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6073
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4 cases of Legionnaires’ disease investigated at hospital.
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The Illinois Department of Public Health says it’s investigating four cases of Legionnaires’ disease in individuals at a suburban Chicago hospital.
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true
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Chicago, Health, General News, Legionnaires disease, Illinois, Water management
|
It said Thursday that two of the four were patients at Advocate Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn within the past two months. The agency says it will visit the hospital this week to test its water and that the hospital is working with it to strengthen its water management. The agency says it has recommended the hospital inform patients and families about Legionella bacteria and work to identify other potential cases of the disease. Water containing naturally occurring Legionella bacteria can be aerosolized through cooling towers, showers, hot tubs, and decorative fountains and, when inhaled, cause Legionnaire’s disease, which is a serious lung infection.
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15376
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Donald Trump Says Florida had five sanctuary cities while Jeb Bush was governor.
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Trump said Florida had five sanctuary cities while Bush was governor. There’s no legal definition of a sanctuary city, and therefore no official classification. A federal report from 2006, when Bush was governor, didn’t name any Florida cities. We found one list on the Internet that claimed five Florida locations as current sanctuary cities, but the supporting evidence was virtually nonexistent. City officials told us they weren’t sure why their cities were on the list.
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false
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Immigration, Florida, Donald Trump,
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"Donald Trump criticized GOP primary rival Jeb Bush’s stance on immigration, implying the former governor allowed parts of Florida to shield illegal immigrants from federal laws while Bush was in office. ""The polls just came out, and I'm tied with Jeb Bush. And I said, oh, that's too bad, how can I be tied with this guy? He's terrible. He's terrible. He's weak on immigration,"" Trump said during a speech in Phoenix on July 11, 2015. ""You know, the sanctuary cities, do you know he had five of them in Florida while he was governor? Can you believe this? I didn't know that."" Trump was practically tied with Bush according to a poll released the same day. But more importantly, Trump seized upon an increasingly used talking point in the presidential campaign -- so-called ""sanctuary cities"" that thwart federal immigration law. Bush’s stance on illegal immigration has wavered a bit over the years, but he was known for being in favor of deportation while in the Governor’s Mansion. Did five sanctuary cities exist in Florida during his time in office? Not according to any official metric, but the Internet is a big place. Sanctuary cities There is no specific legal definition of sanctuary cities, but it generally refers to places where local law enforcement officers aren’t required to alert federal authorities to residents who may be in the country illegally. The easiest sanctuary cities to identify are those with formal written policies. The recent shooting death of a San Francisco woman, allegedly by a Mexican native with a criminal record, has sparked a debate over rules like San Francisco’s quarter-century-old law declaring it a ""city and county of refuge."" The San Francisco law generally bans public employees from assisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement with investigations or arrests unless required by a law or a warrant. There is an exception for people convicted of felonies. The term appears to have roots in the 1980s, when Central American refugees fled civil wars and were initially denied asylum. Religious institutions banded together to protect the refugees, with some cities expressing solidarity with the ""Sanctuary Movement,"" according to a 2011 paper by the Immigration Policy Council. But before then, starting in the 1970s, some cities started policies banning police from asking about the immigration status of people who hadn’t been arrested. We reached out to Trump’s campaign and didn’t hear back; Bush’s people had no comment, either. So we went in search of lists of sanctuary cities. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service published a 2006 report listing 31 cities and counties that ""will generally promote policies that ensure such aliens will not be turned over to federal authorities."" No Florida cities were included. We also found websites that had put together their own lists, such as a 2007 list created by the Ohio Jobs and Justice PAC. Steve Salvi, the group’s founder, is critical of sanctuary cities and claims to have created the most comprehensive list of its kind. It was most recently updated in July 2015 and includes five Florida locations: DeLeon Springs; Deltona; Jupiter; Lake Worth, and Miami. Salvi told us that he culled the list by looking at news reports and input from local citizens. The requirements for the list are very loose -- cities could have provided services to illegal immigrants, or have leaders who promoted immigration reform. We found a few problems with the list. DeLeon Springs isn’t even a town, but part of unincorporated Volusia County. The county sheriff’s department oversees law enforcement there and in Deltona. The Deltona city attorney and the Volusia County Sheriff’s Department both said Deltona had never had such a policy since being incorporated in 1995. Officials in Jupiter and Lake Worth, which Salvi added to the list in 2009 (after Bush left office), said they aren’t sanctuary cities. Both cities have day-labor centers, which could be why they landed on the list. However, the existence of such centers for illegal immigrants to look for work doesn’t tell us anything about whether police cooperate with immigration authorities. Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado denies that his city is a sanctuary city, either now or when Bush was in office. ""Do police enforce immigration? No, we never have. .... Officially, we don’t protect immigrants or deliver immigrants (to federal officials),"" Regalado said. Current policies The Center for Immigration Studies, a group that favors stricter immigration laws, regularly updates a map on its website detailing sanctuary cities, counties and states. It also lists why a location is included. As of this writing, the map listed seven Florida counties: Broward, Hernando, Hillsborough, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Pasco and Pinellas. The center told PolitiFact it based its map on U.S. Department of Homeland Security data from 2014 (years after Bush left office). Under a former program called Secure Communities, Immigration and Customs Enforcement got fingerprints from suspects, and if they had violated immigration laws, the agency asked local authorities to detain them. But some local officials complained that immigrants who were victims of crimes were avoiding the police, so the officials refused to comply with the ICE detainers. The federal agency announced a new more targeted program in November. In Florida, six of seven counties’ sheriff’s departments adopted policies in 2014 to no longer honor those ""detainer"" requests unless there is a legal order to do so. Miami-Dade County stopped complying with the requests a year earlier, in 2013. The Miami-Dade County Commission adopted the policy because the jail had to bear most of the detentions’ cost, and because immigration advocates clamored for the change. Now, arrested illegal immigrants are detained only if they have an outstanding warrant. What could Bush or any governor do to deter sanctuary cities? It seems like the Legislature would have had to have acted, and we didn’t find any action on the matter during Bush’s time. In 2008, after Bush left office, a bill that would have prevented sanctuary cities in Florida died in the Legislature, when Sen. Marco Rubio was then speaker of the House. The bill would have prohibited statewide any sort of government restrictions on disclosing someone’s immigration status in several scenarios, including employment or issuing public benefits. It also would have required all public employees to work with federal agencies to comply with federal immigration laws. Our ruling Trump said Florida had five sanctuary cities while Bush was governor. There’s no legal definition of a sanctuary city, and therefore no official classification. A federal report from 2006, when Bush was governor, didn’t name any Florida cities. We found one list on the Internet that claimed five Florida locations as current sanctuary cities, but the supporting evidence was virtually nonexistent. City officials told us they weren’t sure why their cities were on the list."
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8677
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Kenya, Ethiopia join expanding list of African states with coronavirus.
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Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Guinea and Mauritania all confirmed their first cases of the new coronavirus on Friday, giving the disease a foothold in 19 countries on the African continent.
|
true
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Health News
|
Africa had until now largely been spared the rapid spread of COVID-19, which has infected at least 135,000 people and killed around 5,000 worldwide. Most of Africa’s reported cases were foreigners or people who had traveled abroad. Rapid testing and quarantines have been put in place to limit transmission. But concerns are growing about the continent’s ability to handle the disease. Cases have been reported in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Senegal, Togo, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Sudan, Kenya and Ethiopia. Mauritania’s health ministry said late on Friday that its first coronavirus patient is a European man - nationality not specified - who had returned to Nouakchott on March 9 and had since been in quarantine. The numbers of cases in most of the countries are still in single figures. Senegal confirmed 11 new cases on Friday, raising the total in that West African nation to 21. Its health ministry said 16 had been infected by the same man who had returned from Italy. Among those confirming first cases on Friday, Kenya is the richest economy in East Africa and a hub for global companies and the United Nations, while Ethiopia is Africa’s second-most populous nation, with 109 million people. Addis Ababa and Nairobi are regional transit hubs. In Nairobi, the Kenyan authorities banned all major public events and said they would restrict foreign travel. The mayor of Addis Ababa urged citizens to avoid close personal contact but Ethiopia’s health minister said there were no plans to cancel flights. Kenyan Health Minister Mutahi Kagwe said the country’s first case, a 27-year-old Kenyan, was diagnosed on Thursday after traveling home via London on March 5. He said the government had traced most of the people she had been in contact with, including fellow passengers on her flight, and a government response team would monitor their temperatures for the next two weeks. The Ethiopian case was a 48-year old Japanese national who arrived in Ethiopia on March 4, the health ministry said. Guinea’s first case was an employee of the European Union delegation who had self-isolated after she felt ill upon returning from Europe, the EU delegation said. Sudan’s first confirmed coronavirus case was a man who died on Thursday in the Sudanese capital Khartoum, the Health Ministry said. He had visited the United Arab Emirates in the first week of March. Kenyan Health Minister Mutahi Kagwe said the government had suspended all public gatherings, sporting events, open-air religious meetings and events “of a huge public nature”. Schools will remain open but inter-school events were suspended. Public transport operators must install hand sanitizers in their vehicles and clean them regularly, Kagwe said, while foreign travel would be restricted. Soon after the announcement, shoppers in one Nairobi supermarket were buying up cart loads of staples such as maize flour and water, as well as hand sanitizers and soap. Kenya Airways suspended flights to China last month and on Thursday added Rome and Geneva to the list of suspended destinations. Kenya, which relies heavily on Asian imports, has seen disruptions to its supply chain and a decline in tourism, an important source of hard currency and jobs. “We are going to be hit badly,” Tourism Minister Najib Balala told journalists. The Nairobi Securities Exchange halted trading in the afternoon after the main NSE 20 share index dropped by more than 5% following the news. Mauritius, an island nation off the coast of East Africa whose economy depends on tourism and financial services, has yet to report any COVID-19 cases but said it was offering liquidity to banks to support struggling firms hit by the impact of the virus and cutting banks’ cash reserve requirements.
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10954
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1st Bird-Flu Vaccine Only Partly Effective
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This is an informative summary on the results of the trial of the vaccine against the bird flu stockpiled by the U.S. government as a first step toward a preventative measure against a virulent though not yet highly contagious flu among humans. This article did a good job of summarizing the results of the current study – that 54% of those getting the highest dose appeared to mount an immune response to this strain of flu as compared with 75-90% of those receiving typical winter-flu vaccine having a similar immune response (and at a dose that is 12 times lower than that needed to attain this level of immunity with bird-flu). In presenting the lack of harms associated with even the high doses of antigen needed to trigger the desired immune response, the article included an important caveat about elderly individuals typically faring worse than the healthy young people tested. Good use of multiple sources.
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true
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Costs were not mentioned, but since the story is about an early vaccine trial (one that showed the vaccine to have less than desirable effectiveness), we think cost is not applicable in this case. The benefit of treatment, immune responsiveness to bird flu, was accurately reported as occurring in 54% of those receiving the highest dose of the vaccine administered. In presenting the lack of harms associated with even the high doses of antigen needed to trigger the desired immune response, the article included an important caveat about elderly individuals typically faring worse than the healthy young people tested. This article did a good job of summarizing the results of the current study – that 54% of those getting the highest dose appeared to mount an immune response to this strain of flu as compared with 75-90% of those receiving typical winter-flu vaccine having a similar immune response (and at a dose that is 12 times lower than that needed to attain this level of immunity with bird-flu). In some ways this story avoided a hysterical tone when discussing a possible bird flu pandemic. But it did include a picture of workers in hazmat suits and if offered the calculation that with the current iteration of vaccine it would be possible to fully immunize a mere 1.25% of the population when a portion of that population has never been vaccinated against the flu. This threw off the otherwise well-maintained balance of the report on this potential public health issue. Quotes from an accompanying editorial, a member of the panel monitoring the vaccine’s safety and the head of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease of the National Institutes of Health augment the information presented in the article in the New England Journal of Medicine upon which the story was based. The article mentions ongoing studies with the goal of improving the vaccine so that protection against bird flu could be accomplished with loser doses. This article reported on what it terms ‘the first human testing’ of vaccine against the bird flu. While mentioning other studies underway, and not explicitly stating that this vaccine is not currently available to the public, a thread throughout the piece made it clear that vaccine against this strain of flu was still a work in progress. This article reported on the efficacy of the first vaccine against the bird flu which has been added to the nation’s vaccine stockpile. Does not appear to rely solely or largely on a press release.
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1683
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Medical marijuana farm blooms in conservative Chile.
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Latin America’s first medical marijuana farm has taken root in a dusty yard at a secret location in Chile’s capital, with the blessing of a prominent right-wing official and high hopes the idea could sprout elsewhere in the socially conservative nation.
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true
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Health News
|
A debut crop of around 100 kilos (221 lbs) of prime cannabis bud - with a value of $2 million on the street - was harvested this month from the farm in La Florida, a middle-class Santiago neighborhood, and sent to a laboratory for processing. The project is the brainchild of a curious alliance between Rodolfo Carter, a right-wing municipal mayor with progressive tendencies, and a privately-funded foundation ran by Ana Maria Gazmuri, a 1980s TV soap star who is now an advocate for alternative “holistic” medicine. Scientists plan to extract the active ingredients from the cannabis for use in the treatment of 200 cancer patients who signed up via the local healthcare system or through the foundation. “If there is a therapeutic property to cannabis that relieves pain it would be a criminal irresponsibility as a leader not to give it to citizens who need it,” Carter said at the farm, where the strong smell of marijuana lingers and security staff keep a watchful eye. Although Chile has not followed Uruguay’s lead in legalizing marijuana, it allows the cultivation and use of the plant for medicinal purposes. Cannabis-derived treatments have been found to relieve pain and stimulate hunger in cancer patients, as well as help children with epilepsy. Demand in Chile for medicinal marijuana has far outstripped supply, Gazmuri said. Municipalities from Arica in the country’s far north to Punta Arenas in Patagonia have show interest in setting up a larger farm, she said. “We are working with around 20 local governments, looking at a large plantation to optimize resources,” she said. Besides dealing with the logistical issues of growing a crop attractive to drug traffickers and only legal under certain conditions, the project had to overcome a social stigma attached to marijuana. For some years following the 1974-1990 dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, Chile remained an extremely conservative country, where abortion and divorce were outlawed and illicit drug use heavily punished. But left-wing governments have taken baby steps in recent years towards a more liberal path, legalizing gay and lesbian civil partnerships and proposing a loosening of abortion rules, as well as giving the nod to start up the La Florida project. “I belong to a generation that considered marijuana was linked to people who lived on the margins of the law, but it’s not like that,” said Carter, 43. “It’s a change of mentality that began with me.”
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11605
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Less Invasive Biopsies Gain Favor
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"This story fails to deliver the stuff that people need to know about less-invasive vs. traditional biopsies, such as: With which method are outcomes better? How much better? For which uses was which method’s outcomes better? How much better? Rather than lots of numbers about increased useage, why not give us something we can use? Something we need? Is there evidence to show that this trend is absolutely a good thing? Are there unanswered questions remaining? ""Less invasive"" and ""minimally invasive"" has not always meant better outcomes. Show us the data!"
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false
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"No discussion of costs – which is curious in a story describing the growth in use of less invasive biopsies, supposedly allowing for shorter hospital stays. This was perhaps the most glaring omission in the story. No numbers were given to back up some vague, extravagant claims, such as: ""Minimally invasive"" does not equate to ""no harm."" Yet no discussion of potential harms – either in traditional biopsies or in the minimally-invasive variety made it into the story. No medical intervention with any level of invasiveness is without harm. So potential harms must be discussed to make the story complete. Key questions about the evidence were not asked or answered, such as: Not applicable because no diseases were discussed in any detail. One independent expert was quoted, although not to provide any data-driven evidence. And his quote, ""I doubt there is variation to this in any major medical center"" begs verification. No evidence-based comparison of biopsy techniques was provided – only the vague testimonials on behalf of the less invasive approach mentioned above. The availability – and growing use of – less invasive biopsies is the whole point of the story. But the story didn’t clarify how broad the study sample was – and how representative of different health care settings large and small, urban and rural, etc.. For this information to be truly meaningful and helpful to readers all over the US, such scrutiny is vital. The story focused on the growth in use of – and therefore the relative lack of novelty anymore in – less invasive biopsies. It does not appear that the story relied solely on a news release."
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14459
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"Viral image Says Hillary Clinton told the Des Moines Register on Aug. 8, 2015: ""I will get the NRA shut down for good if I become president. If we can ban handguns, we will do it."
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"A post spread via social media quotes Clinton as telling The Des Moines Register, ""I will get the NRA shut down for good if I become president. If we can ban handguns, we will do it."" Clinton was quoted in The Des Moines Register several times about gun control in the months leading up to the Iowa caucuses, but she did not say what the post accuses her of saying. Clinton has not advocated for shutting down the NRA or banning handguns outright. The claim is entirely fabricated."
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false
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Iowa, Guns, Viral image,
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"Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton explicitly stated her plans to ""shut down"" the National Rifle Association and expressed hope at banning handguns in an interview with The Des Moines Register last summer. At least, that’s according to a viral image that first cropped up on an anti-Clinton Tumblr blog and has been shared widely on Facebook. ""I will get the NRA shut down for good if I become president. If we can ban handguns, we will do it,"" the post quotes Clinton as telling the Register on Aug. 8, 2015. But here’s the thing: The quote is wholly fabricated. Clinton was never quoted in the Register making that statement, and it appears she has not made such a statement anywhere else. Clinton campaigned heavily in Iowa throughout the summer and fall of 2015, and Register reporters and the paper’s editorial board interviewed her several times. But she was not in Iowa on Aug. 8, when she allegedly made the statement. Clinton’s first visit to Iowa in the month of August occurred on Aug. 14, followed by public events on Aug. 15 and Aug. 26. A review of the Register’s archives show Clinton was neither interviewed nor quoted directly on Aug. 8 or in the days immediately following. Clinton did make several statements regarding gun control on the Iowa campaign trail that were covered by the Register. In all of them, she laid out an agenda that calls for broader background-check requirements, including sales at gun shows, as well as stronger measures to prevent gun purchases by domestic abusers and people with serious mental health problems. ""I'm going to speak out against the uncontrollable use of guns in our country because I believe we can do better than that,"" Clinton said in Iowa in July. ""A majority of Americans and a majority of gun owners agree with universal background checks to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers and people who are mentally unstable and even terrorists."" On Aug. 26 in Ankeny, she responded to the on-air murders of a news crew in Virginia: ""We've got to do something. It's a very difficult political issue. But we are smart enough, compassionate enough to balance legitimate Second Amendment rights concerns with preventive measures and control measures, so whatever motivated this murderer ... we will not see more needless, senseless deaths,"" she said. She went on, ""If guns weren't so readily available, if we had universal background checks, if we could put some time out between the person who got fired, or domestic abuse, or whatever other motivation ... maybe we could prevent this kind of carnage."" On Oct. 6, she described her views again, in response to a mass shooting in Oregon: ""I feel like this is unfinished business in our country, and I am very determined that we are going to try to bring some sanity back, so that people's Second Amendment rights are protected — but they are not absolute, the way the NRA wants them to be,"" Clinton said at an event in Davenport. ""There are common-sense ways to make sure people are not using guns to commit mass murders."" Gun control came up again at an event in Sioux City on Dec. 4, after the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif. At that time, she expressed support for banning gun sales to people on federal ""no-fly"" lists. ""I think we've got to be more willing to start imposing these kinds of gun-safety measures,"" Clinton said. ""I'm certainly going to continue advocating for them."" Internet searches for the quote found on the image refer only to the image itself — not to any original reporting from the Des Moines Register, another news outlet or to raw audio or video. Evidence of the quote does not appear to exist beyond what was originally posted on Tumblr. Our ruling A post spread via social media quotes Clinton as telling The Des Moines Register, ""I will get the NRA shut down for good if I become president. If we can ban handguns, we will do it."" Clinton was quoted in The Des Moines Register several times about gun control in the months leading up to the Iowa caucuses, but she did not say what the post accuses her of saying. Clinton has not advocated for shutting down the NRA or banning handguns outright. The claim is entirely fabricated."
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3834
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Montana’s battle against opioid abuse shows progress.
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Montana’s decade-long battle against opioid abuse is showing progress, but there is more to be done, state officials said Wednesday.
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true
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Montana, Prescription drugs, Opioids, Steve Bullock
|
From 2012 to 2017, Montana physicians prescribed fewer and less powerful doses of opioids while the number of people on high doses also declined, according to a report compiled by the state health department and the Montana Board of Pharmacy after analyzing data from the Montana Prescription Drug Registry. The report also says that while Montana’s overall overdose death rate has remained relatively stable, the number of deaths attributed to opioids has been declining. Gov. Steve Bullock said Montana is ahead of the game because it recognized the opioid addiction issue early and acted. Since 2008, the state has implemented a prescription drug registry, prescription drug drop-off locations and increased access to substance abuse treatment, in part through Medicaid expansion. In 2017, the Legislature passed a law allowing anyone to get naloxone _ which reverses the effects of an opioid overdose _ without a prescription. Emergency room physician Bill Gallea said the naloxone law has played a critical role in saving lives. While opioids given in proper amounts can alleviate pain, taken in higher doses or in combination with other medications, opioids can suppress and even stop your breathing, Gallea said. “In our battle to prevent death from overdose, our goal is to have naloxone in every fire truck, every squad car, every clinic and school and to be carried by everyone who is prescribed a high dose of opioids, or is perhaps addicted, and carried by anyone who might encounter a friend or family member who is at risk for an overdose,” he said. “We’ve not yet achieved our goal of universal distribution of naloxone to all the appropriate individuals, but we are making progress,” Gallea said, noting that in the first nine months of this year, naloxone has been used over 500 times by first responders. Another key to reducing opioid abuse is making more medication-assisted treatment available, said Cindy Stergar, CEO of the Montana Primary Care Association. The association has been providing training to primary care providers so they are qualified to prescribe medication that can help ease the withdrawal symptoms of reducing or ending opioid use. Two years ago, Montana had about two dozen such providers. Now there’s 150, she said. Over 600 people are receiving medication-assisted treatment through community health centers and urban Indian Health Service centers, Stergar said. The number is double that across the state. Prescriptions for buprenorphine saw a major increase in 2017, the report said, indicating more people are receiving medication-assisted treatment. Montana’s Substance Use Disorder Task Force has updated its knowyourdosemt.org website with information on identifying and treating opioid use disorder, better ways to manage patients with chronic pain, federal prescribing guidelines and how to taper patients to lower opioid doses. The task force hopes the education will “help find a balance between people who we can help through opiates and those who might be harmed,” said Mark Mentel, a task force member and president of the Montana Medical Association. People picking up prescriptions for opioid pain medication such as hydrocodone or oxycodone have to provide identification under a new law that took effect Tuesday.
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13252
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"Gary Johnson Says he and his running mate ""are the only candidates that do believe in free trade."
|
Johnson said he and his running mate were the only candidates who support free trade. While his statement has truth to it — they are the only candidates supporting the largest free trade agreement currently on the table — Clinton and Trump say they support the idea of free trade deals if executed to their liking. Clinton supported NAFTA and in the Senate voted for several smaller trade deals. For a partially accurate statement that leaves out important details, our rating is Half True.
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mixture
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Economy, Trade, Wisconsin, Gary Johnson,
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"Amid a presidential election that seems to grow stranger every day, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson is looking to stand out the old-fashioned way: with good, clean political claims. Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico, appeared on UpFront with Mike Gousha, a public affairs show on WISN-TV (Channel 12), when he stopped in Milwaukee in early September. Responding to a question about how his platform might appeal to a Republican voter, Johnson rattled off a minute-long list of values ranging from honesty to low taxes to limited government. ""We’re the only candidates that do believe in free trade,"" he told Gousha midway through, referring to his himself and his running mate, Bill Weld, a former governor of Massachusetts. Free trade — the ability to import and export products among countries without restrictions such as taxes and tariffs — has been a hot topic this cycle. While it is an example of limited government intervention, which conservative voters tend to favor, critics say unfettered competition sends domestic jobs to countries with lower wages. The issue of trade came up in each of the three presidential debates — though Johnson’s poll numbers didn’t earn him a spot on the stage with Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump. So, do Johnson and Weld stand alone in support of free trade? Trading positions Let’s start with Johnson’s own position. Over the course of the campaign, he and Weld have both said several times they’re the only candidates who believe in free trade. Specifically, they have voiced support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a far-reaching free trade deal between 12 countries that was finalized and signed by President Barack Obama in February but has yet to be voted on by Congress. John Vaught LaBeaume, a spokesman for Johnson’s campaign, referred us to a Ballotpedia overview of each candidate’s position on the TPP to support Johnson’s claim that he and Weld are the only candidates who support free trade. While a collection of quotes shows Johnson has embraced the TPP, in June, Johnson questioned whether or not he would have signed the TPP while speaking to Politico’s Glenn Thrush. ""Would I have signed or implemented the Trans-Pacific Partnership?"" he said in the June 6, 2016 podcast. ""I've got to tell you, I think it's laden with crony capitalism."" Three months later, when speaking to Gousha in Milwaukee, Johnson suggested that his view that political favors are tied in to free trade agreements is similar to that of many Americans. ""The aversion that we have to these trade agreements is that they are laced with favoritism,"" he said. Despite the issues, Johnson says he would sign the TPP. Clinton and Trump Clinton has had her own change of heart when it comes to free trade agreements. She praised the North American Free Trade Agreement finalized during her husband’s presidency — only to criticize it while running for president herself in 2008. PolitiFact verified the switch at the time. And in 2012, she famously called the TPP ""the gold standard"" of trade deals while serving as Secretary of State — before flipping entirely. At a Democratic primary debate last October, she said that after absorbing new information, she determined the TPP did not meet her standards and she now opposed it. As a senator, she had the opportunity to vote on 10 free trade deals, though none as sizable as NAFTA or the TPP. She voted in favor of six. Two other deals she supported but missed the votes. The final two she voted against. PolitiFact previously broke down her votes. So, Clinton has supported such trade deals in at least some of the cases. Republican nominee Donald Trump’s position has been equally conflicting. He has floated the idea of tariffs, as PolitiFact has previously examined, which is not in line with free trade positions. In July, he railed against the TPP: ""The Trans-Pacific Partnership is another disaster done and pushed by special interests who want to rape our country — just a continuing rape of our country. It’s a harsh word, but it’s true."" Much like Clinton, Trump has voiced support of free trade while criticizing current free trade deals. In the final presidential debate, he said if elected, he would support free trade deals but re-negotiate them. ""We'll have more free trade than we have right now, but we have horrible deals,"" he said. Finally, Green Party candidate Jill Stein has a clear track record of opposing free trade agreements including the TPP and NAFTA. In 2015, she released a video called ""Flush the TPP"" in which she characterized the agreement as a ""backroom deal"" that ""gives corporations more power than nations."" Our rating Johnson said he and his running mate were the only candidates who support free trade. While his statement has truth to it — they are the only candidates supporting the largest free trade agreement currently on the table — Clinton and Trump say they support the idea of free trade deals if executed to their liking. Clinton supported NAFTA and in the Senate voted for several smaller trade deals. For a partially accurate statement that leaves out important details, our rating is ."
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7233
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Kate Spade Foundation to donate $1M for suicide prevention.
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Kate Spade New York has announced plans to donate $1 million to support suicide prevention and mental health awareness causes in tribute to the company’s late founder.
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true
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Mental health, Kate Spade, Health, Entertainment, North America, Suicide prevention, Business, New York
|
To start, the company said Wednesday the Kate Spade New York Foundation is giving $250,000 to the Crisis Text Line , a free, 24-hour confidential text message service for people in crisis. The company also said it will match public donations made to the service from June 20 through June 29, up to an amount of $100,000. Kate Spade New York also says it will host a Global Mental Health Awareness Day for employees as part of its Wellness Program. The 55-year-old fashion designer was found dead by suicide June 5. Her husband says she had depression and anxiety for many years. ___ This story has been corrected to show that Spade was found dead June 5, not last month.
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10824
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New study reveals fresh avocado-substituted diet significantly changes lipid profile
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This news release from the Hass Avocado Board, an agriculture promotion group, summarizes findings from a retrospective analysis that involved combing through hundreds of studies on avocados to find 10 very small ones that addressed the fruit’s impact on cholesterol. When data from the studies were analyzed together the researchers found support for the assertion that eating 1 or 1.5 fresh avocados a day reduces total cholesterol, low density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglycerides. In its description of the benefits and evidence the release omits needed quantification and limitations of the research. Cholesterol is one of many risk factors for cardiovascular disease, which is the leading cause of death in the US. Dietary changes that improve the cholesterol profile may in turn lower the risk of heart disease. However, it is the overall dietary pattern in addition to other known risk factors (smoking, hypertension, obesity, family history, among others), that influence ultimate risk of cardiovascular disease. The addition of a single food to the diet is not expected to result in meaningful changes in overall risk.
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false
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industry/commercial news releases
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Avocados are expensive and that should be acknowledged when advising consumers to add 1 or 1.5 daily to their diets. According to the Hass Avocado Board’s own website, the average retail price of a conventionally grown avocado is $.89, while an organic one is $1.52. A family of four could potentially spend $25 to $42 a week on avocados alone were they to adopt the release’s recommendation. There are several benefit claims but no quantification is provided. For example: “Researchers found avocado consumption (1 to 1.5 per day) significantly reduced total cholesterol (TC), “bad” low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) and triglycerides (TG) when they were substituted for sources of saturated fat.” How much is a significant reduction? From what level to what level? “Interestingly, our results indicate that even healthy subjects with a relatively normal baseline TC (100 to 240 mg/dL), LDL-C (75 to 150 mg/dL), and TG (50 to 175 mg/dL) had significant reductions,” says Sachin Shah, PharmD, corresponding author and expert in cardiovascular health.” Again: what were the actual reductions? Statistically significant findings are not the same as clinically important findings, and the public needs to know how much cholesterol reduction was found in the study. It would also be useful to point out that cholesterol changes do not necessarily equate to reduced risk of actual heart attacks and strokes. It could have been noted that adding an avocado or two a day to one’s diet would also add to daily caloric intake. An average avocado has around 250 calories and 21 grams (about one-third of the recommended daily allowance) of fat. Additional caloric intake can result in weight gain and stored fat, which in turn impacts metabolic markers (such as increased insulin production and inflammatory markers) and cardiovascular risk. The release tells us that the meta-analysis looked at 10 studies that together comprised 229 volunteers, suggesting an average participation of 23 people per study. Those are very small studies. According to the study, in its Discussion section, “Although the overall analysis effectively evaluated the use of avocados in improving lipid profiles, the subgroup analyses by health status or baseline diet are difficult to assess due to the small sample size in each subgroup.” It bears noting that even a meta-analysis can reach the wrong conclusion if studies it includes themselves had design flaws. The news release contradicts itself when first stating that benefits were seen after daily consumption of 1 to 1.5 avocados but then states elsewhere, “However, the optimal amount of avocado and frequency of use needs further evaluation along with the nutritional similarities and differences between other different MUFA sources.” This suggests that the researchers really weren’t sure how much and how often avocados should be consumed to see benefit. The news release does not engage in disease mongering. Heart disease is clearly important and that is not overstated. The release states that the research was “conducted at the University of the Pacific and independently funded.” The published study doesn’t tell us who funded the study either. Under “Financial disclosures” it states “The views expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Government, the Department of Defense, the Department of the Air Force or University of the Pacific.” That statement has nothing to do with financing the study. The beneficial cholesterol-lowering ingredient in avocados is monounsaturated fatty acid (MUFA) which can be found in other foods. The news release doesn’t mention these alternate food sources for MUFA but the study did. It states: “Specific types of nuts are also a good source of MUFA. In a pooled analysis of 25 studies that looked at a variety of nuts (almonds, walnuts, pistachios, peanuts, and macadamias), a mean LDL-C reduction of 7.4% was evident.” It’s common knowledge that avocados are widely available so it doesn’t need to be addressed in the news release. The release makes it clear that the study is an analysis of previous research and that it lends further support to the idea that avocados may be beneficial to one’s diet. It’s evident that the “news” here is the study, and that the idea that avocados lower cholesterol isn’t novel in and of itself. The release misinforms when it claims that meta-analysis studies such as the one described here are “considered the best evidence and an unbiased overview of the body of knowledge on a specific topic. ” In reality, a randomized, controlled, blinded clinical trial involving an adequate sample of participants would likely provide better evidence and less chance of bias than a retrospective review of hand-selected previously published research.
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12999
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On resigning her Texas House seat.
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Summing up, Dukes said in September 2016 that she’d resign her seat in early 2017. On Jan. 10, 2017, however, she was sworn in to serve an additional two years representing the Austin-area district. We find this a FULL FLOP. Full Flop A major reversal of position; a complete flip-flop. UPDATES, Jan. 10, 2017: This story was revised to clarify when the Statesman reported on possibly questionable uses of goverment resources. We also heard back from Dukes and added her elaboration about deciding to get sworn in. These revisions didn't affect our Flip-O-Meter rating. https://www
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false
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Candidate Biography, Corrections and Updates, Ethics, Texas, Dawnna Dukes,
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"Months ago, Dawnna Dukes declared that she’d resign her Texas House seat, effective Jan. 10, 2017. Yet on that date, the 11-term Austin Democrat, who's been under investigation for possibly using taxpayer resources for nongovernmental purposes, joined House colleagues in getting sworn in to serve a fresh two-year term. Dukes represents House District 46, which extends from East Austin north into Pflugerville. Dukes’ actions prompted us to roll out the PolitiFact Flip-O-Meter. Let’s recap: In 2013, Dukes sustained injuries in an automobile accident that she subsequently blamed for often missing House meetings. In two 2016 investigations, too, the Austin American-Statesman uncovered questionable expenses on Dukes’ campaign spending reports and revealed that she was absent from the Legislature for much of the 2015 session, even as she apparently attended several social events. The newspaper also found that Dukes’ consulting company and her subcontractors made more than $1 million over four years working to boost the number of minority- and women-owned companies working for the Austin school district, but had little to show for its work. Dukes then stressed persistent injuries and her desire to care for her daughter in initially telling the Quorum Report, a Capitol news organization, about her plans to resign. That report’s Sept. 26, 2016, story about Dukes’ plans quoted her as saying that multiple visits to the emergency room combined with a more serious evaluation of her condition from physicians had forced her to re-evaluate her situation. ""This has been a very difficult decision to make,"" Dukes said. ""However, in light of my ongoing health issues and concerns, I find that I can no longer provide the active, effective leadership that is needed to continue my sworn duties. I must take the time to focus all of my energy to heal and continue to provide for my young daughter and extended family."" Later that day, the Statesman noted in its news story on Dukes’plans that she’d been dogged by a criminal investigation into use of taxpayer resources for nongovernmental purposes. Her retirement announcement came days after the Texas Rangers delivered the findings of their probe to the Travis County district attorney’s office, which was reviewing the file, the story said. The story also said Dukes was ""allowing her current term to expire rather than resigning immediately, allowing her to make an extra $3,220 per year in retirement benefits from the state because serving any amount in January counts as a full year when calculating pension benefits."" Also noted: Dukes’ name would still appear on the November 2016 general election ballot. Without campaigning for the seat, Dukes went on to defeat her Republican opponent in the heavily Democratic district. Still, the expectation remained that the seat would become vacant starting Jan. 10, the first day of the 2017 regular legislative session, and remain vacant pending the results of a special election to be called by Gov. Greg Abbott. Next, though, the Statesman reported Jan. 7, 2017 that Dukes had notified the new Travis County district attorney, Margaret Moore, that she was no longer planning to step down. Three days later, about half an hour after the noon start of the 2017 session, Dukes joined colleagues in the House and was sworn in to serve a fresh two-year term. Earlier, Dukes explained her move in a Jan. 9, 2017, Facebook post, which she described as her replies to questions from the Texas Tribune, that after constituents urged her to reconsider her plans, her doctors ""gave me the green light and I decided to ensure District 46 had experienced representation starting on"" the session’s opening day. After her swearing-in, Dukes reaffirmed that explanation to reporters. She also declined to discuss the county's probe, saying, ""Anything concerning legal is in the process, or not, and I don’t plan on discussing it."" After we posted this story, Dukes responded to our earlier requests for comment on whether she'd flip-flopped by saying her late-breaking decision to fill the seat honored her longstanding commitment to voters who gave her the 2016 Democratic nomination before she announced her plan to resign the seat. Voters went on to re-elect her, Dukes stressed. Doctors gave her encouragement, Dukes reaffirmed by phone, and constituents ""talked me into keeping the promise to serve."" Asked if she plans not to resign at all, Dukes said she intends to serve ""as long as the people elect me."" Our ruling Summing up, Dukes said in September 2016 that she’d resign her seat in early 2017. On Jan. 10, 2017, however, she was sworn in to serve an additional two years representing the Austin-area district. We find this a . A major reversal of position; a complete flip-flop. UPDATES, Jan. 10, 2017: This story was revised to clarify when the Statesman reported on possibly questionable uses of goverment resources. We also heard back from Dukes and added her elaboration about deciding to get sworn in. These revisions didn't affect our Flip-O-Meter rating.
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4582
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Trump administration eases Obama-era rules on coal pollution.
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The Trump administration accelerated the pace of its environmental rollbacks for the country’s coal-fired power plants Monday, proposing to weaken two Obama-era rules aimed at cleaning up dangerous heavy metals and ash from coal plants and keeping them from washing into groundwater and waterways.
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true
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Electric utilities, Wastewater, General News, Utilities, Politics, Environment, Science, Pollution
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The new proposals — the latest in a series of regulatory breaks granted by the administration for the sagging U.S. coal industry and for electric utilities using coal-fired power plants — reduces “heavy burdens on electricity producers across the country,” EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a statement. One of the two proposals released by Wheeler on Monday would relax some 2015 requirements on coal-fired power plants for cleaning coal ash and toxic heavy metals — including mercury, arsenic and selenium — from plant wastewater before dumping it into waterways. The other would give some utilities up to several years more to clean up or close the more than 400 unlined coal ash dumps around the country that lie within a few feet of groundwater. The rewrite serves to “insert a grab bag of loopholes into what had been a strong national set of health protections,” Thomas Cmar, attorney for the coal program of the environmental advocacy group Earthjustice. It’s “allowing the power industry to continue dumping toxic contaminants in our waterways at the expense of public health,” Cmar said. President Donald Trump has embraced a series of regulatory breaks and boosts sought by the coal and utility industries, including overturning U.S. support of the Paris climate accord and scrapping a legacy Obama climate program aimed at pushing dirtier-burning coal plants out of the country’s electrical grid. But coal production in the U.S. has continued falling amid a boom for natural gas and some renewable energy, and U.S. coal facilities are closing despite the proposed regulatory relief. Coal magnate Robert Murray, an influential Trump donor and fundraiser who had presented the new administration with a written “action plan” of desired breaks for the coal industry, sought bankruptcy protection for his Murray Energy last week. The Trump EPA says the relaxed wastewater rule will save $175 million annually in compliance costs. It contends that discharge of toxic contaminants into rivers, streams and creeks and ponds would actually go down, owing to what it says will be increased, voluntary wastewater cleanups by utilities. Conservation advocates and EPA regulators from the time of President Barack Obama call that claim unproven and unlikely. Wheeler said his agency was releasing two proposed coal regulatory rollbacks in one day “to provide more certainty to the American public.” “These proposed revisions support the Trump Administration’s commitment to responsible, reasonable regulations by taking a commonsense approach, which also protects public health and the environment,” Wheeler said. The nation’s largest public utility, the Tennessee Valley Authority, had been trying for years to win exemption from the wastewater treatment rules for its largest coal-fired facility, arguing that it would be too expensive to bring the Cumberland Fossil Plant into compliance. The plant in Cumberland City, Tennessee, near the Kentucky border, accounts for up to one-sixth of the wastewater released in the country from cleaning out coal plant flues, millions of gallons per day more than any other plant. The plant releases that water into a section of the Cumberland River designated an Outstanding National Resource Water containing lake sturgeon that the state considers endangered. It’s near the Cross Creeks National Wildlife Refuge. The river is also a drinking water source for downstream communities. The EPA rejected an exception for TVA in its 2015 wastewater rules when it determined that the benefits to human health and the environment outweighed the costs of compliance. The proposed new rules reverse course, removing any limits on the amount of selenium and nitrate and nitrite the Cumberland plant can discharge into the river. According to EPA statistics, the plant dumped 1,300 pounds of toxic selenium in the river in 2016, the most recent year available. While selenium is an essential nutrient at lower levels of exposure, high levels can disrupt the nervous system and cause kidney and heart failure, and even death. The proposed rule states that the exception is based on cost because compliance “would likely put the facility at a competitive disadvantage with other coal-fired facilities.” The TVA said in a statement Monday that even without the selenium limits, treatment would remove some of the mineral from the wastewater being pumped downstream. On the other proposal, giving utilities more time to shut down leak-prone unlined coal ash pits, a spokeswoman with the industry’s American Public Power Association noted that operators will have to create new dump sites that meet standards. “This will undoubtedly take some time, and EPA acknowledges this reality” with its extended deadlines, spokeswoman Delia Patterson said. The U.S. coal industry, and utilities owning coal-fired power plants, have been hit hard on the market as natural gas and climate-friendly solar and wind power become dramatically cheaper. Other administration coal proposals include easing restrictions on smokestack releases of toxic mercury and on handling of coal plant waste ash. “In order to keep these plants alive they are literally gutting air and water quality protections for everyone in this country,” said Betsy Southerland, a science director in the EPA’s water office, who retired in 2017. “In the end I think it will only add a few years to the lives of these plants,” Southerland said. The administration plans a 60-day period for public comment on the two rule rewrites. ___ Loller reported from Nashville, Tennessee.
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10190
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Heart CT Scans Outperform Stress Tests in Spotting Clogged Arteries
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This release from Johns Hopkins describes results from a head-to-head comparison study that found computed tomography (CT) scans of the heart’s vessels outperformed single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) stress tests in detecting clogged arteries. The analysis came from a trial that compared how well the two noninvasive imaging techniques (CT scans and SPECT stress tests) matched up with invasive coronary angiography. A quick read of this news release could erroneously lead readers to believe the current standard initial imaging test for a blocked heart artery, SPECT stress testing, should be immediately tossed aside in favor of CT angiography, and that the switch would improve heart attack prevention. While the release had several strengths, it inflated the benefits and soft-pedaled study limitations. Our reviewers suggest the findings are of modest importance because while identifying blocked arteries is important, the bigger question is: What is the prognosis (what will happen to me if I don’t do anything differently?) and how should patients be treated? Identifying blocked vessels is part of that, but it doesn’t provide a complete picture. The release doesn’t mention that elements of the standard stress test, unlike the CT scan, can help predict prognosis. The release presumes that finding blocked arteries is the goal when really what patients and providers need to know is whether or not to undergo additional interventions. About 15 million Americans seek medical attention each year for chest pain, shortness of breath and extreme fatigue — symptoms that may signal a clogged artery. A study that definitively showed that one non-invasive imaging test outperformed another in accurately detecting clogged arteries would be of wide interest. However, one study rarely changes clinical practice. And even when results clearly indicate a newer test does a better job of measuring what it measures, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will automatically improve the health of patients. News releases shouldn’t confuse advancing the ball with scoring a touchdown.
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mixture
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Academic medical center news release,cardiovascular disease
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The release says the price tags of the two tests are similar, between $750 and $1200. But the release says it is unclear whether there are differences in total costs, after taking into account follow-up testing. The journal article provides a clearer picture by citing some other studies that found CT angiography may lead to more follow-up testing and higher rates of revascularization and one study that did not see a difference. The reported findings appear impressive: the CT scans correctly identified blockages in nine out of 10 people, while stress tests picked up blockages in six out of 10. The release further quantifies the findings when it says: Overall, non-invasive CT angiograms accurately detected or ruled out artery blockages in 91 percent of patients, compared with 69 percent for stress testing. When researchers analyzed test performance in a subgroup of 111 patients with very high-risk disease as identified on traditional angiography, the diagnostic accuracy of CT angiograms went up to 96 percent, compared with 80 percent for stress testing. Here again, the release soft-pedals concerns that are pointed out in the journal article. All the tests looked at in the study expose patients to radiation. The journal article notes that while the latest-generation CT angiography machine that they used in the study exposes patients to less than half as much radiation as the SPECT machine they used, the older CT angiography machines in general used around the country actually expose patients to higher doses of radiation than their SPECT machine, and there are ways of doing SPECT that can reduce radiation exposure. In contrast, the release gave only a muddled nod to the issue, saying “While many newer CT scans deliver substantially lower doses of radiation than the scans used in nuclear stress tests, the dose and protocols can vary widely from hospital to hospital.” It never says the average doses in clinical practice are higher. The release says that this is the first head-to-head comparison of CT angiography and SPECT stress testing that also included coronary angiography (inserting a catheter to directly check suspected blockages) and that it included many more participants than earlier studies. The release includes a pretty good description of what happened in the study. But we had a problem with the lead sentence of the release, which says CT scans of heart arteries “are far better at spotting clogged arteries that can trigger a heart attack” (emphasis added). However, this study did not look at heart attack rates or other real health outcomes. The researchers looked only at how well the two noninvasive imaging techniques matched up with coronary angiography, which includes threading a catheter directly into the heart artery to directly measure a suspected blockage. The release should have been more clear that the study did not look at how patients fared after the tests. The release notes in the lead sentence and in the body of the release that the study involved only patients who had chest pain or other symptoms that could indicate a blocked heart artery. However, it should have mentioned that the researchers cautioned their results may not apply to low-risk patients. The release got this one only half right. It mentions that the study was partly funded by Toshiba Medical Systems, the maker of the CT angiography device they tested. However, it fails to include that some of the researchers receive other grant funding, consulting or speaker’s fees from Toshiba and other device makers, even though these financial relationships are clearly noted in the journal article. The release is clear that the point of the study was to compare CT angiography with the current standard imaging test for these patients. It would have been beneficial to also mention what follows the test. The release notes that both types of testing are available so we gave it a satisfactory. However, it would have been beneficial if the release had noted somewhere the differences between the machines and methods used by the researchers and those commonly used in clinical practice. The release notes that for the first time in a trial, patient volunteers underwent all three tests (the two imaging tests) as well as invasive cardiac angiography as part of the study. While the tone of the release is measured, it suggests that clinicians should go ahead and switch tests now, without acknowledging that other experts may want to see confirmation or other kinds of studies before changing how they practice. Our reviewers saw this as problematic.
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6701
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Emails: Trump official pressed NASA on climate science.
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Once a skeptic about climate change, Jim Bridenstine came around to the prevailing view of scientists before he took over as NASA administrator. That evolution did not sit well with a Trump environmental adviser, nor a think-tank analyst he was consulting, according to newly disclosed emails that illustrate how skepticism of global warming has found a beachhead in the Trump White House.
