi case is a signal example of how our health care system is awash in marketing hype and public relations buzz that has swamped rational skeptical thinking about logic and evidence.  That marketing and PR is ever enriching managers while it will send the rest of us, health care professionals included, to the poor house.  And all the money we spend will not buy us the promised miracles and triumphs.

 True health care reform would revisit the pact society once made with drug, biotechnology and device companies meant to promote reasonably priced innovation, but now promoting oligarchy; support transparency and honesty in clinical research; and challenge how health care managers can make millions or billions from unproven, and sometimes worthless or dangerous products.

It also turns out that the study was not double blind.

So the wonder drug may not be any more effective than existing drugs, and it costs a lot more.

Welcome to the 3rd World America.

No Comments

The rate of maternal deaths in the United States has neary doubled since 1990:

Maternal deaths related to childbirth in the United States are nearly at the highest rate in a quarter century, and a woman giving birth in America is now more likely to die than a woman giving birth in China, according to a new study.

The United States is one of just eight countries to see a rise in maternal mortality over the past decade, said researchers for the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in a study published in The Lancet, a weekly medical journal. The others are Afghanistan, Greece, and several countries in Africa and Central America.

The researchers estimated that 18.5 mothers died for every 100,000 births in the U.S. in 2013, a total of almost 800 deaths. That is more than double the maternal mortality rate in Saudi Arabia and Canada, and more than triple the rate in the United Kingdom.

The study was the latest to underscore a steep rise in pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. since at least 1987, when the mortality rate was 7.2 per 100,000 births. The U.S. experienced a sharp spike in 2009 that the Centers for Disease Control attributed to the H1N1 influenza pandemic. The rate has dipped slightly since then, said Nicholas Kassebaum, the lead physician in the University of Washington study, but it remains stubbornly high.

The increase is in stark contrast to most other countries that have had notable decreases, including many in east Asia and Latin America, the report said. The United States now ranks 60 for maternal deaths on a list of 180 countries, down markedly from its rank of 22 in 1990. China, by contrast, is up to number 57.

The reasons for the rise in the maternal deaths in the U.S. are not entirely clear, but several factors seem to be in play.

The article to go on about diabetes, obesity, etc., but makes not a single mention of the rise in equality and the increasing incidence of extreme poverty.

Note that this sort of decline in wellness and life expectancy for the population was presaged the collapse of the Soviet Union.

We are in the process of destroying ourselves.

Why the Catholic Church Should Be Out of the Hospital Business

No Comments

A Catholic hospital in (where else) Oklahoma has forbade its doctors from prescribing birth control:

Doctors affiliated with a small Catholic hospital in Bartlesville, Okla., are no longer allowed to prescribe contraception for the purposes of birth control, according to a report from the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise.

Administrators at Jane Phillips Medical Center are reported to have held a meeting last week to inform doctors of the new directive barring them from prescribing contraceptives as birth control; according to the Examiner-Enterprise, doctors are allowed to prescribe contraceptives for non-birth control purposes, such as cramps, menstrual pain or endometriosis.

“I have spoken to my doctor about my birth control options,” one patient impacted by the directive told the Examiner-Enterprise. “I was told that my physician has been instructed that they can no longer write prescriptions for birth control as birth control. This effects me because I take birth control as birth control. There are other ways to receive birth control, for example headaches, cramps, excessive bleeding — but I have none of those symptoms.

Note that this is not just employees, or on the hospital premises, this is a directive given to any doctor with admitting privileges.

The Catholic Church has been engaging in a massive hospital buying binge, and they are using it to make not just abortion, but birth control, unavailable across the nation.

Why We Should Ban Antibiotics in Animal Feed

No Comments

Here is something that I missed.

I knew that antibiotics served to make animals to gain weight faster, but it never occurred to me that antibiotic residues are making the American public fat as well.

It makes sense antibiotics make cows, chickens, and pigs gain weight faster, so why shouldn’t it have the same effect on humans?

This is particularly significant with pigs, because as opportunistic omnivores, they are metabolically quite similar to us:

If you walk into a farm-supply store today, you’re likely to find a bag of antibiotic powder that claims to boost the growth of poultry and livestock. That’s because decades of agricultural research has shown that antibiotics seem to flip a switch in young animals’ bodies, helping them pack on pounds. Manufacturers brag about the miraculous effects of feeding antibiotics to chicks and nursing calves. Dusty agricultural journals attest to the ways in which the drugs can act like a kind of superfood to produce cheap meat.

