claim_id
stringlengths 1
234
| claim
stringlengths 14
491
| explanation
stringlengths 1
4.18k
| label
stringclasses 5
values | subjects
stringlengths 0
223
| main_text
stringlengths 18
41.7k
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
9759
|
One-two punch of two generics for breast cancer may be more powerful than wonder drug tamoxifen
|
This story looks at two classes of drugs – aromatase inhibitors and bisphosphonates – which it says may deliver a “powerful one-two punch” when treating breast cancer. It reports on two Lancet studies that compiled data from 9 and 26 trials, respectively – what are known as meta-analyses. The studies reported on are newsworthy and there’s certainly some interesting and useful information here. But what’s missing from the piece are key details, including the fact that these drugs can cause significant side effects that may lead some women to stop taking them. Consulting an independent expert may have shed light on this issue for readers. We also think some of the language used in the story was misleading. The headline focuses the “one-two punch” of using the two types of drugs in combination, but there is no evidence in either meta-analysis to support combining the two drugs. Since that wasn’t an element of the research being reported on, why leap to that in a headline? Aromatase inhibitors have long interested scientists as an alternative to tamoxifen, the standard therapy for estrogen receptor(ER)-positive breast cancer, which may increase the risks for uterine cancer, blood clots and eye problems. Standard interventions range from surgery to drug therapy and are often invasive and toxic, sometimes causing side effects that appear months or years after treatment has ended. While non-invasive therapies found to be effective and to reduce the severity of side effects are newsworthy, readers should know that aromatase inhibitors are only used in women who’ve undergone menopause — either natural menopause or induced (e.g. by chemotherapy, oophorectomy, etc). In addition, aromatase inhibitors are not new and have been used both after a breast cancer diagnosis and to prevent breast cancer for some time. Significant side effects of aromatase inhibitors and bisphosphonates lead many women to stop taking them.
|
mixture
|
aromatase inhibitors,bisphosphonates,breast cancer,tamoxifen
|
The Washington Post article calls aromatase inhibitors “inexpensive,” but it doesn’t put a price tag on them. According to some reports, patient copays for taxomifen and aromatase inhibitors are around $8 – $9 for a month’s supply of each drug, which we’ll agree is inexpensive. But the cost of bisphosphonates is not addressed. We’ll give the benefit of the doubt here for the story’s nod in the direction of costs, but ideally we’d prefer to see more specifics. The article reports risk reduction of dying from breast cancer in relative numbers, but we think benefits of an intervention should always be stated in absolute figures when possible. We believe relative risk numbers tend to inflate the impression of how much impact the drug really has. For example, the story states that bisphosphonates could reduce the risk of death by 18% over 10 years. It would be more informative to note that the 10-year risk of death was 14.7% for women who took bisphosphonates vs 18.0% for women who did not receive bisphosphonates — a 3.3% absolute reduction. Another issue here is that aromatase inhibitors are only used in postmenopausal women — either natural menopause or induced. The story doesn’t explain this. Harms aren’t really addressed in this report, except for the last sentence, which states the “main side effect of aromatase inhibitors is an increase in bone loss and fractures.” But aromatase inhibitors also carry the risk of exacerbating menopausal symptoms (including sexual side effects and sleep problems) and of serious muscle and joint pain, which has caused some women to stop taking the drug in the past. Bisphosphonates long term can cause bone fractures (paradoxical – they build bone but not always normal bone) and rarely can cause jaw osteonecrosis (“bone death”). This is more common after dental work, but can also happen sporadically and is devastating. Since these details are missing in the report, we give it a “Not Satisfactory” rating here. The Washington Post report does not point out that these two Lancet journal articles are meta-analyses, meaning the researchers compiled data from various trials and then combined these results into comprehensive reports. The story states that the study came from a collaboration “that collects and analyzes information about randomized clinical trials every few years” but it never specifies what that means. Meta-analyses are essentially a summation of clinical trials, being only as good as the individual studies themselves. As a result, biases in any of these trials are often carried over to the meta-analysis. For example, if a pharmaceutical company financially backed one of these trials, it’s possible that a favorable bias could be introduced in the meta-analysis. Large, double-blind, randomized clinical trials are the gold standard and are seen as the most reliable way to obtain reproducible results. Sometimes, a randomized clinical trial has yielded a different outcome from a meta-analysis looking at the same clinical question. A 1997 New England Journal of Medicine article documents these discrepancies. Another fact the article brings up is that a “substantial number of trial participants switched from tamoxifen to aromatase inhibitors, which affected their results.” But how might this exactly confound the results of these trials? An independent expert could have shed some light on this topic. There is no disease mongering in this article. Although, as noted above, we think there’s some “treatment mongering” going on both the headline and closing quote from a researcher who says, “The drugs are complementary, because the main side effect of aromatase inhibitors is an increase in bone loss and fractures, while bisphosphonates reduce bone loss and fractures as well as improving survival.” These two drugs are commonly prescribed together but the study does not address their use in combination. If the story is going to focus on an issue that wasn’t even addressed in the studies being reported on, we think it’s essential to include a statement from an independent expert about that suggestion. This is a two-source story, with quotes from two professors who had ties to the studies. The report desperately needed an independent expert, who could talk about some of the missing details – like the design and limitations of the studies, the quality of evidence and harms of the interventions. The article compares aromatase inhibitors to tamoxifen, which in the past has been the go-to drug for treating breast cancer. More recently, many women have been on tamoxifen for a few years and then on an aromatase inhibitor in addition to other treatments.The piece could have mentioned other treatments like chemotherapy, radiation therapy and surgery, such as ovary removal in women with very high risks for breast cancer. Often all of these approaches are used together in the course of treatment. The article describes aromatase inhibitors as “a class of inexpensive, existing generics” and bisphosphonates as drugs typically used to treat osteoporosis. In the first paragraph, the story makes it sound as if aromatase inhibitors were just discovered by researchers: “…and despite decades of research scientists have not been able to find anything comparable — until now.” Researchers have known about aromatase inhibitors as an alternative to tamoxifen for at least a decade, something which the story later points out while describing the finding about aromatase inhibitors reducing mortality rates as a “surprise.” That might be overstating the case, since the original study says the evidence on this point is “uncertain” — suggesting that researchers were at least aware of the likelihood that these drugs might reduce death rates. We’ll give the benefit of the doubt, since the story does, eventually, get around to describing what’s new here and why — even if that description is somewhat questionable. The Washington Post story relies on this news release a bit too much for our liking. The article’s lead quote from Paul Workman comes right from the press statement. And while the story acknowledges the source for that quote, it doesn’t alert readers that a second quote from Richard Gray is also pulled from the same news release. We can’t find evidence of any other original reporting, so we’ll flag the story here as Not Satisfactory.
|
17187
|
The National Science Foundation awarded $700,000 to fund a climate change musical.
|
Smith said the science foundation awarded $700,000 for a climate change musical. The NSF awarded nearly that much for a theater company to produce a musical play that focuses on climate change and biodiversity conservation.
|
true
|
Climate Change, Federal Budget, Science, Texas, Lamar Smith,
|
"Republican U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, whose district stretches from San Antonio north into Austin, recently pressed an official about the government bankrolling a musical. Smith, chairman of the House Science, Space & Technology Committee, listed six National Science Foundation grants as questionable--including, Smith said at the panel’s March 26, 2014, hearing, a ""climate change musical that was prepared for Broadway but I’m not sure ever was actually produced, $700,000."" Smith then asked John Holdren, the White House science czar, if the foundation should justify such grants to the public, whose tax dollars fund them, the Texan reminded. Holdren replied that the foundation, which is entrusted with promoting scientific progress, already justifies its grants in online posts. ""We’re going to have to agree to disagree,"" Smith said. We’ve noted the scientific consensus globally that the Earth is warming. We focused for this article on whether the foundation ponied up for a play about that. Grant confirmed To our inquiry, a foundation spokeswoman, Dana Topousis, said by email the grant was awarded in 2010, adding: ""The Civilians, Inc., a Brooklyn, N.Y., theatre company, developed an innovative, out-of-the-box approach to exposing U.S. citizens to science. The project represents the unique cultural leverage of theater in its attempt to inspire the public’s imagination and curiosity about basic science and its relation to their everyday lives."" Topousis continued: ""This venture, like other more traditional NSF-funded informal science education projects (e.g., interactive science exhibits, IMAX films, science-based television programming), aims to educate through a focus on understanding the scientific method, its applications, and its unique ability to extract knowledge about our complex natural world. It presents the pursuit of fundamental knowledge through basic research in a neutral manner that does not advocate any position regarding climate change or conservation research,"" she said. A foundation summary of the grant award, brought to our attention by Topousis and Zach Kurz, staff spokesman for the Republican side of Smith’s committee, states that a grant totaling $697,177 was awarded in 2010 covering August 2010 through July 2014. Play description The summary describes ""The Great Immensity"" as a ""touring play with songs and video that explores our relationship to the environment, with a focus on critical issues of climate change and biodiversity conservation."" ""The play has been created with a network of partners including the Princeton Environmental Institute and Princeton Atelier Program/Lewis Arts Center, which will maintain an ongoing relationship with the project,"" the summary says, continuing: ""The play uses real places and stories drawn from interviews conducted by the artists to create an experience that is part investigative journalism and part inventive theater. Attendance at the performances is projected to be about 75,000."" The summary also says: ""A major goal of the project is to help the public better appreciate how science studies the Earth's biosphere and to promote an inquisitive curiosity about our place in the natural world. The initiative also intends to create and evaluate a new model for how theater can increase public awareness, knowledge, and engagement with important science-related societal issues."" Also, the summary says, the project will lead to the ""development and testing of online content, podcasts, and videos as well as special community education and outreach efforts in each community where the play is staged. Performances will be accompanied by post-performance panel discussions with the artists, local scientists and policy makers. After the completion of the initial tour, the play will be published, licensed, and made available to other theaters to produce independently."" Tickets on sale By phone, Sarah Benvenuti, an administrator for the Civilian Theater Co., said the play is slated to run April 11-May 1, 2014, at the Public Theater’s Martinson Hall in New York, which is not on Broadway. Tickets will be $20 each, she said. Benvenuti said the play is about climate change and includes musical numbers, which one can view in online videos. ""Margin of Error,"" for instance, shows cast members singing about poll results. (Really.) We wondered if the presentation is explicit, say, about human contributions to warming. Benevenuti didn’t say, though she stressed that the play draws on direct conversations with expert scientists. ""Climate change is a real thing,"" she said. ""We have to do something about it."" The script is not published, she said, but she pointed out the Public Theater’s online description of the play as a ""continent-hopping thriller following a woman, Phyllis, as she pursues her husband Karl who disappeared from a tropical island while on an assignment for a nature show. Through her search,"" the summary says, ""Phyllis uncovers a mysterious plot surrounding the upcoming international climate summit in Paris. As the days count down to the summit, Phyllis must decipher the plan and possibly stop it in time. With arresting projected film and video and a wide-ranging score of songs,"" the play ""is a highly theatrical look into one of the most vital questions of our time: how can we change ourselves and our society in time to solve the enormous environmental challenges that confront us?"" Finally, we circled back to the foundation to ask if the musical was an unusual grant beneficiary. Topousis replied by email that while the NSF ""research portfolio this falls under--Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL)--contains projects at the intersection of science and the arts, NSF’s funding this kind of project--a theatrical production--is rare."" Our ruling Smith said the science foundation awarded $700,000 for a climate change musical. The NSF awarded nearly that much for a theater company to produce a musical play that focuses on climate change and biodiversity conservation."
|
4007
|
German lawmakers approve compulsory measles vaccine plan.
|
Germany’s parliament has passed a law requiring that children who attend school or daycare must be vaccinated for measles.
|
true
|
Health, Measles, General News, Europe, Germany, Europe
|
Lawmakers approved the government’s bill Thursday with a majority of 459 in favor, 89 against and 105 abstentions. The law means parents who can’t prove their children have been vaccinated for measles by Aug. 1, 2021, will have to pay a fine of up to 2,500 euros ($2,790). Health Minister Jens Spahn has argued that the compulsory vaccination is necessary because of an increase in cases of the highly contagious and potentially deadly disease. Some parents and doctors had opposed the measure Teachers and daycare workers, staff in hospitals and residents of refugee shelters will also have to be vaccinated. Germany has recorded 501 cases of measles so far this year.
|
8831
|
Celebrex-Lipitor combo may fight prostate cancer.
|
The combination of anti-inflammatory and cholesterol-lowering drugs may be able to stop the progression of prostate cancer, according to new research so far carried out only in mice.
|
true
|
Health News
|
“The two drugs work through different mechanisms of action, but there is a synergistic effect that inhibits the growth of prostate cancer cells,” said Xi Cheng, assistant research professor at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, who conducted the study. His team administered a combination of Celebrex, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug used to treat arthritis and other pain, and Lipitor, a cholesterol lowering statin, to cultured mice tumors in order to measure the transition of early prostate cancer to its more aggressive and potentially fatal stage. Both drugs are sold by Pfizer Inc, but the company played no role in the National Institutes of Health-funded study, Zheng said. The researcher said both drugs have been shown in earlier studies to have some impact on cancer growth when used alone. The Rutgers team found that the combination of low doses of Lipitor and Celebrex had a more potent impact on tumor growth than a higher dose of either agent when used separately. Prostate cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death in men in the United States, with more than a quarter-million new cases appearing each year, according to the American Cancer Society. In the early stage of the disease, prostate cancer cells depend on androgen hormones, such as testosterone, to grow. Treatment involves either decreasing the production of the hormone or blocking its action. “Anti-androgen therapy slows the prostate cancer but eventually the cancer becomes androgen-independent, the therapy becomes ineffective and the cancer cells become more aggressive,” said Zheng. “Treatments available for the later stage cancers are not very good,” Allan Conney, director of cancer research at Rutgers, said in a statement. “Oncologists employ classical chemotherapy drugs which are very toxic and don’t work all that well.” The objective of the Rutgers study was to indefinitely delay the transition to androgen-independence, prolonging the time during which the cancer would be responsive to low-toxicity, anti-hormone therapy. Zheng said it appears that a cell signaling pathway for tumor cell growth is inhibited by the combination of the two compounds. He said human clinical trials are being planned.
|
11202
|
Abbott absorbable stent shows good results
|
Compare this story with one published by the Wall Street Journal four days earlier – even before the study was presented at a conference. The tone and the framing were markedly different. Reuters offered: “proven safe and effective…promising” and even allowed a researcher to predict future uses without any data. The WSJ, on the other hand, offered: “it isn’t clear if the Absorb device offers a worthwhile tradeoff” and more. Users of our site have told us they appreciate our cross-media comparisons. This is a classic example of healthy skepticism in one story – perhaps largely because of the presence of an independent expert – and the absence of both in another.
|
false
|
heart disease,Reuters Health
|
No discussion of costs. The Wall Street Journal, by comparison, at least reported: “Abbott expects to charge more for the Absorb device than the permanent, medicated stents currently available, which cost around $1,500 to $2,000.” The story simply stated, “no blood clots were reported among patients who were far enough along in testing to be evaluated.” Yet the first sentence says the device “has proven safe and effective.” The story begs a much broader much discussion of what benefits one would hope for from device implantation – and how this study (as the Wall Street Journal reported) raises perhaps more questions than it answers. The story simply stated: “Abbott said 6.9 percent of patients suffered major cardiac events — including heart attacks — over a 12-month period, which the device maker described as a low rate.” Do independent experts consider that a low rate? We wouldn’t know from the story. And is a 12-month period sufficient to call the device “proven safe and effective” as the opening sentence does? The story provided only scant explanation of how the study was done and no critical evaluation of the quality of the evidence. It never justifies the first sentence that says the device “has proven safe and effective.” The absence of an independent perspective was felt here as much as anywhere. No overt disease mongering. No independent source was quoted. And the story never stated who paid for the study or whether the quoted researcher has any financial ties to the manufacturer. Any comparison given was a one-sided, conflicted viewpoint, such as that given by the lead researcher: But here’s how the WSJ story offered a comparison through the eyes of someone not connected with the study: It’s clear from the story that the device is available in Europe but not in the US. The relative novelty of the new device is apparent from the story. Not applicable because we can’t be sure of the extent to which the story relied on a news release. We do know that no independent expert was quoted in the story.
|
1344
|
British PM May apologizes as overwhelmed hospitals cancel non-emergency operations.
|
Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May apologized on Thursday to tens of thousands of patients whose operations were canceled to free up staff and beds to deal with emergency patients.
|
true
|
Health News
|
Earlier this week, officials at the National Health Service (NHS) in England recommended that hospitals cancel all non-urgent appointments and operations until next month. May, during a visit to a hospital outside London, said she recognized it is frustrating for patients who had their operations postponed. “I know it is difficult, I know it is frustrating, I know it is disappointing for people and I apologize,” she told Sky News. A flu outbreak, colder weather and high levels of respiratory illnesses have put hospitals in England under strain with many operating at or near full capacity. The issue is potentially damaging for May, already weakened after losing a parliamentary majority in last year’s election and struggling to pacify her deeply divided party as she navigates the final year of Brexit negotiations. The NHS, which delivers free care for all and accounts for a third of government spending on public services, is typically one of the most important issues for voters during elections and one which is often regarded as a weakness for May’s Conservative party. Opposition parties regularly accuse the government of failing to adequately fund the health service. “Ministers refused to provide the funding top NHS officials said was necessary and now patients are paying the price,” said Vince Cable, leader of the Liberal Democrats. Founded in 1948 by the opposition Labour Party, the NHS is a source of huge pride for many Britons who are able to access free care from cradle to grave. But tight budgets, an aging population and increasingly complex medical needs have left many hospitals struggling during the winter in recent years. The pressure continues to grow, according to new data on Thursday. The number of patients stuck in ambulances for at least an hour almost doubled to more 4,700 cases during the Christmas week compared with the week before. Department of Health guidelines say ambulance crews should be able to hand patients over to hospital staff within 15 minutes of arrival at hospital. The average bed occupancy for the Christmas week was 91.7 percent. Doctors say that anything above 85 percent is unsafe. The conditions have led some doctors taking to Twitter to vent their frustrations. One London-based doctor wrote that conditions were so bad that he was practicing “battlefield medicine”, while another apologized for the “3rd world conditions” caused by overcrowding.
|
212
|
Exclusive: India proposes ban on e-cigarettes, with jail terms for offenders - government documents.
|
India’s health ministry has proposed a ban on the production and import of electronic cigarettes, documents seen by Reuters showed, potentially jeopardizing the expansion plans of big firms like Juul Labs and Philip Morris International.
|
true
|
Health News
|
The ministry has proposed that the government issue an executive order banning the devices in the public interest, saying it was needed to ensure e-cigarettes don’t become an “epidemic” among children and young adults. “E-cigarettes and similar technologies that encourage tobacco use or adversely impact public health are hazardous for an active as well as passive user,” the health ministry said in an internal note seen by Reuters that the federal cabinet is expected to consider. Health officials are proposing jail terms of up to three years, with a penalty of up to 500,000 rupees ($7,000), for repeat offenders against the new rules, according to a draft of the executive order. First-time offenders would face a prison term of up to one year and a fine of 100,000 rupees. Such orders are typically issued in India as an emergency measure when parliament is not in session. It can lapse if it is not approved when lawmakers convene against in the next session, which will most likely be held around November. It was not immediately clear whether the draft executive order will face changes, or when it will be approved. India’s health ministry did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters. The ministry’s plans would deal a blow to U.S.-based Juul Labs Inc, which is hoping to launch its e-cigarette in India and has hired several senior executives in recent months. Philip Morris also has plans to launch its heat-not-burn smoking device in India, Reuters has reported. Advocates for the devices say e-cigarettes are far less harmful than smoking tobacco, because users do not inhale the same dangerous matter. But many tobacco-control activists are opposed to e-cigarettes, saying they could lead to nicotine addiction and push people to consume tobacco. “There is evidence that these products are a gateway to tobacco products and induce adolescents and young adults to nicotine use leading to addiction,” the health ministry said in the document. India has 106 million adult smokers, second only to China in the world, making it a lucrative market for firms such as Juul and Philip Morris. More than 900,000 people die each year in the country due to tobacco-related illnesses. Sixteen state governments in India have prohibited e-cigarettes but there is as yet no federal legislation to deal with what the health ministry termed the “hazardous product”. Justifying its call for a ban, the health ministry argued that e-cigarettes can also be used as delivery devices for other substances such as cannabis, and could promote dual use with conventional cigarettes. “These devices are injurious to health and proliferation of these products has a negative impact on public health,” the draft said. Reuters reported in March the health ministry had called for Juul’s entry into India to be blocked, saying such products were “addictive and could potentially undermine our tobacco control efforts”. Juul, whose sleek vaping devices that resemble USB flash drives have become a sensation in the United States, has previously said it aims to improve the lives of smokers by offering a “satisfying alternative to combustible cigarettes”.
|
37611
|
"A man was arrested for allegedly forcing a woman to watch the nine-hour miniseries Roots to ""better understand her racism."
|
Was a Man Arrested for Allegedly Forcing a Woman to Watch ‘Roots’ to ‘Better Understand’ Her Racism?
|
true
|
Fact Checks, Viral Content
|
On February 17 2020, an odd story came out of Cedar Rapids, Iowa via The Gazette, about the arrest of a man who allegedly forced made a woman watch the mini-series Roots so that she might better understand her own racism:A Cedar Rapids man [Robert Lee Noye, 52] who was arrested [February 17 2020] is accused of holding a woman captive and forcing her to watch “Roots” — a nine-hour miniseries that chronicles author Alex Haley’s family line from the capture and enslavement of his ancestor Kunta Kinte to the liberation of Kinte’s descendants. […]When she tried to move, Noye told her to “remain seated and watch the movie with him or he would kill her and spread her body parts across Interstate 380 on the way to Chicago,” the complaint said.Mugshots paired with a sensational headline are often employed by “fake news” or “junk news” sites imitating small local outlets, and The Gazette was a small-city paper. Because of this, many readers encountering the story — including us — were skeptical it was authentic.Not long after its publication, the news was aggregated to other outlets across the country:A criminal complaint stated Noye forced the victim to watch the show, which is a nine-hour historical miniseries about slavery in the U.S. through the post-Civil War era, “so she could better understand her racism.”The complaint also stated the suspect told the victim he would “kill her and spread her body parts across Interstate 380 on the way to Chicago” if she did not sit and watch the show.We contacted the very responsive Cedar Rapids Police Department, and we spoke to an officer who confirmed that the report was accurate. They also sent over a brief release with additional detail about Noye’s arrest:Robert Lee Noye, DOB [redacted] age 52, was arrested for False Imprisonment and Assault Domestic Abuse Simple. The victim, a 37-year old female, was not allowed to leave a room where the suspect was keeping her. The victim dialed 911 and had an open line with the Joint Communications Center (Cedar Rapids 911 dispatch center). Dispatchers could hear the victim asking to leave and the suspect was screaming at her. The suspect is accused of harassing his girlfriend and threatening to commit a forcible felony by saying that he was going to kill her, then spread her body all over U.S. Interstate 380.On February 17 at 12:14 a.m. Cedar Rapids police officers were dispatched to [redacted] for an open 911 line to the dispatch center with lots of screaming. Dispatchers and officers were able to use GPS to locate the area where the call was coming from and, after checking the neighborhood, determined the incident was occurring at 718 2nd Avenue SW. An intoxicated male, later identified as Robert Noye, answered the door. There was 37-year old female and 12-year old female inside the house who were both upset and crying. The suspect allegedly was calling the victim names while officers were present.According to the victim, Noye was verbally assaulting her all night and she set up a bed in the basement to get away from him. According to the victim, Noye came downstairs and told her to get upstairs and watch the movie “Roots” to understand how racist she was while he continued to verbally assault her. He then made threats to kill her. The victim and her daughter went into a room upstairs where the suspect did not allow them to leave. The victim was able to call 911 and leave the line open.The suspect was arrested and transported to the Linn County Jail.The claim that a man was arrested for allegedly forcing a woman to watch Roots on February 17 2020 was genuine, not “fake news,” not “satire,” and not fabricated to capitalize on Black History Month or for any other reason; the suspect’s girlfriend is the alleged victim. The suspect was arrested and charged with first-degree harassment and false imprisonment.
|
1251
|
Mother Earth's MeToo moment: English town joins campaign for 'nature's rights'.
|
Nobody knows exactly how ancient masons, wielding chisels made from deer antlers, managed to build Stonehenge, the standing circle that has enchanted southern England for thousands of years.
|
true
|
Environment
|
But one theory about the epic undertaking reserves a special place for a nearby river, now known as the Frome, that may have served as a conduit for ferrying some of the smaller megaliths toward the site on rafts. Today, the placid waterway is once again playing a supporting role in a grand vision, albeit one its architects want to etch in the statute books, not in stone. Frome, a market town in the county of Somerset, is petitioning the British government to grant the River Frome “legal personhood” – in effect, giving it human rights. In throwing down this gauntlet, the town has joined a global “rights of nature” movement linking river basins in New Zealand to rainforests in South America and towns in the U.S. Midwest. In each case, communities are reimagining ways to harness the law to defend the Earth’s living tissues, and the places they call home. Some have dubbed it Mother Earth’s MeToo moment. In practical terms, supporters hope that granting the Frome rights will give lawyers a new avenue to seek redress whenever its waters are sullied by runoff from pig and dairy farms or overflowing sewers. Last month, one of the River Frome’s tributaries turned an unnatural shade of neon blue – highlighting wider concerns over water quality in British rivers. But Peter Macfadyen, an undertaker who redrew Frome’s political map by leading a band of independent candidates to take over the town council, wants to do more than protect one river. In an era of accelerating climate change, Macfadyen and his allies see their quest as part of a struggle to reset the balance between nature and the modern world. “This is much bigger than just wanting to punish people for doing something wrong,” said Macfadyen, who also served as Frome’s mayor. “It’s about trying to change a mindset about the environment in which we live.” Supporters of the nature’s rights movement see Frome as the first test case for the concept in Europe. Nevertheless, the town has been waiting for months for the government to respond. And just as critics have questioned the effectiveness of campaigns in other countries, some in Frome have their doubts. Neil Howlett, a lawyer who lives by the river in Frome, says he backs many of the community-building steps taken by Macfadyen and other independent local politicians. But he sees the council’s vision for a “river’s rights” bylaw as a distraction. “Having a law which is completely outside the cultural basis of the society in which you pass the law doesn’t make for law that works,” Howlett said. “It’s lovely as an idea. But it’s only lovely as an idea.” “PROGRAMMED FOR SELF-DESTRUCTION” Although indigenous peoples have long shared the intuition that rivers, mountains and lakes are in some sense living, sentient beings, American legal scholar Christopher Stone framed the idea in contemporary legal terms. In his 1972 book, “Should Trees Have Standing?”, Stone argued that voiceless natural features would be best protected by granting them the kinds of legal protections and access to courts usually reserved for two-legged plaintiffs. The argument was a novel twist on the long-established principle in the United States that companies can enjoy “legal personality” to distinguish their legal obligations from those of their directors and shareholders. The idea is starting to spread. Campaigners won what is hailed as the first “rights of nature” courtroom victory in Ecuador in 2011 when judges stopped a road-widening project from dumping gravel in the Vilcabamba River. Around the same time, Bolivia enshrined a far-reaching vision of nature’s rights in a statute known as “The Law of the Rights of Mother Earth.” In 2017, New Zealand’s parliament became the first legislature to acknowledge a river’s legal personhood when it passed a bill recognising the rights of the Whanganui River as an “indivisible and living whole.” That same year, a high court in India declared the Ganga and Yamuna rivers legal entities – along with two Himalayan glaciers and their meadows, waterfalls and forests. Colombia’s constitutional court made a similar move for the Atrato River basin, where riparian communities face illegal gold mining and paramilitary violence. This summer, Bangladesh recognised the rights of all its rivers. Although legal systems in many developing countries were implanted during colonial times, nature’s rights campaigns in Europe and North America represents a role reversal in which “eco-cratic” indigenous worldviews are enjoying a revival. Advocates see this new “Earth jurisprudence” as a skeleton key to unlock a shift away from the endless pursuit of economic growth, regardless of the ecological consequences. “The current system is programmed for self-destruction, and the legal system is the enabler,” said Mumta Ito, a lawyer and founder of Nature’s Rights, a Scotland-based advocacy group, which is advising Frome town council. “The only way we’ll be able to change things is by creating a new operating system with nature’s rights at its core.” Although the quest to win legal personhood for the River Frome was started barely a year ago, the roots of the campaign stretch back to a meeting at the Griffin pub in Frome one evening in 2011. Fed up with party divisions hobbling the town council, Macfadyen and a group of like-minded collaborators resolved to stand as independents at the next elections. Nestling in a shallow bowl of hills and noted for picturesque cobbled lanes, Frome has long been a magnet for free thinkers. But in a town of almost 27,000 people, the mavericks had never attempted a takeover. Surprising even themselves, the Independents for Frome movement won 10 seats on the 17-seat council with their model of a new participatory form of decision-making. In 2015, the Independents swept all 17 seats, prompting the Frome Times to dub the town “The People’s Republic of Frome.” In elections this May, independents won almost 80% of the vote. On a recent afternoon, Macfadyen led Reuters on a tour of some council-backed projects grouped loosely along the river, whose green-brown waters curve gently through the town. Wildflowers, nettles and brambles had been deliberately allowed to run riot on its steep, shaded banks. Near the bridge in the town centre, Frome’s “share shop” allows people to rent items such as power tools, musical instruments or camping gear at low rates. Nearby, a community fridge means nobody’s excess fresh vegetables need go to waste. The town council also backed a new renewable energy cooperative, which raised £300,000 from locals to put solar panels on buildings such as the health centre and football club. Macfadyen laid out step-by step instructions for running a town council in his book “Flatpack Democracy” – a play on the idea that thriving localism could be replicated at scale like self-assembly furniture. Inspired by Frome’s example, independents have taken over more than 20 other town councils and have strong representation on another 20, Macfadyen says. Jamie Kelsey Fry, a contributing editor at the New Internationalist magazine, co-founded a similar initiative in the neighbouring county of Devon. He sees the campaigns as part of a “new municipalism” movement reshaping politics in cities as diverse as Barcelona in Spain, Jackson in Mississippi and Valparaiso in Chile – their organisers often driven at least in part by concerns over climate change. “These groups are going to become exceptionally valuable, because as society functioning in its normal, business-as-usual way begins to collapse, we’re going to have to be in a position to look after ourselves,” Kelsey Fry said. Although the rights of nature movement is growing fast, turning its aspirations into effective restraints on commercial interests remains a challenge. In the United States, the city of Toledo, Ohio, voted in February to amend its charter to state that the giant Lake Erie, plagued by toxic algae blooms, had a right to “exist, flourish, and naturally evolve.” This summer, state lawmakers quashed the move, saying nature did not have appropriate standing. In the case of Frome, legal practitioners would be astonished if the government approves the town’s draft bylaw, partly because there are already laws protecting the river. For example, in 2017, a court in the nearby city of Bath fined a Somerset farmer £22,000 for allowing slurry to spill into the water. The contamination had turned the River Frome brown and foul-smelling and killed at least 1,700 fish. Frome town council said the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government informed it last week that a decision on its application was still pending. The ministry did not respond to a request for comment. With the world’s water bodies facing growing pressure from the extremes of heat, drought and rainfall driven by climate change, Macfadyen argues that any initiative that helps people to look at nature with fresh eyes is worthwhile. “We’re in the situation we’re in because we’ve misunderstood our position in the ecosystem,” Macfadyen said. “And unfortunately, we were wrong. We can’t do what we like. If we pour poison over everything, it comes back to bite us.”
|
35382
|
In July 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump's administration established new guidelines for hospitals to report COVID-19 patient information that eliminates the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as the leader of data collection.
|
In what was framed as an effort to streamline the reporting process, the federal government ordered hospitals to send patient information to a centralized database operated by HHS.
|
true
|
Politics, COVID-19, Editor's Picks
|
Since the beginning of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak in January 2020, Americans relied on hospital patient data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to develop emergency plans that aimed to lessen the chances of deadly bottlenecks in the country’s health care system during the pandemic. The CDC’s system for collecting COVID-19 data from more than 25,000 health care systems nationwide, called the National Healthcare Safety Network, compiled reports that served to help local politicians, epidemiologists, teachers, and everyone else make responsible decisions to curb the virus’ spread. But in mid-July 2020, tweets and news reports alleged that — under the direction of U.S. President Donald Trump — the federal government changed what had become the standard data-collecting system during the global health crisis and stripped the CDC of its role managing COVID-19 hospital information. Numerous readers contacted Snopes to investigate the legitimacy of such a claim, which was first reported by The New York Times on July 14, 2020. First, we searched for any evidence of the above-mentioned order by the Trump administration — that his administration announced a change for where on-the-ground health care staff send their observations on staffing and supply shortages, as well as data on testing, bed capacity in intensive care units, ventilators in use, and COVID-19 cases and deaths. We found a 13-page memo titled “COVID-19 Guidance for Hospital Reporting and FAQs” on the website of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department (HHS), of which the CDC is an arm, which was updated on July 10, 2020. Here’s a summary of some of the document’s main points: In other words, yes, the federal government in July 2020 — as the country’s number of coronavirus cases surpassed 3.4 million — modified the guidelines under which medical facilities report COVID-19 patient data and the pandemic’s impact on them. Per the memo, the White House planned to rely on the centralized system — and that system alone — for how it would divvy up supplies such as personal protective gear and potential COVID-19 treatments going forward. In a special bulletin on July 13, 2020, the American Hospital Association, which represents thousands of medical systems nationwide, urged all hospitals to follow the new reporting guidelines and also stressed the federal government’s announcement that they will be used for distributing resources. Next, we considered perhaps the most controversial aspect to the viral claim: that the change initiated by the Trump administration eliminated the CDC’s previous role as overseer of COVID-19 hospital information. To that point, the memo explicitly reads: “As of July 15, 2020, hospitals should no longer report the COVID-19 information in this document to the National Healthcare Safety Network site.” HHS spokesman Michael R. Caputo elaborated in The New York Times’ story, saying the CDC “will certainly participate in this streamlined all-of-government response. They will simply no longer control it.” The details of the CDC’s new role were unclear as of this writing, and that alarmed public health officials, researchers, and critics of the Trump administration who believed the new system would give the federal government greater control over what Americans know — and don’t know — about COVID-19’s toll on communities. That group’s concerns were largely related to unresolved questions over if, or to what extent, the HHS-run system would release the COVID-19 hospital data to the public like the CDC had done — and whether or not the HHS was going to report the hospitals’ observations accurately. For instance, Thomas File, president of the Infections Diseases Society of America, said in a statement: Collecting and reporting public health data is a core function of the CDC, for which the agency has the necessary trained experts and infrastructure. Placing medical data collection outside of the leadership of public health experts could severely weaken the quality and availability of data, add an additional burden to already overwhelmed hospitals and add a new challenge to the U.S. pandemic response.
|
25635
|
“Covid-19 is NOT killing people. Weak immune systems and bad doctors are.”
|
While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 94% of people who died of COVID-19 had other conditions, they still died from COVID-19.
|
false
|
Facebook Fact-checks, Coronavirus, Viral image,
|
"A recent Facebook post rounds up a lot of misinformation about the coronavirus and presents it as fact. ""Covid-19 is NOT killing people,"" it says. ""Weak immune systems and bad doctors are. The tests are rigged. The death count is . Masks are useless. Hand sanitizer is toxic. Vaccines are poison. The government and media are lying."" This post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) We’ve already looked into several claims in the post. COVID-19 tests aren’t rigged. A common cold won’t cause a positive, the tests are not scientifically meaningless (though there’s new thinking about the most effective testing methods), and we’ve found no evidence that labs are deliberately manipulating test results. The death count isn’t . It’s at about 187,000 in the United States and rising. If anything, doctors say that there’s an undercount of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. Masks aren’t useless. A growing body of evidence shows that wearing one can reduce transmission of COVID-19. Health officials recommend using hand sanitizer to kill the coronavirus. And we’ve debunked plenty of claims about coronavirus vaccines in development, including that the vaccine has killed Ukranirans and kids. So what about the allegation that the COVID-19 isn’t killing people — and that their weak immune systems are? Anyone — not just people who are immunocompromised — can catch COVID-19 if they are exposed to the virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some people are more likely than others to become severely ill: older adults and people with underlying medical conditions. The CDC also urges people with weakened immune systems to protect themselves from the disease. ""Many conditions and treatments can weaken a person’s immune system (making them ‘immunocompromised’),"" the CDC says, listing examples such as cancer, bone marrow transplant and HIV. The CDC found that of the people who died from COVID-19, 6% had only the coronavirus, while the rest had other conditions as well. But that doesn’t mean that only 6% of people actually died from COVID-19, as the president recently claimed. Comorbidities are conditions that patients experience in tandem with a primary condition. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a recent interview with ""Good Morning America"" that it ""does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of COVID didn’t die of COVID-19 — they did."" Dr. Allison Arwady, commissioner of the public health department in Chicago, explained during a news conference that coronavirus can exacerbate or cause health problems. ""If, unfortunately, this person dies while they’re in the hospital, the doctor has to fill out the death certificate and you list things that this person had as well as what is the ultimate cause of death,"" she said. Like Fauci, she said that these people are dying from COVID-19 — not their other conditions. And young, healthy people do die from COVID-19, even if they represent a minority of the disease’s victims, according to the Proto, a publication from Massachusetts General Hospital."
|
10360
|
Prostate cancer breakthrough as UK team develops more accurate test
|
This Guardian story touts a new approach for detecting and diagnosing prostate cancer which, it claims, is safer and more effective than the commonly used methods. The story states that researchers used up to 200 patients to gauge the efficacy of shear wave elastography (SWE) — an approach currently used in diagnosing breast cancer and liver disease. Readers are left clueless as to what the research yielded, other than vague claims of SWE exceeding the value of other named approaches. The story fails to describe the research, to quantify the results, to mention costs or harms of this approach, or to offer any really independent comment on the work. Egregiously, it borrows heavily from a university news release. Prostate cancer is a leading cancer among men in the United Kingdom, as well as elsewhere in the world. The major dilemma is that some cancers are very slow-growing and, in some cases, present a minor problem, while other fast-growing forms can be life-threatening and require immediate action. Telling the difference between the two forms can be difficult, so a new method that might do so would be a boon to public health. Sadly, this story fails to provide anything more than hyperbole and unsubstantiated claims. Readers deserve more.
|
false
|
The Guardian
|
The only mention of costs in this Guardian story is the following sentence, “The method is non-invasive and cheaper than current detection techniques.” But the story offers no information to back up that statement. There’s no mention of the current costs for the available screening approaches and there’s no estimate of what this new technique might cost patients. The story lists the supposed benefits of this new approach, compared to existing methods used for detection and delineating prostate cancer. A source is quoted as saying, “Our new method is far more accurate and also allows us to identify the difference between cancerous and benign tissue in the prostate without the need for invasive surgery.” But the story offers no data or information that would quantify the supposed improvements over existing screening mechanisms. There is no mention of any harms that might come from use of this new approach. And while the story claims that the new technique — shear wave elastography (SWE) — is non-invasive, there are clear harms that can come from false negatives or false positives with any screening technique. The story says virtually nothing about how the research was conducted, which would offer readers some insight into the quality of the study the story is based on. There’s no mention of whether the study was peer-reviewed, where the results were published, or what kind of clinical trial was done — all key factors in establishing the quality of the evidence. The story implies that this test ought to be used in all men in the UK as a screening test for prostate cancer, which may find many false positive results. It also doesn’t point out that despite its prevalence, some types of prostate cancer are very growing and may not require treatment. Many more men die with prostate cancer than die because of prostate cancer. All of the sources in the story were the same sources in the news release. There is no mention of potential conflicts of interest among the researchers, even though this is a new technology which, if successful, could profit the researchers/inventors. The story does mention several current methods of detecting and diagnosing prostate cancer — the PSA (prostate-specific antigen) test, a digital rectal exam (DRE), the use of MRI imaging, and an invasive biopsy, which are all alternatives to this new test. The story also points out the shortcomings of each of those approaches. However, this is a just-passing Satisfactory, since all of this information was taken directly from the university’s news release (see below). While the story doesn’t explicitly deal with the availability of shear wave elastography (SWE), it’s fairly clear that the new approach is experimental, has only been used on no more than 200 patients, and would require larger clinical trials to prove its efficacy — all points that suggest that it may not be available to most patients now. It also states that, “SWE technology is already used in diagnosing breast cancer and liver diseases.” If backed up by valid information, the discovery of a new approach to diagnosing prostate cancer, as well as delineating between fast- and slow-growing tumors would certainly justify doing a news story. But in this case, the writer provides little to no substantive information that would allow readers to benefit from this offering. Far better to have not done a story rather than offer this little. The story is peppered with slightly modified versions of statements from the university’s news release. A slight change here or there in both quoted and paraphrased statements isn’t enough to qualify this as independent reporting. The news release–while boosterish–at least included where the research was published, a fact missing in the news story. The release said: “Each carries significant problems. The PSA test are not offered as standard treatment and the results can be unreliable. The DRE is not good at identifying which cancers are benign and which need treatment. MRI scans are not available across the country and cannot always give a definitive answer. The biopsy is invasive, carries risk of infection and is expensive.” Which the story parrots: “Each carries problems. PSA results can be unreliable; a DRE is not good at identifying which cancers are benign and which need treatment; MRI scans cannot always give a definitive answer; while a biopsy carries a risk of infection and is expensive.”
|
23280
|
"Scott Hassett Says Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen ""knew about (the Ken Kratz sexting) case for nearly a year and did nothing about it."
|
Challenger Scott Hassett says Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen knew about district attorney sexting case but did nothing about it
|
false
|
Legal Issues, Crime, Wisconsin, Scott Hassett,
|
"Prosecutor Ken Kratz has been battered by a storm of denunciation since revelations in September 2010 that he used his position -- and sexually suggestive text messages -- to pursue a crime victim and possibly two other women who relied on him to do right by them in court. Among those castigating the Calumet County district attorney is Scott Hassett, the Democrat candidate for state attorney general. But Hassett’s thunder has also pounded another prosecutor, Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, his Republican opponent in the Nov. 2 election. It was Van Hollen’s Department of Justice that in October 2009 conducted a criminal investigation of Kratz’s most recent ""sexting."" Hassett was blunt in a Sept. 21 e-mail to his supporters, declaring: ""Van Hollen knew about this case for nearly a year and did nothing about it."" Hassett has since been more measured, saying Van Hollen did nothing ""substantive."" When we asked him to back up his claims, Hassett said Van Hollen should have taken a number of steps, including: Much has happened publicly in recent weeks, so it’s important to keep in mind what was known at the time. Let’s look at Hassett’s accusation in light of how the case unfolded and the role of Van Hollen’s office in it: Criminal investigation The Department of Justice’s involvement was limited to the racy texts sent to Stephanie Van Groll in October 2009 by Kratz, then the chair of the state Crime Victims Rights Board. Kratz had gained attention in 2007 for successfully prosecuting junkyard worker Steven Avery for the murder of a young photographer. Reports about texts to the other two women and a separate woman who says Kratz invited her to an autopsy didn’t surface until after the Associated Press revealed the Van Groll texts on Sept. 15, 2010. Kratz, 50, had met Van Groll, 26, while prosecuting a domestic violence case against her former boyfriend. In one text, he wrote: ""You may be the tall, young, hot nymph, but I am the prize."" On Oct. 22, 2009, the third day of receiving such text messages, Van Groll reported them to Kaukauna police. Van Groll said Kratz was harassing her and she feared that his interest in her could affect how Kratz prosecuted her former boyfriend, who was accused of strangling her. Van Groll went to police in Kaukauna, in Outagamie County, because she lived there at the time. Kaukauna police turned their investigation over to the state Division of Criminal Investigation because the Police Department often works with the Calumet County district attorney's office. The Justice Department opened its investigation on Oct. 27, 2009. It closed the probe several days later, without questioning Kratz. Van Hollen told PolitiFact Wisconsin ""there weren’t any facts that indicated any crimes were committed."" Van Hollen, who described himself as being ""very involved"" in the case, said he didn’t question the decision by investigators who determined it was not necessary to interview Kratz. He noted the department took the step of replacing Kratz in the domestic violence case involving Van Groll with one of its own prosecutors. Office of Lawyer Regulation Even though Van Hollen’s agency decided not to file criminal charges, Van Hollen and other department attorneys may have had an obligation to report Kratz to the state Office of Lawyer Regulation. Wisconsin Supreme Court rules require a lawyer to make such a report if he or she knows another lawyer has committed professional misconduct. The misconduct must raise ""a substantial question as to that lawyer's honesty, trustworthiness or fitness as a lawyer."" Two days after the Kratz scandal broke in the news, the Wisconsin District Attorneys Association’s executive committee -- which includes a Department of Justice official -- called on Kratz to resign his district attorney post. The committee judged his behavior with Van Groll as repugnant and ""inconsistent with the standards of our profession."" That would seem to qualify as professional misconduct that the Department of Justice should have reported to the Office of Lawyer Regulation as it was reviewing the case for possible charges. Van Hollen’s office did not to report Kratz to the regulatory office -- but it did pressure him into reporting himself. On Nov. 12, 2009, less than two weeks after the criminal investigation was closed, Department of Justice attorney Kevin Potter told Kratz in an e-mail ""we believe the matter needs to be reported to OLR. Again, we would be willing to discuss with you what we see as being your options and what we believe to be the best course of conduct for you to follow."" Three weeks after that, on Dec. 4, 2009, Kratz reported his texts to Van Groll to the Office of Lawyer Regulation. It could be argued that a complaint filed the Department of Justice would carry significant weight with OLR. But Van Hollen said his office believed that cases that are self-reported were more likely to result in disciplinary action. The Department of Justice also pressured Kratz in an e-mail to resign from the state Crime Victims Rights Board, which investigates complaints of public agencies or officials accused of violating the rights of crime victims. About a month later, on Dec. 3, 2009, Kratz stepped down. Ultimately, the Office of Lawyer Regulation did an initial review and told Van Groll on March 5, 2010, it would not conduct a formal investigation of Kratz. The letter said his texting, while inappropriate, ""did not appear to involve possible professional misconduct."" Since the news surfaced about the other women surfaced, however, OLR said it would open an investigation of Kratz. Gov. Jim Doyle After the news broke about Kratz’s texts to Van Groll and the woman who said he invited her to an autopsy, Doyle used a state law that allows a governor to remove a district attorney from office to launch a process for deciding whether Kratz should be removed. The law allows the governor to oust a DA ""for cause,"" which is defined as ""inefficiency, neglect of duty, official misconduct, or malfeasance in office."" Van Hollen said it wasn’t necessary to inform Doyle because the Office of Lawyer Regulation’s purpose is to investigate lawyer misconduct. He pointed out that while Doyle could remove Kratz as district attorney, OLR action could potentially result in Kratz being barred from practicing law altogether. OK. We’re ready to make a closing argument. In his bid for attorney general, Democrat Scott Hassett accused Republican incumbent J.B. Van Hollen of doing nothing for nearly a year after his office learned that Calumet County District Attorney Ken Kratz had sent sexually suggestive text messages to a crime victim. Van Hollen’s office reviewed the case for possible criminal charges, but found no grounds for any. Van Hollen could have reported Kratz directly to the Office of Lawyer Regulation, but his office instead pressured Kratz himself to do so, feeling that would make the case even stronger. They also pressured him to resign from the Crime Victims Rights Board. They could have reported the text matter to Gov. Jim Doyle, but Van Hollen felt the review panel was in the best position to determine if Kratz committed professional misconduct. Hassett argues Van Hollen could have done more. But his statement was that Van Hollen did nothing. Our verdict: Hassett’s statement is . (Note: Ken Kratz resigned from his position Oct. 4, 2010)"
|
6805
|
NFL, union to host symposium on mental health on May 14.
|
The NFL and the players’ union will host a symposium on mental health on May 14.
