CHICAGO (Reuters) - Air pollution heavy in small particles may cause blood clots in the legs, the same condition air travelers call “economy class syndrome” from immobility during flight, researchers said on Monday.
Dr. Andrea Baccarelli of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and colleagues said they found the link after looking at 870 people in Italy who had developed deep vein thrombosis between 1995 and 2005.
When compared with 1,210 others living in the same region who did not have the problem, they found that for every increase in particulate matter of 10 micrograms per square meter the previous year, the risk of deep vein thrombosis increased by 70 percent.
On top of that, the blood of those with higher levels of exposure to particulate matter was quicker to clot when tested at a clinic, they reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Air pollution from automobiles and industry can contain tiny particles of carbon, nitrates, metals and other materials that have been linked over the years to a variety of health problems.
While lung diseases were an initial concern, later research has indicated it may cause heart disease and stroke, possibly because it increases the rate at which blood can coagulate, Baccarelli and colleagues said. More…
Nursing Homes, along with their politically active PAAC’s have funneled huge sums of money to Tennessee legislators in an effort to support nursing home supported legislation which would placestrict limits and hurdles on those who would sue nursing homes as a result of the negligence and abuse of their elderly patients.
It is hard to imagine how legislators voted into office by the general public would even consider supporting legislation which would take away longstanding rights to victims of nursing home negligence and abuse to make a claim in court to remedy these wrongs.
The only beneficiaries of this legislation are the large corporations which own nursing homes throughout Tennessee. Those that will be hurt by this legislation are residents of nursing homes who will have limited abilities to fight abuse and neglect in nursing homes if this draconian legislation is passed.
The lackeys controlled by nursing homes in Tennessee who have introduced this legislation have the gall to name this proposed legislation: “The Nursing Home Patient Protection Act of 2008”. With this ridiculous nomenclature, these nursing home lackeys hope to obscure the fact that the bill is anything but a patient protection act. On the contrary, it removes from nursing home residents the little protection they have under the law as it is now.
Cook County, Tennessee Representative Henry Fincher who heads a key subcommittee in the Tennessee legislature has correctly labeled this bill the “Kill Old People Cheap Act of 2008”.
Senate sponsor of the bill, Jim Tracey, a Republican, lamely argues that: “If we can cut the cost of insurance down for nursing homes, they can have more nurses, better patient care.” If he really believes this ridiculous statement, it shows what a simpleton Senator Tracey really is. Does it not occur to him that the way nursing homes can avoid lawsuits is simply to give good patient care. Who could argue against a nursing home giving good patient care? More…
If this passes, you can bet you’ll see this type of legislation coming to your state as well. -Sue
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - It’s a happy Mother’s Day for an Arkansas woman — she’s pregnant with her 18th child. Michelle Duggar, 41, is due on New Year’s Day, and the latest addition will join seven sisters and 10 brothers. There are two sets of twins.
“We’ve had three in January, three in December. Those two months are a busy time for us,” she said, laughing.
The Duggars’ oldest child, Josh, is 20, and the youngest, Jennifer, is nine months old.
The fast-growing family lives in Tontitown in northwest Arkansas in a 7,000-square-foot home. All the children — whose names start with the letter J — are home-schooled.
Duggar has been been pregnant for more than 11 years of her life, and the family is in the process of filming another series for Discovery Health.
The new show looks at life inside the Duggar home, where chores — or “jurisdictions” — are assigned to each child. One episode of the new show involves a “jurisdiction swap,” where the boys do chores traditionally assigned to the girls, and vice versa, Duggar said.
“The girls swapped jurisdictions, changing tires, working in the garages, mowing the grass,” she said. “The boys got to cook supper from start to finish, clean the bathrooms,” among other chores.
Duggar said she’s six weeks along and the pregnancy is going well. She and her husband, Jim Bob Duggar, said they’ll keep having children as long as God wills it.
WASHINGTON (AP) — House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Bob Filner accused the Department of Veterans Affairs Tuesday of criminal negligence in the handling of data about the number of veterans who have committed suicide.
E-mails among VA officials were recently disclosed during a trial in San Francisco that suggested some might have been attempting to hide the number of attempted suicides by those under the agency’s care. More…
CHICAGO - Doctors know some patients needing lifesaving care won’t get it in a flu pandemic or other disaster. The gut-wrenching dilemma will be deciding who to let die.
Now, an influential group of physicians has drafted a grimly specific list of recommendations for which patients wouldn’t be treated. They include the very elderly, seriously hurt trauma victims, severely burned patients and those with severe dementia. The suggested list was compiled by a task force whose members come from prestigious universities, medical groups, the military and government agencies. They include the Department of Homeland Security, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services.