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true
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Jim Bridenstine, Climate, AP Top News, Climate change, General News, Politics, Environment, Science, National security, Donald Trump
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“Puzzling,” says the May 2018 exchange between William Happer, now a member of President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, and Thomas Wysmuller of the Heartland Institute, which disavows manmade climate change. Their exchange calls scientifically established rises in sea levels and temperatures under climate change “part of the nonsense” and urges the NASA head — who was copied in — to “systematically sidestep it.” It cannot be discerned whether it was Happer or Wysmuller who put that pressure on the new NASA chief. Their exchange is included in emails from 2018 and 2019 that were obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund under the federal Freedom of Information Act and provided to The Associated Press. But the emails show that Happer, who was then advising Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, kept up the pressure after he joined the National Security Council late last year. In February, he emailed NASA deputy administrator James Morhard, relaying a complaint about NASA’s websites from an unidentified rejecter of man-made climate change. “I’m concerned that many children are being indoctrinated by this bad science,” said the email that Happer relayed. (Happer’s own message was redacted from the records obtained by the environmental group.) NASA does not appear to have buckled under such heat. Specific statements targeted in the email still appear on the space agency’s website. A NASA spokesman on Thursday upheld the space agency’s public statements on climate change. “We provide the data that informs policymakers around the world,” spokesman Bob Jacobs said. “Our science information continues to be published publicly as it always has.” Heartland Institute spokesman Jim Lakely said in an email that NASA’s public characterization of climate change as man-made and a global threat “is a disservice to taxpayers and science that it is still pushed by NASA.” The institute is one of the most vocal challengers of mainstream scientific findings that emissions from burning coal, oil and gas are damaging the Earth’s atmosphere. Since joining the National Security Council, Happer tapped two analysts with the institute to help him frame challenges to widely accepted scientific findings on global warming, the emails show. In a March 3 email exchange, Happer and Hal Doiron, another policy adviser to Heartland, discuss Happer’s scientific arguments in a paper attempting to knock down the contributions of fossil fuel emissions in climate disruption, as well as ideas to make the work “more useful to a wider readership.” Happer writes he had already discussed the work with another Heartland adviser, Wysmuller. Academic experts denounced the administration official’s continued involvement with groups and scientists who reject what numerous federal agencies say is the fact of man-made climate change. “These people are endangering all of us by promoting anti-science in service of fossil fuel interests over the American interests,” said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann. “It’s the equivalent to formulating anti-terrorism policy by consulting with groups that deny terrorism exists,” said Northeastern University’s Matthew Nisbet, a professor of environmental communication and public policy. The National Security Council declined to make Happer available to discuss the emails. The AP and others reported this year that Happer was coordinating a proposed White House panel to challenge the findings from scientists in and out of government that carbon emissions are altering the Earth’s atmosphere and climate. Trump in November rejected the warnings of a national climate change assessment by more than a dozen government agencies. “I don’t believe it,” he said. Happer, a physicist who previously taught at Princeton University, has claimed that carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas from the burning of coal, oil and gas, is good for humans and that carbon emissions have been demonized like “the poor Jews under Hitler.” The emails show Happer expressing surprise that Bridenstine, a former Oklahoma congressman, had put his skepticism of global-warming science behind him before becoming NASA chief in April 2018. Bridenstine a year ago told reporters that after reading Defense Department briefings on global warming, he became convinced it is a serious national security problem: “We’re defending territory in the Arctic that we never had to defend. The Russians are doing things in the Arctic that they never used to be able to do.” He said no other agency has NASA’s credibility when it comes to studying climate change and helping policymakers form decisions about it. Two major U.S. science organizations took issue with Happer’s emails. “We have concerns that there appear to be attempts by a member of the National Security Council to influence and interfere with the ability of NASA, a federal science agency, to communicate accurately about research findings on climate science,” said Rush Holt, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advance of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society. Hundreds of scientific assessments by leading researchers and institutions the last few decades have looked at all the evidence and been “extremely credible and routinely withstand intense scrutiny,” said Keith Seitter, executive director of the American Meteorological Society. He said efforts to dismiss or discredit such assessments are “an incredible disservice to the public.”
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7524
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1st child death this year from flu reported in Pima County.
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Pima County health officials say the county has recorded its first death this year of a child from complications related to the flu virus.
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true
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Tucson, General News, Virus Outbreak, Flu, Public health
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The child’s death is not related to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, the county Health Department said in a statement Wednesday. According to the department, the elementary school-age child got ill and died in late February and that an investigation has determined that the death was cause by a flu infection. “We pay very close attention to pediatric flu deaths,” said Dr. Bob England, county health director. While the current public health focus is on the coronavirus outbreak, the child’s death from the flu “is a somber reminder that other respiratory illnesses cause sad outcomes like this every year,” England said. The department’s statement said health officials recommend immunizations for everyone at least 6 months old and everyday preventive actions. Those include covering coughs and sneezes, staying away from sick people and washing hands often. “If you have not gotten vaccinated against the flu, you still should,” England said. “But next year, please get it early. The risk of influenza among vulnerable groups such as children under five and the adults over 65 remains very real and can have devastating consequences.”
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666
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Steak is back on the menu, if a new red meat risk review is to be believed.
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Cutting back on red and processed meat brings few if any health benefits, according to a review of evidence drawn from millions of people, but the finding contradicts dietary advice of international agencies and has prompted criticism from many experts.
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true
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Health News
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The researchers who conducted the review said their findings suggest most people can eat red and processed meat at current average intake, typically three or four times a week for adults in North America and Europe, without significant health risks. “Based on the research, we cannot say with any certainty that eating red or processed meat causes cancer, diabetes or heart disease,” said Bradley Johnston, an associate professor at Dalhousie University in Canada who co-led the review published on Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine journal. However, in what amounts to a scientific food fight, experts from Harvard, Yale, Stanford and elsewhere, including one of the review authors, said guidelines that could lead people to eat more red and processed meats were irresponsible. They asked in a letter to the journal that it “pre-emptively retract publication” of the papers pending further review. A statement by the Harvard School of Public Health, shared with Reuters by Frank Hu, a doctor and chair of the nutrition department, said: “From a public health point of view, it is irresponsible and unethical to issue dietary guidelines that are tantamount to promoting meat consumption, even if there is still some uncertainty about the strength of the evidence.” The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) both say red and processed meat may or can cause cancer. The WCRF advises eating “little, if any” processed meat and only “moderate amounts” of red meat, such as beef, pork and lamb - with a weekly limit of 500 grams (17.6 ounces) cooked weight. Giota Mitrou, the WCRF’s director of research, said people should not misinterpret the review as saying meat is risk-free. “The public could be put at risk if they interpret this new recommendation to mean we can continue eating as much red and processed meat as they like without increasing their risk of cancer,” she said. “This is not the case.” In the analysis published on Monday, researchers from Canada, Spain and Poland conducted a series of reviews of both randomized controlled trials and observational studies looking at the possible health impact of eating red and processed meat. Among the randomised trials they selected for analysis, which included around 54,000 people, they found no statistically significant link between eating meat and the risk of heart disease, diabetes, or cancer. Among the observational studies, which covered millions of people, they did find “a very small reduction in risk” in those who ate three fewer servings of red or processed meat a week, but said this association “was very uncertain.” “Our bottom line recommendation ... is that for the majority of people, but not everyone, continuing their red and processed meat consumption is the best approach,” Johnston said. David Katz, director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center at the Yale University School of Medicine, said he had “grave concerns” about the potential of the new review “for damage to public understanding, and public health”. But other experts said the work was a comprehensive, well-conducted analysis of the available evidence on eating meat and human health. “This study will, I hope, help to eliminate the incorrect impression ... that some meat products are as carcinogenic as cigarette smoke, and to discourage dramatic media headlines claiming that ‘bacon is killing us’,” said Ian Johnson, a nutrition expert at Britain’s Quadram Institute of bioscience. Christine Laine, editor in chief of Annals of Internal Medicine, noted that nutrition studies are challenging. “To be honest with our patients and the public, we shouldn’t be making recommendations that sound like they’re based on solid evidence,” she said. “There may be lots of reasons to decrease meat in your diet, but if you’re decreasing it to improve your health, we don’t have a lot of strong evidence to support that.”
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4817
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Trump remaking federal policy on women’s reproductive health.
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Step by methodical step, the Trump administration is remaking government policy on reproductive health — moving to limit access to birth control and abortion and bolstering abstinence-only sex education.
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true
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AP Top News, Health, Birth control, Abortion, Politics, North America, Government policy, Sex education, Education, Donald Trump
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Social and religious conservatives praise the administration for promoting “a culture of life.” But women’s-rights activists and some medical experts view the multi-pronged changes as a dangerous ideological shift that could increase unintended pregnancies and abortions. “When I ran for office, I pledged to stand for life,” President Donald Trump said in a recent speech to the Susan B. Anthony List, which backs political candidates who oppose abortion. “And as president, that’s exactly what I’ve done. And I have kept my promise, and I think everybody here understands that fully.” Most of the changes involve rules and regulations under the administration’s direct control, such as a proposal to forbid federally funded family planning clinics from referring women for abortions and separately allowing more employers who cite moral or religious reasons to opt out of no-cost birth control for women workers. Trump also is appointing numerous new federal judges endorsed by anti-abortion groups. Justice Neil Gorsuch, the president’s only appointment to the Supreme Court so far, has a sparse record on abortion, but has drawn praise from anti-abortion groups and criticism from abortion rights supporters. Unlike regulatory changes, judicial appointments cannot be reversed by a future president. Democrats say Trump is changing policy in ways that could disrupt access to family planning for some women. A recently proposed rule would make major changes to Title X, the family-planning program, including banning clinics from sharing physical space and financial resources with abortion providers. Providers like Planned Parenthood could be forced out. “It’s across the spectrum of women’s health services,” said Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Col. “They’re proposing abstinence-only sex education —which study after study has shown doesn’t work— restrictions to family planning, and more and more restrictions to abortion.” Title X serves about 4 million low-income people, mainly women. Disruptions could affect women’s access to long-acting contraceptives, such as implants and IUDs. Those are more effective than daily pills that can be forgotten but also much more expensive up-front. Eight professional groups representing doctors, nurses, midwives and physician assistants say the administration’s Title X proposal “dangerously intrudes” on the patient-provider relationship. “The strange thing about this is that people who want to decrease the number of abortions are taking away access to the very services that help prevent them,” said Dr. Hal Lawrence, CEO of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, one of the eight groups. Among the others are the American College of Nurse-Midwives and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Speaking at a recent rally organized by women’s health advocates in Phoenix, Karina Romero recalled how she had no health insurance and about $20 in her bank account when she sought birth control at a Planned Parenthood clinic in the city’s suburbs. The federal program enabled her to get a long-lasting contraceptive implant. “They have allowed me to pursue a higher education without having to worry about how I’m going to pay for my birth control, or how I’m going to pay for just a regular check up every year,” said Romero, who studies online at Northern Arizona University. The administration says it supports family planning and isn’t cutting funding — merely drawing a “bright line” between birth control and abortion. Officials say the doctor-patient relationship is protected because if a woman asks for an abortion referral, Title X doctors could offer a list of pregnancy services providers, including some who perform abortions. Abortion is legal, but under longstanding law and regulations, taxpayer money cannot be used to pay for abortions. Planned Parenthood, a major provider of both kinds of services, can receive federal family-planning grants while separately providing abortions. Trump’s changes come at a time when U.S. rates of births overall, births to teens, and abortions are low. “If we were seeing skyrocketing abortion rates and wildly high numbers on teen births, you could say we have a crisis, but this is just the opposite,” said Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services under President Barack Obama, and a supporter of abortion rights. “This is playing politics and putting people in a very precarious situation.” In addition to the proposed changes to Title X, other regulatory actions include: — Proposing a shift in the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program to emphasize an abstinence-only approach. — Proposing new criteria for federal family-planning grants that would favor applicants who promote “natural family planning” and abstinence. — Expanding a ban on U.S. funding to foreign organizations that promote or provide abortions. Professor Michael New, who teaches economics at Ave Maria University in Florida, agrees there’s a major policy shift. But New, who opposes abortion, dismisses claims of dire consequences as “false and frankly absurd.” “President Trump is decidedly pro-life and it is his administration’s prerogative to use federal funding rules to incrementally build a culture of life,” said New. “The administration is seeking to redirect tax dollars away from entities like Planned Parenthood that treat abortion as a method of family planning and toward entities that affirm life and provide more holistic health care services.” Planned Parenthood, which survived attempts by congressional Republicans to deny it funding, says the administration’s proposed changes to Title X could be another way of achieving the same goal. Planned Parenthood serves 41 percent of program clients, and operates 13 percent of the clinics. Such facilities have become a specialized niche. Research from Texas after that state moved to oust Planned Parenthood showed that other local providers like community health centers were not able to easily fill the gap. Dr. Stephanie Ho works for Planned Parenthood at a clinic in Arkansas that will have to stop offering medication abortions because of a state law that the Supreme Court this week allowed to take effect. The combination of state restrictions and administration actions worries her. “They’re pushing their views on everyone,” she said. “They’re ignoring scientific evidence and expert medical opinion.” Top Planned Parenthood officials say they will fight to remain in Title X, and will consider litigation if necessary to challenge new rules. HHS is expected to announce funding awards for the $260-million program this fall. At a time when social mores on human reproduction continue changing across the world, some see the U.S. in a time warp. “A lot of social conservative activists are still fighting the battles from the ’60s and the sexual revolution,” said Adam Sonfield, policy manager at The Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights. “That’s their ultimate goal — that some people will just give up and stop having sex.” But Kristi Hamrick, spokeswoman for Students for Life of America, said one result of the policy changes “may be that American women will find that life goes on without Planned Parenthood.” ___ Crary reported from New York. Melissa Daniels in Phoenix also contributed to this story.
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15638
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"A Penn State University study found that ""electronic cigarettes . . . are far less addictive than cigarettes."
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"Dino Baccari said that a Penn State University study found that ""electronic cigarettes … are far less addictive than cigarettes."" He's not blowin' smoke. His characterization of the study's conclusion is accurate. But it's important to note that the conclusion is based on an open-to-anyone survey that relied on the recall of e-cigarette users who may have a natural bias toward reporting that the products they've chosen to use are less addicting than the cigarettes they're trying to avoid. Comparable studies support that conclusion. With the limitations in the methodology, we would characterize the statement as accurate, but in need of clarification or additional information. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, email us at [email protected] And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)"
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true
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Rhode Island, Children, Consumer Safety, Drugs, Legal Issues, Public Health, Public Safety, Recreation, Regulation, Science, Dino Baccari,
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"Electronic cigarettes are devices designed to mimic cigarettes without burning tobacco. Instead, a liquid is rapidly heated, turning it into a gas that users inhale. Often the liquid contains nicotine, the highly addictive substance that keeps smokers hooked. Many smokers say e-cigs have allowed them to stay away from conventional cigarettes and avoid the cancer-causing chemicals they generate. Whether e-cigs should be regulated and banned from public areas the way most tobacco products are, has become contentious here and across the country. The health risks posed to users of e-cigarettes and the people nearby remain uncertain. Some products give off visible smoke, while others don't. Some of the liquids vaporized by the devices contain pleasant flavors, sparking fear that non-cigarette smokers -- particularly teens -- will embrace them and become addicted to nicotine. Complicating the debate: some liquids don't contain any nicotine at all, which avoids the health risk that nicotine is known to pose. Against this backdrop, the Rhode Island Senate Committee on Health & Human Services held a hearing April 16, 2015, on two proposals. The first, S-482, would require vendors to post the same warning signs that go with conventional tobacco products when they sell e-cigarettes. The second, S-489, ""prohibits the use of electronic nicotine delivery system products in public places and places of employment,"" just as smoking is prohibited. One person to testify against both bills was Dino Baccari, whose North Providence company, White Horse Vapor, makes and sells e-cigarettes. Baccari contended that even though conventional cigarettes and most e-cigs contain nicotine, ""vaping"" on an e-cigarette is not as addictive. He said he had the evidence to prove it. ""Penn State University, Dec. 17 of 2014, found that electronic cigarettes … are far less addictive than cigarettes,"" he told the committee. Because nicotine is the driving force in tobacco addiction, and nicotine content in vaping products varies widely, we wondered if Baccari's assessment of the research was correct. He sent us a link to the Penn State website where a Dec. 9, 2014, news release declared: ""E-cigarettes less addictive than cigarettes."" The chief author of the study, published in the respected journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research, was Jonathan Foulds, professor of public health sciences and psychiatry at Penn State's College of Medicine. He told us that former smokers who now use electronic cigarettes indicated that e-cigarettes were far less addicting. The conclusion was based on an online survey with 158 questions, some of which were designed to assess things such as withdrawal, craving and frequency of use. Just over 3,600 e-cigarette users responded. Here are some of the findings in which the e-cigs users were asked comparable questions about their smoking and vaping: * While 86 percent reported ""strong,"" ""very strong"" or ""extremely strong"" urges to smoke a cigarette, the rate was just 12 percent with e-cigarettes. * While 41 percent said their cravings were so strong they had woken up at night to smoke cigarettes, only 7 percent of e-cigarette users said they had done that. * While 92 percent said they were more irritable when they were unable to smoke their cigarettes, only 26 percent reported that type of irritability when they can't use their e-cigarette. * ""Over 90 percent reported that they had experienced strong urges to smoke and withdrawal symptoms when a smoker, but only 25 to 35 percent reported experiencing these symptoms of dependence as an e-cig user."" Foulds said it's likely that e-cigarettes are less addictive because they are not as efficient at getting nicotine into the body as cigarettes. ""They deliver less nicotine and less quickly,"" Foulds said. The highest dependence levels were seen among e-cigarette users whose liquids contained the highest levels of nicotine and among users of newer e-cigarette products that deliver more nicotine to the body faster. But even those customers reported that they felt less addicted than when they smoked tobacco. Such research is not without its potential problems, as Foulds acknowledged. People may not accurately recall their cravings from their days as cigarette smokers. Also, it was an online survey that anyone could take, although the team tried to flag people who might have a financial interest in promoting e-cigarettes. ""Maybe in five years, these people will be just as addicted to their e-cigarettes,"" Foulds said. ""But based on the data that we have in this study, we got a significantly lower dependence score"" than for conventional cigarettes. A spokeswoman for the American Lung Association said the study appears to be ""legitimate, thorough and balanced."" We also found a second study, published Feb. 1, 2015, in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence, led by Jean-Francois Etter of the University of Geneva, which reached a similar conclusion based on survey data. Said the authors, ""We found that e-cigarettes users were less addicted to e-cigarettes than smokers were addicted to tobacco cigarettes."" A third survey-based study from 2013, published in the journal Drug and Alcohol Review, found the same thing. Our ruling Dino Baccari said that a Penn State University study found that ""electronic cigarettes … are far less addictive than cigarettes."" He's not blowin' smoke. His characterization of the study's conclusion is accurate. But it's important to note that the conclusion is based on an open-to-anyone survey that relied on the recall of e-cigarette users who may have a natural bias toward reporting that the products they've chosen to use are less addicting than the cigarettes they're trying to avoid. Comparable studies support that conclusion. With the limitations in the methodology, we would characterize the statement as accurate, but in need of clarification or additional information, which we classify as . (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, email us at [email protected] And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)"
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6730
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5 Alabama school systems closed because of flu.
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At least five north Alabama school systems with about 25,000 students total are canceling classes because of the flu.
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true
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Kay Ivey, Health, Flu, Alabama, Albertville
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The city school systems in Albertville, Boaz and Guntersville have joined the Cullman County and Marshall County system in shutting down until next week. State statistics show Marshall County is the largest system affected by the illness with 5,468 students in kindergarten through the 12th grade. Marshall County plans to resume classes on Tuesday; the others return on Monday. Gov. Kay Ivey declared a flu emergency earlier this month because of an outbreak of the illness. State Health Department officials have said they are investigating more than 50 deaths potentially linked to a flu outbreak statewide, and the agency has been special clinics to vaccinate people against the disease.
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11005
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Drug Ends Spread of AIDS From Mom to Child
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This story is about nevirapine, a drug of choice for the prevention of HIV transmission from mother to child during labor and delivery. Nevirapine crosses the placenta, and studies such as those cited in this story show that taking nevirapine decreases the chance of passing HIV to a child during labor. The story failed to mention that liver toxicity and skin reactions have been observed with long term use of nevirapine in combination with other HIV drugs. If proponents of the drug say it cuts the rate of transmission in half (though no data is provided in the article), that is still not an “end to the spread of AIDS from mom to child,” as the headline suggests. The story should have included the baseline risk of transmission instead of saying the drug “cuts risk in half.” Half of what? The point of the article is that the transmission rates with and without exposure to drug during prior pregnancy are not the same (14.6 vs 17.6%). The problem here is that we don’t have an explicit transmission rate for comparison; the literature says it was 25 to 40% in Africa before antiretroviral therapy. Thus rates of both 14.6% and 17.6% would represent a significant reduction in transmission. While there is no mention of the cost of this drug, it is labeled “inexpensive” and cost is an explicit consideration for resource limited countries. A cost comparison of preventative nevirapine vs. treatment of an infant born with HIV/AIDS would be interesting to note.
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mixture
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No mention of the cost of this drug, though it is labeled “inexpensive”. Inexpensive is relative and may not be viable for health centers w/out funding from clinical trials. However, there is explicit consideration of cost for resource-limited countries. Some quantitative benefits of treatment provided, but it would have been better if the story provided a statement of baseline risk of transmission instead of “cuts risk in half.” However the point of the article is that the transmission rates with and without exposure to drug during prior pregnancy are the same (14.6 vs 17.6%). The problem here is that we don’t have an explicit transmission rate for comparison. The literature says it was 25 to 40% in Africa before antiretroviral therapy. Thus rates of both 14.6% and 17.6% would represent a significant reduction in transmission. Nevirapine crosses the placenta. Studies in pregnant women have shown that nevirapine decreases the chance of passing HIV to a child during labor and at birth. Liver toxicity has been observed with long term use of nevirapine in combination with other HIV drugs, though this is not mentioned in the article. Additionally, other studies have shown 20-40% resistance to the drug after taking one dose as a protective measure in labor, yet there is no mention of the rate of resistance in the main study discussed in the article. Nevirapine may be “easy to take”, but quantification of side effects noted in this and other studies discussed is omitted. Given there is only a 3% absolute reduction in transmission in one study cited, the risks of the drug for newborns and their mothers needs to be discussed. No mention of trial design. Some results given, but they are incomplete. No evidence of disease mongering, though it would have helped if the story provided prevalence rates of HIV/AIDS in babies born to Ugandan women. Sources do not appear to have conflicts of interest, and none are noted. The CDC and VP of Pediatric AIDS Foundation seem to be balanced sources without ties to pharmaceutical companies. How the nevirapine studies are funded would be good to note. No mention of other drugs that may have a similar effect. No mention of harms or disadvantages of taking the drug, even as a single-dose. Skin problems have been reported in people taking nevirapine in combination with other HIV drugs. Liver toxicity has also been reported, but only with long-term use. Availability is clear from the statement that nevirapine “has become a mainstay in the effort to prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission in poor countries”. The story makes clear that this drug has been around and been under study for some time. Prophylactic use in reducing mother to child HIV transmission is not new and has been established as effective in clinical trials. There is no evidence that this story relied solely or largely on a news release.
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26778
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"Cal Cunningham Says Sen. Thom Tillis voted to ""take away"" coverage for people with pre-existing conditions."
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Tillis has repeatedly voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. If those repeal experts had been successful, people with pre-existing conditions could have been left without health care coverage. Tillis later introduced legislation that attempts to protect people with pre-existing conditions, but experts say it doesn't match the ACA's protections.
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true
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Corrections and Updates, Health Care, Voting Record, North Carolina, Cal Cunningham,
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"From Republican U.S. Senate candidates, voters are likely to hear about the economy under President Trump. From Democratic Senate candidates, voters are likely to hear about the need for better health care policy. Nowhere is that more true than North Carolina, where a handful of Democrats are vying to knock out incumbent Republican Thom Tillis. One of them is Cal Cunningham, who has support from the Democratic Party establishment. The Cunningham campaign recently released an ad accusing Tillis of voting to ""take away"" coverage for pre-existing conditions. The Feb. 5 tweet says, ""Without coverage for pre-existing conditions, Susie and her family would be bankrupt. Those protections are exactly what Thom Tillis voted to take away."" Included in the tweet is a video that profiles a mother named Susie who says her daughter has a pre-existing condition. ""Without pre-existing condition coverage, we would be bankrupt,"" Susie says. Cunningham then appears on screen to say, ""Those protections for Susie’s children are exactly what Thom Tillis voted to take away."" Then this text appears over a photo of Tillis: ""Tillis voted against protections for pre-existing conditions."" Is it true that Tillis voted to take away coverage for people with pre-existing conditions? Yes. Tillis voted to repeal a law, the Affordable Care Act, that provides that coverage. While repeal efforts have been unsuccessful, repealing and replacing the ACA has been part of the Tillis platform for years. He voted to repeal the ACA, and later proposed a different law that aims to address pre-existing conditions. But experts say the Tillis plan, along with other Republican proposals, fall short of offering the coverage in the ACA. First, some background. A pre-existing condition is a health problem that someone has before their health coverage starts. Examples include asthma, cancer, diabetes or lupus. Prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, insurers could deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions or inflate their premiums so much that they dropped coverage, as PolitiFact and its partners have previously reported. The Cunningham ad specifically mentions a vote from July 26, 2015: the roll call for a vote to allow the repeal of the health care law. You can see from the bill’s ""statement of purpose"" that it was meant to ""repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 entirely."" The record shows Tillis voted to repeal it. ""Certainly, this provision, if enacted, would have removed coverage of pre-existing conditions because it would have repealed the ACA in its entirety, which would have restored law to what it was prior to 2010, when pre-existing conditions often were not covered in most states, or by federal law,"" said Mark Hall, a law and health professor at Wake Forest University. PolitiFact has repeatedly determined that a vote to repeal the ACA in full would have stripped coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. Subsequent GOP-written bills to replace the ACA have not ensured the same level of patients with those conditions. When PolitiFact reached out to the Tillis campaign, spokesman Andrew Romeo didn’t dispute Tillis’ vote from 2015. But he claimed Tillis has always supported replacing Obamacare ""with a health care law that retains that critical provision, in addition to ensuring Americans under the age of 26 can stay on their family's health plan,"" Romeo said. He added that Tillis has ""taken steps to ensure that patients with pre-existing conditions maintain those protections regardless of Obamacare's future."" Romeo was referencing a bill Tillis co-sponsored known as ""The Protect Act,"" which claims to protect people with pre-existing conditions. But experts say that bill falls short. Karen Pollitz, a senior fellow studying health reform and private insurance for the Kaiser Family Foundation, said the bill doesn’t prevent insurance companies from price gouging. The bill includes language prohibiting discrimination based on health status. But, Pollitz said, it doesn’t prohibit insurers from charging women more than men. She paraphrased lines on pages 9 and 10 of the bill, saying ""nothing in the nondiscrimination requirement ‘shall be construed to restrict the amount that an employer or individual may be charged for coverage under a group health plan except as provided in paragraph 3 or individual health coverage’."" Pollitz said Tillis may have attempted to include price-gouging protections, ""but the language they used is riddled with loopholes that would continue to permit discriminatory rating practices."" To prevent price gouging, health bills should offer subsidies. Tillis’ bill guaranteed the issuance of insurance but didn’t provide funding to make premiums affordable, said David Anderson, research associate at Duke University’s Center for Health Policy. Under Tillis’ bill, Anderson said there was little incentive to keep healthy people in the market pool. So insurers would have two options. ""They can either leave the market entirely or dramatically increase premiums to cover a very sick and expensive group of people,"" he said. ""Since there are no premium subsidies in this bill, insurance will be too expensive for individuals who are in good health to purchase."" PolitiFact reported in 2019 that most of the Republican health care plans fail to fully protect people with pre-existing conditions. A fact-check of White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney singled out the plan proposed by Tillis and other Republican senators. It found that the bill included an option for companies to deny certain coverage if they weren’t able to ""adequately"" deliver services. That fact-check quote critics of Obamacare, such as health care consultant Bob Laszewski and former Republican Senate health care policy staffer Rodney Whitlock, saying the Republican proposals fall short of the coverage offered by the ACA. Cunningham’s ad says Tillis voted to take away coverage for pre-existing conditions. It’s true that Tillis voted for a straight repeal of the Affordable Care Act, a move that likely would have left Americans with pre-existing conditions vulnerable. Tillis’ campaign is right to point out that he has tried to address the issue. But experts agree that the Tillis proposal left loopholes insurance companies could use against people with pre-existing conditions. Cunningham’s statement overlooks some of Tillis’ efforts. But it’s correct about Tillis’ vote and the fact that other Republican plans fall short of matching the ACA’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions. An earlier version of this fact check quoted an expert who said the ""Protect Act"" introduced by Sen. Tillis would have allowed insurance companies to avoid covering people’s pre-existing conditions. In fact, the bill was written to prevent insurance companies from doing that. The expert has revised her comments. This correction has no bearing on the overall rating. Tillis voted to fully repeal the ACA, and bills proposed by Tillis and other Republicans still fall short of matching the ACA’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions."
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18478
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"The Boston Marathon bombing ""is the fifth case"" in which U.S. government officials examined individuals potentially involved in terrorism ""and felt they were no threat and they went on to carry out terrorist murders."
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"King said the Boston Marathon bombing ""is the fifth case"" in which U.S. government officials examined individuals potentially involved in terrorism ""and felt they were no threat and they went on to carry out terrorist murders."" It’s clear that there are at least four prior instances -- Anwar al-Awlaki, David Headley, Abdulhakim Muhammed and Nidal Hasan -- that fit the pattern of someone being on the government’s radar screen and later allegedly committing terrorist acts. But in at least one of these cases, and to a lesser extent two others, it’s not clear that the government determined that the individuals ""were no threat"" based on the initial round of scrutiny."
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true
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National, Terrorism, Peter King,
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"Several days after the capture of Dzokhar Tsarnaev, one of two brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombing, U.S. Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., cited a pattern in which the U.S. government looks into suspicious individuals who later are charged with terrorist acts. According to media reports, the FBI has acknowledged interviewing Tamerlan Tsarnaev -- Dzokhar’s older brother, who died while fleeing the police -- at the request of Russian officials in 2011. ""After looking at his phone records, websites he visited and associates, the FBI found he had no ties to terror,"" ABC News reported. (We should note for the record that Dzokhar Tsarnaev has yet to face trial in the bombing case, so a court has not yet ruled on his guilt or innocence.) In an April 22, 2013, interview on MSNBC, King -- a senior Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee and the House Intelligence Committee -- said that pattern sounded familiar. The Boston Marathon bombing ""is the fifth case I'm aware of where a person was brought to the attention of the FBI. ... The FBI examined them and felt they were no threat and they went on to carry out terrorist murders."" We checked with King’s office, and a spokesman confirmed the four previous examples he was referring to: Anwar al-Awlaki, David Headley, Abdulhakim Muhammed and Nidal Hasan. Here’s a summary of their cases. • Anwar al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born citizen of Yemeni descent, was hunted by the U.S. and killed in a drone strike in September 2011. He was reportedly a key adviser, and even an instigator, in several terrorist incidents involving U.S. targets, including the 2009 killing of 13 and wounding of more than 30 by a shooter at Fort Hood, Texas; the 2009 plot to explode a plane in Detroit using an ""underwear"" bomb; and the foiled attempt to plant a bomb in New York City’s Times Square in 2010. By the time of his death, Al-Awlaki ""had been under the scrutiny of American officials for more than a decade,"" the New York Times reported. ""He first came under FBI investigation in 1999 because of associations with militants and was questioned after the 2001 terrorist attacks about his contacts with three of the hijackers at his mosques in San Diego and Virginia."" • David Headley. Headley, a Pakistani-American born as Daood Gilani, is serving a 35-year sentence for helping organize scouting missions for a 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, India, that left 160 dead. In the late 1990s, Headley had served as a confidential informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency and was sent on one mission to Lahore, Pakistan, in which he infiltrated heroin trafficking networks. But later, his actions raised questions among friends and acquaintances. ""A former girlfriend of Headley’s told a bartender named Terry O’Donnell that he wanted to go to Pakistan to fight alongside Islamic militants,"" ProPublica reported, adding that O’Donnell subsequently contacted an FBI-led task force that was investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. On Oct. 4, 2001, ""two Defense Department agents working for the task force questioned him in front of his DEA handlers at the drug agency’s office."" • Abdulhakim Muhammed. Muhammed, a convert to Islam who was born Carlos Bledsoe, pled guilty to killing Pvt. William Long and wounding Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula outside a U.S. Army recruiting station in Little Rock, Ark., in 2009. He is now serving life in prison. Muhammed had been under investigation by the FBI's Joint Terrorist Task Force. ""The investigation was in its preliminary stages, authorities said, and was based on the suspect's travel to Yemen and his arrest there for using a Somali passport,"" ABC News reported. ABC also reported that his ""travel within the United States had also come under scrutiny by the Terrorist Task Force, including travel to Columbus, Ohio – an area of domestic concern for authorities who have observed a number of Somali Americans traveling from there to Somali to wage jihad."" • Nidal Hasan. Hasan, a psychiatrist and major in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, is the only suspect in the Fort Hood shootings and is awaiting a military trial that could bring the death penalty. Prior to the shootings, the government intercepted at least 18 emails between Hasan and al-Awlaki. They were ""passed along to two Joint Terrorism Task Force cells led by the FBI, but a senior defense official said no one at the Defense Department knew about the messages until after the shootings,"" the Associated Press reported. The FBI and military officials offered divergent reasons for the failure to pass along the messages. ""FBI officials have said a military investigator on the task force saw the emails and looked up Hasan's record, but finding nothing particularly worrisome, the investigator neither sought nor got permission to pass the emails on to other military officials,"" the AP reported. A senior defense official countered that ""the rules of the task force prevented that military representative from passing the records on without approval from other members of the task force."" One additional case shares some aspects of the pattern King laid out -- that of Umar Farook Abdulmutallab, the ""underwear bomber."" But since his plot was foiled and he did not go on to ""carry out terrorist murders,"" his case doesn’t make King’s list. (In Abdulmutallab’s case, the National Security Agency had intercepted a discussion in Yemen that referenced the plot, but analysts did not link these intercepts with a separate piece of information, that Adbulmutallab’s father ""visited the United States Embassy in Nigeria to express concerns about his son’s radicalization,"" according to the New York Times.) We asked Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a terrorism expert who is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, for his thoughts on King’s list. He agreed that Hasan’s case qualified as a good example of government officials determining (misguidedly, as it turned out) that an individual was ""no threat."" He added that he thought Al-Awlaki and Muhammed fit the pattern to a significant degree, but not entirely. In their cases, while the U.S. government did not immediately step in to arrest either man, it’s not clear that the U.S. government went so far as to determine that they were ""no threat,"" Gartenstein-Ross said. The weakest example, Gartenstein-Ross said, is Headley, whose case is murky for several reasons, including his role as a U.S. government informant. Seven years elapsed between his interview in 2001 and the Mumbai attack in 2008 -- a long enough time to raise questions about whether he was sufficiently radicalized to have given government officials reason to believe he was on a path to terrorism. Our ruling King said the Boston Marathon bombing ""is the fifth case"" in which U.S. government officials examined individuals potentially involved in terrorism ""and felt they were no threat and they went on to carry out terrorist murders."" It’s clear that there are at least four prior instances -- Anwar al-Awlaki, David Headley, Abdulhakim Muhammed and Nidal Hasan -- that fit the pattern of someone being on the government’s radar screen and later allegedly committing terrorist acts. But in at least one of these cases, and to a lesser extent two others, it’s not clear that the government determined that the individuals ""were no threat"" based on the initial round of scrutiny."
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4586
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Zimbabwe’s government criticized over cholera outbreak.
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Zimbabwe’s new government is battling criticism over a cholera outbreak that has killed at least 25 people.
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true
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Cabinets, Health, Cholera, Africa, Epidemics, Zimbabwe, Non-governmental organizations, Government spending
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A crowdfunding initiative by the finance minister amid reports of government spending on new vehicles for Cabinet members has only swelled public anger. Some local non-governmental organizations on Friday blamed the government for the deaths in an outbreak that is spreading beyond the capital and raising fears of a repeat of the 2008 epidemic that killed over 4,000 people. “It is alarming and quite unusual for such a medieval and preventable disease to continue to claim such valuable lives in this day and age,” said the Civil Society Health Emergency Response Coordinating Committee in a statement. It warned that government failure to “guarantee the right to health is a serious violation of both local and international law.” The government, which this week declared an emergency, has said it is committed to ending the outbreak. Health Minister Obadiah Moyo, while visiting a suburb identified as the epicenter of the outbreak on Friday, said it is not time “for a blame game.” United Nations agencies such as the World Health Organization say they have intervened to assist the southern African country whose economy collapsed under former leader Robert Mugabe, who resigned in November under military pressure. Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube used Twitter to announce a crowdfunding initiative to help fight the outbreak, infuriating some Zimbabweans long frustrated by the country’s currency crisis and high unemployment rate. ___ Follow Africa news at https://twitter.com/AP_Africa
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10765
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Clot-Busting Drug May Prevent Disability From Mild Stroke
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The story never explains its headline that tPA “may prevent disability from mild stroke.” How often was this seen? How can you draw that conclusion from the records of 4 people? This story may have received a generous score of 3 stars but its shortcomings are very difficult to overlook. Mild stroke is an important health issue. It deserves more explanation than what was given in this story.
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mixture
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Stroke,WebMD
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The story states that the drug costs about $2,000. No, as in “evidence” above, the benefits in the 4 patients are really never explained. Not good enough. The story only says the drug isn’t without risks, chiefly brain bleeding. How often does this occur? This is a big issue. If even one of the 4 people whose records show they got tPA in this analysis had problems after hospital discharge, that could throw any potential benefit out the window. This is a weakness in the story. If only 1% of patients (4 in all) in the analysis were given tPA, how can such sweeping recommendations be made? The story never addressed this. We do, however, always appreciate the boilerplate language about the limitations of talks given at scientific meetings. There is no disease-mongering of mild stroke. One independent source was quoted. But it would have been better if he’d been quoted on the quality of the evidence. There is no discussion about alternative approaches for people with mild strokes. At best, the story compared the new treatment (in a sample of 4 patients!) with routine standard of care (unexplained). The problem is that the story never told us how the 4 patients treated with tPA fared. The story isn’t crystal clear on the widespread availability of the drug tPA but it can be inferred from the story. It’s clear from the story that it would be a relatively novel approach to give tPA to mild stroke patients, since it appears it is hardly ever done now. It does not appear that the story relied solely on a news release.
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28688
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Bee sting venom can kill HIV.
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What's true: A specific component of bee sting venom, melittin, has been shown to destroy strains of HIV in lab cultures. What's false: A bee sting on its own would have no antiviral effect, and even isolated melittin would have to be delivered via complex nanoparticles to be viable as a therapy.
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mixture
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Medical, aids, bees, HIV
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A recurring scientific item spread online since 2013 has presented variations of the claim that bee sting venom can kill HIV, the disease that often leads to AIDS. This assertion is rooted in a 2013 study published in the journal Antiviral Therapy. As stated in that paper, the goal of the research was to establish a proof-of-concept for a topical anti-HIV gel using melittin, a peptide found in bee venom, that could serve as a prophylactic against HIV when applied prior to sexual activity. That melittin is damaging to viruses is not the breakthrough aspect of this research. Melittin is a cytolytic, which essentially means it can destroy cells by increasing their permeability. The problem is that melittin has this effect not just on viruses, but also on important human cells: Bee venom contains a potent toxin called melittin that can poke holes in the protective envelope that surrounds HIV, and other viruses. Large amounts of free melittin can cause a lot of damage. Indeed, in addition to antiviral therapy, the paper’s senior author, […] has shown melittin-loaded nanoparticles to be effective in killing tumor cells. The breakthrough in this study was the researchers’ ability to attach melittin to complex nanoparticles that allowed the compound to selectively target HIV without coming into contact with non-viral cells: The new study shows that melittin loaded onto these nanoparticles does not harm normal cells. That’s because [the researchers] added protective bumpers to the nanoparticle surface. When the nanoparticles come into contact with normal cells, which are much larger in size, the particles simply bounce off. HIV, on the other hand, is even smaller than the nanoparticle, so HIV fits between the bumpers and makes contact with the surface of the nanoparticle, where the bee toxin awaits. Their results were promising, too. Melittin that was not attached to these bumper-modified nanoparticles inhibited the HIV virus’s ability to infect cells, but it was also toxic to normal vaginal cells. But, according to the study, that latter effect was successfully blunted: Melittin formulated as a nanoparticle appears completely unreactive against vaginal epithelial or reporter cells in vitro, and still prevents infection … This meant that by proof of concept standards, the research team had succeeded. Later research achieved another goal: demonstrating that the gel was not toxic to sperm, either. That mileston would be a step forward for mixed HIV status couples interested in a natural conception, the authors of that study argued. But ultimately, the truth is that while this compound is a component of bee venom, the delivery of that compound is a specifically engineered nanoscale process. It should also be noted that these studies didn’t even use melittin from an actual bee, but instead used a synthetic version — so being stung by live bees will in no way afford one protection against HIV.
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34788
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New federal regulations are reclassifying as safe for human consumption meat from animal carcasses containing cancers, tumors, and open sores.
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A disturbing photograph supposedly documents a recent move to approve animal carcasses with cancers, tumors, and open sores for human consumption.
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mixture
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Fauxtography, Food Fauxtography
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In January 2014, many Facebook users were appalled by a widely shared item announcing that “meat from diseased animals has been approved for consumers” and featuring a nauseating picture seemingly documenting the sort of thing that shoppers might now be purchasing from grocery store meat departments: The federal agency overseeing food inspection is imposing new rules reclassifying as safe for human consumption animal carcasses with cancers, tumors and open sores. Federal meat inspectors and consumer groups are protesting the move to classify tumors and open sores as aesthetic problems, which permits the meat to get the government’s purple seal of approval as a wholesome food product. However, that information was very old news, not a description of a recent event. The text was lifted directly from a July 2000 news article describing the implementation of new federal rules for classifying animal carcasses: The federal agency overseeing food inspection is imposing new rules reclassifying as safe for human consumption animal carcasses with cancers, tumors and open sores. Federal meat inspectors and consumer groups are protesting the move to classify tumors and open sores as aesthetic problems, which permits the meat to get the government’s purple seal of approval as a wholesome food product. “I don’t want to eat pus from a chicken that has pneumonia. I think it’s gross,” said Wenonah Hauter, director of Public Citizen’s Critical Mass Energy Project. “Most Americans don’t want to eat this sort of contamination in their meals.” Delmer Jones, a federal food inspector for 41 years who lives in Renlap, Ala., said he’s so revolted by the lowering of food wholesomeness standards that he doesn’t buy meat at the supermarket anymore because he doesn’t trust that it is safe to eat. “I eat very little to no meat, but sardines and fish,” said Jones, president of the National Joint Council of Meat Inspection Locals, a union of 7,000 meat inspectors nationwide affiliated with the American Federation of Government Employees. He said he’s trying to get his wife to stop eating meat. “I’ve told her what she’s eating.” The accompanying photograph had also already made the rounds of the Internet before this item went viral. We don’t know its specific origins, but speculation about what it pictures includes its being a cut from the carcass of an animal with a spinal abscess: Looks like a spinal abscess (i.e., a localized collection of pus separated from the surrounding tissue by a fibrous capsule). Happens occasionally. No respectable establishment is going to be serving that, though. As someone who has worked in the meat industry for the last 8+ years, I can confirm that this is exactly right. We see these things all the time. Usually, they are caught and excised by QA’s or “meat inspectors”. Sadly, though, it is fairly common that they are missed. For around two of those 8 years, I worked in an area that involved sorting the “finished” product, and I was pretty disgusted to see how often these things are missed. It will get past the people who are too bored to do their job properly, but once it hits the butcher who’s selling to you, he has a very vested interest in keeping your food clean and presentable lest he lose customers. He just wants to sell an edible product but ends up losing good product due to careless work further back in the chain. Bottom line is that consumers really don’t need to worry about this. It’s not unheard of, but if it does happen it will be pretty obvious and you should most definitely take steps to make sure whoever is accountable is held as such.
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5469
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No training, no gloves: Zimbabwe’s desperate childbirths.
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When her contractions became unbearably painful, 18-year-old Perseverance Kanyoza rushed to a maternity hospital in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare. But the doors were closed amid a weekslong strike by public health workers. With no money for private care, panic set in.
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true
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Financial markets, AP Top News, Harare, International News, General News, Africa, Health, Zimbabwe, Southern Africa
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A hospital guard directed her to a tiny apartment in the poor suburb of Mbare nearby. The midwife: a grandmother with no formal training and claiming to be guided by the Holy Spirit. Thirteen hours later, Kanyoza gave birth to a healthy baby girl. “It was a miracle,” she told The Associated Press with a beaming smile. “I feared for the worst. I didn’t know what to do after finding the hospital closed.” Her baby was one of dozens delivered in the past week alone with the help of 72-year-old Esther Zinyoro Gwena. She has become a local hero as the southern African country’s worst economic crisis in more than a decade is forcing desperate women to seek out traditional birth attendants who often deliver babies using their bare hands with no sterilization or post-natal care. Some worried Zimbabweans say Gwena’s work only highlights the collapse of a health sector once regarded as one of the best in Africa. Doctors have been on strike for more than two months, seeking better pay than the roughly $100 they receive a month, and nurses and midwives in Harare walked off the job two weeks ago. Since then, Gwena said, she has delivered more than 100 babies and no mothers have died. She doesn’t charge for her services and helping stranded pregnant women is her concern. “I never trained as a midwife. I started by befriending pregnant women at the church and then eight years ago I just started delivering babies. It is the holy spirit,” she said. “I have had no rest since the nurses’ strike started. The work is becoming too much for one person. I am even losing weight,” Gwena said. She said she has been delivering up to 20 babies a day in her two-room apartment. When the AP visited on Saturday, four pregnant women writhed in pain while sitting on blankets on the floor in the tiny living room-turned-maternity ward. The bedroom is now the “recovery room” where several women holding newborn babies huddled on Gwena’s small bed. “They need the bed more,” she said. “I rarely get time to sleep, they are always coming in … in the middle of the night.” Neighbors, relatives of the pregnant women and some of Gwena’s children, who help clean the blood, fetch water from a nearby well and cook, sat on a bench. Others stood in the packed room. “Make way, another one is coming,” one woman shouted. A heavily pregnant young woman walked in carrying a small plastic bucket, blanket and bag. Less than two hours later, the number of pregnant women had swelled to 10, their bags piled in a corner. More stood in line in the hallway outside. “I was apprehensive,” said Grace Musariri, one of the women in line. “But I have already seen four women leaving with their babies in the few hours I was here. The fear is gone.” The makeshift maternity ward contained little but boxes of cotton and gloves donated by President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s wife, Auxillia, who visited on Friday after Gwena’s story made headlines in Zimbabwe’s state media. Before her visit “I used my bare hands,” Gwena said. She asks women to bring their own razor blades, cord clamps and other items. “My biggest challenges are space, water and protective clothing. I need help, and fast,” she told a team of senior health officials who visited on Saturday. She told them she had delivered 15 babies overnight and seven more before lunchtime. One birth caused a brief scare. The baby popped out but seemed lifeless. Some in the room held their breath. Others screamed and the mother began to cry. Gwena splashed water on the baby’s forehead and the child let out a cry. “She is so big,” one woman exclaimed, joining others in cleaning a pool of blood from plastic that would be reused later. The city’s health director, Dr. Prosper Chonzi, said such home childbirth services are becoming rampant. “Throughout Harare there are a lot of traditional birth attendants,” he said. “If you go to our clinics right now they are empty. Where are these women going to? They are now coming to deliver here. There are no follow-ups when these women have delivered. It’s really worrying.” Chonzi said hygienic conditions such as water availability, infection prevention and disposal of placentas were a worry. “There is no proper management of blood and blood products,” he said. “After birth, what happens? There are certain processes that need to happen during labor and after labor both to the mother and to the child. These are now missed opportunities.” Those include helping to prevent HIV transmission from mother to child. The health director added, “I am really depressed, to say the least. Something needs to be done. This is not the way to deliver health services in an urban, local authority.” He told Gwena he would put in a word with his bosses to provide her with more gloves, cord clamps, sterile linens and other items. The pregnant women flooding Gwena’s apartment are happy to receive any assistance as state-provided services either become unavailable or sharply deteriorate. “Both my child and I could have died had it not been for Gogo (grandmother),” said Kanyoza, the new mother, making her way home. ___ Follow Africa news at https://twitter.com/AP_Africa
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2289
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World's first penis transplant patient to father a child.
