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9382
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New way of defining Alzheimer's aims to find disease sooner
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This AP story covers the publication of new research guidelines for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease. The story did a lot of things well — chiefly, it makes it clear for readers that the guidelines are for research purposes only, and will not be used in clinical decision-making. Still, we would have liked to see comment from an independent source on how this news might be misconstrued, especially by readers worried about their own risk for developing the disease. We further take issue with the call to interested readers to join clinical trials (in order to find out what their brains look like) without the mention of possible harms of a positive finding for a disease with no treatment. Anything to do with Alzheimer’s disease is newsworthy, because of the ever growing numbers of Americans who have the condition (currently at 5.7 million). A change in diagnostic guidelines that will bump numbers of those diagnosed with the disease is cause for concern, particularly given the paucity of treatments. This change may be advantageous for researchers, interested in plumbing the early molecular events that underlie disease progression, but for now it’s not at all clear that it’s beneficial for patients now or in the future. Screening is not always better–it can led to overdiagnosis and overtreatment.
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true
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alzheimer's disease
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The story mentions costs — up to $6,000 for a brain scan — and that diagnostic tests would not be covered by insurance because they are still experimental and under investigation. There are no benefits to patients with the change in diagnostic criteria for Alzheimer’s. The story makes clear that the new guidelines are for the benefit of researchers, wanting to target earlier stages of the disease, and are not yet validated for clinical care settings. The new diagnostic guidelines mean that more people will be considered to have Alzheimer’s, and clinical trials for experimental drugs will be seeking to recruit such people. One possible harm is that people might enter a clinical trial, learn that they have early brain changes, and think they have Alzheimer’s when no clinician would diagnose them that way. That could lead to significant anxiety. The story informs readers that the tests: “measure certain forms of two proteins — amyloid and tau — that form plaques and tangles in the brain — and signs of nerve injury, degeneration and brain shrinkage.” However, there’s no discussion of the research behind these tests, how accurate these measures are or how well they predict people’s risk of developing full-blown Alzheimer’s disease. We’d like to have seen more commentary from people in the field who could talk about the current limitations. The story does not engage in disease-mongering. We also liked that the story implied that people with other types of dementia or brain diseases are often misdiagnosed as having Alzheimer’s disease, which complicates research. The story cites two expert sources, one who chaired the panel and another who works for the government agency involved in creating the new guidelines. The panel chair has received fees from Eli Lilly, a drug company that is trying to develop drug treatments for Alzheimer’s. We think an outside voice is key here — someone who wasn’t on the panel and who does not have a relationship with a pharmaceutical or biotech company involved in Alzheimer’s drug development. The story mentions that current clinical diagnostics include assessment of “memory loss and other symptoms of dementia.” The story says patients might try to get the tests (and pay out-of-pocket) or they might enroll in a clinical trial. The story makes clear that these are new (and still experimental) diagnostic criteria for Alzheimer’s disease. The story does not appear to be based on a news release.
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22071
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We bring in enough tax revenue to service our debt, pay for Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, and then still have about $300 (billion) or $400 billion left over.
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Reckitt Benckiser has agreed to pay up to $1.4 billion to resolve U.S. claims that its former pharmaceuticals business Indivior before it was spun out of the company carried out an illegal scheme to boost sales of an opioid addiction treatment.
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mixture
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National, Deficit, Federal Budget, Medicare, Social Security, Taxes, Amy Kremer,
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The settlement, the largest by any company related to the U.S. opioid epidemic, resolved long-running probes by the U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission into the companies’ marketing and sales of Suboxone Film. The deal came after Indivior in April was indicted and accused of deceiving doctors and healthcare benefit programs into believing Suboxone Film, itself a form of opioid, was safer and less susceptible to abuse than similar drugs. The indictment said Indivior also used an internet and telephone program touted as a resource for opioid-addicted patients to connect them to doctors it knew were prescribing Suboxone and other opioids at high rates and in suspect circumstances. The Justice Department said the scheme began before Indivior spun out of Reckitt in 2014 and resulted in thousands of opioid-addicted patients using the drug. Opioids, including prescription painkillers and heroin, played a role in a record 47,600 U.S. overdose deaths in 2017, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said. Reckitt was not indicted like Indivior, but the department last year joined several whistleblower lawsuits alleging the British company improperly marketed the drug. As part of Thursday’s settlement, Reckitt entered into a non-prosecution agreement and agreed to pay nearly $1.35 billion to resolve the Justice Department’s criminal and civil claims. It will also pay $50 million to resolve FTC claims that it engaged in anticompetitive activities aimed at impeding competition from generic versions of Suboxone. Reckitt said in a statement that it “acted lawfully at all times and expressly denies all allegations that it engaged in any wrongful conduct.” But it said its board had decided the settlement was in the company’s best interests. Slough, England-based Indivior has pleaded not guilty to conspiracy and fraud charges. In a statement, it acknowledged Reckitt’s settlement but said it had no new information on the case. Its trial in federal court in Abingdon, Virginia is set for May. (GRAPHIC - Reckitt gains in value after Indivior spin-off: tmsnrt.rs/2NPlAJJ) Shares in Reckitt, whose products range from Mucinex cold medicine and Lysol cleaners, closed up 2.5%. While the settlement is significantly higher than the $400 million that the consumer goods group had set aside to cover the cost of the investigations, analysts said it could allow the company’s new chief executive to focus on a turnaround plan. In an effort to regain investor confidence after setbacks including a safety scandal in South Korea, a failed product launch and a cyber attack, Reckitt’s outgoing boss Rakesh Kapoor launched a plan to split the group into two business units – one for health and one for hygiene and home products. Investors had feared the U.S. probes could hinder the transformation. Analysts at JP Morgan wrote in a note that settlement “clarifies the legal environment for RB and should allow the new management to focus on the RB 2.0 transformation.” While welcoming the settlement, AJ Bell investment director Russ Mould said the cost could limit incoming CEO Laxman Narasimhan’s ability to undertake much-needed investment in Reckitt’s brands. “The danger is that Narasimhan will be operating with one hand tied behind his back,” he said. The company said it would increase its provision related to the investigations to $1.5 billion to cover both the cost of the settlement and “any remaining litigation exposures.” It said the deal would be funded through existing borrowing facilities and cash generation. Separately, Indivior also raised its full-year profit and revenue guidance after Suboxone lost market share at a slower pace than expected. Its shares closed 6.73% higher.