As an aside here, we know that this produces cheaper meat, and thanks to the Danes experiences with their antibiotic ban over the past 15 years, we know about how much money it saves, and it is less than 10¢ a pound.

It is basically negligible.

But what if that meat is us? Recently, a group of medical investigators have begun to wonder whether antibiotics might cause the same growth promotion in humans. New evidence shows that America’s obesity epidemic may be connected to our high consumption of these drugs. But before we get to those findings, it’s helpful to start at the beginning, in 1948, when the wonder drugs were new — and big was beautiful.

 ………

 In 2002 Americans were about an inch taller and 24 pounds heavier than they were in the 1960s, and more than a third are now classified as obese. Of course, diet and lifestyle are prime culprits. But some scientists wonder whether there could be other reasons for this staggering transformation of the American body. Antibiotics might be the X factor — or one of them.

I think that it’s clear that the major issue here is sources of chronic antibiotic exposure, with meat and poultry being the primary contributors, though the article downplays this:

Of course, while farm animals often eat a significant dose of antibiotics in food, the situation is different for human beings. By the time most meat reaches our table, it contains little or no antibiotics. So we receive our greatest exposure in the pills we take, rather than the food we eat. American kids are prescribed on average about one course of antibiotics every year, often for ear and chest infections. Could these intermittent high doses affect our metabolism?

This statement is at best an inaccurate generalization.

There are numerous reports about issues involving antibiotic residues in meat, and it is one of the reasons that the FDA is proposing tighter restrictions on antibiotic use on livestock.

Another Way that Michelle Rhee is Destroying America

No Comments

Do you know what improves performance on tests, particularly those that do not require much in the way original thought?

If you are thinking cramming data you might be right, but this is not how Michelle Rhee is using her jihad against to hurt our children.

Have you ever had a strong cup of coffee to get on the bubble for a test? How about amphetamines? The military has used them for years to maintain focus for fatigued soldiers

How about Ritalin?

Ritalin, like other stimulants will improve performance in the short term, so it is no surprise that aggressive testing incentivizes schools to put children on stimulants:

There has been a lot of public agonizing lately about the steep rise in diagnoses of ADHD over the last two decades. There is growing, and justifiable, worry that a lot of kids are being put on stimulant medications who don’t need them.

What there hasn’t been is a plausible theory about what’s driving this explosion of diagnoses — 40 percent over the last decade and more than 50 percent over 25 years. The CDC now estimates that 12 percent of school age kids, and as many as 20 percent of teenage boys have been diagnosed with ADHD.

………

Now comes a book that, finally, offers a data-based analysis that could begin to account for an increase on this scale. “The ADHD Explosion,“ by Stephen Hinshaw and Richard Scheffler, considers all kinds of factors that may contribute to the surge, from diagnosis by undertrained and harried pediatricians to pharmaceutical advertising. But the eye-opening insight from Hinshaw, a clinical psychologist, and Schleffler, a health economist, who are colleagues at University of California, Berkeley, is the correlation between educational policies and the prevalence of ADHD diagnoses.

Using Centers for Disease Control surveys, Hinshaw and Sheffler found that when rates of ADHD diagnoses are broken down by state, it turns out that there are dramatic discrepancies. Based on the most recent survey, from 2011, a child in Kentucky is three times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as a child in Nevada. And a child in Louisiana is five times as likely to take medication for ADHD as a child in Nevada.

And these states aren’t just outliers. The five states that have the highest rate of diagnoses — Kentucky, Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana and North Carolina — are all over 10 percent of school age children. The five states with the lowest percent diagnosed — Nevada, New Jersey, Colorado, Utah and California — are all under 5 percent. The disparity is even greater for kids prescribed ADHD medication. The same five states are at the top of the list, all of them with over 8 percent of kids getting medication. The states at the bottom of the list for medication — Nevada, Hawaii, California, Alaska and New Jersey — are all under 3.1 percent.

………

What the team found was that high rates of ADHD diagnoses correlated closely with state laws that penalize schools when students fail. Nationally, this approach to education was enacted into law in 2001 with No Child Left Behind, which makes funding contingent on the number of students who pass standardized tests. In more recent years, similar testing-based strategies have been championed by education reformers such as Michelle Rhee. But many states passed these accountability laws as early as the 1980s, and within a few years of passage, ADHD diagnoses started going up in those states, the authors found, especially for kids near the poverty line.