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A young South African man who had the world’s first successful penis transplant last December has impregnated his girlfriend, the doctor who led the surgery said on Friday.
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true
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Health News
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The 22-year-old man, who has not been named, is among around 250 South Africans who lose their penises each year in botched traditional circumcisions. The nine-hour transplant operation formed part of a pilot study by Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town and the University of Stellenbosch. The patient was sexually active five weeks later. “To us it means we are ticking most of the boxes where this guy can stand and urinate normally, can have sexual intercourse and his penis function has recovered completely,” Andre van der Merwe, who led the surgical team, told Reuters. “Now to have children is the last thing we wanted.” He said that independent pregnancy or paternity tests have not been done to verify it was indeed the patient’s child but he had no reason to disbelieve the young man, who was employed and lived in Cape Town. “I know that he can ejaculate normally and there is no reason for him to be infertile. I was expecting a pregnancy at some stage, even though I didn’t expect it this early,” he said. Each year, hundreds of young South African men, mainly from the Xhosa tribe, lose their penises after coming-of-age rituals go wrong. It is hoped Van der Merwe’s pioneering surgery will help them overcome the physical and psychological trauma. Announcing the successful transplant in March, Van der Merwe’s team said the procedure could eventually be offered to men who have lost their penis to cancer or as a last resort for severe erectile dysfunction. Van der Merwe has received requests for penis transplants from as far afield as the United States, Colombia and Russia. “I do believe we will transplant again before the end of the year,” he said.
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12167
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"Jake Tapper Says the Joker's ""Red Hood"" origin story is ""the true one."
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"Tapper said the Joker's ""Red Hood"" origin story is ""the true one."" That's right, we're fact-checking where the Joker came from. So sue us! This claim is throwing down the gauntlet for comic book nerds, pointing to a 1951 backstory about the Joker wearing a disguise and swimming through chemical waste as the one, true origin of the archvillain. He may prefer that version, and that’s fine, because it’s not wrong. But comic historians and even a DC Comics publicist we consulted agreed that the Joker has no definitive backstory — indeed, that is one of the defining strengths of the character."
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false
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Pop Culture, PunditFact, Jake Tapper,
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"For Batman fans, the history of the Joker is no laughing matter. A report that said Warner Bros. is working on a spinoff featuring the origins of the arch-villain led to a Twitter tussle between DailyWire.com editor Ben Shapiro and CNN’s Jake Tapper. On Aug. 23, 2017, Shapiro tweeted his dismay at the news that Warner Bros. may feature a young version of the Joker, with a gritty, 1980s-style backdrop similar to potential producer Martin Scorsese’s well-known crime dramas. ""The whole point of the Joker is that he has no set origin story,"" Shapiro said, including a link about the potential film. Tapper, apparently a Caped Crusader devotee, tweeted a reply contradicting Shapiro: ""Not true, you obviously never heard of the RED HOOD."" Tapper included a page from Detective Comics No. 168, which was released in 1951. Not true, you obviously never heard of the RED HOOD. pic.twitter.com/Azf5AEHyPo The page shows the Joker telling Batman how he once had been a laboratory worker who attempted to steal $1 million from the Monarch Playing Card Company. He made his escape by swimming through chemical waste, which turned his skin white and his hair green. He took his name from the eponymous playing card and has been arching Batman ever since. But something sounded off to this fact-checker, who thought Shapiro had a point about the Joker’s past being mysterious. PolitiFact has written about whether there’s been a female Thor, and whether Wonder Woman’s Gal Gadot or Man of Steel’s Henry Cavill is paid more money, so we have some experience. In true geek fashion, we raised this objection with Tapper, saying that the Red Hood origin story was just the one with which people were most familiar. ""Because it's the true one,"" Tapper replied. Because it's the true one We’ll see about that. The most succinct reply to this came from Nick Valente, a publicist for DC Comics. ""You are correct, there is no definitive backstory for the Joker,"" he said. CASE CLOSED! But wait! Like most comic book plotlines, there’s always room for this story to expand and change. The Joker has been around almost as long as Batman himself, first appearing in 1940s Batman No. 1, when the Dark Knight got his own title after starting in Detective Comics a year earlier. There have been several iterations of the character, but through the decades he has been portrayed largely as a psychotic killer, bent on antagonizing Batman and the people of Gotham City. The Joker had no backstory to speak of until 1951, when the anecdote about the Red Hood that Tapper cited was printed. Versions of this origin have appeared in various forms over the years, with details changed. Glen Weldon, author of The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture, said that DC gave the character an origin story, but that was ""back in the halcyon days before a ravenous fanbase insisted that every random story must calcify into canonical truth."" One of the most famous modern versions of the Red Hood story is Alan Moore’s account in 1988’s The Killing Joke, in which the Joker is a former engineer and failed comedian who leads armed robbers into his former employer, Ace Chemical Processing, Inc., after the death of his pregnant wife. He wears the Red Hood as a disguise and jumps into the chemicals to flee Batman. But that doesn’t mean we should believe the Joker, because, well, he’s the Joker. He’s an unreliable narrator, because his insanity keeps him from telling the truth, and us from knowing the difference. Even Moore’s version of the Joker acknowledged that his story is essentially unknowable. ""Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another,"" the Joker said. ""If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!"" There are plenty of other variations of the story. Sometimes Batman knocks the Joker into the vat, sometimes the hapless criminal jumps. Sometimes the Red Hood isn’t involved at all. Later storylines show that the Red Hood is an alias adopted by many other criminals. Eventually, even Batman’s sidekick Robin dons the Red Hood. ""Since that (1951) story was first published, just about every time any comic's made even the most casual reference to Joker's origin, the Red Hood bit has come and gone, but the ‘fall into a vat of acid, goes nuts’ thing remains,"" Weldon said. The movies complicate things further. In the 1989 film version of Batman, Jack Nicholson’s Joker is a lifelong criminal named Jack Napier (the only time the Joker is given a first and last name) who actually is the man who killed Bruce Wayne’s parents. The late Heath Ledger’s acclaimed 2008 take on the Joker in The Dark Knight gives a nod to the ambiguity of it all, with the grease-painted antagonist telling different characters more than one version of how he was disfigured. (There’s also an offshoot movie based on Jared Leto’s tattooed Joker and Harley Quinn from 2016’s Suicide Squad coming, but that’s a different set of issues altogether.) DC Comics recognizes that their most famous villain juggles the truth. Their Origin of the Joker showed the killer acknowledging that even he gets confused by which story is right. ""Though the Red Hood story — in its blurriest form of spills and chemical burns — is perhaps the most-pointed to origin story for the Joker, it is by no means the definitive one,"" said Brad Ricca, SAGES Fellow at Case Western Reserve University and a comics historian. Recent comic book storylines have suggested that Batman has actually matched wits with three different Jokers through the years. Other stories hint further that the Joker may be immortal. The character has cycled through several personalities and backstories, sometimes insane and sometimes not, but always a dark-humored and lethal opponent for Batman. That’s the strength of comic books, which are free to retroactively change the continuity however the creators see fit, our experts said. Will Brooker, a film and cultural studies professor at Kingston University, said that the most sinister aspect of the character is that inability to define how he became the way he is. ""My feeling is that to pin Joker down to a fixed backstory and identity is reductive, unimaginative and suggests a lack of understanding of what Joker is really about,"" said Brooker, author of Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon. ""He is essentially the opposite of Batman, who has a fixed, definite origin. The whole point is that Batman can never work out who Joker is and where he came from."" Tapper said the Joker's ""Red Hood"" origin story is ""the true one."" That's right, we're fact-checking where the Joker came from. So sue us! This claim is throwing down the gauntlet for comic book nerds, pointing to a 1951 backstory about the Joker wearing a disguise and swimming through chemical waste as the one, true origin of the archvillain. He may prefer that version, and that’s fine, because it’s not wrong. But comic historians and even a DC Comics publicist we consulted agreed that the Joker has no definitive backstory — indeed, that is one of the defining strengths of the character."
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2400
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Church in Italy's 'Triangle of Death' demands cleanup of mafia waste.
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Church leaders in southern Italy have demanded a cleanup of waste dumped illegally by the mafia in a racket that has polluted farmland and earned the region the name the “Triangle of Death”.
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true
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Environment
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The Camorra mafia has been dumping and burning toxic waste for decades in the area between Naples and the province of Caserta. Ten million tonnes have been buried there in the last 22 years, according to environmentalist group Legambiente, and the World Health Organisation says that higher congenital abnormalities and deaths from cancer are “positively correlated” to waste exposure in the area. “The environmental disaster... has turned to a real humanitarian tragedy,” the Archbishop of Naples and bishops of local dioceses wrote in an open letter to President Giorgio Napolitano on Saturday. “Too many are paying the price for the arrogance, abuse, incivility, greed and stupidity of criminals,” the letter said, adding land had been poisoned causing “tragic and irreparable damage”. Authorities say the waste comes mostly from the industrial north and is dumped by mafia gangs for a fraction of the cost of legal disposal. In recent months protesters have taken to the streets of Naples to demand the government do more to clean up the region. Residents have banded together on social media to document the dumping of waste and burning of trash amid growing fears over its impact on health. The government banned the burning of rubbish last month in a decree aimed at tackling the crisis, but the clergymen’s appeal called for a wider response including a clean up, health screening, financial support for those affected, and programs to persuade businesses not to operate illegally.
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31205
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Recent seismic activity in Yellowstone Park portends a coming cataclysmic volcanic eruption.
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Our progeny will reassess at a later date.
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false
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Uncategorized, volcano, yellowstone
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Every so often, a seemingly high number of earthquakes strike the Yellowstone National Park region. Whenever this happens, with an inevitability rivaling Old Faithful itself, the Internet takes the opportunity to remind anyone with a clicking finger that Yellowstone sits above a massive reservoir of magma capable of globally destructive mayhem. A recent example comes from this characteristically muted Daily Mail piece (titled “Is it About to Blow? Yellowstone Supervolcano is Hit by 878 Earthquakes in Just Over TWO WEEKS”) from 28 June 2017: A swarm of nearly 900 earthquakes have hit Yellowstone National Park since 12 June, according to experts. The park sits on one of the world’s most dangerous supervolcanoes and recent activity has raised fears the supervolcano is about to blow. If it were to erupt, the Yellowstone volcano would be one thousand times as powerful as the 1980 Mount St Helens eruption, experts claim – although they say the risk is ‘low’. That there are frequent earthquakes in Yellowstone should come as no surprise. There are thousands of detectable earthquakes in the Yellowstone region in any given year. The entire park sits above a shallow pool of magma fed by an enigmatic hotspot deep within Earth’s mantle. The iconic hot springs and geysers — a result of the interaction between constantly flowing groundwater and the heat of magmatic activity — punctuate a massive volcanic wasteland that was once formed through the wholesale collapse of entire mountains into the depths of the Earth, as described by the USGS: The Yellowstone region has produced three exceedingly large volcanic eruptions in the past 2.1 million years. In each of these cataclysmic events, enormous volumes of magma erupted at the surface and into the atmosphere as mixtures of red-hot pumice, volcanic ash […], and gas that spread as pyroclastic […] flows in all directions. Rapid withdrawal of such large volumes of magma from the subsurface then caused the ground to collapse, swallowing overlying mountains and creating broad cauldron-shaped volcanic depressions called “calderas.” Those three eruptions can accurately be described as cataclysmic. The 2.1 million year old Huckleberry Ridge eruption stands as one of the five largest single eruptions known to our planet, and it left behind a 60 mile wide caldera. A smaller, but still earth-altering eruption occurred 1.3 million years ago. The most recent super eruption, 640,000 years ago, created what we now refer to as the Yellowstone Caldera, a massive crater 35 miles wide and 50-miles long. So-called super-eruptions like these can have global consequences, altering weather patterns, disrupting agriculture, and temporarily cooling the globe. As a precaution, the USGS and other scientific organizations have developed efforts to monitor predictive signs that such an event could be imminent. The Yellowstone Volcano Observatory monitors in real-time seismic activity, land deformation (from GPS and satellite measurements), and thermal changes or chemical signals from the gases being released (from surface detectors). While the observatory witnesses a plethora of tectonic and volcanic activity on a yearly basis — the earthquakes it detects are not evidence of an impending cataclysm, or even an impending eruption. Due to the constant heat and consequent resettling earth, caused by the magma chambers below the surface, their occurrence is natural. While earthquakes would certainly occur in the leadup to an eruption, there are many other things that scientists think would also happen in concert. Most importantly, there would be signs—based on the monitoring of volatile gases, ground deformation, and heat measurements, of a massive and shallow pool of a specific kind of magma pressurizing under the surface: Each of Yellowstone’s explosive caldera forming eruptions occurred when large volumes of “rhyolitic” magma accumulated at shallow levels in the Earth’s crust, as little as 3 miles (5 km) below the surface. This highly viscous (thick and sticky) magma, charged with dissolved gas, then moved upward, stressing the crust and generating earthquakes. As the magma neared the surface and pressure decreased, the expanding gas caused violent explosions. The process that brings this gassy magma up to the surface is a time consuming one, thanks to the fact that the magma rising from the hot spot is more dense than the continental crust it must push through. The process of rising basaltic magma, which occurs over tens of thousands of years, leads to a buildup of trapped magma pressurized by gases which could trigger a massive eruption. Such an event won’t happen overnight, however. The most recent characterization of the magma below revealed a shallow magma chamber (which does not have enough material to create a super-eruption) and a second larger, deeper magma chamber below. This lower chamber, which is connected to the shallow one, technically does have enough material to create such an eruption, but this specific two-chamber setup makes for poor apocalypse producing conditions. The authors argue: Lower-crustal basaltic melts are not expected to contribute to the caldera forming eruptions, and the upper-crustal melts are unlikely to erupt at one time, both [magma chamber] volumes can feed smaller eruptions. Indeed, there have been a number of minor lava flows since the most recent calamity. Such flows, as well as hydrothermal explosions, are the most likely explosive events to occur at Yellowstone, according to the USGS. However, the absence of any evidence for large scale trouble brewing in the immediate magma chamber below—shaking ground notwithstanding—has led the USGS, Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, and the volcanology field in general to conclude that the risk of a caldera-forming apocalypse at Yellowstone in the next couple of thousand years is “exceedingly low.”
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3746
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4 Legionnaire’s cases originated in New Hampshire beach town.
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Public health authorities in New Hampshire say four people who have been identified with Legionnaire’s disease likely acquired the disease in Hampton.
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true
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Health, New Hampshire, Public health, Pneumonia
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The New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services’ Division of Public Health Services says the four people likely acquired Legionella at the end of July or beginning of August in a localized area of Hampton. Legionnaire’s disease, also called Legionella pneumonia, is a bacterial pneumonia. The public health department says it is investigating for additional cases of the disease, as well as for the source of the infections. The disease is usual spread by inhaling droplets of water contaminated with the bacteria. Many people exposed to Legionella do not get sick. The disease has the ability to cause serious illness and death, however.
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30559
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"The vice president of Pfizer said human papillomavirus vaccine Gardasil is ""deadly."
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There’s always some group of people who have a skepticism of big institutions, sometimes big pharmaceutical companies or Western medicine as it is, and that sort of underlies all of this.
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false
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Viral Phenomena, anti-vaccine, antivax, erin elizabeth
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In late February 2018, an article posted to “alternative health” blog HealthNutNews.com began circulating, leading readers to believe that the vice president of the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer had “blown the whistle” on Gardasil, a vaccine that protects against human papillomavirus, an umbrella term for several viruses spread by intimate contact which can lead to cervical cancer if left untreated. The headline on the story cautions that the vaccine is “deadly.” The article is a misleading and confusing hodgepodge of conflicting information, including quotes from medical professionals taken out of context and purposely mischaracterized. For example, the “Pfizer vice president” referenced in the headline is Dr. Peter Rost, who was not the vice president but a vice president of marketing for Pfizer, and who was fired in 2005 after a public skirmish with his employer in which he claimed to be a whistleblower over drug pricing. Of course, it’s unclear how a an executive would “blow the whistle” on a product his company doesn’t make anyway — Gardisil is manufactured by Merck, not Pfizer. The HealthNutNews.com story contradicts its own headline within the first two paragraphs: The former vice president of Pfizer, Dr. Peter Rost, can be seen in the video clip below, discussing what many of us have been saying for years: the Gardasil vaccine is dangerous and Big Pharma just wants to keep people unhealthy. The clip below, taken from the yet to be released “One More Girl” documentary – features Dr. Rost revealing how vaccines and Big Pharma drugs are designed to keep people in a state of dis-ease. NOTE: Dr. Rost doesn’t directly say “Gardasil is dangerous” but he’s discussing the vaccine in the documentary “Gardasil: One More Girl.” Again, the topic IS THE GARDASIL VACCINE. Although he might not use the words, that vaccine is the topic of the interview. In the roughly two-minute video embedded in the story, Rost never mentions Gardasil or any vaccine at all. Instead, he appears to be talking in general terms about his views on the pharmaceutical industry’s “buying influence” over academic institutions and building too-cozy relationships with researchers who should be unbiased in testing drugs — hardly an earth-shattering revelation about a specific vaccine or treatment. The article also contains two quotes from two medical publishing professionals, neither of whom was talking about vaccines or their efficacy: “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.” – Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and longtime editor-in-chief of the New England Medical Journal (NEMJ) “ “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.” – Dr. Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of the Lancet – considered to be one of the most well respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world. Both Angell and Horton edit two prominent medical journals, and both have written editorials that criticize scientific studies and concerns over conflicts of interest created by relationships between researchers and pharmaceutical companies. Neither mentioned vaccines, however. In an e-mail, Horton told us: Yes, this is a wonderful example of selective quotation. I believe that quote is taken from a report of a meeting I attended and wrote about. “The case against science” is one extreme view that is worrying scientists because of a concern about the reproducibility of some studies. We have to face up to criticisms of science today in order to defeat those criticisms. Angell’s quote was taken from a 2015 op-ed in the New York Review of Books, in which she wrote: The problems I’ve discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of TheNew England Journal of Medicine. One result of the pervasive bias is that physicians learn to practice a very drug-intensive style of medicine. Even when changes in lifestyle would be more effective, doctors and their patients often believe that for every ailment and discontent there is a drug. Physicians are also led to believe that the newest, most expensive brand-name drugs are superior to older drugs or generics, even though there is seldom any evidence to that effect because sponsors do not usually compare their drugs with older drugs at equivalent doses. In addition, physicians, swayed by prestigious medical school faculty, learn to prescribe drugs for off-label uses without good evidence of effectiveness. This fear-mongering about alleged dangers of HPV vaccines is not based in any fact. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the vaccines are safe for most of the public, though (like any drug) they may have side effects, or in rare cases, may result in an allergic reaction. It’s not the first time a vaccine has been falsely accused of causing ailments, when they in fact guard the general public from outbreaks — a previous HealthNutNews.com story falsely reported that vaccines were causing 2018’s deadly influenza season. HPV vaccines have been controversial in part because they guard young girls against a sexually-transmitted virus that can lead to cervical cancer; thus, critics often blur the line between religious and anti-science hysteria when discouraging their use. As Joseph Uscinski, associate professor of political science at the University of Miami, pointed out, paranoia about this particular vaccine is enabled by parents who are afraid that providing girls with the vaccine will somehow promote promiscuity: When they hear that the vaccine is actually bad for the kids, it sort of makes them feel it’s okay not to give it to them. He pointed to 2011, when former Minnesota representative and far-right Christian activist Michele Bachmann attacked then-presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry for an HPV vaccine mandate, falsely saying it causes “mental retardation.” Uscinski said:
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35596
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COVID-19 could lose its epidemic status in the United States because of declining coronavirus death rates according to CDC data.
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The “epidemic threshold” refers to the point at which the observed proportion of deaths is significantly higher than would be expected at that time of the year in the absence of substantial influenza, and now COVID-related mortality. This “epidemic threshold” wording only refers to deaths related to COVID-19, which are a lagging indicator of disease activity. The death data is also something that gets filled in as more data – in this case death certificates – are added.
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false
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Medical, COVID-19
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As the United States reported a record increase in the number of coronavirus infections during the middle of July 2020, online reports claimed a decreasing percentage of deaths attributable to the disease meant it would no longer be classified as an epidemic by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Snopes readers asked us to investigate these claims, and we found they both misrepresented death-related data and reached incorrect conclusions. Seeking to downplay the severity of COVID-19, Just the News, a conservative-leaning website, cited the CDC’s COVIDView weekly report — ending on July 4, 2020 — as the source of their claim that the declining numbers of deaths over the previous few weeks suggested that COVID-19 would cease to qualify as an epidemic in the coming weeks. They said the CDC labels an outbreak as an epidemic if: “… the number of deaths attributable to the disease exceeds a certain percentage of total deaths per week.” But this is not entirely correct. First, it should be noted that as of this writing (in mid-July 2020), the CDC has made no announcements about COVID-19’s epidemic classification. Second, the prevalence of the disease, not the number of deaths, is considered to be the main indicator of its epidemic status, according to the CDC: “Epidemic refers to an increase, often sudden, in the number of cases of a disease above what is normally expected in that population in that area.” Just the News reported: CDC data indicate that deaths from [pneumonia, influenza, and COVID-19] began skyrocketing in the country around the second week of March, hitting a peak around early May and then plummeting quickly after that. The latest data show that the percentage of deaths in the country attributable to those factors had as of the last week in June reached its lowest point since the end of last year, becoming “equal to the [current] epidemic threshold of 5.9%,” the CDC said. The agency notes that the official tally of deaths “will likely change as more death certificates are processed, particularly for recent weeks.” Yet the number of deaths attributable to COVID-19, pneumonia and influenza have been declining for 10 straight weeks, the agency said on its website, suggesting COVID-19 may cease to qualify as an epidemic in the next few weeks. The CDC data for the week ending July 4 did indeed state that the percentage of deaths attributed to pneumonia, influenza, or COVID-19 — also known as PIC — based on current death certificate data, “decreased from 6.9% during week 26 to 5.5% during week 27, representing the eleventh week of a declining percentage of deaths.” Snopes asked the CDC what they meant by an “epidemic threshold,” and if this data was accurate. CDC spokesperson Kristen Nordlund told us:
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2888
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China reports second H7N9 bird flu death in a week.
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China reported one more death from the H7N9 strain of bird flu in southwestern Guizhou province, state news agency Xinhua said on Monday, in the second death from the virus in the past week.
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true
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Health News
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A 38-year-old man from Zunyi city died last Thursday, Xinhua said, citing health authorities in Guizhou. Xinhua said it was the first human case of H7N9 in Guizhou this year. Last Friday, China said a 38-year-old man in eastern Fujian province died from H7N9. The World Health Organisation (WHO) said last week that seven more people in China had been found to be infected with the H7N9 strain of bird flu in the previous week, taking to around 150 the total number of cases so far. The H7N9 bird flu emerged last year in China and has infected around 150 people there and in Taiwan and Hong Kong, killing at least 45 of them. Experts say there is no evidence as yet of any easy or sustained person-to person transmission of the strain. But an early scientific analysis of probable transmission of the new flu from person to person, published last August, gave the strongest proof yet that it can at times jump between people and so could cause a human pandemic. The WHO said the source of the human infections was still being investigated. It stressed that it does not advise any special screening for people going in and out of China, nor does it recommend any travel or trade curbs.
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8579
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'Hardest day': New York's Cuomo sees virus slowing despite record death toll.
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Even as medical teams struggled to save an onslaught of gravely ill coronavirus patients and deaths hit new highs, the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations seemed to be leveling off in New York state, the U.S. epicenter of the pandemic, Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Tuesday.
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true
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Health News
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New York was one of several states, along with the nation as a whole, to post their highest daily loss of life from COVID-19, the highly contagious respiratory disease caused by the virus. A staggering 731 fatalities were reported in Cuomo’s state alone. But early statistical signs the crisis might be peaking provided little comfort to weary doctors and nurses on the front lines of the outbreak, as hospital emergency rooms and intensive care units overflowing with COVID-19 patients. “People are just so incredibly sick ... incredibly sick in a way that I’ve never experienced or seen before,” said Jacqueline Callahan, 33, a New York City nurse who spoke to Reuters on condition she not identify the hospital where she works. “So every day is, honestly, the hardest day,” she said. “You just don’t know how it’s going to change, and you just hope it keeps getting better, but - you know - we haven’t turned that corner fully yet.” In Wisconsin, voters on Tuesday braved the coronavirus outbreak to wait 6 feet (1.8 m) apart in lines for hours and cast ballots in the state’s presidential primary and local elections. For the United States, the tally of known coronavirus infections approached 400,000 on Tuesday, with the number of deaths surpassing 12,700 in a record single-day jump of more than 1,800 nationwide. New York state accounted for more than a third of U.S. confirmed coronavirus cases to date, and nearly half the cumulative death toll - 5,489 as of Tuesday. But Cuomo said the rising number of deaths was a “lagging indicator” coming days or weeks after the onset of infections. He pointed instead to slowing rates of coronavirus hospitalizations, intensive care admissions and ventilator intubations as signs social distancing measures imposed last month were working. The governors of Illinois and Louisiana - two other hot spots in the U.S. pandemic - likewise paired reports of record jumps in COVID-19 deaths with data suggesting the contagion may be reaching a plateau. The messages seemed calibrated to convey a sense of hope while urging the public to abide strictly by stay-at-home orders imposed by governors of 42 states. “Let’s not get complacent,” Cuomo told a news conference. “Social distancing is working. ... That’s why you see those numbers coming down.” Across the country, California Governor Gavin Newsom said the infection curve in his state - the first to impose stay-at-home orders - was “bending but it’s also stretching,” with the virus outbreak there expected to peak in mid- to late May. “The curve continues to rise, but now it is slower,” he told a news briefing. In another glimmer of good news, the U.S. surgeon general, Jerome Adams, said on Tuesday the pandemic may end up killing fewer Americans than the range of 100,000 to 240,000 projected earlier by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The latest research model from the University of Washington - one of several cited by leading health authorities - has forecast U.S. coronavirus deaths totaling fewer than 82,000 by Aug. 4. Adams, who is black, also acknowledged early data showing African Americans more likely to die from COVID-19, highlighting longstanding disparities in health and inequalities in access to medical care. The steps to curb the pandemic have hammered the U.S. economy, closing many businesses while unemployment soars. Trump reiterated at a White House briefing he wanted to reopen the U.S. economy soon. “We want to get it open soon, that’s why I think maybe we’re getting to the very top of the curve,” Trump said. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose city is the focal point of the state’s outbreak, said it was too early to declare a corner had been turned but cited encouraging developments. “The number of people showing up in our hospitals who need a ventilator - that situation has improved a bit in recent days,” he said. In the nation’s second-largest city, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti on Tuesday ordered workers providing “non-medical” essential services, such as supermarket employees, wear face coverings while on the job. The order, which takes effect on Friday also requires customers of grocery stores and other essential businesses to likewise wear face coverings. That will come as some relief to Tomas Flores, a grocery worker at Northgate Market in Los Angeles, who like many delivery workers, grocery staff and cleaners, doesn’t have a stay-at-home option. “I do worry,” Flores said, hours before Garcetti’s order. “I ask God to watch over me when I leave my home and to take care of me at work, but I feel the need to come because many families depend on us,” he said. “Not only my family depends on me because I must earn money to bring home, but many people depend on the work that I do.” Graphic: U.S. coronavirus, tmsnrt.rs/2w7hX9T
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27866
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"A child suffocated while playing a ""Chubby Bunny"" marshmallow-stuffing game. "
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Account of a child's death while playing the 'Chubby Bunny' marshmallow-stuffing game.
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true
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Horrors, ASP Article, deaths, marshmallows
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Actual occurrences can sometimes take on folkloric lives of their own, making the shift from news stories to cautionary tales through emotional responses to elements of those events. That was the case with the 4 June 1999 death of 12-year-old Catherine “Casey” Fish, who did indeed die while playing the marshmallow-stuffing game known as “Chubby Bunny” — descriptions of her death have become part of the cautionary lore spread among parents. The rules of “Chubby Bunny” require competitors to enunciate that phrase with marshmallows stuffed in their mouths. No swallowing or chewing is allowed, and any participant who gags, coughs, or spits is “out” of the game. The winner is whichever child manages to utter the expression through the largest number of marshmallows. Casey Fish choked on four marshmallows and collapsed during the annual Care Fair held at Hoffman Elementary School, a grade school in Chicago’s North Shore area, and died at the Glenbrook Hospital a few hours later. The “Chubby Bunny” competition was to have been part of the day’s activities and would have been supervised by a teacher. However, Casey began playing the game with some of her friends when her teacher momentarily left the area ten minutes before the scheduled start of the “Chubby Bunny” competition to have a word with a janitor. As Casey choked, the teacher was summoned back to the room, but he arrived too late to head off the youngster’s death. Casey’s death was reported by the media at the time of the incident. But, unlike many news stories about the death of a child, the deceased sixth-grader’s story was told and retold in ensuing months, primarily via The Oprah Winfrey Show, which talked about the case (including airing interviews with the distraught parents) in January, March, and June 2000. The tale of how Casey’s life ended continued to surface in the news as her parents pursued a civil suit against the school district, asserting that a failure to properly supervise the children led to the death of their daughter. (In 2005, her parents settled their lawsuit for $2 million.) All of this additional attention served to keep the story in circulation. The folkloric shift this real-life tragedy has taken involves the mode of death. While a very real youngster did indeed lose her life through playing “Chubby Bunny,” she did so through choking on the intact confections in her mouth, not (as developing lore would have it) via the marshmallows’ somehow breaking down to form a windpipe-clogging glue. In the example quoted above, the bonbons were said to have “emulsified” — that is, turned into a liquid mass. Another Internet-spread description of the death says “The marshmallows were heated in the mouth and throat and effectively turned into a sticky enough substance that it could not be removed by conventional attempts at first aid.” Yet another version claims that “The marshmallows, warming-up to body temperature, took on the form of her air passage, and choked her to death.” We know the marshmallows did not eventually turn into a sticky, fatal mass after Casey held them in her mouth for a while because, during the lawsuit brought by Casey’s parents, Casey’s best friend testified seeing her pal’s lips turn purple just a few seconds after she had put the marshmallows into her mouth. While marshmallows can be quickly melted into a thick liquid, goopy substance in a pot on the stove (as anyone who has made Rice Krispies squares will attest), the temperature inside the human mouth is not sufficient to reduce them to that state. Absent chewing or licking, a marshmallow can be held in one’s mouth approximately 15 minutes before it entirely disappears, its bulk gradually dissolving and being swallowed across the span of that quarter hour. At no point in that process does the resultant fluid become thick or gluey — it is thin, watery, and easily swallowed. The danger presented by the game comes not from the marshmallows being rendered into a suffocating goo in the human mouth by the heat of that environment, but from their bulk. In the zeal to best others, a child may stuff more of the confections into his mouth than he can cope with, potentially lodging one in his throat where it will block his windpipe the way a cork would. It is not any special “melting” property inherent to marshmallows that makes the game hazardous, but rather that the marshmallows take up so much space, and their consistency makes them difficult to remove either via the Heimlich maneuver or with medical instruments. On 13 September 2006, another “Chubby Bunny” death occurred when a 32-year-old Janet Rudd choked on a marshmallow and collapsed while participating in the game at a fair in London, Ontario. Emergency crews were unable to remove the blockage from her throat at the scene; she was taken to a hospital where she was revived, but she died later that evening.
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"46 percent of women between the age of 16 to 24 despise sexual contact"" in Japan."
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"Ansari said, ""46 percent of women between the age of 16 to 24 despise sexual contact"" in Japan. Despise seems a slightly bold word for it. Still, the surveys on this question all point to a healthy proportion of the young Japanese population having little interest in sex, relationships and dating, and one survey in particular reflects what Ansari said. Experts say Ansari had it right."
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true
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Sexuality, PunditFact, Aziz Ansari,
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"Aziz Ansari departs from the usual comedian slapstick in his first book, Modern Romance, teaming up with a sociologist and traveling overseas to examine the science of how people date in the Internet-at-your-fingertips age. The academic effort intrigued The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart during his June 16 interview with Ansari. Stewart asked his former Daily Show intern if he learned anything shocking during his time reporting for the book. Ansari zeroed in on how dating culture in Japan wasn’t what he expected. ""Well, when we went to Japan, I definitely had this thought of like, ‘Oh, that’s, like, such a technologically advanced culture, they're probably like on the cutting edge of whatever online dating or apps. And then you get there and you realize, I read all these articles, there’s like a crisis there,"" he said. ""And like there was some insane statistic, like, 46 percent of women between the age of 16 to 24 despise sexual contact. And 25 percent of the guys in that same age. ""Despise. Despise. Like, that is like, an aggressive word."" Ansari’s claim about nearly half of Japanese young women not being interested in sex also struck us as incredibly high, so we decided to check it out. What his book says In Modern Romance, Ansari spotlights international cultures in three cities that offer wildly different perspectives on dating: Paris, where relationships are more casual and similar to other European countries; Buenos Aires, which he describes as ""romantically aggressive;"" and Tokyo, where a lack of romance among young people amid falling marriage rates and birthrates has the government on edge. Japan is going through ""a crisis of sorts,"" and leaders are trying to intervene by offering subsidies for parents with kids and throwing state-funded dating events. Ansari brings up the figure about young women not being into sex in his book with a host of other scary statistics, writing, ""In 2013 a whopping 45 percent of women aged 16 to 24 ‘were not interested in or despised sexual contact,’ and more than a quarter of men felt the same way."" Ansari’s coauthor, New York University sociology professor Eric Klinenberg, showed PunditFact by email that the statistic is also cited in 2013 stories about Japanese young people’s disinterest in sex in the Guardian and Slate. Just one problem for English speakers: The source for the statistic is a survey by the Japan Family Planning Association and written in Japanese. PunditFact doesn’t know Japanese, but Kumiko Endo, a Japanese-American academic, does. Endo helped Ansari and Klinenberg navigate the complex story of Japan’s changing relationship norms for Modern Romance. A 34-year-old single woman born and raised in Japan, she said it makes sense why she chose to focus on the identity of Japanese singles and their role in the economy at The New School for Social Research. What the Japanese research shows The Japanese Family Planning Association has conducted this survey every two years since 2002, sending it to 3,000 people between 16 and 49. About 1,300 people responded in 2012, Endo said. Both men and women were asked to rate how interested they are in having sex from Very Interested, Somewhat Interested, Not Very Interested, Not Interested at All, and I Feel an Aversion to It. The percentage of women who responded they were not interested in sex at all or felt an aversion to it was 60.3 percent for ages 16-19 and 31.6 percent for ages 20-24. Combine the age groups, and the average response was about 46 percent negative — the figure that drove attention-grabbing stories in Western media. The association released its newest survey for 2014 a few months ago. In that survey, 65.8 percent of women 16-19 were not interested in sex or felt an aversion to it, and 39.2 percent of women 20-24 felt the same way. This survey is the only one we could find that asks about specific views of sex. Endo mentioned another survey by the government, the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, that asked 4,276 women, of which about 3,400 were 18 to 34, if they had ever had any kind of sexual encounter. The percentage of women ages 18-19 who said they had never had sex was 68.1 percent; for women 20-24, it was 40.1 percent; for women 25-29, it was 29.3 percent; and for women 30-34, 23.8 percent. ""So even at age 34, one out of four women are virgins in Japan,"" Endo said. ""It’s definitely not a religion that’s pushing that number."" (Japan is a secular society.) Endo mentioned a third survey by the NIPSSR that could corroborate the family planning association’s statistic. This one asks men and women if they have any relationships with the opposite sex — even platonic ones. Again, the results speak to a trend of disinterest. In 2010, 49.5 percent of unmarried single Japanese women between the ages of 18-34 said they have no relations with the opposite sex. For men, it was 61.4 percent on average. What changed There’s no simple explanation for what’s going on in Japan. It’s been years in the making, though the drastic change has occurred in a relatively small window of time. First of all, it’s important to understand some cultural differences. Endo says that where westerners might see sex as an act unto itself, in Japan ""sex was never an isolated thing."" In addition, the younger generation has never known anything but economic stagnation, which Endo notes could psychologically dampen interest in sex. And Japanese younger than 27 also are the first to come up in a very changed educational system, one that is no longer centered on competition. All of these things, she speculates, might create a ""generational identity"" that feels differently about sex than the older cohort. The funny thing is, among younger Japanese, it is only attitudes toward sex, not marriage, that have changed. In the corporate-centered society that catapulted Japan into a leading world economy after World War II, men would graduate from college with job offers from corporations that offered employment and benefits for life. They met their wives through family or work, and the women would then leave their jobs to take on the role of primary caregiver for children and the elderly. Family structure and the corporate system effectively constituted Japan’s ""welfare society,"" where the government indirectly provided for the people through its support of the corporations; in turn, their smooth functioning was based upon the understanding that women would provide child care and elderly care while receiving security and benefits in return as part of their husbands’ and sons’ lifetime employment. But the country’s real estate bubble burst in the 1990s, sending Japan into a long period of economic depression and stagnation. Where there once was job stability and the ability to plan ahead, there is now a system in restructuring mode and uncertainty. On top of the worsened labor market, young people in Japan also have the burden of caring and preparing for the oldest population in the world. It would be reasonable to assume that all of these factors would cut into their interest in marriage, but it really hasn’t. In 2010, 86.3 percent of men and 89.4 percent of women still said they ""intend to marry some day."" Japanese women assuming a strong professional role is relatively new, and gender equality in the labor market is decades behind other advanced industrialized nations, Endo said. But even though Japanese women are more and more highly educated and career-oriented, she said women 18- to 24-years-old have been expressing an increasing desire to become full-time housewives. It’s just that many of those same women say they’re not very interested in sex by itself. Our ruling Ansari said, ""46 percent of women between the age of 16 to 24 despise sexual contact"" in Japan. Despise seems a slightly bold word for it. Still, the surveys on this question all point to a healthy proportion of the young Japanese population having little interest in sex, relationships and dating, and one survey in particular reflects what Ansari said. Experts say Ansari had it right. Update: This item was updated on June 25 with more details about the relationship between marriage and sex in Japan."
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10397
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Annual Mammography Starting at Age 40 Still Best Way to Saves Lives from Breast Cancer
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In what is a short and fairly straightforward news release, we’re told by the American College of Radiology and American Society of Breast Imaging that all women age 40 and over should get an annual mammogram. Furthermore, readers are told that if they have any questions about the practice, they should consult their doctor. But that’s about the extent of it. We’re never told how many lives could be saved by more regular screening, nor how those benefits stack up against growing concerns related to overdiagnosis and overtreatment. Nor is any evidence presented to back up the questionable assertion that “all women can benefit” from regular mammography. Every year in the United States, breast cancer is diagnosed in about 224,000 women and kills about 41,000 women, per the CDC’s latest data. To detect and treat the disease as early as possible, clinicians perform more than 39 million mammograms a year, according to the FDA’s numbers. But mammography’s seemingly immutable benefit as an effective, life-saving tool has come under fire in recent years through the publication of large, longitudinal studies. In 2014, for example, a British Medical Journal study of 89,000 Canadian women who were followed for 25 years found no benefit in the practice when it came to saving lives. It also found that 1 in 424 of those women received unnecessary cancer treatment. However, an American Cancer Society official told the New York Times in 2014 that the data showed a benefit for screenings in women in their 40s (i.e. a 15% reduction in breast cancer deaths). Another study published by JAMA Oncology in 2015, which we examined in a recent blog post, focused on the most common diagnosis after mammography: ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS. (DCIS is a tissue anomaly contained within the ductwork of the breast, and is typically only visible in a high-resolution mammogram image.) The study looked at the medical records of 108,000 women diagnosed with DCIS and found that about 80% likely received unnecessary treatment; only black women and women diagnosed under the age of 35, an accompanying editorial concluded, should have received treatment. For reasons that are still unclear, research continues to suggest that early screening is not as widely effective as was once believed — hence the push to clarify the benefits of mammography, as in this American College of Radiology news release that we review below.
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mixture
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Association/Society news release,Breast cancer,Cancer,Imaging
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The average cost of an annual mammogram is relatively easy to find, but this news release didn’t address it. The average out-of-pocket expense, per mammogram visit, is about $33. This is about 1/7th the cost of the full tab (approximately $266), according to a 2011 study in Journal of Women’s Health. There aren’t any numbers on this, and it’s a crucial part of the sales pitch. The release says that screening regularly starting at age 40 “saves many more lives” than screening later or done less frequently. But how many more lives are we talking about? A quick look at at hyperlink in the release — which takes you to the ACR-produced advocacy website mammographysaveslives.org — and clicking “Are you confused?” takes you to a page that suggests mammography has reduced the U.S. breast cancer death rate by 30 percent. But that’s a relative risk reduction, and since the rate of breast cancer for women in their 40s is low, this figure may tend to inflate the size of the benefit for these women. We would have preferred to see a number describing the absolute reduction in breast cancer deaths. For example, according to a recent US Preventive Services Task Force evidence review, screening mammography prevents 4 deaths for every 10,000 women who are screened for at least 10 years compared with no screening. Overdiagnosis and overtreatment aren’t discussed, but these are real and significant issues with mammography. Without any quantification of how mammography can help a woman, and by sidestepping any mention of the two studies mentioned in the “Why This Matters” section (above), it’s difficult to argue this aspect of the release is Satisfactory. In fact, there is really no discussion of any of the evidence that supports screening mammography in this news release — it’s mainly composed of assertions that may or may not be supported by evidence. It’s impossible to tell since the evidence is never presented or discussed. There are no gratuitous descriptions or inflammatory language in the release, and it encourages readers to discuss the issue with their doctors. The Society of Breast Imaging and the American College of Radiology are clearly indicated. A few options are mentioned, i.e. mammography screening only for high-risk groups, later-age screening, and less-than-annual mammograms. Other approaches that could have been discussed include regular physical exams of the breast by a clinician (without mammography) as well as breast self-exams. Availability isn’t mentioned. But because getting a mammogram is relatively routine, we’ll mark this one “not applicable.” Mammography has been around for decades, so what’s the news hook for the release? Apparently it’s the start of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Although that’s a pretty weak basis for putting out a news release, we’ll rule this Satisfactory as the release doesn’t pretend that there’s any actual news here.. A statement from Dr. Debra Monticciolov raised our eyebrows, especially given the surge in recent, high-quality evidence questioning the value of mammograms for some women: “All women age 40 and over can benefit from annual mammography.” In fact, it seems not every woman does benefit — for every woman whose life is saved, many more are overdiagnosed and overtreated. We think women should be encouraged to make an informed personal decision about screening mammography based on a clear understanding of the benefits and risks. This could include, in partnership with her doctor, a look at all known risk factors, including gender, age, race, family history, reproductive history, pregnancies, radiation exposure, previous abnormal breast biopsies, DES, HRT, alcohol use, obesity, physical activity, known genetic abnormalities, prior cancer classification, and other factors. Mammograms do not eliminate these risks.
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41003
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Doctors in India have been successful in treating coronavirus with a combination of drugs (Lopinavir, Retonovir, Oseltamivir along with Chlorphenamine) and are going to suggest the same medicine globally.
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India’s ministry of health has advised that the anti-HIV drugs, Lopinavir and Retonovir, are used in some groups of Covid-19 patients. But it is unclear how successful this treatment has been. The other two drugs from the claim are not mentioned in their guidance.
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true
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online
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Doctors in India have been successful in treating coronavirus with a combination of drugs (Lopinavir, Retonovir, Oseltamivir along with Chlorphenamine) and are going to suggest the same medicine globally. India’s ministry of health has advised that the anti-HIV drugs, Lopinavir and Retonovir, are used in some groups of Covid-19 patients. But it is unclear how successful this treatment has been. The other two drugs from the claim are not mentioned in their guidance. Researchers at the Erasmus Medical Center claim to have found an antibody against coronavirus. Researchers in the Netherlands have released research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, on an antibody against the new coronavirus. A 103 year-old Chinese grandmother has made a full recovery from Covid-19 after being treated for 6 days in Wuhan, China This has been widely reported in the media. Apple has reopened all 42 China stores. Correct. On 13 March 2020, Apple announced that it had reopened all 42 stores in mainland China after a closure of almost six weeks. Cleveland Clinic developed a Covid-19 test that gives results in hours, not days. The number of new cases in South Korea is declining. Italy is hit hard, experts say, only because they have the oldest population in Europe. Whilst it is true that an older population has contributed to a high number of deaths in Italy, it may not be the sole reason. Scientists in Israel are likely to announce the development of a coronavirus vaccine. Scientists in Israel and elsewhere are working on developing a vaccination to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus, but it won’t be ready for the public for over a year. Three Maryland coronavirus patients fully recovered and are able to return to everyday life. Correct. On 13 March 2020, Montgomery County, Maryland confirmed that three residents who previously had the virus no longer tested positive. A network of Canadian scientists are making excellent progress in Covid-19 research. At least one group of Canadian scientists has recently announced some progress in understanding Covid-19. A San Diego biotech company is developing a Covid-19 vaccine in collaboration with Duke University and National University of Singapore. Tulsa County's first positive Covid-19 case has recovered. This individual has had two negative tests, which is the indicator of recovery. Correct, this patient has recovered according to official Tulsa County sources. Two negative tests is one of three official indicators of recovery among people with Covid-19 (who showed symptoms). All seven patients who were getting treated for Covid-19 at Safdarjung hospital in New Delhi have recovered. There is a news story reporting that seven patients in this hospital in New Delhi had recovered. However, these were not the only Covid-19 patients in the city. Plasma from newly recovered patients from Covid -19 can treat others infected by Covid-19. This is being used as a treatment in some countries, but clinical trials have not yet proved that this is effective. Claim 1 of 15
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29707
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"A migrant girl was found with ""20 types of semen in her."" Also, three people were in quarantine for an ""unknown"" disease."
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In another example of hoaxes about immigration intertwining with child-trafficking conspiracy theories, a group of men alleged in viral social media posts that they had found a bunker used for child sex trafficking in Tucson, Arizona. Tucson police, however, confirmed that the site was nothing more than an abandoned homeless encampment.