|
true
|
NFL football, Mental health, Health, Asher Allen, Sports, Brandon Marshall
|
Entitled “Beyond The Physical: A Symposium on Mental Health in Sports,” the forum will feature a series of panels with current and former NFL players as well as mental health organizations, caregivers, medical providers and media personalities. The aim is to raise awareness of mental health and promote a culture in which people, including athletes, are encouraged to seek help and support to achieve overall wellness. Confirmed panelists include NFL wide receiver and co-founder of Project 375 Brandon Marshall; former NFL cornerback Asher Allen; former Pro Bowl running back Warrick Dunn; Atlanta Falcons senior director of player affairs Kevin Winston; and representatives from Active Minds, Mental Health America (MHA) of Georgia, the American Psychological Association, and Campaign to Change Direction. “May is Mental Health Awareness Month and the NFL is pleased to partner with the NFLPA and Cigna to increase awareness and decrease the stigma around mental health ...” said Dwight Hollier, the NFL’s vice president of wellness and clinical services. “This effort is especially important in light of the messages young athletes receive about toughness and the need to be strong all the time. Through our discussions with caregivers, athletes, professionals and others, we will shine a light on mental health in sports and discuss ways to support athletes and others on the journey toward total wellness.” ___ For more NFL coverage: http://www.pro32.ap.org and http://www.twitter.com/AP_NFL
|
18612
|
We have a federal government that thinks they have the authority to regulate our toilet seats.
|
"Cruz, railing against modern interpretations of the Commerce Clause and the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, said, ""We have a federal government that thinks they have the authority to regulate our toilet seats."" While federal attention to toilet seats has dropped since its brief foray into seat shape in the ‘70s, and now mainly addresses toilet access for workers and height for wheelchair users, Cruz is firmly right that the courts, Congress, and executive agencies claim federal power to regulate them. His toilet trivia is True. Editor's note: We updated this item on March 26, 2013, to clarify that the U.S. Access Board requires most restrooms in ADA-covered buildings to have at least one accessible toilet."
|
true
|
National, Consumer Safety, Corrections and Updates, Government Regulation, Regulation, States, Supreme Court, Workers, Ted Cruz,
|
"Toilet seats just got political. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, a constitutional lawyer recently elected to Congress, says they’re an intimate example of federal overreach. He name-dropped the familiar fixtures in his March 16, 2013, speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, known as CPAC. ""We have a federal government that thinks they have the authority to regulate our toilet seats,"" he said. Does the long arm of the law extend into your bathroom? Yes. But some constitutional scholars say that’s too far. Plumbing the Constitution Cruz, a Republican, is no stranger to the nation’s founding documents. He argued before the U.S. Supreme Court as the solicitor general of Texas and has written more than 80 briefs for the nation’s highest court. He might like to flush some of its decisions. Here’s what he told his CPAC audience: ""There's the 10th Amendment, something our omnipotent federal government seems to have forgotten all about. The 10th Amendment provides that the powers not given to the federal government are reserved to the states and to the people. ""How did we get a $16.5 trillion national debt? We have a federal government that thinks they have the authority to regulate our toilet seats and our light bulbs. We need to get back to the Constitution."" We’ve written plenty about light bulbs (which, yes, are regulated) but hadn’t taken up the question of toilet seats. Here’s the thing about toilet seats and the Constitution. The 10th Amendment reserves powers for the states and the people — except those given to the federal government. And under current interpretations of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause and 14th Amendment, there’s power to federally regulate toilet seats. (Take that, commode!) How? Well, the federal government can regulate consumer products, access to public facilities for people with disabilities and workplace health and safety. Thus: • The Mine Safety & Health Administration says, ""sanitary toilets shall have an attached toilet seat with a hinged lid and a toilet paper holder together with an adequate supply of toilet tissue."" • The Occupational Safety & Health Administration says construction sites with 20 employees or more shall provide ""1 toilet seat and 1 urinal per 40 workers."" • The U.S. Access Board requires most restrooms to have at least one ""accessible"" toilet in buildings covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, which means, in part, a toilet seat at a height of 17 inches to 19 inches. Springs to return seats to a lifted position aren’t allowed. Those MSHA and OSHA rules? Cruz’s office says the federal government ""has no business regulating such minutia."" It could be — and has been — worse. Take the Great Horseshoe Seat Scandal of the 1970s. The brand-new Occupational Safety & Health Administration — which draws constitutional authority mainly from the Commerce Clause — had decided to implement a variety of voluntary industry standards as law. And it turned out that plumbers had for decades agreed that public toilets should have open-front, elongated seats rather than the closed rings of home bathroom seats. (Why? Oh, it’s a matter of speculation that’s made us the laughing-stock of Europe, where experts make jokes that the chief of one American lab was too polite to repeat. But it might have something to do with, um, hygiene.) So businesses suddenly faced a federal mandate on seat shape. The ""resultant outcries about picayune government regulations,"" as one newspaper columnist put it, helped land hundreds of OSHA regulations on a to-delete list. The shape of your public toilet seat was no longer federally regulated by the ‘80s. Plumbing fixtures now generally don’t face federal regulation. Instead, manufacturers follow voluntary industry standards, which often get the force of law from state and local governments. But they could. Commodes and the Commerce Clause Meanwhile, the regulations that yet exist — about workplace seat availability and public restroom seat height — strike Cruz as ""regulating down to the minutia"" on issues best left to states and local governments, said his press secretary, Catherine Frazier. He’s right that the federal government ""thinks"" it has that authority, according to constitutional scholars we consulted. Cruz’s former constitutional law professor at Harvard, Laurence Tribe, offered some examples where toilet seats are ""obviously subject to federal regulation"" under settled law: • The commercial sale of toilet seats, like other commodities, in transactions involving an interstate market are subject to regulation under the Commerce Clause. • The provision of adequate toilet facilities to workers in businesses affecting interstate commerce is subject to federal regulation under the Commerce Clause. • Ensuring that toilet facilities, like others, are made available without regard to race or disability is subject to regulation under the Commerce Clause and equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The question of whether the Constitution should be interpreted to grant such power to the federal government exposes a deep rift among experts. Randy Barnett, who represented opponents of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, argues for a narrower Commerce Clause, as do libertarian scholars such as Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute. A few decisions since the 1990s have gone their way, including the recent ruling that the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate wasn’t justified by the Commerce Clause. The framers ""gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it,"" justices ruled. (The mandate was upheld under the government’s taxing power, instead.) But settled law still says toilet seats are fair game. ""Basically, Cruz is taking an example that sounds silly — toilet seats! — but if you look at the legal basis for the regulatory authority, it's pretty well-established and not all that silly,"" said Kermit Roosevelt, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. ""This is just political posturing, and Cruz, as a Harvard law grad, presumably knows it."" Our ruling Cruz, railing against modern interpretations of the Commerce Clause and the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, said, ""We have a federal government that thinks they have the authority to regulate our toilet seats."" While federal attention to toilet seats has dropped since its brief foray into seat shape in the ‘70s, and now mainly addresses toilet access for workers and height for wheelchair users, Cruz is firmly right that the courts, Congress, and executive agencies claim federal power to regulate them. His toilet trivia is . Editor's note: We updated this item on March 26, 2013, to clarify that the U.S. Access Board requires most restrooms in ADA-covered buildings to have at least one accessible toilet."
|
16962
|
"In Texas, ""a faceless hospital panel can deny life-sustaining care, giving you only 10 days to find another facility for your mother, dad, or young child, even if the patient is conscious."
|
"Texas Right to Life said in Texas, ""a faceless hospital panel can deny life-sustaining care, giving you only 10 days to find another facility for your mother, dad, or young child, even if the patient is conscious."" This claim accurately tracks a portion of the law and we see how one could construe this scenario. The law doesn't specify how hospital review panels should be composed or run. But doctors and hospitals insist the law has been carried out in ways not acknowledged here. For starters, the rarely convened review panels aren’t faceless; committee members are reportedly introduced at the reviews. Also, consciousness is not an element of the law. Finally, the law permits courts to add to the 10 days provided for families to find an alternate facility, which the ad doesn’t mention."
|
mixture
|
Corrections and Updates, Health Care, Legal Issues, Texas, Texas Right to Life,
|
"UPDATE: On May 29, 2014, we rated a claim by Texas Right to Life that in Texas, ""faceless"" panels can judge whether to continue a person's care. But we initially misreported a word in the group's statement. Texas Right to Life's ad referred to ""life-sustaining"" care -- not ""life-saving"" care, which is what we wrote. Our correction of our error leads us to conclude the group's claim accurately tracked a portion of the law. Consequently, we are changing our rating to . An ad targeting a Republican state senator opened with what sounded like a heartbeat and a wailing siren in the background as the narrator read words displayed on screen: ""If your loved one is in the hospital, you may be shocked to learn that a faceless hospital panel can deny life-sustaining care, giving you only 10 days to find another facility for your mother, dad, or young child, even if the patient is conscious."" A moment later, the narrator said: ""This actually happens to families across Texas."" Death panels, Texas style? Group cites 1999 law In 2013, state Sen. Bob Deuell, a Greenville physician, unsuccessfully proposed changes in a 1999 law that had created a process for situations when there is no advance directive from a patient regarding an end-of-life decision and there’s disagreement between the primary physician and a patient's family over continuing treatment. Texas Right to Life, which describes itself as the state’s oldest ""pro-life"" group, opposed Deuell’s proposal and also created the ad, which it publicized in a press release. Deuell ultimately lost his 2014 runoff for the GOP nomination to challenger Bob Hall. Asked the basis of the ad claim, spokeswoman Melissa Conway emailed a statement from John Seago, Texas Right to Life’s legislative director, referring to Section 166.046 of the Texas Health and Safety Code, which states that a hospital review committee may align with a primary physician on cutting off or continuing a patient’s life-sustaining care. If a panel agrees on ending such care, the patient or person responsible for their care has 10 days to acquire another physician or move to another facility before the hospital is no longer obligated to provide care, the law says, though a court shall extend the 10-day period if it finds a reasonable expectation a physician or facility that will honor the patient's desires will be found with the added time. The law defines ""life-sustaining"" treatment as treatment that, based on reasonable medical judgment, sustains the life of a patient without which the patient will die. ""The term includes both life-sustaining medications and artificial life support, such as mechanical breathing machines, kidney dialysis treatment, and artificial nutrition and hydration,"" the law says. By email, Seago pointed out the law is silent on who should serve on a review committee nor, he wrote, does it require participants to be identified to the affected family. Seago also said Texas Right to Life, which has advocated for patients, has attended review meetings in which not all committee members were revealed. Seago urged us to reach out to lawyers including Jerri Lynn Ward of Lakeway, near Austin, who said by email that none of her clients--among them, Andrea Clark, whose 2006 dying drew news coverage--knew the names of committee members before review proceedings began. ""I would call that being faceless,"" Ward said. Other views To our inquiries, others including lawyers, physicians and advocacy groups for hospitals and doctors told us the ad claim misrepresents how the Texas law has been carried out. The Texas Hospital Association, which describes itself as the political and educational advocate for more than 430 hospitals and health systems, said the claim misrepresents elements of such extremely rare hospital committee reviews. By telephone, Carrie Kroll agreed that ""at the end of the day, the hospital can say no, we’re not going to provide care."" But review panels aren’t faceless, Kroll said, in that individuals on the panels meet with the families or guardians challenging a physician’s judgment. Also, Kroll said, most hospitals provide patient ""liaisons"" to guide families and loved ones through the reviews. The Senate-approved version of Deuell’s failed 2013 proposal mandated such liaisons during reviews, according to a Texas Medical Association summary emailed to us by association spokesman Steve Levine. On another front, Kroll said, ""we’re not talking about life-saving care. In most of these instances, it’s a situation where the person is dying. They are not going to walk out of that hospital even if they are conscious. They’re in the end of their life--maybe minutes, days, hours… But they’re not somebody who has gone in for a knee replacement and the hospital is just tired of dealing with them and is going to kill them, as an example,"" Kroll said. Hospital association spokesman Lance Lunsford, asked how often review panels must resolve such disputes, emailed us a summary of a 2012 association survey of 212 hospitals and hospital systems. In 2011, according to the summary, the review process was initiated 21 times at 16 hospitals or systems. The group’s survey for 2010 identified a single review that year, the summary says, and its survey for 2009 indicated the process was initiated twice in two systems. Kroll put us in touch with Jeanine Graf, medical director of the pediatric intensive care unit at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, who told us she has served on that hospital’s bioethics committee for at least 15 years. Once a year or every other year, Graf said by phone, the committee decides a child’s care should end because more care would be futile. Otherwise, Graf said, ""we’re just prolonging their deaths."" ""It’s not a faceless committee,"" Graf said. ""The family comes to the committee,"" which consists of nurses, physicians, religious officials and an ethicist, ""and pleads their case. There’s no anonymity. We identify ourselves."" Also, Graf said, she has never seen a patient in such circumstances who was aware of their surroundings. ""They are often the sickest patients who are expected to die no matter what we do,"" she said. After a panel decides more care is unwarranted, usually after a meeting that runs several hours, the family is given at least 10 business days to act, Graf said. ""It very rarely comes to that 10-day clock,"" Graf said. ""The person may die in the interim."" For the medical association, Levine similarly challenged the description of the review committees as ""faceless"" and said the ""rarely used dispute resolution process is used only for terminally or irreversibly ill patients."" Levine suggested we consult attorney Thomas Mayo, an associate professor of law at Southern Methodist University. By email, Mayo told us that since 1998, he’s been part of a statewide working group that regularly discusses the relevant law. By telephone, Mayo suggested the law is more complex than the ad indicates. ""Is it possible a conscious person could be denied life-sustaining treatment because of the actions of a committee? I guess… in the sense the ethics committee has to be consulted and if it is consulted and agrees with the (primary) doctor, then this doctor after a period of time is not obligated to provide that treatment."" Mayo later emailed, calling the statement ""mostly wrong. There is no ‘faceless hospital panel,’ ... and consciousness isn’t the issue. Although the statute doesn’t specify that"" the ""patient should be diagnosed with a terminal or"" an ""irreversible condition in order for this law to apply, that does appear to be the case as a matter of medical practice within the applicable standard of care."" Mayo urged us to contact Robert L. Fine, a Dallas palliative-care physician who told us he’s advised legislators about the law on behalf of his employer, the Baylor Health Care System, and the state medical and hospital associations. By email, Fine expressed skepticism about any physician or review committee employing the law to judge the condition of anyone not terminally or irreversibly ill. ""I don’t know of a single hospital ethics committee that would let that happen,"" Fine said. Affected patients are ""not going to be cured,"" Fine said. ""When these cases come up… it’s always when a patient is terminal or irreversibly ill; typically"" when they’re suffering; often when there is ""division within the family""; and only when an attending physician says further treatment is inappropriate, Fine said, often because the nursing staff is urging that decision. Fine also said: ""I can’t promise you there’s not some rogue hospital or committee out there. But the question would be why isn’t the family taking that"" result ""public?"" Group stands by claim Next, we ran what the medical community was telling us past Seago, who replied by email that nothing disproved what the law allows to occur, including the ""faceless"" panels. Seago pointed out, too, the law doesn’t limit review panels to considering cases involving terminally ill patients. ""Our ad was about the law and instead of looking at the law you are trusting the testimony of doctors,"" Seago emailed. Our ruling Texas Right to Life said in Texas, ""a faceless hospital panel can deny life-sustaining care, giving you only 10 days to find another facility for your mother, dad, or young child, even if the patient is conscious."" This claim accurately tracks a portion of the law and we see how one could construe this scenario. The law doesn't specify how hospital review panels should be composed or run. But doctors and hospitals insist the law has been carried out in ways not acknowledged here. For starters, the rarely convened review panels aren’t faceless; committee members are reportedly introduced at the reviews. Also, consciousness is not an element of the law. Finally, the law permits courts to add to the 10 days provided for families to find an alternate facility, which the ad doesn’t mention. We rate this claim, which is partly accurate but leaves out important details. The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context."
|
30840
|
Eating six or seven bananas at once can result in death from a lethal potassium overdose.
|
So fear not that you might drop dead from having a few too many bananas. You’ll likely take in more potassium from eating foods such as avocados and yogurt than from bananas.
|
false
|
Food, bananas
|
The chemical element potassium (K) is vital for the continued healthy functioning of your adrenal glands, which are located on top of your kidneys and composed of two parts, the medulla and the cortex. When properly functioning, the adrenal glands pump hormones out to your body in response to stress in your environment and also regulate the vital functions associated with these stress responses, such as switching on sweat glands to regulate body temperature, converting food into needed energy, regulating blood pressure, and triggering anti-inflammatory responses. Bananas have long been touted as an excellent source of dietary potassium, as that element is naturally present in the yellow fruit. Bananas not only supply your body with needed potassium but also provide other beneficial effects, such as lubricating your digestive tract, keeping you regular, and protecting your intestines from ulcers and abrasive acids. Given all those positives, why would anyone be concerned about overdosing on bananas? The answer is because there is too much of a good thing: Hyperkalemia (high potassium) in a medical condition that can result from factors such kidney disease or failure, Addison’s Disease, alcoholism, heavy drug use, low red blood cell count (from a severe injury or burn), Type 1 diabetes, or excessive use of potassium supplements. However, is there really enough potassium in bananas that one need worry about the fatal effects of consuming too many of them? It’s certainly a persistent belief, as demonstrated by the following video clip in which English travel show presenter Karl Pilkington repeats to comedian Ricky Gervais the claim that “if you eat more than six [bananas], it can kill you” (which is why, supposedly, bananas aren’t sold in bunches containing more than six): Working out the math shows there’s little cause for concern in this regard, though. The amount of potassium one takes in from eating a single banana is about 422 mg, while the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of potassium for adults is about 4,700 mg per day. So the average adult could safely consume 11 bananas per day and still be taking in less potassium than is recommended as a healthy daily amount. Okay, but what if one is eating all those bananas at once, rather than spreading them out across the course of a day? According to the Linus Pauling Institute, “oral doses [of potassium] greater than 18 grams taken at one time in individuals not accustomed to high intakes may lead to severe hyperkalemia, even in those with normal kidney function.” That amount of potassium is the equivalent of consuming about 42 bananas, in one sitting, a gastronomical feat far beyond the unforced capabilities of most people. In fact, adverse effects of excessive consumption of potassium from food alone have never been documented. It is true that potassium from supplements or salt substitutes can result in hyperkalemia and possibly sudden death if excessively consumed by individuals with chronic renal insufficiency, but that’s not because potassium supplements are inherently dangerous. Rather, about 90% of potassium is excreted by the kidneys, so persons suffering from kidney disease (or other renal complications) have trouble excreting the excess potassium from potassium supplements to the point that it could reach dangerous levels if taken in excess.
|
1865
|
Chocolate lovers tend to weigh less: study.
|
People who ate chocolate a few times a week or more weighed less than those who rarely indulged, according to a U.S. study involving a thousand people.
|
true
|
Health News
|
"A model puts on a chocolate accessory backstage before the 9th Annual Chocolate Fashion Show in New York November 9, 2006. REUTERS/Eric Thayer (UNITED STATES) Researchers said the findings, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, don’t prove that adding a candy bar to your daily diet will help you shed pounds. Nor did the total amount of chocolate consumed have an impact. But the researchers, led by Beatrice Golomb, from the University of California San Diego, said it was possible that antioxidants in chocolate could be behind health benefits including lower blood pressure and cholesterol, as well as decreased body weight. “People have just assumed that because it comes with calories and it’s typically eaten as a sweet, therefore it would inherently have been one way, bad,” said Golomb. She and her colleagues used data from a study on cholesterol-lowering drugs that surveyed 1,000 healthy adults on typical eating habits, including how often they ate chocolate. The participants, who ranged from 20 to 85 years old, ate chocolate an average of twice per week and had an average body mass index, or BMI, of 28, which is considered overweight but not obese. The researchers found that people who ate chocolate with greater frequency tended to eat more calories overall, including more saturated fat, than those who went light on the candy. But even so, chocolate lovers tended to have a lower body weight. That was still the case after researchers accounted for age and gender, as well as how much they exercised. The effect worked out to a 2.3 to 3.2 kg (5 to 7 lb)difference between people who ate five servings of chocolate a week compared to those who didn’t eat any, Golomb said. However, it was only how often they ate chocolate, rather than the total amount, that was linked to their weight. Past studies have tied chocolate to lower blood pressure and cholesterol, and better insulin sensitivity, possibly because of antioxidants or other chemicals in cocoa. There are a number of possible explanations for the results, said Eric Ding, a nutritionist at the Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the study. One is that poorer people stick to the basics when they’re buying food and don’t eat as much chocolate. Poverty has been tied to higher body weight. Another possibility is that “people who lost weight reward themselves with chocolate, more than chocolate causing the weight loss,” he told Reuters Health. Because the new study is relatively small and couldn’t prove cause-and-effect, it’s hard to take any lessons from the findings, Ding said. But the key for chocolate lovers seems to be considering calories and knowing that not all chocolate is created equal. For example, past evidence suggests that antioxidants in chocolate called flavonoids are behind any benefits tied to chocolate — and dark chocolate has the most flavonoids. “If you consume chocolate, consume it in place of something else, rather than adding to your net daily calories. Try to consume dark chocolate,” he said. The researchers agreed that moderation is important. ""This certainly does not provide support for eating large amounts of chocolate,"" Golomb said. ""For those of us who do eat a little bit of chocolate regularly, perhaps any guilt associated with that might be qualified."" SOURCE: bit.ly/6D3TRk"
|
12449
|
ISIS is infiltrating America and using Syrians to do it.
|
"The ad said that ""ISIS is infiltrating America and using Syrians to do it."" ISIS may dream of carrying out this plan, but there is zero evidence so far of it having worked. In the few examples since 2001 of an ""infiltration"" leading to a terror attack, they have not involved ISIS terrorists from Syria. Indeed, the ad’s focus on infiltration amounts to misdirection from a concern that’s more worrisome to terrorism experts -- self-radicalization by people born in America or brought here as youngsters."
|
false
|
Georgia, Homeland Security, Terrorism, National Republican Congressional Committee,
|
"In the hard-fought special election to fill a vacant, Atlanta-area congressional seat, a Republican group’s ad blares the alarm about terrorism on U.S. soil. In the ad, the National Republican Congressional Committee charges Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff with being soft on terrorism. ""ISIS is infiltrating America and using Syrians to do it,"" the ad’s narrator says in a steely voice. ""The FBI warned we can't safely screen every Syrian. Yet Jon Ossoff's liberal party bosses brought 10,000 Syrian refugees to America. And Ossoff supports their dangerous Iran nuclear deal allowing billions for the leading sponsor of terrorism. Billions that will fund terror. While terrorists infiltrate and attack with our safety at risk, Jon Ossoff is just too risky."" Just in case you didn’t get the point, the ad uses lots of not-very-subtle footage of facemask-wearing terrorists, burning American flags and the like. We’ve checked some portions of this narration previously -- the part about the FBI warnings on screenings got a Half True, for instance, and the part about the Iran nuclear deal funding terrorism also got a Half True. Here, we’ll look at the opening line -- that ""ISIS is infiltrating America and using Syrians to do it."" We found solid reasons to be dubious of this claim. The ad contends, twice, that ISIS supporters are ""infiltrating"" the United States from Syria in order to commit terrorist acts. The big problem with that claim: To date, there is not a single documented case of that happening. Nor are there any documented cases that come reasonably close to that description. ""There’s no sliver of truth here,"" said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a terrorism specialist at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. ""It’s simply a statement."" There is one area of the world where Syrian ISIS infiltration might be taking place. ISIS members posing as refugees from Syria can make their way to central and western Europe either over land or by boat from the Mediterranean. But that’s not the case for the United States, the locale that’s clearly the subject of the NRCC ad. For entering the United States, ""ISIS infiltration is not very efficient,"" Gartenstein-Ross said. It’s not that the screening process is perfect, he said, but rather a question of math. ""The refugee-selection process is designed to select very few military-age, single males, and even if you fit the criteria, the odds are still not good that you’ll get selected"" to go to the United States, he said. And before gaining entry to the United States, you are likely to have a long wait in a refugee camp. (We’ve previously looked at the composition of refugees by age and sex here.) NRCC spokeswoman Maddie Anderson argued for the ad’s accuracy by saying that in addition to physical infiltration, ""ISIS is also infiltrating us with their ideology by seeking to inspire lone wolf attacks here from afar. The domestic terrorists have gotten their ideas and been inspired by what’s going on in the Middle East."" We have no objection to the argument that ISIS is inspiring lone-wolf terrorists -- the list below is chock full of examples. But the ad didn’t urge efforts to combat ideological propaganda on social media. It used the phrase ""terrorists infiltrate"" and referred to Syrian refugee admissions -- of humans, not ideas. So the ad gives a very different impression than the one Anderson was arguing. The rare instances in which an adult entered the United States and later went on to commit a terrorist act don’t apply to what the ad said about Syrians. The closest example might be the case of two Iraqi immigrants, Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, who were arrested in 2011 in a sting in Bowling Green, Ky. Before coming to the United States, Alwan had made bombs that allegedly targeted American military personnel in Iraq. So he was a terrorist before coming to the United States, and he did enter -- ""infiltrate"" -- the country. But he came to the United States before ISIS existed, and before the beginning of the civil war that triggered an influx of displaced Syrians. Another example involves Egyptian national Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, the perpetrator of a 2002 mass shooting at the Los Angeles airport. Prior to his immigration to the United States, Egyptian authorities accused him of belonging to the terrorist organization Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (though he denied this charge). The FBI concluded that Hadayet’s killing spree was a terrorist act, but he acted alone and hoped to influence U.S. government policy toward Palestine. This attack pre-dates the dynamic in Syria by a decade and a half. Among more recent perpetrators, Tashfeen Malik, half of the married couple behind the 2015 San Bernardino shootings, came in on a marriage visa. But she was a Pakistani who had come most recently from Saudi Arabia -- not Syria. She pledged loyalty to ISIS shortly before the attack. However, far more common than ""infiltration"" cases are examples of self-radicalization by people already in the United States, mostly people who were born and/or raised in America. Often, they are driven to terrorism by propaganda and social media networks, and sometimes they pledge loyalty to ISIS before committing an attack. Some examples of self-radicalization since the 9/11 attacks: • Seattle Jewish Federation shooting. In July 2006, Naveed Afzal Haq killed one woman and injured five others at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle. He was a U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent who grew up in Washington state. • University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill attack. In March 2006, UNC graduate Mohammad Reza Taheri-azar drove an SUV onto campus, injuring nine pedestrians. He was born in Iran but entered the United States as a young child and was a naturalized U.S. citizen. • Little Rock recruiting station shooting. In 2009, Abdulhakim Muhammed pleaded guilty to killing Pvt. William Long and wounding Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula during a shooting outside a U.S. Army recruiting station in Little Rock, Ark. Born as Carlos Bledsoe and reared as a Baptist in Memphis, Tenn., he was a convert to Islam. • Fort Hood shooting. In 2009, Nidal Hasan, a psychiatrist and major in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, that left 13 soldiers and civilians dead and more than two dozen others wounded. Hasan was of Palestinian descent, but he was born in Virginia and was a U.S. citizen. • The ""underwear bomber."" In 2009, Umar Farook Abdulmutallab became known as the ""underwear bomber"" on Dec. 25, 2009, after he tried to blow up a plane flying to Detroit using a bomb strapped to his underwear. Unlike others on this list, he did not try to settle in the United States but rather boarded a U.S.-bound flight overseas. • Times Square bombing. In 2010, Faisal Shahzad tried to plant a bomb in Times Square in New York City. He did come to the United States to be a student, but he was from a prominent Pakistani military family, and he appears to have radicalized after arriving in the United States. • Boston Marathon bombing. In 2013, brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev carried out twin explosive device attacks at the Boston Marathon, killing three spectators and injuring more than 260 people. The brothers came to the United States as children after their parents fled Chechnya. They arrived in the United States on tourist visas, and then their family applied for asylum. Dzhokhar became a U.S. citizen on Sept. 11, 2012, while Tamerlan had a green card and had applied for citizenship. • Queens hatchet attack. In 2014, Zale H. Thompson injured two New York City police officers using a metal hatchet. Police officials said Thompson was a self-radicalized convert to Islam. • Chattanooga shooting. In 2015, Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez shot and killed five people at two military sites Chattanooga. Abdulazeez was born in Kuwait but moved with his family to the United States as an infant, and he became a naturalized citizen. The FBI said the shooter was inspired by foreign terrorist propaganda. • San Bernardino shootings. The other half of the married couple that carried out the 2015 attack -- Syed Rizwan Farook -- was a U.S. citizen. His parents had emigrated from Pakistan to Chicago, and Farook was born in the United States and raised in California. • Orlando Pulse shootings. In 2016, Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in an Orlando nightclub shooting. He was born in the United States to Afghan immigrant parents. • New York-New Jersey bombings. In 2016, three bombs exploded in New York City and New Jersey, injuring at least 30 people. The alleged perpetrator, Ahmad Khan Rahimi, was born in Afghanistan but came to the United States at age 7 and became a U.S. citizen. • Ohio State university attack. In 2016, Abdul Razal Ali Artan allegedly injured 13 in an attack on the campus of Ohio State University. Artan, an Ohio State student, came to the United States from Somalia as a child and was a legal permanent resident. Bottom line: In most of the terrorist attacks attempted on U.S. soil since 9/11, the perpetrator has either been born in the United States or brought here as a child. Typically, the perpetrator has been influenced by propaganda and gone through a process of self-radicalization inside the United States. ""As far as I know, there is not a single example of a refugee or any other immigrant from Syria committing an act of terrorism in the U.S.,"" said Barnett Rubin, associate director of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University. ""If ISIS is trying to attack the U.S. by infiltrating Syrian terrorists, it has completely failed."" The ad said that ""ISIS is infiltrating America and using Syrians to do it."" ISIS may dream of carrying out this plan, but there is zero evidence so far of it having worked. In the few examples since 2001 of an ""infiltration"" leading to a terror attack, they have not involved ISIS terrorists from Syria. Indeed, the ad’s focus on infiltration amounts to misdirection from a concern that’s more worrisome to terrorism experts -- self-radicalization by people born in America or brought here as youngsters."
|
14285
|
"Austin’s Stop Abuse for Everyone has seen in its offices ""sexual assault survivors that report being attacked by their ridesharing drivers, at a rate of one per month."
|
"Supporters of the anti-proposition group wrote that Austin’s SAFE has seen in its offices ""sexual assault survivors that report being attacked by their ridesharing drivers, at a rate of one per month."" According to SAFE’s CEO, that count reflected what forensic nurses heard from victims over the last half of 2015. Separately, an Austin police tally of assault complaints tied to ride-hailed drivers might signal an even greater per-month average for that year. However, we learned, SAFE heard no such reports from sexual assault victims through the first three-plus months of 2016, perhaps a welcome indication that the pattern reported for 2015 hasn't persisted. The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context."
|
mixture
|
Elections, Crime, Transportation, Texas, Our City, Our Safety, Our Choice,
|
"A fund-raising letter from opponents of a May 2016 Austin ballot proposition affecting drivers for ride-hailing services made us wonder about assaults of residents who purchase a ride through Uber or Lyft. The April 8, 2016, letter, signed by more than 30 women including current and former Austin City Council members, solicits donations to Our City, Our Safety, Our Choice, which urges Austin residents to vote ""no"" on the proposition before voters May 7. At issue: Whether to replace a city ordinance requiring ride-hailing services to submit drivers to background checks including fingerprinting with a mandate preferred by the services which doesn’t require fingerprinting. The letter’s first section refers to a tally of Travis County sexual assaults in 2015 before noting that many assaults go unreported, a conclusion the letter attributes to a Jan. 28, 2016, press release from SAFE, which stands for Stop Abuse for Everyone; the alliance brings together the Austin Children’s Shelter and SafePlace, which says it provides safety for individuals and families affected by sexual and domestic violence. In a new paragraph, the letter says safety ""must be a priority for our city, and that includes the safety of riders."" Then the letter says: ""In the words of one of SAFE Alliance’s forensic nurses ‘I have taken care of about a thousand people in the immediate aftermath of sexual assault . . . I am now seeing a pattern of rape reports that all involve ridesharing and it is of extreme concern to me.’ ""SAFE describes ‘seeing too many sexual assault survivors that report being attacked by their ridesharing drivers, at a rate of one per month in our offices.’"" One reported assault-by-driver a month? Group points to web post We asked the campaign coordinator for Our City, Our Safety, Our Choice about the basis of the quoted statement. By email, Mykle Tomlinson replied that the letter originated with supportive women, not the group. He also pointed us to the Jan. 28, 2016, web post by Kelly White, CEO of the SAFE Alliance. And at first, it looked to us like the anti-proposition group’s claim was fully backed by what White wrote. In fact, after White’s post declares the rate of ""one per month,"" it says that’s an undercount, adding: ""And that’s just the people we see, which is not nearly everyone. Some go to other organizations, some go to the police, and sadly many go nowhere at all."" That well could be. At the least, a January 2016 Austin Police Department break-out of complaints about sex assaults connected to local ride-hailed vehicles or taxi rides supports speculation there may have been more than one alleged sex assault a month in 2015 connected to a ride-hailed driver. The department’s list, which we fielded for another fact check, indicates that from Jan. 15, 2015 through Jan. 1, 2016, police fielded 23 complaints concerning drivers for Uber, Lyft or, in two cases, ""independent"" ride-hailed vehicles. Entries on the list indicate possible crimes ranging from assault ""sexual nature"" to sexual assault to rape. We asked the Uber and Lyft companies for input about this claim. By email, Uber spokeswoman Jennifer Mullin said that of the SAFE-described assault allegations, ""we have not been notified of any arrests or charges of this nature against a driver while using the Uber platform in Austin."" We didn’t hear back from Lyft. Pattern in 2015 hasn’t extended into 2016 So, case closed on this ""one per month"" claim? Not quite, we found, because Austin’s SAFE reports no such reports from sex-assault victims in 2016. White, whom we reached by phone, said she wrote her January post to endorse an attempt by Austin Mayor Steve Adler to encourage, not require, individuals to provide their fingerprints before being permitted to work for Austin ride-hailing services. And, White told us, the ""one per month"" statement was rooted in the experiences of the alliance’s forensic nurses who, starting in June 2015, were newly available on the group’s campus to provide no-charge sexual assault forensic exams like those needed for evidence purposes; a clinic dedicated to providing the exams, Eloise House, opened on the campus in August 2015. By phone, alliance spokeswoman Victoria Berryhill said the alliance had become the sole Austin-area provider of the exams previously performed by another group in hospitals. Through 2015, White said, six women each told a nurse she’d been taken home and assaulted by a driver for the Uber or Lyft service. ""The pattern was of young women alone late at night"" or in ""early morning hours, getting under the influence, getting into a vehicle with a stranger,"" White said, ""and then they were getting taken back to their homes and they were getting assaulted in their own homes."" However, in the first few months of 2016, Austin’s SAFE nurses fielded no such driver-assault reports. That is, she said, ""we are not seeing"" the pattern ""any more."" Our ruling Supporters of the anti-proposition group wrote that Austin’s SAFE has seen in its offices ""sexual assault survivors that report being attacked by their ridesharing drivers, at a rate of one per month."" According to SAFE’s CEO, that count reflected what forensic nurses heard from victims over the last half of 2015. Separately, an Austin police tally of assault complaints tied to ride-hailed drivers might signal an even greater per-month average for that year. However, we learned, SAFE heard no such reports from sexual assault victims through the first three-plus months of 2016, perhaps a welcome indication that the pattern reported for 2015 hasn't persisted. The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context."
|
9536
|
Amgen’s Repatha Unclogs Arteries in Good Sign for Future Sales
|
This story looks at new findings on the benefits of adding a monoclonal antibody drug known as Repatha to statin therapy in people with heart disease. We liked that the story makes it clear that so far, prescribers and insurers have been underwhelmed by the evidence showing that the drug can reduce heart attacks and deaths better than already-available and far-cheaper statins. We get some behind-the-scenes details on how hard it is to get this drug covered by insurers, and given dollar figures on cost of the drug. This new study, though, apparently “bodes well” for changing this reluctance, because researchers saw fewer heart attacks, deaths, and other serious cardiac events in the study group taking Repatha and a statin, compared to the statin-only group. Yet, the story states that the study was too small to determine if these numbers were significant. And if that’s the case, why is this study newsworthy? Given that Bloomberg primarily has a financial audience, presumably it’s to signal to investors that the drug companies involved may finally get the evidence they need to get these expensive drugs prescribed en masse, and make everyone involved richer. For the rest of us–especially those of us looking to better reduce our risk of death from a heart attack–the story needed a few more details: What are the harms of this drug? How big was this trial? Who were these subjects and did they already have cardiovascular disease? What are the risks of getting readers excited by findings from a study “not powered to assess effects on cardiovascular events?” Perhaps most important, when sources are allowed to profess their “love” for a new drug, readers should be told when those sources have financial interests that might bias them. As Amgen admits in the bottom of their news release, “The effect of Repatha® on cardiovascular morbidity and mortality has not been determined.” This means a drug approved and marketed for heart disease hasn’t been shown to effectively treat it, yet it’s expensive and carries side effects. The drug company has a huge stake in convincing everyone these risks are worth it, and that the evidence is more compelling than it seems. Financially-minded readers want to make a good investment not predicated on hype, and readers want to take a safe, effective drug.
|
mixture
|
heart health,monoclonal antibody drugs,repatha
|
This is a strong point of the story, not only stating the cost but discussing it in the context of why insurers are reluctant to cover it. It states: Sales of Repatha and Praluent, made by Regeneron and Sanofi, have been slow to ramp up because insurers have restricted their coverage, seeing the list price of about $14,000 a year as too expensive if the treatments only lower cholesterol. The story contains a numerical chart that shows outcomes of the study related to reductions in plaque volume, plaque regression, death, heart attack, first major heart event and muscle pain (a known negative side effect). For example, it says plaque regression was measured in 64 percent of patients in the drug group who received Repatha and a stain compared to 47 percent in the group who received a placebo and a statin. We’re also told that the study was too small to provide reliable numbers on heart attacks, death and major heart events (such as needing surgery). But if that’s the case, why allow a conflicted source to claim — without challenge — that the drugs are “lifesaving” for the right patients? We think that quote throws the story out of balance. The story also would have been stronger if it had given readers more context to make sense of these numbers: How many patients were in each treatment group? How long did this study last? The chart did include one side effect, muscle pain. However, it didn’t explain there are other risks that come with taking monoclonal antibody drugs, such as local allergic reactions and more severe immune reactions. Nor did it explain how common these are. The story did not provide enough details to readers that would allow them to ascertain the quality of evidence. The story doesn’t caution that this was a conference presentation that likely received only limited peer review. We get a hint that it’s a controlled trial with a placebo group, thanks to the chart that shows outcomes among the different treatment groups. But otherwise we’re left to fill in the blanks on things like overall study size, length of trial, types of people included (did they already have cardiovascular disease? ), and limitations. The story does not disease monger. And we want to praise the story for explaining that insurers have been reluctant to cover it despite marketing pressures from the drug industry. This is because there’s a lack of evidence that it works any better than cheaper medications, something readers need to know. This is a major shortcoming of the story. It quotes an expert source who says he “loves these drugs” and calls them “lifesaving” — even though they’ve never been shown to prolong survival — and fails to disclose to readers that the source is a paid consultant to Amgen, which makes the drug being reported on (as noted in the disclosure statement of this Medscape article). A second source complains about the difficulty of getting insurance coverage for these drugs, but the story again fails to mention that he’s a paid consultant to Regeneron, which makes a competing monoclonal antibody (noted in a different disclosure statement at Medscape). The story discusses the primary alternative, which are statins. The story did not compare it to any other alternatives, of which there are several. This is a strong point of the story. It’s clear the drug is approved and available, yet prescribers are overall reluctant to prescribe it to due to unclear benefits. We’re also given some insight into how complicated it is for doctors to try and get insurer approval, which has an impact on availability. The story makes it clear that this study is novel because it demonstrates that the drug can (possibly) improve not just cholesterol levels but also arterial plaque levels, which suggests potential benefit on outcomes. It’s clear from unique quotes and other details that this story did not rely excessively on a news release.
|
12553
|
"Poor people pay ""in some cases, up to 25 percent of (their) income for water."
|
Damon said that poor people sometimes pay as much as 25 percent of their income for water. A decade-old United Nations report said that the urban poor in Uganda were paying very nearly that much, about 22 percent of their wages. Damon’s co-founder of Water.org has seen people spending this much in his work in Honduras. More recent hard data appears to be in short supply. But it wouldn’t take much for Damon’s claim to be accurate. Given that poor people pay an inordinate share of whatever money they have for basic needs, and they tend to live in places where water costs more, some people probably do spend as much as Damon said.
|
true
|
Global News Service, Poverty, Water, Matt Damon,
|
"Hollywood star Matt Damon has been a champion of bringing clean water and sanitation to the world’s poor for many years, co-founding the group Water.org. The organization links families to microloans so they can tap into safe water supplies. In a conversation with the president of the World Bank, Damon tried to convey a sense of the severity of the problem. ""The poor often pay more for water than the middle class,"" Damon said. ""These people have no savings, but they’re paying every day, in some cases, up to 25 percent of their income just for water."" People who live in poverty always spend most if not every penny of what little they earn on basic necessities. That is part of the crushing reality of being poor. But we wanted to know about the fraction of their income that goes toward water. The poor often pay more for #water than the middle class. They have no savings, but spend up to 25% of income for water. —Matt Damon @water pic.twitter.com/Ar98ZUOH6X Rosemary Gudelj, spokeswoman for Water.org, told us the statistic was based somewhat on anecdotal evidence. Gudelj said Damon drew on the work of the group’s co-founder Gary White. ""Gary’s statement has been, ‘I have met people who pay up to 25 percent of their income on water,’ "" Gudelj said. ""This comes from Gary’s experience in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, when doing research for his master’s thesis."" That might not seem like much to hang a claim on, but we did find a 2006 United Nations Development Program estimate that confirmed Damon’s point. ""In Uganda water payments represent as much as 22 percent of the average income of urban households in the poorest 20 percent of the income distribution,"" the report said. The report went on to say that in countries such as Argentina, El Salvador and Jamaica, the bottom fifth of households were spending over 10 percent of their money on water. The core problem, the report said, is the poorest families often pay the highest prices for water because they aren’t connected to the pipes that provide service to middle class and wealthy homes: ""In Jakarta, Lima, Manila and Nairobi households living in slums and low-income settlements typically pay 5–10 times or more for their water than high-income residents of the same city. In Manila an estimated 4 million people receive water resold through kiosks, pushcart vendors or tanker deliveries."" Each of those middlemen take their cut, and the cost of water rises accordingly. Now, that United Nations report is a decade old and progress has been made since. But Damon avoided hard numbers and the risk that some would be outdated. Taken at face value, he only said that some people pay as much as 25 percent of their income on water. To know the reality, the gold standard would be household spending surveys from a range of countries. But it looks like current ones for water expenditures don’t exist. A report from the advocacy group WaterAid used a baseline assumption that someone was buying the 50 liters/day minimum for drinking water and and sanitation set by the World Health Organization in compiling hypothetical water bills for many countries. But Michael Hanemann, an economist who specializes in water at the University of California Berkeley, said that’s a dicey set of calculations. ""In economics it is the case that when something is expensive, people buy less of it,"" he told PolitiFact. ""It is more likely that they are getting by with less water."" Or as likely, they are using unclean water, and paying the price with illness and bad health. By the way, the average water and sewer bill in the United States is about 0.5 percent of household income, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Our ruling Damon said that poor people sometimes pay as much as 25 percent of their income for water. A decade-old United Nations report said that the urban poor in Uganda were paying very nearly that much, about 22 percent of their wages. Damon’s co-founder of Water.org has seen people spending this much in his work in Honduras. More recent hard data appears to be in short supply. But it wouldn’t take much for Damon’s claim to be accurate. Given that poor people pay an inordinate share of whatever money they have for basic needs, and they tend to live in places where water costs more, some people probably do spend as much as Damon said. The facts we have are enough for us to rate this claim ."
|
10710
|
Study: PSA rise not good prostate cancer predictor
|
It did a better job quantifying harms, but a weaker job in evaluating the evidence. It also never addressed the option of not having PSA tests at all. Neither story addressed costs – a big issue given the evidence about unnecessary biopsies. This story focused on the study results, evaluating the value of tracking rising PSA levels. But it never dropped back to the big picture and never reminded men that NOT having a PSA test at all. The competing HealthDay story did, giving it a small but significant edge in completeness.
|
true
|
Associated Press,Cancer
|
No discussion of costs – not of PSA testing nor of subsequent biopsies. These are big cost issues that warranted at least a line. The story states the 1 in 20 needing biopsy for total PSA vs. the 1 in 7 needing biopsy for PSA velocity. What the article doesn’t quantify is whether there would be fewer false positive findings if PSA velocity was ignored. Better job than its HealthDay competition in actually quantifying the impact on reducing unnecessary biopsies. The story didn’t do as good a a job as its HealthDay competition, which spelled out how men in the study were all from the placebo arm of a drug trial and which provided a bit more detail on the quality of the evidence. Neither story indicated that study subjects were highly selected– normal prostate exam and PSA < 3 as entry criteria. This is important information that may influence how generalizable the findings may be. No disease mongering here. The story included quotes from two independent sources. The HealthDay competition addressed in a much more explcit manner the option of not having the PSA test at all, when it reported: “Current American Cancer Society prostate screening cancer guidelines recommend that men make an informed decision with their doctor about whether to be tested for prostate cancer. “Research has not yet proven that the potential benefits of testing outweigh the harms of testing and treatment,” according to the ACS.” The story stated that most men over 50 get PSA blood tests. The story made it clear that the study was to examine the value in a common practice of doing a biopsy in men with a normal PSA level but in whom an increase in PSA has been detected. Did not appear to rely on a sole news release.
|
11097
|
Weight loss from three diet drugs modest
|
While this was an informative story about the relative average weight loss attained with the use of three different weight loss medications, it neglected some important asepcts of the story needed for readers to understand the complete picture. The results from the studies need to be appreciated in the context of being best case scenarios, i.e. it included only a narrow range of subjects and then utilized the resources they could leverage to best enable them to lose weight. In the real life setting, the average weight loss attained is likely to be somewhat less and occurence of side effects may be higher. Adding to this that weight regain commonly occurs when the medications are stopped, it means that the health claims made for the weight loss observed in the studies is more tenuous. The costs of these drugs were not mentioned; they are major barriers to treatment and should have been discussed in detail. Providing this framework will better enable readers to appreciate a realistic role for medications in the quest for healthy weight.
|
mixture
|
There was no presentation of comparative costs for the three medications mentioned in the story. The benefits of treatment in terms of average weight loss were well presented. The benefits in terms of altered risk of heart disease and diabetes were not quantified. The story should have discussed the evidence (or lack thereof) that these medications can improve health in the long-term. The story should have discussed weight regain issues and failure rates. The story did mention the more commonly documented side effects or increased risks that have been associated with the use of the various medications discussed. While the story discussed the average weight loss observed, it did not provide estimates for the percentage of individuals taking the medication who did not report weight loss. The average weight loss attained with the use of the three medications was discussed. Several times the story linked weight loss from the drugs with reduction in the risk of heart disease and diabetes. But the story never explained how large was the potential heart/diabetes risk reduction. And, on the main point of weight reduction, the story never explained whether the evidence is clear that these drugs benefit health in the long term. The story also failed to provide a context for the weight loss maintenance; this is important because once people are no longer taking the medication, they are apt to regain the weight. This article was very good in its abscence of disease mongering content. The story appears to have made use of several scientific papers, editorials and conversations with weight loss experts that were and were not associated with the research reported on. Although the story was about three different medications used for weight loss, the story did not address the other treatment options that are available for obese individuals. Lifestyle treatments that include behavioral, dietary, and exercise interventions should have been mentioned as an alternate treatment and evidence should have been presented about the evidence of health effects with those alternatives. There is stronger evidence of health benefits from many lifestyle interventions than for drug therapy. The story was very clear about the availability of the three medications it discussed. The story was a basic presentation of some summary data on three weight loss medications. Because the story turned to a source who was not tied to the study, it is safe to assume it did not rely solely or largely on a news release.
|
|
9434
|
Replacing lymph nodes to ease painful legacy of cancer care
|
This article describes lymph node transfer surgery, which replaces lymph nodes that were removed or damaged during breast cancer surgery and radiation treatment with nodes from elsewhere on a patient’s body. The article briefly cautions readers near the end of the story about the limited data and the need for patients to be evaluated by a “comprehensive lymphedema program.” But it doesn’t address costs, potential harms, and the actual number of women who might benefit from this invasive procedure. It also relies on a single anecdote of a Wisconsin woman whose condition rendered her unable to shovel snow or cross-country ski–a degree of severity that doesn’t appear to reflect the experience of most patients. It’s good to see media coverage of lymphedema, a little-discussed consequence of some breast cancer treatment in which lymph nodes can no longer carry out their function of draining fluid, leading to swelling of a patient’s arm and other areas of the upper body. More awareness could be helpful because, according to Breastcancer.org, detecting early symptoms can catch the condition before it damages soft tissue, increasing the likelihood of successful treatment with compression and other low-risk interventions. Surgery is a relatively risky and untested treatment option, and news coverage needs to stress that.