The proposed guidelines are designed to be a blueprint for hospitals “so that everybody will be thinking in the same way” when pandemic flu or another widespread health care disaster hits, said Dr. Asha Devereaux. She is a critical care specialist in San Diego and lead writer of the task force report.The idea is to try to make sure that scarce resources — including ventilators, medicine and doctors and nurses — are used in a uniform, objective way, task force members said.
Their recommendations appear in a report appearing Monday in the May edition of Chest, the medical journal of the American College of Chest Physicians.
“If a mass casualty critical care event were to occur tomorrow, many people with clinical conditions that are survivable under usual health care system conditions may have to forgo life-sustaining interventions owing to deficiencies in supply or staffing,” the report states.To prepare, hospitals should designate a triage team with the Godlike task of deciding who will and who won’t get lifesaving care, the task force wrote. Those out of luck are the people at high risk of death and a slim chance of long-term survival. But the recommendations get much more specific, and include:
People older than 85.
Those with severe trauma, which could include critical injuries from car crashes and shootings.
Severely burned patients older than 60.
Those with severe mental impairment, which could include advanced Alzheimer’s disease.
Those with a severe chronic disease, such as advanced heart failure, lung disease or poorly controlled diabetes.
Suicides and “psychological mortality” among US soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan could exceed battlefield deaths if their mental scars are left untreated, the head of the US Institute of Mental Health warned Monday.
Of the 1.6 million US soldiers who have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, 18-20 percent — or around 300,000 — show symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression or both, said Thomas Insel, head of the National Institute of Mental Health.An estimated 70 percent of those at-risk soldiers do not seek help from the Department of Defense or the Veterans Administration, he told a news conference launching the American Psychiatric Association’s 161st annual meeting here.
If “one just does the math”, then allowing PTSD or depression to go untreated in such numbers could result in “suicides and psychological mortality trumping combat deaths” in Iraq and Afghanistan, Insel warned.
More than 4,000 US soldiers have died in Iraq since the US invasion of 2003, and more than 400 in Afghanistan since the US led attacks there in 2001, of which some 290 were killed in action and the rest in on-combat deaths.
Taser International has fired a warning shot at medical examiners across the country.
The Scottsdale-based stun gun manufacturer increasingly is targeting state and county medical examiners with lawsuits and lobbying efforts to reverse and prevent medical rulings that Tasers contributed to someone’s death.
That effort on Friday helped lead an Ohio judge’s order to remove Taser’s name from three Summit County Medical Examiner autopsies that had ruled the stun gun contributed to three men’s deaths.
“We will hold people accountable and responsible for untrue statements,” Taser spokesman Steve Tuttle said earlier this week. “If that includes medical examiners, it includes medical examiners.”Many medical examiners, who are charged with determining the official causes of death, view the Scottsdale-based company’s efforts as disturbing, the spokesman for the National Association of Medical Examiners says.
“It is dangerously close to intimidation,” says Jeff Jentzen, president of the National Association of Medical Examiners. “At this point, we adamantly reject the fact that people can be sued for medical opinions that they make.”
In the Ohio case, the judge said the county offered no medical, scientific or electrical evidence to justify finding the stun gun was a factor in the deaths of two men in 2005 and another in 2006. Taser and the City of Akron sued the medical examiner, saying examiners in the case lacked the proper training to evaluate Tasers.
Chief Medical Examiner Lisa Kohler said that her examiners rightly concluded Taser contributed to the deaths and said county lawyers will appeal the judge’s ruling.
“I would not be going forward with this if I did not believe in the rulings,” she said.
The judge’s order could have an immediate impact on criminal cases against five Summit County sheriff’s deputies who were charged in the 2006 “homicide” of a jail inmate. Instead of homicide, the judge ordered the cause of death changed to “undetermined.”
Laying a foundation
Before Friday’s verdict, legal experts said Taser’s victory could lay the foundation for other cases against dozens of medical examiners who have ruled that shocks from the 50,000-volt stun gun can be fatal.
Medical examiners say they’re concerned that Taser’s aggressive moves could have a chilling effect on doctors, preventing them from blaming Tasers for deaths even when evidence exists.
Taser still faces lawsuits from family members of victims who claim the stun gun is deadly and the company has not done proper medical research. They allege police officers are using the weapon as a compliance tool against people who do not pose significant threats.
But the company has won an impressive number of legal victories and said it has only paid out settlements in a few cases involving police officer injuries. To date, the company says more than 60 cases have been dismissed.
Taser stun guns are a fixture among police. It is used by more than 12,000 police agencies across the country, and by every major law enforcement agency in the Valley. Many police agencies credit the gun with preventing deaths and injuries to officers and suspects.
At least 20 disabled activists, most of them in wheelchairs, were arrested outside Sen. John McCain’s offices Tuesday after being refused a meeting with the GOP presidential nominee-to-be over a bill to expand Medicaid coverage to more people who want in-home care.