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false
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Politics Immigration, big league politics
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In late June 2019, the junk news site Big League Politics reported a rather disturbing but baseless story that a 10-year-old migrant girl had been found with “20 types of semen in her.” The same story also reported unrelatedly that three people were under quarantine in El Paso, Texas, with an “unknown disease.” The two-fer rumor is rooted in the ongoing national controversy around immigration. Migration on the U.S.-Mexico border has been a topic of high public scrutiny throughout the duration of the Trump administration, both because families and unaccompanied children seeking refuge from violence in Central America have arrived at border stations in large numbers, and also because of President Donald Trump’s harsh rhetoric and policies. Incidents of large-scale human suffering are often exploited by purveyors of hoaxes and misinformation, and this is no different. Big League Politics quotes a source reporting, “There was a female, 10 years old, who was found with 20 different types of semen inside her body.” We checked with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) about this claim. Roger Maier, CBP spokesman covering west Texas and New Mexico, told us the agency has no information substantiating it, and that the rumor has been circulating for at least a year. Citing an unnamed “medical professional on the border in Texas” as its only source, Big League Politics also reported that “three individuals [are] now quarantined at a privately-owned hospital in El Paso with an unknown disease. The Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has not even been able to identify the disease the three migrants have, as the military guards the quarantine area.” We checked with both the CDC and the Texas Department of State Health Services. Neither agency corroborated the report that anyone was in quarantine in Texas. A similar rape rumor was circulated in December 2018 by the viral junk news site NewsPunch (formerly YourNewsWire), but in that iteration of the hoax, the girl was 6 years old and “had been raped by at least 30 men, according to military physicians.” Uncorroborated accusations related to pedophilia or child-trafficking rings are commonly circulated by conspiracy blogs and personalities in the far-fight media ecosystem. Pizzagate, the now-infamous viral hoax that took off around the 2016 presidential election, posited that one such trafficking ring was being operated by members of the Democratic party out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria that had no basement.
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14196
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ColoradoCare would have higher revenues than McDonald’s.
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The Colorado Health Institute analysis said the Colorado universal health care system would have a projected $38 billion in revenues, larger than major corporations. The numbers seem to add up if everything with ColoradoCare goes according to its supporters’ plans. The revenues would be larger than some big companies. However, the health care plan has a make-or-break need to obtain federal waivers that would allow it to assume the roles of state Medicaid and Affordable Care Act programs. No waivers means no deal. The statement is accurate but needs additional information.
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true
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Colorado, Elections, Health Care, Colorado Health Institute,
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"An independent analysis says Colorado's proposed universal health care system would have $38 billion in projected revenues -- dwarfing Fortune 500 companies like McDonald's, Nike and American Express. The report, by the Colorado Health Institute, is a primer on the potential benefits and drawbacks of ColoradoCare, a proposed state health care cooperative that would resemble single-payer health care systems like those in Canada and Europe. Coloradans will decide whether to create the giant system when they vote on Amendment 69 in the November election. ""Supporters estimate ColoradoCare would have $38 billion in annual revenues,"" the report states. ""If it were a private company, ColoradoCare would rank about 80th in the Fortune 500, just behind New York Life Insurance and ahead of well-known companies such as American Express, 21st Century Fox, 3M, Sears, Nike and McDonald's."" Need more perspective? Colorado's annual state budget is $25.7 billion. We examined the statement that ColoradoCare’s projected revenues would be $38 billion and overshadow huge corporates. We found that the number is right in theory, but it depends on the federal government signing off on a first-of-its-kind health system for Colorado. How ColoradoCare would work First, here’s how ColoradoCare would work. If approved by voters, Colorado would be the first state to have a health care system where every resident has coverage financed by taxes instead of private insurance premiums, according to the Colorado Health Institute report. The institute estimates that 83 percent of Colorado’s population -- about 4.4 million people -- would be eligible for primary health insurance coverage through ColoradoCare. The remaining 17 percent of residents would continue to be covered by federal programs, including Medicare and the Veterans Administration. People would still choose their own health care providers, but ColoradoCare would pay the bills. Members would not have to pay an annual deductible, but they would have co-pays. The system would be controlled by a powerful 21-member board, elected by the system’s members in seven districts across the state. The governor and legislature would have no role, except to select an interim board until elections were held. An economic analysis by supporters says ColoradoCare would produce a net savings of $4.5 billion for residents and businesses by eliminating private insurance profits, streamlining paperwork and more efficiently delivering services. Opponents say the proposed amendment will be costly, it won't impact rising health care costs and it will hamper the state’s ability to attract and retain medical providers. The ColoradoCareYes campaign confirmed the proposed nonprofit health system is projected to have $38 billion in annual revenues. About $25 billion would come from state taxes. Employers would pay 6.67 percent in payroll taxes and employees would contribute 3.33 percent, for a total of 10 percent of the payroll. Self-employed people would pay 10 percent of their net income. The projected $25 billion in tax revenues have been independently confirmed by an economist at the Colorado Legislative Council, which provided a revenue impact report to the state board that reviews the language and legality of an initiative's ballot title and summary. For the rest of its annual revenues, supporters say ColoradoCare would apply for waivers from the federal government, so that ColoradoCare takes over the state roles and funding for Medicaid ($10.8 billion) and the Affordable Care Act ($700 million). Out-of-pocket costs for medical care and dental care would each provide an estimated $1 billion. But experts said obtaining the federal waivers is a challenging process -- and there’s no certainty of success. Beginning on Jan. 1, states can apply for a federal waiver to create innovative, alternative health care programs that would take the place of the Affordable Care Act -- while staying true to its goals. ColoradoCare would have to pass a rigorous federal review, showing it would deliver coverage that's at least as comprehensive and affordable as the so-called Obamacare program, while covering the same amount of people. ColoradoCare would have to stay ""revenue neutral"" and not cost more than the existing federal program. Federal waivers, funding ‘not a sure thing’ What are the chances of obtaining the waivers and the federal funds that go with them? ""Definitely, I would say it’s not a sure thing,"" said Karen Pollitz, a senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation, who specializes in health care reform, an issue she worked on for both the administrations of President Barack Obama and President Bill Clinton. Yet, if approved by voters, ColoradoCare would be among the first states to seek an Affordable Care Act (ACA) waiver and bring ""the most far-reaching health care reform in any state since the ACA,"" according to the Colorado Health Institute report. ""There's advantages for being the first one in the door. It lets you kind of establish the framework for the debate that's going follow,"" Pollitz said. Medicaid waivers aren’t automatic, either, though several states, including Colorado, have received the so-called 1115 waivers -- named for a Section 1115 of the Social Security Act ""1115 waivers require a lot of work and back-and-forth between the state and the federal government and compliance with a number of criteria, including budget neutrality,"" said Elisabeth Arenales, the health care program director for the Colorado Center on Law and Policy. The center hasn't reviewed or taken a position on Amendment 69. ""States have to be careful in how they negotiate those waivers because they're essentially locked into a spending contract, and they need to be very mindful that they're both not costing the federal government any additional money but also that their projections of state spending are accurate,"" Arenales said. The ballot initiative’s language makes it clear that getting the waivers are a do-or-die matter for ColoradoCare. No waivers means no program. Under the heading ""Termination of ColoradoCare’s Operations,"" the initiative states: ""If the board determines that ColoradoCare has not received the waivers, exemptions, and agreements from the federal government sufficient for its fiscally sound operation, the board shall: (a) shut down operations and return unused funds; (b) notify the governor of the State of Colorado of ColoradoCare's inability to function."" ColoradoCareYES campaign spokesman Owen Perkins acknowledged the waivers’ critical importance. ""ColoradoCare doesn't move forward without that,"" he said. But, at the same time, he said it should be reassuring to Colorado voters that health care system couldn’t launch until it passes a high bar set by the federal government. ""I think everybody in Colorado should be thankful that there is that vigorous standard,"" Perkins said. ""That ensures that we can't go into this willy-nilly. It could pass with a 75-percent vote and everything look perfect, but if it doesn't receive that waiver, it's not going to happen."" He stressed that the architects of ColoradoCare have done their homework. The Colorado Health Institute is accurate in saying, given ColoradoCare’s projected $38 billion in revenues, if it were a private company is would rank about 80th on the Fortune 500 just behind New York Life Insurance ($38.7 billion in revenues). It’s revenues would be larger than American Express ($35.9 billion), Twenty-First Century Fox ($31.86 billion), 3M ($31.82 billion), Sears ($31.2 billion), Nike ($27.8 billion) and McDonald’s ($27.4 billion). On paper, the ColoradoCareYES campaign’s projected state tax and federal funding revenues add up to $38 billion. Our ruling The Colorado Health Institute analysis said the Colorado universal health care system would have a projected $38 billion in revenues, larger than major corporations. The numbers seem to add up if everything with ColoradoCare goes according to its supporters’ plans. The revenues would be larger than some big companies. However, the health care plan has a make-or-break need to obtain federal waivers that would allow it to assume the roles of state Medicaid and Affordable Care Act programs. No waivers means no deal. The statement is accurate but needs additional information.
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32730
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A Newark woman was arrested for raping and killing her toddler son.
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Previous Empire Herald hoaxes included claims about a dog meat restaurant, a serial killer who purportedly carved “Black Lives Matter” into his victims’ skin, a falsehood about a man committing suicide over the Harriet Tubman $20 bill, and a yarn about a mother caught masturbating with a Happy Meal toy in a McDonald’s Playplace.
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false
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Junk News, content warning, disturbing, empire herald
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In early February 2016, the fake news web site Empire Herald published an article titled “Newark Woman Arrested For Raping Her 2 Year Old Son With A Toy, Child Dies From Injuries.” Its content was no less disturbing than the title: Newark mother arrested for raping her 2 year old son with a vibrator resulting in his death. Shakeda Brown, 25, of Newark, New Jersey, pled not guilty to charges of sexual misconduct with a minor and child abuse after a vibrator she allegedly shoved into her 2-year-old son’s rectum had to be surgically removed, later resulting in the child’s death. Doctors also discovered an object lodged in his rectum, which appears to be a vibrator or some other sex toy. According to reports, it appeared as if the injuries around the toddler’s anus were from his mother using her finger or another object in an attempt to remove the vibrator, but he eventually had to undergo surgery. Authorities further questioned Brown which lead to the discovery of Brown’s involvement in the child’s injuries. According to authorities, Brown provided the following explanation regarding the incident: “I got tired of him crying when I was trying to have sex with my boyfriend. I changed him, fed him, and burped him but he kept crying. I didn’t have sex in over 3 days so I was really horny. When me and my boyfriend were trying to do it, my son kept crying so I put one of my toys in his butt to keep him quiet. I didn’t realize it would cause this much damage to him, I just wanted him to stop crying so I could have sex,” said Brown to authorities. The claim is typical of the outlandish, fabricated articles routinely published by Empire Herald (which features no disclaimer warning readers that its articles are exclusively in the realm of fake news), but the content of this particular article is far darker than many of the site’s other efforts. It also contains no satirical elements or humor, serving solely to distress readers. Why the claim suddenly gained traction is unclear.
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11181
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Higher dietary fiber intake in young women may reduce breast cancer risk
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Bank of England Governor Mark Carney will lead a push by the United Nations to make the finance sector take proper account of the risks posed by climate change, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on Sunday.
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mixture
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Academic medical center news release,Breast cancer,Women's health
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Guterres said the Canadian, due to leave the bank on Jan. 31, was “a remarkable pioneer in pushing the financial sector to work on climate”. He told a news conference before a U.N. climate summit in Madrid beginning on Monday that Carney would be the U.N. special envoy on climate action and climate finance from next year. Michael Bloomberg, billionaire owner of the Bloomberg financial data and news service and former New York City mayor, was the U.N. special envoy for climate action until he stepped down in November, shortly before filing paperwork to run for U.S. president. Carney first spoke of the risks that climate change poses to finance in 2015, and since then has urged better risk management, supervision and disclosure. He has spoken of “stranded assets” - deposits of coal, oil and gas that might lose their value if the world shifts away from carbon - and decried a lack of transparency about the effect on global warming of trillions of dollars of potential investments. The 54-year-old has spent nearly seven years at the head of the bank, and previously led the Bank of Canada and worked for Goldman Sachs. The Bank of England said Carney would seek to make the impact of climate change central to financial reporting, risk management and the calculation of returns ahead of a global summit in Glasgow in November 2020. “The disclosures of climate risk must become comprehensive, climate risk management must be transformed, and investing for a net-zero world must go mainstream,” Carney said in a statement. Some 70 countries have promised to go ‘net zero’ - offsetting their greenhouse gas emissions with measures such as carbon capture or planting trees - by 2050. Last week, Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann said addressing climate change was a job for governments. But the new head of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, has promised to discuss sustainability considerations in an impending strategic review. The Band of England said Carney would earn $1 a year in his new role, nearly 900,000 pounds ($1.15 million) less than his annual package at the British central bank. Carney was originally due to leave in 2018 but stayed on to help steer Britain’s economy through the Brexit transition. His successor has not yet been named and Carney has signaled that he would extend his stay beyond Jan. 31 - the date Britain is due to leave the EU - if necessary. Carney had been seen as a contender to lead the International Monetary Fund, but the job went instead to Kristalina Georgieva, former World Bank chief executive. ($1 = 0.7794 pounds)
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10323
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In Test of Stents, Old Standby Wins Out
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Our review names some story elements that we think could’ve been added or removed. To us, the most notable omission was the litany of financial conflicts of interest the researchers had with stent manufactures.
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true
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Costs aren’t discussed. The article gives the absolute rates of major adverse cardiac events for each treatment group. Also, while this is likely not a major issue for most readers and not an official strike against the article, as an FYI we point out that there are some interwoven concepts that can be confusing. The article’s headline is that SES won this contest. If you want to get technical, there are two buts. First, while SES did have the fewest cardiac events of the 3 stents, the difference with ZES wasn’t statistically significant. In other words, the apparent superiority of SES may have been do to chance. Or not. We don’t know. Researchers call this a trend but not significant evidence. Second, this contest, the study, wasn’t designed to answer whether SES was the best. The researchers concluded, as quoted in the story, that this study answered two main questions: ZES and SES were similar, and ZES fared better than PES did. Notice it didn’t say SES was the best. There’s overlap between harms and benefits here because stents are designed to prevent harm. However, the study identifies the development of blood clots on the stent as a safety outcome (along with the numbers of heart attacks and death). While the article tells us that the rate of clots was significantly lower with one type of stent, it does not quantify the harms. There are some valuable details about the study in this article, including the number of subjects, the 3 treatment arms, randomization, the follow-up period, a definition of the endpoint—a composite called “major adverse cardiac events”—and what actual events that means. It gets kudos for identifying the key limitation of the one-year follow-up with a nod to important results from a longer ongoing study. There were some aspects of the evidence missing, which is not surprising in a short article about a fantastically complex topic. In a quote the researchers laud their study as a “practical” one. We’re not told what that means. And see our comment under Benefits regarding the explanation of the results. Also, an article of this length doesn’t have the real estate to go into all the nooks and crannies (and limitations) of composite endpoints, like MACE, which are very standard in such trials. But we appreciated that the author unpacked it a bit by noting that rates of death and heart attacks did not differ. We give the article a Satisfactory rating because, in this very focused and balanced review, it doesn’t balloon the target population for drug-coated stents. That said, we would’ve liked to have seen at least some overview of who is a candidate for stents at all, bare or coated. Not everyone with a clogged artery gets stents, or, rather, should get stents based on the evidence. It’s a complex topic, with different guidelines for those having heart attacks and those with stable angina, but it’s also a hot topic these days due to widespread misconceptions about who gets stents and what benefits they actually have. Recent evidence, such as the COURAGE trial, suggests that for most people with stable angina, stents don’t prevent heart attacks or improve survival compared to only taking medicine and leading a heart-healthy lifestyle. One source, Dr. Fonarow, was apparently not affiliated with the study. We appreciated his placing the results in context with prior research and on clinical decision-making. Google tells us that he has a financial relationship with the company that makes zotarolimus-coated stents. But given the fact that his quotes—and the study—are not in favor of zotarolimus, perhaps the lack of this disclosure is excusable. One key conflict of interest, study funding from a stent manufacturer, was identified. However, we fail the article on this criterion because it neglects to mention that the researchers disclosed a web of financial relationships with literally all the stent manufacturers. We count 9 financial relationships with Cordis, who makes the sirolimus-coated stent, which came out “on top” in this article. Taking into account that the article implies availability of the 3 stent types, the study itself was comparing a newer approach with the “old standby.” The article could’ve been more explicit about the availability of these 3 stents, but the last sentence describing the study’s real-world implications, suggests that all 3 are currently available in cath labs. The article explains that the three stents are coated with different drugs, the zotarolimus version is a newer entry, while the sirolimus one is the “old standby”. It would’ve been nice to read how the stent with paclitaxel fits into the big picture.
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28327
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"Cellphone users are being increasingly targeted by a ""SIM swap fraud,"" in which their phones will briefly stop working before they receive a call tricking them into surrendering their information."
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What's true: SIM swap fraud, in which a cellular service provider is duped into assigning a mobile phone number to a new SIM card is real and on the increase, according to experts. What's false: SIM information cannot be gathered or swapped via a phone call, and victims will often not be aware that their information has been stolen until they find themselves unable to place calls.
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mixture
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Fraud & Scams
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One of the many new forms of crime that modern technology has brought us is a form of identify theft known as SIM swap fraud. Subscriber identification modules (SIMs), commonly referred to as SIM cards, store user data in Global System for Mobile (GSM) cellphones. In simple terms, your phone’s SIM card stores identifying information that authenticates your cellphone service and allows you to connect to mobile networks. If fraudsters can gather enough personal information about you to answer some common security questions, they may be able to call your cellphone service provider, claim that you have lost or damaged your phone’s SIM card, and ask the provider to switch your phone number to a different SIM card (which is in their possession). Once that’s done, the fraudsters effectively control your phone number and can use it obtain a wealth of sensitive information — including, possibly, requesting that your bank send codes via text messaging that will enable them to reset passwords and log in to your financial accounts. While security experts have been trying to raise awareness of SIM swap fraud, at least one social media post on the subject sought to provide useful preventative advice but misstated how such fraud actually occurs. The most common version of the post read as follows: Dear All, Please lets be very careful. There is a new HIGH TECH FRAUD in town called the SIM SWAP FRAUD and hundreds of persons are already VICTIMS. How it works 1 A new fraud called SIM SWAP has started. Your phone network will momentarily go blind / zero (No Signal / Zero Bars) and after a while a call will come through. 2 The Person on the other side will tell you that he is calling from (your cell phone company) depending on your network and that there is a problem in your mobile network. 3 He will instruct you to Please press 1 on your phone to get the network back. *Please at this stage don’t Press anything, Just cut the call. If you press 1, the network will appear suddenly and almost immediately go blind again (Zero Bars) and by that action, your phone is #HACKED. It is increasing day by day. Within a second they will empty your bank account and cause you enough damage. What you will experience It will appear as though your line is without Network, meanwhile your SIM has been SWAPPED. The danger here is that, you will not get any alert of any transactions, so please those of us doing USSD Banking and Mobile Banking BEWARE. So please be careful. Please forward to your contacts, loved ones and friends Received from a Cybersecurity Group Steven Andrés, an instructor in the graduate program in homeland security at San Diego State University, termed that advice “incorrect.” Rather than being tricked over the phone and asked to press a button to initiate a malicious swap, Andrés explained, victims typically don’t even know their SIMs were swapped out until it is too late: The SIM in your current phone will just display “No Carrier” without any audible notification. You won’t receive any phone calls and will not be able to make any phone calls. But in today’s modern world where most of us communicate through words instead of phone calls, you may not realize your phone has lost cellular service until you leave the house. Victims connected to WiFi networks at home or work would still be able to use email on their phones, as well as access the internet and social media apps such as WhatsApp, Twitter, and Instagram. Andrés, who founded his own tech security company, told us that SIM swaps provide perpetrators with the ability to receive a victim’s incoming calls or SMS (text) messages, just as Wired reported in August 2018: At its most basic level, a SIM swap is when someone convinces your carrier to switch your phone number over to a SIM card they own. They’re not doing it for prank call cover, or to rack up long-distance charges. By diverting your incoming messages, scammers can easily complete the text-based two-factor authentication checks that protect your most sensitive accounts. Or, if you don’t have two-factor set up in the first place, they can use your phone number to trick services into coughing up your passwords. Another security firm, Flashpoint, found evidence suggesting that some scammers pay off mobile phone service employees to help them execute SIM swaps on targeted customers’ accounts. The company also listed signs that a user’s SIM information has been hijacked, which echo the ones Andrés mentioned: Affected phones cannot make calls, have no reception, and potentially have no 911 access. Additionally, attackers take over online accounts belonging to the subscriber. Unexpected text messages or e-mails referring to password resets, account logins, or phone number changes may occur before a successful takeover. According to the tech news site Motherboard, in 2017 hackers exploited a weakness that allowed them to specifically target T-Mobile service users by gaining enough information that they could call the company, impersonate their victims, and request new SIM cards. T-Mobile alerted users in January 2018 to watch out for scammers trying to seize their information. One scam victim told the site that: I lost $5200 in total, $1999 from one account, $2500 from another and $600 in credit card points redeemed for cash. I still haven’t gotten my number back and have spent countless hours closing and reopening all my bank accounts, filling a police report, dealing with banks, credit card companies and TMobile. I’ve had to pay interest on my credit card as all my funds were frozen from Jan 9 to Jan 25th and I’m pretty sure I’ll get some check return fees because I didn’t change my transfer account for my auto debits in time. The best part was TMobile sent me a bill and charged me for ending my service and porting out my number. Are you kidding me?!?! Both Wired and Andrés recommended that cell phone users implement two-step verification for their accounts, but Andrés also urged them to seek more information from their service providers. “I would strongly urge your readers to contact their carriers and specifically ask how they can completely block SIM or other account changes,” he said. “The issue is that even if you have a PIN on your account, if there is an unscrupulous employee at the carrier, they may be able to easily bypass the protection.”
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33780
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Television journalist Geraldo Rivera was born Jerry Rivers but changed his name to appeal to Latino viewers.
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While one might find much to criticize about Rivera’s reportorial techniques, his ethnicity is genuine. His father’s surname was Rivera, his given name was Gerald, and the only concession he made to fashion was to agree to go by the Spanish pronunciation of his given name to satisfy an employer who wanted an identifiably Puerto Rican reporter. In the world of television, that’s practically a refreshing authenticity.
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false
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Media Matters
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A brash young lawyer-turned-journalist named Geraldo Rivera burst upon the New York news scene in the early 1970s as a reporter for WABC-TV, and by 1972 he had garnered national acclaim and an Emmy Award for his series of investigative reports exposing deplorable conditions at the Willowbrook State School for the Mentally Ill, which led to a government investigation of the facility, court intervention, and the subsequent closing of much of the institution while reforms were implemented. After this promising beginning, however, much of the viewing public became disenchanted with Rivera as he moved through higher-profile national stints on ABC (Goodnight, America; Good Morning, America; and 20/20 Newsmagazine) and NBC (Geraldo), where he was perceived as eschewing the substantive in favor of the sensational, the tawdry, and the bizarre in segments such as “Devil Worship: Exploring Satan’s Underground” (an excuse for airing more pointless and rambling interview footage with Charles Manson), “The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault” (a live, two-hour tease for the opening of the famous gangster’s vault, which yielded nothing but a few old bottles), and an on-air talk show brawl with neo-Nazis which left Geraldo with a broken nose when he was hit in the face with a chair. Rivera’s image problems continued during his work for Fox News: While covering American military activity in Afghanistan in 2001 he was criticized for taking a gun into a war zone and derided for misplacing the scene of a “friendly fire” incident by 300 miles (he later said he has confused two different incidents, although the other incident didn’t take place until three days after his report), and while covering the war in Iraq in 2003 he was censured by the U.S. military (and reportedly booted out of Iraq) for broadcasting details that revealed tactical information about an upcoming U.S. attack. Of all the professional criticisms leveled at Geraldo Rivera over the years, one of the most common is also the one of the most unfair — the claim he was born Jerry Rivers and shamelessly adopted the stage name “Geraldo Rivera” to appeal to Latino viewers and stand out from the crowd by claiming a counterfeit ethnicity: I hate when the Geraldo Riveras of Hollywood and others like him make money exploiting Latino surnames. Geraldo you are not Latino just cause you speak a little Spanish. I remember that you changed your name from Jerry Rivers, you saw yourself as Jewish until you decided it was beneficial to be Latino for your opportunity. Although Geraldo Rivera was known by some slight variations of his given name in his younger days, those variations were not the product of a crass effort on his part to “appear more ethnic” by turning a distinctly Anglo name into a Latino one. Rather, they came about through his having parents from different ethnic backgrounds who meddled with their own names and their children’s to accommodate others, through differences between English and Spanish versions of common names, and through people’s natural tendency to use nicknames in place of formal names when addressing relatives and other close acquaintances. Geraldo Rivera’s father, Cruz Rivera, was the son of a Puerto Rican sugar plantation worker. After immigrating to New York, Cruz married a Jewish woman named Lilly Friedman, touching off the first of the Rivera family’s name changes: My father Allen Cruz Rivera worked for Republic [Aviation]. “Allen” was Dad’s nom de mariage, taken to assuage his Jewish in-laws when he married my mother Lilly Friedman. Cruz, which translates as “cross” in English, was Dad’s real first name, but he worried that my mother’s family would choke on the Christianity of it. But even though Geraldo’s family name was unquestionably Rivera, his mother’s finagling with the birth certificates of her children created a confusing situation in which Geraldo and some of his siblings bore surnames different than the family name: When I was born, my mother filled in my birth certificate with the name Gerald Riviera, adding an extra “i” to my father’s surname. She did the same thing for my sister Irene. Later, she would drop the pretense for my sister Sharon, only to pick it up again with the birth of my baby brother Craig. Whenever we asked about the inconsistencies, she would shrug shyly and joke her way out of it. “I just forgot how to spell it,” she would say, and leave it at that. Underneath, I came to realize, she was deeply embarrassed over what was a clumsy attempt at an ethnic cover-up. With my parents and youngster sister known as Rivera, and with various documents bearing one spelling or the other, we were all confused. School officials were also stymied. My high school yearbook carried one spelling for my graduation photo, and the other for my team pictures. Over the years, the name-game has been an absurd humiliation, forcing me into countless and often contradictory explanations. Once I became a public person, it even gave rise to the convoluted tale — first spun by a New York disc jockey in 1973 — that I was a Jew posing as a Puerto Rican to cash in on affirmative action, and that my real family name was Rivers. Yearbook photos from Geraldo’s high school and college (the University of Arizona) document that his name was never Jerry Rivers — his given name was indeed Gerald, and his surname alternated between the family name, Rivera, and his mother’s “continentalized” spelling of it, Riviera: As one would expect, friends and acquaintances took to calling him by the less formal Gerry, while relatives on his father’s side of the family knew him as Geraldo, the Spanish equivalent of Gerald. According to Geraldo himself, the epiphany which led to his opting for one version of his surname over the other occurred in his early 20s, while he was working as an assistant manager in a South Bronx department store: I was at my post at Alexander’s, dispensing cheap cotton-shifts to a throng of bargain-hungry women in the store’s basement, when my Aunt Ana, Dad’s favorite sister, came up to say hello. She lived in the area and shopped for ninety-nine-cent specials run in my department. “Why you use this name”? she said in her broken, thickly accented tongue, and pointing a hard finger at the Riviera on my name tag. “You ashamed to be Puerto Rican?” I had no answer. Skating through the last few years at Maritime [a merchant marine college] and on the West Coast, this was the first I had been confronted by someone who knew the whole story. “I’ll get a new name tag,” I said, fumbling to remove the damning tag from my shirt. In New York, the name game was not going to fool anyone. In one of those flashes of personal discovery, I resolved then and there never voluntarily to use the bastardized spelling again, and as soon as I could afford to, to change it legally. The final alteration came in 1969 when Geraldo Rivera, by then a law school graduate and a practicing lawyer, came to the attention of WABC-TV through his representation of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican activist group: I had an appointment with Al Primo, news director for WABC-TV, Channel 7, the ABC Television Network’s flagship local station. He was looking for a Puerto Rican to complement his already ethnically diverse on-air team. Aside from Gloria [Rojas], who worked for the rival CBS affiliate, New York’s million-plus Latino community was not represented on any of the major local news programs. Apparently, Al Primo was out to change that. He caught me mouthpiecing on the air for the Young Lords and thought he saw the makings of a newsman, and so he asked Gloria for an introduction. He told me how television would help me to help my people, in ways bigger and better than I could have ever imagined. He told me not to worry that I did not know the first thing about the television news business; the station would send me to a crash course in broadcast journalism at Columbia University. I wondered, out loud, why I should leave the legal profession after I had worked so long and hard to get through law school. He asked how much money I was making. “About two hundred a week,” I replied. “I’ll give you three hundred a week to start, and I’ll raise it fifty a year for the next five.” Deal. “By the way,” he said, shaking on our new relationship, “what’s Gerry short for?” “Gerald.” “Gerald?” he tried. “It’s not very Puerto Rican, is it?” “No,” I said. “I guess not, but it’s better than Sidney.” “Sidney?” “That’s what my Jewish mother wanted to call me.” He laughed politely at the exchange, but his smile seemed forced. I sensed he was disappointed. After all, he was going to some trouble to hire a Puerto Rican reporter; surely, he wanted to at least get his money’s worth. “If you want something more Latin,” I suggested, “my father and his side of the family call me Geraldo.” “Geraldo?” he said, and this time his smile was genuine. “Geraldo Rivera.” He tested the sound, rolling the Rs and learning what millions were about to, that the G in Spanish is pronounced H. “That’s better,” he said finally. “Let’s go with Geraldo.”
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38736
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Critics argue that Mark Zuckerberg isn’t really “giving away” 99% of his Facebook stock (about $45 billion), as he announced in December 2015.
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"Mark Zuckerberg Isn't Really ""Giving Away"" $45 Billion"
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mixture
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9/11 Attack on America, Celebrities
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After Mark Zuckerberg announced that he plans to “give away” 99% of his Facebook stock, critics argued that Zuckerberg wouldn’t exactly be “giving away” his fortune because of the business model that Zuckerberg plans to use. Claims that Mark Zuckerberg isn’t really giving away $45 billion aren’t true or false. The answer falls somewhere in between because of complicated laws that define limited liability companies (LLCs) and 501c3 organizations (non-profit charities). We’ll lay out the facts and let you decide if claims about Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to “give away” $45 billion are closer to truth or fiction. First, we’ll start from the beginning. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced that they would donate 99% of their Facebook stock (about $45 billion) to “advancing human potential and promoting equality” in a letter to their newborn daughter on December 1, 2015. In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg described the letter as such: Priscilla and I are so happy to welcome our daughter Max into this world! For her birth, we wrote a letter to her about the world we hope she grows up in. It’s a world where our generation can advance human potential and promote equality — by curing disease, personalizing learning, harnessing clean energy, connecting people, building strong communities, reducing poverty, providing equal rights and spreading understanding across nations. We are committed to doing our small part to help create this world for all children. We will give 99% of our Facebook shares — currently about $45 billion — during our lives to join many others in improving this world for the next generation. Thank you to everyone in this community for all your love and support during the pregnancy. You’ve given us hope that together we can build this world for Max and all children. After Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan announced that they would giveaway 99% of their Facebook stock, critics came forward to argue that the couple wasn’t exactly “giving away” their fortune. Because Zuckerberg’s Facebook stock will be meted out through a limited liability company (LLC) instead of a 501c3 (non-profit organization),they argue, Zuckerberg will still be able to use the money to invest in private companies, lobby politicians and donate to political campaigns. He’ll also be able to write checks from the LLC to anybody, including himself. Under the LLC structure, there’s also no board of directors to report to, federal disclosure requirements or minimum charitable contributions that need to be made each year, critics argue. James Kwak, an associate professor at the UConn Law School, called Zuckerberg’s decision to set up an LLC a “$45 billion loophole” in a blog post: Essentially, Zuckerberg can do everything with the LLC’s money that he can do with his own money. So on the most substantive level, he hasn’t done anything except announce some vague intentions. The “99%” claim made a lot of headlines, but there’s a lot less there than meets the eye. A lot of things that other billionaires do with their own money—like invest in other companies—Zuckerberg can now do with the LLC’s money. The only thing he seems to be saying is that he and his family will restrict their personal consumption to 1% of his fortune (about $450 million), but even that is not entirely clear. He certainly retains the ability to take money back out whenever he wants, and the LLC will almost certainly do some things that really are personal consumption (like political contributions). In addition, whenever the LLC makes a contribution to a real charity, the associated tax deduction will flow back up to Zuckerberg and Chan. So to the extent that they have to sell stock to pay for their consumption, they will never pay tax on those sales. (Put another way, their remaining $450 million, as well as any money they make in the future, is now all after-tax money.) Mark Zuckerberg responded to the criticism by explaining the decision to set up an LLC rather than a 501c3 nonprofit. In a follow-up Facebook post, Zuckerberg said that he had decided to forgo the tax advantages of establishing a non-profit organization to support charitable causes because an LLC would give him more flexibility to champion causes. Zuckerberg also said that proceeds from the LLC’s investments in private companies would also be devoted to charitable causes, which is another benefit of an LLC: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is structured as an LLC rather than a traditional foundation. This enables us to pursue our mission by funding non-profit organizations, making private investments and participating in policy debates — in each case with the goal of generating a positive impact in areas of great need. Any net profits from investments will also be used to advance this mission. By using an LLC instead of a traditional foundation, we receive no tax benefit from transferring our shares to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, but we gain flexibility to execute our mission more effectively. In fact, if we transferred our shares to a traditional foundation, then we would have received an immediate tax benefit, but by using an LLC we do not. And just like everyone else, we will pay capital gains taxes when our shares are sold by the LLC. What’s most important to us is the flexibility to give to the organizations that will do the best work — regardless of how they’re structured. For example, our education work has been funded through a non-profit organization,Startup:Education, the recently announced Breakthrough Energy Coalitionwill make private investments in clean energy, and we also fund public government efforts, like the CDC Ebola response and San Francisco General Hospital. In the end, there’s no reason to call Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that he’ll give away 99% of his Facebook stocks “false.” But it’s not accurate to say that Zuckerberg has already “given away” $45 billion of his wealth to charitable causes yet, either. That’s why we’re classifying this one as “truth and fiction.” Comments
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11115
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An Apple a Day May Help Keep Heart Disease Away
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Granted, it sought an independent nutritionist’s perspective but she was reacting to the same incomplete information from an abstract of a talk not yet given. It also reports cholesterol-lowering results only in relative risk reduction terms, giving readers no good sense of the scope of the potential benefit. Cardiovascular diseases are still America’s leading killers. Readers deserve more scrutiny of the evidence, better quantification of potential benefits, and more information to put new findings into the context of existing alternatives.
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false
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Diet studies,HealthDay,heart disease
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Not applicable. The cost of apples is not in question. Again, the supposed benefits were only stated in terms of test scores – and then only in relative risk reduction terms, not absolute. Read our primer on this topic. We can’t think of any potential harms, and the story stated that “Despite the addition of several hundred calories a day to their diet, the apple-eating women didn’t gain weight over the course of the study. In fact, they lost an average of 3.3 pounds.” There was some odd stuff here. The story never explained why dried apples were used. Yet it quotes a nutritionist saying she’d recommend fresh apples over dried apples. So why were dried apples used in the study? Also, the control group in the study apparently ate dried prunes. The story – oddly – stated: “What effects, if any, the prunes had on cholesterol levels were not mentioned in the study abstract.” So the story is based solely on a study abstract? Apparently. The story only quoted the researcher from a statement, and noted further that he was “to present the findings Tuesday at the Experimental Biology meeting in Washington D.C.” So the researcher wasn’t interviewed. His quote was pulled from a statement. And the information came from a short abstract. That’s not sound practice. We’re going to take a hard line on this – and we admit we hold the bar high, but we think it’s for important reasons. The story only discusses changes in cholesterol scores – and actually doesn’t do a very good job of that because it only provides relative risk changes, not the absolute score changes. (14% of what? 23% of what? 4% of what?) But the bigger point is that there was no discussion of what difference these changes actually makes on peoples’ cardiovascular heatlh. Yet the story was headlined, “An apple a day may help keep heart disease away.” Where was that shown? The first sentence said “eating apples…may be good for your cardiovascular health.” Where was the evidence that these lower scores actually equate to improved outcomes? Changes in cholesterol scores are changes in risk factors – not necessarily changes in the disease itself or in individual outcomes. The story could have said that in just an additional line. We’ll give the story credit for seeking the input from an independent clinical nutritionist, although she apparently only had a news release and/or an abstract to comment on – which is incomplete basis for comment much less a story. No, apples weren’t compared with anything else – dietary, other lifestyle options, or drugs – to lower cholesterol levels. So even if readers could grasp the scope of the relative risk reduction figures given, they weren’t put into the context of what else is done to lower cholesterol levels. Bigger impact? Smaller? Same? Not applicable. The availability of apples is not in question. If apples have ever been studied before by anyone else for cardiovascular heatlh, we weren’t told about it in this story. But since no claims of novelty were made, we’ll rule this Not Applicable. Although the story sought an independent expert’s input, the basis of the story was apparently a news release because that’s the source of the only quote given from the researcher. And the story admits it relied on an abstract of a paper that hadn’t even been presented yet.
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32204
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"A mother sued a hospital and claimed that a flu shot had ""turned"" her son gay."
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Previous World News Daily Report fictions include claims an infant in the Philippines was born with stigmata, a lottery winner died trying to gold-plate his genitals, a 14-year-old virgin was impregnated solely by a flu shot, a slaughterhouse employee killed dozens of coworkers in a period of twenty years, a donor heart recipient got an organ from a serial killer and then went on a killing spree, a man’s genitals were mutilated during the attempted “rape” of a pit bull, a meth-using babysitter ate a small child while high, a Smithsonian employee was discovered to be “raping” a mummy, an overweight man sued Golden Corral after he was kicked out for staying too long, rat meat was sold as chicken wings in the United States before the 2016 Super Bowl, a woman broke a world record for giving birth to 14 children by 14 different men, a Nazi sub was located in the Great Lakes, a mother sued a tampon company for taking her daughter’s virginity, a 101-year-old Italian woman gave birth to a healthy baby using fertility treatments, CIA agents were caught smuggling cocaine across the Mexican border, a National Geographic journalist was eaten alive by a giant sunfish, Edward Snowden said that Osama bin Laden was alive and well under CIA protection, a fisherman caught a giant shark in the Great Lakes, a four-year-old boy was arrested by the FBI for hacking their databases, and a man was arrested for embezzling McDonald’s McNuggets in a body cavity.
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false
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Junk News, flu shot, gay, that viral feed
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On 26 September 2015, the World News Daily Report web site published an article (later aggregated by fellow fake news outlet That Viral Feed) claiming a woman had sued a hospital because she believed a flu shot had “turned” her son gay: Andrea Benenacci, the mother of a 16-year-old teenager who recently received a flu shot at San Francisco General Hospital, is suing the hospital after she noticed extreme changes in her son’s sexual preferences. The single mother of two blames the hospital for giving her son a vaccine shot which allegedly has made him queer. “My son was perfectly normal before the shot” she told reporters. Medical specialist Frank Weishberg claims he has observed a progression in similar claims in the past decade. “In my 40 years of research on male health relating to problems of the male reproductive system, I have been witness to at least a hundred similar cases only in the past decade, with a large amount in the San Francisco Bay area, which is extremely atypical,” he admits. The article and its claims were purely fabricated. World News Daily Report is a fake news site whose modus operandi involves snatching unrelated pictures and attaching them to wild falsehoods and garnering social media shares via clickbait content. The site’s disclaimer clearly states that WNDR’s content is completely false: WNDR assumes however all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content. All characters appearing in the articles in this website — even those based on real people — are entirely fictional and any resemblance between them and any persons, living, dead, or undead is purely a miracle. The photograph of “Andrea Benenacci” that accompanied the article was taken from August 2015 news stories about a woman named Amber McCullough (the mother of conjoined twins), and the picture of “Frank Weishberg” was a photograph of one-time “world’s oldest doctor” Walter Watson. Neither image was accurately presented.
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28946
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Patients can circumvent insurance company claim denials by requesting a specific form of documentation, as the insurance company will opt to simply cover the cost rather than provide the paperwork.
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"What's true: HIPAA laws entitle patients to access to their medical records (with limited exemptions), and insurers unable to document adherence to healthcare laws could conceivably reverse a denial decision to avoid hassle. What's false: Insurers are not required to designate a ""HIPAA Compliance Officer,"" nor are they obligated to provide the names and credentials of everyone involved in a coverage decision."
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mixture
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Medical, HIPAA, insurance companies, medical hack
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On 11 December 2015, a Facebook user published the above-reproduced image advising: MEDICAL HACK: So, your doctor ordered a medical test or treatment and your insurance company denied it. That is a typical cost saving method. OK, here is what you do: The user indicated that the image was back by “popular demand,” but it didn’t begin appearing in our inbox until December 2015. At that time, its spread on Facebook, and the ease with which it promised patients might navigate universally unpleasant medical insurance company morasses, led many to question whether its claims were accurate. The image, which appeared with a photograph of a medical professional in scrubs to imply authority on the matter, appeared to convey a simple strategy not exclusive to dealings with insurance companies. By simply overwhelming your adversary with onerous or difficult to attain requests, you might encourage their compliance on a separate, smaller request. The tactic is common and often invoked to beat bureaucratic entities at their own game, often with mixed results. While the meme appears concise, it carries a number of specific legal, medical, and insurance-related claims. It began by referencing “cost saving” denials made by insurance companies irrespective of medical necessity; an example of such a practice was rescission, since banned under the provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2012, most commonly known as “Obamacare.” In its first point, the meme directs patients to call their insurance companies (department or division unspecified) and request to speak with the “HIPAA Compliance/Privacy Officer,” a position it asserts is required by federal law of all insurance companies, presumably under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, or HIPAA. However, while it’s true that insurers are required to have someone on hand who can explain HIPAA-related issues to customers, they aren’t required to dedicate people solely or specifically to that task, nor identify them as “”HIPAA Compliance/Privacy Officers.” Once a patient makes contact with an insurance company’s “HIPAA compliance officer,” step two claims that that person is obligated to supply the “NAMES as well as CREDENTIALS of every person accessing your record” in order to have reached the initial decision of denial. Again, it’s true that HIPAA regulations mandate that patients be able to obtain information about who has accessed their medical records, those regulations don’t require insurers to provide the credentials of every such person. Step three of the meme assumes that steps one and two can be achieved without question. It holds that under the conditions described, health insurers will almost always opt to reverse the decision rather than provide information to which the patient is entitled under federal law. Whether such an entitlement existed is debatable (and likely variable) and whether the insurance company would indeed choose a path of ostensible least resistance is again impossible to predict. The third section further claims denials of coverage were invariably made by “low paid HS graduates,” not medical doctors of a relevant specialty. This portion appeared to suggest that insurance companies are bound by law to base decisions to deny coverage of services or medications on the decision of not just a doctor, but a doctor that is board certified in the specialty under which that treatment fell. We were unable to substantiate that assertion. In the large number of provisions attached to both HIPAA and Obamacare, none appeared to mandate that denial of coverage decisions be based on a doctor’s review. Similarly, we found no evidence that should such a convention be widely observed, documenting it would be difficult: if the law required physician supervision in compliance with HIPAA, insurance companies more than likely provided for that in the structure under which they issued coverage denials. Ultimately, information on how such decisions were reached didn’t appear to be widely available (the image tacked on an assertion that “they” don’t “want you to know” the process), but the basic underlying assertion didn’t seem to be supported by existing laws. As such, the opacity of the process may be less deliberate obfuscation, and more a simple absence of related legal structure — if insurance companies are entitled to deny coverage on a discretionary basis without the say-so of a doctor, there’s no reason a non-mandated process would be outlined through any plan resource or HHS guideline. Asking for such documentation would make as much sense as someone demanding a receipt for a donut you didn’t buy. Consistent across the board in all healthcare law was a mandatory stipulation all denials must be issued to patients in writing; no language specified such denial decisions must be reached by a doctor or specialist. Finally, in step four the meme instructs patients to report any refusal (presumably with respect to the requested information) to the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) as a HIPAA violation. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHR), that is correct — suspected HIPAA violations can be reported by anyone to that agency. However, whether the documentation listed constituted a HIPAA violation remained unclear; doing so would perhaps result in outside review of a patient’s appeal, but not likely in a timely fashion. Armed with a freshly issued prescription coverage denial from our own health insurer, we contacted them on 15 December 2015 to see if following the steps in the meme worked. The customer service agent with whom we spoke repeatedly stated she was unaware of any such entity within the company titled “HIPAA Compliance [or] Privacy Officer.” We asked whether there was a broader department with whom we could lodge such a request; she indicated that our only recourse involved officially appealing the decision. When we asked whether we could obtain a list of names and credentials for the individuals on the panel responsible for the decision, she indicated that fulfilling such a request was not possible, adding that the panel was made up of “medical professionals and pharmacists familiar with the relevant treatment.” Unlike most partially correct advice memes, the shakeout of the “medical hack” meme wasn’t necessarily of limited value. Anyone who has navigated the complex intersection of HIPAA, Obamacare, insurance companies, and authorizations is likely familiar with how truly arbitrary such decisions and reversals often can seem. Utilizing the advice as presented in the meme is unlikely to worsen a patient’s experience after they’ve been denied a test or treatment, but the cumulative presented advice was no guarantee of success in securing a successful appeal of denial. The largest risk appeared to be wasting time on the phone attempting to elicit such a decision, but similarly, it wouldn’t hurt to try before exploring other options. Given all available information, however, insurance companies routinely made every attempt to follow the letter of the law (if not its spirit) and remained largely compliant; hoping for a chink in that armor could well be a long shot.
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9439
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Regular painkillers work as well as opioids for sprains, strains and fractures
|
The news story reports on the findings of a recent study published in JAMA, which evaluated the effectiveness of four painkillers in addressing acute arm or leg pain in emergency room patients. One of the painkillers was a combination of the over-the-counter medications acetaminophen and ibuprofen; the other three painkillers were combinations of acetaminophen and an opioid (oxycodone, hydrocodone or codeine). The study found that — within the two-hour window being evaluated — there was no statistical significant difference in the effectiveness of the four drugs, indicating that acetaminophen/ibuprofen is a viable alternative to opioids for addressing acute pain. The story is exceptionally concise — a news brief rather than a feature — but does a good job of describing the study and placing it in the context of the “opioid crisis” in the U.S. But much like a related news release, which we also reviewed, the story fails to place the findings in context with previous research on the relative efficacy of opioid and non-opioid painkillers. The story does a lot of things well, particularly given its brevity. It describes the study well and makes clear that the study is important because of the ongoing opioid crisis in the United States. As we noted when reviewing a news release on this study, the American Society of Addiction Medicine reports that at least 2 million Americans had an addiction to prescription painkillers in 2015 — and more than 20,000 people died from prescription painkiller overdoses in the same year. And data from the National Institute of Drug Abuse show that this problem is on the rise. However, any story about research findings will be stronger if it explains how new findings are consistent with or differ from previous research in the field. That may be especially true here. If this story aimed to highlight the finding that non-opioid painkillers are comparable in effectiveness to opioid painkillers, it could have mentioned any of several studies (cited in the journal article) that had similar findings in post-surgical settings.
|
mixture
|
ibuprofen,opioid drugs,pain relief
|
Cost isn’t addressed. As we noted when reviewing the news release, the costs of ibuprofen and acetaminophen are fairly low — but the relevant opioids are also relatively inexpensive. For the relevant dosages, the costs would be more or less comparable, with the hydrocodone/acetaminophen combination likely being the most expensive. The story does a nice job here. It offers some quantification of the benefit without delving into statistically insignificant distinctions. In short, it makes clear that there was no practical difference in the effectiveness of the painkillers. The story does not delve into potential harms — but it does note that the study itself did not collect information on side effects. In a case like this one, simply reminding readers that there are potential side effects for all the drugs studied, and that the study did not address them, is sufficient for a Satisfactory rating. The story squeaks by on this one for explaining, albeit very briefly, that the study was randomized and that there were caveats to the data. No disease mongering here. There are no independent sources cited in the story, nor does the story address potential conflicts of interest. We get that this story is part of a series that aims to present brief “snapshots” of recent research findings that are interesting or important — little news nuggets you can read in the amount of time it takes you to wait for the elevator. But we think getting outside input is sort of a threshold issue for journalism, and perhaps especially so for health care journalism. It could simply be a sentence from an independent source noting whether this is valuable information for clinical decision-making in emergency rooms. Are opioids regularly prescribed to patients with these types of injuries? Likewise, there don’t appear to be any conflicts of interest related to the paper. A few words to that effect would have been very welcome. The story (and the study itself) are focused on the comparison of alternatives. While the story doesn’t explicitly state that the relevant drugs are clinically available, acetaminophen and ibuprofen are both sufficiently well-known over-the-counter painkillers that the writer can assume most readers are familiar with their availability. Opioid drugs, meanwhile, are generally much harder to access and tightly regulated in many states. This is the weakest point of the story. It was also the weakest point of a news release on the work, and we’ll make the same observation here that we did there. First, here’s a key quote from the JAMA article: “Relatively few ED [emergency department] studies have compared the efficacy of the 3 most commonly used opioid analgesics in the ED and none has compared them in a single study. Although opioids are considered to provide stronger analgesia than nonopioid analgesics, 1 ED-based study found that adding combination oxycodone and acetaminophen to naproxen did not improve pain relief at 1 week in patients with acute low back pain. Several postsurgical studies have found combination nonopioids to be as effective as a combination of codeine and acetaminophen.” This is really useful information. Among other things, it tells us that previous studies have found similar results — but not in the context of addressing acute pain in the emergency room. In other words, it makes clear how this study builds on and is different from earlier research. That’s important. What’s more, as we noted in the “Why This Matters” section at the top of the page, the studies cited in the JAMA paper had comparable findings. This is not the first time someone has found that non-opioids are comparable to opioids. If you’re trying to tell people that there may be a way for doctors to meaningfully address one contributing factor to the opioid crisis, you should point to all of the supporting information — not just the most recent. The story included information that was not found in the release.