|
mixture
|
breast cancer,cancer,surgery
|
There’s no discussion of costs, although the story does mention that insurance coverage varies. After featuring one woman’s positive outcome, the only discussion in the story about the scope of the benefits was this statement: About a third of lymph node transfer patients see some positive effect, Song said. It’s not clear where that information comes from–a clinical trial? More should have been said about what we know (or don’t know) about the potential benefits. The story does make it clear that this surgery works for “some but not all” women” and is “not a cure.” There’s no discussion of medical risks and hardships of surgery. Along with the usual risks posed by surgery, there’s a risk that lymph node transfer could cause lymphedema to develop in the part of the body where healthy nodes were extracted, according to Breastcancer.org. For many women those drawbacks may outweigh the potential for an uncertain benefit. Near the end of the story, there is a paragraph that conveys the tenuous nature of the evidence to support this surgery, saying a surgeon “noted that over about the past decade, the microsurgeries have been studied only in small research trials, and results vary with surgeon experience.” That helps readers know there isn’t much research, but we think more specifics were needed. How many patients have been studied? How do we know results vary by surgeon? What kind of research trials were these? Did they compare microsurgery to other approaches? Not all people with lymphedema have symptoms as severe as the patient featured in this story, whose arm was “painfully swollen to lift anything heavy or even fit into her usual clothing.” That should have been conveyed more clearly. The story also quotes a surgeon saying that typical patients have “had that swelling for a while” and “treatment is an uphill battle.” Of course, surgeons tend to see only a segment of cases that haven’t responded well to other treatments. Breastcancer.org calls surgery “an option of last resort for severe lymphedema that does not respond to treatment. Most people with lymphedema would not be considered candidates for surgery.” The two doctors quoted are both surgeons. The article would have benefited from an expert familiar with a range of treatments for breast cancer-related lymphedema; for example, a lymphedema-certified physical therapist. There are a range of treatment options for lymphedema. The article mentions a few: The main treatment consists of wearing compression bandages and massage to bring down swelling. A lymphedema specialist initially prescribed a large pump that massaged (patient) Wolfe-Tank’s arm for an hour a night, temporarily relieving some of the pain. It also says lymph node transfer is “not the only option. A technique called lymphovenous bypass reroutes lymph-carrying channels, going around damaged or missing nodes to drain into veins instead.” The story laudably conveys a recommendation that patients be “evaluated in a comprehensive lymphedema program to determine their best options.” Information on what a “comprehensive lymphedema program” is and how to find one would have been useful. The story says “a small but growing number of hospitals offer microsurgical attempts at relief from lymphedema.” It also mentions that it’s sometimes covered by insurance. The story mentions a “small but growing” number of hospitals that offer this microsurgery along with a backdrop of concern that women aren’t being adequately monitored for lymphedema following breast cancer treatment: Yet too often women aren’t warned about symptoms or checked for early signs, when lymphedema is more easily treated, said Dr. Sheldon Feldman of New York’s Montefiore Einstein Center for Cancer Care. He co-authored physician guidelines issued this fall by the American Society of Breast Surgeons on prevention and treatment of breast cancer-related lymphedema. The story does not appear to rely on a news release.
|
33423
|
Ongoing tetanus vaccine campaigns in Kenya are a ruse to sterilize women of childbearing age.
|
Despite such claims, no compelling evidence exists that the tetanus vaccination program in Kenya has been in any way animated by a desire to sterilize Kenyan women. Such claims have their roots in laboratory testing widely considered to have been flawed in method.
|
false
|
Medical, Disease
|
In October 2014, a group of concerned Catholic bishops in Kenya released a statement claiming a tetanus vaccine program aimed at women entering or in their childbearing years was in actuality a stealth attempt to sterilize women en masse for unstated reasons. Among questions raised by the group in its statement about the tetanus vaccine campaign in Kenya were why the vaccines were considered necessary if no “tetanus crisis in Kenya” had been declared, why the vaccine was offered primarily to women between the ages of 14 and 49, why boys and men were not targeted by the campaign, and why tetanus was “prioritized” over other illnesses affecting citizens of Kenya: We are not convinced that the government has taken adequate responsibility to ensure that Tetanus Toxoid vaccine (TT) laced with Beta human chorionic gonadotropin (b-HCG) sub unit is not being used by the sponsoring development partners. This has previously been used by the same partners in Philippines, Nicaragua and Mexico to vaccinate women against future pregnancy. Beta HCG sub unit is a hormone necessary for pregnancy. When injected as a vaccine to a non-pregnant woman, this Beta HCG sub unit combined with tetanus toxoid develops antibodies against tetanus and HCG so that if a woman’s egg becomes fertilized, her own natural HCG will be destroyed rendering her permanently infertile. In this situation tetanus vaccination has been used as a birth control method. We retain that the tetanus vaccination campaign bears the hallmarks of the programmes that were carried out in Philippines, Mexico and Nicaragua. We would want to participate in ensuring that the vaccines to be administered are free of this hormone. A Catholic doctors’ group in Kenya echoed the concerns of the bishops, and an anti-abortion site quoted Dr. Muhame Ngare of the Mercy Medical Centre in Nairobi as saying: We sent six samples from around Kenya to laboratories in South Africa. They tested positive for the HCG antigen. They were all laced with HCG. This proved right our worst fears; that this WHO campaign is not about eradicating neonatal tetanus but a well-coordinated forceful population control mass sterilization exercise using a proven fertility regulating vaccine. This evidence was presented to the Ministry of Health before the third round of immunization but was ignored. Dr. Collins Tabu, the head of immunization at Kenya’s Health Ministry, refuted the claim and said women immunized under the program in recent years subsequently conceived, promppting Dr. Ngare to respond with: Either we are lying or the government is lying. But ask yourself, ‘What reason do the Catholic doctors have for lying?’ The Catholic Church has been here in Kenya providing health care and vaccinating for 100 years for longer than Kenya has existed as a country. Usually we give a series three shots over two to three years, we give it anyone who comes into the clinic with an open wound, men, women or children. If this is intended to inoculate children in the womb, why give it to girls starting at 15 years? You cannot get married till you are 18. Dr. Ngare’s forced choice between the doctors or the Kenyan government neglects a third possibility: someone, somewhere is sincere but mistaken. His statement about the timing of vaccinations in respect to the earliest age women can marry in Kenya is a good illustration of fallacious thinking — since the vaccine is given in a five-shot series, beginning administration three years prior to marrying age makes more sense than exposing women who are married but not yet immunized to losing children to tetanus. The expressed concerns of Ngare and bishops in Kenya are the same as false rumors circulated over two decades ago in several other countries (Mexico, Tanzania, Nicaragua, and the Philippines) where the WHO and UNICEF undertook tetanus vaccination programs: Rumours have circulated recently in Mexico, Tanzania, Nicaragua, and the Philippines that WHO and UNICEF are using women as guinea pigs to test a contraceptive vaccine given to them under the guide of tetanus toxoid vaccine. These rumours, apparently initiated by so-called ‘pro-life’ groups, are completely untrue. The vaccines do not contain contraceptive vaccines of any other substance which interferes with fertility of pregnancy and their labeling accurately describes their actual contents. The false claims made by these groups have had an adverse impact on immunisation programmes in all four countries. The rumors have several aspects, one being the focus on women of childbearing age in Kenya. Neonatal tetanus resulted in the deaths of 550 Kenyan babies in 2013, and according to UNICEF, 58,000 babies worldwide died of neonatal tetanus in 2010 (a count that includes only known tetanus deaths). The organization explained the necessity of tetanus immunization in countries such as Kenya, and how the scope of the problem could be even larger than has been recorded to date: Maternal and neonatal tetanus represents a very high proportion of the total tetanus disease burden due mainly to inadequate immunization services, limited or absent clean delivery services and improper post-partum cord care. The majority of mothers and newborns dying of tetanus live in Africa and Southern and East Asia, generally in areas where women are poor, have little access to health care, and have little information about safe delivery practices. Once the disease is contracted, the fatality rate can be as high as 100% without hospital care and between 10% to 60% with hospital care. The true extent of the tetanus death toll is not known as many newborns and mothers die at home and neither the birth nor the death is reported. That information was echoed in an interview with James Elder, UNICEF’s Chief of Communications for East Africa, by the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-Fam): C-Fam: Are WHO and UNICEF experimenting with hCG vaccines in Kenya? Elder: No. The aim of the vaccination is to eliminate neonatal tetanus in Kenya through vaccination campaigns in districts that have been identified as at high risk for maternal and neonatal tetanus. C-Fam: Why would only the female population of child bearing age be targeted for this specific tetanus vaccination program? Elder: The aim of the vaccination campaign is to prevent neonatal tetanus in newborns who are the most vulnerable and bear the highest burden of tetanus disease. These children live in the parts of the country with limited access to health facilities — most births occur at home in unhygienic conditions. Some of the babies are born to girls as young as 15 years old from communities living in marginalized areas. Children born at home under unhygienic conditions are at risk of tetanus infection through the cut umbilical cord. Their mothers are also at risk of infection with tetanus infection during childbirth. Vaccinating girls and women of child bearing age (15 to 49 years) accords protection to the women even if they deliver at home in unhygienic conditions. They pass this protection to the unborn child in the womb. For the babies born to women who have received the required doses of the vaccine this protection from tetanus lasts for a few weeks after birth. That is why they have to get TT vaccine again through the routine immunization programme. C-Fam: Why does the Tetanus vaccine require 5 doses, when usually tetanus vaccination only requires one shot every 5 to 10 years? Elder: During vaccination campaigns that aim to protect newborns living in areas with limited access to health facilities, 3 doses are administered. The second dose after 1 month or soon thereafter and the third dose after 6 months. The 3 doses provide protection for 5 years. These are additional doses as most people have received some TT vaccine when they cut themselves or during visits to Antenatal clinics when pregnant. Five doses are recommended in the Kenya Vaccination policy to anyone (male or female) as it offers protection against tetanus for life. Another aspect of the debate concerns contraceptive vaccines, a medical initiative that has long been in the testing phase. However, the Catholic bishops in Kenya are not claiming that Kenyan women are being given the equivalent of a contraceptive vaccine (something which in current form would have to be readministered every few months to be effective), but rather are being sterilized through the injection of a substance (b-HCG) that renders them permanently infertile. The Kenya Catholic Doctors Association claimed they had tested samples of the tetanus vaccine used in Kenya and found them to be laced with (b-HCG) (a component of experimental birth control vaccines), but UNICEF noted that there was no laboratory in Kenya capable of making an accurate analysis of that nature: The tests were done in hospital laboratories in Kenya. The staff in these laboratories could not however tell whether the samples were vaccines or not, as this was not declared to the testing laboratories by the Catholic Doctors Association. The laboratories tested the samples for hCG using analyzers used for testing human samples like blood and urine for pregnancy. There is no laboratory in Kenya with the capacity to test non-human samples like vaccine for hCG. Again, this aspect of the claim perfectly mirrors similar rumors spread decades earlier during the course of tetanus vaccination programs in several other countries: After these rumours were spread, attempts were made to analyse TT vaccines for the presence of hCG. The vaccines were sent to hospital laboratories and tested using pregnancy test kits which are developed for use on serum and urine specimens, and are not appropriate for a vaccine such as TT, which contains a special preservative (merthiolate) and an adjuvant (aluminum salt). As a consequence of using these inappropriate tests, low levels of hCG-like activity were found in some samples of TT vaccine. The laboratories themselves recognised the insignificance of the results, which were below the reliable detection capability of the kits and were due to a nonspecific interaction between the adjuvant or other substances in the vaccine and the test kit. However, these results were misrepresented by the ‘pro-life’ groups with the resulting disruption of immunisation campaigns. When the vaccines were tested in laboratories which used properly validated test systems, the results clearly showed that the vaccines did not contain hCG. The low levels of hCG-like activity seen in some samples were the result of false positive reactions. In fact, in a laboratory in Hungary, it was shown that the sterile water supply from the local hospital gave a higher false positive level of hCG than did the TT vaccine. The conspiracy theory that Kenya’s tetanus vaccination program is actually aimed at sterilization, not vaccination, has had staying power long after the original controversy passed. This is, in part, thanks to one of the companies tasked to perform analyses by the Catholic Doctors Association losing their laboratory accreditation years after the fact. In December 2016, a company that had been involved in efforts to test the tetanus vaccine — Agriq-Quest — was audited by both the Kenya Accreditation Service (KENAS) and the International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC). That audit resulted in Agri-Quest losing its laboratory accreditation. A former employee who resigned from Agriq-Quest told Business Daily Africa in January 2017 that the lab had been claiming to perform analyses they were not capable of performing: A former employee at Agriq-Quest who requested anonymity for fear of victimisation claimed that the lab lacked capacity to carry out the tests it was handling for its clients, including the Ministry of Health […]. Agriq-Quest, however, claimed through an attorney that their loss of accreditation came as a result of more nefarious reasons — the government hadn’t paid them for analyses they performed on behalf of the Ministry of Health and The Catholic Doctors Association because the Ministry wanted them to doctor their results: Agriq-Quest, through their lawyer Gitobu Imanyara, last year claimed that the government had not paid them Sh13.8 million for tests performed on controversial tetanus and polio vaccines. They claimed that the government’s decision was as a result of the company’s refusal to doctor results in favour on the Ministry of Health which had jointly asked for the analysis with the Catholic Church. The company’s results from tests carried out on the vials showed that the samples of the vaccines were contaminated as had been claimed by the Catholic Church and Agriq-Quest claimed the government wanted the results altered to show that they were fit to be administered to women and children. While no evidence has been offered to suggest that narrative was anything other than a desperate PR move by a business whose accreditation had been revoked, the claim of a government’s mandating doctored results to sell a secret sterilization program has not been ignored by conspiracy minded websites such as Your News Wire, which continued to promote Agriq-Quest’s claims as recently as February 2018.
|
30945
|
An image contrasts radically different gun laws and homicide rates in Honduras and Switzerland.
|
All in all, this meme compares two countries that aren’t the least bit similar, then gets wrong nearly all the aspects of those countries it references. As such, it isn’t the least bit useful or instructive as a discussion point for debates over gun ownership laws.
|
false
|
Politics Guns, gun statistics, switzerland
|
Every mass shooting event in the United States prompts renewed debate about the efficacy of gun control regulations, and the 1 October 2015 shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon that left nine people dead on was no exception. Such debates typically feature each side presenting charts contrasting violent crime and homicide rates in countries with permissive and restrictive gun ownership laws to make the case that the prevalence of guns corresponds to either higher or lower crime rates. The wake of the Umpqua Community College shooting brought the widespread online circulation of an image which sought to make the point that two countries of roughly equal population, Honduras and Switzerland, had radically different laws regarding gun ownership and radically different homicide rates: Switzerland, where gun ownership is supposedly mandatory, has the world’s lowest homicide rate, while Honduras, where gun ownership is supposedly prohibited, has the world’s highest homicide rate: First off, even before we check the specific claims about each country, we have to note that this item presents a flawed premise. For a comparison of this nature to be valid, the two things being compared should be fairly equivalent outside of the factors being examined, but that isn’t the case here. The two countries mentioned here are so very different that this isn’t just a comparison of apples and oranges; it’s more like a comparison of apples and radishes. Honduras and Switzerland are roughly equivalent in population (a little of upwards of 8 million people each), but other than that, they aren’t the least bit similar in geography, economics, or culture. Switzerland is a small, landlocked country in western Europe surrounded by three of the most affluent countries in the world (Germany, France, and Italy) in terms of gross domestic product (GDP), and even though Switzerland itself is fairly small in population (96th in the world) and size (134th in the world), it ranks in the top 20 in terms of GDP. On the other hand, Honduras is a Central American country that is nearly three times the size of Switzerland and possesses coasts along both the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean sea, but is a “lower middle-income country with persistent poverty and inequality challenges,”with a GDP only about 2.5% that of Switzerland and three neighbors (Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala) that share similar economic conditions. Not to mention that Honduras is right in the path of the flow of drugs shipped by sea and air from Colombia and has therefore been ravaged by the drug war and its attendant factors of massive criminal organizations, violence, and governmental instability. As far as homicide rates go, Honduras does have the highest intentional homicide rate in the world at about 90.4 homicides per 100,000 people per year (which is even shockingly higher than the homicide rate of the next worst country, Venezuela, at 53.7). Although Switzerland’s intentional homicide rate is indeed low at 0.6, it isn’t quite the lowest in the world: it’s bested by several other countries such as Liechtenstein, Monaco, Iceland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, the latter two of which have some of the most restrictive gun control laws in the world. Moreover, a better metric for comparison purposes here might perhaps be the firearm-related death rate rather than the overall intentional homicide rate; in that case, Honduras is still the worst, but Switzerland doesn’t fare quite as well (ranking behind about 43 other countries). Additionally, it is not true that Honduras “bans citizens from owning guns” nor that Switzerland “requires citizens to own guns.” Honduras enacted a ban on open and concealed carry in 2007, but a 2012 news report stated that “under the existing law, citizens are allowed to own as many as five personal firearms,” and in mid-2014 Guns & Ammo rated Honduras as one of the “10 Best Countries for Gun Owners,” saying that “Hondurans may purchase most popular types of shotguns, handguns or rifles for the recognized purposes of self-defense and recreation.” While Switzerland ranks fourth among all countries in gun ownership per capita (much higher than Honduras), they do not “require” all their citizens to own guns. Switzerland has a long history of mandatory military service for all able-bodied male citizens. The government issues firearms to conscripted men which, after training, they take home with them and keep until the conclusion of their military obligation (about age 34 for non-officers), but no other citizens are “required” to own guns: Switzerland trails behind only the U.S, Yemen and Serbia in the number of guns per capita; between 2.3 million and 4.5 million military and private firearms are estimated to be in circulation in a country of only 8 million people. Yet, despite the prevalence of guns, the violent-crime rate is low: government figures show about 0.5 gun homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2010. By comparison, the U.S rate in the same year was about 5 firearm killings per 100,000 people, according to a 2011 U.N. report. Unlike some other heavily armed nations, Switzerland’s gun ownership is deeply rooted in a sense of patriotic duty and national identity. Weapons are kept at home because of the long-held belief that enemies could invade tiny Switzerland quickly, so every soldier had to be able to fight his way to his regiment’s assembly point. (Switzerland was at risk of being invaded by Germany during World War II but was spared, historians say, because every Swiss man was armed and trained to shoot.) The “gun in every closet” tradition was challenged in 2001, after a disgruntled citizen opened fire with his army rifle inside a regional parliament, killing 14 and injuring 14 others. The subsequent opposition to widespread gun ownership spearheaded a push for stricter arms legislation. The government and pro-gun groups argued, however, that the country’s existing laws regulating the sale, ownership and licensing of private guns, which includes a ban on carrying concealed weapons, are stringent enough. The law allows citizens or legal residents over the age of 18, who have obtained a permit from the government and who have no criminal record or history of mental illness, to buy up to three weapons from an authorized dealer, with the exception of automatic firearms and selective fire weapons, which are banned. Semiautomatics, which have caused havoc in the U.S., can be legally purchased. The authorities made one concession, though: since 2008, all military — but not private — ammunition must be stored in central arsenals rather than in soldiers’ homes. The debate culminated in a nationwide referendum, when 56% of voters rejected the proposal initiated by anti-gun organizations to ban army rifles from homes altogether. Swiss citizens may buy and keep firearms, subject to certain restrictions and licensing requirements: An acquisition license is required primarily for handguns. Rifles and semiautomatic long arms that are customarily used by recreational hunters are exempt from the licensing requirement,whereas fully automatic guns are banned. An applicant for a weapons license must be at least eighteen years of age, may not have been placed under guardianship, may not give cause for suspicion that he would endanger himself or others with the weapon, and may not have a criminal record with a conviction for a violent crime or of several convictions for nonviolent crimes. The license is issued by the canton of residence of the applicant but is valid throughout Switzerland.
|
8823
|
Unhappy LASIK patients urge FDA to take action.
|
Patients unhappy with their laser eye surgery urged U.S. health regulators to do more to limit poor results, saying complications from the LASIK procedure have taken a toll on their sight and emotions.
|
true
|
Health News
|
Blurred vision, dry eyes, glare and double-vision have led to depression and in some cases suicide, several patients told a U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel. “Since LASIK, I am visually handicapped,” said patient David Shell, adding that he has near constant eye pain and depression. “My eyes never feel comfortable... 10 years have passed and I still suffer from this problem.” Millions of Americans have had successfully undergone LASIK, or laser-assisted in-situ keratomileusis, which uses a laser to reshape the eye’s cornea, making them less dependent on glasses or contact lenses. Surgeons and other industry representatives told the FDA’s outside advisers most LASIK patients are satisfied with their vision. They noted depression is a complex condition and that no studies show a direct link to laser eye surgery. Still, the FDA is taking another look at the surgery after receiving 140 reports of side effects and device malfunctions between 1998 and 2006. The FDA wants its panelists’ advice on what information it would add to its website or product labeling to help those considering undergoing LASIK. “Most of the patients who are having these procedures are fairly satisfied and are doing well. Clearly there is a group who are not satisfied and do not get the kind of results they expect,” Daniel Schultz, head of the FDA’s device center, told reporters on Thursday ahead of the meeting. Several unhappy patients at the advisory meeting faulted their surgeon for not ruling them out as a poor candidates for LASIK, or for failing to stress the severity of possible side effects. The FDA, which has said the surgery is safe and effective regulates LASIK devices but not the surgeons or clinics that offer the procedure. Stock analysts have said the FDA focus on the procedure could further hurt LASIK companies, which have already seen the softening U.S. economy dampen demand for the elective surgery that is usually not covered by health insurance. LASIK device makers include Advanced Medical Optics Inc, Alcon Inc and Bausch & Lomb, among others. TLC Vision Corp and LCA-Vision Inc run LASIK clinics. Eric Donnenfeld, an ophthalmologist at New York University Medical Center, said the surgery aims to improve patients’ lives. “The reality is that, following LASIK, the great majority of our patients see as well or better than they ever saw with their glasses or contact lenses with which they were unhappy,” he told the advisory panel. Still, some patients said that while their vision had improved, dry-eye and other side effects were overwhelming. The FDA is also planning to begin a study on LASIK patient satisfaction in 2009 along with the National Eye Institute and two industry groups: the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery and the American Academy of Ophthalmology. Patient and consumer advocates at Friday’s meeting objected to the groups’ involvement with the study, citing conflicts of interest. Industry representatives said it would help them understand why some patients are unhappy with their LASIK results. Advanced Medical Optics shares were off 1.1 percent to $19.84 in noon trading, while Alcon shares were off 0.2 percent to $154.68, both on the New York Stock Exchange. TLC Vision shares were down 2.5 percent at $1.19, while shares of LCA-Vision were off 0.6 percent at $12.03, both on Nasdaq.
|
6106
|
Illinois oil refinery to upgrade in pollution settlement.
|
A southwestern Illinois oil refinery will spend nearly $11 million on pollution controls in settling a federal lawsuit accusing it of excessive dangerous chemical emissions.
|
true
|
Clean Air Act, Lawsuits, Phillips 66, Mississippi River, Illinois, Environment, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Pollution
|
The lawsuit filed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency alleged the Wood River Refinery in Roxana made operation changes in 2009 leading to more than a dozen violations of the Clean Air Act. The Belleville News-Democrat reports the suit cited the refinery over chemical emissions including sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide and benzene. The refinery is along the Mississippi River about 15 miles northeast of St. Louis is operated by Phillips 66. A company spokesman declined to comment. The agreement also includes a $475,000 fine and requires the refinery to implement a $500,000 project to decrease lead paint hazards at certain homes and buildings. ___ Information from: Belleville News-Democrat, http://www.bnd.com
|
9847
|
A better way to see the brain
|
The American Academy of Neurology has set new guidelines for correctly diagnosing most strokes, recommending a type of MRI over a CT scan. The study, a literature review of MRI and CT studies going back to 1966, was published in the academy’s journal, Neurology. The story, however, does not make it clear how much better the MRI performs nor how much a switch to MRIs nationwide would cost. It does do a good job, though, of finding voices critical of the practicality of such a switch. Strokes are among the leading causes of death and injury, although this story doesn’t point this out. Correctly assessing a stroke can make a big difference in how someone is treated and whether a future stroke is prevented. At the same time, MRIs typically cost more and take longer than CT scans. To show whether they are worth the additional time and money, reporting about these new guidelines needs to quantify the benefits, potential harms and costs.
|
false
|
"There is no mention in this story of costs, which is a shame. CTs are the preferred diagnostic tool right now and, apparently, are widely used. A switch to MRIs would not only mean the purchasing of a lot of new equipment but also staff training, new protocols and new drugs and dyes to be administered. Are we talking about an extra $1,000 per person? $5,000? More? The reporter spoke with two local medical institutions and could have asked both of them what it costs to buy both sets of equipment and what it costs to administer the exams. There are considerable benefits to be had, presumably. Because the number of patients is so huge, even a small improvement over present diagnositic techniques could have a big impact. As the study itself points out, ""Presently, the only specific, approved therapy for acute ischemic stroke is IV tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) given within 4.5 hours. tPA use has been limited due to the short treatment window, concerns about the limitations of CT-based diagnosis, and fear of hemorrhagic risks."" Does the story get into this, though? No. There is no attempt to quantify the benefits. There is almost a throw-away line in the study that says, "" A recent study estimated the epidemiologic impact of DWI-based diagnosis would result in reduced annual TIA incidence (33%) and increased stroke incidence (7%) in the United States."" Reducing these ""mini-strokes"" by 33% would indeed be a dramatic change, given the number of people who suffer from them, but these are ""warning strokes,"" that can actually force people to change risky behaviors or begin taking the right medications to avoid an actual stroke. Those strokes may have actually climbed by 7% in the theoretical model of a world where diffusion scans were the norm. A 7% increase in strokes could mean an additional 55,650 people suffering a stroke each year, by our count. Again, these numbers would be nice to see in the story. Stating that something ""is superior"" and ""is considerably better"" is not quantifying potential benefits. The study itself spends little time on the numbers, but the numbers are there. And the reporter could have asked the authors to go through the numbers. There is no evidence presented that a strategy that starts with MRI has better outcomes than a strategy started with a CT. The guideline expert implies that it is obvious. The other doctors question that, but never explicitly in terms of outcomes. That’s where this story really falls short. Not applicable. There was no disease mongering in this story because the scope of the disease was never explained. As the actual study states, ""Stroke is the third leading cause of death and the leading cause of permanent disability and disability-adjusted loss of independent life-years in Western countries."" So a better way of diagnosing a stroke could have a huge impact. That sort of context should have been in the story. The story does use some independent sources, but it does not identify conflicts of interest. Again, this is a big missed opportunity because the authors of this paper have potential conflicts. They have worked with many drug and device makers, including Siemens, one of the big MRI makers, as well as: Boehringer Ingelheim, ImaRx Therapeutics, Photothera, Cerevast, CoAxia, Sanofi, Solvay Pharmaceuticals, GlaxoSmithKline, Wyeth, Genentech, LifeCycle Pharma A/S, ReNeuron, Novovision, NeuroLogica Corporation, Avanir Pharmaceuticals, Micromedex, AstraZeneca, Bayer Schering Pharma, Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited, Embrella Cardiovascular, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Novo Nordisk, Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co., Pfizer, Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma Corporation, PDL BioPharma, Inc., Terumo Neurovascular Monitoring, Guidant, Cordis, Bard Peripheral Vascular, Inc., Abbott, Boston Scientific, Olea Medical, Lantheus Medical Imaging, and, believe it or not, even more. Two hold patents on MR devices. Might they stand to beneft? This should have been the entire point of the story, but there is really no comparison. Just broad statements made about MRIs being superior, etc. This is something that the story really should have done high up. Why has it become standard practice to do a CT scan and not an MRI? One of the authors says that 40% of his time is spent giving MRIs and 40% doing CT scans. Is that typical? Nonethless, we’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. The story makes it clear that both approaches are available (and therefore not new), but it should have made it more clear how rare (or not) diffusion MRI is. There is a press release, but this story goes beyond the release."
|
|
3522
|
University of Nebraska team creates cornfield robot system.
|
Plant science students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are still taught to phenotype by hand, wading into muddy fields to record the differences in physical characteristics between varying corn hybrids with a small set of tools and a pen and notebook.
|
true
|
Lincoln, General News, Robotics, Financial markets, Nebraska, Science
|
But like the rest of 21st century life, technology is on track to render humans obsolete. A team of UNL plant scientists and biological systems engineers have built an automated system capable of detecting an individual corn leaf and grasping it with robotic precision to screen its temperature, chlorophyll and water content in less than a minute, the Lincoln Journal Star reported. At a time when driverless combines can harvest around the clock, drones can nimbly identify problem spots in a field, and cattle herds are fitted with wearable devices to monitor their individual health, the Plant Phenotyping Robot System marks another leap forward for precision agriculture. James Schnable, an associate professor of plant science who specializes in computational biology, said before hybrid corn “really took off” after World War II, there was little need to measure how a specific breed of corn physically manifested itself in the field. “When we started doing hybrid breeding, there became this mechanism where there was a lot of investment in breeding and suddenly you have this whole discipline of how you collect data to make breeding decisions,” he said. UNL has trained aspiring plant scientists in labs and research fields to phenotype various corn hybrids in the search for breeds with higher heat and drought tolerance that produce better yields. Phenotyping took a leap with the opening of the Greenhouse Innovation Center at Nebraska Innovation Campus, where an automated conveyor belt and camera system can record miniscule changes to individual plants in a controlled environment. That technology has been taken out of the greenhouse and into the field at various places in the state, including the Eastern Nebraska Research and Extension Center near Mead, where a Spidercam outfitted with special cameras, like those found at colossal stadiums, records the physical characteristics of plants in the field. “The challenge is we need to score bigger and bigger populations as we do more and more complicated breeding tasks,” Schnable said. “And the total population of students interested in spending their summers in cornfields as steam is coming out of the mud is not getting any bigger. “That’s why we need more complicated technology to look at much bigger experiments across more environment,” he added. Schnable, who partnered with a trio of biological systems engineers at UNL to develop the robot, said the goal is to verify the data collected from the expensive camera systems at ground level, and once perfected, do it faster and with more certainty than an army of human scientists can. Building a robot to automate those processes took years, as the team had to build a system that could identify the leaf from a corn or soybean plant, and then direct a robotic arm where to reach and how to grab it for a battery of measurements, said Abbas Atefi, a Ph.D. candidate in biological systems engineering. “For our task, we needed to find the 3D coordinates of each grasping point on the leaf,” Atefi said. Using a “time-of-flight” camera, rather than a standard color camera, the robot could be given hundreds of options for points to grab on an X, Y and Z axis. Atefi spent two years writing an algorithm that narrowed the hundreds of candidate sites into a single representative point before converting the coordinates into directions for the robotic arm to bend and twist toward a leaf, finally grabbing it without damaging it. Once that was accomplished, the team worked on refining the fiber-optic cable and temperature sensor installed on the gripper, which measure the biochemical and physiological processes of the plant through indicators such as chlorophyll and water content. After hundreds of tweaks to the algorithm, the team ran the robot through a series of tests in the Greenhouse Innovation Center, comparing the results to a series of benchmarks taken by both human researchers and the powerful imaging system already in operation. The results, which will be published in the academic journal Computers and Electronics in Agriculture in August, show that the robot is able to determine the temperature of a leaf with comparable accuracy to a human, while tests measuring chlorophyll, water content, and nitrogen still need more fine-tuning. But early results feed into the optimism the team has about the robot’s future, both in the greenhouse and in the field. “Integration is something we think about a lot,” said Yufeng Ge, an associate professor of biological systems engineering at UNL. The robot needs to be able to operate in a wide array of environments — wheeled around on a moveable platform in more conventional greenhouses, or woven seamlessly into the existing conveyor belt system at Innovation Campus — while providing a known degree of accuracy in each, Ge said. “If you have a graduate student, they are human, they will make errors,” he added. “But we can have a system where hundreds of robots are scattered throughout the greenhouse, each carrying a specific sensor to look at one aspect of the plants with great accuracy.” Schnable said automating certain phenotyping processes also frees graduate students to crunch the massive volumes of data looking for patterns that emerge in various hybrids. ″(Graduate students) may not want to stay in grad school if the first two years they are just walking around taking measurements,” he said. “Longer-term, there is a vision that this would be able to go out into the field, where I still do have grad students running around.” Santosh Pitla, an associate professor of biological systems engineering, said the robot will soon be tested on a robotic platform — essentially a small, driverless tractor with a 5-foot clearance and a toolbox full of scientific instruments that can navigate a cornfield on its own — that would allow for automated data collection in hundreds of field acres. If drone imaging or the on-board computers in a combine can sense higher plant temperatures in wider parts of a field, Pitla said robotics is the next leap in precision agriculture, allowing farmers to pinpoint the water, fertilizer or pesticide inputs down to the individual plant. “Right now, we still talk about things in pounds per acre or gallons per acre,” he said. “I think we could get to the point where we’re talking about per plant, and every plant has a name and each robot can go and tend to each plant’s needs. That’s the end goal, treating each plant separately.” ___ Information from: Lincoln Journal Star, http://www.journalstar.com
|
4334
|
16 Indianapolis students mistakenly injected with insulin.
|
Sixteen students of an Indianapolis school were hospitalized as a precaution Monday after they were mistakenly injected with insulin during a tuberculosis skin test, according to school officials.
|
true
|
Indianapolis, Technology, General News, Health, Tuberculosis, Indiana, U.S. News
|
The Metropolitan School District of Lawrence Township says the students from the McKenzie Center for Innovation & Technology were taken to local hospitals for observation after being injected with a “small dosage” of insulin by Community Health Network personnel. The tuberculosis skin test requires an intradermal injection of liquid — 0.1 milliliter of a purified protein derivative called tuberculin — in the lower part of their arm, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A resulting bump is checked two or three days for any signs of latent or active tuberculosis infection. The district says it’s working closely with Community Health Network “to determine the cause of the error.” It’s unclear why the students were receiving the test. “We have full confidence that the events of today are isolated in nature and will be addressed swiftly by the Community Health Network,” District spokeswoman Dana Altemeyer said in a statement. Insulin is administered to person suffering from diabetes, a disease in which blood sugar levels are too high. The insulin, which is produced by a healthy body, helps the glucose, which comes from consumed food, get into the body’s cells to give them energy. The side effects of a too high injection of insulin includes sweating, nervousness, hunger and irritability, according to the Mayo Clinic. Responding to questions on the size of the insulin dosage and how the mistake occurred, Community Health Network released a statement saying it is committed to patient safety and values relationships and partnerships and “consider it a privilege to partner with schools including MSD of Lawrence Township.”
|
5447
|
Outbreak of Legionnaire’s blamed on hot water system.
|
An outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease at a newly opened hospital outside Columbus has been traced to its hot water system.
|
true
|
Columbus, Health, General News, Legionnaires disease, Ohio, Disease outbreaks
|
The health department said at least 16 patients admitted to the 210-bed Mount Carmel Grove City hospital after its opening April 28 have been diagnosed with Legionnaires’. The disease is a severe form of pneumonia that’s caused by inhaling tiny water droplets containing the legionella bacteria. One of the patients, a 75-year-old woman, died. Hospital president Sean McKibben said in a statement Thursday that the disease outbreak happened because of inadequate disinfection of the hot water system prior to the hospital’s opening. He said a permanent supplemental disinfection system with constant monitoring and controls has been installed. ___ Information from: The Columbus Dispatch, http://www.dispatch.com
|
35540
|
The government of Italy is calling for the arrest of Bill Gates.
|
What's true: While giving a speech, a single Italian politician called for former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates to be arrested. What's false: This position has not been endorsed by the Italian government as a whole.
|
false
|
Politics, COVID-19
|
In May 2020, a video started to circulate online that supposedly showed an Italian politician calling for the arrest of Bill Gates, the former Microsoft CEO who has been at the center of several conspiracy theories due to his foundation’s work to develop a vaccine for the COVID-19 coronavirus disease pandemic. This video was frequently shared on social media with the caption, “Italian Government call for arrest of Bill Gates”: This is a genuine video of an Italian politician calling for Gates’ arrest. However, a single politician’s opinion does not equate to the entire Italian government calling for action. In fact, this view has been condemned by Italian government officials (you can hear this politician being told “enough” and to be quiet during the video). The politician in this video is Italian Parliament Member Sara Cunial. She’s part of Italy’s “5 Star Movement,” a political party that has been blamed for a rise of measles in Italy after pushing an anti-vaccination agenda. Cunial, who was briefly suspended from the party in 2018 after likening vaccines to “free genocide” in a Facebook post, was fined in April 2020 for violating one of the country’s shelter-in place policies to visit a beach. (Cunial claims she was never fined.) Cunial’s speech before the Italian Parliament hit on a number of popular (and discredited) conspiracy theories regarding COVID-19. For instance, she linked the spread of the disease to the rise of 5G technology, claimed that Gates was working to de-populate the world, and said that the “ID2020” coalition was working to secretly implement digital microchips via mandatory vaccines. Cunial also fabricated a quote from Gates. After claiming that this was an “exact quote” from a Gates’ speech, Cunial falsely said that the former Microsoft CEO once stated, “If we do a good job on vaccines, health and reproduction, we can reduce the world population by 10-15%. Only a genocide can save the world.” Not only is this a fabricated quote, it illustrates a common misconception about Gates’ work related to global population. The former Microsoft CEO is working to lower child mortality, improve the health of poorer populations, and give people better access to contraceptives. In other words, Gates is not trying to use vaccines to kill children. Rather, he is hoping that a lower child mortality rate and better supportive programs will reduce the need for parents to have more children. Gates articulated his goals in a 2009 letter from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: A surprising but critical fact we learned was that reducing the number of deaths actually reduces population growth. […] Contrary to the Malthusian view that population will grow to the limit of however many kids can be fed, in fact parents choose to have enough kids to give them a high chance that several will survive to support them as they grow old. As the number of kids who survive to adulthood goes up, parents can achieve this goal without having as many children. Not only was Cunial’s speech littered with conspiracy theories, the politician also blamed Italy’s leadership for allowing dogmatic scientism to become the “true cultural epidemic” of this country. This comment created some blowback (Cunial curiously claimed that she was not referring to Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte) and some politicians urged her to apologize for the remark.
|
14423
|
"Club for Growth Says Donald Trump promised ""to take care of everybody (through government-run healthcare and) the government's going to pay for it."
|
"Club for Growth says Trump promises ""to take care of everybody (through government-run healthcare and) the government's going to pay for it."" It's clear from Trump's website and some of his public comments that he wants a market-based approach to healthcare, not a system run by the government, which makes the Club for Growth ad wrong. Because Trump wants a program to cover the poor — ""the lower 25 percent that can't afford private"" insurance — doesn't mean, as the ad contends, that ""he wants more government healthcare."" After all, the poor already get health coverage under Medicaid, which is jointly funded by the states and the federal government."
|
false
|
National, Drugs, Economy, Federal Budget, Health Care, Poverty, Public Health, Club for Growth,
|
"Club For Growth is trying to make it appear that Donald Trump is in favor of more government-run health care. In a television ad attacking the billionaire Republican, the conservative Washington-based anti-tax group features a female announcer stating, ""Some people think government-run, taxpayer-paid health care is a disaster, and some don't."" The commercial cuts to Democrat Hillary Clinton promising ""we will have quality affordable healthcare for every American,"" and then to CBS News anchor Scott Pelley questioning Trump by declaring, ""Universal healthcare,"" and Trump responding, ""I'm going to take care of everybody."" There's a quick cut back to Pelley asking, ""Who pays for it?"" and Trump responding, ""The government's going to pay for it."" The announcer continues, ""Ask Donald Trump why he sides with Hillary Clinton and why he wants more government healthcare."" For this fact check, we will try to look at whether Club For Growth was accurately depicting Trump's stand. In the Republican debates, Trump has repeatedly called for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Obamacare is not government-run health care. It is, however, a system of private insurance plans where the government sets minimum standards for those plans, helps people compare plans and sign up for a plan through a ""marketplace,"" subsidizes some of the cost for low-income people, and penalizes people who don't purchase a plan. Trump has consistently characterized that system as ""a disaster."" So why is Club for Growth saying that Trump wants more government healthcare? First, we checked to see if the group accurately portrayed what Trump said. We located the Pelley interview and found the group had taken his points out of context. The interview aired on 60 Minutes on Sept. 27. As always, Trump attacks the act. ""What's your plan for Obamacare?"" Pelley asks. ""Obamacare's going to be repealed and replaced,"" says Trump. ""Obamacare is a disaster if you look at what's going on with premiums where they're up 45, 50, 55 percent."" (A claim with cherry-picked data that PolitiFact later ruled to be Half True.) Pelley asks, ""How do you fix it?"" ""There's many different ways, by the way. Everybody's got to be covered,"" says Trump. ""This is an un-Republican thing for me to say because a lot of times they say, 'No, no, the lower 25 percent that can't afford private.' But —"" At this point, Pelley seems to interrupt. ""Universal health care?"" he asks. ""I am going to take care of everybody,"" Trump says. ""I don't care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody's going to be taken care of much better than they're taken care of now."" Pelley: ""The uninsured person is going to be taken care of how?"" Trump: ""They're going to be taken care of. I would make a deal with existing hospitals to take care of people. And, you know what, if this is probably —"" Pelley: ""Make a deal? Who pays for it?"" ""The government's gonna pay for it,"" Trump says. ""But we're going to save so much money on the other side."" Yet in the next breath, the candidate seems to talk about people buying their own plans, a key point Club for Growth has left out. ""But for the most part, it's going to be a private plan and people are going to be able to go out and negotiate great plans with lots of different competition with lots of competitors with great companies and they can have their doctors, they can have plans, they can have everything,"" he says. We note that some of the goals Trump is talking about are very similar to the goals of Obamacare, which was an attempt to get everyone covered, let private plans provide the coverage, let the private plans compete for customers and let people have their own doctors. (That last element wasn't fulfilled for some people who found they could not, despite President Barack Obama's vow, keep their old health plan and, by extension, may have been forced to use a different physician. In addition, although he told Pelley, ""Everybody's got to be covered,"" the healthcare plan on his website calls for eliminating the Obamacare penalty for not purchasing insurance. ""No person should be required to buy insurance unless he or she wants to,"" it says. Trump has also expressed support for other ideas that go beyond the ACA, such as letting insurers market the same plans across state lines, letting taxpayers deduct health insurance premiums the way businesses do, expanding the use of Health Savings Accounts so any member of a family can tap into it without penalty and make them inheritable, and allowing the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices, a change in federal law that, he says, would save about $300 billion a year. But none of these proposals constitute more government-run, government-paid healthcare, and Trump has said he opposes a single-payer system. We contacted both Club for Growth and the Trump campaign about the ad and Trump's plans, but we didn't get a response. Our ruling Club for Growth says Trump promises ""to take care of everybody (through government-run healthcare and) the government's going to pay for it."" It's clear from Trump's website and some of his public comments that he wants a market-based approach to healthcare, not a system run by the government, which makes the Club for Growth ad wrong. Because Trump wants a program to cover the poor — ""the lower 25 percent that can't afford private"" insurance — doesn't mean, as the ad contends, that ""he wants more government healthcare."" After all, the poor already get health coverage under Medicaid, which is jointly funded by the states and the federal government."
|
3892
|
Colorado county sheriff to double size of mental health unit.
|
A Colorado sheriff’s office plans to increase the size of its unit responding to calls involving people experiencing mental health crises, officials said.
|
true
|
Colorado Springs, Mental health, General News, Colorado
|
The El Paso County Sheriff’s Office expects to add a second deputy and a clinician from the UCHealth system by mid-February, The Gazette reported Sunday. They will form a second team to work alongside an existing two-person team, officials said. A case manager is also expected to join the unit to prioritize follow-up calls to help connect residents with mental health services and decrease future 911 calls, officials said. The sheriff’s office launched its Behavioral Health Connect Unit more than a year ago to divert people into mental health care rather than jail. In its first year, the unit responded to 573 calls and provided services to 450 people, conducting follow-up checks on 212 people, sheriff’s office data showed. The second unit is expected to assist with more than 200 calls related to mental health received each month by the sheriff’s office. The first unit can only respond to an average of 50 to 60 monthly calls, officials said.
|
8968
|
Breastfeeding may help protect mothers against stroke
|
The release focuses on a prospective cohort study, one of the strongest types of observational studies, that identified a correlation between breastfeeding and stroke. Specifically, the study reported that women who nursed at least one child were less likely to have a stroke later in life. The release notes that this was an observational study and, therefore, could not establish a cause-and-effect relationship between breastfeeding and stroke risk. Although the incidence and mortality from stroke has been in decline, stroke remains a significant health problem in the United States, affecting hundreds of thousands of men and women every year. Therefore, new information that could help people make lifestyle choices that affect their long-term risk of stroke has the potential to significantly affect the health and quality of life for millions of people. That said, it is important for news release to highlight the limitations of new research — something that this release takes pains to do.
|
true
|
American Heart Association,breastfeeding,stroke
|
Breastfeeding is not an option for all mothers, whether because of medical/physical limitations or because of socioeconomic ones. However, breastfeeding is also not a medical intervention that one can easily place a price tag on. This is a tough one to call. The release clearly lays out the research findings that breastfeeding is associated with reductions in stroke risk, even breaking it down by subgroups. That’s good. However, the release only tells readers about relative reductions in risk, as opposed to absolute reductions in risk. What does that mean? Well, let’s say that the women in a study have a 0.25% risk of getting Disease X. If the study reports that a specific behavior doubles the risk of Disease X, that sounds like a big deal — a 100% increase in risk! But that’s a 100% relative increase in risk. The absolute risk would go from 0.25% to 0.5%. The difference between relative and absolute risk is something HealthNewsReview.org has written about, and it is a key distinction that we feel is important. So, when the release tells us that breastfeeding was associated with a 23% decrease in stroke risk, readers still don’t know what that means in terms of absolute risk. And because the baseline absolute risk numbers aren’t mentioned, savvy readers can’t even do the calculation for themselves. Breastfeeding may be “natural,” but it’s not effortless. Breastfeeding can be time-consuming and exhausting, and carries risks of dehydration and breast pain. That said, these are not necessarily medical issues that rise to the level of discussion in a news release about an observational study like this one. As such, we’ll rate this criterion as not applicable. The release does a pretty solid job here, describing the study fairly well and acknowledging its limitations. But there are a couple of things that could have been slightly better. For example, the release describes the study in the fifth paragraph. It is not until the 10th paragraph that the release explicitly tells readers that “Because the study was observational, it couldn’t establish a cause-and-effect relationship between breastfeeding and lower stroke risk, meaning that it is possible some other characteristic that distinguishes between women who breastfeed and those who don’t is the factor changing the stroke risk.” For example, it’s possible that women who did not breastfeed had higher levels of stress than women who did breastfeed, which may be a contributing factor to stroke. And it is not until the 12th paragraph that the release tells readers that “The study was also limited by the relatively small number of strokes that occurred during the follow-up period (just 3.4 percent of the women experienced a stroke during the study period and 1.6 percent reported having had a stroke prior to the study) and by the Women’s Health Initiative’s exclusion of women who had already had severe strokes at the time of recruitment.” To be clear, we are very glad that the release includes these valuable qualifiers. However, we think the release would have been stronger if they had not been buried at the bottom of the piece. No disease mongering here. The release offers context on the incidence of U.S. stroke mortality rates. The release clearly discloses the source of research funding. The release also notes that “author disclosures [regarding potential conflicts of interest] are on the manuscript.” It would have been much better to simply disclose the conflicts on the release itself by saying: “The authors report no potential conflicts of interest.” The release does a nice job here, stating: “Breastfeeding is only one of many factors that could potentially protect against stroke. Others include getting adequate exercise, choosing healthy foods, not smoking and seeking treatment if needed to keep your blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar in the normal range.” Not all of the alternatives have been proven to protect against stroke but listing them is a worthwhile reminder that lifestyle changes might reduce their risk. The release requests that pregnant women make breastfeeding part of their “birthing plan” and to breastfeed for at least six months to receive the most benefits. It’s assumed readers know that breastfeeding is an available option unless there are medical or lifestyle barriers. The release notes that “This is among the first studies to examine breastfeeding and a possible relationship to stroke risk for mothers.” It would have been helpful to briefly note what the other studies found and whether the results were different or had similar conclusions. The release uses responsible, cautious language. The recommendation to breastfeed to prevent stroke based on observational research may be an overreach, however.