ADHD diagnoses of public school students within 200 percent of the federal poverty level jumped 59 percent after accountability legislation passed, Hinshaw reports, compared with less than 10 percent for middle- and high-income children. They saw no comparable trend in private schools, which are not subject to legislation like this.

How do ADHD diagnoses help schools at risk of losing their funding? First, Hinshaw notes, for kids who do have ADHD, it should improve their performance in school, including their test scores. Second, it may help kids who are disruptive in class settle down, which could improve scores for the whole class. Finally, in many areas, the test scores of student with ADHD diagnoses aren’t counted. So even it if it doesn’t help the child, it might help the school.

The researchers missed the point that I made, that giving your kids uppers will help with their tests, even if they suffer from strokes or sudden heart failure at age 14, it’s no skin off of the nose of Michelle Rhee and her ilk, if they hit their numbers, they win, and if they don’t they convert the “failing” to hedge fund backed charter schools, and they still win because they have a future career as a well remunerated executive at an “educational foundation”.

Obamacare Is a Subterfuge

No Comments

When one looks at Obama, and the neoliberal free market mousketeers who surround him, one has to to wonder just how much Obama, who actually taught at the University of Chicago, is in thrall to Chicago School economic theory.

While I do think part of the motivation for putting forward what became the PPACA was an attempt to “fix” the thoroughly dysfunctional healthcare delivery system in the United States, I also think that there has been an unspoken agenda, which is to sever the relationship between employers and their employees insurance.

If you talk to most economists, and all of the conservative “freshwater” economists, they will vehemently maintain that employer provided healthcare is economically unjustified, and so should be abolished.

When you look at the implementation of healthcare reform, it seems that one constant is that the employer mandate has been repeatedly delayed and weakened.

And today, they did it again:

For the second time in a year, the Obama administration is giving certain employers extra time before they must offer health insurance to almost all their full-time workers.

Under new rules announced Monday by Treasury Department officials, employers with 50 to 99 workers will be given until 2016 — two years longer than originally envisioned under the Affordable Care Act — before they risk a federal penalty for not complying.

Companies with 100 workers or more are getting a different kind of one-year grace period. Instead of being required in 2015 to offer coverage to 95 percent of full-time workers, these bigger employers can avoid a fine by offering insurance to 70 percent of them next year.

How the administration would define employer requirements has been one of the biggest remaining questions about the way the 2010 health-care law will work in practice — and has sparked considerable lobbying. By providing the dual phase-ins for employers of different sizes, administration officials have sought to lighten the burden on the small share of affected employers that have not offered insurance in the past.

As word of the delays spread Monday, many across the ideological spectrum viewed them as an effort by the White House to defuse another health-care controversy before the fall midterm elections. The new postponements won over part, but not all, of the business community. And they caught consumer advocates, usually reliable White House allies, by surprise, particularly because administration officials had already announced in July that the employer requirements would be postponed from this year until 2015.

Congressional Republicans seized on the announcement as the latest justification for scrapping the health-care law. In particular, they renewed their opposition to the law’s requirement that most Americans have insurance, saying it is unfair to delay rules for businesses and not for individuals.

Of course it’s unfair.

That’s a feature not a bug.

It is my belief that the goal of these actions is to create a space which will allow the minimization, and eventual elimination, of employer provided healthcare, because ……… freedumb and free markets.

This also explains why Obama has been so eager to cut a “grand bargan” with the ‘phants, and why he is so enthusiastic about trade deals like the TPP where freedumb and free markets trump democracy, labor rights, and environmental protections.

F%$# Ronald Reagan for Gutting Mental Health Care in the US

No Comments

Former Virginia gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds was stabbed by his mentally ill son, who then shot himself.

Yesterday, his son was released early from what would be a 48 hour psyche evaluation because there were no beds available:

Dennis Cropper, executive director of the Rockbridge County Community Services Board, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that the emergency custody order, or ECO, allowed Gus Deeds to be held as long as four hours to determine whether he should be kept longer, up to 48 hours, under a temporary detention order.

 The son was evaluated Monday at Bath Community Hospital, Cropper said, but was released because no psychiatric bed could be located across a wide area of western Virginia.