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15873
|
"Homeopathy, acupuncture and aromatherapy ""have been given elevated legitimacy under the Affordable Care Act."
|
"Goldberg wrote that homeopathy, acupuncture and aromatherapy ""have been given elevated legitimacy under the Affordable Care Act."" The law does provide a leg up for alternative therapies (although it’s unclear whether homeopathy and aromatherapy would ultimately benefit). In practice, though, it’s important not to oversell the impact. Most of the provisions in question are modest, and the one with potentially the biggest impact has been curbed by a subsequent guidance from HHS. The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details."
|
mixture
|
Corrections and Updates, Health Care, PunditFact, Jonah Goldberg,
|
"Editor's note, Feb. 25, 2015: One of the core principles of our work, and the work of all journalists, is to contact the subjects whom we are writing about. In this fact-check, we didn’t meet our high standards. While we emailed Jonah Goldberg five days before publishing our fact-check, we never followed up with a phone call or another email to see if he had seen our questions. And while we also attempted to contact Goldberg’s source, Kevin Williamson, we did so only by Twitter. That’s not good enough in our book. Goldberg has since responded to this fact-check via a column on NationalReview.com. While there is nothing in his response that changes our rating, we should have made every attempt to reach him so he could make his points prior to publication. For that, we are sorry. PolitiFact has published literally hundreds of fact-checks on President Barack Obama’s signature health care law, the Affordable Care Act, so it’s always a surprise when a reader stumps us with a fresh claim they’ve run across. Recently, a reader sent us a column from the conservative National Review that said the law gives preferred treatment to non-traditional forms of medicine. The column was from Jonah Goldberg, citing the work of another National Review writer, Kevin Williamson. ""As my National Review colleague Kevin Williamson notes, ‘Everybody wants to know what Scott Walker and Sarah Palin think about evolution, but almost nobody is asking what Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama think about homeopathy, acupuncture, aromatherapy and the like.’ Even though such remedies have been given elevated legitimacy under the Affordable Care Act."" We wondered: Is Goldberg right that the law gives ""elevated legitimacy"" to such non-traditional techniques? It turns out there’s a solid core of truth to the claim, but also some important caveats. (Neither Williamson nor Goldberg returned inquiries for this fact-check.) Where the claim has a point In recent years, the use of ""complementary and alternative medicine"" (also called ""integrative health care"") has grown substantially. A survey by the National Institutes of Health found that roughly four of every 10 American adults and one of every nine children uses at least one form of alternative medicine. That category includes such fields as acupuncture, chiropractic, diet therapies (such as the Atkins, Ornish, South Beach or vegetarian diet), homeopathy, hypnosis, massage therapy, tai chi and yoga. Following a lobbying campaign by alternative-medicine practitioners, and assistance from then-Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, several provisions favorable to non-traditional forms of medicine were inserted into the health care law. Here are provisions that stand to benefit complementary and alternative medicine: • Section 3502 establishes grants for medical homes. The law says that the interdisciplinary teams supporting such homes may include ""licensed complementary and alternative medicine practitioners"" and ""doctors of chiropractic."" • Section 4001 establishes the National Prevention, Health Promotion and Public Health Council and, in turn, an advisory group on prevention, health promotion, and integrative and public health issues. • Section 4206 creates a pilot program to provide at-risk individuals who use community health centers with ""individualized wellness plans"" designed to reduce risk factors for preventable conditions, including integrative health techniques. • Section 5101 creates a National Healthcare Workforce Commission and expands the definition of the health care workforce to include integrative health care practitioner, licensed complementary and alternative medicine provider, and doctors of chiropractic. • Section 6301 establishes the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to fund research that determines which medical techniques work best. Some of the institute’s research addresses alternative medicine, including a study of ""non-pharmacologic strategies to reduce pain and depression,"" as well as efforts to compare acupuncture and cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia among cancer survivors. The institute is also funding studies of ""relaxation and mindfulness exercises,"" massage, yoga, meditation, and breathing exercises. All told, the institute is spending $4.1 million for studies involving alternative medicine, or about 3.5 percent of its funding to date on this type of study. Findings from this research could become significant, since many alternative medicine therapies have not yet faced rigorous scientific testing -- a key prerequisite for getting insurance companies to pay for them. Potentially the most far-reaching provision, however, is Section 2706. Alternative-medicine advocates say this section stipulates that as long as an alternative-medicine practitioner is fully licensed by a state, insurance companies must reimburse them just as they do medical doctors. (Literally, the section says that ""a group health plan and a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage shall not discriminate with respect to participation under the plan or coverage against any health care provider who is acting within the scope of that provider's license or certification under applicable state law."") Put all of these elements together and Goldberg has a point. Where the claim overstates the case That said, it’s important to note some limitations in how the health care law is treating alternative medicine in practice, rather than in theory. For starters, the first four provisions cited above are heavier on symbolism than practical impact. They involve things like pilot programs, advisory committees and optional extensions of definitions to include alternative-medicine practitioners. The research being conducted could ultimately make a difference, but it’s still a small portion of the institute’s portfolio. Most importantly, the most sweeping of the half dozen provisions -- the changes to reimbursement policy prompted by Section 2706 -- hasn’t yet turned into a boon for alternative-medicine practitioners. In states like California, Hawaii, Montana and Rhode Island, lawmakers have offered bills that would enshrine the language of Section 2706. But they have not become law yet. Meanwhile, the federal Department of Health and Human Services has thrown cold water on advocates’ most sweeping visions. Perhaps influenced by pushback from traditional medical disciplines, HHS issued guidance that says, in part, ""This provision (2706) does not require plans or issuers to accept all types of providers into a network."" Alyssa Wostrel, executive director of the Integrative Healthcare Policy Consortium, calls the HHS guidance ""faulty,"" and Harkin (who’s now retired from the Senate) and other advocates have sought to reverse it. But for now, the HHS guidance seems to be having a chilling effect on the expansion of alternative-medicine coverage. Our ruling Goldberg wrote that homeopathy, acupuncture and aromatherapy ""have been given elevated legitimacy under the Affordable Care Act."" The law does provide a leg up for alternative therapies (although it’s unclear whether homeopathy and aromatherapy would ultimately benefit). In practice, though, it’s important not to oversell the impact. Most of the provisions in question are modest, and the one with potentially the biggest impact has been curbed by a subsequent guidance from HHS. The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details, so"
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26371
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A photo shows a “Center for Global Population Reduction” at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation headquarters.
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This photo has been altered to make it look like the words “Center for Global Human Population” appear on the Gates Foundation’s building.
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false
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Public Health, Viral image,
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"Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has emerged as a prominent voice in public discussions about how to combat the coronavirus. In 2015, he was already warning Americans that the country was unprepared for an inevitable infectious virus. More recently, he’s become a target for misinformation concerning the pandemic. We’ve debunked several claims, including that he said ""church services can’t resume until we’re all vaccinated,"" that the Gates Foundation paralyzed nearly 500,000 children testing a polio vaccine, and that the foundation has a patent for the coronavirus. An image lurking in certain corners of the internet has a similar theme. It shows what looks like the corner of a foundation building, with the words ""Bill & Melinda Gates foundation"" seemingly etched in the facade. Above that? These words: ""Center for Global Human Population Reduction."" ""Right out in front for the world to see their plan,"" reads one Facebook post sharing the image. It was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) The image appears to be a doctored photo of 500 Fifth Ave N., the foundation’s headquarters in Seattle. We searched for that address in Google Maps and found this photo, which shows the foundation’s name and the street number 500, just as it appears in the image on the Facebook post, but without the name of the supposed center. The corner of the building is also visible in the Google Maps street view. The ""Center for Global Population Reduction"" marking doesn’t appear on the building. The foundation’s 2018 annual report, the most recent available, makes no mention of such a center or even population. We also didn’t find that center searching the foundation’s website. But allegations that Bill Gates is wielding vaccines to thin human herds aren’t new. In 2018, for example, we fact-checked a story that he had a ""plan to depopulate the planet."" That claim was wrong, and as several other fact-checkers have found, so is this one."
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17016
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"Julián Castro Says Dan Patrick ""proposed Arizona-style show-me-your-papers legislation."
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"Castro said Patrick ""proposed Arizona-style show-me-your-papers legislation."" Patrick’s unsuccessful proposal was similar to, and modeled on, Arizona’s show-your-papers provision."
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true
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Immigration, Criminal Justice, Crime, Texas, Julián Castro,
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"In an April 15, 2014, debate on immigration, Democrat Julián Castro said Republican Dan Patrick filed legislation akin to the 2010 Arizona mandate that police officers ask individuals about their immigration status. ""He filed (Senate Bill) 1070-like show-me-your-papers legislation,"" the San Antonio mayor said in the debate aired by the Univision network. Castro said this action left Patrick out of step with Texas Democrats and Republicans who, he suggested, are more supportive of immigrants regardless of origin. Patrick, the Houston state senator in a May 27 runoff with incumbent David Dewhurst for the GOP lieutenant governor nomination, replied: ""No, mayor. That’s a lie."" Asked to elaborate, Patrick said: ""First of all, that bill, which didn’t pass, would have only … come into play had police had suspicions that someone had committed a crime and then"" they would ""turn it over to"" the federal Immigration Customs Enforcement agency, he said, ""to try to keep us in line with Secure Communities,"" the program enabling fingerprints of arrested individuals to be checked against federal crime and immigration databases. Patrick further said he’d decided, ""based on things the federal government has done, that that bill will not pass and will not be effective."" We wondered if indeed Patrick filed an Arizona-type ""show-me-your-papers"" proposal. Looks like it. Castro's basis By email, Castro spokesman Jaime Castillo quoted Patrick’s measure, which died without a hearing in the 2011 legislative session, and said it was similar to a vital part of Arizona’s law. As recapped by Castillo, Patrick’s legislation specified: ""A peace officer shall inquire into the lawful presence of any person who is lawfully stopped, detained, or arrested on other grounds if the officer has a reasonable suspicion to believe the person has violated a criminal provision of the federal immigration laws (sic)."" Castillo said Arizona's law ""included language authorizing police officers to check immigration status if they have reasonable suspicion to believe that someone is here illegally and, before"" court rulings ""to arrest without a warrant, anyone ‘the officer has probable cause to believe … has committed any public offense that makes the person removable from the United States.’"" Let’s look at both. Arizona law Arizona’s 21-page measure, signed into law in April 2010, included provisions intended to ""work together to discourage and deter the unlawful entry and presence of aliens and economic activity by persons unlawfully present"" in the country. A key element of the law--which included state-level restrictions on human smuggling and workers congregating in search of day jobs--directed law officers at all levels to check the status of people stopped for various reasons who might appear to be in the U.S. illegally. Another section said the immigration status of arrested individuals must be checked before their release. The law also provided for officers to transport individuals lacking proof of legal residency to federal authorities. Generally, as noted in a 2010 fact check, the law required legal immigrants to carry papers that confirmed their legal status, though the U.S. Supreme Court later threw out parts of the law that would have made state crimes out of federal immigration violations, as reported by The Associated Press in June 2012. According to the AP’s account, the court rejected the law’s mandate that immigrants obtain or carry immigration registration papers. It also tossed language making it a state criminal offense for an illegal immigrant to seek work or hold a job, the AP said, and voided a provision permitting police to arrest suspected illegal immigrants without warrants. The court let stand the law’s requirement that police officers check the status of people stopped for various reasons who might appear to be in the U.S. illegally. Even then, the AP reported, the justices said the provision could be subject to additional legal challenges. Also, they removed some teeth by prohibiting officers from arresting people on immigration charges. Patrick’s proposal According to a Texas legislative website, Patrick filed his measure, SB 126, on Nov. 8, 2010 in anticipation of the 2011 legislative session. The proposal called for revising the state’s Code of Criminal Procedure by specifying that a ""peace officer shall inquire into the lawful presence of any person who is lawfully stopped, detained, or arrested on other grounds if the officer has a reasonable suspicion to believe the person has violated a criminal provision of the federal immigration laws."" If the officer has ""probable cause"" to believe as much, the officer could arrest the person and ""shall identify and report the person to"" ICE, the proposal said. Also, Patrick’s measure voided any local ordinance, regulation or policy interfering with an officer carrying out the described duty, furthermore giving legal immunity to an officer, agency or other governmental entity for any cause of action connected to carrying out such duties aside from intentional misconduct, recklessness or gross negligence connected with the intended law. At the time, news stories said Patrick had filed a proposal like the show-your-papers part of the Arizona law, though Patrick stressed in interviews that police officers would be required to ask a person if they were in the state legally only if they reasonably suspected otherwise. A Nov. 13, 2010, news story in the San Antonio Express-News quoted him as saying law agencies wanted the question to be required, instead of being optional, to avoid complaints of profiling. In January 2011, Patrick separately told the Associated Press and an MSNBC host that he’d been to Arizona to see its law in action. Patrick said on MSNBC: ""It's workable for our police. And then once a police officer says to someone, are you legally present, because they don't have any identification, we then give the discretion to the officer to take the next step. Is that an arrest, is it detaining that person on suspicion of another possible crime?"" Logan Spence, Patrick’s lieutenant governor campaign manager, replied to our query about Patrick’s proposal with an email suggesting Patrick’s proposal was more narrow than the entire Arizona statute. By phone, Castillo said Castro didn’t say in the debate that Patrick filed the entire Arizona law. Our ruling Castro said Patrick ""proposed Arizona-style show-me-your-papers legislation."" Patrick’s unsuccessful proposal was similar to, and modeled on, Arizona’s show-your-papers provision.s . – The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing."
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28483
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In 1862, Abraham Lincoln ordered the execution by hanging of 38 Dakota Sioux fighters.
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What's true: Lincoln approved the execution of 39 Dakota men convicted by a military commission of perpetrating massacres during the Dakota War of 1862. What's false: The military commission had sentenced 303 Dakota fighters to death, but Lincoln commuted 264 of those sentences despite threats of mob violence and intense pressure to reverse his decision.
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mixture
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History, abraham lincoln, indigenous peoples, native americans
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In March 2018, thousands of Facebook users shared a meme which asserts that President Abraham Lincoln had ordered the executions of 38 Native American warriors in 1862: That claim is largely accurate, but it’s also misleading; it omits to mention that although Abraham Lincoln did approve 39 death sentences (one of the condemned men was ultimately spared), he also prevented the hangings of 264 other Native Americans by commuting their death sentences, in the same order. It also fails to make it clear that the death sentences did not originate with Lincoln. Rather, the executions were ordered by a military commission and sent to the president, who had the legal authority to approve or decline to approve any or all of the sentences. The Dakota War of 1862 involved a violent uprising by Dakota Sioux tribal members in Minnesota in response to hunger and privation as well as treaty violations on the part of the United States federal government, which had a long history of displacing and exploiting Native American peoples since the birth of the American colonies. The conflict began in August 1862, lasted for six weeks, and involved killings, atrocities, and hostage-takings on both sides. On 26 September 1862, the Dakota surrendered at what became known as Camp Release in Minnesota. According to the Minnesota Historical Society, the U.S. forces then commenced military trials for hundreds of captured Dakota fighters: On September 28, 1862, two days after the surrender at Camp Release, a commission of military officers established by Henry Sibley began trying Dakota men accused of participating in the war… As weeks passed, cases were handled with increasing speed. On November 5, the commission completed its work. 392 prisoners were tried, 303 were sentenced to death, and 16 were given prison terms. On 9 November 1862, the list of the 303 condemned Dakota fighters was sent to Lincoln for his approval of their executions. Two days later, he requested a review of their cases and trials. In July 1862, the United States Congress had passed a law relating to court martials and military commissions which made it clear that death sentences emerging from such trials could not be carried out without the approval of the President of the United States: …Be it further enacted that the President shall appoint, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, a judge advocate general, with the rank, pay, and emoluments of a colonel of cavalry, to whose office shall be returned, for revision, the records and proceedings of all courts-martial and military commissions, and where a record shall be kept of all proceedings had thereupon. And no sentence of death, or imprisonment in the penitentiary, shall be carried into execution until the same shall have been approved by the President. In a major 1990 paper on the trials and executions, University of Minnesota law professor Carol Chomsky was highly critical of the trials and of Lincoln’s confirmation of the execution of the Dakota fighters for actions taken in the context of a military conflict, a punishment that was not handed down to other military combatants, such as Confederate soldiers in the Civil War. However, she also noted that Lincoln was under intense pressure to sign off on the executions of all 303 Dakota men, and that a mob in Minnesota, stoked by local political leaders, threatened to implement vigilante justice should the president spare any of the condemned fighters: [Major General John Pope] warned [Lincoln] that the people of Minnesota, perhaps combined with some of the soldiers, would take matters into their own hands and kill “all the Indians — old men, women, and children,” if the President did not allow all the executions to go forward. If the President proved reluctant to decide, he suggested, the condemned could be turned over to the state government. Minnesota Governor Ramsey left no doubt what decision he would make if given the opportunity, writing to Lincoln to urge execution of all the condemned. A great public outcry arose in Minnesota in response to reports that Lincoln might not carry out the full sentence of the military commission. The Stillwater, Minnesota Messenger demanded extermination of the Dakota: “DEATH TO THE BARBARIANS! is the sentiment of our people.”‘ Minnesota’s Senator Morton Wilkinson and Representatives Cyrus Aldrich and William Windom wrote to Lincoln reciting stories of rapes and mutilation “well known to our people” and protesting any decision to pardon or reprieve the Dakota. If the President did not permit the executions, they said, “the outraged people of Minnesota would dispose of these wretches without law. These two peoples cannot live together. We do not wish to see mob law inaugurated in Minnesota, as it certainly will be, if you force the people to it.” In December 1862, Lincoln announced his decision about the issue to the United States Senate, suggesting that the priority of executions should be directed at captives who had committed acts of rape: Anxious to not act with so much clemency as to encourage another outbreak on one hand, nor with so much severity as to be real cruelty on the other, I ordered a careful examination of the records of the trials to be made, in view of first ordering the execution of such as had been proved guilty of violating females. However, the president discovered that only two of the 303 men had been convicted of rape, and so he widened the criteria for execution to those who had committed “massacres” (as opposed to just taking part in “battles”): This class numbered forty, and included the two convicted of female violation. One of the number is strongly recommended by the commission which tried them for commutation to ten years’ imprisonment. I have ordered the other thirty-nine to be executed on Friday, the 19th … In the end, one of the 39 condemned men had his death sentence commuted, and the executions of the remaining 38 Dakota fighters took place on 26 December 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota: A few weeks later, the New York Times offered a harrowing and disturbing account of those executions: Precisely at the time announced — 10 A.M. — a company, without arms, entered the prisoners’ quarters to escort them to their doom. Instead of any shrinking or resistance, all were ready, and even seemed eager to meet their fate. Rudely they jostled against each other, as they rushed from the doorway, ran the gauntlet of the troops, and clambered up the steps to the treacherous drop. As they came up and reached the platform, they filed right and left, and each one took his position as though they had rehearsed the programme. Standing round the platform, they formed a square, and each one was directly under the fatal noose. Their caps were now drawn over their eyes, and the halter placed about their necks. Several of them feeling uncomfortable, made severe efforts to loosen the rope, and some, after the most dreadful contortions, partially succeeded. The signal to cut the rope was three taps of the drum. All things being ready, the first tap was given, when the poor wretches made such frantic efforts to grasp each other’s hands, that it was agony to behold them. Each one shouted out his name, that his comrades might know he was there. The second tap resounded on the air. The vast multitude were breathless with the awful surroundings of this solemn occasion. Again the doleful tap breaks on the stillness of the scene. Click! goes the sharp ax, and the descending platform leaves the bodies of thirty-eight human beings dangling in the air. The greater part died instantly; some few struggled violently, and one of the ropes broke, and sent its burden with a heavy, dull crash, to the platform beneath. A new rope was procured, and the body again swung up to its place. It was an awful sight to behold. Thirty-eight human beings suspended in the air, on the bank of the beautiful Minnesota; above, the smiling, clear, blue sky; beneath and around, the silent thousands, hushed to a deathly silence by the chilling scene before them, while the bayonets bristling in the sunlight added to the importance of the occasion. It is accurate to say that Lincoln approved the executions of 39 Dakota fighters, and that despite their convictions for participating in war-time massacres, the condemned men were not afforded the conventional rights of due process (such as trial by jury) and did not have attorneys present to plead on their behalf. It is also true that Lincoln, as President of the United States, did have the legal authority to commute all 303 death sentences presented to him for his approval. However, in the very act of approving 39 executions, Lincoln was at the same time ordering the commutation of 264 death sentences. Despite intense political and popular pressure, Lincoln spared the lives of many more Dakota fighters than he condemned, albeit not as many as he could have. The popular meme displayed above leaves out this very important context, and it therefore gives an incomplete and misleading account of Lincoln’s December 1862 decision.
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42088
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Suggests the flu shot was responsible for the death of a New York state senator.
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A self-described “alternative news” story suggests the flu shot was responsible for the death of a New York state senator. The official cause of death is still pending.
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false
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flu shot, influenza, vaccines,
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A self-described “alternative news” story suggests the flu shot was responsible for the death of a New York state senator. The official cause of death is still pending.The weekend before Thanksgiving, New York State Sen. José Peralta worked at a community event offering the flu shot for free.“The senator was a huge advocate of public health,” his spokesman, Chris Sosa, told FactCheck.org.Peralta, 47, died days later, on Nov. 21. While Sosa said his official cause of death is still pending, his wife told the New York Post that preliminary results show he died of “septic shock” — which occurs when sepsis leads to dangerously low blood pressure. Sepsis, caused by the body’s response to an infection, can be life-threatening if left unchecked. But an “alternative news” story posted Nov. 27 on a website called Collective Evolution exploits Peralta’s death, and his advocacy, by suggesting his death resulted from the flu vaccine.The author includes an important caveat: “[T]here is no way for me to know for sure whether the flu shot was the cause of, or was a contributing factor in Jose Peralta’s death.” But the article makes misleading and speculative statements that all but draw an unsupported connection between Peralta’s flu shot and his death.“After Getting Flu Shot, New York State Senator Gets Sick For Two Weeks, Then Dies,” the headline reads.The story goes on to cite a Nov. 22 New York Times article that quotes Sosa as saying Peralta had resisted going to a doctor despite not feeling well, but eventually went for an exam. “It was like pulling teeth to get him to talk about not feeling well,” Sosa told the Times. “He just thought he was having symptoms related to getting the flu shot.”But Sosa told us those remarks were not intended to convey any connection between the flu shot and Peralta’s death. He called such an assertion “scientific nonsense.”The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that some who get the flu shot may experience a low-grade fever, headaches and muscle aches. It notes that the “most common side effects from the influenza shot are soreness, redness, and tenderness or swelling where the shot was given. “Sosa said that, by the time Peralta consulted a doctor at NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst, he had other symptoms not expected from the flu shot — such as difficulty breathing. He was scheduled for an early December follow-up exam.“I do not for a moment believe his death was caused by the flu shot,” Sosa said. “The senator would be disappointed to find that conspiracy theorists are using his death to forward their agenda by misrepresenting the facts.”Judith O’Donnell, an epidemiologist and section chief of the infectious diseases division at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, said she had never heard of someone getting sepsis from the vaccine.“I would say it’s impossible,” she said.Sepsis could be triggered a number of ways. O’Donnell said it could result from, say, bacterial pneumonia, or a urinary tract infection that spreads into the bloodstream.“Septic shock is caused by an overwhelming bacterial infection that generally starts somewhere, but the bacteria gets into the bloodstream,” she said, leading to a chain of “inflammatory events” that could lead to organ failure. “If not treated, or treated too late, it can even lead to death.”The alt-news story — which is laced with opinion — criticizes the media for ignoring “a possible connection between vaccines and human illness, disease and death. … Especially in this case, as septic shock has been previously linked to the flu.”But it’s not the flu vaccine that has been linked to sepsis — it’s the flu itself.“A certain subsection of patients can develop sepsis” from influenza, O’Donnell said — typically if they are already at risk, such as elderly or very young people, or pregnant women, and have compromised immune systems.The dubious article concludes with the false claim that “the historical rise in the promotion and usage of vaccines correlates to the rise of disease and death from illnesses like the flu,” which “should be enough for us to write off taking vaccines altogether.”That’s contrary to the facts.A 2017 CDC study — reviewing nearly 5,000 hospitalized flu patients from the 2013-2014 season — found that those who received the vaccine were between 52 and 79 percent less likely to die than those who had not received the vaccine.“In other words, an unvaccinated hospitalized flu patient was 2 to 5 times more likely to die than someone who had been vaccinated,” the CDC said in a press release.Likewise, an article presented by the World Health Organization, citing a number of studies, says vaccines are “among the most efficient tools for promoting individual and public health.”Experts have long tried to squash the misconception that the flu shot can lead to the flu. “I wish there was some way we could really put that myth to bed,” O’Donnell said.The University of California Berkeley School of Public Health notes: “Injectable vaccines can’t cause the flu because they’re made either with a version of the virus that has been inactivated, or ‘killed,’ or with only components of the virus.” Those components “trigger your immune system to make antibodies,” O’Donnell said, which help safeguard patients from getting the flu — or from getting seriously ill if they do.Health officials have urged patients to get vaccinated, in part to stave off complications from the flu that could be fatal (including sepsis). The CDC recommends that “everyone 6 months of age and older should get a flu vaccine every season.”Update, Jan. 15, 2019: Peralta had acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL), according to autopsy results provided to the family, Sosa told FactCheck.org. Sosa said Peralta’s wife and family were unaware that the late state senator had cancer; he had received a physical in June and “nothing alarming came up.” Those with cancer can be at higher risk of developing an infection and, therefore, sepsis, according to the CDC.Update, Jan. 17, 2019: The New York City Medical Examiner’s Office told us that it determined that Peralta died from “complications of acute promyelocytic leukemia.”Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on the social media network.“14 Facts You Should Know About the Flu.” University of California Berkeley School of Public Health. 28 Nov 2018.Andre, FE, et. al. “Vaccination greatly reduces disease, disability, death and inequity worldwide.” Bulletin of the World Health Organization, vol. 86, no. 2. Feb 2008.Christenson, Brith, et. al. “Additive preventive effect of influenza and pneumococcal vaccines in elderly persons.” European Respiratory Journal. 2004.Enos, Richard. “After Getting Flu Shot, New York State Senator Gets Sick For Two Weeks, Then Dies.” Collective Evolution. 27 Nov 2018.“Influenza and Pneumoccal Disease Can Be Serious, Health Officials Urge Vaccination.” Press release. National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. 2018.Mays, Jeffery C. “José Peralta, First Dominican-American Elected to New York State Senate, Dies at 47.” The New York Times. 22 Nov 2018.“New CDC Study Shows Flu Vaccine Reduces Severe Outcomes in Hospitalized Patients.” U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 25 May 2017.O’Donnell, Judith. Section chief of the infectious diseases division, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center. Phone interview with FactCheck.org. 6 Dec 2018.“Seasonal flu shot.” U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2 Oct 2018.“Sepsis.” Mayo Clinic. Accessed 5 Dec 2018.Sosa, Chris. Spokesman, New York State Senator José Peralta. Phone interview with FactCheck.org. 3 Dec 2018.
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8870
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Novartis sued in Calif. over kids' cough medicine.
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A California mother has sued drug maker Novartis AG in what the company believes to be the first proposed class action involving its Triaminic children’s cough and cold medicines since overdose fears prompted a recall of the drugs.
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true
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Health News
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A general view shows the headquarters of the drug making company Novartis in Basel January 17, 2008. REUTERS/Christian Hartmann The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, said several studies have shown deaths and serious injuries linked to over-the-counter children’s cold remedies. As a result, Novartis “either knew ... or reasonably should have known that their cough and cold products were ineffective and dangerous when used by children under the age of six,” the lawsuit said. A Novartis spokeswoman said the company had not seen the lawsuit and had no comment on it. The company, which recalled Triaminic oral infant cough and cold medicines late last year, said it believed the lawsuit is the first to bring claims involving the drugs. The lawsuit was brought by Kelly Carter, who dosed her 4-year-old son with Triaminic Daytime Cough & Cold in 2007. It was not immediately clear from the lawsuit whether or how the drug harmed Carter’s son. Her attorney could not be reached for comment. Novartis sells a number of products under the Triaminic brand. The lawsuit alleges that Americans spend more than $2 billion annually on over-the counter cough and cold remedies for children. In October, the Consumer Healthcare Products Association, a trade group representing makers of over-the-counter medicines, said overdoses of oral infant cough and cold medicines have led to death and serious injury in rare instances. The group stressed that the medications are safe when used as directed. U.S. Food and Drug Administration reviewers have recommended that over-the-counter cough and cold medicines that contain decongestants and antihistamines should come with new instructions saying they are not for very young children. According to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over-the-counter cough and cold drugs send an estimated 7,000 U.S. children under the age of 12 to emergency rooms every year, mostly for overdoses.
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37839
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You have to go to Settings -> Privacy -> Health -> COVID-19 Exposure to turn off automatic contact tracing on your iPhone and/or Android device.
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Do You Need to Disable COVID-19 Contact Tracing on Your Phone?
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mixture
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Fact Checks, Viral Content
|
In mid-May 2020, the following status update screenshot circulated on Facebook, urging people with iPhones (and possibly Android devices) to “turn off … exposure COVID notifications” via a series of directions in settings:It’s likely the image above circulated as a screenshot due to Facebook’s organization of COVID-19-related content (spaces between the letters in “COVID” also suggested attempts to circumvent the algorithms.) White text against a blue background read:Turn OFF your Exposure C O V I D Notifications on your phones. Go to Settings 👉 Privacy 👉 Health 👉 Turn Off C o v i d 19Facebook’s text-based status updates in the image-generating format above limited the available number of characters, so no contextual information appeared with the claim. However, it implied that the setting described activated automatically on iPhones and/or Androids.We first checked the claim on an iPhone 11, navigating from Settings to Privacy and then Health. Although the phone was updated to iOS 13.5, we did not see any “COVID-19 setting” displayed to toggle on or off:According to rumors about COVID-19 contact tracing and iPhones or Androids, contact tracing functionality was purportedly native to the iOS 13.5 installation:But when we updated the iPhone, contact tracing was mentioned in the release notes:Additional text suggested that any COVID-19 contact tracing functionality was not native to the update, and instead secondary to functionality on opt-in, third-party public health apps:iOS 13.5 speeds up access to the passcode field on devices with Face ID when you are wearing a face mask and introduces the Exposure Notification API to support COVID-19 contact tracing apps from public health authorities. This update …According to a May 20 2020 article on Apple-centric site 9to5Mac.com, the functionality is indeed opt-in and of limited scope:Apple and Google have been developing the Exposure Notification API with close guidance from public health officials. When a user enables the feature and has an app from a public health authority installed, the device will regularly send out a beacon via Bluetooth that includes a random Bluetooth identifier. From there, the Exposure Notification API will download a list of the keys for the beacons that have been verified as belonging to people confirmed as positive for COVID-19 and check against that list. If there is a match, the user may be notified and advised on next steps.Apple and Google say that as of today, a handful of U.S. states and 22 countries across five continents have requested and received access to the Exposure Notification API. The two companies say they have consulted with and briefed a number of different public health teams, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC Foundation, the Association of Public Health Laboratories, the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, and the Public Health Informatics Institute of the Taskforce for Global Health.Therefore, it seems that some people might see such a setting on their phone — but likely only if they installed a separate state or local public health app by a public health authority. Since we had no such app installed, we did not see the functionality to toggle anything related COVID-19 on or off.A separate 9to5Mac.com article from May 19 2020 explained how to enable or disable COVID-19 contact tracing, noting:Anonymous COVID-19 contact tracing via Bluetooth (not GPS location) is available with iOS 13.5.Contact tracing is called “Exposure Notifications” on iPhone and is turned off at the system level by default. You’ll have to download an app from your local health authority that will require your explicit permission to use anonymous Bluetooth data for it to work when phase one of the rollout starts in May [2020].Apple and Google have said that phase two of the contact tracing software will allow it to work without a third-party health authority app, but that won’t happen until later [in 2020].Only users who installed third-party COVID-19 apps were opted into contact tracing functionality, the site reported, continuing:Note: The “COVID-19 Exposure Logging” toggle is disabled by default in iOS 13.5. This does not collect any data without you installing and authorizing a local health authority app, which will be available soon. Apple and Google’s exposure notification system will be completely opt-in.How to turn on/off COVID-19 contact tracing on iPhone“Contact tracing” has become something of a big-tech boogeyman on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. The practice of contact tracing was decades old, not invented by Apple or Google, and remained a key function of public health — particularly during an active pandemic:Contact tracing, a core disease control measure employed by local and state health department personnel for decades, is a key strategy for preventing further spread of COVID-19. Immediate action is needed. Communities must scale up and train a large contact tracer workforce and work collaboratively across public and private agencies to stop the transmission of COVID-19.Although it is partly true that a pool of users with COVID-19 public health apps might have been opted in to contact tracing with the iOS 13.5 update, “COVID-19 Exposure Logging” did not function independently of those apps as of May 22 2020. Later functionality was expected to work independent of those apps, but only users who had downloaded a third-party app would see the “COVID-19 Exposure Logging” toggle on or off option. Contact tracing wis not a technology conspiracy, but a pre-social media strategy for minimizing public exposure to infections disease.Finally, the irony of taking to Facebook to rail on egregious privacy violations cannot be overstated.Comments
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38342
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A widely circulated obituary claims that the Great Barrier Reef has died after an impressive 25 million year run.
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Obituary: Great Barrier Reef is Dead
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false
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Environment
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Scientists have disputed claims that the Great Barrier Reef has died — arguing that the reef is dying, but not dead. Claims that the Greater Barrier Reef has died can be traced back to an obituary published by Outside magazine in October 2016 under the headline, “Obituary: Great Barrier Reef (25 Million BC-2016).” The story begins, “The Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in 2016 after a long illness. It was 25 million years old.” The Great Barrier Reef’s obituary documents in formation nearly 25 million years ago, it’s rise to worldwide fame in the 1770s, and its slow demise brought on by climate change-induced bleaching in the later half of the 1900s that (allegedly) led to is death in 2016: ..In 1981, the same year that UNESCO designated the reef a World Heritage Site and called it “the most impressive marine area in the world,” it experienced its first mass-bleaching incident. Corals derive their astonishing colors, and much of their nourishment, from symbiotic algae that live on their surfaces. The algae photosynthesize and make sugars, which the corals feed on. But when temperatures rise too high, the algae produce too much oxygen, which is toxic in high concentrations, and the corals must eject their algae to survive. Without the algae, the corals turn bone white and begin to starve. If water temperatures soon return to normal, the corals can recruit new algae and recover, but if not, they will die in months. In 1981, water temperatures soared, two-thirds of the coral in the inner portions of the reef bleached, and scientists began to suspect that climate change threatened coral reefs in ways that no marine park could prevent. The report documents additional mass bleaching that occurred in the winters of 1997-98 and 2001-02, and a major bleaching event in 2005-06. The deathblow came in 2016 when the reef experienced its worst coral die-off yet. The obituary explains that it’s not clear if the Great Barrier Reef could be saved, but nobody had made a serious effort to do so. In 2016, the Australian government approved the largest coal mine in the country’s history and pressured the United Nations to remove a chapter about the Great Barrier Reef from a report on the impact of climate change on World Heritage sites: Australia’s Department of the Environment explained the move by saying, “experience had shown that negative comments about the status of World Heritage-listed properties impacted on tourism.” In other words, if you tell people the reef is dying, they might stop coming. Outdoor magazine is a reputable publication, and scientists haven’t disputed many of the individual facts presented in the Great Barrier Reef’s article. The main premise of the article, however, that the Great Barrier Reef has died, doesn’t appear to be supported by scientific evidence. There’s no disputing that the Great Barrier Reef is in dire straits. The ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies has reported that up to 93 percent of the reef has been impacted by bleaching: The final results of extensive aerial and underwater surveys reveal that 93% of the reef has been affected. It’s a mixed picture of very severe, moderate and little damage that changes dramatically from north to south along the 2300km length of the Reef. Meanwhile on the west coast of Australia, researchers are also discovering large-scale bleaching caused by elevated temperatures on both sides of the Australian continent. “We’ve never seen anything like this scale of bleaching before. In the northern Great Barrier Reef, it’s like 10 cyclones have come ashore all at once,” says Professor Terry Hughes, convenor of the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce that is documenting and studying the event. “Towards the southern end, most of the reefs have minor to moderate bleaching and should soon recover.” Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority reported in March 2017 that 22 percent of the of the Great Barrier Reef’s coral had actually died from bleaching events, leaving more than three-quarters of it alive. The Huffington Post quoted leading coral scientists who called claims that the Great Barrier Reef was dead “wildly irresponsible.” Russell Brainard, chief of the Coral Reef Ecosystem Program at NOAA’s Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, told HuffPost he expects the article was meant to highlight the urgency of the situation. But those who don’t know any better “are going to take it at face value that the Great Barrier Reef is dead,” he said. So, while the Great Barrier Reef might be dying, and some stretches of coral have actually died, we’re calling the claim that the Great Barrier Reef has died is mostly fiction. Comments
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26247
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“Children don’t seem to be getting this virus”
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Children do contract the coronavirus. Hundreds of cases in people 17 and under have been reported in Wisconsin, and tens of thousands in the U.S. But early evidence shows that children are not at higher risk for the virus, and in most cases, experience milder symptoms than adults.
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false
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Public Health, Wisconsin, Coronavirus, Janel Brandtjen,
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"There are several diseases that are especially tough on kids. Measles, chickenpox and even this year’s most common strain of influenza in Wisconsin target children and can cause serious, even life-threatening complications. So the world breathed a sigh of relief when the first reports about children and COVID-19 seemed to show that this novel coronavirus wouldn’t be one of those diseases. A preliminary report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published April 6, 2020, found that children make up only a small portion of U.S. coronavirus cases thus far and are less likely to become seriously ill. As the debate continues about how quickly to relax restrictions and reopen the country, that information has become a key part of the reopen-now argument. State Rep. Janel Brandtjen, R-Menomonee Falls, dove into the issue in the comments section of an April 28, 2020 post on her Facebook page that criticized Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, for not opening playgrounds and restrooms at parks. Replying to a commenter, she wrote, ""In fact, New York is considering opening schools because children don’t seem to be getting this virus."" A few days later, though, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared that all schools in the state would be closed for the remainder of the academic year. (Evers made the call weeks earlier that Wisconsin schools would be closed through June.) But is Brandtjen right about the rest of her claim — that ""children don’t seem to be getting this virus""? As of May 21, 2020, the CDC reported that 40,457 of the country’s more than 1 million coronavirus cases occurred in patients 17 and under. To be sure, that is a tiny fraction of overall cases, clocking in at just 3% of the 1.2 million cases listed by the CDC. But it’s still more than 40,000 children who have gotten sick with COVID-19, in the official count. Others, of course, may have gotten sick and never been tested. In Wisconsin, the same pattern holds: 257 cases have been reported in patients 9 and under, and 695 in patients ages 10-19 (the state Department of Health Services uses different age breakdowns than the CDC). The two age groups account for just 7% of the state’s total coronavirus cases, and even less for whom the disease turned more serious. Just 32 people under the age of 20 have been hospitalized by the virus, according to the DHS website. Although the numbers are small, they’re there — and there, too, are the rare cases that have turned fatal. Wisconsin has avoided the death of a child from the virus so far, but nationally, a handful of deaths have occurred in pediatric cases. So, children do seem to be getting this virus. But what early data and the raw numbers show is that they seem to be contracting it far less, and less seriously, too. That’s what Brandtjen pointed to when asked to back up her claim. In a phone call with PolitiFact Wisconsin she said her choice of words in saying that children don’t ""seem"" to be getting the virus acknowledged that nuance. Brandtjen cited a CDC webpage on kids and coronavirus which notes that children don’t appear to be at higher risk, and most U.S. cases appear in adults. She also quoted a Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin news release stating that ""one of the main understandings was that (COVID-19) didn’t affect healthy kids as seriously as adults."" In the release, the hospital wrote that only a handful of children there tested positive for the virus, and all went home after brief hospitalizations. The Children’s release, however, brings up another distinction in the conversation about kids and COVID-19: a new, more serious disease known as Pediatric Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome, or PIMS. No kids at Children’s have presented with PIMS symptoms, the release says, and research on the link between PIMS and the coronavirus is still limited. But doctors in New York, which as of May 12 was investigating 102 cases of the syndrome and three deaths, suspect COVID is involved. Though rare and treatable, it’s likely another way the virus is affecting kids. And one more bit of nuance: As schools across the country mull over opening their doors this fall, research is still being done on whether and how much children can spread the virus. The answer could be critical to the discussion of what reopening schools, day care centers and other places where kids gather should look like moving forward. Brandtjen claimed ""Children don’t seem to be getting this virus."" Hundreds of kids in Wisconsin, and tens of thousands in the U.S., have fallen ill with COVID-19. That said, children do not seem to be contracting the virus as much, or as seriously, as the rest of the population. That’s an important nuance, particularly amid such a contentious debate."
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37290
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The day after Colorado legalized marijuana, dozens of people died from cannabis-related overdoses.
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Marijuana Overdoses Kill 37 in Colorado?
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false
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Fact Checks, Viral Content
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Just days after Colorado legalized the sale of recreational marijuana, an opportunistic satirist wrote an article reporting that smoking weed had triggered dozens of fatal overdoses on its first day of legalization. The January 2014 article went viral as readers either tried to make sense of how it happened, enjoyed the schadenfreude, or passed it along as a warning “just in case”:Colorado is reconsidering its decision to legalize recreational pot following the deaths of dozens due to marijuana overdoses.According to a report in the Rocky Mountain News, 37 people were killed across the state on Jan. 1, the first day the drug became legal for all adults to purchase. Several more are clinging onto life in local emergency rooms and are not expected to survive.“It’s complete chaos here,” says Dr. Jack Shepard, chief of surgery at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Denver. “I’ve put five college students in body bags since breakfast and more are arriving every minute.”“We are seeing cardiac arrests, hypospadias, acquired trimethylaminuria, and multiple organ failures. By next week the death toll could go as high as 200, maybe 300. Someone needs to step in and stop this madness. My god, why did we legalize marijuana? What were we thinking?”Hypospadias is a congenital defect in which the urethra is on the underside of the penis instead of its tip; trimethylaminuria is better known as “fish odor syndrome” and is caused by the accumulation of a compound usually broken down by the body into odorless components. Neither has been associated with marijuana use, heavy or otherwise.The story goes on to make its satirical bent extremely clear to people who read that far:“We told everyone this would happen,” says Peter Swindon, President and CEO of local brewer MolsonCoors. “Marijuana is a deadly hardcore drug that causes addiction and destroys lives.“When was the last time you heard of someone overdosing on beer? All these pro-marijuana groups should be ashamed of themselves. The victims’ blood is on their hands.”One of the those victims was 29-year-old Jesse Bruce Pinkman, a former methamphetamine dealer from Albuquerque who had recently moved to Boulder to establish a legal marijuana dispensary.Pinkman was partying with friends when he suffered several seizures and a massive heart attack which ultimately proved to be fatal. Toxicology reports revealed that marijuana was the only drug present in his system.“This is just a terrible tragedy,” says his friend Peter, “Jesse was trying to go legit and now this happens? I guess drugs really are as dangerous as they say.”But most importantly, this story first appeared on The Daily Currant, a once-lively satire site that died a quiet death in 2016. However, thanks to the vagaries and quirks of the internet, the Currant’s stories live on, circulating without attribution in perpetuity.
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37624
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"Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg said that ""95 percent of your murders"" are committed by ""male minorities 15 to 25."
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Did Michael Bloomberg Say Young Men of Color Commit ’95 Percent of Your Murders’?