|
6013
|
Space station shipment launched from Virginia seashore.
|
A fresh grocery shipment rocketed toward the International Space Station on Wednesday after launching from Virginia’s seashore.
|
true
|
Virginia, Holidays, Science, Easter
|
Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket blasted off from Wallops Island. The company’s Cygnus capsule should arrive at the space station Friday, just in time for Easter. While there’s no Easter ham or lamb, NASA said plenty of holiday fixings are going up for the space station’s six residents, including smoked turkey, pork chops, asparagus and cobbler. Altogether, more than 800 meals are tucked away. The 7,600-pound (3,450-kilogram) load also included three free-flying robots to be tested as astronaut helpers, 40 black lab mice and 63 tiny student-research satellites. Two of the cube-shaped Astrobee robots will be tested inside by the station crew, while the third — called Seeker and the size of a bread loaf — will wait until the Cygnus departs in July before being released and flying solo in orbit. The mice are part of tetanus-vaccine testing. This particular Cygnus is named the S.S. Roger Chaffee after the youngest of the three astronauts who died in the 1967 Apollo 1 spacecraft fire. Northrop Grumman said it’s honoring Chaffee ahead of the 50th anniversary of the first manned moon landing, because he made the ultimate sacrifice without ever reaching space. Another space station delivery should be coming by month’s end. NASA’s other commercial shipper, SpaceX, is due to launch a shipment from Florida on April 26. SpaceX Dragon capsules have been making station deliveries since 2012 and Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus capsules since 2013. ___ The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
|
14073
|
"The Dog Meat Festival in Yulin, China, ""threatens global public health."
|
Hastings said in his resolution that the dog meat festival in Yulin, China threatens global public health. No evidence backs that up. A leading expert at the World Health Organization dismissed the idea, both for the festival in particular, and the practice of eating dog meat in general. Peer-reviewed studies in China find little connection between the dog meat trade and rabies. There may be other reasons to condemn the festival, but the risk it poses to public health globally is not one of them.
|
false
|
Global News Service, Animals, Public Health, Alcee Hastings,
|
"Every June, the city of Yulin in China’s southwestern Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region hosts a spectacle that has drawn international condemnation. An estimated 10,000 dogs are butchered as part of a dog meat festival that started about six years ago. U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., moved to put his colleagues on record against the practice. In a House resolution, he highlighted that ""dogs who reach the slaughterhouses are typically beaten to death with shocking brutality, without any regard for their welfare,"" and that the dog meat trade ""poses a risk to human health by exposing people to a multitude of diseases, including rabies and cholera."" Action is needed, the resolution continued, because the Dog Meat Festival in Yulin ""threatens global public health."" We are not insensitive to how ugly the scene might well be in Yulin. But our focus is on whether this festival in itself poses a threat to global public health. Hastings spokesman Evan Polisar sent us a statement that said ""anything that happens in China has global significance, positively or negatively, due to China's enormous size."" The statement noted that rabies kills about 2,000 people a year in China. People who handle the dogs are most at risk of contracting rabies by being bitten or scratched. ""Since rabies is deadly and the number in China is so big, a reduction of that number is a global accomplishment,"" Polisar told us in an email. The statement from Hastings’ office also mentioned the potential for food contamination at restaurants that serve dog meat. Perhaps, but that falls well short of describing a global health threat, officials at the World Health Organization told us. Put simply, you may reject the dog festival as being cruel to animals or unethical, but you shouldn’t suggest it poses a global health threat. ""While much can be said from the ethics and animal welfare points of view, we’re not aware of scientifically justified arguments behind the claim that a dog meat festival in China or the practice of eating dog meat represent a global threat to public health,"" said Dr. Kazuaki Miyagishima, director of WHO’s Department of Food Safety, Zoonoses and Foodborne Diseases. ""While it may pose a potential public health issue within China because of the lack of compliance with existing regulations, this would have no or very limited international impact."" Dog meat is eaten primarily in countries in Asia, although it is also reported in some places in Africa. This map shows the nations most commonly mentioned in news reports. China did see a resurgence of rabies during the 1990s and the government responded with more monitoring and rabies vaccination programs. A study of about 1,300 cases found that six cases (.5 percent) were tied to the dog meat trade. Researchers in Yunnan Province on Guangxi’s western border took tissue samples from 300 dogs slaughtered for meat and found none were infected with rabies. Hastings’ resolution also mentioned cholera, but China reported no outbreaks of cholera in 2014 and while there was one between 2010 and 2013, it occurred far away in another part of China to the north and east of Yulin. We could find no survey of global health threats that made any reference to dog meat or the dog meat trade. Worldwide, rabies kills about 60,000 people a year, about a third of them in India. HIV/Aids and tuberculosis, clear global health threats, each kill over a million people annually. There are reports from China and Africa that dog slaughter is particularly cruel because some believe that the meat tastes sweeter if the animal dies in pain. The moral objections are obvious. The government of Yulin has distanced itself from the festival and moved to limit it. Our ruling Hastings said in his resolution that the dog meat festival in Yulin, China threatens global public health. No evidence backs that up. A leading expert at the World Health Organization dismissed the idea, both for the festival in particular, and the practice of eating dog meat in general. Peer-reviewed studies in China find little connection between the dog meat trade and rabies. There may be other reasons to condemn the festival, but the risk it poses to public health globally is not one of them."
|
41864
|
Republicans’ “sabotage of the Affordable Care Act has already cost more than 3 million Americans their health insurance.”
|
Former President Barack Obama claimed that Republicans’ “sabotage of the Affordable Care Act has already cost more than 3 million Americans their health insurance.” That’s according to one estimate, but another found no significant change in the rate or the number of uninsured from 2016 to 2017.
|
mixture
|
Affordable Care Act, health insurance, uninsured,
|
Former President Barack Obama claimed that Republicans’ “sabotage of the Affordable Care Act has already cost more than 3 million Americans their health insurance.” That’s according to one estimate, but another found no significant change in the rate or the number of uninsured from 2016 to 2017. As politicians are wont to do, Obama cherry-picked the higher figure that more strongly supported his point.And since he made his remarks, another estimate, from the Census Bureau, was released, showing the percentage of Americans who were uninsured for all of 2017 wasn’t statistically different from 2016.These are estimates, based on surveys, and there are several differences in the methods and measurements that may explain some of the discrepancy. We can’t say whether one number is closer to the actual drop in the uninsured than the other. It is worth noting, however, that the number of people who signed up in late 2017 to purchase their own insurance on the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges decreased by 400,000 from the open enrollment period that began in late 2016. And the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates it’s the elimination of the individual mandate penalty — the penalty for not having insurance — next year that will cause a significant decrease in the number of people without health insurance. CBO estimated 4 million people will lose or drop coverage in 2019.Obama made his comment on Sept. 7 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in a speech in which he urged the crowd “to vote because our democracy depends on it.” Among his criticisms of the current administration was the claim about an increase in the uninsured. The Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index backs up Obama. The phone survey found that the percentage of U.S. adults who are uninsured rose, from 10.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2016 to 12.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2017. That’s “the largest single-year increase Gallup and Sharecare have measured since beginning to track the rate in 2008,” Gallup said in a story on the results, and it represents an estimated 3.2 million people.The survey included 25,072 adults in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., for the fourth quarter of 2017, and 42,546 adults for the fourth quarter of 2016. The margin of error was plus or minus 0.4 percentage points.Another measure from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the National Health Interview Survey — estimates that 29.3 million people (or 9.1 percent of the population) were uninsured during 2017, an increase of 700,000 people from 2016. However, the NHIS report called the 2017 figures “not significantly different from 2016.”The NHIS report, released in May, is based on data for 78,074 people, who were interviewed throughout the year.We’ve reported both estimates in our “Trump’s Numbers” reports on changes in various statistical measurements.Why is there such a difference between the two figures? At least some of the gap is due to differences in how the surveys are conducted and what exactly they are measuring.Dan Witters, research director of the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index, told us there were several reasons why the two measures may be different. For one, the Gallup-Sharecare figures were for the fourth quarters of 2016 and 2017, while the NHIS figures come from surveys conducted throughout the year. Both surveys measure whether the respondents are uninsured at the time of the interview.He provided Gallup-Sharecare figures representing the full year, which brings the two estimates a little closer together. The Gallup-Sharecare estimates found a 1.0 percentage point increase in the uninsured for 2017, compared with 2016. That’s an increase of roughly 2.5 million American adults without health insurance, compared with the fourth quarter comparison figure of 3.2 million.And there are other differences: The Gallup-Sharecare is a random-dial phone survey — using both cell and landlines — of all adults, while the NHIS is an address-based, in-person survey, and the uninsured measure includes children. Both organizations then weight the responses to more accurately reflect the demographics of the full population.The method of interview matters. How people respond to a phone versus a mail survey can be different, Witters said. In fact, the well-being survey has since changed from a phone-based survey to mail-based, and won’t release new estimates until sometime in 2019, Witters said, once it has a new trend line using the same method of data collection.In other words, Gallup-Sharecare doesn’t want to compare data collected using different survey methods. Witters equates that to a “cautionary tale” in trying to compare estimates from two credible organizations.Sharon Long, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, told us the NHIS survey would have a “much higher response rate” than a phone-based interview, which also could lead to different estimates. And the NHIS survey includes a few additional questions to verify that respondents are uninsured or not covered by Medicaid. “As a result, we would expect the estimated uninsurance rate to be lower in the NHIS than in Gallup, all else equal,” she said.The Urban Institute also measures uninsurance through its Health Reform Monitoring Survey, which releases figures for the first and third quarters and hasn’t published data beyond the first quarter of 2017 yet. HRMS uses an online survey, with respondents drawn from an internet panel. “We’re all measuring things differently,” she said, but there should be “more consistency when you look at trends over time,” instead of looking at individual levels.The individual numbers from the three measurements may be different, but the trend lines are similar, as the Urban Institute found in 2015 and in more recent comparisons Long provided to us. For instance, for the third quarter of 2017, the three groups had the following percentage estimates for the uninsured among the 18-to-64-year-old population: 14.8 percent (Gallup), 12.9 percent (NHIS) and 11 percent (HRMS, unpublished data). All three measurements are up, to varying degrees, from the first quarter of 2017 or the third quarter of 2016 — so they follow the same trend line — though the changes also may not be statistically significant.As for the gap between the 2017 NHIS and Gallup figures, Long says, “It’s a big difference and the problem is it’s hard to know what’s driving it.” There is a random element in any survey sample, she says. “We’ve been more cautious in not viewing a single quarter as clear evidence of a big change.”The closest we could come to creating an apples-to-apples comparison between the Gallup-Sharecare and NHIS survey still showed a sizable difference in the two organizations’ 2017 fourth quarter numbers. Both organizations publish figures for adults age 18 to 64, with Gallup-Sharecare showing 13.1 percent were uninsured in the fourth quarter of 2016 and NHIS showing 12.7 percent were uninsured. For the fourth quarter of 2017, Gallup-Sharecare found 14.8 percent of those nonelderly adults were uninsured, while NHIS’ figure was 13.2 percent.As for Obama’s claim of 3 million more uninsured Americans under the Trump administration, Witters said the Gallup-Sharecare survey “clearly supports that statement.”Long said she doesn’t think there’s a problem with using the figure. “It’s useful information but it should be presented with some caveats.”Obama could have said this was according to “one estimate,” instead of stating the number as a fact, particularly considering the NHIS figure is considerably lower.After Obama made his remarks, the U.S. Census Bureau on Sept. 12 released its estimates for the uninsured in 2017. It measures the percentage of Americans of all ages who were without health insurance for the entire year, finding both the rate (8.8 percent) and number (28.5 million people) of the uninsured were not statistically different from 2016.The Census also measures the uninsured at the time of interview and gives annual averages and state-by-state figures for that measure. Similar to NHIS, the Census found an increase in the number who didn’t have insurance at the time of interview of 715,000 (with a margin of error of plus or minus 248,000), and it found the uninsured rate had increased in 14 states and decreased in three states by statistically significant amounts (see Table 6 and Table A-5).The Trump administration has taken some actions that experts perceived as a hindrance to those getting coverage through the Affordable Care Act exchanges, such as reducing the open enrollment period in 2017 by half and cutting the advertising budget for the exchanges by $90 million.Despite those actions, the number of people signing up in the 2017 open enrollment period (for policies starting in 2018) through the ACA exchanges for coverage dropped only slightly, by 400,000 people. The number with exchange plans was 11.8 million, a 3 percent drop from the 12.2 million who signed up during the 2016 open enrollment period for 2017 plans. Open enrollment then didn’t end until Jan. 31, 2017, though the Trump administration cut off promotional spending for the final days of that period.The year before, the figure was 12.7 million, according to the government’s final enrollment report released April 3.The decrease in exchange-plan coverage was smaller than experts had expected. When preliminary numbers were announced in late 2017, Larry Levitt, senior vice president for health reform at the Kaiser Family Foundation, tweeted that he was “very surprised that ACA marketplace enrollment is down only slightly.”The open enrollment period this year for the 39 states under HealthCare.gov runs from Nov. 1 to Dec. 15.As we said, estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office project larger movement in uninsurance for 2019, due to the Republican tax law’s elimination of the penalty associated with the ACA’s individual mandate. CBO estimates that will cause 4 million people to lose or drop coverage in 2019, rising to 12 million two years later and 13 million in 2025.Some will choose not to get insurance, while others will be priced out of the individual market. “[H]ealthier people would be less likely to obtain insurance and … the resulting increases in premiums would cause more people to not purchase insurance,” CBO said.
|
4692
|
UN chief visits Congo Ebola region, pledging support.
|
The United Nations secretary general visited Congo’s eastern city of Beni on Sunday, pledging solidarity as the region faces an Ebola outbreak that has killed nearly 2,000 people in a year and ongoing insecurity that has residents skeptical of outside help.
|
true
|
International News, Peacekeeping forces, Ebola virus, Armed forces, Africa, Health, Felix Tshisekedi, Antonio Guterres, General News
|
“I could not go to the DRC (Congo) without coming to meet the brave inhabitants of this beautiful territory,” U.N. chief Antonio Guterres said. “There are major concerns about health. There is measles, malaria, cholera and now the terrible drama of Ebola. We are fully on the side of the Congolese people to try to meet all these challenges.” Guterres also pledged the U.N. peacekeeping forces’ support with the armed forces of Congo in the fight against extremism “that is threatening not only Congo but Africa and the world.” He is on a three-day trip to Congo. He stopped in Goma earlier and on Monday will meet with Congo’s President Felix Tshisekedi. “It is important for the people of Beni to know that we have heard their cries of distress. The United Nations as a whole is committed to supporting the Congolese authorities, local communities and civil society actors in the fight against insecurity,” he said while in Beni, adding that he will discuss these issues when he visits Kinshasa on Monday. Guterres’ trip comes as Ebola cases are about the topple 3,000 along with nearly 2,000 deaths in eastern Congo since the outbreak was declared a year ago. Health authorities have faced major challenges trying to stem the spread of the disease amid insecurity and mistrust from communities. Traumatized by Ugandan Allied Democratic Forces rebels since October 2014, residents of Beni say they do not trust the U.N. peacekeepers, who they say have done little to protect them from rebel attacks. The region is home to numerous rebel groups vying for control of the mineral-rich land. “Imagine rebels attacking in the evening but we try to call MONUSCO but they arrive in the morning with cameras,” said Nzanu Nzoli a former resident of the town of Eringeti who traveled to Beni to flee the attacks. “The visit of Antonio Guterres will not change the current state of our situation in Beni because before him we had already received the promises of the Congolese government and the U.N. ... But it will soon be five years without action. ... Nothing will change.” Others in the area said a visit from the head of the U.N. could boost military operations. “I believe that with his visit ... Antonio Guterres will learn about the current situation of the rebels, and the evolution of Ebola. Often he receives reports but he will feel the situation, so I hope for a favorable outcome,” said Kambale Mundoleko, an Ebola survivor near Beni in Mangina who lost her entire family. Upon his arrival in Mangina, Guterres visited an Ebola treatment center and also witnessed the unloading of four Ebola patients.
|
11234
|
Youthful fling with ‘Tommy John’ surgery
|
This news story describes a study performed at one of the most famous sports medicine clinics in the U.S., where one of the most famous elbow surgeons in the world (and his colleagues) performs an operation known as “Tommy John” surgery (named for the Hall-Fame pitcher). The study shows that more young athletes are getting elbow reconstruction surgery at this clinic than ever before. The news story’s sole source—an author of the study—suggests that this is a widespread epidemic and speculates that the reason for the increasing number of operations in young athlete is that they are over-using their immature elbows during year-round play without any breaks. Although this may be true, the article provides no research to support this assertion. The reported increase in elbow reconstructions among young athletes may be a serious problem worthy of concern, or it may be a statistical quirk. It’s possible, for example, that this clinic is more likely than less-famous clinics to attract the parents of young athletes with a career-threatening injury. Until there is similar evidence of high surgery rates from more clinics and solid evidence that these operations are caused by over-training, this article could be raising unfounded alarm. The news story provides insufficient information in other areas as well. There is no mention of costs, potential harms, or treatment options other than surgery. And the story cites no source who is independent of the research under consideration. Interestingly, the researcher interviewed for the story assigns blame for over-training injuries to the athletes (and perhaps by implication parents and coaches). Another source might have pointed out that sports medicine physicians sometimes wonder whether they too contribute to recurrent or chronic injuries, by helping athletes to return prematurely to the sports that cause them harm.
|
false
|
The article doesn’t mention the cost of surgery. The article says the absolute rate of success (return to previous level of competition or higher) was 83% in a cohort of 743 people who had elbow reconstructive surgery, a rate similar to other studies. (Am J Sports Med. 2008;36(6):1193-205.) However, the news article does not point out that this success rate varied a good bit, and was as low as 56% in minor league pitchers.
|
|
11121
|
Study: Not Every Hernia Needs to Be Fixed
|
Overall, this story does a good job summarizing the results of a recent study on watching waiting vs. preventive surgery for hernias. Hernia operations are a common procedure and the study challenges conventional wisdom that all hernias should be fixed. Watchful waiting, including active monitoring of symptoms, appears appropriate and safe for middle-aged men with asymptomatic hernias; however, neither strategy proved superior over the two-year observation period. The story summarizes the study design, and notes those included were middle-aged men with asymtomactic or mildly symptomatic hernias; however, according to the source article, half of referred patients were ineligible to participate in the study. In order for the authors, and in turn the journalist, to report that the finding is generalizable to real patient populations, this issue of how and why patients were excluded from the trial needs to be explained. The journalist and the authors might need to clarify that this study does not apply to men who have had ANY hernia related pain in previous six weeks (and that’s a lot of people!). Surgical complications are casually mentioned, however, the discussion is limited when compared to that of untreated hernias. There is also no mention that a hernia can recur even with the surgery (1.4% in this study.) 31% of the watchful waiting group decided to have surgery over the four-year duration of the study, though reports of pain at two years were similar in both groups. The journalist could include more information on why so many in the trial crossed over and decided to have surgery. The story could have further developed the effect of hernia pain on quality of life. Secondary pain and function outcomes were better in the surgery group, but this was not mentioned by their authors in conclusion, nor by the journalist. Lastly, there is no mention of the cost of hernia operations, which may be an important factor for someone trying to make this choice.
|
true
|
No mention of the cost of hernia operations, which may play a role in someone opting for watching waiting. The story does not provide enough information on the effect of pain or the limits a hernia might place on daily activities. There is some information on this in the study in JAMA, but little is mentioned in story. 30% of the watchful waiting group decided to have surgery during the 4 years, though reports of pain at 2 years were similar in both groups. More information on why they decided to have surgery and the effect of hernia pain on quality of life would be useful in order to better inform patients who are trying to make a choice. However, overall, this criterion was met. The reporter used absolute numbers, not just relative — always a good idea. The story mentions harms and the frequency of surgical complications in this study, however, the discussion is limited when compared to the discussion of untreated hernias. Does not mention the harm that a hernia can recur even with the surgery (1.4% in this study.) The most significant harm reported may be the one case of nerve injury, which was not mentioned in the story. While the story states 20% had complications, three of them life-threatening, readers could have used more detail. Mentions some evidence from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) article. Mentions the randomization and an overview of the study design. Provides some appropriate quantitative evidence. This study raises an interesting question for medicine and for journalism: does the failure to demonstrate a significant difference mean that the treatments are equivalent? We think “no.” The story could have also further scrutinized the evidence by asking about the condition of the men in the trial. One of the trial’s inclusion criteria was having no pain or no interference with activities in the previous six weeks. So it’s not clear whether they really had no symptoms or just minimal symptoms. The story does a satisfactory job of explaining that hernia surgery is a common procedure and that this study challenges the conventional wisdom that all hernias should be fixed. Story includes perspective from editorial writer. In comparing treatment options, the possible harms of surgery could have been explored more fully. The story does not mention specific potential surgical or post-operative complications. 22.3% of those who underwent surgery (this included those randomized to the surgery group or those from watchful waiting who crossed over into the surgery group) had complications which included wound infections, urinary tract infections, and in a few cases, serious cardiovascular problems requiring hospitalization. This rating does not apply, as the story focuses on watchful waiting and active surveillance in lieu of preventative surgery for hernias. Hernia operations are a common procedure and available in most hospitals; the new treatment (no intervention, save for monitoring general health or symptoms typical of a hernia) is also now an evidence-based option for treatment. The story provides accurate information that watchful waiting vs. preventive surgery is a newer approach to treating men with mildly symptomatic hernias.
|
|
3398
|
Bill allowing pharmacists to give kids the flu shot at risk.
|
The contentious debate about whether Connecticut lawmakers should scrap a religious exemption for certain childhood vaccinations could inadvertently end up sinking efforts to make the flu vaccine more accessible to children.
|
true
|
Health, General News, Connecticut, Flu, Public health
|
A bill that would allow trained pharmacists to administer the influenza vaccine to children 12 years and older cleared the General Assembly’s Public Health Committee in a 17-7 vote this year, but it later died on the Senate calendar due to inaction. Bill supporter, Nathan Tinker, CEO of the Connecticut Pharmacists Association, said his organization doesn’t plan to push hard for it again in the next regular legislative session because he is worried the debate over the General Assembly’s efforts to scrap a religious exemption for some vaccines will ultimately spill over into discussions about the flu shot and likely doom the bill in the short, three-month session. “There is a community of people who are concerned about the impact or potential impact, whether real or perceived, about vaccines,” Tinker said. “And they get a lot of attention from legislators and that can make it difficult.” When the new legislative session opens in February, lawmakers are expected to consider ending the state’s longstanding religious exemption after newly released data showed a continued decline in immunization rates for measles, mumps and rubella among kindergarteners. That proposal has already met resistance and some of the concerns raised are like the ones voiced during this year’s discussion of the flu vaccine bill. Legislators were flooded with testimony earlier this year from parents with concerns about whether making the vaccine more convenient could lead to injuries that pharmacists might not be trained recognize. Others questioned the motives of the pharmaceutical industry and necessity of flu shots. Dr. Sandra Carbonari, a primary care pediatrician in Waterbury and the medical director of the Connecticut Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, also opposed the bill, but for different reasons. She questioned whether state regulations for providing the flu vaccine to children who receive Medicaid benefits might ultimately make the shot too expensive, and whether DPH’s vaccine program can handle a large increase in the number of providers. She also noted that immunizing a child can be complicated. “Determining the appropriate vaccine for a pediatric age patient is not simple and requires accurate information about the medical history and current state of health,” she said in written testimony. Supporters of the flu shot bill argue that allowing parents to drop by a pharmacy, rather than make an appointment with a pediatrician, would ultimately lead to higher flu immunization rates. The bill had the support of the state’s Department of Public Health, which noted three children in Connecticut died from flu-related complications during the 2017-18 flu season. Pharmacists in Connecticut are currently allowed to vaccinate people 18 years or older. According to DPH, individuals under 18 can be administered the flu vaccine by advanced practice registered nurses at retail locations, such as a CVS MinuteClinic. Sen. Heather Somers, of Groton, the top Senate Republican on the Public Health Committee who co-sponsored this year’s bill, stressed that the legislation is voluntary and requires the consent of a parent or guardian. Somers contends the legislature just ran out of time to act on the bill earlier this year, and she plans to resurrect it when lawmakers convene again in February for the 2020 session. “This is something that saves lives,” said Somers, who helped to organize a mobile flu clinic in her district last year. “I think accessibility is key in our health care system.”
|
9894
|
Short-term pill-free therapy may help insomniacs
|
There is a lot to like about the possibility of a treatment for insomnia that doesn’t rely on sleeping pills or intense and expensive counseling by specialists. While this story paints a reasonably fair picture of a small test of a brief behavioral therapy for insomnia, the overall impression given to readers may have shaded toward emphasizing the positive while skipping over uncertainties, future research challenges and possible alternative approaches. Insomnia affects many people. And we are all subjected to a relentless flood of ads for sleeping pills. News of research into relatively simple approaches that don’t rely on drugs is understandably welcome, but stories about small, preliminary trials need to be frank about the limitations.
|
true
|
Reuters Health
|
Although this trial was a preliminary experiment, the proposed intervention is clearly defined as two office visits and two telephone calls with a nurse, so it should have been possible to estimate the cost. Since one purpose of testing this sort of brief intervention is to offer lower-cost alternatives to established behavioral treatment for insomnia, readers should have been given some estimate of the relative costs of the interventions. The story tells readers that 55 percent of people in the active intervention group no longer met the criteria for insomnia after four weeks. However, readers are not told how the researchers defined insomnia. Was it a complete inability to sleep? How frequently did the participants have trouble sleeping? How much more did they sleep after treatment? Without these and other details, it is difficult to get a feel for what effect the treatment had. While this story reported how many people needed to be treated in order to make a difference for at least one… a statistic we encourage journalists to use more… the story reported twice as many people benefited as the researchers actually said they saw. The researchers wrote that one person either had remission (no more insomnia) or response (significantly less insomnia) for every 2.4 people treated. But the story says that for every 2.4 participants treated one responded and one overcame insomnia. We won’t hold this story to this criterion because neither the journal article on the test nor an accompanying commentary noted any adverse events. However, the story could have pointed out that a trial this small generally would miss all but the most common problems. Also, the story could have pointed out that until further evidence is developed, it is not know for certain how this type of intervention compares with alternatives. If it turns out that for some people this treatment is less effective than alternatives, then prescribing it would mean leaving them at greater risk of being harmed by insomnia. The story gives a brief description of the experiment and some of the main outcomes that the researchers measured. The story would have been better if it told readers more about the limitations of this small trial, including what sort of further testing would be needed to determine if the intervention would work for people in the general population, rather than just those who match the profiles of the individuals who volunteered to participate in this test. The story compared this brief intervention to more established behavioral therapy, without noting the pitfalls of trying to compare results from different trials. The story did not tell readers that there is ongoing debate about the best way to measure the results of insomnia studies. The story provides estimates of how many people complain of insomnia. It also portrays this intervention as an alternative to existing treatments, rather than an effort to expand treatment to more people. The story includes comments from the author of a commentary article that appeared in the Archives of Internal Medicine along with the research article. In the disclosure section of their article, some of the researchers reported ties to pharmaceutical companies, but since this trial tested a non-drug approach and was funded by public agency and academic grants, it seems reasonable to consider the industry links as not being relevant to this study. We will credit this story for discussing the alternatives of sleeping pills and cognitive behavioral therapy. Although there was no reference to other less-intense non-drug approaches that clinicians may recommend for dealing with insomnia, there was a comment at the end of the story that offered some basic advice that readers could use on their own. The story says this form of “brief behavioral treatment for insomnia is not yet generally available”. It also described this study as being a first step in the process of making such an intervention available without making predictions about a timetable. This story suggests that there are no brief behavioral interventions available to people with insomnia. They story should not have suggested that the only alternative treatments are drugs and expensive cognitive behavioral therapy. The story does not appear to rely on a news release.
|
12994
|
"Tuberculosis recently passed ""HIV/AIDS as the leading infectious killer globally."
|
Seymour said tuberculosis is now a bigger killer than HIV/AIDS. Numbers from the United Nations and the World Health Organization support that, but another equally credible source, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, said the death tolls are about the same. The data’s not good enough for highly precise estimates. It’s also unclear that TB is killing more people than it did before. The higher estimate by the WHO reflects better reporting, mainly from India, but not more actual deaths. The one undisputed point is that death rates are falling faster for HIV/AIDS than for TB. Both sets of data back that up. In that respect, TB is the more threatening infectious disease because the world is having a harder time getting ahead of it. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the TB threat is itself rising. It looms larger than HIV/AIDS because that threat has fallen.
|
mixture
|
Global News Service, Federal Budget, Public Health, Nick Seymour,
|
"Among nations, the United States is the runaway leader in the money it spends on global health programs, and the looming question for advocates is what will happen under President Donald Trump and a Republican Congress. Nick Seymour, a Harvard junior volunteering at a health clinic in Mexico, argued for sustained spending. ""One would be hard-pressed to find a policy issue that has a greater impact on more lives than global health financing, yet the topic has not broken through the white noise of the election and post-election coverage,"" Seymour wrote in a Jan. 7 op-ed published in The Hill. Seymour underscored the many millions of HIV/AIDS patients helped by American dollars, and noted a disturbing trend with tuberculosis. ""Tuberculosis’ recent surpassing of HIV/AIDS as the leading infectious killer globally has not been met with anything close to equal funding for relief,"" he wrote. We’ve looked at TB’s death toll before; it is a wickedly tenacious disease. The data question is, has it really become a bigger killer than HIV/AIDS? And looking at the data, the estimates are mixed. But just as importantly, the relative death tolls of the two diseases has more to do with success in treating HIV/AIDS patients, and less to do with any change in the spread of TB. Seymour told us he relied on figures from the United Nations and World Health Organization. For 2015, they estimated 1.1 million people died from HIV/AIDS. In the same year, TB deaths reached 1.4 million, jumping 300,000 from just a year before. The rise inspired headlines that tuberculosis was now the leading cause of death from infectious disease. And within the framework of that UN data, that was accurate. But there is another widely used and well regarded overview of global health. It is the Global Burden of Disease study, produced by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington and published by the British medical journal Lancet. By their calculations, TB deaths in 2015 totalled 1.1 million and HIV/AIDS deaths 1.2 million. But as institute researchers Hmwe Kyu and Theo Vos, told us, you couldn’t actually say that one topped the other. ""We didn’t find any statistically significant difference between the number of deaths due to both diseases,"" they said. An imperfect science: The India factor Estimating deaths from TB and HIV/AIDS requires judgment calls. As the WHO’s TB report noted in its methodology section, ""There are many potential sources of uncertainty associated with estimates of TB incidence, prevalence and mortality."" Many poorer, more rural nations have a hard time collecting the data from doctors and clinics. Faced with missing numbers, analysts make assumptions to fill in the gaps. Then they run the country totals through overall statistical models that involve other assumptions. Usually, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and the WHO roughly agree at the global level. But in 2015, there was a 300,000 death difference for TB. That was also the first year when new numbers from India began to change the WHO’s global estimates. Prudence Smith, a WHO spokeswoman, told us in October that between 2013 and 2015, India shifted from a reporting system based on paper to one that lives on the Internet. ""In addition,"" Smith said, "" the country has made case notification legally mandatory."" In the world of tuberculosis, India is a huge deal. It is home to more than 25 percent of all TB cases and deaths worldwide. With more raw data in hand, the WHO’s estimate of the TB death toll in India more than doubled, going from 220,000 in 2014 to 480,000 in 2015, a jump of 260,000. To be clear, it’s not that more people were dying from TB, just that India reported more deaths to the WHO. Curiously, in the same period, the institute’s estimate for India barely changed. It had judged the figure to be in the neighborhood of 480,000 since 2013. The WHO’s upward shift for India accounted for 80 percent of the rise in its global total for TB. The institute had no reason for such an adjustment. It had factored in a higher number for India all along and it's global total remained about the same. Why TB might overtake HIV/AIDS (without even trying) Most people hearing that TB deaths now outnumber HIV/AIDS deaths, or had simply pulled even with HIV/AIDS, would likely think that TB was spreading. That would be wrong. Beyond the matter of better reporting out of India and a couple of other countries, the real driver behind the shifting numbers has to do with HIV/AIDS. ""We have been much more successful in the fight against AIDS than TB,"" said Audrey Jackson, a senior global health fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. (Jackson just published a report on the many ways TB programs have played second fiddle inside Washington.) Death rates for both TB and HIV/AIDS have been falling, but the decline has been faster for HIV/AIDS than TB. Using the institute's data, between 2005 and 2015, the death rate for HIV/AIDS globally fell by 42 percent. At the same time, the TB death rate fell by about 34 percent. This chart from the institute’s database shows the impact on the number of deaths. The gains against HIV/AIDS have a lot to do with a massive hike in the number of people receiving antiretroviral treatment. There has also been a rise in the number of people getting treated for TB, but according to researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, in many countries, it’s proven harder to spot patients with TB. That leads to delays in care, which in turn make it harder for the person to beat the disease. Couple that with the rise in antibiotic resistant TB, along with other factors, and the gains are slower compared to HIV/AIDS. Those trends cast TB as more of a growing threat than HIV/AIDS. Right now, the death rates are about the same. However, Hmwe Kyu at the institute said that if the trend lines continue, then the victims of TB will outnumber those of HIV/AIDS. Not because TB has become worse, but because the situation with HIV/AIDS got better faster. Our ruling Seymour said tuberculosis is now a bigger killer than HIV/AIDS. Numbers from the United Nations and the World Health Organization support that, but another equally credible source, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, said the death tolls are about the same. The data’s not good enough for highly precise estimates. It’s also unclear that TB is killing more people than it did before. The higher estimate by the WHO reflects better reporting, mainly from India, but not more actual deaths. The one undisputed point is that death rates are falling faster for HIV/AIDS than for TB. Both sets of data back that up. In that respect, TB is the more threatening infectious disease because the world is having a harder time getting ahead of it. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the TB threat is itself rising. It looms larger than HIV/AIDS because that threat has fallen."
|
1082
|
Sydneysiders find their happy place catching a wave on 'Fluoro Friday'.
|
The sun is rising over Sydney’s Bondi Beach and surfer Grant Trebilco, clad in a colorful striped long-sleeved shirt and bright yellow shorts with black polka dots, has just caught his first wave.
|
true
|
Health News
|
Whether he catches one wave or a hundred, this salt water therapy, as Trebilco calls it, is where he finds his happy place. Trebilco was diagnosed with bipolar disorder seven years ago and hospitalized in a mental health facility. Finding himself unable to cope with everyday situations, he did the one thing that brought him happiness. He went surfing. He immediately felt better and realized that one wave was all he needed to get him through the day. Hoping to share this discovery with others, Trebilco put on a fluorescent suit one Friday when getting ready to surf. “Fluoro Fridays” was born. Every Friday morning since that day six years ago, a group of people dressed in bright colors or wearing colorful garlands has sat at the southern end of Bondi Beach in what is called an “anti-bad vibes circle” to discuss depression, anxiety and living with mental illness. Britain’s Prince Harry and his wife Meghan were invited to join the circle during their visit to Australia last year. The prince has said he sought counseling in his late twenties to deal with the grief of losing his mother, Princess Diana. “Prince Harry said ‘asking for help is not a weakness, it’s a strength’, and that just showed people around the world you don’t have to face mental health challenges alone,” Trebilco said. “Fluoro Friday” now takes place on 150 beaches around the world and Trebilco says that, for some people, it’s the first time they’ve been able to share their mental health struggles. “I think the way the OneWave community helps is that it lets people know it’s OK not to be OK,” Trebilco said. Members of the community say it helps raise their spirits. “Whether you surf or not, you can just come into the water and it just clears your head for the beginning of your Friday and gives you a good start to the weekend,” said Ricky, one of the members of the community.
|
9420
|
Stem Cells for Knee Problems? U.S. Doctors Investigate
|
The focus of this story seems to be this question: Where do we stand with regard to stem cells helping with wear-and-tear arthritis (osteoarthritis) of the knees? The story does well in giving some background regarding stem cells, and how this is apparently a growing trend. The story would have been strengthened considerably by including the potential harms of treatments, the costs of stem cells vs. conventional therapy and discussing the alternatives more thoroughly. Osteoarthritis of the knee (like lower back pain) is one of the most common, but difficult-to-treat orthopedic ailments in the Western world. Given that we’re living longer, and experiencing historically high levels of obesity, this problem is expected to become even more common. With this will come a growing demand for non-surgical interventions (although injecting stem cells into the knee joint is still invasive). Health claims about stem cells have exploded and include advertised benefits for everything from Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis to erectile dysfunction and blindness. This means journalists have a big opportunity to educate the public regarding what we do know — and what we don’t know — about this emerging technology. Also, it’s important to note that academic medical centers also have been making misleading claims about stem cells–it’s not just private clinics.
|
mixture
|
knee osteoarthritis,stem cell therapies
|
While the story mentions that stem cell treatments are often not covered by insurance, they should have said how much these treatments typically cost. The story features studies in progress, and gives brief mention to a handful of other published studies. But no results are quantified, and the implication is that that’s because past research isn’t worth discussing. But if there is a “lack of research” showing that stem cell injections are effective, why allow sources to claim that “It’s helped us extend some players’ careers” and “There’s definitely a group of people that it helps”? Those claims, if they are repeated at all, should be immediately followed by cautions about the lack of evidence supporting them. This story does not clearly state the harms involved with either conventional therapy for osteoarthritis nor the injection of stem cells into the knee joint. This story is clear in stating that the evidence for effectively treating osteoarthritis of the knee with stem cells is currently lacking, and that more research is needed. One detail that might have been useful to add is that the current study underway doesn’t have anyone assigned to receive a “sham” procedure (in this case, likely an injection of saline), which is considered the gold standard way to test for the effectiveness of injection treatments. Also, the evidence is still unclear if either of the surgeries mentioned (arthroscopy and microfracture) are effective in and of themselves. So we’re essentially adding an unproven injection treatment on top of surgical treatments that are also unproven. There is no disease mongering in this story. Four different physicians are quoted in the story. However, according to Dollars for Docs, three of these physicians have recent financial ties to companies actively involved in stem cell product development. This was not disclosed. Non-surgical and drug alternatives for treating pain from osteoarthritis of the knee were not discussed. Also, the story starts out by saying “Knee osteoarthritis, or arthritis of the knees, is a difficult-to-treat and painful condition affecting millions of people.” Many patients have mild symptoms that are well controlled with medicine, exercise, physical therapy and other simpler and less expensive treatments than discussed here. The article should have mentioned these and said that the treatments discussed are considered for those not responding to these other, first-line therapies. The story implied that there are plenty of places to get these procedures, but lack of evidence and insurance coverage, as well as concerns by the FDA, are standing in the way of availability. The story makes it clear this is an emerging technology that is currently being tested to see how it compares with existing approaches. This story does not appear to rely upon a news release.
|
21227
|
Romneycare was model for Obamacare.
|
"Rick Perry says ""Romneycare was model for Obamacare"""
|
true
|
Health Care, Texas, Rick Perry,
|
"While Texas Gov. Rick Perry was debating rivals for the Republican presidential nomination on Oct. 11, his campaign was righting ""wrongs"" uttered by the other candidates through a Twitter account called ""PerryTruthTeam."" During the debate, PerryTruthTeam sent out a familiar message: ""Romneycare was model for Obamacare."" The Perry campaign has hit that idea hard. On Oct. 10, Perry posted an online video linking the health care plan that Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, signed in 2006 for his state (dubbed Romneycare by critics) and the one that President Barack Obama signed in 2010 for the country (dubbed Obamacare by critics). We checked whether the Perry campaign’s five-word tweet was on the mark. Perry’s tweet implies that the White House used the Massachusetts law to build its own national law. We’ll begin our examination by noting that even if you’re just looking at the two laws from the outside, without knowing any behind-the-scenes information, they seem pretty similar. Generally, both laws leave in place the major insurance systems: employer-provided insurance for some workers and their families, Medicare for seniors and Medicaid for the poor. Also, both laws require people to buy insurance or pay a penalty, a mechanism called the ""individual mandate."" Both laws also seek to reduce the number of people without health insurance by expanding Medicaid and offering tax breaks to help moderate-income people buy insurance. Finally, companies that don't offer insurance have to pay fines, with exceptions for small business. Some other shared elements: • Health insurance exchanges. Both the Massachusetts and national plans provide for voluntary ""exchanges"" that individuals and small businesses can use to purchase private-sector health insurance. These exchanges are designed to offer a range of plans with different benefits and premium levels. • Affordability subsidies. Under both plans, lower-income individuals and families can receive government subsidies to help them pay health insurance premiums. In the Massachusetts plan, the subsidies flow to adults living at 150 percent to 300 percent of the federal poverty level, depending on their household size. Under the national plan, the sliding-scale subsidies go up to 400 percent of the poverty level. Still, there remain differences between the federal law and the Massachusetts law. Two of the biggest: • Cost containment. Critics of the Massachusetts plan have taken it to task for its lack of cost-containment provisions. The federal law makes changes to Medicare that are intended to lower program costs, such as restructuring how payments are made to private insurance plans offered through Medicare, known as Medicare Advantage plans. Since Medicare is a federal program, the Massachusetts plan does not address this issue. • Financing. Both the Massachusetts plan and federal law are financed in part by revenue generated from the individual and employer mandates. But the Massachusetts plan's financing is heavily dependent on leveraging federal matching funds, while the federal law, in addition to cost savings from Medicare, imposes taxes on drug makers, medical device manufacturers, health insurers and indoor tanning services. It also taxes high-cost health care plans. The Massachusetts plan does not do these things. So, the laws, while not identical, share many core elements. Next, we wondered if the federal law was indeed based on the Massachusetts law. Again, it’s difficult to know what people in Congress and in the White House looked at as they drafted the final health care law. But according to independent reports, they consulted people who worked on the Massachusetts law. On its website, the Perry campaign pointed to an NBC News news story published online Oct. 11, 2011, under the headline ""White House used Mitt Romney health-care law as blueprint for federal law."" The report refers to White House visitor logs showing that three health care advisers and experts ""who helped shape the health care reform law signed by Romney in 2006"" had a dozen meetings with senior White House officials in 2009, including one with the president. One of the experts, Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told NBC News that ""the White House wanted to lean a lot on what we’d done in Massachusetts."" ""They really wanted to know how we can take that same approach we used in Massachusetts and turn that into a national model,"" Gruber said. Gruber received a $380,000 contract from the Obama administration in 2009 to help Congress draft the federal health care law based on the Massachusetts plan, according to the story. He earlier had been hired by the Romney administration to do computer modeling of the costs of various approaches to expanding health-care coverage, the story said. Gruber’s biography on the MIT website says he ""was a key architect of Massachusetts’ ambitious health reform effort and in 2006 became an inaugural member of the Health Connector Board, the main implementing body for that effort."" Romney, asked at an Oct. 11 news conference about the NBC report that three of his ""aides"" had advised Obama on health care, disputed that characterization of the experts, saying they were ""consultants,"" not ""aides."" ""I’m sure the president got lots of ideas (on health care reform),"" Romney said, ""but the one person he should have talked to, that he never talked to, was me."" Romney said he would have told Obama that ""the plan he was crafting wouldn’t work"" because the nation couldn’t afford more federal spending. And he said that if he were elected president, he would push for the repeal of the federal health care law. Romney’s campaign has also played down Gruber’s influence, telling Politico for an Oct. 11 news story that he was not an adviser to Romney and that Romney’s administration hired him only to run econometric models. However, the Politico story also says that ""it is well known that Obama’s health care plan was in part modeled after Romney’s 2006 reforms."" We also reviewed an article in the June 6, 2011, New Yorker magazine on the development of the Massachusetts and federal health care laws. Like the NBC News piece, the New Yorker article notes that people who worked on the Massachusetts law were also consulted by the White House. One was Jon Kingsdale, a former insurance executive whom Romney had hired to implement the Massachusetts law, according to the article. ""The policy in Massachusetts was real,"" Kingsdale told the New Yorker. ""We were very, very influential. I testified a lot. The congressional staffers would constantly ask, ‘Well, how do you handle this? How do you handle that?’ We were the go-to people."" The article also describes a meeting in 2008, before Obama had decided to support an individual federal mandate, that was attended by people who would later become ""the key brokers"" of the final deal on the federal health care law in 2010. Among those organizing the meeting was John McDonough — a Massachusetts advocate for universal health care during Romney’s governorship who had since been hired by U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass. During the development of the Massachusetts law, McDonough ""was named by Romney aides as a ‘stakeholder’ to represent consumer interests,"" according to the NBC News article. At the October 2008 meeting, McDonough laid out three health care policy options that the next president could adopt, one of which he called ""Massachusetts Avenue"" and was based on Romney’s plan, the New Yorker article says. Fifteen of the 20 people at the meeting — representatives from hospital associations, the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, the labor movement and groups advocating universal health care — backed the ""Massachusetts"" option, the article says. The following year, Obama health care adviser Nancy-Ann DeParle sent a memo to the president recommending that he support a mandate like the one in Massachusetts, according to the New Yorker article. A few weeks later, Obama told congressional leaders he would back a requirement that every American buy health insurance. Finally, it’s important to note that some of the key ideas in the federal law had been circulating before the Massachusetts law was written. For example, scholars credit Alain C. Enthoven — an emeritus professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business who worked in the Defense Department during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations — with popularizing the idea of health insurance exchanges as many as three decades ago. And at least one previous Republican proposal on health care has included an individual mandate, a plan put forward by Sen. John Chafee, R-R.I., during the Clinton administration’s unsuccessful push for universal coverage in the early 1990s. So, what of Perry’s tweet? Although the federal law isn’t an exact replica of the one in Massachusetts, the plan signed by Romney certainly served as a model."
|
11106
|
FDA Approves New Device for Brain Tumor Treatment
|
The story relies soley on two press releases and as a result falls short on providing important details about the device and of the trial. The company presentation to the FDA is readily available (http://www.fda.gov/downloads/AdvisoryCommittees/CommitteesMeetingMaterials/MedicalDevices/MedicalDevicesAdvisoryCommittee/NeurologicalDevicesPanel/UCM247168.pdf ) and could have been used to provide readers with more context as well as quantitation of benefits and harms with the device. Given that this is a relatively common type of brain cancer and that it can be resistant to other treatments, readers deserve more information than that provided in news releases to be able to judge the potential of this new device and how it compares with other approaches.
|
false
|
Devices,WebMD
|
NO discussion of costs – even though the story allowed a company spokesman (from a news release) promote the potential for the device. Why not ask that company directly for the cost? No quantification of benefits – only this: “The FDA says the study showed comparable overall survival rates in patients in both groups.” Does that mean a week? A month? A year? Longer? Answer – not in the story: Both treatment groups had a median survival of about 6 months. The story stated: “The agency says patients treated with the new system experienced a slightly higher incidence of neurological side effects, including convulsions and headaches, than patients receiving chemotherapy.” What does slightly higher incidence actually mean? What is the baseline incidence – in actual numbers? And how much higher was the incidence with the new system? Give the numbers and let readers/consumers decide what’s “slightly higher” and what that might mean in their own lives. There was no scrutiny of the evidence – not surprising given the story’s reliance on company and FDA news releases. By comparison, look at how MedPageToday reported the back story when it reported last month on an FDA advisory’s committee’s struggle with the issues: The story appropriately frames the target population: “is meant for adults with glioblastoma multiforme that recurs or progresses after chemotherapy and radiation treatment. Glioblastoma multiforme is a common type of brain cancer, and the tumor is highly resistant to standard treatments, such as surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, the FDA says in a statement.” As already stated, no independent source was quoted about the evidence, about the benefits or harms. Even the news-release-lifted quote from the FDA official said only that the approval shows FDA’s “commitment to innovative new devices that provide patients with other treatment options.” That’s more of a self-promotional statement about FDA than it is a helpful comment about the role of this particular device. This is indeed unfortunate given the availabilty of the information about the pivotal study in toto from the FDA website. But the online story didn’t even link to that information. The news-release-driven info dances around the edges of what we want to hear, but never really delivers. Excerpts: But we’re not given any meaningful, substantive, data-backed comparison. It wouldn’t take much space to do so. How often do other treatments fail? How often do debilitating side effects occur from surgery, radiation, chemotherapy? The purpose of the story was to announce FDA approval of the new device, so it’s clear that it’s not widely available yet. We’re only told that this is a new device, newly approved by the FDA. But its unique place in the treatment of this brain tumor type is not clearly defined. In reality, the use of weak electrical fields to interrupt cancer cell growth has been known for some time. But we’re not given any of that context. The story admits it drew its information from a company news release and an FDA news release. Was it that urgent that this be published before a live person could actually be interviewed? And if we accept the FDA as the primary source, then the only source was the company spokesman, who is not an independent voice on this product and its potential.