(emphasis mine)

It’s kind of trite to blame Ronald Reagan, except for the fact that Reagan WAS to blame, having aggressively gutted the public psychiatric health system, first in California, and then, after he was elected, nation wide.

Another Nail in the Anti-Vaxxers Delusions

No Comments

Researchers have determined that indicatations of autism are present in children in the first 6 months of life:

An early indication of autism can be identified in babies under six months old, a study suggests.

US researchers, writing in Nature, analysed how infants looked at faces from birth to the age of three.

They found children later diagnosed with autism initially developed normally but showed diminished eye contact – a hallmark of autism – between two and six months of age.

A UK expert said the findings raise hope for early interventions.

In the study, researchers led by Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta used eye-tracking technology to measure the way babies looked at and responded to social clues.

They found infants later diagnosed with autism had shown a steady decline in attention to the eyes of other people from the age of two months onwards, when watching videos of natural human interactions.

Lead researcher Dr Warren Jones told BBC News: “It tells us for the first time that it’s possible to detect some signs of autism in the first months of life.

“These are the earliest signs of autism that we’ve ever observed.”

I’m not surprised by this study.

My wife pegged Charlie as being on the spectrum in his first week outside of the womb. She knew something was different in the first 5 minutes.

Of course, she is a trained special educator, so it’s in her profession.

What this means is that autism is present well before when know-nothings claim that vaccinations “cause” autism.

Can we please stop listening to Jenny McCarthy Now?

Well, This Explains a Lot

No Comments

Talking Points Memo has discovered that insurance companies are deceiving their customers in an attempt to extract higher premiums out of them:

Donna received the letter canceling her insurance plan on Sept. 16. Her insurance company, LifeWise of Washington, told her that they’d identified a new plan for her. If she did nothing, she’d be covered.

 A 56-year-old Seattle resident with a 57-year-old husband and 15-year-old daughter, Donna had been looking forward to the savings that the Affordable Care Act had to offer.

 But that’s not what she found. Instead, she’d be paying an additional $300 a month for coverage. The letter made no mention of the health insurance marketplace that would soon open in Washington, where she could shop for competitive plans, and only an oblique reference to financial help that she might qualify for, if she made the effort to call and find out.

 Otherwise, she’d be automatically rolled over to a new plan — and, as the letter said, “If you’re happy with this plan, do nothing.”

 If Donna had done nothing, she would have ended up spending about $1,000 more a month for insurance than she will now that she went to the marketplace, picked the best plan for her family and accessed tax credits at the heart of the health care reform law.

 “The info that we were sent by LifeWise was totally bogus. Why the heck did they try to screw us?” Donna said. “People who are afraid of the ACA should be much more afraid of the insurance companies who will exploit their fear and end up overcharging them.”

 Donna is not alone.

Why the heck are they trying to screw you?

Because they are Insurance Companies, theat’s why they are trying to screw you.

Like the scorpion said to the turtle,  “It’s my Nature.”

It’s Like a Slow Motion Car Wreck

No Comments

So, the little people will be required to buy health insurance under the PPACA (Obamacare), but the requirement for big employers has been pushed back a year:

Businesses won’t be penalized next year if they fail to provide workers health insurance after the Obama administration decided to delay a key requirement under its signature 2010 health-care law.

The government will postpone enforcement of the so-called employer mandate until 2015, the administration said today. Under the provision, companies with 50 or more workers face a fine of as much as $3,000 per employee if they don’t offer affordable insurance.

The move addresses complaints from employer groups to President Barack Obama’s administration about the burden of the law’s reporting requirements. The decision pushes the issue past the 2014 midterm congressional elections, as Republicans have sought to make the health law a symbol of government overreach.

“In our ongoing discussions with businesses we have heard that you need the time to get this right,” Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama, said in a White House blog post announcing the decision. “We are listening.”

The move may lead some employers to delay providing coverage to workers. The law’s individual mandate remains in effect, a provision that requires most Americans to carry health insurance.

You knew that this was coming.

When big business talks, they, “Are listening.”

When it’s civil libertarians, , the poor and elderly, advocates for financial reform, the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, etc., it’s, “talk to the hand”.

H/t to my Dad, who sent me a link to a (subscription only) WSJ article.

Oh, Crap

No Comments

Have you heard about MERS?