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true
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Fact Checks, Politics
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Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg’s defense of “stop and frisk” police tactics disproportionately targeting young people of color was brought back to light after audio from a 2015 speech found new life on social media five years later:Audio of @MikeBloomberg’s 2015 @AspenInstitute speech where he explains that “you can just Xerox (copy)” the description of male, minorities 16-25 and hand to cops.Bloomberg had video of speech blocked.Perhaps because of the problematic explanation he gives for #StopAndFrisk pic.twitter.com/Fm0YCi4ZRy— Benjamin Dixon (@BenjaminPDixon) February 10, 2020The audio was taken from Bloomberg’s February 2015 appearance at the Aspen Institute. In it, the former New York City mayor can be heard saying:Ninety-five percent of your murders and murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description and Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male minorities 15 to 25. That’s true in New York. That’s true in virtually every city in America. And that’s where the real crime is. You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people that are getting killed. So you want to spend the money on a lot of cops in the streets. Put those cops where the crime is, which means in minority neighborhoods.So one of the unintended consequences is people say, “Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities.” Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in minority neighborhoods. Yes, that’s true. Why do we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is. And the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them… And then they start, “Oh I don’t want to get caught.” So they don’t bring the gun. They still have a gun, but they leave it at home.The audio was originally posted on YouTube by journalist Karl Herchenroeder shortly after Bloomberg’s appearance for the institute on February 10 2015. Herchenroeder also reported at the time that the Aspen Institute and GrassRoots TV, the group that filmed Bloomberg’s speech, honored his request not to release the footage of his remarks. NPR reported in February 2020 that the far-right Daily Caller blog also posted audio of the speech.“At this point, I think it’s beyond reasonable to respectfully call on all of the people who endorsed @MikeBloomberg to retract those endorsements,” Dixon later wrote.About 90 minutes after Dixon’s post, another Twitter user posted footage of Bloomberg defending “stop and frisk” — the practice of detaining and questioning people based on “reasonable suspicion” — in a June 2013 interview with WOR-AM in New York City. Bloomberg said at the time:One newspaper and one news service, they just keep saying, “Oh it’s a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group.” That may be, but it’s not a disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the [crime]. In that case, incidentally, I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little. It’s exactly the reverse of what they’re saying. I don’t know where they went to school, but they certainly didn’t take a math course. Or a logic course.Mike Bloomberg defending Stop-and-Frisk in 2013: “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.” pic.twitter.com/KpdKgUALsL— ً (@upmtn) February 11, 2020At the time, a reported 87 percent of around 5 million police interactions in the city invoking “stop and frisk” involved Black or Latinx people. According to a March 2019 report by the New York Civil Liberties Union, 66 percent of overall stops conducted under the program resulted in the detainee being frisked, but 93 percent of people frisked did not have a weapon. In August 2013, federal Judge Shira A. Scheindlin ruled that “stop and frisk” was unconstitutional and that Bloomberg’s administration “turned a blind eye to the evidence that officers are conducting stops in a racially discriminatory manner.” At the time, Bloomberg argued that Scheindlin had denied “a fair trial” to the city.But in November 2019, prior to embarking on his presidential campaign, Bloomberg apologized for “stop and frisk” in an appearance at the Christian Cultural Center, a Brooklyn church in which the congregation is primarily Black.“Over time, I’ve come to understand something that I long struggled to admit to myself: I got something important wrong,” Bloomberg said. “I got something important really wrong. I didn’t understand back then the full impact that stops were having on the black and Latino communities. I was totally focused on saving lives, but as we know, good intentions aren’t good enough.”
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24748
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"Obama nominee Dawn Johnsen ""called motherhood 'involuntary servitude.'"
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Republicans accuse nominee Johnsen of supporting abortion rights but opposing motherhood
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false
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Abortion, National, House Republican Conference,
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"Republicans have made it clear they're opposed to the nomination of Dawn Johnsen to head the White House Office of Legal Counsel. They're unhappy with her support of abortion rights, but a recent blog posting made a surprising allegation: That she said motherhood was ""involuntary servitude."" We wondered if she was really was so impolitic as to attack motherhood. And if so, does she have it in for apple pie as well? The allegation came from the Web site of the House Republican Conference: ""At least 45 House Republicans have co-signed a letter to President Barack Obama in opposition to his nomination of Dawn Johnson [sic] for the head of the Office of Legal Counsel,"" the site says in a blog post . The post continued: ""Her brazen pro-abortion stances [include] a Supreme Court amicus brief where she called motherhood 'involuntary servitude.'"" The Republicans are referring to a 1989 brief in Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services, a case that tested whether states could prohibit abortions in public health institutions. Johnsen was then legal director of the National Abortion Rights Action League, one of 77 organizations to sign the brief. Footnote 23, part of the brief that Johnsen said in a Senate hearing that she wrote, said the following: ""While a woman might choose to bear children gladly and voluntarily, statutes that curtail her abortion choice are disturbingly suggestive of involuntary servitude, prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment, in that forced pregnancy requires a woman to provide continuous physical service to the fetus in order to further the state's asserted interest. Indeed, the actual process of delivery demands work of the most intense and physical kind: labor of 12 or more grueling hours of contractions is not uncommon."" So Johnsen compared ""forced pregnancy"" — not motherhood — to involuntary servitude. After we asked the Republican Conference about the claim, staffer Ericka Andersen acknowledged it was wrong. ""You are correct that the post was written inaccurately,"" she told us in an e-mail. She corrected the post to say Johnsen ""equated forced pregnancy with 'involuntary servitude.'"" Kudos to the conference for acknowledging the error. But we still find the original claim ."
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3369
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Legionnaires’ case identified at Quincy veterans’ home.
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Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s administration is investigating a case of Legionnaires’ diseases at the veterans’ home in Quincy, the site of 13 deaths from the malady starting with a 2015 outbreak.
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true
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Veterans affairs, Quincy, Chicago, Health, General News, Illinois, Veterans, Public health
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The Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs and the Illinois Department of Public Health are reviewing the case of the resident with the flu-like illness. Officials say the resident of the home 312 miles (500 kilometers) southwest of Chicago has received medical treatment and is recovering. Officials say no other cases of the illness contracted by breathing infected water vapor have been identified. Staff members are monitoring residents for respiratory illnesses. Officials have notified residents, staff members, and relations and representatives of residents. The last case of Legionnaires’ at Quincy was in 2018. An outbreak that began in 2015 caused the deaths of 13 residents and sickened dozens more. Then-Gov. Bruce Rauner faced withering criticism for not doing enough in response to the crisis.
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8998
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Procedure plus medication is better than standard treatment for heart disease patients
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A dozen Swiss climate activists appeared in court on Tuesday after refusing to pay a fine for playing tennis inside branches of Credit Suisse bank last year in a stunt intended to highlight the bank’s fossil fuel investments and “stop people acting like nothing is happening.”
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mixture
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heart disease,Percutaneous coronary intervention,St. Michael's Hospital,stent
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The young activists, mostly students, were fined 21,600 Swiss francs ($22,254) for trespassing at Credit Suisse branches in November 2018. Lawyers for the students who are appealing the fine said on Tuesday they were acting as whistleblowers for the climate emergency. “..It is not enough to just go out on the street or to vote, we must disturb a little bit so people stop acting like nothing is happening,” Paul Castelain, one of the activists, told Reuters outside a courtroom in Renens, a suburb of Lausanne. Video footage from 2018 shows students dressed in tennis whites playing matches inside Credit Suisse branches in Lausanne and Geneva to underscore Swiss tennis star Roger Federer’s sponsorship deal with the bank, which they want him to drop because of its fossil fuels investments. Federer did not immediately respond to a request for comment via his Foundation. Credit Suisse, which had filed charges against the activists, said it respected their cause but deemed their actions unacceptable. “Combating global warming is important,” it said in an emailed statement. “Credit Suisse respects freedom of expression as a fundamental democratic right. [However,] to protect its clients, employees and branches, it does not tolerate unlawful attacks on its branches, irrespective of the perpetrators and their motives.” Pressure is rising on Switzerland’s financial sector to divest from fossil fuels and thousands of students have marched through Swiss cities in recent months demanding action on climate change. A swing to the left in an October election has boosted their demands. Credit Suisse in December said it will stop financing the development of new coal-fired power plants although activists at the court said this was not enough. It said on Tuesday it was also seeking to align its loan portfolios with objectives set out in the Paris Agreement on climate change. A ruling is due on Jan. 13. ($1 = 0.9706 Swiss francs)
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37696
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Beginning in 2020, Boston University will begin awarding posthumous degrees to students who die before completing their studies.
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Will Boston University Begin Awarding Posthumous Degrees in 2020?
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mixture
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Fact Checks, Viral Content
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A story published by the student newspaper at Boston University attracted attention online on August 12 2020, after revealing the school’s move to formalize the process behind awarding posthumous degrees.The Daily Free Press first broke the story on its Twitter account before following up with a story on its website an hour later:BREAKING: Effective this Fall, Boston University will begin approving the issuance of degrees to students who die before completing their college education.— The Daily Free Press (@dailyfreepress) August 12, 2020“We sent out the inital tweet as a breaking news tweet to outline that the policy is here and what it entails,” said editor-in-chief Angela Yang, who wrote the story. “We broke the news because it wasn’t announced to the BU community and we did not find any other news articles talking about it.”While the university only adopted a formal policy in 2020, Yang — who wrote the story — reported that BU had awarded posthumous degrees in the past, and that the policy in question was first proposed in 2013.According to the story, meetings concerning the adoption of the policy began in January 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic was covered widely in the United States. The story was confirmed by university spokesperson Colin Riley, who said that the policy was not spurred by the spread of the disease.“There were proposals to formalize this, sadly, when a student passes away, particularly if they’ve been here years,” he told the newspaper. “It’s unfortunate timing. People may misconstrue.”Yang told us that she recognized that the newspaper’s initial tweet on the story did not provide enough context, but that the Free Press did not publish the story in an attempt to stir fears about the new policy, which was posted on the university’s website after being instituted.“Our tweets simply presented the information we had, and we did not speculate on that information,” she told us. “The discussion around it falls into the hands of the BU community. The tweet was bad timing now and would have been bad timing back in June had we caught the policy when it first released. But bad timing should not hinder us from reporting on news that had yet to be broken — we were doing our everyday jobs as journalists, and did not expect this to blow up the way it did.”According to the story:To be eligible for a degree after death, a student must have been in good academic standing and within one semester of completing their coursework. The criteria also states students must have been “likely” to pass their courses with “acceptable” grades, as well as been likely to have fulfilled any other non-academic requirements within one more term.Graduate students must have completed all academic requirements other than their thesis or dissertation, which, however, must be “near completion.”“The student’s committee must have determined the scholarship to be substantial work and worthy of the degree,” the policy stated. The same goes for creative products required for a degree from a graduate program.Students who die with more than a semester left before graduation or who otherwise do not meet the criteria for a degree will be eligible for what the school calls a Certificate of Academic Achievement.We contacted Riley seeking further comment on the policy, but have not heard back.While Boston University’s guidelines on how to award degrees after a student’s death were formalized only recently, several other universities have similar policies in place. For example, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo states on its site:The majority of the faculty in the department of the student’s major may recommend to the President the award of a posthumous degree to the family of a deceased student when that student has satisfactorily completed at least two-thirds (2/3) of all coursework towards a degree. Under special circumstances, the President or designee may grant the awarding of a posthumous degree or certificate for a student who has completed less than two-thirds (2/3) of the degree coursework.The Boston University campus is scheduled to reopen for students in August 2020. According to the university’s website, undergraduate students will be tested for COVID-19 upon returning to campus and every three days afterward, whether they live on or off campus. Graduate students will be tested once a week after their initial testing.Comments
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5615
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South Burlington police to hold forum on heroin.
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The South Burlington Police Department is holding a community forum on heroin and heroin addiction.
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true
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Health, Burlington, Police, Heroin addiction
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The event takes place April 20 at the South Burlington High School. The first half of the forum will provide some basic information about heroin and heroin addiction and how it’s affecting South Burlington. The second half will be a question and answer session with a panel of professionals, including a doctor, mental health professional, school superintendent and police and fire department members.
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12531
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Malia Obama arrested with a gang of thugs in Chicago.
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This time fake news says Malia Obama arrested for drugs, dog fighting in Chicago
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false
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Fake news, PunditFact, Bloggers,
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"A fake news post falsely said former first daughter Malia Obama was arrested with a group of seven men after a day of drinking, drugs and dog-fighting. The headline on a May 6, 2017, post on ConservativeFlashNews.com read, ""Malia Obama arrested with a gang of thugs in Chicago."" The post was flagged by Facebook users as part of the social media site’s efforts to cut down on fake news in users’ feeds. The post said Obama and the men were at an unnamed park in Chicago, and were charged with wanton endangerment of animals, public intoxication and possession of a controlled substance. Obama had been forbidden by her famous parents from going to any such party, the story said, but disappeared before turning up at the police station. This didn’t happen, of course, because the story is fake. It turned up on a few other websites around May 6. But it actually originated on May 5 at TheLastLineOfDefense.org, a parody website that has been the source of several fake news stories that we’ve previously checked. TheLastLineOfDefense.org publishes bogus posts keyed to topics designed to troll conservatives. The site’s creator, a man who said his name is Zeke Wilekenmeyer, has told PolitiFact he deliberately tried to get gullible readers to share his stories to prove those readers don’t rely on facts. The articles quite often end up being passed around on multiple websites, often without an indication that they are fake -- this Malia Obama post is just the latest example. A previous story from TheLastLineOfDefense.org said Malia Obama had been expelled from Harvard University for smoking marijuana in Boston, despite the fact that she hadn’t even been enrolled at the school. As for the fake accomplices pictured in the story, the image is taken from a series of mugshots showing a group of eight men arrested in Florence County, S.C., in 2013 for running a dogfighting ring. Malia’s image was inserted to suggest she’d been partying with the other seven. But that’s not the case. As far as we know, the 18-year-old is still enjoying her gap year before enrolling at Harvard this fall."
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20874
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"Congress gave an unelected board ""the power to deny care to seniors."
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Price worries about health care law's impact to seniors
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mixture
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Georgia, Health Care, Medicare, Tom Price,
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"For critics of the controversial federal health care law, there are few elements of it that are discussed with as much disdain as the Independent Payment Advisory Board. Rush Limbaugh, for example, has called the 15-member board ""death panels."" U.S. Rep. Tom Price, a Republican from Roswell, explained some of his concerns about the board in a Dec. 8 letter he sent to constituents of the northwest metro Atlanta district he represents. Several people who received the letter asked us about the veracity of one particular sentence concerning the board. ""[T]hey put in place an unaccountable, unelected board of 15 bureaucrats, known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board [IPAB], and gave them the power to deny care to seniors,"" wrote Price, a doctor, underlining that specific part of the letter. So can this board deny care to seniors, as Price wrote? First, what is this board and what can it do? It was created to reduce Medicare spending, if spending surpasses the targeted rate, which is the average of consumer and medical care inflation. Medical inflation has been higher than general inflation 24 of the past 25 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS). Board members are chosen by the president, with advice from the U.S. Senate. Board proposals to reduce spending must be submitted to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) by Sept. 1 of each year and to the president and Congress by Jan. 15 of the following year. The Senate can vote by a three-fifths majority to reject the board’s recommendations, but it then must come up with Medicare spending cuts. Board members should include doctors, employers, health economist researchers and third-party payers and can serve six-year terms. The HHS secretary, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator and the administrator of the Health Resources and Services Administration are nonvoting members of the board. The board would be required to submit its first proposal to the president and Congress in January 2014 if per capita spending exceeds projections. ""[T]he Board is directed to consider, among other things, Medicare solvency, quality and access to care, the effects of changes in payments to providers, and those dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid,"" according to the CRS. The health care law has goals of maintaining or enhancing beneficiary access to quality care. It prohibits IPAB from reducing payments for inpatient and outpatient hospital services, inpatient rehabilitation and psychiatric facilities, long-term care hospitals and hospices until 2020, noted an April report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that researches health policy. The Kaiser report says there could be changes in ""Medicare Advantage, the Part D prescription drug program, skilled nursing facility, home health, dialysis, ambulance and ambulatory surgical center services and durable medical equipment."" Another Georgia congressman, Rep. Phil Gingrey, claimed a few months ago that ""a bunch of bureaucrats decide whether you get care, such as continuing on dialysis or cancer chemotherapy."" Those bureaucrats were, yes, IPAB. We reviewed that claim and rated Gingrey’s statement as False. Section 3403 of the health care law noted that IPAB may not submit ""any recommendation to ration health care."" Price believes costs will exceed projections, which will require cuts to Medicare. The congressman told us that IPAB decisions will likely result in changes such as withholding payment to doctors for certain services, specifically under a formula the federal government uses for Medicare physician payment known as the sustainable growth rate. Some doctors, the congressman believes, will see fewer Medicare patients. Lack of access is equivalent to a denial of care, Price argues. ""It’s a cause-and-effect relationship,"" Price said. The Kaiser report backs up Price’s argument. ""If IPAB recommends policies that squeeze Medicare payment rates without equal pressure being placed on private payment rates, there is some concern that Medicare beneficiaries would be at greater risk of having access problems, as providers become more inclined to serve other patients,"" it says. Robert Zirkelbach, spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, the trade group for the nation’s private insurance companies, told us that seniors could be impacted by cuts to Medicare Advantage, a health choice program for recipients. Some argue otherwise, and note that Medicare Advantage users will pay slightly less this year for care. Our conclusion Price gets it partially right. The IPAB can push for changes that impact some areas of health care, and that could have an indirect result on care for seniors. The board, however, cannot propose changes that impact the most widely used forms of care -- such as inpatient hospital services, long-term care and hospice -- for Medicare beneficiaries. The IPAB can impact changes to some programs, but not specific care to specific seniors as Price’s statement implies. Price’s concerns have merit, but his statement about the IPAB having the power ""to deny care to seniors"" needs much more context to be completely accurate."
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5428
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Uganda: 9-year-old girl from Congo dies of Ebola.
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A 9-year-old Congolese girl who tested positive for Ebola in neighboring Uganda has died, Ugandan authorities said Friday, as the World Health Organization said that the outbreak has neared 3,000 cases.
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true
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Travel, International News, General News, Africa, Health, Uganda, Ebola virus
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The girl’s body was repatriated to Congo for a funeral upon the request of her father, according to Uganda’s health ministry. The girl, who was traveling with her mother, was identified at a border screening Wednesday as a possible Ebola patient and isolated. Although cases of cross-border contamination have been rare, this case highlights the risk of Ebola spreading across the border into neighboring Uganda and Rwanda. Borders in the region are often porous, and many people traveling at night use bush paths to cross over. In June, a family of Congolese with some sick family members crossed into Uganda via a bush path. Two of them later died of Ebola, and the others were transferred back to Congo. “It is critical we continue to be on high alert in high-risk areas and empower communities to be prepared in order to contain the virus,” the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said. Uganda has had multiple outbreaks of Ebola and hemorrhagic fevers since 2000. Because the 9-year-old Ebola victim passed through an official entry point this week, Ugandan health authorities believe she had no contact with any Ugandan. But at least five other Congolese, including attendants to patients, who shared an ambulance with the sick girl have been identified by Ugandan officials as Ebola contacts. Four of them have since been taken back to Congo for vaccination and monitoring, said Joyce Moriku Kaducu, Ugandan minister of state in charge of primary health care. Ebola has killed nearly 2,000 people in eastern Congo since August 2018. The disease is spread through contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person. WHO said Friday that cases have reached 3,000 in Congo, with 1,893 confirmed deaths and about 900 survivors. On average, 80 people per week are sickened by the virus, which has infected most people in Congo’s North Kivu province. The Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo hasn’t shown signs of slowing down despite new treatments and vaccines given to more than 200,000 people in the region and the use of two therapeutic treatments being used as part of a clinical trial. Insecurity has been one factor in a region where rebel groups have fought for control of mineral-rich lands for decades. Ebola also has spread because of mistrust by communities who have also staged attacks against health workers. Many people in eastern Congo don’t trust doctors and other medics. “One year into the response, the lack of community acceptance remains the single greatest obstacle to containing the outbreak,” said Bob Kitchen, Vice President of Emergencies at the International Rescue Committee. “Building trust with the community doesn’t just mean dialogue with the affected population. It means working with the community to adapt the response and address the overall needs they are facing inside and outside of the Ebola outbreak.” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus will travel this weekend to Congo with U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and senior officials, including Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa. On Friday, he called on partners to increase their presence in the field. “Our commitment to the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is that we will work alongside them to stop the Ebola outbreak,” Ghebreyesus said. “Our commitment also means strengthening the health systems to give them all the other things they need. Building strong systems is what will protect people, communities and the world.” ___ Maliro reported from Beni, Congo. AP writers Carley Petesch in Dakar, Senegal, and Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed to this report.
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11157
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Scientists find way to predict timing of menopause
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Anti-Mullerian Hormone, or AMH, is a hormone produced by cells in the ovary during reproductive years and can be detected with a blood test. Declining AMH levels has been shown to correlate with poor response to in-vitro fertilization, a marker of poor ovarian reserve. This has led to the idea that the test could be used to predict the start of the menopausal transition. However, because the marker has not been studied systematically, it is unclear what different AMH levels mean. For example, what is a normal AMH level? As a result, AMH levels should be interpreted with some caution. This story reports on results from a new study whose results are to be presented at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology. The study investigators developed an algorithm using AMH levels to predict onset of menopause. However, the full results of the study have not been made available and have not been evaluated by experts. This story does little to explain to the reader the limitations of the AMH test. It presents the assertion that the test is reliable as fact and does not discuss any potential downsides. False positive results, for example, could cause unnecessary worry and anxiety and lead to needless fertility treatments. The story also does not say whether the AMH test is new or not. In fact, it is not new and is one of group of tests that are intended to evaluate ovarian reserve. However, the study does not mention any of those other tests that are available. This area of research is important because the duration of fertility is of great interest to many women. A method that could accurately predict menopause could be a proxy for predicting the end of the fertility period. But, as noted, it’s too early to say that about this reported method.
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false
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"The story does not mention costs, or potential costs of the test. On one website, the cost was of the test was $183. It is unclear whether insurers would pay for this, unless in the setting of an infertility evaluation.http://www.acubalance.ca/ovarian-reserve-testing-including-anti-müllerian-hormone-amh. The story does not quantify the potential benefits of the AMH test. The story provides no mention of any potential downsides of the testing. False positive results, for example, could cause unnecessary worry and anxiety and lead to needless fertility treatments. The story provides no discussion of the strength of the current study. Although the story mentions that the results are ""to be presented"" at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, it does not discuss why that may mean it is hard to interpret the implications of the findings. The story does not engage in disease mongering. The story should have also avoided referring to women who want a career before having babies to know how long to wait. Having a career does not preclude having a family, biological or otherwise. The story briefly quotes one source other than the study’s lead author. The story makes no mention of any existing alternatives, of which there are several. The story does not describe whether the AMH test is available or not. The story does not say whether the AMH test is new or not. In fact, it is not new and is one of group of tests that are intended to evaluate ovarian reserve. There is no way to know if the story relied on a press release as the sole source of information."
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20394
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Medicare will be bankrupt in nine years.
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Pat Boone claims Medicare will be bankrupt in nine years
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false
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Ohio, Medicare, Pat Boone,
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"The 60 Plus Association, an advocacy group that bills itself as ""the conservative alternative"" to the AARP, has a fondness for golden oldies. The group hired singer Pat Boone as its pitchman in an ad that targets the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act, the health reform bill often called Obamacare approved by Congress in 2010. In the ad, Boone warns seniors of potential dangers in the bill and urges them to call Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio. Look-alike versions aired in other states target four other Democratic senators. PolitiFact already has run several of Boone’s claims in the ad through the Truth-O-Meter. A statement that an independent payment advisory board created by the health care act ""can ration care and deny certain Medicare treatments"" was rated, as was the claim that the IPAB is ""like a Medicare IRS with the power to cut Medicare in order to pay for new government programs."" And the statement that the health care law ""will cut $500 billion from Medicare"". That leaves us with another alarming assertion: ""Medicare will be bankrupt in nine years, but Washington politicians, like Sherrod Brown, are ignoring the problem, putting their own re-elections first."" The second part of the statement is subjective political rhetoric that we can't rate. We can, however, examine the foundation of the claim about Medicare going bankrupt. PolitiFact Ohio won’t try to predict the future. But the claim about Medicare going bankrupt isn’t a predictions as a result of an ideological debate. Rather, it’s rooted in research and projections by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. 60 Plus cited two reports from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office when we asked about the claim. The CBO's ""March 2011 Medicare Baseline,"" 60 Plus said, ""estimated that the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund would be exhausted in 2021."" Another CBO report, the ""Budget and Economic Outlook"" for fiscal 2012 to 2022,"" estimated that the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund would be exhausted by early 2022,"" it said. That's true -- and it's not what Boone says in the ad. The Hospital Insurance Trust Fund to which the reports refer is one of two separate trust funds run by the federal government for Medicare. This trust fund, which collects most of its money from federal payroll taxes, pays for one of four parts of Medicare, Part A, which covers inpatient hospital care, home health care, and services at skilled nursing facilities and hospices. The other trust fund is the Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Fund. It is mostly covered by the federal government’s general fund and premiums and pays bills for Medicare Part B, which covers doctor visits and other outpatient costs, and Part D, which covers prescription drugs. Medicare Advantage, or Part C, gives recipients the option to receive care through private insurers. It doesn’t have a trust fund. The Supplementary Medical Insurance fund is in good shape. It is ""projected to remain in financial balance for all future years,"" according to a 2011 report by the fund’s trustees. The Hospital Insurance fund does have big problems, but that's not the same thing as being ""bankrupt,"" a legal term of art that doesn’t apply to federal governmental programs. A report by the Congressional Research Service leaves open the question of what would happen if the Hospital Insurance fund were to run out of money. ""There are no provisions in the Social Security Act governing what would happen in such an event,"" the report says. ""There is no authority in law for a general revenue funding of the shortfall. The fund would continue to have payroll taxes credited to it though these would be insufficient to pay all the pending claims."" But the CRS report also notes that the Hospital Insurance trust fund has faced a projected shortfall ""almost from its inception."" In 1970, when the program was only four years old, the insolvency date was 1972. For the next 16 years, trustees expected the fund to be exhausted by the 1990s. Congress repeatedly changed legislation to lower fund spending and keep it from going dry. (""Baseline"" projections are made with the assumption that current laws and formulas remain unchanged.) Our colleagues at FactCheck.org wrote in 2009 about a TV ad for another conservative group, Americans for Prosperity, which predicted Medicare would be bankrupt in eight years -- 5 1/2 years from now. They checked a nearly identical claim of bankruptcy by Rep. Paul Ryan a year ago. In both cases, FactCheck said, the claim ""goes too far."" Again, we won’t try to predict the future. But for this claim, we don’t have to. 60 Plus cited reports showing that Medicare's Hospital Insurance Trust Fund faces insolvency in nine years. And while it’s worth noting that Congress has always pulled the fund from the brink of insolvency, and that insolvency has been forecast almost from the program’s start, that’s an event in the future that we won’t try to predict. What we do know from research that 60 Plus cited is that that Boone’s claim -- that Medicare will be bankrupt in nine years -- takes a projection for one trust fund and applies it to all of Medicare. By doing so, Boone’s claim overstates what the CBO reports forecast. The Hospital Insurance Trust Fund supports just one of the four parts of Medicare. The portions of Medicare that cover regular doctor visits and prescriptions are covered by a different trust fund that trustees say is in good shape. On the Truth-O-Meter, Boone’s claim rates ."
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31364
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A new, rare tick burrows under your skin and moves about undetected.
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Gallagher told us that even though as of 23 May 2017 the post has been shared more than 50,000 times, no one bothered to ask him where he got the information — or whether it was real or fake.
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false
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Uncategorized, Bugs, deer ticks, hoaxes
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In early May 2017, a viral post started circulating on Facebook, warning viewers that there was a new type of tick for which to be on the lookout. The post contains two photographs, one of a tick, and the other showing a person’s skin — supposedly after the tick has burrowed inside. It was shared thousands of times: This is 100% false. It’s an experiment I did with my daughters. We wanted to see how fake news travels without anyone questioning it… I wasn’t trying to scare anyone, nor did I think it would get more than 100 shares. I purposely used photos that looked fake. Like the St George watermark picture, but people still shared away without asking me any questions. As Gallagher pointed out, the first clue the post was not an authentic warning was that the pictures come from two different sources that have nothing to do with a “new rare tick warning.” The top photograph, if clicked, reveals a watermark from St. George News, which is a local news outlet for Southern Utah: Prior to becoming ill, the visitor had been vacationing on the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park and adjacent areas in mid-September, according to the statement. The visitor was treated successfully with a course of antibiotics. People contract TBRF after being bitten by infected soft ticks, which typically feed on rodents Tick-borne relapsing fever, also called TBRF, is a rare, but treatable and curable, bacterial infection that occurs in the western United States, the media statement said. People contract TBRF after being bitten by infected soft ticks, which typically feed on rodents. The photograph below it has been on the Internet since 2008. It was originally posted on a message board for the web site SportFishWorld.com. The image was taken by a man who was bitten by a tick (but it simply bit him, and did not burrow beneath his skin). He documented the healing process:
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16377
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The last time there was a sustained surge of confidence in government's competence was under Ronald Reagan.
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"George Will said the last time there was a ""sustained surge"" in confidence in government was under Reagan. While trust did rise and generally hold level in the Reagan years, it also had a steady and larger increase under Clinton. However you slice the numbers, it is clear that the American public had a ""sustained surge of confidence"" during Clinton's presidency. And Clinton, obviously, was president more recently than Reagan."
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false
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History, Polls and Public Opinion, PunditFact, George Will,
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"As the midterm elections get closer, Republicans are questioning the competence and trustworthiness of President Barack Obama. This is a theme that came into sharp focus during the immigration debate when House Republicans said they wouldn’t move forward because they didn’t trust the president to enforce the law. The botched launch of the Obamacare website did the president no favors. Now, Republicans are pouring concerns over Ebola and the Secret Service into the same mold. The pundits lobbed their opposing views at each other on Fox News Sunday. Brit Hume said the level of people saying the government is incompetent is higher than ever. Juan Williams shot back that the public always thinks the government is incompetent. George Will entered the fray to note that the country has most to fear from ""excessive faith in government."" Will skewered Republicans for engaging in nation building overseas and Democrats for their efforts to cure social ills at home. Then Will made an interesting historical observation. ""The last time there was a sustained surge of confidence in government's competence was under (President) Ronald Reagan,"" Will said. Will is correct that public trust in government rose and then held steady under Reagan. But he errs in ignoring Bill Clinton’s two terms in office, when the public’s trust in government also rose sharply. In the following chart, the Pew Research Center averaged the results of a number of surveys since 1958 that probed the public’s trust in government. (The political scientists we reached said the words ""confidence"" and ""trust"" are largely synonymous in this context.) Source: Pew Research Center, Public trust in government: 1958-2013 Trust in government fluctuated during both the Reagan and Clinton presidencies, but under Reagan, trust rose by 11 percentage points -- from 33 percent to 44 percent. In the Clinton years, trust rose over 20 percentage points -- from 21 percent to 44 percent, according to data from American National Election Studies. As for Will’s use of the word ""surge,"" gains in trust were steeper during Clinton’s two terms, but he started from a much lower point than Reagan. What lies behind the numbers The consensus among the political scientists we contacted is that trust in government tracks closely with the economy. ""The growth in trust we observe under Reagan and Clinton coincides with economic expansions,"" said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College. In his forthcoming book, Why Washington Won’t Work: Polarization, Political Trust, and the Governing Crisis, Vanderbilt University political scientist Marc Hetherington analyzed how party affiliation changes the survey results for trust in government. ""Republicans in the electorate only seem to trust the government when Republicans are in office,"" Hetherington said. ""Democrats trust government about the same amount over time. Republicans fluctuate a lot."" Hetherington sent us this chart that tracks party affiliation and trust in government by who was president. Theda Skocpol, a political scientist at Harvard University, is skeptical about how much these polls actually reveal about American attitudes. Skocpol said these general opinions mask considerable nuances. ""Americans express opposition or doubt when asked about government overall,"" Skocpol said. ""But they usually like all the specifics (of programs) by wide margins."" Skocpol gave the example of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While the current Ebola scare might have taken a toll on the agency’s ranking, last year it stood at the top of the public’s list. According to Gallup, 60 percent of the people said the CDC was doing an excellent or good job. Our ruling George Will said the last time there was a ""sustained surge"" in confidence in government was under Reagan. While trust did rise and generally hold level in the Reagan years, it also had a steady and larger increase under Clinton. However you slice the numbers, it is clear that the American public had a ""sustained surge of confidence"" during Clinton's presidency. And Clinton, obviously, was president more recently than Reagan."
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9519
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Heart Failure Drug Shows Promise in First Human Trial
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This HealthDay story reports on the very early results of a phase one trial of a drug, cimaglermin, intended to improve the left ventricular function among patients with a type of heart failure known as “severe left ventricular systolic dysfunction.” The story does clearly say that it is a phase one trial and explains that clinical use of the drug may be years away, if then. The story would have been stronger if it had detailed exactly what the researchers were measuring when they concluded the drug worked better than placebo. Obviously, if a new drug is found that works effectively to thwart this kind of heart disease, then that’s good news all around, especially if the drug is needed less frequently and is well tolerated, as the story suggests. But care needs to be taken in potentially over-touting the results of these very early trials, and therefore raising the hopes of patients who may be disappointed at a later stage in the research process. Only larger studies with longer follow-up will determine whether these very preliminary results are supported or not. A key outcome to follow will be preventing admissions to the hospital for heart failure, and ultimately, prolonging life.
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true
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heart failure
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There is no mention of the cost for the tested drug, cimaglermin, in this story. The costs for regularly prescribed drugs for the medical condition that’s the focus of the study — weakened left ventricular function — are well known and although cimaglermin is an experimental drug, it should be possible to predict whether the new drug would be comparatively priced, cheaper or more expensive. Readers would benefit from that knowledge. While this story discusses that the drug seemed to benefit patients and was effective, it doesn’t say how that was measured, and by how much the measurement improved due to the drug. (By digging into the research paper, via figure 3, we found that the benefits were measured by tracking absolute increases in ejection fraction, which is the amount of blood pumped out the ventricles. It increased 8% in the group receiving a medium or high dose of the medicine.) One issue that might be confusing for readers: The story notes that a “phase 1 trial like this one is designed to see if a new drug is safe, not to test its effectiveness.” If that’s the case, then why is the framing of the story about how effective it was? The story clearly points out that side effects included nausea and headaches, and that one participant did experience abnormal liver function after receiving the highest dose, a side effect that eventually cleared up. This is a strong point of the story: It clearly establishes that this was a small phase one randomized controlled trial, and the story explains what that means for the drug’s development. A phase 1 trial like this one is designed to see if a new drug is safe, not to test its effectiveness. Before cimaglermin could be used to treat patients, it must prove its worth in a series of progressively larger and challenging trials and then be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The process can take several years. Based on these preliminary findings, larger trials are being planned, Lenihan said. But, as noted in quantify benefits criterion above, readers might be confused by why so much of the story focused on the drug’s effectiveness, if this preliminary study wasn’t designed to test that. The story doesn’t commit disease mongering. The story does get credit for quoting a researcher not affiliated with this project, but it neglects to mention some obvious potential conflicts of interest among the members of the research team. According to the research paper, eight of the 13 researchers have some linkage to pharmaceutical firms and seven of them have a connection to the sponsor of the study, Acorda Therapeutics, Inc., either as consultants, employees, or stockholders, and two of them have had research funded by the company. The story does mention alternatives for dealing with weakened left ventricular function, primarily through this paragraph: “People with heart failure often take a combination of drugs, Lenihan said. These include medications to lower blood pressure and diuretics to help remove excess fluid that builds up as a result of the heart’s labored pumping ability. In addition, some people have implanted defibrillators or pacemakers.” We’ll rate this category satisfactory, given that the story admits that it is reporting on a phase one trial, and includes the following information: “Before cimaglermin could be used to treat patients, it must prove its worth in a series of progressively larger and challenging trials and then be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The process can take several years.” The drug is clearly described in terms of its experimental nature at this point. This story doesn’t appear to have relied on a news release.
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5009
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Flu outbreak sickens over 30 migrants at border center.
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More than 30 migrants have tested positive for influenza at a major processing center where a flu-stricken teenage boy died, the latest evidence of growing public health threats posed by inadequate facilities to deal with a surge of families and children reaching the U.S. border.
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true
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U.S. News, Health, Flu, McAllen, North America, Public health, Texas
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It was unclear if anyone ill came in contact with a 16-year-old Guatemalan boy who was held at the facility in McAllen, Texas, and died Monday, a day after he was diagnosed and transferred to a smaller station. Carlos Hernandez Vasquez was detained for six days, twice as long as generally allowed by U.S. law. The processing center is a converted warehouse that holds hundreds of parents and children in large, fenced-in pens that gained international attention last year when it held children separated from their parents. The government closed the facility after the flu outbreak, sent in cleaning crews to disinfect the building and plans to reopen it soon. The 32 sick children and adults have been quarantined at a smaller processing center, according to a U.S. Border Patrol official who spoke with reporters on condition of anonymity because there is an ongoing investigation. Their ages were unknown. Since December, five children have died after being apprehended by border agents, putting authorities under growing pressure and scrutiny to care for migrant children. Kevin McAleenan, the acting Homeland Security secretary, came under withering criticism Wednesday from a Democratic lawmaker who called the administration’s actions with children “inhumane.” The Department of Health and Human Services, which cares for unaccompanied migrant children, said Wednesday that a 10-year-old girl from El Salvador died last year after being detained by border authorities in a previously unreported case. The girl died Sept. 29 at an Omaha, Nebraska, hospital of fever and respiratory distress, officials said. The department began caring for the unidentified girl in March 2018, said spokesman Mark Weber, who described her as “medically fragile,” with a history of congenital heart defects. With the government running out of space to hold migrants, the Trump administration has been taking dramatic steps to keep up with the influx. The Defense Department said Wednesday that it will provide temporary housing for at least 7,500 men and women who are taken into custody by immigration officials along the border. It will loan tents to the Department of Homeland Security, which will manage the camps. The Defense Department will evaluate six potential sites over the next two weeks: Tucson and Yuma in Arizona and Tornillo, Donna, Laredo and Del Rio in Texas. Tornillo, near El Paso, is where unaccompanied children were housed last year. The Pentagon said military personnel will only erect the tents and won’t be involved in operations. The 77,000-square foot (7,155-sq. meter) processing center in McAllen is modeled after a similar facility in Nogales, Arizona, built for an influx of Central Americans in 2014. It has separate pods for boys and girls who came alone and parents with their young children. Some older children are split from their parents to avoid having them mix with much younger children. Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, which includes McAllen, is the busiest corridor for illegal crossings. The Border Patrol made 36,681 arrests in the area in April, nearly three of every four coming in family units or as children traveling alone. Border Patrol agents have averaged 69 trips to the hospital a day since Dec. 22 and about 153,000 hours monitoring detained population at hospitals, the official said. Authorities have also cleaned other holding facilities in South Texas, including Brownsville, Corpus Christi, Kingsville and highway checkpoints. Migrants are not being vaccinated at Border Patrol stations, but they may be when hospitalized, the official said. The Border Patrol is offering vaccines to agents working. ___ Long reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Lolita C. Baldor in Washington contributed to this report.
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10749
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Combination Chemo-Radiation Therapy May Help Preserve Larynx for Patients with Laryngeal Cancer
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Illustration: National Cancer InstituteThe release focuses on a recent article published in JAMA Otolaryngology – Head & Neck Surgery about a treatment for cancer of the larnyx. The paper reports that use of the drug cetuximab in conjunction with radiation therapy results in modestly-improved survival rates for patients with cancer of the larynx or hypopharynx who have not had their larynx surgically removed. The release does a good job of explaining the nature of the research involved, namely that these findings stem from a retrospective analysis of a relatively small subgroup who participated in a larger study. The release also stresses that the use of cetuximab in conjunction with radiation therapy for requires further evaluation. That is all to the good. However, while the release provides specific numbers in regard to potential benefits, it never makes clear that these numbers, in this study design, are statistically nonsignificant. In other words, statistically speaking, there is no advantage. In addition, the release does not do enough to address issues related to cost and potential harms — nor does it place the work in context with previous research on the use of cetuximab and radiation therapy in treating head and neck cancers. Cancer of the larynx is relatively uncommon, with 13,430 new cases anticipated in the U.S. in 2016, according to the National Cancer Institute. However, the 5-year survival rate is highly variable: patients who catch the cancer while it is still localized have a 76.3 percent chance of surviving for five years; that survival rate drops to 35.1 percent if the cancer has metastasized. And 19 percent of laryngeal cancer patients are diagnosed only after the cancer has metastasized. What’s more, surgical treatment of laryngeal cancers can mean removal of the larynx — meaning a patient often loses the ability to speak. That can have a significant impact on a patient’s quality of life. New research that can improve survival rates for patients, while preserving the larynx, is certainly worth of discussion. However, as with all potential clinical treatments, the potential benefits need to be discussed alongside related costs and potential risks. Without that context, healthcare providers, patients, and their loved ones are not able to make informed decisions. In addition, the release doesn’t acknowledge the body of work that already exists on using cetuximab in conjunction with radiation to treat head and neck cancers. That makes it harder for readers to determine what is truly new about this research news.
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false
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Cancer,Journal news release
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The release doesn’t discuss costs at all. Given that the relevant study compared radiation therapy to the use of radiation therapy in conjunction with cetuximab, that’s particularly problematic. Cetuximab is already on the market (under the trade name Erbitux) for use in treating various cancers. The drug has been the subject of public debate regarding its cost relative to its therapeutic value (e.g., see these articles in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today). Regardless of where one stands on that debate, treatment with cetuximab can cost tens of thousands of dollars, which is worth mentioning. And the likelihood that the combo therapy won’t be covered by insurance (given its nonsignificant results) should have been discussed. The release addresses three benefits, and provides numbers for all three. That’s good. However, the release doesn’t tell readers that these numbers, given the size and nature of the study, are not statistically significant. There appears to be no advantage in taking a drug that is both costly and can cause significant adverse side effects. This comes back to cetuximab. As noted above, cetuximab is already sold under the trade name Erbitux. And Erbitux’s own website notes that it can cause significant adverse health effects, including heart attacks and allergic reactions that resulted in death. We don’t expect a news release to include a thorough recounting of every possible adverse health effect associated with a treatment, but we do expect there to be at least an acknowledgment of known health risks — and especially so when the relevant risks are so severe. This is a close one. In many ways, the release does an exemplary job of characterizing the research: it clearly notes that this was a “secondary subgroup analysis” and tells readers the number of patients involved (160 patients: 90 got CRT, 78 got only radiation therapy). The release also explicitly states that “These results need to be interpreted in the context of a retrospective subset analysis with limited sample size.” Kudos to them for writing that. The release also states that “This treatment approach warrants further evaluation in larger populations to fully assess the potential value of cetuximab or other molecular targeting agents to augment laryngeal preservation rates.” That sentence makes clear that more work is needed, in a bigger study, to address a very specific benefit. So, kudos again. However, there are three things the release doesn’t tell us. First, we aren’t told that the differences between the compared therapies were statistically insignificant. Secondly, the reader has no way of knowing what stage of cancer the patients had. Did all the patients have localized cancers? Did they all have metastasized cancers? Was it a mix? And, if it was a mix, how were patients with different stages of cancer divided between the CRT and radiation therapy groups? This can make a huge difference in how to interpret the results. Thirdly, while the release notes that this research evaluated only a subgroup of a larger study, it doesn’t tell us much about the larger study. What was the larger study designed to evaluate? That would be good to know. No disease mongering here. The release might have mentioned that layyngeal cancer is partly preventable with the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. The release tells readers that the work was funded by Eli Lilly and Company, but refers readers to the journal article for information about financial disclosures, potential conflicts of interest, etc. This is not okay, for two reasons. First, while the release mentions Eli Lilly’s funding, it doesn’t make clear Lilly’s financial ties to cetuximab. Lilly manufactures cetuximab and receives royalties on Erbitux worldwide (though it is marketed by different companies, depending on where it is being sold). In short, Lilly has a vested interest in seeing an increase in cetuximab use (the drug reportedly brought in $723 million in 2014 — in North America alone). Second, many readers, possibly most readers, may not have access to the journal article. And if an institution knows that information is worth mentioning to readers (such as whether researchers had conflicts of interest), then an institution should not make readers put in extra legwork to find that information. And there is certainly relevant information to share here. The lead author reported working as a consultant for Lilly. Two co-authors are Lilly employees. A third co-author is a former Lilly employee and owns Lilly stock. And a fourth co-author works for Merck KGaA, which markets cetuximab outside of North America. In other words, five of the nine authors have clear conflicts of interest that are not disclosed in the release. The focus here is on laryngeal cancer treatments that don’t require surgical intervention, so we can leave surgical interventions out of the picture. However, there are a range of other chemotherapy treatments that can be used in conjunction with radiation therapy, such as cisplatin. The release doesn’t mention these “chemoradiation” options, much less offer any sort of comparison. This release notes that more research, on a larger scale, needs to be done to “assess the potential value” of interventions like CRT in treating cancer while preserving the larynx. However, the release would have been much better if it had clearly noted that cetuximab is not currently eligible for insurance coverage for this particular condition and a result will not be available to many patients. Earlier studies have looked at the use of cetuximab and radiation therapy in treating head and neck cancers. For example, “Concurrent cisplatin and radiation versus cetuximab and radiation for locally advanced head-and-neck cancer” was published in 2011. And “Cetuximab prolongs survival in patients with locoregionally advanced squamous cell carcinoma of head and neck: A phase III study of high dose radiation therapy with or without cetuximab” came out in 2004. Granted, these are not necessarily addressing the same thing as “laryngeal preservation” in patients with larynx or hypopharynx cancers — but it’s certainly worth mentioning. Readers could easily infer from the release that using cetuximab and radiation therapy in conjunction to treat throat cancers is relatively new — and it’s not. The release uses fairly cautious language throughout. However, two statements that contradict each other earned this an unsatisfactory: “The higher rate of laryngeal preservation that was achieved with the use of CRT compared with radiotherapy alone was encouraging,” “This study was not powered to assess organ preservation.”
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28273
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"A photograph shows Frank ""Rocky"" Fiegel, a real-life person who served as the inspiration for the character ""Popeye."
|
"What's true: Frank ""Rocky"" Fiegel was a real person who lived in the hometown of ""Popeye"" creator Elzie Segar. What's false: A photograph often shared as if it shows Fiegel actually depicts another individual unrelated to the ""Popeye"" franchise."
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mixture
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Fauxtography
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The internet’s interest is periodically piqued by a photograph supposedly showing Frank “Rocky” Fiegel, the man believed to be cartoonist E.C. Segar’s inspiration for the character of “Popeye”: The claim that Fiegel was the inspiration for “Popeye” is largely accurate. However, the picture shown above is not a photograph of him. Fred Grandinetti explored the origins of the character in his book Popeye: An Illustrated Cultural History. He found that the locals of Chester, Ill., where creator Segar was raised in the early 1900s, likely served as an inspiration to Segar. The characterization of Popeye, for example, can be found in the look and personality of Fiegel, who had a strong chin, always smoked a pipe, and had a propensity for fights, according to Grandinetti: The lore of Chester, Illinois, holds that the character of Popeye was inspired by town resident Frank “Rocky” Fiegel. Lee Huffstutler, herself a Chester local, makes and well supports this argument. According to Huffstutler, Rocky Fiegel was of Polish descent and lived with his mother in a house near the Evergreen Cemetery. Mrs. Huffstutler describes him as “tall, strong, always ready for a fight and always a winner” … Rocky worked part-time at George Gozney’s saloon. When he finished his work and had consumed a couple of beers, he would take a chair outside, seat himself, tilt the chair back, and, with pipe in his mouth, proceed to take a nap in the sunshine. Of course, the sleeping Rocky became an amusing target for the school children who came by. They would creep near, yell loudly, and run. Rocky would awaken with a start and jump out of his chair, arms flailing, ready for a fight. but alas, there would be no opponent. The children would be a block away by that time. In the March 28, 1947, issue of the Chester Herald Tribune, there is an obituary for Mr. Fiegel, who died at his home in Chester on March 24, 1947. Born January 27, 1868, he was 79 years of age at the time of his death. The editor wrote that Frank “Rocky” Fiegel was a familiar character in Chester and was credited for being the inspiration of Elsie Segar’s “Popeye.” The article reads: “In his younger days he performed amazing feats of strength. Because of his hardened physique he was affectionately known as “Rocky.” His angular jaw and familiar corn-cob pipe apparently impressed the young Segar. Some versions of this claim also state that Fiegel, like Popeye, was a sailor, but that wasn’t the case. Furthermore, Fiegel wasn’t aware of his role in the creation of Popeye until the final years of his life, according to the Southern Illinoisan: In Chester, it is commonly accepted that Fiegel provided Segar with the basis for the character of Popeye. Although not a sailor, and more inclined to guzzle liquor than spinach, Fiegel had the reputation of being as tough and as fearless as the cartoon character … Fiegel, a bartender and general laborer around Chester, seldom had steady work and was often seen loafing around the town’s saloons … It wasn’t until 1938, nine years before he died, that he learned that he was the inspiration for Popeye. That was the year the strip’s creator, Segar, died. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a picture of Fiegel sitting in a rocking chair and smoking a pipe, saying he was the inspiration for the character. While Fiegel likely inspired Segar’s Popeye character, the viral photograph frequently attached to this claim doesn’t actually show him. The image is one of an anonymous sailor aboard the HMS Rodney in 1940. The image is available via the Imperial War Museum where it is presented with the caption: “A Leading Stoker nicknamed “Popeye”, with 21 years service”: Fiegel was in his 70s at the time this photograph was taken. Furthermore, HMS Rodney was a British battleship in service of the Royal Navy, far from Fiegel’s home in Chester. A genuine photograph of the “real life Popeye” can be seen in a 1979 article published in the Carbondale, Ill., newspaper Southern Illinoisan about Chester’s famous resident (see top right image): Sun, Apr 8, 1979 – Page 33 · Southern Illinoisan (Carbondale, Illinois) · Newspapers.com Here’s a larger version of that image: Fiegel passed away in 1947 and was buried in an unmarked grave. According to the Official Popeye Fan Club, this was remedied in 1996 when a headstone bearing a 1929 version of Popeye was placed at Fiegel’s final resting place: On September 7, 1996, Fiegel’s formerly unmarked grave was finally marked with a headstone. The marker was inscripted with the 1929 version of E.C. Segar’s Popeye character. This version of Popeye most resembles his legendary ‘real life’ counterpart.