|
9915
|
2 Treatments for Retinas Make Gains
|
This was a story that deals primarily with an experimental new drug called VEGF Trap Eye that treats age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of blindness in older adults. (The story also diverges briefly into discussion of a second drug based on embryonic human stem cell research, but this is not the main focus of the story and will not be an emphasis in our review.) Since the study’s findings about the new drug appear to have come directly from Regeneron, the manufacturer, without any external scrutiny, we feel it was incumbent upon the story to provide some independent expert analysis of the results — something which it failed to do. The story also wasn’t detailed enough in its description of which specific patients might benefit from the drug, what harms they might experience, and what other treatment options may be available to them. The “wet” form of macular degeneration and Stargardt’s retinopathy — the two eye diseases discussed in this story — are serious causes of vision loss with few if any effective treatments.
|
mixture
|
New York Times
|
The story does mention the cost per dose of two competing drugs, Lucentis and Avastin (which are actually two different formulations of the same drug that are made by the same company, Genentech). Lucentis is the version of the drug meant for the eye, whereas Avastin is approved and sold as a cancer treatment. However, doctors can use Avastin off-label in the eye with much smaller doses than cancer patients need. The result is that the cost per dose is vastly lower for Avastin than it is for Lucentis. A head-to-head trial of Avastin and Lucentis is now underway that will probably have important implications for pricing and prescribing of these drugs. (If Avastin works just as well as Lucentis, more doctors will presumably switch to it at much lower cost to patients.) Moreover, allegations have surfaced recently that Genentech is providing questionable financial inducements for doctors to use the more costly Lucentis instead of Avastin. Given the significance of these developments for anyone who needs or may need treatment for AMD, we feel the story could have and probably should have gone into a bit more detail about why these two drugs have such wildly different costs. We also think that if the story is interviewing a company about its plans to seek marketing approval in just a few months, they certainly could get some kind of pricing estimate from them. Nevertheless, by at least mentioning costs, the story accomplishes more than most other health articles that we review and does enough to satisfy the minimum for this criterion. We’ll award a satisfactory. A pretty good job here. The story notes that the major benefit of the new drug over existing treatments would be the potential for less frequent dosing and follow-up visits. It also quantifies the benefit in terms of the numbers of letters and lines that were legible on any eye chart — a metric that should have “real-world” significance for most readers. The story cites a company assurance that the new drug is “equally safe” compared with its FDA-approved competitor. To which we respond: How safe is that? Injecting substances into the eye is associated with rare but potentially serious risks such as infections of the interior eye. There’s also some evidence that Lucentis is associated with increased risk of stroke. Does the new drug carry the same risks? The story should have provided more details. With over 2000 patients in the trials the company could have reported on the minor and major complications that were observed in the 2 trials. Two major problems here: We feel that the story crosses the line when it diverges briefly into discussion of a potential new treatment for Stargardt’s macular dystrophy, another retinal disease that causes earlier-onset macular degeneration. In its coverage of the experimental therapy, which just received approval to start human testing, the story solicits a comment from the father of a 10-year-old boy who, according to the father, “basically went from normal vision to legally blind in seven months.” This anecdote represents a worst-case scenario for this disease, and its inclusion with almost no context seems to serve little purpose other than to create undue fear in the reader. The child would not even be a candidate for the trial, according to the story, since enrollment in the study is limited to adults. The only expert source quoted in the story was an investigator on the study of the new drug. Although the story disclosed that he was a consultant for the drug’s manufacturer, Regeneron, it should have sought out a comment on the findings from somebody with no stake in the research. This is especially important considering the findings were not published in a journal and presumably have not been vetted by other researchers. Laser surgery and photodynamic therapy are other potential treatment options for wet AMD. The story did not mention them. The story calls VEGF Trap-Eye “experimental” and says the drug’s developers plan to apply for approval of the drug in the first half of 2011. The story does not try to oversell the novelty of the new treatment. The story seems to have relied on the company for the substance of this story and quoted only one researcher who was affiliated with the study (not counting the father of the child with Stargardt’s macular dystrophy, which, as discussed above under the Disease Mongering criterion, was not the main focus of the story). Since no independent sources were referenced, we can’t be sure to what extent this story may have relied on a release. We’ll call it not applicable.
|
27768
|
A 1964 campaign ad for President Lyndon B. Johnson featured a purported Republican voter expressing concerns which eerily echoed threads of debate in the GOP in 2016.
|
MALE NARRATOR: Vote for President Johnson on November 3rd. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.
|
true
|
Politics Ballot Box, 1964, Barry Goldwater, campaign ads
|
"On 8 March 2016, the Facebook page for the web site Quartz shared a video called “Confessions of a Republican,” which was originally a political advertisement from 1964. The clip rapidly gained traction, and along with it skepticism that the viewpoints expressed too neatly echoed political schisms debated during the 2016 election: // <! [CDATA[ (function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = ""//connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.3""; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); // ]]> This “Confessions of a Republican” ad from the 1964 presidential election is going viral, thanks to its uncanny relevance to the 2016 presidential election. Posted by Quartz on Tuesday, March 8, 2016 The speaker (actor Bill Bogert) discussed his lifelong identity as a loyal Republican voter before expressing reservations about the candidacy of then-Senator Barry Goldwater, who unsuccessfully challenged President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. Among the concerns he aired (the ad’s full text is at the bottom of the page) were what he described as a tendency of Goldwater to rapidly reverse position or deny statements on key issues, as well as a hawkish attitude during a point in American history when the specter of nuclear destruction loomed: The hardest thing for me about this whole campaign is to sort out one Goldwater statement from another. A reporter will go to Senator Goldwater and he’ll say, “Senator, on such and such a day, you said, and I quote, ‘blah blah blah’ whatever it is, end quote.” And then Goldwater says, “Well, I wouldn’t put it that way.” I can’t follow that. Was he serious when he did put it that way? Is he serious when he says I wouldn’t put it that way? I just don’t get it. A President ought to mean what he says. President Johnson, Johnson at least is talking about facts … but Goldwater, often, I can’t figure out just what Goldwater means by the things he says. I read now where he says, “A craven fear of death is sweeping across America. What is that supposed to mean? If he means that people don’t want to fight a nuclear war, he’s right. I don’t. When I read some of these things that Goldwater says about total victory, I get a little worried, you know? I wish I was as sure that Goldwater is as against war as I am that he’s against some of these other things. I wish I could believe that he has the imagination to be able to just shut his eyes and picture what this country would look like after a nuclear war. That portion alone drew comparisons to a fluctuating GOP identity in 2016, as well as objections raised about Donald Trump within the Republican party. Another excerpt paralleled former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke’s endorsement of Trump in February 2016: I wouldn’t have worried so much about party unity because if you unite behind a man you don’t believe in, it’s a lie. I tell you, those people who got control of that convention: Who are they? I mean, when the head of the Ku Klux Klan, when all these weird groups come out in favor of the candidate of my party — either they’re not Republicans or I’m not. Bogert concluded by saying that he planned to vote against Goldwater on Election Day, and that his party made a mistake in its choice of nominee. A voiceover then urged viewers to vote for Johnson. While it’s true many of the expressed sentiments echoed 2016 election rhetoric, the video was not a modern creation. The first appearance of it we found on the internet dated back to at least 2008 (clicking “transcript” revealed identical text to the video that circulated in 2016). The source for the earlier version was the Museum of the Moving Image, which exhaustively catalogued such media as part of an exhibit called The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952-2012: The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952-2012 is an online exhibition presenting more than 300 television commercials from every election year since 1952, when the first campaign TV ads aired. The website will be updated through the 2012 election between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. The site includes a searchable database and features commentary, historical background, election results, and navigation organized by year, type of ad, and issue. There is a playlist feature that allows visitors to select, annotate, and share their own groups of ads, and to view playlists by guest contributors. Each selected commercial is accompanied by a list of related ads. There is a transcript for each ad and a feature that allows visitors to search the entire database by title and by words in the transcripts. Remarks on the clip provided further context about the political climate in 1964: The margin of Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964 was partly a repudiation of Barry Goldwater’s extreme right-wing views. Goldwater, an Arizona senator and author of the best-selling book The Conscience of a Conservative, won the Republican nomination after a bitter primary campaign against moderate New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. In his acceptance speech, Goldwater made the infamous statement, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” The assertion, meant as a defense of conservatism, merged in the public consciousness with statements in which Goldwater advocated the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam and argued that Social Security be made voluntary. Film professor and author of the linked book (What’s Fair on the Air: Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest) Heather Hendershot said in a 2011 Curator’s Note: The right-wing media explosion of the 1960s has largely been lost to history, but we do have some snapshots of liberal responses to Cold War right-wingers in the form of campaign ads produced for the 1964 Johnson presidential campaign. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) used TV and radio to emphasize that Republican nominee Sen. Barry Goldwater was a nut with his finger on the proverbial button—as in LBJ’s infamous “Daisy Ad.” “Confessions of a Republican” is certainly less well-known, and is undoubtedly one of the strangest political campaign ads ever produced. In it, an actor (not identified as such) expresses his extreme anxieties about Goldwater. As he becomes increasingly nervous, he lights a cigarette to steady his nerves, and the camera moves in closer and closer. Who the hell is this sweaty, perturbed Man in a gray flannel suit? The spot is long on emotion and short on in-depth information, a tactic that should be familiar to TV viewers who have experienced virtually any mass mediated political campaign. Content-wise, what is of greatest interest is our putative Republican’s concerns about the “weird groups” supporting Goldwater, like the Ku Klux Klan. During the 1964 campaign a strange waltz materialized around the idea of “extremism,” with Goldwater insistent that he was not an extremist and the Johnson campaign insistent that he was. Our confessing Republican, a fantasy created by the DNC, distanced himself from the kooks, while revealing himself to be on the edge of instability himself. A 2010 blog post delved into the ad’s historical relevance (describing Goldwater’s campaign as “a naked appeal to Southern white racists to bolt the Democratic Party and support the Republican Party”). The article was written as race and racism once again became enormous issues in American politics following the 2008 election of the United States’ first black president. In November 2014, the actor from the 1964 commercial was interviewed about the “Confessions of a Republican” ad: Mr. Bogert himself was a 28 year-old Republican just as fearful of the man his Party put forth to lead the nation as was his semi-fictional character. “No, I certainly did not vote for Barry Goldwater. I voted for Lyndon Johnson. Ask me how long it’s been since I voted for a Republican.” I did. It’s been a long time. The interviewer noted that they had presumed that the actor in the Johnson campaign clip was a Democrat, but Bogert said that its producers required an actual Republican star in the spot: But just as the agency behind this commercial (Doyle Dane Bernbach) made sure that all of the staff who made this campaign were ardent Democrats, I’d always presumed that the actor in the “Confessions of a Republican” commercial was also a Democrat. Why would a Republican actor sign on to do a commercial at the expense of his own Party? “No, I’m a Republican. I just couldn’t stand Barry Goldwater. I was terrified of him … My father was disappointed that I did this commercial. He thought my performance was good, but he disagreed with the entire thesis.” I learned that when Bill Bogert interviewed to get the gig, the first question that the ad agency asked the young actor was whether or not he was a Republican. It was a pre-requisite for the gig. Not only was the “Confessions of a Republican” ad a legitimate archival clip from the 1964 campaign, but the actor depicted in it was himself a Republican, a casting prerequisite. The clip was likely scripted, but it was not a 2016 creation intended as a critique of the current political discourse. [TEXT: Confessions of a Republican] REPUBLICAN: I don’t know just why they wanted to call this a confession; I certainly don’t feel guilty about being a Republican. I’ve always been a Republican. My father is, his father was, the whole family is a Republican family. I voted for Dwight Eisenhower the first time I ever voted; I voted for Nixon the last time. But when we come to Senator Goldwater, now it seems to me we’re up against a very different kind of a man. This man scares me. Now maybe I’m wrong. A friend of mine just said to me, “Listen, just because a man sounds a little irresponsible during a campaign doesn’t mean he’s going to act irresponsibly.” You know that theory, that the White House makes the man. I don’t buy that. You know what I think makes a President – I mean, aside from his judgement, his experience – are the men behind him, his advisors, the cabinet. And so many men with strange ideas are working for Goldwater. You hear a lot about what these guys are against – they seem to be against just about everything – but what are they for? The hardest thing for me about this whole campaign is to sort out one Goldwater statement from another. A reporter will go to Senator Goldwater and he’ll say, “Senator, on such and such a day, you said, and I quote, ‘blah blah blah’ whatever it is, end quote.” And then Goldwater says, “Well, I wouldn’t put it that way.” I can’t follow that. Was he serious when he did put it that way? Is he serious when he says I wouldn’t put it that way? I just don’t get it. A President ought to mean what he says. President Johnson, Johnson at least is talking about facts. He says, “Look, we’ve got the tax cut bill and because of that you get to carry home X number of dollars more every payday. We’ve got the nuclear test ban and because of that there is X percent less radioactivity in the food.” But, but Goldwater, often, I can’t figure out just what Goldwater means by the things he says. I read now where he says, “A craven fear of death is sweeping across America. What is that supposed to mean? If he means that people don’t want to fight a nuclear war, he’s right. I don’t. When I read some of these things that Goldwater says about total victory, I get a little worried, you know? I wish I was as sure that Goldwater is as against war as I am that he’s against some of these other things. I wish I could believe that he has the imagination to be able to just shut his eyes and picture what this country would look like after a nuclear war. Sometimes, I wish I’d been at that convention at San Francisco. I mean, I wish I’d been a delegate, I really do. I would have fought, you know. I wouldn’t have worried so much about party unity because if you unite behind a man you don’t believe in, it’s a lie. I tell you, those people who got control of that convention: Who are they? I mean, when the head of the Ku Klux Klan, when all these weird groups come out in favor of the candidate of my party — either they’re not Republicans or I’m not. I’ve thought about just not voting at this election, just staying home — but you can’t do that, that’s saying you don’t care who wins, and I do care. I think my party made a bad mistake in San Francisco, and I’m going to have to vote against that mistake on the third of November."
|
43
|
Special Report: Powder Keg - FDA bowed to industry for decades as alarms were sounded over talc.
|
At an invitation-only gathering late last year, U.S. regulators and their guests huddled at a hotel near Washington, D.C., to discuss the best way to detect cancer-causing asbestos in talc powders and cosmetics.
|
true
|
Health News
|
The “Asbestos in Talc Symposium,” sponsored by the Food and Drug Administration, was dominated by industry hands: Most of the 21 non-government participants had done work for talc companies, such as testing and serving as expert witnesses and consultants, symposium documents and other records show. Key sessions were led by witnesses for Johnson & Johnson in lawsuits alleging the company failed to warn customers that its Baby Powder was tainted with cancer-causing asbestos, the records show. Others who sought invitations were turned away, including a physician who had testified against J&J in trials that resulted in billions of dollars in damage awards against the company. History was repeating itself. Over the past 50 years, the FDA has relied upon - and often deferred to - industry even as outside experts and consumers repeatedly raised serious health concerns about talc powders and cosmetics, a Reuters investigation found. Again and again since at least the 1970s, the agency has downplayed the risk of asbestos contamination and declined to issue warnings or impose safety standards, according to documents produced in court proceedings and in response to public records requests. The agency said it lacks the authority to require manufacturers to test for asbestos in talc or report any results. And it seldom has ordered its own tests - until recently. Amid heightened scrutiny in Congress, a criminal investigation of J&J and costly jury verdicts against the company, the regulator commissioned tests that found asbestos in 11 talc-based cosmetics, including Johnson’s Baby Powder. J&J recalled 33,000 bottles. Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois congressman who chairs a U.S. House subcommittee investigating talc safety, told Reuters it was time for regulators to stop relying on manufacturers’ safety assurances. “When something as serious as cancer or carcinogens are at issue,” Krishnamoorthi said, “self-regulation doesn’t make a lot of sense.” In written responses to questions from Reuters, the FDA said its resources and authority to regulate the cosmetic industry are limited. The agency said it has no power to ensure the safety of cosmetics before they are put on store shelves, nor to force companies to pull them off when potential hazards are discovered. “We are dependent on manufacturers to take steps to ensure the safety of their products,” the FDA said after announcing a voluntary recall of tainted cosmetics in March. FDA officials declined to comment on the decisions of former employees over the years, saying only that the agency relies on the best information available and that studies “have improved our understanding of how and why asbestos fibers are hazardous.” The agency said it now recognizes, as the World Health Organization and other public health agencies did years ago, that there is no known safe level of asbestos. FDA officials said their current policy is to act swiftly - and if necessary encourage recalls - even when small amounts are discovered. The regulator has stood by its recent tests of Johnson’s Baby Powder, despite pushback from the company. J&J, the world’s largest producer of talc powders, said in a statement that it recalled the 33,000 bottles of Baby Powder out of an “abundance of caution.” Eleven days later, the company announced that tests by labs it hired had determined that there was no asbestos - other than some contamination it said came from an air conditioner - in samples from the one bottle tested by the FDA and the batch it came from. In written responses to Reuters, J&J said it systematically tests its talc and has always found its powders to be safe and pure. “Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, the FDA and other regulatory bodies defended talc,” J&J’s Chief Executive Alex Gorsky testified in an Oct. 3 deposition. “FDA agreed overall with the position that we had taken with the safety of our talc.” The company told Reuters that it “has long cooperated (with) and supported the FDA in its mission to protect the public health,” and that any suggestion it has unduly influenced the agency to reduce regulation or standards is “just false.” The FDA now is under increasing pressure to ensure talc powders and cosmetics are free from asbestos. The agency’s testing of talc-based cosmetics this year followed jury verdicts totaling more than $5 billion against J&J in cancer lawsuits, as well as a Dec. 14 Reuters report showing that J&J knew its raw talc and powders sometimes tested positive for asbestos from the 1970s into the early 2000s and did not report those findings to the agency. J&J has disputed the Reuters report as “one-sided, false and inflammatory.” In the wake of the Reuters report, the company announced it was under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission. According to people familiar with the matter, these include a criminal grand jury probe into how forthright J&J has been about the safety of its powders. The FDA began looking into talc safety in 1971 after researchers at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York found what appeared to be asbestos in unnamed brands of talc powder. Two years later, FDA records show, the agency found asbestos in a sample of Shower to Shower, a J&J powder at the time that was made with the same talc as Johnson’s Baby Powder. The FDA never publicly announced the finding. J&J told Reuters the result was not final, citing findings in an FDA table issued in 1976. But that table, reviewed by Reuters, is ambiguous, listing no result for the type of asbestos found in 1973. J&J told Reuters the gap means no asbestos was found. Assured by J&J and other manufacturers that their talc was safe, the FDA eventually ended its inquiry without taking action because “the potential hazard did not warrant a recall,” Heinz J. Eiermann, a former J&J researcher who at the time ran the agency’s cosmetics division, wrote in a March 1976 memo. That same year, J&J, other talc companies and their trade group, the Cosmetic Toiletry and Fragrance Association, persuaded FDA officials that manufacturers could monitor the safety of their own products, according to records J&J and the group produced in litigation. The FDA dropped plans to impose testing and purity standards for talc powders and cosmetics. The trade group published its own test, which was voluntary for companies to use. The written standard for that test acknowledges that it cannot detect most types of asbestos at low levels, nor one common type - chrysotile - at all. In a statement to Reuters, the trade group said it believed that chrysotile was not commonly linked to talc used in cosmetics. Chrysotile is the type of asbestos the FDA-commissioned test found in Baby Powder this year. It also was found in several tests conducted by labs for J&J on its talc from 1972 through 2003, according to records produced in litigation. J&J has said that some of the tests were on industrial talc and that others, on Baby Powder talc, reflected background contamination. Asbestos is a loose term for a group of six minerals that readily separate into needles or fibers. Easily inhaled, they are known to cause lung, ovarian and other types of cancer. While most people exposed never get cancer, for some even small amounts are enough to trigger the disease. Just how small has not been established. Talc safety concerns resurfaced in 1983 when a graduate student scouring geology journals for a toxicology class came across information he considered disturbing: Talc deposits are commonly laced with asbestos, a similar mineral. Philippe Douillet immediately thought of the talc powder his sister used on her baby, he recalled in an interview with Reuters. He urged her to stop using it. Then he petitioned the FDA to require an asbestos warning on talc powders. “It was really obvious to me there was a big issue there,” said Douillet, who now runs a biotechnology company in Miami. When the FDA began evaluating Douillet’s petition, it looked to J&J for key information, agency records show. The FDA’s June 1985 risk assessment relied upon a decade-old letter from the company for the agency’s estimate of the amount of dust babies were exposed to during diapering. That 1974 letter from J&J to the FDA said that, hypothetically, even if babies were exposed to talc powder with as much as 1% asbestos, it would be a far lower concentration than allowed at the time for industrial workers. J&J told Reuters in a statement that “at no point has Johnson & Johnson taken the position that it would consider talc containing 1% asbestos appropriate for sale to consumers.” In the end, the FDA decided there was no need for an asbestos warning on talc powders. In a July 1986 letter to Douillet, acting associate FDA commissioner J.W. Swanson wrote that the quality of cosmetic talc had improved “and that even when asbestos was present, the levels were so low that no health hazard existed.” What’s more, Swanson wrote, agency officials had come to question earlier reported findings of asbestos in talc powders. Those doubts, he wrote, were based in part on a paper published in the proceedings of a 1977 scientific conference. Both of the paper’s authors had worked for J&J, one as an asbestos testing contractor and the other as its longtime talc supply manager. The authors argued that some testing methods were apt to misidentify microscopic lookalike rock splinters as asbestos. The industry’s test, the paper said, was designed to avoid this confusion. Other U.S. and European public health authorities have come to regard such splinters as presumptive toxins because of their similarity to asbestos. The FDA defended its 1986 decision to reject Douillet’s petition. In a statement, it said the graduate student “did not provide persuasive evidence that the cosmetic talc produced at the time contained significant amounts of asbestos minerals.” Eight years later, the regulator received a new request for a warning label on talc powders. This one came from Dr. Samuel Epstein, a University of Illinois environmental medicine professor who chaired the Cancer Prevention Coalition, an advocacy group. Epstein’s 1994 petition didn’t concern asbestos. It raised the possibility that talc, by itself, was a hazard worthy of a warning label. His petition was based on research showing that talc, when used as an antiperspirant and deodorant in underwear, was associated with ovarian cancer. In a brief July 1995 letter, FDA acting cosmetics chief John Bailey told Epstein’s coalition that the agency had taken no action because it had other priorities. Bailey told Reuters in a statement that he issued this “interim” response because the petition lacked scientific support. In 2002, having taken no action on the petition, Bailey moved to the cosmetic trade group, now known as Personal Care Products Council. The council considered him a “key employee” because of his “former employment with the FDA,” according to a tax filing by the group. Now a consultant, Bailey serves as a litigation expert witness to J&J and other talc companies. In his statement to Reuters, Bailey said he had been hired at the council “as a scientist responsible for applying sound science to decision making.” He disputed Reuters’ finding that the FDA deferred to industry, saying the agency takes potential health concerns seriously and does its own evaluations. In 2006, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified use of talc powder in the perineum area - the pelvic region between the legs - as “possibly carcinogenic.” Two years later, Illinois medical scientist Epstein filed a second petition to the FDA seeking a cancer warning label on talc products. J&J went to work to defeat it. In a May 2008 email to colleagues, J&J executive Kathleen K. Wille wrote: “Our response could be a potential source of data and information on which the FDA can base their response.” Together, J&J, its talc supplier and the Personal Care Products Council arranged for a pair of scientists to assess the published studies that linked talc and ovarian cancer, according to emails and other records produced in litigation. The scientists concluded that the evidence was too weak to consider talc as a cause. At a May 2009 meeting, Bailey, Wille and other industry representatives briefed FDA officials on the assessment, according to a meeting memo produced in litigation by J&J’s talc supplier. Three days later, Wille told colleagues in an email, “We have every confidence that the FDA will dismiss this petition once they have reviewed our submission.” J&J told Reuters in a statement that the company had been confident because it believed the agency would be swayed by science, which it said supported J&J’s position that talc does not cause ovarian cancer. Before the FDA ruled on the warning requests, however, concerns about asbestos contamination flared again. This time, the FDA’s South Korean counterpart reported finding asbestos in talc powders. Acting on that 2009 report, the FDA commissioned talc tests for the first time in 40 years, hiring Maryland-based AMA Analytical Services Inc, which analyzed 34 samples of talc powders and cosmetics, including Johnson’s Baby Powder. It found no asbestos in any of them. The lab had no experience testing for asbestos in talc. Its prior work focused on building materials such as vinyl flooring, according to the deposition testimony of AMA lab director Andreas Saldivar. The FDA has said Saldivar’s lab used “the most sensitive techniques available” but cautioned that the results were limited to the 34 talc powders and cosmetics tested. The testing had other limitations as well. Saldivar’s lab looked at less talc per sample than other labs that have found asbestos in talc powders. And it did its work in a fraction of the time typical for such analyses, according to a Reuters review of the lab report and interviews with experts who test talc for asbestos. Saldivar’s lab was recently rehired by the FDA. This time, it found the asbestos that led to the first recall of J&J’s iconic Baby Powder. Saldivar declined to comment. In the first verdict of its kind, a South Dakota jury found in October 2013 that J&J had a duty to warn women that research had linked its talc powder to ovarian cancer. No damages were awarded. Then the FDA weighed in on the issue. In April 2014, 20 years after Epstein first contacted the agency, the FDA rejected both of his petitions for warning labels. Its announcement said the science wasn’t strong enough to support a cancer warning, echoing the assessment J&J and its industry partners had presented to the agency in 2009. In court, such arguments have not always proved convincing. In early 2016, a Missouri jury concluded J&J’s powders caused a woman’s ovarian cancer death and awarded her survivors $72 million. An appellate court later set that verdict aside, ruling that the woman had filed her suit in the wrong state. In the aftermath, the FDA asked J&J for “safety literature and data regarding talc,” correspondence shows. The company submitted a report saying no asbestos had “ever been found during any testing” of its talc. Since then, lawsuits have compelled J&J to produce internal documents that show the company knew its talc and powders had tested positive for asbestos on occasion for decades. The company now faces more than 16,000 lawsuits alleging that its powders caused ovarian cancer and mesothelioma, an incurable cancer. The vast majority are awaiting trial. In court, there have been mixed verdicts, mistrials and some appellate rulings in J&J’s favor. Last year, in response to renewed asbestos concerns, FDA cosmetics chief Dr Linda Katz began organizing the November 2018 symposium and a public hearing on talc testing, now planned for next year. She reached out to J&J for help. J&J vice president Jethro Ekuta responded by sending Katz a letter in June 2018 recommending a list of three talc testing experts. All three had served as defense witnesses or consultants for J&J. Two of the experts Ekuta recommended, as well as a third J&J defense witness, led sessions at the closed-door “Asbestos in Talc Symposium” on Nov. 28, 2018. None of the sessions were led by medical experts who had questioned the safety of talc powders and cosmetics. J&J said that apart from recommending experts, it did not advise the FDA on the symposium. Ekuta, who has left J&J, declined to comment. In a statement to Reuters, the FDA downplayed its role in the symposium, saying the event was “hosted” by the Joint Institute for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (JIFSAN), a research group co-founded by the FDA. “No formal or regulatory recommendations were expected or made,” the agency said. In fact, records show, the FDA initiated and paid for the meeting, set the agenda and chose the participants. The meeting set the stage for formal recommendations on how to test products used every day by millions of people. The FDA said a government committee tasked with proposing a standard test for asbestos in talc powders and cosmetics is “continuing to work through issues discussed at the JIFSAN symposium.” Many FDA meetings are held in public and invite comment. Details on the talc symposium were hard to come by, however, even after it was over. The FDA declined Reuters’ requests to provide a list of participants or any information on what transpired. After Reuters filed a public records request with JIFSAN, the research group posted meeting information online and released planning emails. The guest list showed that more than half of the 54 participants were employed by or recently retired from FDA and other agencies. Of the 21 non-government participants, 17 had either worked for talc companies, done lab testing or served as expert witnesses for the industry, Reuters found. Five of the participants affiliated with talc companies also have served as expert witnesses for plaintiffs. Most of the non-government participants were experts in geology or minerals testing. In a statement, the FDA said it would ordinarily avoid having sessions led by defense or plaintiff witnesses. However, the agency said there are a “limited number of experts worldwide with scientific knowledge” on asbestos testing, standards and results analysis. Not everyone was welcome. Among those turned away was Dr. David Egilman, a clinical professor of family medicine at Brown University. He testified last year in a trial that ended in a $4.69 billion verdict for women alleging J&J’s talc powders caused their ovarian cancers. Egilman told Reuters he was concerned that if the FDA was guided by geologists and industry consultants, it might overlook fundamental questions about which mineral fibers cause cancer. He wanted to offer his expertise, as a physician and researcher, on what technicians should look for under the microscope. Testing hinges “on the determination of what particles or elements should be tested for,” he wrote in a November 2018 email to organizers asking to be included in the symposium. “This is a medical question and not a technical question.” Katz took a different view. In an email forwarded to Egilman, she said: “This meeting is not intended to discuss health-related issues or concerns.” She met with Egilman later. Katz also told Egilman that the symposium was not intended to reach any consensus. At its conclusion, however, session leaders, including three who have served as defense witnesses for J&J, drafted what they called “consensus” or “concurrence” reports. Two of the reports reviewed by Reuters embraced industry positions on what fibers should be counted as hazardous, an issue of fierce contention in courtrooms across the country. The reports discouraged counting fibers that may or may not be asbestos, saying that doing so might exaggerate the hazard. That view runs contrary to the positions of other U.S. and European public health officials, who presume mineral fibers that even look like asbestos are toxic. As Arnold Brody, a professor emeritus at Tulane University Medical School, told jurors in a talc powder trial last year, “The lung doesn’t care” what it’s called. These issues are likely to be aired at the public hearing the FDA said it is planning for next year. The gathering could signal how the agency intends to navigate between industry and consumer interests in coming years. Krishnamoorthi, the congressman heading the House investigation into talc safety, said the agency needs to bring consumers and their advocates into the discussion. “In light of the public interest around this particular issue,” he said, “we need to find out what’s going on.”
|
6473
|
Oakland council bans coal shipments, citing health risks.
|
The Oakland City Council voted unanimously Monday night to kill a plan to use a proposed marine terminal to transport Utah coal to Asia, calling such shipments public health and safety hazards. Backers argued the project would bring needed jobs to an impoverished part of town.
|
true
|
Top News, California, Health, Utah, Environmental concerns, Environment, Business, Oakland, Public health, U.S. News
|
The vote — which prompted environmental activists still in council chambers after four hours to break into applause — approved an ordinance that bans the transport, handling and storage of coal and petroleum coke at bulk material facilities or terminals in Oakland. “We want jobs that people can have, and have a long life and they don’t have to rely upon a job of desperation,” said Council President Lynette Gibson McElhaney after the vote. “I just believe that we can do better in Oakland.” The ordinance requires a second vote. City leaders have wrestled with the issue for more than a year, as detractors and supporters of the proposed marine terminal argued over the environmental dangers of bringing millions of tons of coal through the area and the economic benefits of good-paying union jobs. The terminal is part of a larger makeover of an army base that closed in 1999, eliminating thousands of jobs. The proposed terminal is in West Oakland, a historically black neighborhood that’s among the poorest and most polluted in the region. The council approved the project before the coal proposal was made. It’s uncertain whether the terminal will continue without shipping coal. A lawyer for the Oregon Bulk and Oversized Terminal on Monday sent the council a letter detailing potential legal consequences. “Politically, no quantity of handling coal or petcoke under whatever extraordinary standard will be tolerated,” said David Smith. “While that may accomplish a political outcome, it is only the first steps towards an unfortunate legal outcome.” City leaders said they were confident they could overcome a legal challenge. More than 150 people on both sides rallied outside the building Monday before the evening meeting. They packed the council’s chamber, cheering and booing as speakers testified. At times, it was so hard to hear speakers that the council president had to ask security to remove some people from the room. Coal proponents railed at the council for what they saw as a pre-ordained vote. They argued that any environmental impact would be mitigated by transporting coal in covered rail cars that are unloaded underground. “We agree 1,000 percent that West Oakland is polluted,” said Ron Muhammad, a fourth-generation resident of West Oakland. “But the project has a plan to mitigate it, to address it, so since the public health portion is taken out of the picture, then it goes back to the jobs.” On the other side, coal opponents argued there was no way to keep coal dust from escaping into the air, and that rail shipment would worsen the health of children already disadvantaged by poverty and bad air. “This whole notion of coal-covered cars is rather ridiculous to say the least because it’s never been done before,” said Derrick Muhammad of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which opposes the shipment of coal. Among the speakers were residents of Utah who were furious that their state lawmakers had pumped more than $50 million in public money to build the facility, hoping to spur investment in the state’s rural counties.
|
13254
|
"David Holmes Says Gerald Daugherty advocated lowering the penalty for crimes like strangulation in domestic violence cases because ""they just ‘throw more people into the’"" jail ""‘system."
|
David Holmes says Gerald Daugherty advocated lighter penalty for certain strangulation cases
|
false
|
Criminal Justice, Crime, Texas, David Holmes,
|
"The Democratic challenger in a Travis County commissioner race says incumbent Republican Gerald Daugherty has urged a reduction in penalties tied to strangulation attempts in domestic violence attacks. David Holmes, a mediator and former legislative aide seeking to represent Precinct 3 covering western parts of the county, said in an Oct. 17, 2016, Facebook post: ""Strangulation family violence crimes have arisen as an issue in my campaign for county commissioner after my opponent advocated lowering the penalty for such crimes because,"" Holmes wrote, ""they just, ‘throw more people into the system.’"" For this fact check, we reviewed the original video from a May 26, 2016, work session where Daugherty made a statement about the county possibly asking state lawmakers to re-classify strangulation to a misdemeanor from a felony. Holmes didn’t provide nor did we find other indications of Daugherty otherwise exploring or pushing for the change. In his Facebook post, Holmes urged viewers to watch and share an accompanying video he made that shows Daugherty saying at the work session: ""Now strangulation, you know, is a definition that throws more people into the system. I mean, and I don’t know whether, you know, we need to be at the Legislature going, ‘don’t put strangulation as a damn felony,’ I mean, you know, because, you know, that just raises the numbers."" SOURCE: Video posted on Facebook by David Holmes, Oct. 17, 2016 (screenshot) We learned more about the context of Daugherty’s comments by watching the county’s posted video of the session. It shows Daugherty piping up after the commissioners court heard criminal justice officials describe factors behind a 13 percent, 299-person uptick in the county’s jail population from May 2014 to May 2016. Addressing the commissioners court, members of the county’s Jail Population Monitoring Group, consisting of county justice planning, criminal courts and pretrial service administrators, cited as factors increases in felony family violence charges as well as bookings of individuals with mental disabilities. Carsten Andresen, one of the administrators, told the commissioners court that an enhanced form had helped authorities build domestic violence cases--resulting in more felony charges since 2014. To our inquiry, Kelsey McKay, a Travis County prosecutor, said by phone the county in 2014 added questions to the Travis County Sheriff’s Office strangulation supplement form to improve evidence-gathering about suspected abusers. Before that, McKay advised, the 2009 Legislature revised Title 5, Chapter 22 of the state penal code to make it a third-degree felony rather than a Class A misdemeanor if a family member, household member or significant other of a victim is ""recklessly impeding the normal breathing or circulation of the blood of the person by applying pressure to the person’s throat or neck or by blocking the person’s nose or mouth."" About an hour and 10 minutes into the work session, Daugherty expressed frustration at the jail population statistics presented before asking the monitoring group about how the group is organized. In our transcript below, we’ve bolded the Daugherty comments noted by Holmes: ""If you have a committee and you don’t have a chairman and you don’t have a charge - how often do you meet?"
|
6606
|
Stop! Washing your Thanksgiving turkey could spread germs.
|
Go ahead and rinse your cranberries, potatoes and green beans. But food experts say don’t — repeat don’t — wash the turkey before popping it in the oven on Thanksgiving Day.
|
true
|
AP Top News, Health, General News, Thanksgiving, Lifestyle, Banks, U.S. News, Weekend Reads
|
They say that could spread the germs lurking on your turkey in the kitchen sink or nearby food. But it’s been a challenge trying to convince cooks to stop rinsing off raw poultry. “If your mother did it and your grandmother did it, and suddenly the (government) says not to wash your turkey, you may take some time to adjust,” said Drusilla Banks, who teaches food sanitation for the University of Illinois Extension. Germs that can make people sick are common in the guts of healthy poultry and are legally allowed to be on raw turkey and chicken. The assumption is that nobody eats their poultry rare, and that thorough cooking will kill the bacteria. So it’s possible that two common causes of food poisoning — salmonella and campylobacter — are on the turkey, said Mindy Brashears, a food safety official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The do-not-wash raw poultry advice from the USDA is relatively new and perhaps hasn’t caught on because it goes against the ingrained belief that washing makes things clean, said Banks. Participants in a food safety study offered their own rationale: “If it’s still slimy — I’m not sure what that is. It just feels good to wash it,” said one. Another said: “My grandmother taught me that. She just said to wash all your food because there’s no telling where it’s been before it got in the pack.” Benjamin Chapman, a study author and food safety expert at North Carolina State University, said the instinct to wash raw poultry goes back at least decades when people relied more on visual cues to spot problems with poultry. TV chef Julia Child was among those who said washing chicken was “just the safer thing to do” before experts began advising against it. But food prep is a juggling act, and germs from poultry can be spread even if it’s not washed, especially when birds are removed from packaging. It’s why washing and sanitizing hands, utensils and surfaces are even more important. The USDA-funded study underscores that point. Researchers sprayed raw chicken with a harmless strain of E. coli and watched volunteer cooks at test kitchens. Among those who washed their raw chicken, about a quarter ended up spreading the bacteria to their lettuce. But even some of those who did not rinse the chicken got germs on the lettuce. There are other opportunities for germs to survive and thrive on turkeys: thawing and cooking. For thawing, experts say frozen birds shouldn’t be left out on counters since germs can start multiplying on the outer parts that defrost first. They instead recommend thawing in fridges, cold water or in microwaves. You can also cook a frozen turkey, but it will take a lot longer. And to ensure a bird is thoroughly cooked, they say to use a thermometer to check that the deepest and thickest parts of it have reached 165 degrees. Even after the meal is cooked, you aren’t out of the danger zone. To keep turkey and other leftovers safe, experts say they should be refrigerated after two hours. ___ The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
|
26977
|
Video shows Gianna Bryant in the hospital after helicopter crash.
|
No, this is not a video of Gianna Bryant in the hospital
|
false
|
Fake news, Facebook Fact-checks, YouTube videos,
|
"A video claims to show Gianna Bryant being ushered through a hospital, surrounded by medical staff. But that didn’t happen. Bryant died with her father Kobe Bryant in a helicopter crash on Jan. 26. The next day, a video titled, ""Kobe Bryant Daughter Gianna Bryant Final Hours"" was uploaded to YouTube. The video shows a young girl laying motionless on a hospital bed. She is slowly moved down a hallway lined with doctors and nurses in the first part of the video, and in the second she is surrounded by hospital staff and mourners. The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) Together, they’ve been shared thousands of times. As of Jan. 28, the video has 485,771 views on YouTube and 112,600 likes on the original TikTok it appeared in. While this video does feature a young woman who was killed in an accident, that woman is 28-year-old Ariana Cervantes. The original video was titled ""Ariana’s Honor Walk"" and was uploaded to YouTube on Sept. 4, 2019. The Pacific Attorney Group reported that Cervantes was one of two people killed by a traffic collision on Aug. 28, 2019, in Downey, Calif. She died two days later in the hospital. The video description says that Cervantes was an organ donor who received an honor walk, a ritual described by the New York Times as a way to show respect to dying patients planning to donate their organs. The full version of this video was uploaded more than four months before Gianna Bryant’s death."
|
6830
|
Unlikely alliance fighting pipeline in Texas Hill Country.
|
One of the longest proposed new natural gas pipelines in the U.S. is set to run through Heath Frantzen’s property in the Texas Hill Country, where more than 600 white-tailed and trophy axis deer graze on a hunting ranch his family has owned for three generations.
|
true
|
General News, Environment, Business, Texas, U.S. News, Aquifers
|
Fearing financial ruin and conservation risks, Frantzen and dozens of other landowners in central Texas have banded together with environmental groups and conservative-leaning city governments in opposing the route of pipeline giant Kinder Morgan’s 430-mile (690-kilometer), $2 billion natural gas expressway. “We know a lot more today about the aquifers, we know a lot more today about the endangered species, we know a lot more today about the sensitivity of the environment,” Frantzen said. “And putting a pipeline project through an area such as this, especially when you can compare it to some of the other places where they could put it even less expensively and with much greater ease — this is an idiotic idea.” But Kinder Morgan has defended its proposal, stating it’s looking to ease a pipeline shortage and help drillers transport gas trapped in West Texas’ thriving Permian Basin to refineries on the Gulf Coast. Now, the company is exercising eminent domain as a nasty legal battle over the path of the pipeline threatens to jeopardize future projects passing through central Texas. Opponents of the route are also challenging state regulators at the Texas Railroad Commission who gave Kinder Morgan the green light while accepting millions of dollars from the oil and gas industry. Unlike the Dakota Access Pipeline project that sparked massive protests in 2016 and 2017 over fears it would hurt the environment and sacred Native American sites, opposition to the Texas pipeline has largely played out of public view. Kinder Morgan’s pipeline project comes as an unprecedented boom in oil and natural gas production in the Permian Basin has catapulted the nation to the forefront of the global shale market. Last year, the U.S. surpassed Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest crude oil producer, according to an assessment by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Natural gas is a byproduct of oil drilling, and without the proper infrastructure to move it from the Permian Basin, companies end up burning off excess through a process known as flaring, Kinder Morgan spokesman Allen Fore said. “That’s the purpose of this project, to capture that natural gas and ship it to market,” Fore said. If completed, the pipeline will deliver up to 2 billion cubic feet (56.6 million cubic meters) of natural gas — enough to fuel 31,500 homes for one day —as it passes through 16 Texas counties. Texas already has the most expansive pipeline network in the country with more than 460,000 miles (740,250 kilometers) of channels zigzagging through it. But the project is at the center of a fight that has grounded an unlikely alliance assembled across the state’s central region, where momentum has grown in calling for the company to reroute the pipeline and in urging for further industry regulation in oil-friendly Texas. Those strange bedfellows have held townhalls, formed grassroots community campaigns, and lodged lawsuits against Kinder Morgan. Opponents of the route have pointed to the potential contamination of the region’s porous Edwards Aquifer, the impact it would have on an environmentally sensitive area, and the lack of public engagement and oversight in the routing process. Kinder Morgan has repeatedly stated the pipeline won’t pose any safety threat. There is also concern that Kinder Morgan’s success would set a precedent for other companies interested in building conduits through Hill Country, said Chuck Lesniak, who serves on an advisory committee for the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. “I do know that the industry is paying attention to this project, and the legal issues, because from a legal standpoint, if this goes south on Kinder Morgan, it has enormous impacts on other pipeline projects proposed for Texas,” Lesniak said. A judge has ruled in favor of the Houston-based company in one legal challenge attempting to block the project on grounds that the Texas Railroad Commission doesn’t provide enough state oversight or regulation; that decision is being appealed. Fore said the company has made 150 routing adjustments and is not considering changing the pipeline’s set path. The company has started preliminary work, including marking the construction space and leveling the land, but no pipeline has been laid in the ground. Clashes between rural landowners and companies seeking to seize property are not uncommon in Texas, where an estimated 95% of the land is privately owned. Although landowners are compensated for pipeline operators’ use of easements, they often argue the money provided isn’t enough. Unlike the Texas Public Utility Commission rules that electric, telephone and water utilities must follow, oil and gas companies do not need to seek the approval of the Texas Railroad Commission or affected municipalities for their proposed route. They also have no formal public process to hear from affected landowners. The commission has said it does not approve of whether a pipeline is necessary. “We approve of whether they have met certain requirements and given us information that we need so we know this is a pipeline ... about to be constructed so we can go out and inspect and put it on our inspection schedule,” said Railroad Commission spokeswoman Ramona Nye. Texas’ lack of oversight on the pipeline industry allows companies to make unilateral determinations about the best route, said Luke Ellis, an attorney representing roughly 40 landowners, including Frantzen, in their disputes with Kinder Morgan. For Frantzen, it could be the end to his way of life at his 260-acre (105-hectare) ranch. He called it a sentimental moment when he picked up an array of deer antler sheds littering his ranch one day this summer. “No one has fought (Kinder Morgan) harder and no one has fought them longer than we have in the Hill Country,” he said. ___ Follow Clarice Silber on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClariceSilber
|
8432
|
China sees drop in imported coronavirus cases but local infections rise.
|
China reported fewer new coronavirus cases on Thursday that involved travellers arriving from abroad, but said locally transmitted infections rose, with the capital Beijing seeing new local cases for the first time in more than three weeks.
|
true
|
Health News
|
To prevent a rebound of the epidemic as business activity resumes, an increasing number of Chinese provinces have begun offering coronavirus testing to the public. At the same time, local authorities are offering coupons to residents in hopes they will spend money to revive an economy ravaged by the outbreak. On Friday, China is expected to report that its economy shrank by 6.5% in the first quarter, in what would be the first contraction since at least 1992, when it first started issuing quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) data. New imported cases dropped to 34 on Wednesday from 36 a day earlier, the National Health Commission said, down for the third straight day, amid stringent border checks, reduced international flights, and a ban on entry by foreigners. But the number of locally transmitted cases rose to 12 from 10 a day earlier, with Beijing seeing three new local cases, the first since March 23. The other new local cases on Wednesday were in the provinces of Heilongjiang and Guangdong, both of which have been battling an influx of infected travellers, mostly Chinese nationals returning from abroad. Overall, mainland China reported 46 new confirmed cases on Wednesday, the same as a day earlier, bringing the total number of confirmed cases to 82,341. On Thursday, state television reported that President Xi Jinping had approved the withdrawal of 4,000 army medical personnel who had been sent to the central province of Hubei, where the outbreak originated, in another milestone as the province and its capital city Wuhan return towards normal. Earlier this month, Wuhan lifted a lockdown that had paralysed the city of 11 million for more than two months in a drastic effort to contain the virus. The northwestern province of Shanxi said on Thursday it would provide nucleic acid testing to the public “in a bid to spot, quarantine, and treat coronavirus patients as early as possible”. The testing will be partly subsidised and provided to those who are required to undergo a test as well as residents who want one, provincial authorities said. In the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, which is battling an influx of cases from Chinese people crossing the border from Russia, the city of Harbin also began offering virus tests this week to residents who want them, local media said. Meanwhile, more cities are rolling out measures to stimulate consumption. The eastern city of Wenzhou said it would dole out 1.8 billion yuan of shopping coupons. Wuhan will make similar moves soon, its commerce bureau said on its website on Thursday. Heilongjiang saw 16 new imported cases, all among Chinese nationals who came from Russia. The neighbouring Chinese region of Inner Mongolia also saw imported cases from Russia. Guangdong saw five new cases connected to travellers from overseas. The number of new asymptomatic cases increased to 64 from 57 a day earlier. China does not include patients with no clinical symptoms such as a cough or a fever in its tally of confirmed cases. Some of the new confirmed cases had been counted as asymptomatic previously.
|
9963
|
Robot prostate surgery has downsides, needs more data
|
This is a story about a study examining the costs, harms and the impact of doctor experience associated with the use of robotic prostatectomy. The story raised some important issues that are not ordinarily broached during patient – doctor conversations. While raising some potential red flags with respect to doctor experience, the story failed to critically examine what, if any, benefit there might be to this particular surgical approach. While it is valuable to know that after completing 80 procedures of this type, a surgeon is no longer apt to leave cancerous tissue behind, it is also important to know if there is any value added by having this more expensive procedure. The story does serve as an important reminder to consumers that more modern sounding approaches do not necessarily offer the patient a less problem plagued experience. This story is provides an example for consumers to consider about the value in knowing about both the benefits as well as the harms associated with whatever treatment option they are considering. Further – the story raises the point that newer or seemingly more sophisticated treatments are not always superior to lower-tech options.