I don’t mean the fraudulent legal figleaf known as the Mortgage Electronic Registration System that is a plague upon home-owners, I am instead referring an actual plague to Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, a SARS like infectious disease with a 55% fatality rate centered in Saudi Arabia.

Discussions of this disease have been bouncing around the epidemiology world for a while, there have only been about 80 confirmed cases, but in a couple of months millions of pilgrims will be going to Saudi Arabia as a part of the Hajj:

When the Black Death exploded in Arabia in the 14th century, killing an estimated third of the population, it spread across the Islamic world via infected religious pilgrims. Today, the Middle East is threatened with a new plague, one eponymously if not ominously named the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-CoV, or MERS for short). This novel coronavirus was discovered in Jordan in March 2012, and as of June 26, there have been 77 laboratory-confirmed infections, 62 of which have been in Saudi Arabia; 34 of these Saudi patients have died.

Although the numbers — so far — are small, the disease is raising anxiety throughout the region. But officials in Saudi Arabia are particularly concerned.

This fall, millions of devout Muslims will descend upon Mecca, Medina, and Saudi Arabia’s holy sites in one of the largest annual migrations in human history. In 2012, approximately 6 million pilgrims came through Saudi Arabia to perform the rituals associated with umrah, and this number is predicted to rise in 2013. Umrah literally means “to visit a populated place,” and it’s the very proximity that has health officials so worried. In Mecca alone, millions of pilgrims will fulfill the religious obligation of circling the Kaaba. And having a large group of people together in a single, fairly confined space threatens to turn the holiest site in Islam into a massive petri dish.

The disease is still mysterious. Little is understood about how it is transmitted and even less regarding its origins. But we do know that MERS is deadly, with a mortality rate of about 55 percent — a remarkably higher lethality than that posed by its close cousin, the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus, which in 2003 terrified travelers across the globe but posed a fatality rate of only 9.6 percent. The MERS coronavirus is new to our species, so mild and asymptomatic infections seem to be rare, but the human immune response to infection is itself so extreme that it can prove deadly in some cases.

All this is going on while a Dutch lab is claiming rights to the species genome, which is crippling research on the disease.

This has all the hallmarks of a public health catastrophe.

Would You Cut Someone’s Throat for Money

No Comments

The hed is instructive, “Chicago Hospital Accused of Cutting Throats for $160,000.”

When people talk about how the private sector solves everything, just remember this story:

A surgeon at Chicago’s Sacred Heart Hospital cut a hole in Earl Nattee’s throat on Jan. 3, the day before he died. It’s not clear why.

The medical file contained no explanation of the need for the procedure, called a tracheotomy, according to a state and federal inspection report that quotes Sacred Heart’s chief nursing officer as saying it happened “out of the blue.” Tracheotomies are typically used to open an air passage directly to the windpipe for patients who can’t breathe otherwise.

Now, amid a federal investigation into allegations of unneeded tracheotomies at the hospital, Nattee’s daughter, Antoinette Hayes, wonders whether her father was a pawn in what an FBI agent called a scheme to defraud Medicare and Medicaid.

“My daddy said, ‘They’re killing me,’” Hayes recalled, in reference to the care he received at the hospital.

Based in part on surreptitious tape recordings, an FBI affidavit lays out allegations that a Sacred Heart pulmonologist kept patients too sedated to breathe on their own, then ordered unneeded tracheotomies for them — enabling the for-profit hospital to reap revenue of as much as $160,000 per case.

They have witnesses who wore wires, and a number of doctors, as well as the CEO of the for profit (notwithstanding the Catholic hospital sounding name) hospital.

There is a reason why governments need to aggressively regulate, or operate, critical services, because incentives to produce good behavior are either ineffective, or more expensive than explicit regulation.

H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Appeals Court Slaps Down Obama on Contraception Restrictions

No Comments

They sided with the lower court, and ordered the Obama administration to make emergency contraception (AKA Plan B) over the counter:

The Obama administration has in part lost its push to sustain age limits on over-the-counter sale of Plan B One-Step, commonly known as the morning-after pill.

After a lower court recently slapped down all age limits, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday granted the Justice Department’s request for a stay on one-pill variants of emergency contraceptives but denied it for two-pill variants, declaring that the appellants have “failed to meet the requisite standard.”

This is a very well deserved smackdown.