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34987
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"U.S. President Donald Trump said ""We're going to take the firearms first and then go to court."
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As can be seen in this video clip, Pence began speaking on the subject of how red flag laws were one mechanism that might provide “local law enforcement additional tools if an individual is reported to be a potential danger” while still allowing for due process. Trump interrupted and twice expressed the desirability of being able to take firearms away from citizens first and not involving the courts until afterward:
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true
|
Politics
|
In recent years, many states in the U.S. have responded to multiple incidents of mass shootings by passing “red flag laws” intended to provide a means by which potentially dangerous (and armed) persons could be legally restricted prior to their engaging in harmful acts: They are state laws that authorize courts to issue a special type of protection order, allowing the police to temporarily confiscate firearms from people who are deemed by a judge to be a danger to themselves or to others. Often, the request for the order will come from relatives or friends concerned about a loved one who owns one or more guns and has expressed suicidal thoughts or discussed shooting people. The authorities may also request an order. How long the guns are taken away under these “extreme risk protection orders” depends on the circumstances, and can usually be extended only after another court hearing. The orders also bar the person they cover from purchasing guns In general, red flag laws authorize courts to issue a special type of protection order that allows police to temporarily confiscate firearms from persons deemed by judges to be a danger to themselves or to others. Advocates argue that such laws can help save lives without infringing on civil liberties, while opponents maintain that “red flag” seizures violate constitutional due process guarantees. In February 2018, a few weeks after a mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida left 17 people dead, U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence Trump met with lawmakers to discuss the subjects of gun laws and school safety. Nikolas Cruz, the suspected shooter, had been able to legally purchase an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle even though local police had previously received multiple calls about his potentially dangerous behavior, a subject that Trump and Pence discussed at that meeting.
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3906
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FA Cup games delayed 1 min for prince’s mental health push.
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The start of games in the third round of the FA Cup will be delayed by one minute to raise awareness of mental health issues.
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true
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Health, Soccer, Sports - Europe, Mental health
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The English Football Association’s “Heads Up” campaign is spearheaded by Prince William, who is the president of the governing body. Most games in the third round of the cup will start at 3:01 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 4. The FA says “during the minute delay, fans will be encouraged to consider the positive impact 60 seconds can have on their own well-being or in supporting a friend or family member.” ___ More AP soccer: https://apnews.com/Soccer and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
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26425
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“Face masks being manufactured in China, for example, went to domestic consumption and their own fight against the virus” while the U.S. was “largely unable to import supplies from China.”
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All imports from China fell during January and February 2020, compared with a year earlier, but did not disappear entirely. The federal government as well as a few states have imported medical supplies from China during the COVID-19 pandemic. U.S. imports of certain medical supplies from China fell in 2019 when the Trump administration raised tariffs on these goods.
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false
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Florida, Coronavirus, Marco Rubio,
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"Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., casts some blame on China for the U.S. struggle to obtain crucial medical supplies amid COVID-19. Writing in the New York Times, Rubio accused China of using the world’s supply chain of medical gear to benefit itself during the coronavirus outbreak: ""Having monopolized those critical supply chains, the Chinese Communist Party pointed them inward. It ensured that face masks being manufactured in China, for example, went to domestic consumption and their own fight against the virus. Largely unable to import supplies from China, America has been left scrambling because we by and large lack the ability to make things, as well as the state capacity needed for reorienting production to do so. As a result, doctors are forced to ration supplies and, in some cases, cease using necessary protective equipment."" There are clear problems in the U.S. medical supply chain. A mad dash for masks and other supplies has created logistical hurdles and frenzied dealmaking in the global market, including in China. And Rubio’s concerns about the U.S. relying on China for supplies are not new. He raised them more than a year ago. ""Although American pharmaceutical firms face short-term commercial opportunities in China, the U.S. runs the risk of losing important components of its medical supply chain to China’s government-backed industry,"" Rubio wrote in a report in February 2019. But in his op-ed, Rubio overstates the problem with Chinese imports and ignores some key factors — including that imports were declining before COVID-19 as a result of President Donald Trump’s tariffs. ""Sen. Rubio’s comment is typical of ‘bash China’ remarks, but inaccurate,"" said Gary Hufbauer, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. ""China is exporting millions of masks."" We reached out to spokespersons for Rubio and did not receive a response. There were fears that China would not export critical medical supplies to the U.S. as COVID-19 cases ramped up. China produces much of the world’s protective medical equipment. There was a dip, but the exports did continue. China’s exports of protective medical equipment to the U.S. declined by 19% in January and February, compared with the same period last year. All other products fell by a far greater amount: 28%, according to an analysis by Chad Bown at the Peterson Institute. ""We imported less from them for these products than we did last year, but some of that is economics: They have more demand for these things internally, so they had less of an ability to export them to the world,"" Bown told PolitiFact. New export restrictions by China also created logjams. Officials in China said the restrictions were imposed to ensure quality, but U.S. companies said they were facing bottlenecks, the Wall Street Journal reported. In February, the United States was focused on exporting supplies to China to fight the crisis. The drop in imports of masks from China is not related only to COVID-19. Rubio’s op-ed did not mention the Trump administration’s increase on tariffs for various goods from China in 2018-19. That also affects imports of medical supplies. In 2018, Matt Rowan, president of the Health Industry Distributors Association, warned that proposed tariffs would drive up health care costs. The products ""are used widely throughout health care settings and are a critical component of our nation's response to public health emergencies, such as Ebola,"" he said at a federal government hearing. The tariff hikes for personal protective equipment and other supplies went through in September 2019 despite such warnings. U.S. imports of masks, respirators and gloves from China fell following the tariff increases. In March 2020, the federal government established a temporary exclusion for masks. ""In other words, the fall in imports from China is largely a self-imposed wound,"" said Mary Lovely, a Syracuse University economist and trade expert who is also a Peterson fellow. The decrease in imports followed the shutdown of manufacturing regions in China in the country, she said. The U.S. government has tried to increase the flow of supplies from China, including authorizing the use of a Chinese version of N95 masks. One more point: The U.S. has imported masks and other supplies from China in recent weeks. On March 29, Trump announced an operation called Project Air Bridge to bring medical supplies from overseas. The project’s first flight came from China on March 29 and brought millions of supplies, including 130,000 N95 masks. Project Air Bridge has delivered more than 760,000 N95 masks, 600 million gloves, 52 million surgical masks in addition to other supplies including surgical gowns, thermometers and face shields, a Federal Emergency Management Agency spokesperson said. Those supplies came from China, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, India, Honduras and Mexico. From China alone, there have been over 133 million units of imported N95 masks, gloves, surgical masks, surgical gowns, thermometers and face shields, FEMA said. Some states have arranged their own imported masks or other supplies from China. Rubio said ""face masks being manufactured in China, for example, went to domestic consumption and their own fight against the virus"" while the U.S. was ""largely unable to import supplies from China."" China did have a greater need for its domestically manufactured masks in February as the virus ravaged the country, but Rubio greatly overstates the situation. Imports of masks from China to the U.S. did drop in January and February, but imports of other products dropped even more. Imports to the U.S. did occur in April through the federal government’s Project Air Bridge, and a few states arranged their own imports with the help of other entities."
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28011
|
A machine-shop worker tore his scrotum in a piece of machinery and then stapled it back together.
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A machine shop worker tore his scrotum in a piece of machinery and then stapled it back together.
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true
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Medical, Emergency Room, Phallacies
|
A supposed reproduction of a medical journal article describing an unusual case of scrotum self-repair using a stapler was a ubiquitous piece of faxlore back in the pre-internet days: UNUSUAL CASE Scrotum Self-Repair By William A. Morton, Jr, MD One morning I was called to the emergency room by the head ER nurse. She directed me to a patient who had refused to describe his problem other than to say that he “needed a doctor who took care of men’s troubles.” The patient, about 40, was pale, febrile, and obviously uncomfortable, and had little to say as he gingerly opened his trousers to expose a bit of angry red and black-and-blue scrotal skin.After I asked the nurse to leave us, the patient permitted me to remove his trousers, shorts, and two or three yards of foul-smelling stained gauze wrapped about his scrotum, which was swollen to twice the size of a grapefruit and extremely tender. A jagged zig-zag laceration, oozing pus and blood, extended down the left scrotum.Amid the matted hair, edematous skin, and various exudates, I saw some half-buried dark linear objects and asked the patient what they were. Several days earlier, he replied, he had injured himself in the machine shop where he worked, and had closed the laceration himself with a heavy-duty stapling gun. The dark objects were one-inch staples of the type used in putting up wallboard. We x-rayed the patient’s scrotum to locate the staples; admitted him to the hospital; and gave him tetanus antitoxin, broad-spectrum antibacterial therapy, and hexachlorophene sitz baths prior to surgery the next morning. The procedure consisted of exploration and debridement of the left side of the scrotal pouch. Eight rusty staples were retrieved, and the skin edges were trimmed and freshened. The left testis had been avulsed and was missing. The stump of the spermatic cord was recovered at the inguinal canal, debrided, and the vessels ligated properly, though not much of a hematoma was present. Through-and-through Penrose drains were sutured loosely in site, and the skin was loosely closed. Convalescence was uneventful, and before his release from the hospital less than a week later, the patient confided the rest of his story to me. An unmarried loner, he usually didn’t leave the machine shop at lunchtime with his co-workers. Finding himself alone, he had begun the regular practice of masturbating by holding his penis against the canvas drive-belt of a large floor-based piece of running machinery. One day, as he approached orgasm, he lost his concentration and leaned too close to the belt. When his scrotum suddenly became caught between the pulley-wheel and the drive-belt, he was thrown into the air and landed a few feet away. Unaware that he had lost his left testis, and perhaps too stunned to feel much pain, he stapled the wound closed and resumed work. I can only assume he abandoned this method of self-gratification. This article about a machine shop worker who sliced his scrotum open while masturbating with a piece of machinery (causing the loss of a testicle), then simply stapled the sac back together, was popular fodder in text-based Internet discussion groups in the early 1990s. Despite the clinical tone of the article, told from a first-person perspective of the doctor who treated the patient’s resulting injuries and infection, many readers found the scenario described too bizarre to be true and suspected it was a hoax crafted by someone working in the medical field. As a first step towards verifying or debunking this item, we tracked down a copy of the medical journal that had supposedly published the article and ascertained that the article did indeed appear in the July 1991 issue of Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality. Still, some doubters didn’t consider that to be sufficient proof that the events described therein had actually occurred — the journal editors might have been fooled by a doctor who sent in a fictitious case report as a prank, they insisted. So, we tracked down the physician whose name appeared at the head of the article and contacted him to see if he could verify the account and supply any additional information. He replied to us as follows in 1994: Dear Mr. Mikkelson: I am now retired, but submitted the article; treated the patient about 20-25 years ago and have had phone calls from all corners of the U.S. ever since. A xerox is on the billboard in practically every army post, college dorm, men’s club, etc. I’ve had interviews/phone by talk-show hosts, etc. No Phil Donahue yet! The man actually came to me 3 days post-injury when the fever, swelling, and pain of secondary infection frightened him. Though unlikely, tetanus was even a possibility. He was not that impressed with the pain of the moment of injury — it happened so quickly, like losing your fingertip to a band-saw — and was unaware his left testis was probably propelled up into the rafters of the machine shop where he worked. Every man who questions me imagines the initial pain to have been intense, but should realize that once the testis had been ripped out (gasp!) there was not the continuing discomfort one would experience from a first-class kick in the nuts! I saw him again 5 years later in the hospital for a non-urologic problem. Incidentally, the Navy has left xeroxes in every bar along the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Tel Aviv — my son’s girlfriend saw one in Greece 2 years ago.
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13580
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The Clinton Foundation is a charity where President and Secretary Clinton and their daughter, they take no salary, they get no money from it, they take no personal benefit from it.
|
"Rosen said, ""The Clinton Foundation is a charity where President and Secretary Clinton and their daughter, they take no salary, they get no money from it, they take no personal benefit from it."" Rosen’s claim is correct on its face. The Clintons do not take any sort of paycheck, bonus or fees from the Clinton Foundation. It is possible the foundation has boosted the Clintons’ public image since Bill Clinton left office, and this has helped them command hefty speaker fees and book advances, and it’s also given them extra opportunities to mingle with the global elite. But they may have gotten these benefits even without the Clinton Foundation. Their celebrity primarily comes from their track record in politics."
|
true
|
Candidate Biography, Ethics, PunditFact, Hilary Rosen,
|
"Some Republicans have presented the embattled Clinton Foundation as serving one purpose: ""lining the pockets of Bill and Hillary Clinton,"" as GOP Chair Reince Priebus put it. Responding to such criticisms, Democratic pundit Hilary Rosen said the Clintons ""take no personal benefit"" from the foundation. She also pointed out the legitimate charitable work the foundation carries out, such as its programs addressing AIDS in Africa and storm recovery in Haiti. ""The Clinton Foundation is a charity where President and Secretary Clinton and their daughter, they take no salary, they get no money from it, they take no personal benefit from it,"" Rosen said on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show Aug. 24. That’s a pretty wide gulf between the assertion that the foundation is just a front for the Clintons to make oodles of money and claims that they don’t get any personal benefit. It made us wonder: What exactly do the Clintons get out of the foundation? Bill Clinton is currently a member of the foundation’s board of directors, while Chelsea Clinton is vice chair. Hillary Clinton was a board member between leaving the State Department in 2013 through the launch of her presidential campaign in 2015. In the most recent year for which tax forms are available, 2014, the foundation reported that Chelsea Clinton worked 35 hours per week for the foundation and other related organizations, Bill Clinton worked 25 hours per work, and Hillary Clinton worked 20 hours per week. The Clintons don’t take a salary from this work, and they don’t receive any other direct monetary benefit. Other Clinton Foundation leaders take home six-figure salaries, according to tax documents. The Clinton Foundation is a public charity that, as we have reported, allocates about 80-90 percent of its expenditures to charitable programs, while the rest goes to fundraising and overhead. (A quick aside: There’s some confusion over how much the Clinton Foundation spends on charitable programming primarily because the word ""foundation"" is in the name. Typically, a private foundation’s primary activity is grantmaking, giving money to charities who actually do the work. But the Clinton Foundation operates as a public charity in that they run many of their programs themselves. The Clintons also have a traditional private foundation, the Clinton Family Foundation.) So the Clintons don’t receive compensation from the foundation. However, you can make a case that they have received some indirect personal benefits. This is not to say that any of these benefits are unethical or improper. Experts on nonprofit ethics told us these are pretty standard, and they haven’t seen anything reported about the Clinton Foundation that proves corruption. Still, it’s worth reviewing the limited types of benefits that the Clintons do get. Public relations The most obvious, outward-facing benefit for the Clintons is notoriety and media attention. The organization got off the ground in 2001, the year Bill Clinton left the White House. During the periods when he or Hillary were not in or running for office, the foundation kept the family in the public eye — and more often for good reasons, rather than scandalous ones (at least up until the past year or so, when Clinton launched her 2016 campaign and the foundation faced more intense scrutiny). Throughout its existence, the Clinton Foundation has received attention for its work to make AIDS medication more accessible in Africa, efforts to combat climate change, establishing a business mentoring program, writing school food guidelines, and more. Every fall, Bill Clinton and his family receive a spate of press as the stars of the annual Clinton Global Initiative, a networking conference for wealthy philanthropic donors. Chelsea Clinton has embraced her role as a public face of the organization. ""It does continue to draw attention to the work they do as family and individuals throughout the world,"" said Ann Skeet, director of leadership ethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. ""At a minimum, it is good public relations."" When the Internal Revenue Service evaluates charities applying for tax-exempt status, which the foundation has, it wants to ensure that the organization is set up to provide a public benefit rather than serve private financial desires, Skeet said. There’s nothing improper about the Clintons taking advantage of their public image in this role, as long as it goes toward that public benefit. Another big benefit: The Clintons’ role as high-dollar fundraisers for the foundation also enabled them to maintain relationships with wealthy and powerful individuals, including many who are also involved in the Democratic Party. There are some crossover big money donors, such as Fred Eychaner, Haim Saban and Daniel Abraham. (Republicans have been involved in the foundation, too; Mitt Romney spoke at the 2012 Clinton Global Initiative amid his run for the White House.) The Clintons have also received some indirect monetary benefits from their charitable work, though none of this money came from the foundation’s coffers. Bill Clinton wrote a book in 2007 called Giving, for which he received an advance of about $5 million, according to the New York Times. The book was about charitable work and so is, in part, based on his work with the Clinton Foundation. Similarly, he has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars delivering numerous speeches where he talks about his Clinton Foundation work. For example, Samsung Electronics paid Bill Clinton $450,000 to deliver the keynote address at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, during which he talked about how technology has affected his work in the developing world through the Clinton Foundation. Samsung has also donated between $100,000 and $250,000 to the foundation. Experts also pointed out that the Clintons have donated to their own charity, and those donations would be tax-deductible. Bill and Hillary Clinton have donated millions to their private philanthropy, the Clinton Family Foundation, which has in turn given between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. Chelsea Clinton herself has donated between $25,000 and $50,000. And foundation tax documents stipulate that the Clintons, ""due to extraordinary security and other requirements,"" often need to travel first class or via charter plane. A spokesperson said that in some cases, when the Clintons travel on foundation business, the foundation pays for their travel service directly. At least one campaign ad has been made lampooning Hillary Clinton’s travel on private jets. Chicken or the egg? This discussion raises a chicken-or-the-egg question: Do these benefits the Clintons receive really come from the foundation, or do they come from their already sizeable political capital? Before the Clintons started their foundation, they were famous for being the country’s first family. Absent the foundation, it’s quite possible they could command equally sizeable speaking fees and book advances. They would have access to the same members of the global elite. They would have the ability and finances to donate to charitable causes. Buildings would bear their names. Hillary Clinton would still receive hefty donations supporting her presidential campaign. In all likelihood, very little would change in the Clintons’ private lives if the foundation were to close, said Tony Proscio, a researcher at Duke University’s Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society and a consultant to foundations and large nonprofit organizations. ""It’s fair to wonder how much of a ‘benefit’ these things would be to Bill and Hillary Clinton, who are already at home in high society, more famous than almost anyone, and probably welcome to associate themselves with whatever good deeds they please,"" Proscio said. ""Are those ‘benefits’ as valuable to the Clintons as they would be to someone else? It’s debatable."" On the flip side, he said the foundation likely would not be as successful nor as widely known if it didn’t have the Clintons’ name attached. He noted however, ""There’s a glamour attached not only to the foundation but to the Clintons' participation in the foundation that seems a little self-serving."" The reason people start charities in their name and donate significant amounts of money often boils down to a desire to feel like they’re contributing to a cause they care about or to increase their standing in the community, Skeet said. These are, however abstract, a form of personal benefit. ""All donors to all organizations give for a reason you can tie back to personal benefit,"" she said. Our ruling Rosen said, ""The Clinton Foundation is a charity where President and Secretary Clinton and their daughter, they take no salary, they get no money from it, they take no personal benefit from it."" Rosen’s claim is correct on its face. The Clintons do not take any sort of paycheck, bonus or fees from the Clinton Foundation. It is possible the foundation has boosted the Clintons’ public image since Bill Clinton left office, and this has helped them command hefty speaker fees and book advances, and it’s also given them extra opportunities to mingle with the global elite. But they may have gotten these benefits even without the Clinton Foundation. Their celebrity primarily comes from their track record in politics."
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34015
|
A child who drank sour candy spray experienced throat spasms.
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What's true: The drinking of any liquid can provoke a laryngospasm if the imbiber is trying to breathe at the same time. What's undetermined: A child named Kylin experienced frightening throat spasms after drinking sour candy spray; something in sour candy spray causes life-threatening throat spasms.
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mixture
|
Food, food warnings
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This alert about sour candy sprays dates to May 2006. Akin to warnings about drug-laced suckers and poisoned Halloween treats, it raises the specter of a danger to children lurking in a foodstuff they find highly appealing. Because youngsters are prone to devouring candy as they encounter it rather than first showing it to a parent, sweets have to be safe for them to eat. This apparent account of one child’s experiences suggests that at least one class of candy is not. Example: Warning about Spray Candy sold in stores We had a very scary incident with Kylin Saturday night all because of some candy. It’s a liquid that’s sour and you just spray it into your mouth. I was right by Kylin and her friend and heard them say that it would be fun to see what it would taste like if the drank some instead of just sprayed it. (you know, typical kid fun stuff, I thought nothing of it) So Kylin said she’d try it and took the lid off (it’s just like a pumpstyle hair spray top) and she took one sip. I turned around to ask if she was ok cause I thought she was making noises like when water or something just doesn’t go down right and realized that she was just gasping over and over again for air and wasn’t actually breathing. She was having a laryngospasm! The definition of what happened is this – laryngospasm The sudden acute spasm of the vocal cords (and epiglottis) that can result in occlusion of the airway and death. This medical definition above is from http://cancerweb.ncl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/omd?action=Home&query= Anyway, Kylin’s airways did close and she couldn’t breath, so we had to call 911. She threw up before the ambulance got here and she did start being able to breath after that but still had difficulties for a little bit. The paramedics recommended we take her to the urgent care unit here and get her checked out just to be sure cause she continued to have weird spasms that were causing her throat to make a weird noise for about 2 hours after that. The doctor there is who told me what actually happened.She is ok now, thank God, but it was so super scary!! Kylin and Daegen both have had sour spray candy before (not sure if they’ve had this kind though, I’ve seen a few different kinds) and this has never happened but it did this time. I’m attaching a picture of the spray (like I said, there’s lots of different variations out there) and am hoping that it will get forwarded and passed around so that hopefully no child or parent has to ever go through this again. We are just so lucky that Kylin did start breathing again and is ok now. I have been in contact with a lady from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and she came to take a look at it this morning and she took some pictures of it and then was on her way to the convenience store to buy some so they could further investigate in. I have also contacted Global news and they may do a story about it, I’m waiting to hear back from them while they are researching it a bit. Here is the spray that caused this. It says “sour” at the top and then “Big Mouth candy spray” and it does come in different flavors, this one being sour green apple. While the heads-up appears to be the work of a parent who saw her child through a difficult and frightening time and now seeks to warn others to stay away from a product that brought her youngster to grief, we have yet to locate the author of the piece and so can’t say if there really was a little girl named Kylin whose drinking of a sour liquid candy caused her throat to spasm and her airway to close. Details given in the story place the incident in Canada (reference is made to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and to Global, one of that country’s major television networks), but the candy warned against is also available in the U.S., making the caution borderless. Children have a high tolerance and liking for extremely sour flavors. (An adult’s palate differs from that of a child in terms of which flavors can be distinguished and what tastes good. Because of this difference, sour candies marketed to adults are deliberately formulated to be less intense than those intended for their younger counterparts.) Sour bonbons account for a large segment of the youth candy market, with such confections available in a wide variety of forms, such as lozenges, toffees, suckers, powders, sprays, and liquids. While a candy meant to be spritzed into the mouth might not appeal to adults, it would to children, who would regard such delivery method as supplying an additional element of fun to the experience. Children would also (as did the girl in the account) look to experiment with this type of product by attempting to drink it from the container. Such use is highly foreseeable, so candymakers should be aware they would be held legally responsible for harm resulting from kids misusing the edible in this fashion and should thus test for adverse reactions to this sort of mishandling. That the product has arrived on the market generally indicates that there is nothing inherently dangerous about drinking the confection, and we haven’t turned up any news stories about injuries to consumers who drank the spray rather than spritzed it. It is true that on 9 June 2006 the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) issued an advisory regarding the use of sour spray candy, but since the advisory is vague about whether drinking the candy truly poses a risk to children (and notes that “an adverse health consequence is unlikely”), for the moment we’ll leave the question of whether an element of sour candy sprays might provoke throat spasms open, hence the “Undetermined” rating to that aspect of the story. Laryngospasms can and do occur, though, and it is not unreasonable that a child who drank a liquid candy could have experienced one, even if nothing in the candy were to blame. A laryngospasm is a spasmodic closure of the larynx — this physical event is something the human body inflicts upon itself when liquid threatens to surge into the lungs. When we are in danger of drowning ourselves via attempting to breathe and drink at the same time, our vocal folds snap shut, temporarily interrupting speech and breathing. (Because the larynx snaps shut with such speed and force, the voicebox can feel sore for hours after the spasm has concluded.) A laryngospasm happens in a flash and usually lasts 30 to 60 seconds. During that interval, breathing is accomplished only with great difficulty, with the victim gasping for breath and failing to attain it. Outside of surgical intervention (tracheotomy) or intubation, there is no way to restore breathing to someone experiencing a laryngospasm — one has to simply wait it out, a terrifying thing to ask of any parent watching his or her child gasp for breath. The account being spread in e-mail does appear to chronicle a laryngospasm: it describes the typical progress of such an event, and nothing in it is inconsistent with how such a medical episode would unfold. However, where the warning breaks down is in the aspect of what caused the spasm and thus the nature of what is being warned against. While the account’s writer ascribes it to some component of the spray and thus advocates parents everywhere keep that particular form of candy away from their kids, it appears more likely the cause was a simultaneous attempt to both drink and breathe. More simply, under the far more plausible theory, anything the child had been in the process of drinking at that moment — milk, water, candy spray — would have caused her vocal folds to snap shut and leave her unable to draw breath for about a minute.
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A list circulating online contains 50 false statements by President Barack Obama
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List documents fifty lies told by Barack Obama.
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mixture
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Politics Politicians, ASP Article, barack obama
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This criticism is based on an overly-literal interpretation of Barack Obama’s 2007 speech in Selma, Alabama, which we covered in a separate article. These attributes are not mutually exclusive: Barack Obama’s (biological) father was all of these things at different times in his life, as Obama described in his book, Dreams from My Father: [My father] was as African, I would learn, a Kenyan of the Luo tribe, born on the shores of Lake Victoria in a place called Alego. The village was poor, but his father — my other grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama — had been a prominent farmer, an elder of the tribe, a medicine man with healing powers. My father grew up herding his father’s goats and attending the local school, set up by the British colonial administration, where he had shown great promise. He eventually won a scholarship to study in Nairobi; and then, on the eve of Kenyan independence, he had been selected by Kenyan leaders and American sponsors to attend a university in the United States. We are unaware of Barack Obama’s ever having claimed his father was a “proud freedom fighter.” Obama has written (and spoken) at length about his father’s returning to Africa from America to work for the Kenyan government, with that country’s political turmoil eventually leaving him a “bitter drunk” and “a defeated, lonely bureaucrat.” As we discussed in a separate article, Kenyan politician Raila Odinga has recently claimed to be Barack Obama’s cousin, but there is no substantive evidence documenting his claim, and the two men share no meaningful familial connection. The author has apparently confused Obama’s grandmothers. In the instance cited above, Obama was speaking of his maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, not his paternal grandmother. (In 2007 Obama described his maternal grandparents as “nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists.”) Many Swahili words and names are of Arabic origin (just as many English words originated with other languages). “Barack” is a Swahili name that entered the language via historical trade and cultural ties with Arabia. The topic is already covered in our separate article about the (false) claims that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Barack Obama attended more than one school in Indonesia, one of which was a public school that included Islamic religious instruction among its curriculum, and one of which was a private Catholic school. We are unaware of Barack Obama’s ever having claimed he was “fluent” in any Indonesian language (beyond the level of competence that could reasonably be expected of the non-native child speaker he was at the time he lived in that country). He did acquire (and apparently still has) a passable command of Bahasa, as Time magazine noted in a 2007 article: When prominent Indonesians visit the U.S., the first person they want to meet is Obama, says Parnohadiningrat Sudjadnan, the Indonesian ambassador to the U.S. “Back home people think of him as one of us, or at least one who understands us,” he says, adding that they are delighted to find that Obama speaks passable Bahasa, the language spoken in Indonesia and Malaysia. We have not found any citation for Obama’s having claimed that his childhood in Indonesia qualified him as having “more foreign experience” (what the comparative “more” refers to also isn’t clear). Barack Obama did live in Indonesia for four years as a child, and he could in fact speak the local language passably well. Whether his time in that country provided him more “foreign experience” is argumentative, but people other than Obama himself have suggested that it might: Some would argue that his childhood experiences, as well as his mixed heritage (his father was Kenyan, his mother from Kansas), gives him a better inner compass on foreign policy than most Americans. They cite the pioneering work of Ruth Hill Useem, the late sociologist of Michigan State University, who spent her career studying what she called Third Culture Kids — the millions of U.S. children (an estimated 20 million since the advent of mass air travel) who have been carted abroad by their missionary, diplomatic, corporate or military parents. These frequent-flier kids don’t spend enough time in their adopted countries to become fully bicultural, but they take pieces and add it to their home values and traditions — creating millions of “Third Cultures.” Studies have shows that kids who have spent time abroad are more likely to go to college, to relate to one another despite the influences of vastly differing cultures, and to latch on to one aspect of their culture — in Obama’s case African Americanism. Barack Obama has lived in, traveled to, or otherwise spent time in countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, including Russia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Israel, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, the Palestinian Territories, Afghanistan Chad, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa, as well as serving as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Whether his experiences make him “stronger on foreign affairs” is argumentative, but again, people other than Obama have suggested that it might: “Living abroad does give you a wider view of the world,” says Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser under Jimmy Carter, and a Polish-American who spent four years as a child living in Germany with his diplomat father. Obama is “a person with genuine sensitivity of world affairs,” says Brzenzinski, who is supporting Obama. “It’s not the conventional mouthing of culture sensitivities.” Brzezinski points to Obama’s greater willingness to meet leaders of hostile nations and his early resistance to the war in Iraq as examples of his superior intuition on foreign policy. Obama wrote at length in his two books about his experiences growing up as the child of mixed-race parents and the issues that accompanied that status, and he noted in his first book, Dreams From My Father that before entering politics he had used marijuana and cocaine. His drug use, he wrote, was “… something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory” and said in a 2006 interview that his drug use was “… reflective of the struggles and confusion of a teenage boy. Teenage boys are frequently confused.” We could not find an instance in either of Barack Obama’s books (or elsewhere) where he claimed that his decision to run for public office was influenced by an article in Ebony magazine. In Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama writes of a childhood experience occurring on a day when his mother dropped him off at a library on her way to work, and he began thumbing through issues of LIFE magazine: Eventually I came across a photograph of an older man in dark glasses and a raincoat walking down an empty road. I couldn’t guess what this picture was about; there seemed nothing unusual about the subject. On the next page was another photograph, this one a close-up of the same man’s hands. They had a strange, unnatural pallor, as if blood had been drawn from the flesh. Turning back to the first picture, I now saw that the man’s crinkly hair, his heavy lips and broad fleshy nose, all had this same uneven, ghostly hue. He must be terrible sick, I thought. A radiation victim, maybem or an albino — I had seen one of those on the street a few days before, and my mother had explained about such things. Except when I read the words that went with the picture, that wasn’t it at all. The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible. There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who’d undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person. I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page. Did my mother know about this? What about her boss — why was he so calm, reading through his reports a few feet down the hall? I had a desperate urge to jump out of my seat, to show them what I had learned, to demand some explanation or assurance. But something held me back. As in a dream, I had no voice for my newfound fear. By the time my mother came to take me home, my face wore a smile and the magazines were back in their proper place. The room, the air, was quiet as before. As far as we know, no one has yet found any matching article in the pages of LIFE magazine. However, that does necessarily not mean Barack Obama saw no such article; it may simply mean that, writing decades after the fact, he misremembered the title of the magazine he was viewing. In 2004, just after winning election to the U.S. Senate, Barack Obama said during apress conference, in response to a question about his possibly running for national office, that: I am a believer in knowing what you’re doing when you apply for a job, and I think that if I were to seriously consider running on a national ticket I would essentially have to start now, before having served a day in the Senate. Now, there are some people who might be comfortable doing that, but I’m not one of them. A legislative “present” vote (which essentially counts as a “No” vote but does not go on record as such) is, as the New York Times observed, “not unusual in Illinois,” a tactic often used in concert with other party members and leaders: An examination of Illinois records shows at least 36 times when Mr. Obama was either the only state senator to vote present or was part of a group of six or fewer to vote that way. In more than 50 votes, he seemed to be acting in concert with other Democrats as part of a strategy. In other cases, Mr. Obama’s present votes stood out among widespread support as he tried to use them to register legal and other objections to parts of the bills. In Illinois, political experts say voting present is a relatively common way for lawmakers to express disapproval of a measure. It can at times help avoid running the risks of voting no, they add. We’re unsure what supposed “misvote” this line references. Barack Obama was indeed a professor at the University of Chicago’s Law School, a fact verified by that institution itself: The Law School has received many media requests about Barack Obama, especially about his status as “Senior Lecturer.” From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year. Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track. The title of Senior Lecturer is distinct from the title of Lecturer, which signifies adjunct status. Like Obama, each of the Law School’s Senior Lecturers has high-demand careers in politics or public service, which prevent full-time teaching. Several times during his 12 years as a professor in the Law School, Obama was invited to join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position, but he declined. Between 1993 and 2002, Barack Obama worked as a civil rights lawyer with the Chicago law firm of Miner, Barnhill & Galland. It’s unclear what ethics bill this statement references. Obama did help pass a major ethics reform bill as an Illinois State Senator, and 110th U.S. Congress passed the Legislative Transparency and Accountability Act, which “closely mirrored and drew key provisions from a bill (S. 230) that Senators Obama and Feingold introduced in January 2007.” We could find no reference to document Obama’s supposedly having said that neither of those bills would exist if not for him. Again, it’s unclear which ethics bill this statement references, nor could we find any reference to document Obama’s supposedly having said such a bill was “hard to pass.’ As the New York Times reported in February 2008: When residents in Illinois voiced outrage two years ago upon learning that the Exelon Corporation had not disclosed radioactive leaks at one of its nuclear plants, the state’s freshman senator, Barack Obama, took up their cause. Mr. Obama scolded Exelon and federal regulators for inaction and introduced a bill to require all plant owners to notify state and local authorities immediately of even small leaks. He has boasted of it on the campaign trail, telling a crowd in Iowa in December that it was “the only nuclear legislation that I’ve passed.” “I just did that last year,” he said, to murmurs of approval. A close look at the path his legislation took tells a very different story. While he initially fought to advance his bill, even holding up a presidential nomination to try to force a hearing on it, Mr. Obama eventually rewrote it to reflect changes sought by Senate Republicans, Exelon and nuclear regulators. The new bill removed language mandating prompt reporting and simply offered guidance to regulators, whom it charged with addressing the issue of unreported leaks. Those revisions propelled the bill through a crucial committee. But, contrary to Mr. Obama’s comments in Iowa, it ultimately died amid parliamentary wrangling in the full Senate. We couldn’t find a reference for Barack Obama’s supposedly claiming that he had “released” his state records, only that he said he “didn’t have the resources available to maintain those kinds of records” and that they might not exist. Politico.com noted in October 2008 that: Obama’s Senate files became an issue after he pressed Hillary Rodham Clinton during their nomination battle to release the schedules from her eight years as first lady. When her campaign demanded Obama release his state Senate files, he told reporters he did not “maintain a file of eight years of work in the state Senate because I didn’t have the resources available to maintain those kinds of records.” The records “could have been thrown out. I haven’t been in the state Senate now for quite some time,” he said. His campaign later said that “files pertinent to ongoing casework” were passed to his successor, but Obama didn’t save correspondence with the general public, state associations or lobbyists, or memos on legislation and correspondence with Illinois state agencies. Some of the records that have surfaced have done little to dampen the demand for a more complete accounting. In Barack Obama’s book Dreams from My Father, beginning at the start of Chapter 9, he writes in detail about the efforts of community organizers to push a grassroots campaign advocating the removal of asbestos from the Altgeld Gardens housing project in Chicago. Although in his book Obama emphasizes his own role in the effort, many other people who took part in are indeed mentioned as well. It is unclear to us what bill or statement is supposedly being referenced here. We couldn’t find a reference for Barack Obama’s having described himself as a “bold leader in Illinois,” but certainly some of his supporters have claimed that of him (just as some of his critics have claimed the opposite). Barack Obama did pass 26 bills in his final year as an Illinois state senator. We could not find any reference to his claiming that all of them were “my own” bills, but he certainly received a boost in passing them from Illinois Senate President (and fellow Democrat) Emil Jones, who “helped Obama learn the ways of the state legislature and gave Obama the chance to work on the ethics legislation and death penalty reforms that Obama now boasts about in his presidential campaign”: Emil Jones Jr. helped Obama master the intricacies of the Legislature. When Democrats took control of the state Senate, Jones, though he risked offending colleagues who had toiled futilely on key issues under Republican rule, tapped Obama to take the lead on high-profile legislative initiatives that he now boasts about in his presidential campaign. And when Obama wanted a promotion to the U.S. Senate, Jones provided critical support that gave the little-known legislator legitimacy, keeping him from being instantly trampled by the front-runners. As FactCheck.org noted in March 2008 about the ‘NAFTA-Gate‘controversy: It’s now clear that a Canadian news report that started this flap wasn’t accurate. No evidence has surfaced to show that any Obama “staffer” telephoned the Canadian ambassador in Washington, and all concerned deny that any such conversation took place. But it is equally clear that Obama’s senior economic adviser did visit Canada’s consulate in Chicago on Feb. 8, and that NAFTA was one of the several topics discussed. Exactly what was said is not so clear, however. The memo says Obama’s anti-NAFTA stance was described as just “political maneuvering,” but the adviser says he said no such thing. The campaign says the adviser wasn’t authorized to convey any message from the candidate anyway. No audio recording or verbatim transcript of the disputed conversation is available, and there’s no reason to expect that any exists. In September 2007, the U.S. Senate voted on a resolution to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization: Charged with defending the system put in place after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Guards answer to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and are revered by many for their defense of the country during the 1980s war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The legislative move to classify Shiite Muslim-dominated Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard force as terrorist would be first such move against a foreign government entity and would freeze any of its assets under U.S. jurisdiction. It would also allow the U.S. Treasury Department to move against firms subject to U.S. law that do business with the Guard, which have vast commercial interests at home and abroad. Senator Obama was on the campaign trail at the time and did not return to Washington for the vote. On March 1, a Columbian Army strike on a FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) rebel camp in Columbia killed 24 people, including Raul Reyes, the FARC’s foreign minister. Files in a laptop computer seized from the wreckage of the rebel camp included references to U.S. diplomatic overtures which the Associated Press described as “scintillating, if vague”: In a Dec. 11 message to the secretariat, [Ivan] Marquez writes: “If you are in agreement, I can receive Jim and Tucker to hear the proposal of the gringos.” Writing two days before his death, Reyes tells his comrades that “the gringos,” working through Ecuador’s government, are interested “in talking to us on various issues.” “They say the new president of their country will be (Barack) Obama,” he writes, saying Obama rejects both the Bush administration’s free trade agreement with Colombia and the current military aid program. Exactly who the referenced “gringos” were and whether they had any substantive connection to Barack Obama is unknown. In August 2007, major Democratic candidates signed a pledge to not campaign in Florida because that state had moved its primary election up to 29 January 2008, one week earlier than the Democratic national rules allowed. In January 2008, the Obama campaign launched national television advertisements on CNN and MSNBC that were also shown in Florida. Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton maintainted that they had asked CNN and MSNBC to pull Florida from the ad buy, but those networks said they could not. Senator Obama didn’t seriously claim to have “won” Michigan; during an 8 March 2008 Today Show interview he misspoke and inadvertently mentioned Michigan among a list of states which he had won. In accordance with the agreement mentioned in the previous entry, Barack Obama’s name didn’t even appear on the Michigan ballot. Senator Obama didn’t claim to have “won” Nevada (a state that holds caucuses rather than direct-election primaries); he noted, correctly, that although Senator Hillary Clinton tallied more overall votes at the Nevada caucuses, he actually picked up more national delegates from that state: Mitt Romney took Nevada’s Republican caucuses, while Democrats debated whether their party had rendered a split decision. New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won the vote count among those at the caucuses, but Illinois Sen. Barack Obama claimed a slight advantage in national convention delegates on the strength of his showing in rural areas. Obama said in a statement released by his campaign that he came from 25 points behind and nearly beat Clinton today because he did well across all of Nevada — “including rural areas where Democrats have traditionally struggled.” Obama’s campaign said his performance in rural areas of the state helped him win a total of 13 national convention delegates, versus 12 for Clinton. Senator Obama has no influence or power over the holding of caucuses rather than primary elections; that choice is made by each state individually, and candidates have to abide by whatever is decided. We could not find any reference to document Barack Obama’s having claimed he passied “900 bills in the [Illinois] state senate.” We are unsure what “extortion” claim this statement supposedly references. In April 2007, the Chicago Tribune wrote of Barack Obama’s first campaign for public office: The day after New Year’s 1996, operatives for Barack Obama filed into a barren hearing room of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners. There they began the tedious process of challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating petitions of state Sen. Alice Palmer, the longtime progressive activist from the city’s South Side. And they kept challenging petitions until every one of Obama’s four Democratic primary rivals was forced off the ballot. Fresh from his work as a civil rights lawyer and head of a voter registration project that expanded access to the ballot box, Obama launched his first campaign for the Illinois Senate saying he wanted to empower disenfranchised citizens. But in that initial bid for political office, Obama quickly mastered the bare-knuckled arts of Chicago electoral politics. His overwhelming legal onslaught signaled his impatience to gain office, even if that meant elbowing aside an elder stateswoman like Palmer. Senator Obama didn’t say that has never accepted money from political action committees. (He used PAC money in his previous U.S. Senate and Illinois state Senate races.) He pledged that he would not accept PAC money for his 2008 presidential bid, a pledge that he has upheld. As Politico.com noted in May 2008: In his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama is refusing donations from federally registered lobbyists and excluding them from his official campaign staff. (They can still be advisers and volunteers, and their spouses’ checks are certainly welcome.) The Wall Street Journal observed in November 2008 that: Democratic lobbyists are wondering about their future in an Obama administration. Although Sen. Obama has taken a tough line toward registered lobbyists, he has allowed himself some maneuvering room. Like Sen. McCain, Sen. Obama has banned lobbyists from working on his campaign until after they quit their lobbying jobs. Senator Obama also said that his administration would not employ federally registered lobbyists, although (as the New York Times noted) he has allowed himself some “wiggle room” in that regard: Turning to campaign promises in which he pledged sweeping ethics restrictions, President-elect Barack Obama will bar lobbyists from helping to pay the costs of his transition to power or working for it in any area in which they have represented clients in the last year, his transition team said. The new rules do seem to leave some wiggle room. Aides to Mr. Obama, who declared during the campaign that lobbyists would not “find a job in my White House,” said the guidelines allowed for lobbyists to work on the transition in areas where they have not done any lobbying. Further, the rules apply to lobbyists who must register with the federal government; many people who work for lobbying firms or in other areas of the influence business in Washington do not have to register, because they do not personally lobby federal officials on specific issues. A widely-circulated spoof of Apple Computer’s famous 1984 television advertisement for their (then-new) Macintosh computer was not created by an Obama campaign worker. It was, as explained in a statement issued by the managing director of Blue State Digital (a firm contracted to provide technology services to the Obama Campaign), created without authorization by an employee of that company: Statement from Thomas Gensemer, Managing Director, Blue State Digital On Wednesday afternoon, March the 21st, an employee at our firm, Phillip de Vellis, received a call from Arianna Huffington of “The Huffington Post” regarding the “1984” video currently circulating online. Initially, de Vellis refused to respond to her requests. He has since acknowledged to Blue State Digital that he was the creator of the video. Pursuant to company policy regarding outside political work or commentary on behalf of our clients or otherwise, Mr. de Vellis has been terminated from Blue State Digital effective immediately. Blue State Digital is under contract with the Obama Campaign for technology pursuits including software development and hosting. Additionally, one of our founding partners is on leave from the company to work directly for the campaign at headquarters. However, Blue State Digital is not currently engaged in any relationship with the Obama Campaign for creative or non-technical services. Mr. de Vellis created this video on his own time. It was done without the knowledge of management, and was in no way tied to his work at the firm or our formal engagement [on technology pursuits] with the Obama campaign. I have spoken with David Plouffe, Sen. Obama’s campaign manager, to inform him of this action and am appreciative of his understanding and ongoing support of our work. Senator Obama expressed opposition to the war in Iraq well before he gained a seat in the U.S. Senate in 2004. (The vote that authorized U.S. military action in Iraq was held in 2002.) He has since voted in the Senate to authorize funding for that war, for reasons he defended in a February 2008 Democratic debate: The two Democrats exchanged pointed words over each other’s records on the war in Iraq, which contrast sharply even as economic and domestic concerns become dominant in the race. Clinton voted in 2002 to authorize the invasion, which Obama opposed from the start. After Obama again touted a high-profile antiwar speech he gave in Chicago before the war, Clinton pointed out that he, like her, had subsequently voted for war funding, and that their records on Iraq were similar since he came to the Senate in 2005. “When it wasn’t just a speech, but it was actually action, where is the difference?” she said. “Where is the comparison that would in some way give a real credibility to the speech that he gave against the war?” Obama shot back: “Once we had driven the bus into the ditch, there were only so many ways we could get out.” These items are covered here in separate articles about the national anthem, Che Guevara, and Social Security.
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Photographs show a white tiger with Down syndrome.
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What's true: Inbreeding resulted in a white tiger with unusual facial features. What's false: The tiger's appearance was the result of Down syndrome.