|
true
|
"The story indicated that the robotic procedure was more expensive than a standard surgical prostatectomy. In addition, it included information about the expenses associated with obtaining and running the equipment. It is not clear from this story what, if any, the benefits are of having a robotic prostatectomy instead of a standard surgical prostatectomy. There was no discussion about the decreased hospital stay or reduced recovery time that has been reported with this approach. Although these are short term benefits, they may be of interest to certain patients. In this sense, the story was the flip side of what we often see – exaggerated benefts and no mention of harms. This story mentions harms (although data comes from biased literature review) and no benefits. The story provides readers with some potentially interesting questions to raise with a doctor (e.g. how many of these surgeries have you done using this equipment; is this approach the best for the type of cancer I have, i.e. early or more advanced). The story mentions in passing potential harms such as impotence and incontinence, referencing a study published in October. However – the story did not really follow-up on one of the key issues it raised. For example, the story mentioned that a surgeon will have to do 80 procedures with this equipment to ensure that they don’t leave any cancerous tissue behind. The story could have completed this thought and indicated the ramifications of leaving cancerous tissue behind in terms of health consequences. The story indicated that the publication reported on examined data from a number of previously published reports. The story then extracted several salient facts to highlight some variables that affect outcomes of interest to patients. The story would have been improved by noting the weaknesses or biases associated with a simple literature review. This is not a systematic review of the literature or a meta-analysis. This is simply a literature review and the methods are flawed — for example, the authors chose 68 papers of 412 on basis of selection/inclusion criterion ""…those with greatest relevance to the paper."" The story did not engage in overt disease mongering. It might have been useful to note that not all prostate cancers result in morbidity or mortality meaning that not all prostate need active treatment. The story does not use any comments from experts in the field without a direct connection to the study reported on. The story mentioned that the authors of the study reported on did not compare robotic surgery complication rates to traditional surgery rates. In a perfect world, we would have hoped that the story would have investigated these data points anyway. The story mentioned that robotic prostatectomy was the ‘dominant approach’ to this procedure in the United States. But that is an erroneous statement by the physician who is from Australia. It is certainly booming in popularity, but that doesn’t make it the dominant approach. The story indicated that robotic prostatectomy is not a new procedure. Does not appear to rely exclusively on a press release."
|
|
2118
|
Herbs, supplements often sold deceptively: U.S. report.
|
Sellers of ginseng, echinacea and other herbal and dietary supplements often cross the line in marketing their products, going as far as telling consumers the pills can cure cancer or replace prescription medications, a U.S. government probe found.
|
true
|
Health News
|
Herbal, vitamin and mineral pill products in a file photo. REUTERS/File In an undercover probe, investigators at the Government Accountability Office also found that labels for some supplements claim to prevent or cure ailments like diabetes or heart disease — a clear violation of U.S. law. GAO staff targeted supplements most popular with older consumers and posed as elderly buyers in stores or over the telephone. “The most egregious practices included suspect marketing claims that a dietary supplement prevented or cured extremely serious diseases, such as cancer and cardiovascular disease,” the GAO said in a report released on Wednesday at a Senate hearing. For example, one shopper at a supplement specialty store was told that a garlic supplement could be taken instead of prescribed blood pressure drugs. Another staffer posing as a forgetful, elderly consumer was told by a salesperson that he could take aspirin and ginkgo biloba together with no harm. The Food and Drug Administration has said that combination can cause internal bleeding. The GAO, which conducts investigations for Congress, also said it found trace amounts of potentially harmful contaminants such as lead and arsenic, but at levels that do not exceed federal guidelines. Findings of pesticides, however, did exceed the FDA’s advisory levels, the GAO said, and 16 of 40 supplements tested would violate the FDA’s tolerance. Manufacturers told the GAO that they were concerned about the contamination findings but “that the levels identified were too low to raise any issues” during their own testing. “Given the expected generally small consumption of the supplements, we do not believe these levels represent a significant risk to health,” FDA Deputy Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein said in remarks prepared for the Senate Committee on Aging. Unlike prescription drugs, the FDA does not approve dietary supplements before they can be sold. The Federal Trade Commission regulates the marketing of herbal supplements, which are not allowed to claim that they treat medical conditions. But calls for stronger oversight have been growing. Experts at the Institute of Medicine have said the FDA needs to use the same strict standards to regulate supplements as it uses for medications, and earlier this week the GAO said the FDA should ask Congress for more power to regulate supplements. Some lawmakers, including Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, have proposed legislation to beef up the agency’s oversight of supplements. Sharfstein said the FDA is obliged to look for problems only after a product is sold by reviewing medical literature and analyzing complaints. The agency has taken action to help recall dozens of tainted supplements and alert consumers to hazardous products, he said.
|
7613
|
Overdose deaths down slightly last year compared to 2018.
|
The number of accidental drug overdose deaths in Rhode Island dropped slightly last year when compared to 2018, and are down more than 8% since 2016, state officials announced Wednesday.
|
true
|
Rhode Island, Accidents, Opioids, Health, General News, Virus Outbreak
|
There were 308 accidental drug overdose deaths in 2019, down from 314 during 2018, and down from a high of 336 in 2016, according to preliminary numbers released by the Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals. About 83%, or 256 of last year’s deaths, involved opioids, the agency said. “We are pleased to see that the numbers are down for the third straight year,” the agency’s acting director, Kathryn Power, said in an emailed statement. “At the same time, we know that we are still fighting an overdose epidemic, and as we grapple with the coronavirus today, it’s more important than ever that we keep our actions focused and connect Rhode Islanders with critical resources and support.” Before the current reduction that began in 2017, accidental drug overdose deaths increased 143%, from 138 in 2009 to 336 in 2016.
|
27986
|
Some people have eschewed retirement homes in favor of living on cruise ships.
|
Also, life on a cruise ship means one acquaintance after another, but no permanent ongoing connections of any depth. Fellow passengers disembark to return to their regular lives at the termination of their one- or two-week holidays, which means friendships struck up with them land in the “We’ll keep in touch” bin very quickly. As for staff, while serial cruisers can strike up deeply affable relationships with some of the line’s employees, these rapports are inherently limited by their very nature: no matter how close such associations appear to be, ships’ employees are required to be deferential to paying passengers, so the friendship-critical element of honesty can never be part of such dealings. Making a cruise ship one’s permanent address, therefore, will not be for everyone. While those at ease with a steady diet of the superficial will thrive, those who require the comfort of at least a few real friendships will likely feel lonely even though they live among crowds.
|
true
|
Travel, Tourist Trap
|
About 2 years ago my wife and I were on a cruise through the western Mediterranean aboard a Princess liner. At dinner we noticed an elderly lady sitting alone along the rail of the grand stairway in the main dining room. I also noticed that all the staff, ships officers, waiters, busboys, etc., all seemed very familiar with this lady. I asked our waiter who the lady was, expecting to be told she owned the line, but he said he only knew that she had been on board for the last four cruises, back to back. As we left the dining room one evening I caught her eye and stopped to say hello. We chatted and I said, “I understand you’ve been on this ship for the last four cruises.” She replied, “Yes, that’s true.” I stated, “I don’t understand” and she replied, without a pause, “It’s cheaper than a nursing home.” So, there will be no nursing home in my future. When I get old and feeble, I am going to get on a Princess Cruise Ship. The average cost for a nursing home is $200 per day. I have checked on reservations at Princess and I can get a long term discount and senior discount price of $135 per day. That leaves $65 a day for: 1. Gratuities which will only be $10 per day. 2. I will have as many as 10 meals a day (of fantastic food, not institutional food) if I can waddle to the restaurant, or I can have room service (which means I can have breakfast in bed every day of the week). 3. Princess has as many as three swimming pools, a workout room, free washers and dryers, and shows every night. 4. They have free toothpaste and razors, and free soap and shampoo. 5. They will even treat you like a customer, not a patient. An extra $5 worth of tips will have the entire staff scrambling to help you. 6. I will get to meet new people every 7 or 14 days! 7. TV broken? Light bulb need changing? Need to have the mattress replaced? No problem! They will fix everything and apologize for your inconvenience. 8. Clean sheets and towels every day, and you don’t even have to ask for them. 9. If you fall in the nursing home and break a hip you are on Medicare; if you fall and break a hip on the Princess ship they will upgrade you to a suite for the rest of your life. 10. There is always a doctor on board. Now hold on for the best! Do you want to see South America, the Panama Canal, Tahiti, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, or name where you want to go? Princess will have a ship ready to go. So don’t look for me in a nursing home, just call shore to ship. PS: And don’t forget, when you die, they just dump you over the side at no charge. Origins: Although the “cruise ship” recounting has become the more widespread, the earlier form taken by this piece of e-lore featured not a luxury liner but a hotel. In 2003 this waggish diatribe against the cost of nursing home care had its writer swearing to check into a Holiday Inn when the grey hairs became too many. By 2004, some of the numbered items now found in the “cruise ship” tale were in place, albeit in a version that claimed Holiday Inn rather than Princess as substitute elder care housing (e.g., “TV broken? Light bulb need changing? Need to have the mattress replaced? No problem! They will fix everything and apologize for your inconvenience”). By 2005 more numbered items had been added, including some cruise-specific ones (e.g., “There is always a doctor on board” and “And don’t forget, when you die, they just dump you over the side at no charge”). Also by 2005, what had begun as one writer’s claim about his or her fanciful future plans had come to be presented as the actual remarks of an old woman living that life on a cruise ship. It is at this intersection that folklore and reality: while the account of the “elderly lady” has clearly evolved from earlier pieces about pie-in-the-sky retirement plans involving Holiday Inn, some people of advanced years have indeed made their homes on cruise ships. Bea Muller, an 86-year-old retiree, took up residence on Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth 2 on 5 January 2000. Her husband had passed away while the couple was on a world cruise eleven months earlier, and rather than opt for a retirement home, Mrs. Muller sold her house and possessions and booked herself onto the ship. Instead of submitting a monthly or yearly fee, in 2001 Muller was reported to be paying as she went, booking one cruise after another. Thanks to her frequent traveler discounts, her overall costs amounted to about $5,000 a month. (Cruise prices have increased since then, which is something those entertaining similar plans should keep in mind. Also, Muller’s accommodations were small and windowless: a 10×10 foot cabin that barely fits a bed, radio, and television, with a bathroom smaller than the average closet found in a typical home.) Its cramped quarters aside, Muller was happy with her life aboard a ship. “I’ve got full-time maid service, great dining rooms, doctors, medical center (where she volunteers), a spa, beauty salon, computer center, entertainment, cultural activities and, best of all, dancing and bridge.” (Muller passed away in 2013, and the Queen Elizabeth 2 was retired from service in 2008.) Bea Muller was not the first long-time cruiser: Cunard had a previous guest, Clair MacBeth, who lived aboard ship for 14 years. As to whether living out one’s golden years aboard a cruise ship is a viable alternative to spending them in a retirement home, a geriatrician at Northwestern University says such a plan is a feasible and cost-effective alternative to assisted-living facilities. Dr. Lee Lindquist, an instructor at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, compared the costs (over a 20-year life expectancy) of moving to an assisted-living facility, a nursing home and a cruise ship, including the expense of treating acute illnesses, Medicare reimbursement and other factors. She determined that the net cost of cruise-ship living was only about $2,000 more than the alternatives ($230,000 versus $228,000) and offered a higher quality of service. “Cruise ships offer such a range of amenities — such as three meals a day, often with escorts to meals if needed, room service, entertainment, accessible halls and cabins, housekeeping and laundry services and physicians on board — that they could actually be considered a floating assisted-living facility,” says Lindquist. Lindquist says the plan would work best for seniors who need a minimal amount of care. “Seniors who enjoy travel, have good or excellent cognitive function but require some assistance with activities of daily living are the ideal candidates for cruise-ship care. Just as with assisted living, if residents became acutely ill or got to the point that they needed a higher level of care, they would have to leave.” Although Lindquist’s findings would seem to support the premise of it being cheaper to live on a luxury liner than in a retirement home, we’d want to examine her research vis-a-vis the types of care facilities she looked at and the cruise-ship costs she factored in before we’d feel comfortable about offering an opinion on her assessment. (She might have compared only very expensive retirement homes against the cheapest accommodations offered on ships that are less than well thought of, for example.) However, whatever the validity of Lindquist’s findings, cost is but one of the elements to the choice of where to reside after retirement. Golden agers who decide to make their permanent homes on cruise ships sacrifice proximity to family and friends; their nearest and dearest are no longer just a short car ride away. Those devoted to their children and grandchildren might well deem that too high a price to pay, no matter what the spreadsheet says about the relative financial costs. Likewise, those who lack progeny but who are involved in their communities or who are part of a number of strong friendships may not want to opt for the vagabond life, because it would mean abandoning that which gives them joy.
|
9800
|
The Best Foods for Thought, Literally
|
And the body of the story didn’t do enough to establish how the principal finding – a change in brain imaging – may not be tied to the diet at all. We need to do a better job of educating readers that what shows up on an imaging test sometimes has no connection to symptoms or health status.
|
false
|
Mediterranean diet
|
Not applicable. The cost of a Mediterranean diet is not in question. When you find this story online on WSJ.com, it carries the banner: “The Diet That Saves The Brain.” There isn’t any discussion in the body of the story to back up that bold claim. We don’t blame the reporter for this but someone at WSJ has to take responsibility for this hype. We’ll also add this to our wish list: an explanation that higher “white-matter volume burden” is a surrogate measure of health — i.e. it does not necessarily translate to more brain damage. These white spots are often found in normal people and might not mean anything. The differences the researchers found were statistically significant, but there’s no attempt to sort out whether the changes observed are clinically meaningful. Not applicable. No discussion of harms and we’re not sure what they would be. The researchers actually published a long paragraph of potential limitations, which we include here to show that a simple line at the end of the story – cautioning “that the study doesn’t prove that a Mediterranean-style diet causes less brain damage and said more study is needed” – doesn’t really get at an independent evaluation of the evidence – something an independent expert could have provided as well. The researchers wrote: A MeDi (Mediterranean Diet) was associated with a lower WMHV (brain magnetic resonance imaging white matter hyperintensity volume) burden, a marker of small vessel damage in the brain. However, white matter hyperintensities are etiologically heterogenous and can include neurodegeneration. … However, our study has several limitations. We only measured food frequency at baseline, which was on average 7 years before the time of MRI WMH assessment (range, 2-14 years), and thus participants could have changed their diet before the MRI was performed. However, dietary patterns appear to be stable in other population-based studies. In addition, despite the use of a valid and reliable food frequency questionnaire to calculate MeDi scores, a potential for both random and systematic misclassification of dietary habits persists, although any misclassification is most likely to be random and thus tending to minimize an association between a MeDi and WMHV. Most studies depend on similar methods, and they are a practical approach, albeit subjective in nature. In addition, we used the traditional MeDi score method to quantify adherence, but this too has limitations because the score is based on the cohort- and sex-specific median values across 9 food categories, which does not readily allow for an examination of dose-dependent associations. However, most population-based studies have used this approach. Although the potential for confounding always exists, the persistence of associations after adjustment for many potential confounders suggests that this form of bias does not account for the associations observed. The MRI study population represents a subcohort of the overall NOMAS cohort and was younger and generally healthier than the full cohort. However, as mentioned previously, we did not observe diet differences between those who were included and excluded, again suggesting that selection into the study cohort did not bias our results. Last, MRIs to measure WMHV were only conducted once, so we are unable to infer the temporal association between the MeDi and development of WMHs. One might argue that the story inflated the potential role of white matter hyperintensities, but we’ll give the story the benefit of the doubt on this one. No independent perspective provided and – if the journalist isn’t going to do a critical analysis of the evidence – then an independent perspective is sorely needed in such stories. The story didn’t even include a line about other stroke prevention research – dietary or otherwise. Not applicable. The availability of components of the Mediterranean diet is not in question. The story reported: It’s the first study to specifically examine the effects of the diet centered around vegetables, fruits, fish, whole grains, nuts, olive oil and a moderate amount of alcohol, with limited consumption of red meat, sweets and refined grains like white bread or white rice—on the brain’s small blood vessels. Previous studies have suggested adhering to a Mediterranean-style diet is associated with a lower risk of heart disease, stroke and cognitive disorders like Alzheimer’s disease. We can’t be sure of the extent to which the story may have been influenced by a news release. We do know that it included no direct quotes, no independent perspectives.
|
31453
|
A 43-year-old woman forced her unfaithful husband to eat his own genitals.
|
All three publications are known purveyors of fake news. One particularly successful Mississippi Herald hoax, which was picked up by major media outlets in the U.S. and the U.K., alleged that a couple discovered they were biological siblings during IVF treatment. And a Florida Sun Post article duped news outlets with a false claim about the death of a New Zealand woman during an “alligator selfie.”
|
false
|
Junk News, alabama observer, castration, florida sun post
|
In late April 2017, three regional fake news items claimed that a local woman forced her husband to eat his own genitals after learning of his cheating behavior. The items were published by the Florida Sun Post, the Alabama Observer, and the Mississippi Herald respectively. All contained near verbatim content, with the location varying between each iteration: A 43-year old woman from Alabama’s St. Clair County is in custody after authorities were called to a property on 16th St S in Pell City late last night to respond to a reported domestic disturbance. Upon arrival, the officers found a confronting scene. In the master bedroom, a 49-year old man, and the husband of the accused woman, lay in a pool of blood with a gruesome wound to his groin. “The male victim did not show any signs of consciousness and paramedics were called immediately,” a source familiar with the matter told the media. After the paramedics arrived, the man was found to have had his penis and testicles ‘cleanly severed’ with a sharp instrument, believed to be a knife that was found on the bedside table. The wound was dressed and the victim was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he is now listed in a serious but stable condition. “We pled with her to reveal where she had hidden the man’s genitals, but she refused to discuss it at first,” said the source. However, after continued interrogation, the woman finally admitted the grim truth. “She told us that after cutting them off, she was struck by such a sense of anger that she forced them into her husband’s mouth. She admitted to holding the knife to his throat and demanding that he chew and swallow them, or she would kill him.” … A nurse gave the victim syrup of ipecac to induce vomiting, and the partially-digested genitals were regurgitated,” said the source.
|
9366
|
From Chaos To Calm: A Life Changed By Ketamine
|
Can ketamine help people with depression and other psychiatric diagnoses? Unfortunately, this story doesn’t answer that question, beyond vague claims about one patient’s outcome. It skips any discussion of limitations of the studies or caveats about their conclusions. Importantly, it does not tell readers about the side effects reported in these and other studies. The only two experts quoted are advocates of expanded ketamine use. One of them has applied for a patent on a ketamine delivery device, which is not disclosed. There is little that differentiates this story from others reported by the same journalist on numerous occasions; for example, in early 2012, later in 2012, 2015 and again last year. Following a developing story is a valuable journalistic practice, but there is little in this story that explains why it is news now. The lack of references to side effects or to published studies showing poor results deprive readers of vital background and context. The pain, fear and frustration of psychiatric disorders can be overwhelming, and sufferers and their loved ones may be desperate to find effective help. A story like this one, painting a picture of a miracle cure, preys upon such desperation. Readers deserve a balanced report with appropriate cautions.
|
false
|
ketamine
|
The story does not discuss cost, even though it presents a substantial barrier to people who might want to explore ketamine treatment, especially since it is unlikely to be covered by insurance. Although ketamine is not approved by the FDA specifically for treatment of psychiatric diagnoses, some physicians do prescribe it. Some online sources quote costs of $400-800 per treatment (here and here). Typical treatment regimens involve multiple treatments at first, then maintenance sessions every few weeks. Most clinics inject or infuse ketamine. A nasal spray form is offered by some clinics, including this one, which charges $395 for an initial assessment, then $250 to $350 per session. The story relies largely on a single anecdote of a person who says ketamine “helped me get my life back”. The expert sources use only vague descriptions of ketamine as “transformational” and that patients in one trial “got dramatically better.” There are references to clinical trials, but none cites any specific results in quantified terms. There is no discussion of harms in the story. The Johnson & Johnson news release cited in the story lists a number of side effects: “The most common treatment-emergent adverse events (>10%) reported in the esketamine group were metallic taste, nausea, vertigo, dizziness, headache, drowsiness, dissociation, blurred vision, paraesthesia (tingling sensation) and anxiety.” A recent journal article that was not mentioned in this story reported side effects so severe that all the participants quit taking an inhaled form of ketamine. The story does not give readers important details about the studies it cites. One of the Johnson & Johnson trials reported that patients who received the experimental esketamine drug and an antidepressant improved more than patients given a placebo and antidepressant. But it is not clear how meaningful the improvement was. (Four points on the 60-point MADRS questionnaire, which is a smaller improvement than reported in many trials of approved antidepressants.) A second trial mentioned in that J&J release did not show any statistically significant difference. What’s more, one of the J&J researchers noted in a recent letter to a medical journal that, “Larger phase 3 studies are required before the patient population and the utility of esketamine can be fully evaluated in [Treatment Resistant Depression].” The journal article cited in the story about a study in children with a fear disorder notes that it was merely a “[r]etrospective review from a single practice without placebo control with potential for response and recall bias”; that is, a low level of evidence. In addition to using ketamine to treat depression, the story touts “growing evidence it can help people with anxiety, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and perhaps even obsessive-compulsive disorder.” The story dangles unsubstantiated hopes in front of readers with a vast array of mental health diagnoses or concerns. The only two experts quoted in the story are research collaborators who have long advocated for expanded use of ketamine treatment. One of them, Demitri Papolos, has applied for a patent on a ketamine delivery device. The story should have reported this potential financial interest. The story makes numerous claims about ketamine helping people when other treatments did not, but it does not provide specific comparisons about the pros and cons of ketamine compared to approved treatments. The story highlights a patient using a ketamine nasal spray without making it clear that this form of the drug has not been approved by the FDA. There is little that differentiates this story from others reported by the same journalist on numerous occasions; for example, in early 2012, later in 2012, 2015 and again last year. The story does not appear to be based on a news release.
|
8343
|
Getinge to ramp up ventilator production capacity by 160% due to coronavirus.
|
Getinge, one of the world’s biggest makers of medical ventilators, said on Monday it will increase production capacity this year by 160% to 26,000 ventilators to meet demand spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic.
|
true
|
Health News
|
That expands on the Swedish company’s announcement last month that it would increase capacity by 60%. Ventilator producers are under pressure to raise output as hospitals around the globe become overwhelmed by coronavirus patients. Meanwhile, the pandemic is disrupting the transport and supply of crucial ventilator parts such as hoses, valves, motors and electronics. “The demand for advanced ventilators for the intensive care units in hospitals continues to increase globally as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak,” Getinge said in a statement. The company said on March 16 it had already raised output substantially, going from one work shift to nearly two at its ventilator factory, and was looking to quickly ramp up further though it was experiencing component shortages. The following day, Getinge, which says it has around a 25% share of the global ventilator market, said it would increase capacity by 60%. In 2019 it produced 10,000 ventilators, equipment that is crucial in the care of patients critically ill with COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. To counter the shortage, some countries including Italy, Britain and the United States have drafted in carmakers and aerospace manufacturers to start producing ventilators. On Sunday, electric carmaker Tesla Inc showed a prototype for a ventilator in a video published on its YouTube channel.
|
34212
|
People with blue eyes have the highest tolerance for alcohol.
|
Such studies remain limited in size, scope, and number, and are in some cases controversial. As a result, a more complete and confident understanding of the possible relationships between eye color and alcohol tolerance remains elusive, and the meme remains unproven.
|
unproven
|
Science, alcohol, eyes
|
In 1999, Morgan Worthy, a research psychologist at Georgia State University, proposed the hypothesis that light-eyed individuals might be more likely than dark-eyed individuals to develop alcohol dependence. Worthy mentioned this idea in passing, after a discussion of other physical properties correlated to “dark eyes” that hinted at relationships between eye color and human behavior or function. Eye color is determined primarily by variations in the number and particle size of just one pigment: melanin. Though other pigments may play a role, melanin is the main factor involved. More melanin results in darker eyes, “moving from blue to grey, green, hazel, brown, and black.” The amount and nature of melanin in the human iris is controlled or modified by multiple genes that serve other functions as well. That eye darkness is related to multiple genes with roles in different aspects of the human body makes finding a convincing link between eye pigmentation and human traits via genetics challenging. In his book Eye Color: A Key to Human and Animal Behavior, Worthy made the argument that eye color and physiological reactivity (i.e., how a body physically responds to a stimulus of any kind) appear to be correlated, and that this fact could potentially demonstrate a link between eye darkness, alcohol tolerance, and alcohol abuse because it would mean that light-eyed individuals might have to consume larger quantities of alcohol to get drunk than others: If dark eyes are positively related to physiological sensitivity this might be seen in a greater response to various drugs including alcohol. A greater or earlier response to alcohol might serve to decrease the amount of alcohol consumed by the steady drinker since a smaller amount would result in an equivalent effect. For that reason, persons who are most sensitive to alcohol would, perhaps, be less likely to drink enough to become physiologically addicted. At the time, the notion was speculative. In 2001, researchers (also from Georgia State University) tested Worthy’s hypothesis using the information obtained from two separate surveys, one of 10,860 Caucasian male prison inmates, and another of 1,862 Caucasian women. In both samples, the researchers reported, “individuals with light eyes … consumed significantly more alcohol than individuals with dark eyes.” This, they argued, supported Worthy’s alcoholism hypothesis: The results may indicate that greater sensitivity to alcohol in dark-eyed individuals prevents them from drinking the large quantities of alcohol needed for development of physical dependence. Alternatively, greater behavioral inhibition may motivate light-eyed individuals to engage in alcohol consumption to achieve harm avoidance. Generally speaking, it is this Georgia State University study, demonstrating that lighter-eyed folks generally drink more than darker-eyed folks, that people reference when they make memes about blue-eyed people having a higher tolerance for alcohol. For example, the website “MindblowingFacts.org” cited the study in a 2012 article that may have inspired later memes: That doesn’t mean the science is anywhere near settled, however, nor does it mean science has abandoned the question. While it is unknown exactly what mechanism would link eye color with alcohol dependence, one genetic explanation does jibe with the earlier research: a mutation on a gene that codes for the production of melanin (OCA2, the melanosomal transmembrane protein): The OCA2 gene … has a major impact on eye color by producing a protein that controls melanin formation and processing. The more OCA2 activity in the iris melanocytes, the darker the eye color … Why might having blue eyes put one at higher risk for alcohol dependency than having brown eyes? One possible explanation is that a gene lying near the OCA2 gene on [human] chromosome 15 carries a mutation that leads to increased alcohol tolerance, and thus a tendency to drink too much. In 2015, a group of researchers from the University of Vermont and Yale sought to test the notion that dark-eyed persons, with their potentially greater sensitivity to alcohol, might have a lower incidence of alcohol dependence because they need to drink less alcohol to get drunk. To test that nation, the researchers looked for correlations between eye color and alcoholism in a representative sample of European-descended individuals. They did find a slightly increased risk of alcoholism in light-eyed individuals, hinting that eye color could be “a potential indicator of alcohol dependence risk.” A 2017 study approached the same question, albeit in a much more limited fashion, with a bit of breathalyzer field work. This work also supported the association: In this field study carried out in a French barroom, we hypothesized that the average blood alcohol concentration of participants with blue eyes would be higher than people with other eye color. We measured blood alcohol concentration with a breathanalyzer among 61 customers from various occupational backgrounds, and calculated the association between eye color and BAC. Results showed that among males and females, irrespective of age, participants with blue eyes had a higher BAC than the others … This ecological result suggests that iris pigmentation represents a biological marker for underlying factors involved in higher alcohol consumption.
|
3743
|
Kansas records its first flu death of the season.
|
Health officials say Kansas has recorded its first flu deaths of the season.
|
true
|
Health, Wichita, Kansas, Flu, Pneumonia
|
The Wichita Eagle reports that the Kansas Department of Health and Environment says two deaths in the state have already been directly attributed to influenza as of Monday. Pneumonia has been the direct cause of death in another 38 deaths, and the flu or pneumonia has been contributing factors in an additional 132 deaths. In last week’s KDHE flu report for Kansas, there were 101 outpatient visits for influenza-like illnesses. The newborn to 4 years old age group had 29 reported cases for the first week of the flu season. Flu shots are generally recommended for anyone age 6 months and older. Flu symptoms include a fever, body aches, chills, tiredness, cough and headache. ___ Information from: The Wichita (Kan.) Eagle, http://www.kansas.com
|
21729
|
Fracturing or horizontally fracturing the shale to open up larger pockets of natural gas ... has been used for over 60 years and, as of 2009, over 80,000 wells have been fracked in Ohio.
|
State Sen. Kris Jordan says 'fracking' has been used more than 60 years in Ohio
|
mixture
|
Environment, Ohio, Energy, Kris Jordan,
|
"During a recent debate in the Ohio Senate over a proposed law to allow drilling at state parks, some lawmakers focused on fracking, an increasingly controversial technique used to extract oil and gas from underground. Republican Sen. Kris Jordan was among those to defend process. He questioned why Democrats and others were so worried, considering fracking’s long history in Ohio. ""The process of fracturing or horizontally fracking the shale to open up larger pockets of natural gas in order to make it financially feasible to drill the wells – this process has been used for over 60 years and, as of 2009, over 80,000 wells have been fracked in Ohio,"" Jordan said on the Senate floor on June 15. Considering that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is studying hydraulic fracturing’s effects on drinking water and since fracking will remain a topic of interest as more oil and gas companies are expected to tap Ohio’s natural gas deposits, PolitiFact Ohio decided to look at Jordan’s claim. So what is fracking? Fracking -- hydraulic fracturing -- is a technique that uses a combination of water, sand and chemicals to free up natural gas or oil beneath the surface. First, a well is drilled. Then, the fluid is shot down the well at high pressure, causing rock formations to crack and release natural gas or oil. The fracking fluid is then either recycled, stored in deep underground wells or treated. Concerns over fracking have grown lately for a variety of reasons. Chesapeake Energy temporarily halted fracking operations in Bradford County, Pa., after a well blew out in April, causing thousands of gallons of fracking fluid to spill into a nearby waterway. Such incidents have coincided with the increased popularity of the ""Gasland,"" a documentary made in 2010, which attempts to show the environmental dangers of fracking, including a scene about flammable tap water. We called Jordan to find out more about fracking in Ohio. He said his information came from Thomas Stewart, the Ohio Oil and Gas Association’s executive vice president and lobbyist. ""I’ll trust him as one of the experts,"" Jordan said. Indeed, we found an April interview in which Stewart said pretty much the same thing as Jordan: ""We’ve been fracturing wells in the state of Ohio since the early 1950s. There’s been over 80,000 wells hydraulically fractured in the state of Ohio,"" Stewart said then. According to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, which regulates oil and gas drilling in Ohio, hydraulic fracturing in Ohio began 59 years ago in 1952. From that year to 2009, 80,306 wells were hydraulically fractured. So it appears Jordan is pretty much on the mark. He was a little off when he said fracking has occurred for more than 60 years, the fact remains the technique has been around for decades. But Jordan’s and Stewart’s statements are not exactly the same. The difference highlights environmentalists’ growing concerns. Jordan mentioned ""horizontal"" fracturing while Stewart made no such distinction. Stewart actually discussed the differences between vertical and horizontal fracturing in his April interview. Horizontal fracturing is related to horizontal drilling, a newer drilling method in which a well is first drilled vertically into the ground, then horizontally for thousands of feet. This allows drillers to access more underground resources through a single vertical well. Of the more than 80,000 Ohio wells that have been fracked, 39 have been horizontally fractured, according to ODNR. The overwhelming majority of fracturing jobs have been for vertical wells. An ODNR geologist and the Ohio Oil and Gas Association say both vertical and horizontal fracturing are equally safe when properly regulated. But to environmentalists, the difference is important. Ellen Mee, director of environmental health policy for the Ohio Environmental Council, said the more recent, horizontal fracturing method is more dangerous because it uses more water and more chemicals to extract the gas. And the fracking fluid is shot at a higher pressure. Mee also noted recent accidents at sites conducting horizontal fracking – a preferred method to extract natural gas from shale formations around Pennsylvania and New York. ""The difference is really quite significant,"" Mee said. ""We’re really talking about a significantly risky endeavor."" Tom Tomastik, an ODNR geologist, disagreed. He said the potential for problems are the same. Tomastik said past problems with hydraulic fracturing in Ohio were due to faulty well construction rather than perceived flaws in the fracking process. Tomastik said the media has irresponsibly hyped the dangers of fracking. ""It’s made it look like this technology is hazardous and causes all kinds of problems when we can demonstrate that it hasn’t,"" Tomastik said. In a fact sheet available online, ODNR stresses that none of its water well investigations since 1990 have uncovered problems caused by hydraulic fracturing. The fact sheet also addresses fears that fracking could contaminate drinking waters. It is ""impossible for frack fluid to travel upward thousands of feet, or between rock formations and into freshwater aquifers,"" according to the ODNR. A recent study by Duke University researchers did show that houses near sites that used horizontal fracturing to extract natural gas in New York and Pennsylvania were more likely to have methane contamination in drinking water systems. But the study failed to directly connect the contamination to fracking activity. ""More research is needed across this and other regions to determine the mechanism(s) controlling the higher methane concentrations we observed,"" the report said. Where does that leave Jordan’s claim? Jordan correctly cites the statistic for the number of times hydraulic fracturing has been used on wells in Ohio. And while he overstated the time frame slightly, he wasn’t off by much. His underlying point, though, was that hydraulic fracturing is not new to Ohio and, he argues, that the technique is relatively safe. But he specifically mentioned horizontal fracturing, which is a much newer technique. When we asked him about the discrepancy, Jordan said he assumed all the fracturing in Ohio was horizontal. ""Maybe I didn’t ask if it was horizontal or vertical,"" Jordan said. That’s an important fact to know, especially since the state says horizontal fracturing has only been used 39 times in Ohio."
|
7329
|
Doctors, nurses leave homes to protect families from virus.
|
Lisa Neuburger was caring for a patient with the coronavirus when the person’s ventilator tube became detached. As she worked to help the patient, she knew fluid from the person’s lungs could be spraying into the air, possibly exposing her to the virus, despite the protective gear she was wearing.
|
true
|
St. Paul, Health, General News, Lifestyle, AP Top News, Virus Outbreak, U.S. News
|
That’s when the 37-year-old nurse and mother got scared for her family. “I couldn’t sleep that night. I thought, ‘If I brought this home to my mom, she’s probably going to die, and it’s probably going to be my fault.’ So I had to find a different way,” Neuburger said. To protect her family, Neuburger moved from her parents’ home, where she had been living with her son after a recent divorce, and into a camper. Even though she doesn’t know when she’ll be able to hug her 11-year-old boy again, she’s glad she chose to self-isolate — especially since she began feeling sick five days after that hospital scare. Holed up in the camper as she awaits the results of a COVID-19 test, Neuburger is among countless doctors and nurses around the world who are choosing to move to hotels, tents, garages and other temporary housing to protect their loved ones — even as they risk exposing themselves to a virus that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, including a number of medical workers. Hotels, some business owners and people who run Airbnb rental homes are among those offering lodging, sometimes for free, to doctors and nurses needing to self-isolate. Social media is full of efforts to match medical professionals with temporary housing. One Facebook group, RVs 4 MDs, connects RV owners with medical workers. In Ireland, a real estate company has used Instagram to offer up empty flats. The extra layer of isolation means those who are risking their own health to save the lives of others are now sacrificing even more as they resign themselves to virtual contact with their kids, parents, spouses and others they would normally fall back on for emotional support during this stressful time. “It’s upsetting — even though you know it’s the right decision to leave your family,” said Mica Sosa, a floor nurse at an oncology unit at a Phoenix hospital, who moved into a friend’s empty condominium a few weeks ago. “It’s so bizarre to turn around and walk away from the people you normally run to.” Events Sosa knows she will miss: Easter with her 4-year-old son; her mom’s 71st birthday; and her own 7th wedding anniversary. Some colleagues thought she was moving too soon. But with her mother’s age and her own husband in his 60s, Sosa didn’t want to wait until Phoenix had a surge in cases to take precautions. “Why wait until you are New York to get that radical? You need to protect yourself now,” she said. “I think everyone needs to look at their own family situation and decide what’s best for them.” For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. But the virus can lead to more severe illness, including pneumonia, and death for some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems. Outside Portland, Maine, a pregnant Joy Engel is staying home with a toddler son while her husband, Dr. Ben Hagopian, lives in a friend’s empty in-law apartment. “We fought hard for this pregnancy and we weren’t willing to take the risk,” Engel said. For Neuburger, the gravity of the coronavirus took hold in one shift in the intensive care unit at the Minnesota hospital where she works. She felt her mask leaking as she cared for one patient, but she kept doing her job and switched to a protective respiratory device when she could. Then came the patient whose ventilator tube came apart. On the way home from work, she called her dad. She told him to take her son, Xander Ponkin, upstairs, while she went directly to the basement where she had been staying. She kept away from the rest of her family until she could move into a camper two days later. “My dad made me give him a hug even though I didn’t want to. He said, ‘What happens if you get sick and die? I won’t see you again,’” she said. She used Facebook to find the camper, and plans to pay its owner $200 a month. It’s now parked in the driveway of her former in-laws, who are caring for Xander, in the Twin Cities suburb of St. Paul Park. She has been able to play with him in the yard — at a distance. They also use video chat to play games, and she watches from her window as he shoots baskets outside. The hardest part, Neuburger said, is not being able to give him a hug. “I’m making the best of it. I’m trying to,” she said. “Sometimes I just sit here and cry. But then … I feel like I sleep better knowing I’m not possibly infecting my family.” ___ Associated Press writer David Sharp in Portland, Maine, contributed to this report.
|
10813
|
HPV Vaccine Can Protect Women Across a Broad Age Range
|
The news release describes a recent study published in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases demonstrating the potential benefits of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination in women 26 years and older. While the release makes an admirable attempt at summarizing the study in a concise and easy-to-understand manner, the resulting brevity leaves many questions unanswered regarding a public health issue as important as HPV. In particular, the release does not account for the specific study design — no sample sizes were reported and demographics of the patient volunteers were not described. Furthermore the specific benefits of HPV vaccination in women 26 years and older are not explicitly stated. The news release devotes much of its focus on the lead author’s research biography. Journalists and other readers would have been better served if the “Who” section instead described the women who were recruited for the study and how many had a history of HPV infections, for example. If HPV vaccination is indeed effective in preventing disease in women 26 years and older, this could have implications for HPV-related cancer screening and prevention procedures. The research may also be of interest to younger women (or their caregivers) who are making decisions about whether or not to get the vaccine.
|
false
|
Academic medical center news release,Cancer
|
The vaccine is expensive and requires three, possibly in the future two, doses. Insurance may not cover it since it is not currently recommenced for the age group studied. “The drug company price for either vaccine is around $130 or $140 per dose,” according to the American Cancer Society, “This cost does not include the cost of giving the shots or the doctor’s charge. So, it’s possible that the cost for the series (3 shots over 6 months) could be $500 or more.” The benefits of HPV vaccination for women 26 years and older are qualitatively described in the news release in statements such as: “The study showed that women in this age group were still protected from HPV infections” and “The scientists followed each woman for four to seven years. They found that the vaccine protected the women against HPV infections during the follow-up period and that the women were protected from many types of HPV across a broad age range.” Both statements lack quantification. In the first statement, the reader is left wondering exactly how many women were still protected. The second statement seems to suggest that the vaccination protects against any types of HPV infections while a close reading of the study suggests that only certain strains of HPV were considered, and for those strains only persistent infections were counted. In general, statements such as the ones above should be tempered with further details on the study design. In this case, there is a lack of crucial information such as how many women were enrolled in the study and what proportion already had a history of HPV. Finally, what was the measured outcome? What does it mean exactly to be “still protected from HPV infections?” Did none of the women enrolled in the study have HPV going into the study? The release isn’t clear. The news release does not mention harms, and that’s a troubling omission in a summary of a study devoted to a drug’s safety and efficacy. The published study states the following: “Serious adverse events related to vaccination occurred in five (0·2%) of 2877 women in the vaccine group and eight (0·3%) of 2870 women in the control group.” It is unclear from the news release what kind of study protocol was followed. Only the headline of the study listed at the bottom under the “When” subhead gives us a clue: “The paper, “Efficacy, safety, and immunogenicity of the human papillomavirus 16/18 AS04-adjuvanted vaccine in women older than 25 years: 7-year follow-up of the phase 3, double-blind, randomised controlled VIVIANE study,” was published in the June 28, 2016 online edition of The Lancet (www.thelancet.com/infection).” While the title informs us that this was a double-blind, randomised controlled trial, it is still unclear how efficacy, safety, and immunogenicity were measured. In particular, what were the primary and secondary, if any, endpoints of the study? What percentage of women enrolled in the study already had a history of HPV? The news release gives a fair portrayal of the health implications of HPV without engaging in any disease mongering. The study was funded by GlaxoSmithKline, the vaccine manufacturer, but that’s not mentioned in the news release. It is difficult to gather from the news release what alternatives were considered in the study. Clearly one group of women received HPV vaccinations. We can only assume the other group did not. Alternatives to this vaccine strategy include achieving higher rates of vaccination in younger women and expanding cervical cancer screening services. Most readers are probably aware of HPV vaccinations and that the vaccine is widely available. However, the vaccine isn’t affordable to all. The news release doesn’t make a claim of novelty, and rightly so. There wasn’t a basis for it. The study and its results aren’t novel. The vaccine has been tested in older women before and not found to be very effective because of prevalence of HPV infection prior to vaccination. This study shows some benefit but needs to be compared and contrasted to previous studies on this topic. The news release exhibits balanced language throughout.
|
30294
|
"President Trump nominated Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, best known for his appearances on the television series ""Ancient Aliens,"" to lead the Space Force."
|
Roche is seeking damages and compensation in a U.S. lawsuit against former executives of a Utah-based company, the Swiss drugmaker’s latest case targeting what it calls fraudulent schemes involving its diabetes test strips.
|
false
|
Junk News, Giorgio Tsoukalos, military, space force
|
Roche has filed several lawsuits in U.S. federal court in which it alleges individuals and companies obtained low-priced diabetes test strips meant for mail-order customers, only to re-direct them for sale via pharmacies where higher prices allowed them to profit from the difference. “Defendants caused Roche to wrongfully pay over $87 million in rebates and to lose a similar amount of sales of retail strips,” according to Roche’s complaint filed in U.S. District Court in New Jersey on Tuesday against more than a dozen defendants including Jeffrey C. Smith, chief executive at Utah’s Alliance Medical Holdings until 2017. In Utah, where Alliance Medical filed for bankruptcy protection in 2017 after a raid by federal agents seeking evidence of potential healthcare fraud, Roche contends Smith and others from 2011 to 2017 sought fraudulent reimbursements for 1.84 million 50-count boxes of Roche diabetes test strips. Smith did not immediately return phone calls and e-mails seeking comment. For America’s 30 million people with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes and prick their fingers daily, blood glucose test strips help keep their glucose levels in check, preventing blindness, heart disease or death. These plastic strips are costly, running to $160 for boxes of 100 and creating incentives for a “grey market” away from formal retail channels that strip makers contend is vulnerable to fraud and safety concerns. In a separate U.S. lawsuit in Michigan, Roche alleges executives at another medical supply companies used a similar test-strip flipping scheme to cheat it out of $84 million. (This story has been refiled to switch order of third, fourth paragraphs to provide full first reference to defendant)
|
17371
|
"Large parts of Florida"" have experienced ""years of below average rainfall."
|
"The Associated Industries of Florida said in its press release that ""large parts of Florida"" have experienced ""years of below average rainfall."" While parts of Florida have had below-average rainfall, we also saw years of above-average rainfall. Climatologists told us the state overall is doing fine, thanks to the years when it was above average. Most recently, 2013 was the 14th or 15th rainiest year on record since 1895. While the record on rainfall is mixed, there are other issues that affect water levels in the aquifer. Overpumping for residential and commercial uses, especially during dry spells, has a lot to do with the dwindling water supply as well, but AIF, which lobbies for business interests that pump from the aquifer, makes no mention of that. The claim is partially accurate, but leaves out important details."
|
mixture
|
Environment, Florida, Associated Industries of Florida,
|
"Florida may be the Sunshine State, but what really sets it apart is its water -- where it comes from, how much there is and who uses it. Lawmakers are paying more attention to water policies in an election year. That means the business-backed lobbying group Associated Industries of Florida is also announcing a new group to help the state make decisions about water quality and quantity. In a Feb. 6 press release, AIF announced the H20 Coalition, a group described only as ""stakeholders"" who plan to help mold legislation for water laws. The group points out some reasons for this marked interest. ""Years of below average rainfall in large parts of Florida combined with reduced infrastructure spending during the recession, have exacerbated a growing shortfall in water supply across the state, drawing the attention of Florida's businesses, environmental groups, utilities and government,"" the release said. It seems like there’s been a lot of rain across the state lately. Is it true swaths of Florida have been experiencing a persistent lack of rain over the years? We decided to examine the rain gauges and find out. Rain check The state’s main groundwater supply is the Floridan Aquifer, which also supplies parts of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. The aquifer’s network loses water as it is pumped out of the ground through wells or city water systems, and relies on rainfall to recharge water levels. Andy O’Reilly, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geologic Survey’s Florida Water Science Center in Orlando, says that across the state, anywhere from less than one to 25 or more inches of annual rainfall has the potential to soak into the aquifer, depending on the local geology. Even much of that ends up as runoff in rivers and streams. The rest of the precipitation either evaporates or is used by plants for transpiration. ""Rainfall is the biggest component in maintaining the aquifer on a regional level,"" he said, noting that the Floridan Aquifer is particularly sensitive to precipitation levels -- and from overpumping by homes and industries during dry spells. So the first thing we did was look into statewide rainfall totals. Checking in with the Florida Climate Center provided a quick look at statewide totals over the years. Over the last 30 years, Florida has averaged a little more than 54 inches of rain per year, among the highest in the country. Going back to 2000, an extremely dry year, there have been five years of below-average rainfall statewide (2012 was the most recent complete year available): Yr ‘00 ‘01 ‘02 ‘03 ‘04 ‘05 ‘06 ‘07 ‘08 ‘09 ‘10 ‘11 ‘12 Avg 43.2 54.5 59.4 61.1 59.2 62.7 42.6 45.2 55.1 56.0 49.1 48.9 55.5 So, five out of 13 years were below average, which is about 40 percent. We checked the state’s five water management districts, designed to tend to water resources across Florida. AIF said that ""large parts"" of Florida had below average rainfail, so numbers by district give us a sense of how rainfall measures up on a regional basis. For instance, the Southwest Florida Water Management District, which extends from parts of Marion County down to Sarasota County, has a 30-year rainfall average of 51.2 inches. For that district, rainfall totals were: Yr ‘00 ‘01 ‘02 ‘03 ‘04 ‘05 ‘06 ‘07 ‘08 ‘09 ‘10 ‘11 ‘12 Avg 37.8 45.6 56.9 65.9 62.9 55.1 45.8 39.5 50.7 47.5 53.3 46.6 51.1 So there were six years out of 13 that were below the regional average, which is about 46 percent. The South Florida Water Management District, covering the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Palm Beach metroplex over to Fort Myers and Naples, extending north of Lake Okeechobee into Orlando, has a 30-year average of 51.4 inches. Its rainfall totals were: Yr ‘00 ‘01 ‘02 ‘03 ‘04 ‘05 ‘06 ‘07 ‘08 ‘09 ‘10 ‘11 ‘12 Avg 39.4 53.2 54.3 53.3 48.4 60.0 40.7 42.8 53.3 48.4 48.9 49.3 52.2 There are seven years below that average since 2000, or about 54 percent. The data is broken down different ways in different districts, but all of them give you a decent idea of which parts of the state are experiencing less rainfall than usual. In the Northwest Florida Water Management District, covering the Panhandle from Escambia County to the western half of Jefferson County, district-wide data isn’t kept, but rather organized by cities where rainfall totals are measured. In Panama City, for example, the 30-year rainfall average is 61 inches. They’re an example of a location being hit by some below average years lately: Yr ‘00 ‘01 ‘02 ‘03 ‘04 ‘05 ‘06 ‘07 ‘08 ‘09 ‘10 ‘11 ‘12 Avg 41.2 50.4 49.0 64.7 46.3 52.6 42.5 35.8 57.8 53.6 48.7 38.7 65.8 That means 11 years between 2000-12 had below average rainfall, or 85 percent. What the climatologists say But do these numbers mean there’s a shortage of rainfall in the state? Climatologist David Zierden with the Florida Climate Center says no. While it’s true there have been some drier years than normal in the past decade or so, there have been plenty of wetter than average years, too. He said 2013 was the 14th or 15th rainiest year on record since 1895. Tracking average rainfall means ""there will be some winners and some losers,"" Zierden said. Sometimes the totals are above the average, and sometimes they’re below, which is the nature of Florida’s rainfall. This is a pattern that repeats across the state’s climate zones. He added the state has been in and out of drought over the last decade, but recent years are no worse than 2000 and 2001, which coincided with three dry years of La Nina conditions. ""Here in Florida we’re really dominated by year-to-year totals,"" he said. ""There’s no statistically significant trend at work here."" Those rainfall variances, as inconsistent as they may be, still mean parts of the state have had dry years, and hydrologist O’Reilly said they still could affect the aquifer. That’s because the recharge rate is not a direct ratio to the rainfall total; for example, a 20 percent decrease in rainfall could mean quite a bit more than a 20 percent decrease in the recharge rate. Overall, the accumulated effects of rainfall deficits and surpluses combine with the rate at which people pump water out of the aquifer to affect the water supply’s long-term balance, he said. The AIF press release doesn’t mention overpumping from the aquifer as part of the problem maintaining the water supply, but some experts say that would be the real driver of any shortfalls. And commercial interests, especially agriculture, are responsible for most of that overpumping during dry periods. Tom Swihart, the former head of the Office of Water Policy in the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, says not only are estimates of future water supply shortfalls historically too high, but currently funded water projects all but meet those goals. Water usage by residents is on a downward trend as well, not just in Florida, but nationwide. But even keeping that in mind, ensuring quality should take precedent over quantity, Swihart said. ""All of this concern about water supply deflects attention from the much more serious problem of excessive nutrients in Florida waters,"" he said, referring to the proliferation of fertilizers, pesticides and dangerous chemicals in the water supply from the industries for which AIF lobbies. ""That truly is a statewide issue and needs urgent attention."" Our ruling The Associated Industries of Florida said in its press release that ""large parts of Florida"" have experienced ""years of below average rainfall."" While parts of Florida have had below-average rainfall, we also saw years of above-average rainfall. Climatologists told us the state overall is doing fine, thanks to the years when it was above average. Most recently, 2013 was the 14th or 15th rainiest year on record since 1895. While the record on rainfall is mixed, there are other issues that affect water levels in the aquifer. Overpumping for residential and commercial uses, especially during dry spells, has a lot to do with the dwindling water supply as well, but AIF, which lobbies for business interests that pump from the aquifer, makes no mention of that. The claim is partially accurate, but leaves out important details."