The Obama administration’s behavior in this mater has been craven, dishonest, and hypocritical. They have taken what should be a core value, and used it as a political football.

Why Species Patents Suck, Part Gazillion

No Comments

Stuck in the middle of an article about the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS) is this tidbit about how a lab is claiming all rights to its genome, impeding research on the illness:

But impeding an effective response is a dispute over rights to develop a treatment for the virus. The case brings to the fore a growing debate over International Health Regulations, interpretations of patent rights, and the free exchange of scientific samples and information. Meanwhile, the epidemic has already caused forty-nine cases in seven countries, killing twenty-seven of them.

At the center of the dispute is a Dutch laboratory that claims all rights to the genetic sequence of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus [MERS-CoV]. Saudi Arabia’s deputy health minister, Ziad Memish, told the WHO meeting that “someone”–a reference to Egyptian virologist Ali Zaki–mailed a sample of the new SARS-like virus out of his country without government consent in June 2012, giving it to Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam.

“The virus was sent out of the country and it was patented, contracts were signed with vaccine companies and anti-viral drug companies, and that’s why they have a MTA [Material Transfer Agreement] to be signed by anybody who can utilize that virus, and that should not happen,” Memish said.

Though Memish referred to a “patent,” the Dutch team has not patented the viral genetic sequence but has placed it under an MTA, which requires sample recipients to contractually agree not to develop products or share the sample without the permission of Erasmus and the Fouchier laboratory. Memish said that the Dutch MTA was preventing Saudi Arabia from stopping the MERS-CoV outbreak, which appears to have started eleven months ago in the Eastern part of his country. The Dutch team denies the MTA is slowing work on the outbreak, saying it has given virus samples to any lab that has requested it.

If you thought that the idea of patenting software was bad, patenting genes and species is a whole new level of f%$#ed up.

In today’s world, when we are in the middle of a potential epidemic, our first priority is to make the world safe for scumbag profiteers.

Judge Overturns Craven Obama Administration Morning After Pill Policy

No Comments

A while back, in yet another attempt to appease right wing Neanderthals who will never support him, the Obama Administration overruled its experts at the FDA, and limited access to the morning after pill.

Well, a Federal Judge just called the decision, arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable:

A federal judge on Friday ordered that the most common morning-after pill be made available over the counter for all ages, instead of requiring a prescription for girls 16 and younger. But his acidly worded decision raises a broader question about whether a cabinet secretary can decide on a drug’s availability for reasons other than its safety and effectiveness.

In his ruling, Judge Edward R. Korman of the Eastern District of New York accused the Obama administration of putting politics ahead of science. He concluded that the administration had not made its decisions based on scientific guidelines, and that its refusal to lift restrictions on access to the pill, Plan B One-Step, was “arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable.”

He said that when the Health and Human Services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, countermanded a move by the Food and Drug Administration in 2011 to make the pill, which helps prevent pregnancy after sexual intercourse, universally available, “the secretary’s action was politically motivated, scientifically unjustified, and contrary to agency precedent.”

This is a very well deserved smack down.

Of all the bits of cowardice to come out of the Obama administration over the past few years, this was arguably the most heinous.

Yeah, the Sequester is Benign………

No Comments

That’s why cancer clinics are unable to treat thousands of patients:

Cancer clinics across the country have begun turning away thousands of Medicare patients, blaming the sequester budget cuts.

Oncologists say the reduced funding, which took effect for Medicare on April 1, makes it impossible to administer expensive chemotherapy drugs while staying afloat financially.

Patients at these clinics would need to seek treatment elsewhere, such as at hospitals that might not have the capacity to accommodate them.

“If we treated the patients receiving the most expensive drugs, we’d be out of business in six months to a year,” said Jeff Vacirca, chief executive of North Shore Hematology Oncology Associates in New York. “The drugs we’re going to lose money on we’re not going to administer right now.”

………

The care will likely be more expensive: One study from actuarial firm Milliman found that chemotherapy delivered in a hospital setting costs the federal government an average of $6,500 more annually than care delivered in a community clinic.

Those costs can trickle down to patients, who are responsible for picking up a certain amount of the medical bills. Milliman found that Medicare patients ended up with an average of $650 more in out-of-pocket costs when they were seen only in a hospital setting.

So, not only are we going to kill grandma, it’s going to cost us more money to do so.

Well, anything to make Grover Norquist happy, I guess.