“If he should be president, it would be ironic that he comes from a party that talks a lot about family values,” said Bob Kafka, national organizer for ADAPT, a group advocating for passage of the bill. Without the legislation, many disabled and elderly people don’t have the choice to apply coverage to anything other than institutional care, he said.
“Families are devastated because they don’t have a choice to keep people at home,” Kafka said.
McCain was not in his office during the protest. He was campaigning Tuesday in Florida on his health care plan.
The bill, stuck in committee since last year, would amend the Social Security Act to allow people who are eligible for Medicaid coverage of nursing home costs to spend it instead on home-based, or community care.
Sponsored by Sens. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Arlen Specter, R-Pa., it also would grant extra money to states that participate in the program, according to a summary of the bill.
Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, are co-sponsors of the bill, but McCain is not.
Capitol Police Sgt. Kimberly Schneider said about 20 people from the group were arrested outside McCain’s office in the Russell Senate Office Building on Tuesday and charged with unlawful assembly.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Programs teaching U.S. schoolchildren to abstain from sex have not cut teen pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases or delayed the age at which sex begins, health groups told Congress on Wednesday.
The Bush administration, however, voiced continuing support for such programs during a hearing before a House of Representatives panel even as many Democrats called for cutting off federal money for so-called abstinence-only instruction.
These programs, backed by many social conservatives who oppose the teaching of contraception methods to teenagers in schools, have received about $1.3 billion in federal funds since the late 1990s. Currently, 17 of the 50 U.S. states refuse to accept federal funds for such programs.
Experts from the American Public Health Association and U.S. Institute of Medicine testified that scientific studies have not found that abstinence-only teaching works to cut pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases or the age when sexual activity begins.
The American Psychological Association and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists also issued statements to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform criticizing the abstinence-only programs.
Lawmakers cited government statistics showing that one in four U.S. teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease and 30 percent of U.S. girls become pregnant before the age of 20.
Republicans said even if some abstinence-only programs do not work, others do, and it would be wrong to end the funding. More…
From The Washington Independent: By MIKE LILLIS 04/22/2008
The Bush administration has no plans to rescind controversial guidelines restricting enrollment in a popular children’s health-care program, despite a recent legal finding that they were administered illegally. The administration’s position could leave the issue to the courts, where several states have already sued the White House over their right to expand coverage under the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP.
It could also lead to a showdown with Congress, though legislative efforts to expand SCHIP were twice vetoed by President George W. Bush last year. Perhaps with that in mind, congressional critics of the enrollment guidelines are clinging to the unlikely hope that the new legal opinion will inspire the administration to scrap the rules voluntarily.
The long-running debate over SCHIP highlights the sharp differences between the White House and a Democratic Congress over Washington’s role in providing health care. With medical costs skyrocketing and employers dropping more and more coverage benefits, many lawmakers are pushing to expand that role into higher income brackets. The Bush administration has fought that push, claiming such expansions nibble away at private insurance markets.
In limbo are tens-of-thousands of kids whose health coverage hinges on their eligibility for the state-federal program.
At issue are controversial eligibility guidelines — issued directly to state health officials in an Aug. 17 letter — that prohibit states from using federal SCHIP funds to cover children in families earning more than 250 percent of the federal poverty level, or $53,000 for a family of four, until they have covered 95 percent of kids living under 200 percent of poverty, or $42,400. Supporters in and outside of the White House say the rules ensure that SCHIP dollars go to the lowest income kids.
But on Thursday, the Government Accountability Office challenged the guidelines, charging that the administration broke the law when it bypassed Congress in issuing them. Under a 12-year-old law, the GAO says, the changes have to be reviewed by both Congress and the GAO before they could take effect.
The legal opinion is being cheered by children’s health-care advocates and state health officials. But they might not want to hold their breath waiting for change: The GAO opinion has no teeth, and the Bush administration has already issued a statement saying it will ignore it.
“GAO’s opinion does not change the department’s conclusion that the 8/17 letter is still in effect,” Jeff Nelligan, spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said in an Apr. 18 statement.
The issue boils down to a difference in legal interpretations. The Bush administration claims the Aug. 17 letter is just a non-binding statement of general policy — a clarification of existing law. The GAO, on the other hand, argues that the letter constitutes a policy change significant enough to require congressional and GAO perusal under the Congressional Review Act.
“The August 17 letter from CMS to state health officials is a statement of general applicability and future effect designed to implement, interpret or prescribe law or policy with regard to [SCHIP],” GAO writes. “Accordingly, it is a rule under the Congressional Review Act. Therefore, before it can take effect, it must be submitted to Congress and the Comptroller General.”
The Congressional Research Service, another nonpartisan investigative research body, reached a similar conclusion in a January report.
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