|
9559
|
How to heal head injuries? Try new app
|
This story describes a pilot study that used an app to track cognitive and physical activity in 34 young concussion patients during the two weeks after their injuries. The study, summarized in a letter in JAMA Pediatrics, was designed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to test the feasibility of gathering real-time data from objective measures. The story contains some original reporting but misleads readers when it takes its lead from the news release and asserts that the observational findings “suggest that the right balance during recovering from concussion may be resting one’s brain but still getting some physical activity.” In reality, the main conclusion of the study was simply that the app can be a useful tool for tracking activity following a concussion. This misleading notion is reinforced by the headline, “How to heal head injuries? Try a new app.” It’s not available for trying, and it’s not intended to heal head injuries. A more accurate headline would be “Researchers determine app may be reliable way to track activity and symptoms after a concussion, pending further research.” Concussion was diagnosed in about 1.5 percent of 11- to 19-year-olds in 2015, the highest rate of any age group, according to a Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association report. Since teens and smart phones are pretty much inseparable, an app could be a useful tool for researchers to track symptoms and compliance around activity. Whether a symptom/activity tracking app could have any impact on permanent cognitive damage remains unknown, and news stories need to be clear about that.
|
mixture
|
concussions
|
The intervention, rest, does not have any obvious costs. (Unless one is working, wherein prescribed rest can result in loss of income.) The tool used to track activity and symptoms could presumably cost money if it’s ever made publicly available. The nature of the study was to determine if the app was feasible for wider research–and not to see if it was more beneficial than another app (or no app at all) at tracking activity concussion symptoms. For this reason, we’ll give the story a N/A rating on this one. However, we did want to stress that the story focuses on a secondary finding of the study that makes it sound like it was an intervention trial comparing cognitive activity to physical activity and their impact on concussion symptoms and recovery. We’re told that patients who spent more time reading, playing online games, watching television or working on a computer (so called cognitive activities) reported “more severe symptoms” on the day they engaged in the activity and two days after. And it stated that more physical activity tended to correspond with fewer symptoms over the following two days. Ordinarily, we’d expect to see that put in quantified terms–i.e., how many symptoms is “fewer?” 1 or 10 or 100? The story mentions the heightened risk of further damage from activity in the days and weeks after a concussion, and the unknowns/uncertainties of this risk. The story does state that the study was a pilot and that more research is needed. However, this opening line is a misrepresentation of the research findings and overshadows the more cautionary details: “Have a child healing from a head injury? There’s an app for that, and it may help doctors to improve concussion care.” There is no app publicly available for children healing from a head injury. Only this small group of researchers has access to the tool used in the study. This was a feasibility study to see if the technology worked. It remains to be seen if it does anything other than objectively keep track of symptoms. The story does not appear to engage in disease mongering. However, it would have been helpful to let readers know how common youth concussions are in addition to noting the recent rise in diagnosed cases. The story does not use any independent sources such as an outside concussion expert. There do not appear to be any conflicts of interest, but the story could have let readers know that the work was funded by the Penn Medicine Translational Neuroscience Center. Rest is the standard recommended care for concussion. In terms of alternatives for tracking concussion symptoms, there does seem to be a plethora of apps available, which the story didn’t mention. Readers may feel mislead about the availability of the app, given the story’s headline (“How to heal head injuries? Try new app”) which very strongly indicates that not only is this app publicly available, but also that it’s capable of healing head injuries. Neither are true. The lead may give the false impression that the study broke ground because it suggests “that the right course during recovery from concussion may be resting one’s brain while still getting some physical activity.” The idea that moderate physical activity may improve brain function in concussion patients is not new. As well, the story suggests there’s a new app to help track concussions, but doesn’t mention that it’s far from the only one. The story should have more clearly explained how this one is different, since parents are likely to be curious. The story contains original quotes from two researchers and so does not appear to solely rely on Penn’s news release. However, it did echo many of its statements.
|
36661
|
Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who testified that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in the 1980s, is actually comedian Amy Schumer doing a piece of performance art.
|
The ‘Amy Schumer Is Actually Christine Blasey Ford’ Conspiracy Theory
|
false
|
Disinformation, Entertainment, Fact Checks, Politics
|
The days following a September 27th, 2018 hearing before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee, in which Palo Alto University professor and Stanford research psychologist Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh violently assaulted her during a party more than three decades before, swirled with increasingly bizarre stories about a grand conspiracy.One such rumor centered around Dr. Ford not actually existing. Instead, according to this particular theory, she is a piece of performance art created and sustained for many years by none other than actress and comedian Amy Schumer at the behest of her relative Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York):Despite the lack of any evidence that Amy Schumer has been donning prosthetics to play the part of Dr. Ford for many years, and a mountain of replicable evidence that they are indeed two separate people, the theory gained traction in some of the more credulous corners of the internet, pushed by the usual array of bots, trolls, and useful idiots (mostly at the #Pizzagate and #QAnon levels of social media):It is true, as is claimed above, that comedian and actor Amy Schumer is a semi-distant relative of Sen. Chuck Schumer (the New York Democrat is her father’s cousin.) This is hardly secret knowledge, as the Washington Post reported in 2014:Schumer the comedian (that would be Amy) is the creator and star of “Inside Amy Schumer,” an Emmy-nominated sketch comedy series. Her dad, Gordon Schumer, is the senator’s cousin.“I highly doubt he has ever seen my act,” said Amy Schumer in a 2011 interview with LA Weekly about her first cousin once removed (that would be Chuck). But that might have changed. After the White House Correspondents Association dinner in May, the senator told New York Daily News that he planned to check out Ms. Schumer’s act, which can reportedly get a little raunchy.Sunday’s run-in was both a Kodak moment and a clear reminder of the senator’s Hollywood swag.What is not true is that there is any link at all between Amy Schumer and Christine Blasey Ford, much less that one is playing the other in prosthetic makeup. Even the disinformation-type meme “proving” the resemblance between the two women (above) shows only the slightest of incidental resemblances.Add to that the fact that Amy Schumer would have only been a year old in 1982 (when Brett Kavanaugh allegedly drunkenly groped and harassed a 15-year-old Christine Ford, and that there are photographs documenting her existence every step of the way, including a 1999 high school yearbook photograph showing her as “Class Clown,” and this particular conspiracy fever dream falls apart before it even gets out of the gate.
|
13294
|
Heroin .. pours across our southern borders.
|
"Trump said heroin ""pours across our southern borders."" The vast majority of heroin in the United States comes from Mexico and South America."
|
true
|
National, Drugs, Donald Trump,
|
"In the third and final presidential debate, Republican nominee Donald Trump blamed President Barack Obama and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for many of the problems faced by people in New Hampshire. Trump said that included drug addiction. ""The single-biggest problem is heroin that pours across our southern borders, just pouring, and destroying their youth and is poisoning the blood of their youth and plenty of other people,"" Trump said. We’ve all heard of poppy fields blooming in Afghanistan, but is Trump right that heroin is entering the United States largely through the southern border? Yes. Even though Southwest Asia supplies heroin to most of the rest of the world, nearly all of the heroin available in the United States comes from Mexico and South America. ""Mexico, and to a lesser extent, Colombia, dominate the U.S. heroin market, because of their proximity, established transportation and distribution infrastructure, and ability to satisfy US heroin demand,"" the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration wrote in its National Drug Threat Assessment of 2015. ""Mexico continues as the primary supplier of heroin to the United States,"" the White House’s page on the international heroin market reads. ""Estimated cultivation of opium poppy reached 10,500 hectares in 2012, with an estimated pure potential production of 26 metric tons."" Here’s a chart from the DEA report demonstrating the prevalence of heroin from the southern border: As you can see, South America and Mexico have been the sources for much of the heroin in U.S. markets for the past two decades. In recent years, Mexican traffickers have expanded by simultaneously wedging black tar heroin into Northeastern markets dominated by Colombian white powder heroin and increasing production and distribution of white powder heroin themselves. Mexican heroin accounted for 45 percent of the total weight of heroin the DEA seized and analyzed in 2012 (South American heroin accounted for 51 percent). By 2014, the proportion of Mexican heroin had grown to 79 percent (South American heroin made up about 17 percent), DEA spokesman Russell Baer told PolitiFact in September. This market share is also reflected in the amount of heroin seized at the border and the amount grown in Mexico. From 2013 to 2015, the amount of poppy fields cultivated in Mexico increased by 169 percent from 11,000 hectares to 28,000 hectares, according to Baer. In 2008, the total amount of heroin seized at the U.S.-Mexico border (about 560 kilograms) surpassed the amount seized from commercial airlines for the first time (about 400 kilograms). Border seizures nearly quadrupled from 2008 to 2015 (2,210 kilograms), according to data provided to us by Baer. ""The majority of the drugs in the U.S. market are trafficked across the Southwest Border from Mexico into the US. Southwest Border seizures conducted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, while not the complete picture, provide insight into trafficking trends,"" he said. Traffickers typically smuggle the drugs in through secret compartments in vehicles across the border (illegally and legally), transport them to stash houses in hub cities like Dallas, Los Angeles and Phoenix, and then distribute to the Midwest and East Coast. Our ruling Trump said heroin ""pours across our southern borders."" The vast majority of heroin in the United States comes from Mexico and South America."
|
34179
|
Convicted sex offender and billionaire Jeffrey Epstein introduced Donald and Melania Trump.
|
In sum, given the discrepancy in stories regarding how the Trumps met.
|
unproven
|
Politics
|
If you are experiencing distress, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or visit online here. Conspiracy theories flew after Jeffrey Epstein, a financier with ties to some of the most influential figures in American politics, died from apparent suicide in jail on Aug. 10, 2019, while awaiting trial on charges of sexually abusing young girls. But one of the unsubstantiated stories about Epstein had reportedly come from his own mouth before his death. Epstein stated that he introduced Donald Trump in 1998 to his future wife Melania, a claim that has not been corroborated by any other source we are aware of. Epstein has long been accused of sexually abusing and trafficking young girls, although criminal proceedings against him in the mid-2000s concluded with Epstein being given a relatively lenient sentence, which has since been heavily criticized. He was again arrested in July 2019 and pleaded not guilty to federal sex-trafficking charges, facing up to 45 years in prison if convicted. Epstein’s most recent arrest renewed attention to his ties to wealthy and powerful men, some of whom have been accused of participating in Epstein’s alleged sex-trafficking and abuse activities. It also placed scrutiny on his past friendship with Trump. In 2002, Trump told New York magazine that he had known Epstein for 15 years, and that Epstein “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Trump has acknowledged at the time of Epstein’s July 2019 arrest that the two shared a friendship but stated he “had a falling out with him a long time ago.” But according to The New York Times, after Trump’s 2017 inauguration, Epstein sought to play up the past friendship, “claiming to people that he was the one who introduced Mr. Trump to his third wife, Melania Trump, though neither of the Trumps has ever mentioned Mr. Epstein playing a role in their meeting.” That’s not how the Trumps tell the story. According to Melania Trump, who has been asked in interviews how she met her husband, Donald Trump approached her at a party in 1998 and introduced himself. Paolo Zampolli, another wealthy media figure who founded the ID Management modeling agency, has long taken credit for the Trumps’ initial rendezvous — he threw the party at the Kit Kat Club during New York Fashion week where the two reportedly met.
|
6269
|
Burkina Faso arrests 30 over illegal female circumcisions.
|
Burkina Faso authorities have jailed more than 30 adults after they carried out botched female genital mutilation on nearly 60 infants and girls who have been hospitalized.
|
true
|
Health, Arrests, Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou
|
Viviane Ursule Sanou, head of the National Secretariat against Circumcision, said Tuesday the banned procedure was carried out on girls and young women ranging from 10 months to 24 years old in the capital, Ouagadougou, Kaya in the north and two towns in the central east. She says because the practice is illegal, many people carry out the circumcisions in secret. All of the victims have been admitted to hospitals for treatment of hemorrhage and infection. Burkina Faso adopted measures banning female circumcision in the early ’90s. The penal code adopted this year suggests up to 10 years in prison and severe fines.
|
24491
|
About 750,000 people die in China each year from auto emissions.
|
Car pollution in China doesn't cause as many deaths as Nany Pelosi claims
|
false
|
Environment, National, Foreign Policy, Transportation, Nancy Pelosi,
|
"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has long considered herself a human rights activist and an environmental advocate. So during a recent trip to China, Pelosi discussed how the issues overlap during a meeting with the country's president, Hu Jintao. She recounted the meeting for television host Charlie Rose on the Oct. 5, 2009, edition of his show. ""I took a little bit of a different approach this time in terms of talking about environmental justice because . . . 750,000 people, approximately, die in China each year from auto emissions. The Gobi Desert is encroaching on the rest of China. There are sandstorms in Beijing. They know that . . . there's something that has to be done about climate change and environmental protection and that — and so my pitch to them is there has to be environmental justice. As you develop and as you compete, you can't leave people behind."" We wondered if the death toll from auto emissions could possibly be as high as Pelosi claims. But first, some background. Most scientists believe that increased concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, such as nitrous oxide, are due in part to the number of cars on the road that do not burn fuel efficiently. Our cars release greenhouse gases that trap heat from the sun and have caused the Earth to warm. There's also evidence that the heat-trapping qualities of greenhouse gases lead to an increase of particulate matter and carcinogens in the atmosphere — bad news for those with asthma and other respiratory illnesses. We called Pelosi's office and they pointed us to 2007 news reports about a World Bank analysis that focused on the cost of pollution in China. According to the Financial Times, the Chinese government asked the World Bank to exclude information about how many people die each year as the result of air and water pollution. (For its part, the World Bank says the numbers were left out due to ""some uncertainties about calculation methods and its application."") ""Missing from this report are the research project’s findings that high air-pollution levels in Chinese cities (are) leading to the premature deaths of 350,000-400,000 people each year,"" the July 2, 2007, Financial Times story said. ""A further 300,000 people die prematurely each year from exposure to poor air indoors, according to advisers, but little discussion of this issue survived in the report because it was outside the ambit of the Chinese ministries which sponsored the research."" On top of that, 60,000 premature deaths were related to poor-quality water that resulted in diarrhea, and stomach, liver and bladder cancers, according to the story. So, Pelosi is relying on a news story's summary of World Bank data that was not officially published but that was obtained by the Financial Times. According to the news story, on the high end, there are 760,000 deaths annually from water and air pollution, not just auto emissions, as Pelosi said on the Charlie Rose Show. We took a look at the report, and found that it provided a lot of compelling evidence that Chinese citizens suffer a great deal from air and water pollution and that smog and dirty water in that country lead to many premature deaths. But it offered no overall numbers, nor did it focus specifically on auto emissions. ""Energy consumption, especially coal consumption, is the main source of air pollutants,"" the report said, noting that medical evidence suggests ""outdoor air pollution is a contributing cause of morbidity and mortality."" To get another perspective, we called Mark Jacobson, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Stanford University, who has studied death rates due to carbon dioxide pollution. In 2008, he found that for each increase of 1 degree Celsius caused by carbon dioxide, the resulting air pollution would lead annually to about 1,000 additional deaths in the United States, and 20,000 worldwide. That's on top of the approximately 2 million air pollution-related deaths worldwide, he explained, citing numbers from the World Health Organization. ""Home heating and cooking are really the biggest source of deaths,"" Jacobson said, explaining that, particularly in China, India and other developing countries, cooking is often done with animal dung, wood or coal. ""There's a lot of smoke, no ventilation."" Indeed, most pollution-related deaths — about 1.6 million of the 2 million overall, according to the WHO — are the result of poor indoor air quality. According to WHO's numbers, that leaves only about 400,000 deaths annually that stem from outdoor pollution — worldwide. Furthermore, outdoor air pollution isn't limited to auto emissions. Much of it comes from agricultural operations, electricity generation and industries that rely heavily on fossil fuels, Jacobson said. So to summarize: Pelosi said that about 750,000 people in China die annually from auto emissions. But she was basing her claim on news reports that relied on data that was never actually published. (When we inquired, the World Bank declined to directly address the statistics.) So even if the World Bank data is correct, Pelosi misinterpreted it by saying that all those deaths are related to auto emissions. On top of that, the World Health Organization estimates that most pollution-related deaths are the result of indoor pollutants (those coal and wood fires we mentioned above), not outdoor ones. So while Pelosi is correct that air pollution is harmful and may be responsible for many deaths in China, she's wrong to say that auto emissions are specifically responsible for 750,000 of them annually."
|
7885
|
Italian coronavirus deaths jump, dashing hopes that worst was over.
|
Fatalities in Italy from coronavirus have surged in the last 24 hours, the Civil Protection Agency said on Tuesday, dashing hopes the epidemic in the world’s worst hit country was easing after more encouraging numbers in the previous two days.
|
true
|
Health News
|
The death toll rose by 743 on Tuesday, the second highest daily tally since the outbreak emerged in northern regions on Feb. 21, and up steeply from the 602 recorded on Monday. Italy has seen more fatalities than any other country, with latest figures showing that 6,820 people have died from the infection in barely a month. The total number of confirmed cases hit 69,176 on Tuesday, but with Italy testing only people with severe symptoms, the head of the Civil Protection Agency said the true number of infected people was probably 10 times higher. “A ratio of one certified case out of every 10 is credible,” Angelo Borrelli told La Repubblica newspaper, indicating he believed some 700,000 people could have been infected. The latest data comes as a disappointment to a country that has been in lockdown for two weeks, with schools, bars and restaurants shut and Italians forbidden from leaving their homes for all but essential needs. On Monday the government closed all businesses not deemed to be essential to the nation’s supply chain of vital requirements, and after the latest figures Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte stiffened fines for people leaving their homes to up to 3,000 euros ($3,225) from a previous maximum of 206 euros. “Every one of us must play our part,” he told reporters at a news conference held by remote video link to avoid contagion. “If everyone obeys the rules they don’t only protect themselves and their loved ones, but they will enable the whole national community to come out of this emergency.” Current restrictions are due to remain in place until April 3, but there is speculation the date will have to be pushed back given the continual rise in cases across the country. A decree issued on Tuesday gave the government the power to extend the deadline to July 31. However, Conte denied planning to keep the lockdown in place until that date, saying he hoped to loosen curbs “well before then”. Investment bank Goldman Sachs forecast on Tuesday that the Italian economy, already teetering on recession before the outbreak hit, would shrink by more than 11% this year. Economy Minister Roberto Gualtieri told parliament he expected a contraction of “a few percentage points”. The Civil Protection Agency said the biggest difficulty facing the health service was a shortage of masks and ventilators - a problem that has dogged hospitals since the start of the outbreak. Underscoring the problem, the regional governor of Veneto, Luca Zaia, ordered the confiscation of ventilators at veterinary surgeries, saying they could be converted to human use. With other countries looking to hoard their own medical supplies, a consortium of Italian textile and fashion companies have converted their production lines and will soon be able to produce half the required amount of masks. “(This) will give our system the ammunition that we need in order to fight this war and avoid our total dependence on imports,” Domenico Arcuri, the national commissioner for the emergency, told reporters. The government has said a number of industrial sectors, including medical suppliers, must keep operating during the crisis, but there is growing unhappiness amongst some unions who think the list of strategic concerns is too wide. Workers in the metal, chemical, textile, rubber-plastic and paper industries are expected to go on strike on Wednesday, alarming the government, which is holding talks with unions to try to stave off the stoppages. “The last thing that Italy can allow itself is industrial conflict in a situation of national emergency,” deputy Economy Minister Antonio Misiani told SkyTG24 television.
|
9455
|
Just One Hour of Exercise a Week May Help Prevent Depression
|
This Time magazine story describes a large study that looked at survey data from Norway to determine if exercise played a role in reducing the risk of developing depression among the 22,000 participants. The story suggests that it does and, to its credit, points out that this kind of study cannot show a causal relationship between exercise and the prevention of depression. The story is filled, however, with conditional statements about what may or may not be happening in this research. It also lacks any statements from sources independent of the study. Independent sources provide an important counter-balance to comments from researchers directly involved with the study. Conditional statements like “may help” can also be phrased as “may not help”–more specific language helps readers understand the real benefit.
|
mixture
|
depression,exercise
|
Costs aren’t a factor in this story given that the researchers are suggesting that even minimal exercise, such as walking and cycling, can lead to the decrease in depression they say that they have found. It costs nothing to walk and, aside from the cost of a bicycle, cycling is also free. Perhaps the biggest cost is a time cost–people who work long hours at sedentary jobs may have a hard time fitting this into their schedules. The story barely passes this criterion with, “People who said they didn’t exercise at the study’s start were 44% more likely to become depressed, compared to those who exercised at least 1 to 2 hours a week.” Also, “they say, 12% of depression cases could be prevented if everyone got just one hour of exercise a week.” But to be fully informative it’s important to put the 44% percent in absolute terms. How many people in the exercise group developed depression, and how many people in the non-exercise group developed depression? We’ll give this N/A since the risks associated with light exercise are fairly minimal. However, we think it’s always a good idea to discuss the potential harms of an intervention. In this case, the story implies that very light and infrequent exercise provides this benefit. Does this encourage people to exercise less and to then lose out on other health benefits of more exercise? Injuries are also an issue for those going from no to some exercise. The story explains the results of a study that “followed more than 22,000 healthy Norwegian adults without symptoms of anxiety or depression for an average of 11 years.” It also explains that, “The study could not prove a cause-and-effect relationship between exercise and the risk of depression.” The large size and the statement that the findings aren’t causal are both indicators of the quality of the evidence. But then the story adds, “but the authors say it strongly suggests one,” referring to a causal relationship. Studies like this one cannot prove causality and since they were based on the self-reporting of participants, their conclusions should maintain some skepticism. Add to that the fact that the story is loaded with conditional statements: “Regular exercise may prevent,” “If their hypothesis is right,” “depression cases could be prevented,” “People seemed to have mental health benefits,” “benefits of exercise are likely responsible,” “exercise may also have a role in preventing people developing depression” All of these conditional statements suggest that the evidence may or may not hold up over time. Other factors: The study is of Norwegians. How generalizable is it? And, the self-reported exercise information was collected only at the start of the study, the amount of exercise that participants completed regularly was not assessed at any other time. The study itself is careful to say this, but the story makes it sound as if ongoing exercise was documented. No disease mongering here. The story doesn’t include any content from independent sources. The study does mention that exercise, if it is proven to have a positive effect on depression, should be used along with medications and counseling in people who already have been diagnosed. However, it does not discuss methods for preventing depression. Are there any? Even if there are none, that should be mentioned. While it makes no statements about availability, most readers will realize that exercise, such as walking and cycling, are usually readily available. Exercise for mental health is not a new concept. What makes this study novel is that it’s looking at exercise’s potential to prevent depression, and if that impact would be useful enough for a public health level initiative. As the study explains: “While many agencies are keen to promote the potential mental health benefits of exercise, at present the literature is unable to provide the most basic information needed for effective, targeted, evidence-based public health campaigns concerning depression and anxiety.” The story didn’t explain this. The story does not appear to rely on the news release as it includes quotes from an email interview with the author. However, it did not provide any information not already found in the news release.
|
17763
|
The vast majority of people in this country are keeping their (health insurance) plan.
|
Axelrod said the vast majority of people are keeping their health care plans. That’s certainly what the 2010 health care law intended. The law was crafted largely to leave in place the health care delivery systems for people who get health insurance either through their employer (about 50 percent of people with insurance) or through the government-managed Medicare or Medicaid programs (about 30 percent). Some changes may be occurring in the employer market that would stop people from keeping the health care plans they have. But the bigger issues are in the so-called individual market, which accounts for about 6 percent of Americans who now have health care. The health care law, in essence, raises standards that will make many plans offered in the individual market obsolete. Experts told us there is no precise data to determine how many people will be forced to change health care plans, but they generally agreed the number will be small this year. The broad consensus is that, for the time being, most people will see changes in their coverage and what they pay for that coverage consistent with changes they have seen with their insurance over the past decade.
|
true
|
National, Health Care, Pundits, David Axelrod,
|
"It’s the question-du-jour about the new health care law: Are people going to be able to keep their health insurance if they like it? President Barack Obama has several times said yes. But cancellation notices coming in the mail to policyholders tell another story. The contrast between Obama’s promises and what’s playing out in America has led to a fierce political war of words about who lied, who knew what and when, and how Americans will have to deal with the ramifications. Former Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod and Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn debated the issue Monday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Coburn: ""You're no longer eligible to buy your own plan, which was the No. 1 promise that the president made to the American people. You cannot get what you had."" Axelrod: ""Most people are going to keep their own plans, senator, and you know that."" Coburn: ""That’s not true."" Moments later, Axelrod made his point again: ""The majority of people in this country, the vast majority of people in this country, are keeping their plan. People who are uninsured are going to have choices they never had before."" In this fact-check, we wanted to dig into what’s happening to the American health insurance system to see what policies are being canceled, how many, why and how you might be affected. A good starting point is to see how Americans get their insurance right now. Using census data, the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that in 2012, a little less than 50 percent of the public got their coverage through an employer-based plan. That is, a business negotiates a contract with an insurance company and offers health coverage to its workers. The second largest group, about 30 percent, gets insurance through either Medicare, Medicaid or both. A third group of people with insurance, about 6 percent, buy policies directly from insurance companies. This is called the individual market. (The remainder of Americans, around 16 percent, are currently uninsured.) The health care law that was passed in 2010 made changes to all three legs of the health insurance stool, but the biggest changes came in the individual market. Before the health care law was passed, the individual market was widely considered a mess. Insurers could turn you down for pre-existing conditions, and none of the insurance was standardized, so if you bought a policy, it wasn’t always crystal clear what you were getting. The law’s goal always had been to get these people into standardized plans that cover a defined list of benefits. As a result, some existing policies did not meet standards set by the new health care law. This is why people in this group may be seeing cancellation notices. Kaiser estimates that 15 million people are in the individual market. They are likely to have a very different experience from the ""vast majority"" cited by Axelrod. In New Jersey and Florida, hundreds of thousands of people have received cancellation notices and more are popping up across the country. It’s unclear how many people in the individual market will be forced to change their plan. And what happens to people who are will vary. People can buy another plan from the same company or shop around. Some of them will be eligible for government subsidies and some will not. This group is where the disruptions are most likely. Another group of people -- about 90 million -- are covered through through Medicare or Medicaid. While the Affordable Care Act does make changes, most notably in something called the Medicare Advantage program, they are not being moved into new coverage plans. That leaves the nearly 150 million people who get their insurance through the plans their employer offer. Those plans could change. But it’s tough to say how substantially, and how much as a result of the health care law. Part of that is because plans change every year. Still, some companies are making changes to bring costs down. For example, UPS is telling their employees that if their spouse can receive health insurance through a different employer, UPS will no longer offer them coverage. That certainly could mean people are not keeping their health care plan. How much of the blame should be shouldered by the health care law is a different matter. We asked a variety of experts to comment on the literal accuracy of Axelrod’s statement. For the most part, regardless of their opinion of the new health care law, they gave Axelrod the benefit of the doubt. ""It’s probably true -- at least for next year,"" said Gail Wilensky, the former head of Medicare and Medicaid under President George H. W. Bush. ""Most employers aren’t going to do anything about the insurance they are offering for 2014 because of the Affordable Care Act."" ""He is absolutely right,"" said Bob Laszewski, a health insurance consultant and head of Health Policy and Strategy Associates. But Laszweski also said Axelrod was intentionally diverting attention from the real problems taking place in the individual market. Gerard Anderson, director of the Center for Hospital Finance and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said, ""I would make the same comment that David Axelrod makes but without any real facts. The people with large employers are not really being impacted by the (health care law) and neither are the Medicare and Medicaid recipients."" Sabrina Corlette, program director at at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms, echoed Anderson’s point. For Ted Marmor, a professor of health policy at Yale University, rejected Axelrod’s claim, largely because no one has the hard evidence to back it up or refute it. ""No one has the data to be sure,"" Marmor said. ""Axelrod has no authority for his claim. It is a hope."" But Marmor is among the minority of the experts we consulted. ""It's simply true,"" said Dan Mendelson, CEO of Avalere Health, a Washington health consulting group. ""Most of the lives are in the large corporate customer base and we're seeing virtually no dropping of coverage there."" What does it mean to keep your plan? In the view of some analysts, if the plan offered by an employer changes, it is not the same plan and this would make Axelrod wrong. Chris Conover, a critic of Obamacare and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank, said the Affordable Care Act requires that every plan offer certain minimum benefits, such as free preventive care. It also allows children up to age 26 to stay on their parents’ plan. Those and other rules drive up premiums and lead to employers offering different plans. Conover said millions of people ""actually have had to purchase more expensive coverage even if they were perfectly happy with their old coverage."" Axelrod’s office takes a different view. We contacted them and his staff pointed us to a 2013 survey by the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans. Based on responses from 966 organizations, including firms both small and large, the survey found that 94 percent were definitely or very likely to continue to offer coverage. In that sense, the majority of Americans would still get insurance through their employer. Still, in the survey, about half of the companies estimated Obamacare would raise costs in the range of 1 to 4 percent. Many businesses, in the range of 30 to 40 percent overall, planned to increase the employee share of premiums, raise their deductibles and in other ways shift costs to workers. But it is important to remember that cost and risk shifting has been with the country for a long time. The Kaiser Family Foundation annual survey of employer plans reports that in the past 10 years, the average share of premiums paid by employees has gone up and the fraction of workers in high-deductible plans has risen steadily since 2006, reaching one fifth of the people in the study in 2013. Richard Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group of insurance companies, said the impact of the health care law takes place within an insurance marketplace that has been far from static. ""There have been year to year changes to policies,"" Zirkelbach said. Of all the factors that drive those changes -- rising medical costs, changes in the health of the people in the insurance pool, and government regulation -- Zirkelbach believes the Affordable Care Act rules are having the largest impact as employers look to 2014. Zirkelbach points especially to the minimum requirements for every insurance plan. The employee benefit survey reports that about three quarters of all plans meet all minimum requirements and need no further changes. Our ruling Axelrod said the vast majority of people are keeping their health care plans. That’s certainly what the 2010 health care law intended. The law was crafted largely to leave in place the health care delivery systems for people who get health insurance either through their employer (about 50 percent of people with insurance) or through the government-managed Medicare or Medicaid programs (about 30 percent). Some changes may be occurring in the employer market that would stop people from keeping the health care plans they have. But the bigger issues are in the so-called individual market, which accounts for about 6 percent of Americans who now have health care. The health care law, in essence, raises standards that will make many plans offered in the individual market obsolete. Experts told us there is no precise data to determine how many people will be forced to change health care plans, but they generally agreed the number will be small this year. The broad consensus is that, for the time being, most people will see changes in their coverage and what they pay for that coverage consistent with changes they have seen with their insurance over the past decade."
|
16546
|
"In 2012, there were nearly 12.2 million arrests and only 410 ""uses of deadly force"" by police in the United States."
|
"Flynn said that in 2012, there were nearly 12.2 million arrests and ""410 uses of deadly force"" by police in the United States. The Milwaukee police chief correctly quotes official FBI statistics on arrests and justifiable homicides by law enforcement officers, although it appears the 410 is an undercount of the number of people killed by police."
|
true
|
Civil Rights, Criminal Justice, Public Safety, Guns, Wisconsin, Edward Flynn,
|
"In the wake of the fatal police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn was interviewed for nearly an hour on Wisconsin Public Radio about the incident and its implications. At one point during the Aug. 20, 2014 interview, Flynn told host Kathleen Dunn ""there are many reasons why (police) uses of force are dramatically down, and the main one is training."" Then, alluding back to Ferguson, the chief added: ""It's an extraordinarily rare event. But the fact is, (in) 2012, there were 12,197,000 arrests in the United States, OK? And there were 410 uses of deadly force. Now that is, I think, three-thousands of a percent. So, it’s still an extraordinarily rare event."" In the comparison Flynn uses, there is one police killing in 0.00003 percent of all arrests -- an even tinier fraction than he suggested. But expressed another way, the 410 is an average of more than one police killing per day. So, what about the two figures themselves: Are they accurate and do they account for all of the people who are killed by police? Renewed focus Around the country, attention to the use of deadly force by police was heightened after Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, was shot to death on Aug. 9, 2014, in Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb. In Milwaukee, residents held rallies to raise questions about the Brown case and about the April 2014 death of Dontre Hamilton, a 31-year-old who was shot multiple times by a police officer during a struggle in Red Arrow Park in downtown Milwaukee. (In Milwaukee, there was one police killing of a citizen in 2012, four in 2013 and two through late August of 2014, the Police Department told us.) PolitiFact National rated Half True a claim by conservative talk show host Michael Medved that ""more whites than blacks are victims of deadly police shootings."" The claim ignored the fact that there are more than five times more whites than blacks in America. And our colleagues rated as False a statement that an unarmed black person is shot by a police officer every 28 hours. The report that had been cited by CNN pundit Marc Lamont Hill looked at all deaths, not just those of unarmed individuals. And it rolled in some deaths that did not involve police officers. Flynn’s claim Flynn, who headed the police departments in Arlington, Va., and Springfield, Mass., before becoming Milwaukee’s chief in 2008, is known nationally for his use of data. When we asked for evidence for Flynn’s claim, a Milwaukee police spokesman cited two FBI reports. Both are from 2012, the most recent full-year statistics available. There were 12,196,959 arrests across the country in 2012, which means the figure Flynn used -- 12,197,000 -- was rounded up only slightly. The highest numbers of those arrests were for drug abuse violations, driving under the influence and larceny-theft. There were also 410 cases of justifiable homicide in 2012, according to the FBI, which defines justifiable homicide as the killing of a felon by a law enforcement officer in the line of duty. For example: A police officer responding to a bank robbery alarm who shot a suspect after the suspect fired at the officer. But that doesn’t taken into account all police killings of citizens. FiveThirtyEight.com, a news website devoted to data analysis, recently reported that the 410 is a minimum figure. The numbers are self-reported by local police agencies and not audited, not all police agencies report those figures to the FBI and the number doesn’t include homicides that weren’t ruled justifiable. The FBI totals are likely an undercount for another reason, criminologists told us. Researchers who examine police killings of citizens within large metropolitan police departments often find that the number of such incidents recorded by the departments are higher than the number of justifiable homicides reported by the FBI. But the criminologists also noted Flynn’s comparison is one legitimate way to measure the frequency of police killings. Our rating Flynn said that in 2012, there were nearly 12.2 million arrests and ""410 uses of deadly force"" by police in the United States. The Milwaukee police chief correctly quotes official FBI statistics on arrests and justifiable homicides by law enforcement officers, although it appears the 410 is an undercount of the number of people killed by police. To comment on this item, go to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel website."
|
19868
|
Before Act 10, the total cost of public sector employees’ employment was 29 percent higher than that in the private sector. After the act, it’s still 22 percent higher.
|
"Johnson argued the changes included in Act 10 were modest -- public employees still receive 22 percent higher wages and benefits than private sector workers. Johnson cited the work of two researchers for conservative think tanks, but later told us he ""doesn’t endorse"" the findings of that study, or ""any specific study."" That underlines what we found: There are different ways to measure the same thing. Indeed, an academic came up with a far different pre-Act 10 starting point when he did his own study in 2011. There certainly appears to be an element of truth in the study, but it’s not as definitive as Johnson presented it on the radio. And credible independent researchers have raised valid questions about the conclusion."
|
false
|
Income, State Budget, Unions, Wisconsin, Ron Johnson,
|
"On the morning after Gov. Scott Walker rolled to victory in the recall election, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) made it clear the battle over public employee pay and benefits is far from over. Appearing on Charlie Sykes’ talk show on WTMJ-AM (620), Johnson cited Walker’s move to curb collective bargaining and make public employees pay more for pensions and health care. He said the measure, known as Act 10, only had a slight impact on the disparities between public and private sector workers in Wisconsin. And Johnson cited a new study to prove his point. Johnson said that even after the changes, ""the pension benefits for public sector employees is still four and a half times richer than the private sector, and the health benefits are two times richer than the private sector."" He continued: ""Before Act 10, the total cost of public sector employees’ employment was 29 percent higher than that in the private sector. After the act, it’s still 22 percent higher."" Johnson added this footnote: ""I do want to point out … about those statistics that I just spouted in case people want to punch holes in them. That was just a study by Heritage and AEI working together and that does factor in equal educational experience and equal types of job classifications. So this isn’t just because public sector employees are higher educated or have more important jobs. This equalizes that and it’s still 22 percent higher cost."" That comparison caught our attention, since no one had highlighted it during the recall itself. We started with the report, since Johnson cited it directly as his source. The report was completed by Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute and Jason Richwine of the Heritage Foundation. The researchers at the conservative think tanks have done numerous studies on public-private pay -- both at the state and federal level -- that show public employees come out ahead in compensation. The paper focused on Wisconsin was issued May 30, 2012, less than a week before the June 5, 2012 recall election. When we asked several experts on public employment compensation for their take on the paper, we ran into a familiar debate between competing political agendas. Indeed, the foes know each other so well, it’s a little like the ""Spy vs Spy"" comic in Mad magazine. Each time either side issues a report, researchers from the other side try to punch holes in it. Here’s how the debate plays out on this one. The report used a bad comparison: Keith Brainard, research director for the National Association of State Retirement Administrators, noted the report compares state workers’ compensation to pay and benefits at private sector firms with far fewer workers. He said a state is more properly compared to the state’s largest firms. Such companies, he noted, generally pay better. The comparison is fine: Biggs, one of the authors of the paper, said the size of the companies didn’t skew the results. ""We could choose the largest establishment size"" -- firms with more than 500 workers ""and, so long as you value the pensions right, public employees would still have a large advantage."" The report used a bad assumption: Brainard and Jeffrey Keefe, a professor at the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations, argue private sector benefits are understated in the report. Specifically, they say the report uses today’s low interest rates to calculate the value of private sector workers’ 401(k), which magnifies the public-private gap. They argue that the rate of return, 3.67 percent, is based on low-risk U.S. Treasury securities and is less than half of what such funds have historically earned over the long-term through investments in stocks, bonds and so forth. Said Brainard: ""The net result is to produce a substantial difference between the current private sector annuity values."" The report’s assumptions are valid: Biggs and Richwine said they are trying to treat public and private pensions equally. Using something other than Treasury securities would produce a retirement benefit with far greater risk than found in the public employee retirement system. Said Biggs: ""Our approach is consistent with economic theory, with how liabilities are priced in private financial markets, and with the findings of non-partisan government agencies like the Confirmation Budget Office, the Federal Reserve, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (which constructs the National Income and Product Accounts, which are the official 'books' of the US economy)."" Keefe said it was impossible to replicate the research using the formula contained in the Biggs-Richwine report. Keefe did his own earlier analysis of Wisconsin public-private pay using data from the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. That report, issued in February 2011 as Act 10 was unveiled, found Wisconsin public employees earn 4.8 percent less in total compensation per hour than comparable full-time employees in Wisconsin’s private sector. That’s compared to the Biggs-Richwine study which put the pre-Act 10 gap at 29 percent. Why did Johnson chose to highlight the study he did? In an emailed statement, Johnson said the study ""is a product of two highly respected institutions. That said, I don’t endorse the findings of any specific study, or validate their findings."" He added: ""No one wants to underpay government workers, but with mounting deficits and debt, we can’t afford to overpay them either. We need to make sure that government sector salaries are benchmarked against those of the private sector. I welcome studies like this one, which help us understand how to set those benchmarks."" Our rating Johnson argued the changes included in Act 10 were modest -- public employees still receive 22 percent higher wages and benefits than private sector workers. Johnson cited the work of two researchers for conservative think tanks, but later told us he ""doesn’t endorse"" the findings of that study, or ""any specific study."" That underlines what we found: There are different ways to measure the same thing. Indeed, an academic came up with a far different pre-Act 10 starting point when he did his own study in 2011. There certainly appears to be an element of truth in the study, but it’s not as definitive as Johnson presented it on the radio. And credible independent researchers have raised valid questions about the conclusion."
|
33190
|
A photograph depicts a new method discovered by Russian scientists to turn black skin white instantly.
|
Although the exact origins of this image are uncertain, it appeared at least as far back 2012 on Reddit as an image-based warning about the dangers of falling asleep at the beach (a far likelier explanation for the photograph than a demonstration of skin-whitening). An old (and clearly unrelated) image was repurposed as evidence for a dubious medical claim.
|
false
|
Fauxtography, benzodiazepine, moscow faculty of sciences, moscow times
|
In early August 2015, several web sites published articles with titles such as “A Russian Laboratory has invented a way to remove the black Skin layer of black People” (with the earliest iteration we’ve found being dated 31 July 2015). Nearly all the articles had identical text (down to rendering errors) reporting that: This is unbelievable and yet real. According to a publication of the Moscow Faculty of Sciences, researchers have developed a chemical process to « whiten » quickly a person. With a mixture that includes oxytane and benzodiazepine. It would suffice to stay for 6 hours in a bath consisting of 50 grams per liter of water. Then the skin peels off naturally. This is in fact the upper skin layer responsible for the color that can be removed. The laboratory at the origin of the discovery has already announced 254 people have been treated by this method. The Russian government may soon allow the reimbursement of this treatment. According to Russian authorities, is an high value for thousands of immigrants who may feel more integrated in Russia once their color matches the one of the premises. A strong point of view decried by the associations of human rights. The claim appeared (without obvious origin) almost simultaneously on a number of web sites of questionable repute, and the photograph that accompanied it was demonstrably misrepresented. The image was posted as part of a Reddit thread titled “Sleep in the beach” published on 20 June 2012 and has been widely circulated online since then. Early iterations never presented the picture as anything other than evidence of a sunburn (and the setting depicted was clearly not a laboratory, Russian or otherwise). Most of the “skin treatment” articles claimed that Moscow Times had recently published an article about the purported discovery, but we were unable to locate any report that even loosely matched their claims. Similarly, a Google search for “Moscow Faculty of Sciences” returned results related to this claim and nothing else. Google searches for the combination of two chemicals cited in the articles as agents of the skin whitening formula (oxytane, which appears to be a fuel additive [PDF] and benzodiazepine(s), a class of sedative hypnotic drugs not known for effects on skin) similarly returned only results related to this claim.
|
9206
|
Tucatinib (ONT-380) progressing in pivotal trial against HER2+ breast cancer
|
This news release from the University of Colorado’s medical center reports on the results of a phase 1 clinical trial involving 50 women who took the investigational drug tucatinib to treat HER2-positive breast cancer. All of the women in the study previously had taken other cancer drugs, averaging five prior treatment regimens. The news release noted that the data came from a phase 1 study which was primarily focused on establishing the safety of the drug and ensuring that it had some effect; however, it provided confusing information about tucatinib’s effects on the breast cancer’s progress, offered no specific information about potential harms or availability and included inappropriately enthusiastic language about the drug’s importance, given the small size and short study period. In particular, the release quotes one of the study’s authors as saying that “there are women who are alive today because of this drug,” a statement that seems somewhat overblown given the preliminary nature of these findings. The drug under investigation in this study is meant to treat one of the most difficult and aggressive types of breast cancers; HER2-positive strains account for about one-in-five breast cancers, are more likely to occur in younger women and are more likely to metastasize to the brain. The study involved women who already had undergone treatment with several other anti-cancer drugs. In addition, the molecular characteristics of this drug make it a candidate for delaying or preventing brain metastasis. The study results led to FDA “fast-track” status for the drug.
|
false
|
tucatinib,University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
|
The news release provides no information about how much tucatinib treatment might cost. If it’s not too soon to promote the potential benefits of a drug it’s not too soon to provide cost estimates. [Editor’s note: We had originally rated this criteria Not Applicable since it is an investigational drug in very early trials and it’s plausible costs are unknown. However, the rating has been revised to be consistent with past reviews and to reflect our general position that costs (or cost estimates based on similar drugs or treatments) should be presented.] The discussion of benefits is somewhat confusing. The news release says that 27% of the women treated with tucatinib “saw clinical benefit” from the drug. However, the article itself states that evaluation of the drug’s impact was possible for only 35 women, and of these women, 20 showed no progression of their disease, while there was a “partial response” for three women, meaning that their tumors shrank by at least 50%. The most important benefit identified by the original study actually was that tucatinib caused less frequent and less severe side effects (including diarrhea and rash) than the alternatives currently used in treating these types of breast cancers. The news release barely mentioned this finding, stating simply that the drug “has a very favorable side effect profile” without explaining what that means. According to the original study, 30% of the patients had to have their treatments “interrupted,” usually due to effects on liver function, although the study says the drug treatment was “almost always” re-initiated, and no one had to be removed from the drug entirely. None of these problems was mentioned in the news release, which also offers no specific information about the frequency or severity of side effects. The news release states that the trial involved 50 patients overall, but does not explain that the study produced data that could be evaluated for only 35 patients. The release does note that this was a phase 1 trial. Despite providing this information, however, the language used in the news release seems to imply a level of significance for this study greater than one would expect for a study of 50 patients who were evaluated, in some cases, after as little as 24 weeks. The news release does not commit disease mongering, but it also provides no information about what percentage of breast cancers are of the HER2+ variety. (According to the Mayo Clinic website, about 20% of breast cancers have the HER2+ gene mutation, which makes them more aggressive.) Thus, a naïve reader might be inclined to think that the drug would benefit a larger percentage of breast cancer patients than is likely to be the case. We won’t give credit or dock points in this case; we’ll rate it Not Applicable. The news release mentions Array BioPharma, which originally developed tucatinib, but it does not state specifically that Array provided the funding for this study, nor does it explain that three of the authors of the original paper are Array employees. It does note that its only source, Dr. Virginia Borges, director of the Breast Cancer Research Program and Young Women’s Breast Cancer Translational Program at the University of Colorado Cancer Center, “has been a major driver of the drug’s development from its invention at Array Biopharm in Boulder, CO and now through clinical trials of the drug, which is licensed to Cascadian Therapeutics of Seattle, WA.” The release quotes researcher Virginia Borges, MD, MMSc, director of the university’s Breast Cancer Research Program saying that trials of other drugs have been “lackluster” in their effects on breast cancers positive for both HER2 and estrogen receptors. Borges further suggests that tucatinib is more effective than other drugs in preventing brain metastases. The release notes that because tucatinib is a “small molecule,” it can pass through the blood-brain barrier to interfere with brain metastasis, which is more common in HER2-positive breast cancers. However, there is no specific comparison of this ability with other drugs currently in use. No information in the news release gives an indication as to when (or if) tucatinib might be widely available. The lead researcher’s comment that “I think this drug has an extremely high likelihood of being approved for women with HER2+ breast cancer for use after previous treatments” is problematic given that the investigative drug is still in early trials and has not yet been FDA approved. The news release suggests that tucatinib is unusual because it is taken in pill form, meaning women do not need to visit infusion centers for treatment. It also suggests that tucatinib is unusual because of its small molecular size, enabling the drug to pass the blood-brain barrier. However, no information is provided about how many, or how few, other cancer drugs can be taken in pill form or whether any other anti-cancer drugs currently in use or in testing also can pass through the blood-brain barrier. The use of unjustifiably glowing language arguably is the news release’s most serious flaw. In particular, the subhead of the release quotes Dr. Borges as saying, “There are women who are alive today because of this drug.” Later in the release, she predicts that tucatinib “could be a substantially practice-changing drug.” While either statement could be true, drawing such sharp conclusions from evaluations of 35 women, only three of whom actually experienced tumor shrinkage, seems premature. In addition, the investigator is quoted saying, “And it’s going to be an especially important drug due to its ability to control brain metastases” It’s important to note the comments about crossing the blood brain barrier that come from the “Translational Relevance” section of the study. The authors note that in preclinical studies with intracranial tumor models, mice treated with the investigational drug combined compared with 2 other oral agents (lapatinib or neratinib) showed a survival benefit when each drug was given at maximum dose. They do not note any study or evidence showing that this investigational agent has shown benefit in terms of treating brain metastasis in human patients, so that language in the release also appears unjustified. Because it seems tucatinib would be used for a particularly vulnerable group of women — those diagnosed at younger ages and with more aggressive and difficult-to-treat cancers — it seems especially important that those writing about the drug exercise caution and avoid overplaying study results.