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mixture
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Fauxtography, animals, down syndrome, kenny
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Photographs purportedly showing a “tiger with Down syndrome” have been circulating around the internet for several years. While these images are real, the animal’s appearance is not the result of Down syndrome, but of inbreeding. The photographs show Kenny the White Tiger, a big cat that was rescued from a breeding facility by Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge in 1999. While Kenny’s face had unusual features that could bear a superficial resemblance to those of a person with Down syndrome, this is not an official diagnosis: The diagnosis of Down’s Syndrome is also questionable. Down’s Syndrome results from a third copy of chromosome 21. Although a mouse model for Down’s Syndrome exists, tigers have 19 chromosomes to humans’ 23. While Kenny’s face does bear a superficial resemblance to that seen in people with Down’s Syndrome, it’s far from clear that this was the result of a third copy of any chromosome, let alone one that could be matched to our 21st. What is clear is that Kenny was a victim of the greed of the breeding industry. White tigers are very rare. With so few of them, the genetic pool is limited, and inbreeding is an inevitable consequence. Kenny’s parents were brother and sister. Most of his siblings were stillborn, or died very young, according to Patricia Quinn, a spokesperson for Turpentine Creek Wildlife Reserve, where Kenny lived from the age of two. The Association of Zoos and Aquariums banned the inbreeding of white tigers in 2011, explaining that the practice was “clearly linked to various abnormal, debilitating, and, at times, lethal, external and internal condition.” According to BigCatRescue.org, these animals are nearly always born with crossed eyes, and many also have spinal deformities, cleft palates, club feet, and defective organs. Kenny the white tiger also suffered from many health problems, and had to have a large tumor removed in 2007. While the surgery was successful, Kenny died in 2008: Kenny was ten years old when he died — about half the lifespan of a normal tiger.
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Study shows real-world massage is effective treatment for low back pain
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A small group of patients were treated for low-back pain with 10 massages and more than half received some relief, according to this release from Indiana University-Purdue’s School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. The researchers are to be applauded for seeking evidence for a potential low-cost, non-pharmaceutical and non-invasive public health solution for a very common problem. Unfortunately, the release omitted some important details such as how many volunteers were involved, how long the study lasted, including any follow-up, and how improvement in back pain was measured. The study itself provides all that information (104 patients were studied for either 12 or 24 weeks) and the release would have been better with that and additional data included. Although almost everyone will have low back pain at some point in their life, relatively few develop persistent, disabling pain — so-called chronic low back pain. For these individuals, there are many available treatments, but none have been shown to consistently offer a “cure” or a large improvement that is sustained after the treatment is completed. Treatments often fall into categories of oral medicines, physical and behavioral therapies, and invasive procedures such as injections or surgery. This study examines one physical treatment — massage. This study looked at results over time in less than 100 patients treated by community-based massage therapists. The study showed that about half had an improvement in pain and function after 3 months, but this decreased to about 40 percent by 6 months. How these results compare to other treatments in usual practice settings is the actual “real world” question. One that is not answered by this study.
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false
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back pain,Indiana University,massage therapy
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We give the release credit for stating that massages are generally not covered by insurance and that patients typically pay out-of-pocket. And the release provided some important context about cost with this statement from the lead author: “Generally, people wonder if it is worth it. Will it pay to provide massage to people for an extended period of time? Will it help avoid back surgeries, for example, that may or may not have great outcomes? These are the types of analyses that we hope will result from this study.” While massage is now offered in nearly all cities and towns, not all readers know how much they will need to shell out for the 10 sessions used in this study. A one hour massage averages $60 an hour nationally, so 10 sessions would cost about $600. That’s something people considering this type of therapy would like to know. The release does not explain the benefit in useful numerical terms. It includes the statement that more than 50 percent of patients received “clinically meaningful improvements.” We need the release to describe a single one of those improvements and define “meaningful” using numbers. One could argue that “50 percent” is a quantified benefit, however, the use of “more than 50 percent” does not appear accurate since they are claiming improvement in low back pain without telling us that the benefit fell away in time. The number reported in the study for the “bodily pain domain” is 49.4 percent clinical improvement at 12 weeks and 40 percent improvement at 24 weeks — a lessening of the benefits over time. We hesitate to suggest that any harm could come from a massage. But the release could have included a statement of there being “no evidence of harms” during the study, if that were the case. Depending on the cause of the back pain, is there a potential risk that some patients might experience a worsening of pain after a massage? The release doesn’t say whether people with injuries should avoid massage and seek help from a back specialist. This is especially important if people are seeking therapy on their own, without seeing a physician. As we described above in regard to benefit and harm, the release does not provide enough numbers to help readers assess the quality of the evidence. We aren’t told how many volunteers were in the study or the length of time they were followed. The release should have noted that there was no comparison group, meaning we don’t know how they would have done if they didn’t get massage or sought another treatment, Moreover, we aren’t told which type of massage the volunteers received, what kind of training the therapists had, or whether the volunteers were receiving other treatments at the same time. Further, the release doesn’t tell us which type of massage was used or how many patients were assigned to each type. One might assume Swedish massage was the style used since it is the best known, but the full study states that therapists “utilized any massage technique within the purview of their training experience,” and noted that the following techniques were employed: “Swedish massage, active isolated stretching, myofascial techniques, lymphatic drainage, movement, trigger point therapy, neuromuscular therapy, cranialsacral therapy, reflexology, Reiki, acupressure, and positional release.” These are all vastly different alternative treatments. For example, unlike Swedish massage, Reiki involves only light or no touch. The types of massage used needed some clarification in the release. We do give the release credit for noting some limitations of the research. It states that “much more work needs to be done” and that the study results need to be replicated and a cost-benefit analysis undertaken to show the enefits of massage for back pain. There was no disease mongering. The release provides context on the numbers of people who experience back pain, but the 15 percent cited is a tad higher than the usual 7-10 percent cited in other research. The release does not give us any information about who funded the study. We should be told who funded the study and if there are any conflicts of interest for the authors or their institutions. We would like to give the release credit for mentioning that back pain is very complex, and that surgery is sometimes an option. However, we think the release falls short in not acknowledging that there has been extensive research on a variety of complementary approaches before this study including yoga, massage, acupuncture and exercise. The release could have provided that information about alternatives, as well as make some effort to tell us how massage compares with other non-invasive physical treatments. The complexity of the problem, the option for surgery and the nature of chronic treatment are all relevant, as the release notes, but that’s no substitute for mentioning other treatment alternatives, some of which, like physical therapy, are covered by insurance. It’s common knowledge that massage is widely available. We give the release credit for noting that it’s not covered by insurance and therefore not accessible to everyone. The release claims this is “the first study of its kind” to assess massage for low back pain. Many studies have evaluated outcomes of massage in uncontrolled studies (where there was no comparison to another treatment). A search at the National Library of Medicine resulted in almost 300 results. While some of the studies may not precisely compare to this one — the release does not back up its claim by explaining the novelty. To further complicate things, the release includes a confusing paragraph about the “real-world” massages given to the research patients: “Previous studies of the effectiveness of massage were conducted in controlled research situations. In this study, patients were referred by a physician to a massage therapist. The massage therapist designed and provided a series of 10 massages — at no cost to the patient — in a clinical treatment environment, mimicking the experience of people who choose to seek massage therapy in the real world.” When we read that paragraph, we get the impression that a therapist came to a “clinical environment” to provide the 10 massages. How is that “mimicking the experience” of the real world any better than previous studies? The release doesn’t include any unjustifiable language. But the headline and opening of the release tend to give the study more credit than is due. It’s in the closing paragraphs that the release notes that the study results need to be replicated and that a cost-benefit analysis should be done to learn the effectiveness of this treatment.
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9221
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Study: Running actually lowers inflammation in knee joints
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This news release suggests that long distance running may be protective of knee cartilage because the amounts of two biomarkers for synovial fluid inflammation decreased after 30 minutes of running. The volunteers in the study were all under 35 and healthy. Similar subjects tested without running showed no decrease in the two markers. The release does a poor job of conveying the findings and will leave readers with the impression that this research is much more definitive than it really is. Here are a few of the shortcomings: Patients who suffer joint inflammation are often told to quit running, but if running is beneficial for knee inflammation, then discontinuing this exercise may be unnecessary. This news release makes it sound as if this is the first study to ever address this issue and that the results definitively indicate that running is protective against the development of knee arthritis. But that’s very misleading. In fact, many other studies have looked at this question and come back with conflicting findings. This new study, of only 6 people, is low in quality and adds little to the evidence base. It probably did not deserve a news release at all, no less one that overstates the findings as as carelessly as this one.
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false
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Brigham Young University,inflammation,running
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There is no cost mentioned, but typically, running does not have any cost requirement except for good shoes. This category is not applicable for this research. The benefits of this approach are in no way quantified. The news release states that the amounts of inflammation markers decreased, but does not say by how much although the published study includes this information. It should be kept in mind that the inflammation markers are a proxy for what we really care about — actual rates of osteoarthritis. It is doubtful that measuring two biomarkers after a 30-minute run can tell us much about the impact of running over a lifetime. In addition, the release does not mention that this is a pilot study and that only 11 subjects were used and only 6 actually completed the tests because synovial fluid is difficult to obtain from a healthy joint. The paper does include statistics, but the p values (the probability of obtaining a result equal to or exceeding what was actually observed) may not be of any use when applied to only 6 subjects. This does not seem to be a statistically valid study. The release was probably premature. Possible harms are not discussed. The release hints that this benefit is there for “healthy” joints, but says nothing about joints with torn cartilage, already degrading joint surfaces or substantial osteoarthritis. The release notes that researchers plan more do more study of those with anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries, but that is a tendon injury, not a joint injury. There’s a concern that this release could send the wrong message to some runners. What about people who experience pain when they run? Should they continue to run, despite the pain, because running might be “chondroprotective.” With only 6 successful subjects, the quality of evidence is lousy. But the release doesn’t comment on this at all or discuss any limitations of the study. It doesn’t even tell us how many subjects there were. The release doesn’t engage in disease mongering. Osteoarthritis in the knees and other joints is a factor of aging. Anything that can prevent this occurrence is of benefit. There is no funding source listed, but there is also no funding source listed in the paper. The authors do declare in the paper that there is no conflict of interest and what any conflict would be, considering that the “treatment” discussed is running, is a puzzle. Our standard here is to require some discussion of funding sources. Even if no funding was provided, the release should say so. There is no mention of any alternatives. Many runners are told to switch to other forms of exercise as they get older to avoid joint pain. Do other forms of exercise produce the same benefits on inflammation? Obviously, running is available to anyone who’s able to do it for no cost. The release could have pointed out that areas with sidewalks and dedicated trails make this activity more accessible. As stated in the review summary, many previous studies tried to determine whether running increases the risk of osteoarthritis. But the release doesn’t mention previous research and thus overstates the novelty of the new findings. People with osteoarthritis are usually advised to continue to exercise. Because running is a high impact aerobic exercise it may sound counter-intuitive to continue running, but not necessarily novel. The release doesn’t include unjustifiable, sensational language. However, the focus on a study with functionally only 6 subjects isn’t at all as revealing as the headline suggests. It reads: “Running may also slow the process that leads to osteoarthritis.” That’s confusing. Besides slowing the process, what does running do?
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7179
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‘Healthy Holly’, once lucrative, now bane of Baltimore mayor.
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“Healthy Holly” is a polite African American girl with devoted parents and a little brother. She loves exercise. She craves fresh fruit and vegetables. And she’s now the bane of Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh’s existence.
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true
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U.S. News, Health, Business, Childrens books, Catherine Pugh, Maryland, U.S. News, Baltimore
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Since the state prosecutor’s office began a criminal investigation into Pugh at the Maryland governor’s request earlier this week, there’s been a growing tide of examinations spurred by revelations that she was paid $700,000 over roughly eight years for her self-published paperback series about the fictional “Healthy Holly.” By Wednesday afternoon, the total grew to $800,000 after a businessman divulged that his financial firm gave Pugh $100,000 after she clinched the 2016 Democratic primary. The first-term mayor went on an indefinite leave of absence amid the accelerating scandal involving the lucrative sales of her obscure children’s books to a $4 billion hospital network she once helped oversee and a major health plan that does business with the city. Al Redmer, Maryland’s insurance commissioner, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that his regulatory agency is now looking at Kaiser Permanente, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, and a state car insurance fund for possible wrongdoing. “To the extent that any insurance carrier would divert funds away from that mission is something that could be concerning based on the facts,” Redmer said in an interview. “Our role is to make sure that entities that we regulate have in no way violated the law or regulations.” Pressure on Pugh ratcheted up dramatically after the Kaiser Permanente disclosed Monday that it paid her limited liability company about $114,000 between 2015 and 2018 for roughly 20,000 copies of her illustrated books. The company said it “purchased Healthy Holly books because we believe residents would be inspired by a book about health and wellness authored by a member of the Baltimore community.” Another city health provider, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, said it made contributions to Associated Black Charities, a nonprofit that manages the city’s taxpayer-funded Children and Youth Fund, to purchase and distribute books. CareFirst declined to comment, while Kaiser said it would cooperate fully with any investigation. Pugh’s attorney has said she looks forward to cooperating with the state prosecutor’s probe and will provide “as much information as possible to put this matter to rest.” Also Wednesday, Acting Mayor Bernard “Jack” Young, who has taken over Pugh’s day-to-day responsibilities since she went on leave, told reporters he’s directed Baltimore’s law department to pull dozens of the most recently authorized city contracts for review. In a closed-door meeting, Baltimore’s ethics board voted to open a probe into Pugh’s book deals. Johns Hopkins Health System disclosed that Pugh, during her days in the state senate, once approached a senior employee to buy her illustrated books. The employee declined. Hopkins spokeswoman Kim Hoppe said they’ve found no evidence of any Healthy Holly purchases or donations to Pugh’s company. J.P. Grant, the Maryland businessman who revealed his firm’s $100,000 payment Wednesday in an interview with The Baltimore Sun, said Pugh told him his company’s check would help distribute Healthy Holly books to schoolkids. Citing deteriorating health from pneumonia, Pugh abruptly retreated to her home Monday amid multiple calls for investigations of her highly lucrative book deals, including a $500,000 arrangement with the University of Maryland Medical System. There was no contract behind the deal and the hospital network described some of the purchases as “grants” in federal filings. Pugh, who sat on a state Senate committee that funded the regional health network before becoming mayor, began serving on the system’s board in 2001. She stepped down from the volunteer board last month and returned her most recent payment of $100,000. The nonprofit Associated Black Charities said five organizations donated $87,180 to pay for “Healthy Holly” books, of which the charitable group kept $9,552 to use as “general support.” One of those groups was apparently the quasi-public Maryland Automobile Insurance Fund. Its former executive director, M. Kent Krabbe, authorized a $7,500 donation in 2012, shortly before Pugh — then a state senator — successfully sponsored legislation supported by the company. That donation was first reported by the Baltimore Business Journal. Krabbe left his leadership role at the car insurance fund in 2015, eventually becoming a director of Pugh’s inaugural committee in 2016 and then joining the Baltimore Department of Transportation as operations manager for special events, a newly created position that came with a $107,100 salary. He could not be reached for comment. Mark McCurdy, the current director of the state’s car insurer of last resort, said there was nothing in their records to say why Krabbe had the auto insurance carrier write a check to Pugh’s Healthy Holly company for its outreach program with Associated Black Charities. “On the surface, it’s not the kind of donation that fits our philosophy,” said McCurdy, stressing that the car insurance fund never received or distributed any Healthy Holly books. Meanwhile, the University of Maryland Medical System’s acting CEO has announced that the former state Sen. Francis X. Kelly and two of his sons would also take voluntary leaves from boards of six affiliated organizations. Kelly & Associates Insurance Group has done millions of dollars in business with the hospitals. About one-third of UMMS board members received compensation through the medical system’s arrangements with their businesses. Legislation is pending in Maryland’s capital focusing on board governance. ___ Follow McFadden on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dmcfadd
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7319
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Amid coronavirus pandemic, black mistrust of medicine looms.
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Just as the new coronavirus was declared a global pandemic, gym members in New York City frantically called the fitness center where Rahmell Peebles worked, asking him to freeze their memberships.
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true
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AP Top News, Race and ethnicity, Understanding the Outbreak, Health, General News, Lifestyle, Pandemics, Virus Outbreak, U.S. News
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Peebles, a 30-year-old black man who’s skeptical of what he hears from the news media and government, initially didn’t see the need for alarm over the virus. “I felt it was a complete hoax,” Peebles said. “This thing happens every two or four years. We have an outbreak of a disease that seems to put everybody in a panic.” Peebles is among roughly 40 million black Americans deciding minute by minute whether to put their faith in government and the medical community during the coronavirus pandemic. Historic failures in government responses to disasters and emergencies, medical abuse, neglect and exploitation have jaded generations of black people into a distrust of public institutions. “I’ve just been conditioned not to trust,” said Peebles, who is now obeying the state’s stay home order and keeping his distance from others when he goes out. Some call such skepticism the “Tuskegee effect” — distrust linked to the U.S. government’s once-secret study of black men in Alabama who were left untreated for syphilis. Black people already suffer disproportionately from chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease and are far more likely to be uninsured. How the government and medical community responds to the crisis will be especially crucial for outcomes among black Americans, civil rights advocates and medical experts say. “We are right to be paranoid and to ask tough questions,” said U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts who joined other congressional leaders in asking the government to collect and release information about the race and ethnicity of people who are tested or treated for the virus that causes COVID-19. “History has shown us, when we do not” ask questions, said Pressley, who is black, “the consequences are grave, and in fact life and death.” NAACP President Derrick Johnson, who hosted a coronavirus tele-town hall with U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams last month, said black and brown communities need reliable information about the crisis. “Now that this has been deemed a pandemic, I am most concerned with inequities in who’s provided tests, who’s provided treatment and how those tests and the treatments are administered, in a way that is open, transparent, and equitable,” Johnson said. For most people, the virus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. But for some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia and death. Cities with large black populations like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee and New Orleans have emerged as hot spots for the coronavirus. Figures released by Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services show 40% of those who have died from COVID-19 are black in a state where African-Americans are just 14% of the population. And many Southern states with large black populations have been slow to mandate statewide restrictions shown to slow virus spread. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, black adults are 60% more likely than non-Hispanic white adults to be diagnosed with diabetes, 40% more likely to have high blood pressure and are less likely to have those conditions under control. Additionally, in 2015, black women were 20% more likely to have asthma than non-Hispanic whites. Those disparities make the availability of a treatment or vaccine urgent, even as the virus is currently projected to claim tens of thousands of lives. But given history, Peebles said he wouldn’t rush to accept a remedy. “If we got to a place where the government says, ‘OK, now it’s time to take a vaccine,’ then I’m definitely going to be skeptical of their intentions,” he said. Launched in 1932 by the U.S. Public Health Service, the Tuskegee study involved roughly 600 poor black men in Alabama who weren’t treated for the sexually transmitted disease so researchers could track its progress. The program was exposed and ended in 1972, and then-President Bill Clinton formally apologized in 1997. The Tuskegee legacy has helped pollute the black community’s relationship with American medical science. A 2016 paper found the fallout included mistrust of medicine among black men, along with fewer interactions with doctors and higher mortality rates. In Tuskegee, where many families include descendants of victims, many residents don’t trust government health information, said Lucenia Dunn, a former Tuskegee mayor. So volunteers trying to get the word out about coronavirus have gone door-to-door distributing fliers with cartoon-like illustrations that don’t look “too official,” she said. “We have a general distrust in this community,’” Dunn said. “I call it ‘subconscious rejection.’ The attitude is, ‘I’m going to rebel against this. You people have been telling us lies for years. Why should I believe you now?’” In Los Angeles, Jahmil Lacey helped found a public health group for black men and boys, TRAPMedicine, that educates black barbers and organizes workshops to address health disparities among their customers. “People will quote the Tuskegee experiment as the reason why black people don’t trust health care, but there’s so much more than just that one example,” Lacey said. “We don’t trust systems that are connected to white supremacy. So, we have to do the work to repair it.” Indeed, Tuskegee didn’t happen in a vacuum. In the 1950s, doctors at the John Hopkins Hospital used cervical cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks, a black mother of five, to pioneer medical advances and research that continue globally today. Lacks, who died in 1951, never gave her consent and her family has never been compensated. One way to begin healing the mistrust is to increase black representation in the medical field, said Dr. Nicollette Louissaint, executive director of the Washington-based emergency response advocacy group Healthcare Ready. “We have to make sure that ... the message itself and the messengers are being adapted to the appropriate audience,” said Louissaint, who is black. “It’s going to be really important that we get that right.” ___ Reeves reported from Birmingham, Alabama. Both are members of the AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow Morrison on Twitter at http://twitter.com/aaronlmorrison. Follow Reeves on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Jay_Reeves
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31236
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The U.S. government funded Mitch McConnell's care and rehabilitation when he had polio as a child.
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However, it was operated as an innovative, nationwide nonprofit organization, not a federal or state agency, and it was not taxpayer or government-funded. The Warm Springs center visited by McConnell remained owned and operated by a nonprofit organization until 1974, when the state of Georgia took it over, making it truly government-run. Since 2014, it has been owned and operated by Augusta University.
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false
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Politics, death and taxes, healthcare, mitch mcconnell
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On 22 June 2017, the Occupy Democrats Facebook page posted a meme claiming that the United States government paid for Mitch McConnell’s care and rehabilitation when the Republican senior senator contracted polio as an infant in the 1940s. This claim is contrasted, in the meme, with McConnell’s support for the Senate Republican health care plan published that day: As a kid, Mitch McConnell had polio, and the government paid for ALL of his care and rehabilitation. Now, as the leader of the Republicans in the Senate, McConnell is taking government-funded care away from tens of millions of Americans. Let that sink in. An article accompanying this meme reports that government-sponsored, publicly funded healthcare saved the young McConnell’s life: Mitch McConnell has been relentlessly working to roll back Medicaid and deprive millions of Americans of government-sponsored healthcare coverage for eight years now. But if it weren’t for the government, McConnell wouldn’t be able to walk at all. Young Mitch came down with a terrible case of polio as a child in Alabama. “My mother was, of course, like many mothers of young polio victims, perplexed about what to do, anxious about whether I would be disabled for the rest of my life” he admitted in a 2005 interview. But luckily for him, his mother took him 50 miles to the Warm Springs, where President Roosevelt won his own battle with polio and established a polio treatment center that was paid for by the public. President Roosevelt asked the people of America to send in dimes to the White House as part of his “March of the Dimes” foundation. Over two and a half million dimes were mailed in, and they paid for Mitch’s physical therapy and treatment. A Death and Taxes article posted on the same date reports a similar story: How did Warm springs fund McConnell’s therapy, you ask? This was two decades before Lyndon Johnson launched federal health coverage by signing into law the creation of Medicare and Medicaid. In the mid-30s, Roosevelt and his law partner Basil O’Connor founded the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation and started organizing fundraising balls around the country. By 1938, however, the balls grew less effective and the president needed a new strategy. Using a phrase coined by vaudeville entertainer Eddie Cantor, “March of Dimes” — a spin on the popular newsreel series “March of Time” — Roosevelt founded the March of Dimes foundation and launched a campaign asking the public to mail ten-cent donations to the White House. Within a month, Roosevelt received around 2,680,000 dimes. The campaign continued through WWII. McConnell started visiting Warm Springs in 1944. In other words, he overcame polio with the help of public money allocated by the White House. Mitch McConnell has often told the story of his childhood affliction with polio, and the role of FDR’s Warm Springs rehabilitation center in his recovery. In his 2016 memoir The Long Game, McConnell recounted how he was struck with polio at the age of two while staying with his mother in his aunt’s home in Five Points, Alabama. It’s one of my life’s great fortunes that Sister’s home was only about sixty miles from Warm Springs, Georgia, where President Franklin D. Roosevelt had established a polio treatment center and where he’d often travel to find relief from the polio that paralyzed him at the age of thirty-nine. My mother took me there every chance she had. The nurses would teach her how to perform exercises meant to rehabilitate my leg while also emphasizing her need to make me believe I could walk, even though I wasn’t allowed to. So it’s clear that Mitch McConnell did indeed receive significant help — primarily in the form of physical therapy and physical therapy training for his mother — from the polio rehabilitation center established by Roosevelt at Warm Springs, Georgia. However, neither this particular center nor the care given to McConnell were government-funded. Roosevelt purchased the property at Warm Springs, Georgia and established a center there in 1927, having visited frequently for therapy for his own polio, which he contracted in 1921. He (and others) set up the Warm Springs Foundation, a nonprofit organization that depended on wealthy philanthropists and donations from members of the public. In 1934, Basil O’Connor (once a partner at Roosevelt’s law firm and a close associate of the recently-elected President) began organizing fundraising for the Warm Springs Foundation, set around the President’s birthday celebrations each year. Within four years, these birthday balls had raised $1,350,030 for the Warm Springs rehabilitation center (the equivalent of $23.3 million in 2017). In September 1937, Roosevelt reconstituted the Warm Springs Foundation as the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (as polio was then widely known); in January 1938, the directors of the foundation launched the first “March of Dimes”, a phrase coined by vaudeville star Eddie Cantor who helped promote a nationwide fundraising drive which attracted the support of Hollywood stars as well as charitable middle-class families giving 10 cents each. In six months, the March of Dimes raised $81,073 (which would be about $1.4 million in 2017). In July 1938, the New York Times published a detailed auditor’s report, which offered a breakdown of donations and expenditure. Some aspects of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis perhaps reflect a more innocent time. For example, the hundreds of thousands of dimes sent by members of the public were processed at the White House and a cheque was given to Roosevelt, who then turned it over to O’Connor for distribution via the Foundation. However, in many ways the operation was a precursor of the professional, almost corporate style of non-profit fundraising and campaigning that has followed since. For example, a large portion of funds raised in 1938 came from attendees at 8,000 Presidential birthday balls throughout the country, labor organizations contributed the equivalent of $760,000, and the Western Union and Postal Telegraph companies wrote off the cost of thousands of birthday greetings sent to the President at 25 cents per message. The following year, charity sporting events were held throughout the country, and badges were distributed to donors as part of an awareness-raising “Give a Dime and Wear a Button” campaign. Funds raised for the Warm Springs Foundation and National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis were also distributed in the form of research grants to scientists hoping for a breakthrough in the treatment of polio. This came to fruition in the 1950s when Dr. Jonas Salk — who had received a grant from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis — developed a successful polio vaccine. The Warm Springs center that helped in Mitch McConnell’s recovery was indeed founded by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was President at the time McConnell was struck by the disease, in 1944. Roosevelt was the driving force behind both the Warm Springs Foundation and its successor, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, and used his political office to energetically promote fundraising for polio care and research. The funding came from the kindness and charity of the public, as well as wealthy celebrities and large corporations.
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10716
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Bypass patients can benefit from a few drinks: study
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The biggest flaws were common ones: Using causal language in the headline – “bypass patients can benefit from a few drinks” – for an observational study that cannot prove cause and effect; There was no discussion of the limitations of drawing conclusions from observational studies – and not a word about the potential weaknesses in a study that relied on people to fill out a questionnaire about their alcohol consumption; Using only relative figures – not absolute – to describe both benefits and harms. See our primer on this topic. Studies have been done for decades on alcohol and heart disease. This story never mentioned that long history. In 220 words, no time or space was provided for context or for an evaluation of the evidence. That’s why it got 0 stars.
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false
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Reuters Health
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The cost of alcoholic drinks isn’t in question. The benefit – in terms of risk reduction – was provided only in relative risk reduction terms – 25% reduction in additional heart procedures, heart attacks or strokes. But readers should be told “25% of what?” See our primer on this topic. Most of the story focused on benefits. The story reported that “bypass patients with a condition called left ventricular dysfunction who were heavy drinkers, defined as having more than six drinks daily, were twice as likely to die from heart problems.” But twice as likely as what? Twice as likely could mean 1 in 100 going up to 2 in 100. Was that it? Or was it 25 in 100 jumping up to 50 in 100? This is why we expect stories to quantify harms (and benefits) in absolute terms, not just relative. See our primer on this topic. It concluded with: “The American Heart Association recommends men limit themselves to two drinks a day and women to one drink a day, because too much alcohol can raise blood pressure and have other negative effects.” But again, no information was given on the extent of blood pressure increase or on what “other negative effects” they were talking about. If it’s worth mentioning, it’s worth specifying. We’ve said before that news organizations that make causal claims about observational studies should have to write on the blackboard hundreds of times: “Association does not equal causation.” So using phrases like “can benefit from a few drinks” in the headline is wrong. There was no discussion of the limitations of drawing conclusions from observational studies – and not a word about the potential weaknesses in a study that relied on people to fill out a questionnaire about their alcohol consumption. Not applicable because this 220-word story didn’t really given any background on the heart conditions in question. No independent expert was quoted – only one of the researchers. The potential benefit of alcohol consumption was not compared with any other approach for reducing the risk of additional heart procedures, heart attacks or strokes in people who had bypass surgery. This could have been done with a little homework and a few more sentences. The availability of alcohol isn’t in question. We aren’t given any context of the long, long history of research looking at alcohol and heart disease. Not applicable. We can’t be sure of the extent to which the story may have relied on a news release. Only one researcher was quoted.
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3104
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From coconut patties to guns, lawmakers ready for session.
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The 60-day Florida legislative session that begins Tuesday will have lawmakers considering everything from coconut patties to a state budget expected to exceed $90 billion.
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true
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Legislature, Climate change, General News, Florida, Ron DeSantis, Environment, State budgets, Gun politics, Bills
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Lawmakers are also expected to address abortion rights, private gun sales and environmental issues such as the rise in sea level. While the budget is the only thing the Legislature is constitutionally required to pass each year, there are already about 3,000 bills filed, including about 1,600 that seek to stuff local projects into the budget. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has declared 2020 “the year of the teacher.” He’s proposing a $91.4 billion budget that includes $600 million to raise the minimum salary for teachers to $47,500 a year. It also includes $1 million to help eradicate pythons in the Everglades and elsewhere — just one of the environmental initiates he wants the Legislature to approve. But the Legislature doesn’t have to follow the governor’s budget recommendations, and while House Speaker Jose Oliva has been diplomatic, he’s expressed some concern over the teacher pay proposal. “My initial thought is one of gratitude for those who came before us and saw it fit to bind us and all future legislatures to a balanced budget,” Oliva said when DeSantis announced the proposal. While several abortion bills have been filed on both sides of the debate, a bill requiring girls under 18 get their parents consent before having an abortion has a good chance of passing. Sen. Kelli Stargel is sponsoring the legislation and draws from her own experience as a pregnant teenager. “I thought for sure my mother would kill me when I told her that I was pregnant underage,” Stargel told her colleagues when presenting the bill. “She advised me to have an abortion. I chose not to have the abortion, but through that process, we are closer.” Florida already has a law that requires that a girl’s parents be notified if she gets an abortion, but it doesn’t require parents give their permission for the procedure. The parental consent bill would allow girls to ask a judge for a waiver if they are victims of abuse or incest. It’s one of several bills filed on both sides of the abortion issue, though most of the others are less likely to pass. There’s a House bill that would outlaw abortions if a doctor can detect a fetal heartbeat, but Senate President Bill Galvano said that would be tough to get through his chamber. Even more unlikely to pass is a bill to ask voters to change the constitution to require at least 50 percent of the House and Senate be comprised of women before lawmakers can vote on an abortion bill. Democratic Sen. Lauren Book said she sponsored the bill to serve as a talking point after the Alabama Senate sent a heartbeat bill to the governor with only two female senators voting on the legislation. “Having to watch two women, whose backs were certainly against the wall in a chamber like that, having to speak up for millions of women who had no voice and no representation in that chamber,” Book said. “I started drafting it after that.” Lawmakers will once again consider new gun laws two years after the Parkland high school shooting that left 17 dead. Galvano directed Infrastructure and Security Committee Chairman Sen. Tom Lee to come up with gun safety legislation after mass shootings across the country last year. Lee won’t go as far as Democratic proposals to ban assault rifles and large capacity magazines, but he said he’s considering changes to better document private gun sales. “It seems to me like the best thing we can do to enhance public safety is to take a look at the systems that we use or the requirements that we have in law for people to transfer or sell weapons between individuals,” Lee said. The environment will also be a top issue. Lawmakers are considering legislation that addresses the algae blooms that have plagued Florida in recent years. Republicans are also backing bills to create the Statewide Office of Resiliency and the Statewide Sea-Level Rise Task Force. The Department of Environmental Protection would be directed to take action based on the task force’s recommendations. Then there are hundreds of miscellaneous bills that won’t be among the most hotly debated, such as legislation that would ban “pet leasing,” which is essentially rent-to-own contracts some pet stores offer consumers. Then there’s Book’s bill to designate coconut patties as the official state candy. “This is very serious legislation,” Book said with a laugh. “I thought it would be fun and light, and people are very opinionated about it. Why not salt water taffy? Why not pink Starbursts? We feel strongly about Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. And I’m like, ‘Guys, but this is created in Florida.’”
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40838
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Health tourism costs nearly £300 million on some estimates.
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A dam at a gold mine in western Brazil burst on Tuesday, leaving a 2-km (1.2-mile) trail of mining waste and injuring two people, according to the country’s National Mining Agency (ANM).
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true
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health-tourism
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No one was killed in the incident in Mato Grosso state, ANM said in a statement. The dam is registered under the name of an individual wildcat miner rather than in the name of a mining company. Inspections of the dam had not turned up any problems, and it had been declared as stable on Sept. 25, the agency said. Brazil remains on high alert for dam ruptures after a tailings dam at a Vale SA iron ore mine burst in January, killing at least 250 people in the second major disaster of its kind in four years.
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15950
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Amazing fact: Senate has already voted on more amendments in 2015 than Reid allowed ALL YEAR last year.
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"Kerpen, among others, tweeted, ""Amazing fact: Senate has already voted on more amendments in 2015 than (Harry) Reid allowed ALL YEAR last year."" On the numbers, that is right. But experts cautioned us that the claim falls more in the interesting factoid category than a sign of a different or more cooperative Senate leadership. The statement is accurate but needs clarification and additional information. Correction: An earlier version of this fact-check incorrectly described Sen. David Vitter's amendment."
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true
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Congress, PunditFact, Phil Kerpen,
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"There’s a new sheriff in charge of the U.S. Senate, and he’s eager to show how he’s shaking up the law of the land. We’re talking, of course, about new Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who took over the Senate’s top slot after the midterm elections bounced Democrats from power. And in this new world, Republicans are touting an eye-catching factoid as evidence of a functional Senate, one they say runs on fairness and order under GOP control. ""Amazing fact: Senate has already voted on more amendments in 2015 than Reid allowed ALL YEAR last year,"" tweeted Phil Kerpen, opinion-writer and president of conservative 501(c)(4) American Commitment, on Jan. 22, 2015. Kerpen, formerly of Americans for Prosperity, the Club for Growth and the libertarian Cato Institute, told us he heard the statistic from McConnell himself. We wanted to know if it was true that the Senate has already allowed more votes on amendments in less than one month than all of 2014. And why? On Senate stoppage and filled ‘trees’ The simple answer on the number of votes is that Kerpen is correct. But the reason behind it varies depending on your particular political lens. A simple search of Senate roll call votes on amendments in 2014 and 2015 backs up Kerpen’s statement. In 2014, there were 15 roll call votes on amendments. As of Jan. 22, 2015, the date of Kerpen's tweet, there were 16 roll call votes on amendments. There have since been 17 more votes on amendments to the bill to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which passed a week later but will likely face President Barack Obama’s veto pen. Kerpen came at the tally a different way, counting ""real"" votes on amendments, a distinction that also includes roll call votes on motions to table amendments, which effectively kills them. By his math, there were 16 votes allowed on amendments in 2014 and 26 so far in 2015. By either count, the numbers work. What changed? In 2014, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., relied on a funny-sounding procedure called ""filling the amendment tree."" Basically, Reid filled the docket allowed for amendments by adding amendments with inconsequential changes that no one else could override. The procedural tactic prevented Republican-sponsored amendments from being heard on the floor. ""He did that more than any of his predecessors,"" Donald Ritchie, Senate historian, told PunditFact. Reid wasn’t doing this just to be a not-so-nice guy. To Democrats, it was to counter Republican tactics. Unlike the House, the Senate does not have strict rules for the substance of amendments that can be attached to bills (i.e., you could add a health care amendment onto a defense spending bill). And that’s exactly what happened in years past. Republicans began introducing off-topic amendments that, for example, cut off U.S. aid to Egypt or, a favorite of Sen. David Vitter, R-La., to eliminate health care subsidies for Senate staffers. No matter what the topic of the bill. Sometimes this was in effort to force difficult votes for Democrats back home. To Republicans, Reid’s style of blocking amendments emulated an uncooperative and off-the-rails leadership style -- one that is tremendously well-documented -- that stymied policymaking. To Democrats, it was necessary to get anything accomplished. Republicans were filibustering votes on the underlying bills and not committing to a vote in exchange for allowing some amendments, said Steven S. Smith, a political science professor at Washington University in St. Louis. ""Reid saw they were filibustering everything, bringing the place to a standstill,"" Smith told us. ""So he wondered why he should give them votes at all."" Reid’s office does not dispute the number of votes on amendments, but they do take issue with what they deem an ""empty talking point"" that neglects Republican responsibility for the gridlock. His spokesman argues that Republicans blocked their own share of amendments by not compromising on potential amendments to be heard on the floor and refusing to come to an agreement about when a bill should come to a vote. ""(Reid) makes no apologies for blocking what we all consider to be extremely pointless political amendments that were just designed not to improve the bills we were working on but to run 30-second political ads against Democratic senators,"" said spokesman Adam Jentleson. ""Republicans are entirely culpable in that number being what it is."" Reid’s style of blocking amendments irritated Republicans, sure, but it also flared up during the 2014 midterms with Republicans using it to attack Democrats. The GOP pounced on Alaska Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Begich, for instance, for his lack of roll-call votes on his amendments. McConnell, conversely, said he would allow open amendments on the Keystone XL bill, hence the GOP celebrating its ""new management"" style. As political experts told us to expect, there have already been clashes with McConnell’s methods a few days after the initial celebration. During the Keystone debate, Democrats objected to McConnell tabling Democratic amendments and not letting Democrats debate their amendments for a minute. Reid, perhaps ironically, tweeted, ""I've never seen debate shut down as aggressively as when Sen. McConnell refused to allow Dems to debate their own amendments for just 1 min. ... and that’s saying something."" What the experts tell us Bottom line, experts said, voters shouldn’t take the new tactics as evidence that McConnell’s ""return to normal order"" will give the Democrats an easy path to voting on the amendments of their choice. ""It’s not going to happen,"" said Roy Meyers, University of Maryland, Baltimore County affiliate professor of public policy. University of Kansas political science professor Burdett Loomis agreed, saying, ""The overall idea isn’t trivial (‘regular order’), but the exact number isn’t very significant, especially if McConnell, as expected, runs the Senate almost completely to the (Republicans’) advantage."" It’s too early to know whether we have a ""sea change"" of order on our hands in the Senate, said Sarah Binder, George Washington University political science professor. ""In other words, the intense partisanship of the Senate that led Sen. Reid to all-but shut down the amendment process last year has not dissipated,"" Binder said. ""I think the question going forward is whether McConnell can find a way to conduct the Senate such that senators from both parties believe their legislative needs are being met."" Our ruling Kerpen, among others, tweeted, ""Amazing fact: Senate has already voted on more amendments in 2015 than (Harry) Reid allowed ALL YEAR last year."" On the numbers, that is right. But experts cautioned us that the claim falls more in the interesting factoid category than a sign of a different or more cooperative Senate leadership. The statement is accurate but needs clarification and additional information. That meets our definition of . Correction: An earlier version of this fact-check incorrectly described Sen. David Vitter's amendment."
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8754
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Gene switch malfunctioning in chronic lung disease.
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Smokers who have chronic lung disease are much more likely to have a poorly working antioxidant defense system than other smokers, a finding that may lead to new treatments, U.S. researchers said on Friday.
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true
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Health News
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A right lateral view chest x-ray of a healthy lung is seen in an undated handout photo. REUTERS/DCD/Dr. Thomas Hooten/Handout Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, is the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States and the world and is on the rise. There is no cure. The researchers found that a master gene called NRF2, which turns on other genes involved in protecting the lungs from pollution and cigarette smoke, was not working properly in smokers with advanced COPD, which affects 210 million people worldwide. And they said a compound found in broccoli might help correct this problem. “This work clearly demonstrates that a decline in our antioxidant system is involved in progression of COPD, which could also be the cause for other environmental disease,” Shyam Biswal of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine said in a statement. There are no treatments for COPD, a condition that includes emphysema, chronic bronchitis and some types of serious chronic asthma. Smoking is by far the leading cause of COPD, but environmental factors such as pollution play a role. In earlier studies, Biswal found that mice with poorly working NRF2 genes developed severe emphysema. His current study in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine looked at tissue samples of smokers with COPD and those without it. They found that the lungs of people with COPD had decreased levels of antioxidants that were regulated by the NRF2 gene. The sicker the patients, the lower the levels they found. But they also found that sulforaphane, a compound that occurs naturally in broccoli and wasabi, was able to restore the function of the NRF2 gene in human tissue. “These are the keys we are looking for in terms of having a more specific intervention,” Dr. John Heffner, past president of the American Thoracic Society, said in a telephone interview. “If we can discover the primary triggers that induce lung damage in smokers we will be able to slow the progression of this highly lethal condition,” Heffner said. He said the study, which he was not involved in, pointed to a genetic switch that turns off the body’s defenses against cigarette smoke and leads to lung damage. “Compounds that target that switch may be able to turn it back on to prevent the progression of COPD.” He said it was too early to suggest eating broccoli would cure COPD. Other clinical trials of antioxidants have failed to show a benefit. “We are hoping to initiate human trials with these more specific compounds that target what has been shown to be the most important antioxidant system,” he said.
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29578
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Germany created and distributed leaflets to curb sexual assault due to an incident in Cologne on New Year's Eve.
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What's true: Leaflets were created and distributed in the city of Munich in 2013 to reinforce cultural standards in mixed bathing areas such as pools after a number of complaints were registered by German swimmers. What's false: The country of Germany created the leaflets; the leaflets were distributed in response to an incident in Cologne in 2015-2016; the leaflets were created after a wave of Syrian immigrants came to Europe in 2015; the complaints were entirely or primarily related to sexual assault or misconduct.
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false
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Politics Immigration, cologne, daily mail, leaflets
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As Germany rang in the New Year in 2016, a number of assaults were reported in Cologne and other cities. As many as 600 reports were lodged, and people quickly moved to blame recent refugees and migrants for what was framed as a novel spate of violence against women on that night. On 1 February 2016, Britain’s Daily Mail published an article titled “Germany hands out cartoon etiquette guides at swimming baths after dozens of women were groped by migrants,” which held: In the wake of the sex assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve and a wave of reported cases of sexual harassment in swimming baths, officials have now created a special cartoon guide on appropriate etiquette. The illustrations feature German captions with subtitles in English and Arabic and warn migrants not to wear underwear instead of swimming trunks, harass women, or push them in the water. The Daily Mail maintained that the leaflets were created in response to the events in Cologne in late 2015 or early 2016. That outlet was far from the only source for such claims; blogger Steven Crowder published a 27 January 2016 item titled “Germany Takes Measures To Curb Islamic Rape… With Leaflets?” That post similarly posited that the leaflets were Germany’s official response to the purported widespread, refugee-centric sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve: The last time there was a festival in Cologne, it was New Year’s Eve. Amongst the fireworks and yuletide feelings, a thousand women (who were asking for it apparently) were sexually assaulted by Muslim refugees. Hey, the festive spirit was moving them too, just in different ways. Some Western men and women share a kiss, maybe in Islam you just rape a little bit. It’s cultural, you racist, try to understand. Plus some of these women were “half naked” as in the men could see their faces. Burkas are making a ton more sense, aren’t they ladies? … Thanks to this nifty thing called the Internet, a lot of women have aired their grievances with not only their governments, but against Islamic men … The solution to the migrant rape culture? You’re going to love this. A leaflet campaign teaching Muslim migrants to just say “No” to the rape. I’m as serious as herpes. Officials in Germany are handing out flyers explaining to the refugees how to properly behave themselves. The image’s most visible appearance was in a 15 January 2015 item in the German version of The Local, titled “Town bans male refugees from pools amid complaints.” A portion was included in this version that described the true origin and purpose of the leaflets. The article explained that they were available in multiple languages for immigrants from a variety of backgrounds, and served a general purpose of providing information for individuals unfamiliar with public bathing protocols, including safety instructions: Meanwhile in Bavaria, swimming pools have issued leaflets with simple pictorial instructions on behaviour for migrants who may never have swum in public before. The leaflets are available in multiple languages, including Arabic, French, Pashto and Somali, and include safety and behaviour tips in a comic book style. As the more complete image above illustrated, two or three of 13 frames pertained to co-ed swimming comportment. The rest addressed water safety, appropriate attire, and common hygienic practices for individuals unfamiliar with public pools. The article continued, contextualizing the portion about co-ed bathing areas and dating the leaflets to 2013, well before recent, larger waves of people began seeking refuge in Europe: Particular emphasis is placed on stopping physical and verbal harassment of women, with images showing a red “no” symbol over an outstretched hand reaching for a woman in a bikini. A Munich city spokesman told DPA that officials conceived the leaflets in 2013 after increasing numbers of problems in the city’s 18 public swimming pools. “The ground rule of respect for women – whatever clothing they’re wearing – is unfortunately not respected by all our swimmers. That’s why there is an explicit indication about it,” the spokesman said. As the article stated, the leaflets were created due to a number of unspecified “problems,” not specifically to curb sexual assaults. A larger picture suggested that the problems did not entirely (or even primarily) stem from behavior in public bathing areas, and the bulk of tips covered safety, sanitation, and clothing. While it’s true that the leaflets were created and distributed in Munich following “problems” in public bathing areas, the leaflets came long before any events in Cologne on New Year’s Eve in 2015 or 2016, as they were created in 2013. Additionally, the leaflets were produced in a variety of languages, and there was no evidence that their creation was prompted by any complaints about how immigrants or refugees behaved toward female swimmers.
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34914
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Four Impossible Whoppers provide “enough estrogen to grow boobs on a male.”
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This is not the case. Simply put, though phytoestrogens do interact with the human body in ways that disrupt estrogen-controlled processes, their effect in almost all cases is much less pronounced than that of actual estrogens. For this reason, Stangle’s comparison of “estrogen” levels in Impossible Whoppers and birth control pills, which contain synthetic estrogen compounds, is problematic.
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false
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Food
|
On Dec. 20, 2019, the livestock industry publication Tri-State Livestock News published a wide-ranging screed against the Impossible Whopper, the livestock-free substitute burger sold at Burger King. The author of the article, South Dakota veterinarian James Stangle, made a series of dubious assertions to arrive at the conclusion that four Impossible Whoppers per day contain “enough estrogen to grow boobs on a male.” For several reasons articulated below, this conclusion is flawed. Strictly speaking, Impossible Burgers, which use soy as their protein, have no estrogen in them whatsoever. Estrogen refers to a group of sex hormones created by an animal’s endocrine system that affect myriad reproductive and other bodily processes. These chemicals, the most significant of which is estradiol, are not found in any plant-based product, including the soy protein of Impossible Whoppers. When people express concern about “estrogen” in soy products, they are actually expressing concern about phytoestrogens — a class of compounds structurally similar to but nonetheless different from estrogens. In soy products, the most relevant chemicals meeting this description are known as isoflavones. Though Stangle devotes ample space to the lesson “not all proteins are created equal,” he frequently relies on the demonstrably false assumption that phytoestrogens and estrogens are equal in terms of their effect on hormonally mediated processes.
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