|
6747
|
Post-Ebola, West Africans flock back to bushmeat, with risk.
|
As the deadly outbreak of Ebola has subsided, people in several West African countries are flocking to eat bushmeat again after restrictions were lifted on the consumption of wild animals like hedgehogs and cane rats. But some health experts call it a risky move.
|
true
|
Animals, AP International News, Ebola virus, Africa, Abidjan, Africa, Bats, West Africa, Health, Ivory Coast
|
Ivory Coast, which neighbors two of the three countries where Ebola killed more than 11,300 people since December 2013, lifted its ban on wild animal meat this month. The meat of squirrel, deer, fruit bats and rats has long been a key source of protein for many in the region, but it is also a potential source of the Ebola virus. Though bushmeat hasn’t officially been linked to West Africa’s recent Ebola outbreak, the deadliest in history, infections in Africa have been associated with hunting, butchering and processing meat from infected animals, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. The Ebola virus is then spread through direct contact with the bodily fluids of victims or corpses. “From a public health standpoint, this decision is unfortunate at best,” said Ben Neuman, a virologist at Texas A&M University-Texarkana. “The only source of Ebola in the world is infected animals, and there’s good evidence that some of these animals, like bats, can be infected for a long time.” However, not all bushmeat is equal, he said. Bats pass on the virus and travel far. Some types of rodents can get the virus. Primate meat is likely not as much of a danger, given that they succumb to Ebola more quickly than people. “There’s a good case for banning the sale of bats as bushmeat. The other sources are a lesser risk,” Neuman said. “I don’t want to see it all legal, but we don’t want to see people go hungry, either.” Ivory Coast, Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ghana all warned against, or banned, the sale of bushmeat in 2014 as the outbreak emerged. They began rolling back those restrictions after the World Health Organization said in March that Ebola was no longer an international health emergency. Many in the countries are happy that they can now enjoy the meat they have always relied on. Some believe it is tastier than imported meats or chicken, and it’s often cheaper. “We weren’t happy that the government banned us from eating bushmeat these past two years. But we did what we were told because of Ebola,” said Lucien Douhan while shopping for bushmeat in the Yopougon suburb of Abidjan. In the teeming open-air markets, vendors handled the stiffened meat in recognizable animal form. Bat wings competed for space on worn wooden tables with other meat, some tails and claws still attached. Flies buzzed. A machete hacked. Those who sell the meat say they have been through hard times. “We couldn’t afford for our kids to go to school. It was hard for us. We had to sell frogs so the kids could eat, and we sold snails too,” said Brigitte Gahie. “But today, thanks be to God, the meat is back and the people are coming back.” In Guinea, bushmeat sales are still illegal, said Mohamed Tall, the minister of livestock and animal production there. Despite the ban, people still consume it. “We ate it before Ebola. We eat it after Ebola. Nothing can stop me from eating it,” said Marcel Yombouno in Guinea. Liberia issued a warning against the consumption of bushmeat during Ebola, but now the meat is being sold openly. In Sierra Leone, a bushmeat ban has been lifted. Ebola first appeared in 1976 in Congo and has caused periodic outbreaks there and in other African countries. Its re-emergence is likely, said Neuman, given the densely populated areas where Ebola has occurred. “Ebola will come again,” he said. “Hopefully we will be ready this time.” ___ Petesch reported from Dakar, Senegal; AP writers Boubacar Diallo in Conakry, Guinea; Clarence Roy-Macaulay in Freetown, Sierra Leone and Jonathan Paye-Layleh in Monrovia, Liberia contributed to this report.
|
3213
|
Destiny’s Child singer Williams seeks mental health help.
|
Destiny’s Child singer Michelle Williams says she’s seeking help for the depression she has struggled with for years.
|
true
|
Beyonce Knowles, Mental health, Michelle Williams, Kelly Rowland, Entertainment, North America, Health, Music
|
Williams said in an Instagram post Tuesday that she has “sought help from a great team of health care professionals.” She gave no specifics on her treatment, and a message left with her manager seeking details was not immediately returned. Williams’ post says that for years she has dedicated herself to increasing awareness of mental health and empowering people to seek help. She says she recently decided to listen to the advice she has given, and wants to lead by example in seeking treatment. The 37-year-old Williams was a core member of Destiny’s Child, the trio with Beyonce Knowles and Kelly Rowland that sat atop the R&B world from 1997 to 2006.
|
4342
|
University of Missouri reports tuberculosis case on campus.
|
The University of Missouri says a student has been diagnosed with active tuberculosis and left campus voluntarily.
|
true
|
Columbia, Health, Tuberculosis, Missouri, University of Missouri, Mens college basketball, College basketball
|
The school said in a news release that campus and local health officials are working to track down other people who might need testing. The school described the student as cooperative but declined to release the student’s condition or other details, citing student privacy laws. Tuberculosis is a serious disease that usually affects the lungs and can be deadly if not treated. In developed countries, it has largely been brought under control. But it’s a major scourge in less affluent places. Symptoms include persistent coughing, weight loss and fatigue.
|
26412
|
During the 1918 flu pandemic, San Francisco residents formed the “Anti-Mask League.” San Francisco “was ultimately one of the cities that suffered the most with a high death rate.”
|
Some people have protested stay-at-home orders in recent weeks with public demonstrations. During the flu pandemic in 1918, protesters formed an Anti-Mask League in San Francisco. San Francisco was among several cities that experienced a second wave of cases.
|
true
|
California, Coronavirus, Facebook posts,
|
"The protests against stay-at-home orders in some state capitals have drawn comparisons to the 2010 tea party movement, but the idea of protesting such rules amid a pandemic is not just a 21st-century phenomenon. There are parallels to a protest a century ago. ""During the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, several influential San Francisco residents including a few physicians formed the Anti-Mask League which objected to wearing masks to prevent the spread of influenza,"" stated an April 22 Facebook post. ""They held meetings of thousands of maskless people. San Francisco was ultimately one of the cities that suffered the most with a high death rate."" (The ""Spanish flu"" is a misnomer — it’s more accurate to refer to it as the flu pandemic of 1918.) The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) The post includes a black-and-white photo of policemen wearing masks over their mouths and noses. We did a reverse Google search and found the image matches a photo of policemen in a different city — Seattle — wearing masks in 1918. But there are accurate statements in the text, which draws from a source at the University of Michigan. We found that there was such a thing as the Anti-Mask League in San Francisco in January 1919. The city did have one of the highest death rates from the flu, but the authors said they can’t prove whether the Anti-Mask League played a role. Mak pulled from an essay by J. Alexander Navarro at the University of Michigan Center for the History of Medicine, a book by Alfred W. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic and the San Francisco Chronicle archives. As the number of flu cases rose in October 1918 in San Francisco, the city passed an ordinance requiring everyone to wear a mask in public except at mealtime. Mask wearing was promoted as a symbol of patriotism. Gov. William Stephens told Californians it was a ""patriotic duty for every American citizen"" to wear a mask. City officials and local newspapers reported widespread compliance with the mask order initially, Navarro found. But some resisted the rules, and police arrested 110 people on Oct. 27 for not wearing their masks or for failing to keep them properly adjusted. The majority were fined $5, though some went to jail. In November, with cases declining, the city started to lift restrictions, although it still required masks. People flocked to public venues including theaters and sports arenas. At a boxing match, the city’s mayor and city health officer were photographed not wearing masks, for which they were fined. Later that month, the mayor annulled the ordinance. But new cases quickly emerged, and the mask ordinance was reinstated in January. Opponents formed the Anti-Mask League, multiple news articles in January 1919 show. Crosby wrote in his book that the league consisted of ""public-spirited citizens, physicians and fanatics."" At a meeting of the Anti-Mask League ""resolutions were passed denouncing the mask ordinance as contrary to the desires of the majority of the people,"" the San Francisco Examiner reported. Nearly 2,000 people attended. The league got their wish, and the mask rule was rescinded Feb. 1. Navarro and colleagues studied how 43 cities fared during the 1918 pandemic and published their results in the Journal of the American Medical Association. They found that many cities experienced second waves after ending social distancing. San Francisco had one of the higher excess-death rates: 673 per 100,000 people. ""It is impossible to say for certainty that the advent of the Anti-Mask League played a role in that outcome,"" Navarro told PolitiFact ""Undoubtedly, having over 2,000 people gather would have helped continue to spread influenza."" The main factors in San Francisco’s outcome, however, were failure to implement interventions such as social distancing quickly and failure to keep them in place long enough. Navarro said he didn’t find something similar to the Anti-Mask League in other cities. Only a few other cities implemented mandatory face mask orders, while others recommended that the public use masks. A Facebook post said during the 1918 flu pandemic, San Francisco residents formed an ""Anti-Mask League."" San Francisco ""was ultimately one of the cities that suffered the most with a high death rate."" Residents angry about the reinstatement of a mask order did form the Anti-Mask League in January 1919. It appeared to be short-lived, as the mask rule was quickly rescinded. Researchers found that San Francisco did have one of the higher death rates in the country, but it is impossible to say whether that was directly related to the mask protests. A photo of masked police officers that accompanies the post is real, but it shows officers in Seattle."
|
5786
|
N. Carolina court: State retirees should pay health premiums.
|
A former North Carolina Supreme Court chief justice and other retired state government workers and teachers aren’t exempted from paying health insurance premiums because they had a deal with the state to keep their benefits unchanged, an appeals court ruled Tuesday.
|
true
|
State courts, North Carolina Supreme Court, Access to health care, State governments, Health, North Carolina, Courts, John Tyson
|
The state Court of Appeals said retirees don’t have a contract preventing them from being forced to pay part of their health insurance costs under a law passed in 2011. A three-judge panel ruled unanimously that there is no contractual obligation limiting the State Health Plan covering more than 700,000 employees, retirees and their dependents. “Retired state employees are promised nothing more than equal access to health care benefits on an equal basis with active state employees,” Judge John Tyson wrote in the ruling for himself and Judges Wanda Bryant and Robert Hunter. Retirees, including former Chief Justice I. Beverly Lake, sued in 2012 after the legislature directed the state employee health insurance plan to mandate that they make monthly contributions to receive what had been standard insurance coverage. The retirees claimed the state had agreed to a non-amendable contract that entitled them to premium-free health benefits for the rest of their lives under a health care plan in which the former workers paid 20 percent of their co-insurance. Retirees still have access to premium-free options in a 70/30 plan and, if qualified, to a Medicare Advantage plan. Active state employees have no premium-free health care options, the judges said. The appeals court reversed a 2017 decision by Gaston County Superior Court Judge Edwin Wilson that retirees had a contractual right to receive the standard coverage without a premium. State Treasurer Dale Folwell, whose office includes the State Health Plan, estimated in 2017 that with more than 220,000 people covered by the lawsuit, Wilson’s decision could cost state taxpayers more than $100 million, plus much more to cover the higher cost for retiree coverage in the future. ___ Follow Emery P. Dalesio on Twitter at http://twitter.com/emerydalesio . His work can be found at https://apnews.com/search/emery%20dalesio.
|
24543
|
"As a candidate, President Obama ""declared that everyone deserves access to reproductive health care that includes abortion, and vowed that this 'right' would be at the heart of his health care reform plan if elected president."
|
Boehner says abortion access was always a key goal for Obama health plan
|
true
|
Abortion, National, Health Care, John Boehner,
|
"To build opposition to the health care bill, Republicans have been saying it would expand coverage of abortion. To back up that claim, House Republican Leader John Boehner sent a ""GOP Leader Alert"" that said President Barack Obama was doing that to fulfill a campaign promise. ""During his quest for the presidency, now-President Obama declared that everyone deserves access to reproductive health care that includes abortion, and vowed that this 'right' would be at the heart of his health care reform plan if elected president,"" Boehner wrote in the Sept. 10, 2009, message. There's never been any question that Obama favors abortion rights. On Jan. 22, 2008, for instance, Obama released a statement on the 35th anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion that said, ""Throughout my career, I've been a consistent and strong supporter of reproductive justice, and have consistently had a 100 percent prochoice rating with Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America."" But he has been somewhat more coy, or perhaps strategically fuzzy, about exactly where he would draw the line on federal funding for abortion in his own health care plan. His comments on abortion rights have often used the phrase ""reproductive care"" rather than abortion. We'll take a separate look at the three parts of Boehner's sentence. Did candidate Obama say that everyone deserves access to reproductive health care? Did he say that such issues are at the heart of his health care reform plan? And did his definition of ""reproductive health"" care include abortion? On the first and second questions, we think then-candidate Obama did say something that closely matches what Boehner says he did. In a July 17, 2007, appearance before the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Obama said the following: ""In my mind, reproductive care is essential care. It is basic care, so it is at the center and at the heart of the plan that I propose. Essentially what we're doing is, we’re going to set up a public plan that all persons and all women can access if they don’t have health insurance. It will be a plan that will provide all essential services, including reproductive services, as well as mental health services and disease management services, because part of our interest is to make sure that we’re putting more money into preventive care."" (This one is not included in our Obameter database of promises, but we'll examine next week whether it should be.) The words Obama used are slightly different from the ones cited by Boehner, but we think that to say reproductive care is ""essential"" means that ""everyone deserves"" to have it. Meanwhile, inferring from Obama's language that it's a ""right"" requires a slight leap, but it's close enough that we won't quibble. So the key to whether Boehner is right comes with the third question: Does Obama's definition of ""reproductive health care"" necessarily include abortion? On this question, the evidence is suggestive but not quite a slam dunk. Abortion opponents rely on a few pieces of evidence to support the assertion that Obama believes reproductive health care includes abortion. One is a story that ran in the Chicago Tribune on July 18, 2007, the day after Obama's Planned Parenthood speech. In it, Washington bureau reporter Mike Dorning wrote that when Obama was asked about his proposal for expanded access to health insurance, the candidate ""said it would cover 'reproductive health services.' Contacted afterward, an Obama spokesman said that included abortions."" Another source is a candidate questionnaire by RH Reality Check, which describes itself as ""an online community and publication serving individuals and organizations committed to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights."" Posted Dec. 21, 2007, the questionnaire was filled out by ""Sen. Barack Obama's campaign staff."" The question that's most relevant to Boehner's assertion is this one: Q: Does Sen. Obama support the Hyde amendment (which bars the use of federal funds to pay for abortions)? Under what circumstances does he believe that Medicaid should cover abortions (all pregnancies, life- or health-threatening pregnancies, pregnancies that are a result of rape or incest, extreme fetal malformation)? A: Obama does not support the Hyde amendment. He believes that the federal government should not use its dollars to intrude on a poor woman's decision whether to carry to term or to terminate her pregnancy and selectively withhold benefits because she seeks to exercise her right of reproductive choice in a manner the government disfavors. Both of these comments suggest, fairly strongly, that Obama would include access to abortion in his health care plan — but they leave a degree of doubt. While we are not aware of any pushback from the campaign once these two items were published, both statements were made by campaign staffers, not the candidate himself. On his campaign Web site, Obama did not specifically address the federal funding issue. In the ""women's issues"" section, the campaign said only that ""Barack Obama understands that abortion is a divisive issue, and respects those who disagree with him. However, he has been a consistent champion of reproductive choice and will make preserving women's rights under Roe vs. Wade a priority as president. He opposes any constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's decision in that case."" Asked for any additional evidence to back up Boehner's assertion that Obama was referring specifically to abortion, Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee, told PolitiFact that Obama was speaking in ""terms of art"" that his Planned Parenthood audience would immediately grasp. ""'Reproductive health services' is one of those conventions that all of the players understand. It is not limited to abortion, but it always encompasses abortion. It is like when a prolife candidate says, 'I support strong legal protection for the right to life of unborn children.' Everyone on all sides understands that this means he thinks abortion generally should not be legal, and no doubt he also supports fetal homicide laws . . . I suppose someone could argue that since he didn't specifically mention abortion, there is the theoretical possibility that he wants to keep abortion completely unrestricted and only wants to pass fetal homicide laws. But that would be to ignore the lexicon that groups develop on these issues and the way they are understood in context."" So back to Boehner's claim. He said that candidate Obama ""declared that everyone deserves access to reproductive health care that includes abortion, and vowed that this 'right' would be at the heart of his health care reform plan if elected president."" The record shows that Obama did indeed make those statements. His message to the abortion rights group may have been deliberately fuzzy, but it's clear what he meant — and it was confirmed by the campaign to the Tribune reporter. We find Boehner's claim to be ."
|
11295
|
Gardasil: Yup. Still Safe.
|
This op-ed-style piece about the safety of the Gardasil vaccine is to be commended for paying attention to a study with negative findings. Negative studies aren’t as sexy as research that reports amazing or frightening new effects from medical interventions, but the mundane finding of “no difference” is often the reality of medical research and a result that readers need to hear about more often. The message here is sound, but we wish the story had followed some practices that would have buttressed the author’s viewpoint and thereby made the piece more useful for readers. These include: quantifying the benefits of the vaccine and its cost; describing the results of the study that’s the basis for the piece and the quality of evidence it reports; and seeking out an independent voice to comment on the findings. The safety of Gardasil matters because it protects against cervical, vaginal, vulvar and anal cancer, and more than 178 million doses of it have been dispensed worldwide since it entered the marketplace eight years ago.
|
mixture
|
women's health
|
No mention was made of the cost of the vaccine. The story focuses on safety to the exclusion of efficacy. It does not say which strains of HPV Gardasil protects against or how effective it is.at preventing the cancers those strains cause. It does not tell the reader that the more recently formulated vaccine, Gardasil 9, has expanded the protection conferred by the earlier version. The story notes the vaccine is not associated with serious adverse effects sometimes attributed to it (e.g. multiple sclerosis). It mentions that syncope and possibly skin rash are thought to be side effects of the vaccine. Ideally, the story would have provided more information about how frequently these effects are seen (the main objective of the study being reported on). The story says nothing about the quality of the evidence — i.e., that the researchers reached their conclusions by reviewing data accumulated in a number of studies carried out since the vaccine’s approval. There are no details provided regarding the methodology of these studies or their strengths and limitations. The story’s assertion that cervical cancer causes 4,000 deaths each year in the United States is backed up by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But that number doesn’t really give much sense of one’s overall lifetime risk of developing the disease and whether the disease is common or relatively rare. It would have been useful to know, comparatively, how common cervical cancer is and how it ranks in relation to other cancers. There is no independent voice included, nor does the story alert readers to the fact that Merck funded the study. Drug company funding is obligatory for post-marketing surveillance data of this type. So while it’s worth mentioning, such funding is arguably not as important as when a company funds a study with glowing findings on a new unapproved device or drug. The story notes that abstinence, if it worked, could obviate the need for the vaccine. The story notes that more than 178 million doses of the vaccine have been dispensed, meaning that it is readily available. The story notes that the study driving the coverage is “new,” but beyond that doesn’t establish what is different or interesting about this research compared with previous studies. There’s enough context here that we can be sure the story does not rely on a news release.
|
5595
|
Hearing begins on fate of Missouri’s lone abortion clinic.
|
Patient safety at Missouri’s only abortion clinic is the point of contention at a state administrative hearing that will decide if the clinic can remain open.
|
true
|
Michael Brown, Health, General News, Abortion, St. Louis
|
Opening statements and testimony began Monday before a commissioner with the Missouri Administrative Hearing Commission. At issue is the state health department’s effort to revoke the license for Planned Parenthood’s clinic in St. Louis. The state has said that part of the reason it is seeking to remove the license is a series of “failed abortions.” Assistant Attorney General John Sauer outlined details of those cases. In one, he said, a woman had to undergo up to five procedures over four days to complete the abortion. In another, a woman bled heavily after doctors failed to recognize a condition that put her at higher than normal risk. Sauer cited a third incident where a woman had an abortion but later had to return for a second one because the doctor missed that she was pregnant with twins. Donna Harrison, executive director of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, was called as an expert witness by the state and reviewed the records. She said there was no indication that adequate follow-up exams were done on the patient. “There is a much higher risk of infection” if fetal parts remain in a woman’s uterus after an abortion, Harrison said. But Planned Parenthood’s attorney, Chuck Hatfield, played a video deposition of William Koebel, director of the section of the health department responsible for abortion clinic licensing, who was asked if the facility was deemed unsafe. “Not that I recall,” Koebel said. Hatfield said that after a March inspection, the health department “moved the goal line” in an effort to take away the clinic’s license. On Monday Koebel said that an inspection on March 11-13 discovered that no complication reports had been filed for a woman who had to undergo multiple procedures before her abortion was complete. That incident prompted Koebel to request records of all incidents of women who had to undergo multiple abortion procedures. Four women were found. Details of the fourth were not outlined Monday. Planned Parenthood officials said at the hearing that the state cherry-picked four difficult cases out of thousands of successful abortions. Missouri would become the first state since 1974, the year after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, without a functioning abortion clinic if the license revocation is allowed. The battle also comes as abortion rights supporters raise concerns that conservative-led states, including Missouri, are attempting to end abortion through tough new laws and tighter regulation. Several dozen observers filed the administrative hearing room at a state building in downtown St. Louis, the vast majority of them wearing pink T-shirts to show support for Planned Parenthood. Heightened security was outside amid concerns about possible protests. Planned Parenthood supporters unfurled a large abortion rights banner along a parking garage. Commissioner Sreenivasa Rao Dandamudi is presiding over the hearing, which is expected to last five days. A commission official said that in his role, Dandamudi “acts as an independent trial judge.” A ruling isn’t expected until February at the earliest. The health department has sought to interview physicians involved in those abortions, including medical residents who no longer work there. Planned Parenthood has said it can’t force them to talk and that the state’s concerns were addressed long ago. Attorneys for the health department wrote in legal filings to the commission that physicians’ refusal to talk “presents the final, critical obstacle.” Missouri is among several states to pass new restrictions on abortions in the hope that the increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court will eventually overturn Roe v. Wade. Republican Gov. Mike Parson signed legislation in May banning abortions at or beyond eight weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for medical emergencies but not for rape or incest. A federal judge in August temporarily blocked implementation of the law until the legal challenge plays out in court, which could take several months. While the Missouri case unfolded, Planned Parenthood quietly built a new abortion clinic in Illinois, just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. The 18,000-square-foot (1,700-square-meter) clinic in Fairview Heights, 12 miles (19 kilometers) east of St. Louis, opened Wednesday, in part to meet the demand for abortions from Missouri residents. Missouri women have been increasingly getting abortions at the Hope Clinic for Women in Granite City, Illinois, another St. Louis suburb. Deputy Director Alison Dreith said 58% of the abortions performed at the Hope Clinic through August of this year involved Missouri women, compared with 37% involving Illinois women. Another abortion clinic sits in Overland Park, Kansas, a Kansas City suburb. The clinic is 2 miles (3 kilometers) from the state line. Information from the state of Kansas shows about 3,300 of the 7,000 abortions performed there last year involved Missouri residents.
|
4058
|
Minnesota woman starts support program for Lyme disease.
|
Lisa Najarian sipped her chamomile tea in the sunny kitchen of her Grant home on a recent Monday and sighed.
|
true
|
Lyme disease, Health, Minnesota
|
“September’s a bad month for me,” she said. The symptoms of the Lyme disease she has suffered for 19 years were affecting her. She acknowledged them — fatigue and brain fog — and then pushed them aside to keep talking about her project, Twin Cities Lyme Foundation, and the $148,000 raised at its first gala this month. The foundation uses an assessment tool to help folks experiencing poor health find out if they have Lyme disease. The foundation donates $1,000 per person toward getting a diagnosis and connects people with doctors who have been certified by the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported. “My mission is to help people get better,” Najarian said. “I wish I’d had somebody like me to take me under their wing and say, ‘Let me get you to somebody who can help you.’” Najarian doesn’t know when she contracted Lyme. She never had the telltale bulls-eye rash. Her symptoms started in July 1999 while living in Illinois. She woke up one morning and her left ear was plugged and ringing — a symptom she still has today. After that came terrible vertigo, heart palpitations and migraine headaches. She was misdiagnosed with Meniere’s disease, something historians believed Vincent van Gogh may have had when he cut off his ear. In the days and weeks after a person is bitten by a tick, bacteria spreads through the bloodstream. Lyme is often called “the great imitator” because it can appear to be something else, such as Meniere’s disease, fibromyalgia, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) or others. Najarian is married to Pete Najarian, a former Gophers and Vikings linebacker, and they have two children, Lex and Kole. In 2007, the family moved to Connecticut, about an hour from Old Lyme, where the disease was first diagnosed in 1975. While in Connecticut, she had a series of symptoms that sent her to specialists as she tried to understand what was happening to her body. In September 2010, she was hosting friends for dinner when she suddenly felt ill. She excused herself and went to her room, where she was overcome by vertigo and a terrible migraine. “I said, ‘I think I’m going to die,’ ” she said. After a trip to the emergency room that required morphine to mask the pain, she was bedridden for two weeks. “The kids were pretty worried,” Pete Najarian said. “The answer part of it is the most frustrating. She saw so many doctors.” While in Connecticut, she even took a Lyme disease test, but it was negative. She learned later that blood tests are not reliable because the disease pulses, which means it flares up and then appears to go dormant. Najarian said the foundation’s assessment test lists 109 symptoms for Lyme, some of them neurological such as claustrophobia. In 2014, Pete’s brother Paul died and the family moved back to Minnesota to be close to Pete’s parents. His father is John Najarian, the well-known University of Minnesota transplant surgeon. When they bought their house in Grant, they were disturbed to find its 13 acres infested with ticks. They spray the grounds monthly with permethrin to keep them away. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Minnesota had 1,304 confirmed cases of Lyme in 2016. In 2015, Najarian took the Lyme test again and got a positive. She called that moment “a silver lining.” She’s on a regimen of diuretics every two weeks to keep inflammation down. She also uses natural medicine such as Monolaurin and oil of oregano. But the bacteria has been in her system so long that it has caused irreversible damage, such as the hearing in her left ear and the chronic fatigue. She got the idea to start a foundation to help others after talking with Brant Rooney, who maintained the Koi pond on their property. He spoke at the gala, relating how his wife had Lyme. “She suffered from severe migraine headaches,” Najarian said. “He woke up one morning and got the if-you-are reading-this-I’m-already-gone letter.” Rooney’s wife left the note on the bathroom mirror, went to her favorite park and shot herself. Najarian said it’s stories like these that push her to get the word out to people who may have Lyme disease but don’t know it. “Had I been able to get ahold of her, I would have been able to help her,” she said. ___ Information from: St. Paul Pioneer Press, http://www.twincities.com
|
25692
|
“Drug overdose deaths decreased in 2018 for the first time in 30 years.”
|
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 67,367 people died of a drug overdose in 2018. Drug overdose deaths decreased from 2017 to 2018, dropping by about 4.1%, according to the CDC. Still, the number of overdose deaths was four times higher in 2018 than in 1999. Experts also note that the 2018 decrease was extremely small, that deaths went up again in 2019 and that the numbers for overdose deaths remain at historic highs.
|
true
|
Drugs, Health Care, Health Check, Ryan Holets,
|
"Detective Ryan Holets, whose personal story includes the adoption of an infant born to a drug-addicted mother, addressed the Republican National Convention on its second night. He praised President Donald Trump’s efforts in addressing drug and opioid abuse and noted ""drug overdose deaths decreased in 2018 for the first time in 30 years."" The detective has worked for the Albuquerque, New Mexico, police department for nine years and was invited by Trump to the 2018 State of the Union address. The year before, Holets promised an addicted mom that he and his wife would adopt her baby — and they did. Holets has seen the results of the nation’s drug crisis both professionally and personally. We reached out to the Albuquerque Police Department for the source of Holets’ data but did not get a response. The nation’s opioid crisis has been a talking point in Trump’s campaign since 2016 — and his administration has touted efforts it has made to provide money to states for treatment and other programs, so we decided to look into it. Did the death rate decline in 2018 as Holets noted? Yes, but that’s not the whole story. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 67,367 people died of a drug overdose in 2018. That number exceeded the tally, based on the most recent data available, of those who died either in car wrecks or by firearms. Two-thirds of those drug overdose deaths involved some type of opioid, including those given by prescription or those purchased illicitly, such as heroin. The CDC cites a rise in opioid deaths as coming in three ""waves."" The origin of the first wave came after doctors began prescribing more opioids for pain relief in the 1990s, with data showing a rise in deaths emerging around 1999, the CDC said. Another wave began in 2010. This one was fueled by deaths involving the illegal use of heroin. The third wave quickly followed, starting in 2013, with increases in deaths associated with synthetic opioids, particularly illicitly manufactured fentanyl. Despite the rising number of deaths, opioid prescribing continued to rise, fueled by marketing campaigns aimed at physicians by drug manufacturers. The total number of opioid prescriptions peaked in 2012 at more than 81 prescriptions per every 100 people in the U.S., according to CDC data. To combat that, a growing number of prescribing recommendations have been issued by physician and hospital groups, aimed at reducing the number of pills per prescription and the total number of prescriptions. The overall prescribing rate fell to 51 prescriptions per 100 people by 2018, according to the CDC. Still, Americans are more likely to fill a prescription painkiller than patients in other countries, and the rate of opioid prescriptions in the U.S. remains among the highest in the world. Deaths associated with all types of opioid use — from prescriptions to street use — are a lagging indicator of the number of people dependent or addicted to the drugs, said experts. Improved access to treatments to help people quit, as well as increased use of overdose reversal treatments, such as naloxone, can suppress death rates. The Trump administration has continued and expanded funding efforts, some of which began under President Barack Obama, to help provide treatment, research and other services. Yet the administration is also actively seeking to end the Affordable Care Act, which includes a provision requiring insurers to offer substance abuse treatment and has expanded access to treatment through Medicaid in the majority of states that fully implemented the law. Drug overdose deaths did decrease from 2017 to 2018, dropping by about 4.1%, according to the CDC. Still, the agency notes that the crisis is far from over, as the number of overdose deaths was four times higher in 2018 than in 1999. Parsing those numbers further, the decrease in deaths in 2018 came in three categories, with prescription-involved opioid deaths falling the most, a 13.5% decrease, followed by heroin deaths, down 4%. Conversely, deaths associated with the use of synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, rose by 10%. So Holets was correct to say drug overdose deaths fell in 2018. But that statistic doesn’t put the issue in perspective. ""It did decrease slightly, meaning it went from 134 deaths a day to 130 deaths a day,"" noted Dr. Chad Brummett, a director of the Michigan Opioid Prescribing Engagement Network, a collaboration of physicians that makes recommendations on prescribing. ""It’s disingenuous to pretend that was a huge win,"" said Amy Bohnert, associate professor at the University of Michigan. ""As someone who does research on this, I would be reluctant to consider a change of that scale to be clearly a sign of a real change as opposed to random error."" Brandeis University professor Andrew Kolodny said it was the first overall downtick in drug overdoses in 30 years, but he would parse it a bit for opioids, saying it was the first decline in 25 years. However, a bigger issue for Kolodny is that the speaker failed to mention that drug overdose numbers went up again last year. ""It is misleading to point to a slight reduction in 2018, when deaths went up again in 2019 and we remain at record-high levels of opioid deaths,"" said Kolodny, medical director for the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management. The CDC says preliminary data shows reported overdose deaths went up 6% in the 12 months ending in January 2020. Holets is correct in saying that overall drug overdose deaths ticked down in 2018, although a small category of deaths — those related to fentanyl — rose. And it’s pretty close to 30 years since a decline was documented. Still, Holets failed to mention that drug overdose deaths went up again last year, according to preliminary data from the CDC. Also left unsaid were other factors that may contribute to the rising or falling drug death rates — and what that may say about the underlying level of dependence or addiction."
|
34187
|
U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris is descended from the 19th-century slave owner Hamilton Brown.
|
Even if it is the case that the Harris family, by way of Christiana Brown, are descendants of Hamilton Brown, those who seek to attack or undermine Sen. Harris for the wrongdoing of a man who died almost 200 years ago should first gain a better understanding of the often complicated, traumatic histories of black families in the United States — and tread much more carefully.
|
unproven
|
Politics
|
In June and July 2019, social media users shared reports that claimed one of the ancestors of 2020 presidential Democratic primary candidate and U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) was a slave owner on the Caribbean island of Jamaica. Such claims were shared widely in the aftermath of the first round of Democratic primary debates, during which Harris brought racial issues to the fore by criticizing primary rival and former Vice President Joe Biden’s legislative record on busing, which she called “hurtful” to her as a black woman. The focus on racial issues and Harris’ racial identity intensified after Donald Trump, Jr., son of President Donald Trump, briefly shared a tweet that averred: “Kamala Harris is *not* an American Black. She is half Indian and half Jamaican.” The source of that tweet, the @ali account, has consistently promulgated the claim that Harris is descended from “Jamaican Slave Owners.” Amid the renewed scrutiny of Harris’ family history, the right-leaning website “Big League Politics” posted what it said were the names of the “slaves Kamala Harris’ ancestor owned,” adding: “Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris is descended from Irish slave owner Hamilton Brown, the namesake of Brown’s Town in Jamaica, who recruited massive numbers of Irish migrants to Jamaica to work on his sugar plantations after the British empire abolished slavery.” The “Red State” website published a similar post, whose headline asked, “When Will Race-Baiting Kamala Harris Acknowledge She is a Descendant of a Slave Owner?” Similar reports appeared on right-leaning blogs and websites in January and February 2019. All of them were based on an account written by Donald Harris, a retired Stanford University economics professor and the father of Sen. Harris. On Jan. 13, Jamaica Global, a website for the global Jamaican diaspora, published an article that Prof. Harris had written in September 2018 about his family’s roots in Jamaica. He was born on the island, before immigrating to the United States in the 1960s, to pursue a career as an economist and university lecturer. While studying for his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley, he met Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian cancer researcher. The couple were married, and their daughter, the future California Attorney General and U.S. Senator, was born in Berkeley in 1964. Harris and her sister, Maya, are therefore first-generation American citizens, born in the U.S. to a Jamaican father and Indian mother. In his Jamaica Global article, Harris claimed to be descended from the 19th-century planter and slave owner Hamilton Brown. He wrote: “My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town) and to my maternal grandmother Miss Iris (née Iris Finegan, farmer and educator, from Aenon Town and Inverness, ancestry unknown to me). The Harris name comes from my paternal grandfather Joseph Alexander Harris, land-owner and agricultural ‘produce’ exporter (mostly pimento or all-spice), who died in 1939 one year after I was born and is buried in the church yard of the magnificent Anglican Church which Hamilton Brown built in Brown’s Town (and where, as a child, I learned the catechism, was baptized and confirmed, and served as an acolyte).” [Emphasis is added]. There is no doubt that Hamilton Brown was a prominent plantation owner in Jamaica during the first half of the 19th century, owned slaves, and also advocated against the abolition of slavery and sought to downplay the difficult working and living conditions of slaves in Jamaica. However, we have been unable to verify that a line of descent exists between the modern-day Harris family and the 19th-century slave owner. As such, the claim that an ancestor of Sen. Harris owned slaves in Jamaica remains unproven. If evidence emerges that verifies that line of descent, we will update this fact check accordingly. The slave owner at the heart of this controversy died in Jamaica on Sept. 18, 1843, “in the sixty-eighth year of his age.” His headstone is located in St. Mark’s Anglican (Church of England) cemetery in Brown’s Town and establishes that he was born, likely in 1776, in County Antrim, in what is now Northern Ireland. According to one contemporary news article, he died after he was “thrown from his gig” in a horse-and-carriage accident. Another contemporary news report indicated he first immigrated to Jamaica in or around 1795. According to a National Library of Jamaica entry, Brown “started out humbly as an estate book-keeper and rose to become a large landowner.” He was the founder of Brown’s Town in St. Ann’s parish, which he represented in the colonial House of Assembly for 22 years. He also owned many slaves. According to one document, held by the U.K. National Archives, Brown owned at least 121 slaves in 1826, comprising 74 females and 47 males. In 1817, he owned at least 124 slaves, made up of 74 females and 50 males. According to records held by the “Legacies of British Slave-Ownership” project at University College London (UCL), Brown was at various times the owner, manager, or executor of several dozen plantations and estates on the island of Jamaica. Brown was also a steadfast slavery apologist. In contributions to the colonial House of Assembly, he opposed efforts, emanating from mainland Britain (where slavery was by then widely opposed), to “interfere” in the slave trade in Jamaica. In one 1823 speech, he lashed out at the “hypocrisy” and “cloven foot” of William Wilberforce, a British M.P. widely regarded as the hero of the anti-slavery abolitionist movement. In 1832, a Methodist missionary named Henry Whiteley spent three months in Jamaica, touring the island and inspecting the conditions of life for slaves, and the practices of colonial settlers and slave owners, including Brown. In a pamphlet published the following year, Whiteley recalled that he and Brown discussed the concept of “amelioration” — a gradualist approach to slavery in the 1820s and 1830s which, as distinct from the outright prohibition and extinction of slavery that characterized abolitionism, instead proposed making slavery more humane and tolerable. Brown was opposed even to this, according to Whiteley: … I was rather startled to hear that Gentleman [Brown] swear by his Maker that [amelioration] should never be adopted in Jamaica; nor would the planters of Jamaica, he said, permit the interference of the Home [London] Government with their slaves in any shape. A great deal was said by him and others present about the happiness and comfort enjoyed by the slaves, and of the many advantages possessed by them of which the poor in England were destitute. Among other circumstances mentioned in proof of this, Mr. Robinson, a wharfinger [wharf owner], stated that a slave in that town had sent out printed cards to invite a party of his negro acquaintance to a supper party. One of these cards was handed to Mr. Hamilton Brown, who said he would present it to the Governor [imperial viceroy of Jamaica] as proof of the comfortable condition of the slave population. Notwithstanding that dinner party, the conditions suffered by slaves in Jamaica were far from “comfortable,” and Whiteley’s pamphlet went on to document, in disturbing detail, the punishments meted out to slaves by their owners, which he personally witnessed and described in some cases as “inhumanly severe.” Whiteley saw slaves, some girls as young as 12 years old, flogged between 40 and 50 times with a horse whip, for supposed misconduct as trivial as over-sleeping or not meeting their assigned work targets. In one case, a man was whipped 39 times despite not having committed any discernible “offense” — rather, one planter had him flogged as a method of petty revenge against the slave’s owner, for some unspecified sleight. Whiteley’s findings about the conditions of life for slaves in Jamaica could not have been further from the outlandish claims made by Brown and his fellow colonial settlers. We discovered ample evidence of Brown’s slave ownership and his political and business career on the island of Jamaica. However, details about his immediate family are lacking, by comparison. With the generous and expert assistance of Rachel Lang, a researcher at University College London’s “Legacies of British Slave-Ownership” project, we have managed to piece together the following facts: We have not yet found a record of a Christiana Brown being born to Mary Melvina Brown. Such a record would establish a link between Donald Harris’ paternal grandmother Christiana and the Antrim slave owner Hamilton Brown. As a result of this absence, we are issuing a rating of “unproven,” until such evidence emerges. We did discover other notable details. Donald Harris wrote in his “Jamaica Global” article that his grandmother, Christiana, died in 1951, at the age of 62. We found a record of a woman named Christiana Brown having died in Brown’s Town in June 1951. However, that woman’s age was listed as 70, which would mean she was born in 1880 or 1881. We found a birth certificate for a Christiana Brown, born to Frances Brown and an unnamed man, in September 1881. We found no other details about either of these women, and a woman born in September 1881 would be 69, rather than 70 years old, in June 1951. However, it’s possible that the June 1951 death certificate contained a small error about the deceased’s age, and that Donald Harris made a larger error in recalling his grandmother’s age at the time of her death, which took place several decades ago. We also found a baptismal record for a male child born to Hamilton and Mary Melvina Brown in April 1881. No name was provided for the child, and the birth year does not match any of the Brown’s other children, as far as we are aware. It is possible that the child’s gender was recorded in error, and a female child born to the Browns in April 1881 would indeed have been 70 years old by June 1951. However, we have so far not been able to reconcile these discrepancies. (Stanford University agreed to send Donald Harris our request for any evidence that might corroborate his claim that his grandmother was a descendant of the planter Hamilton Brown. Unfortunately, we did not receive a response of any kind). Finally, it is worth noting that, even if it is true that the Harris family are descendants of the Antrim slave owner Hamilton Brown, they are also quite likely to be descendants of slaves. It is well-documented that British and Irish slave owners in the Caribbean (and their counterparts in the American colonies) routinely raped and engaged in illicit sex with female slaves, resulting in many “illegitimate” children of mixed racial heritage. If it is the case, for example, that Christiana Brown was the daughter of Hamilton and Mary Melvina Brown, this means that two of Christiana’s siblings were Mabel Melvina and Edwin Hamilton Brown, both of whom were listed in their baptismal records as “colored,” that is of mixed race (as opposed to “black” or “white,” the other labels used in baptismal records at that time). This in turn would mean that Hamilton Brown, a man born on the island of Ireland in the late 18th century and a prominent and powerful slave owner, had racially mixed grandchildren, after fathering a daughter (Mary Melvina) with a woman whose name did not appear on the baptismal certificate. Although we don’t have clear proof, that pattern strongly suggests that that particular branch of Brown’s family tree derived just as much from an enslaved woman, whose identity may well be lost to history, as it did from Brown himself.
|
9806
|
Inventor says new heart catheter will save lives
|
We understand that a newspaper would find it interesting to report on the human interest angle of someone who grew up on a pig farm who won an award for his invention and who hopes to hire disabled veterans to work on his invention. But a health story – so categorized by the Chicago Tribune – that includes claims about saving lives, reducing risks to an absolute minimum, and decreasing health care costs – needs to provide some evidence to back up such claims. This story didn’t deliver that evidence. It was an impressive job of cheerleading, though. The compelling human interest angle of the story shouldn’t deceive any reader into thinking that this “breakthrough” approach can do what the story claims it can do. Maybe it can. But we urge journalists to take a more evidence-based approach to such claims – even in a human interest story and certainly in one in the health section. The use of a peripherally-inserted catheter to measure central venous pressures is not new and has been studied for more than a decade (see Crit Care Med 2000 Vol. 28, No. 12). While some would argue that using the arm as an access site is preferable, there are no studies to back up that claim. It might be easier to do and not require the skill level of a neck insertion but the catheter ends up in the same place and shares all of the liabilities of any central venous catheter. (By the way, central venous pressure measurement catheters end up in a blood vessel and not in the heart as described in the story.)
|
false
|
Chicago Tribune,Devices
|
There is no discussion of how much the “breakthrough” approach will cost. The story states that the catheter: But there isn’t one piece of data – of evidence – presented in the entire 718-word story. That’s not a short story these days – so there was plenty of space afforded. There was no discussion of harms in the story. Placing a catheter into the central circulation and measuring pressure is not without the potential for harm. Although the risk of a catastrophic rare neck artery puncture may be avoided with the use of the arm approach, the risks of misplacement and infection may not be reduced. There was no discussion of evidence – yet the story provides a clue about why. Late in the story, a doctor is quoted saying that “he wants to test the first 50 catheters” that the inventor can provide. Does that mean there’s no clinical evidence yet? For an approach that the story says “will save lives…decrease health care costs…reduce risks to an absolute minimum” ??? In reality, the device was approved by the FDA under the assumption that it is not all that different from existing devices commercially available. Not applicable. There wasn’t really any specific discussion of any condition. The story at least turns to two physicians who are considering use of the catheter at their hospitals. Venous heart catheters are mentioned – but no meaningful comparison was made with the new approach – again, because no evidence was provided. It is actually somewhat disingenuous to claim superiority of a new device that was approved by the FDA under a 510K premarket approval process – which is predicated on the assumption that the device is not significantly different than existing devices already on the market. Not clearly explained. Is anyone using this catheter clinically right now? Peripherally-inserted central venous catheters for drug and fluid delivery as well as pressure management is not a new concept. This wasn’t discussed at all in the story. While there may be advantages to the use of the arm for access, there are also potential disadvantages. While controversial, some studies have suggested that many patients in shock would benefit from a pulmonary artery catheter (usually inserted in a neck vein) that allows doctors to have a better understanding of a patient’s blood volume and performance of the heart. While a pulmonary artery catheter takes time and skill to place and interpret, the debate about which approach is best is ongoing. This story didn’t reflect the debate – making the inventor’s approach seem like a slam dunk. Because other sources were quoted, it does not appear that the story relied solely on a news release.
|
2626
|
Older Americans upbeat about aging, future: survey.
|
Baby boomers are upbeat about aging and expect the next phase of their lives to be better than the last, but many are concerned about their financial future and long-term health costs, a survey released in Tuesday showed.
|
true
|
Health News
|
Americans are living healthier and longer that ever before. The U.S. Census Bureau predicts boomers will turn 65 at a rate of 10,000 per day for the next decade, making them, along with centenarians, the fastest-growing segment of the population. More than 75 percent of seniors questioned in the poll on aging are optimistic, think the best is yet to come, and expect to have the same quality of life, or better, during their next decade. “The reason they are upbeat is because we have changed our definition of aging. People are working longer. They see people that are older being healthier,” said Donna Shalala, the president of the University of Miami and a former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services during the Clinton administration. Shalala, 71, who will discuss the results of the poll during a panel on successful aging in Miami on Wednesday, said people are buoyed by seeing their relatives living longer. “My mother is 100 years old. Why shouldn’t I be optimistic?” she added. The majority of 2,250 seniors, aged 60 or older, questioned in the telephone survey from the National Council on Aging, medical insurer UnitedHealthcare and the newspaper USA Today said they are confident they will be able to maintain their health and think they manage stress effectively. Although many seniors feel financially secure, nearly half of low- and middle-income seniors questioned in the poll are not confident they will be able to cover their expenses over the next five to 10 years. About a third of older Americans do not think they will be able to afford long-term care, according to the poll, and for 1 in 5 seniors, a major financial event would result in a fiscal crisis. Lower income seniors are also more likely to suffer from chronic illnesses and less likely to exercise. Seventy-two percent of people who make less than $30,000 a year said they live with a lingering health problem. Whether it is out of necessity, a sense of productivity, or the enjoyment of it, about 20 percent of seniors over 65 said they are still working either full- or part-time. “The market absolutely threw this generation off,” Shalala said about the impact of the recession. And just as many seniors are staying in the workplace longer, the vast majority want to “age in place,” or continue to live in their own home for the next decade. It could be a feasible option for most 60 somethings, but less than half of seniors in their 70s said they could live independently. The poll also showed that a lack of services in the community is a concern for seniors. More than 25 percent of people in their 60s were not confident there would be resources and facilities in their communities to allow them to live independently. “With appropriate preventive care and lifestyle changes, growing older doesn’t have to mean living with chronic disease and disability,” said Rhonda Randall, the chief medical officer at United Healthcare & Retirement. The poll was conducted between May 10 and June 6. The margin of error for the general population is +/-3.1 percent.
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.