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6786
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UN says plague cases in Madagascar almost doubled in 5 days.
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The number of plague cases in Madagascar has almost doubled over the last five days and medical experts project the situation will worsen, with 1,000 cases expected every month if funds aren’t rapidly provided, the United Nations said Thursday.
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true
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Madagascar, Bubonic plague, Africa, Plague, Science, United Nations, Indian Ocean
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U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters that only 26 percent of the $9.5 million needed to combat the outbreak of the often deadly disease has been received. Dujarric said U.N. humanitarian officials in the Indian Ocean island nation reported 1,032 cases as of Wednesday, 67 percent of which were pneumonic plague. He says that “is more serious than the bubonic plague and highly challenging to control.” So far, he said, 89 deaths have been counted, including 13 on Tuesday. Dujarric said U.N. officials have strengthened systems to identify contacts of victims, monitor the number of patients at hospitals, transport medical samples, and address “the transmission risks of traditional burial practices.” Madagascar has about 400 plague cases per year, or more than half the world’s total, according to a 2016 World Health Organization report. Usually, they are cases of bubonic plague in the rural highlands. Bubonic plague is carried by rats and spread to humans through flea bites. It is fatal about half the time if untreated. For the first time, though, this outbreak is largely concentrated in the country’s two largest cities, Antananarivo and Toamasina. Most of the cases in the current outbreak are pneumonic plague, a more virulent form that spreads through coughing, sneezing or spitting and is almost always fatal if untreated. In some cases, it can kill within 24 hours. Like the bubonic form, it can be treated with common antibiotics if caught in time. Global health officials have responded quickly. The World Health Organization, criticized for its slow response to the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, has released $1.5 million and sent plague specialists and epidemiologists. The Red Cross is sending its first-ever plague treatment center to Madagascar. But, Dujarric said, “Medical experts project that the situation will continue to deteriorate, with 1,000 cases per month expected if the response is not rapidly funded.”
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18575
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In 2011 alone, 269 New Jerseyans were killed by gun violence.
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"Oliver said in a column that published the day the state Assembly voted on a package of gun-control bills that ""in 2011 alone, 269 New Jerseyans were killed by gun violence."" The FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report for 2011 – the most up-to-date year of complete crime data – verifies that number. It’s worth noting, however, that 12 other states had more deaths attributed to gun violence than New Jersey that year."
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true
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New Jersey, Guns, Sheila Oliver,
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"More than 250 people in New Jersey died in 2011 because of a weapon, according to Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver. And it’s not just any weapon, either, she said in a Feb. 21 opinion piece that appeared in The Times Of Trenton. The column published the day the state Assembly voted on a 22-bill package of gun-control measures. ""In 2011 alone, 269 New Jerseyans were killed by gun violence,"" Oliver (D-Essex) wrote. Assembly Democrats spokeswoman Jennifer Scortino said Oliver’s statistic comes from the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report for 2011. We verified its accuracy. New Jersey, however, didn’t have the highest number of deaths in 2011 resulting from gun violence. That title goes to California, at 1,220 murders. California was one of 12 states with a higher number of gun-related deaths in 2011 than New Jersey. Complete FBI data for 2012 is not yet available, but we also looked at the number of gun-violence deaths dating to 2005. The data shows that gun-violence deaths in New Jersey have fluctuated through the years. Prior to 2011, New Jersey had 246 gun-violence deaths in 2010; 220 in 2009; 236 in 2008; 260 in 2007; 289 in 2006; and 276 in 2005, according to annual UCR reports. Let’s review some background on how the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports works. More than 18,000 law enforcement agencies from across the country voluntarily report crime data to the FBI, which then compiles volume and rate of crime offenses for the nation, states and many cities and counties, according to FBI.gov. It also includes arrest, clearance and law enforcement employee data. But the FBI isn't the only agency that tracks data involving weapons. We also checked mortality data with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. For 2010, the latest data available, New Jersey had 456 deaths resulting from injuries caused by firearms, a spokesman said. Of that number, 246 incidents were assaults by unspecified firearms; 11 were assaults by rifles and larger firearms; 181 were suicides; and 18 were other categories involving firearms. Oliver noted in her column that the bills package was not a knee-jerk response to the December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., but one that resulted after lengthy discussions about other mass shootings around the country as well as efforts to close loopholes in existing gun laws. ""Our comprehensive package promotes common-sense measures without infringing on the Second Amendment rights enshrined in our Constitution,"" Oliver wrote. ""By keeping dangerous weapons off of our streets, cracking down on illegal gun trafficking and addressing mental health issues and school security, we can stop these tragedies from becoming all too common."" Although the Assembly passed the bill, Republicans pointed to flaws in the bills package and accused Democrats of rushing the bills through to gain a political advantage with Gov. Chris Christie and the Legislature up for re-election this year. ""This is simply a way for the Democrats to find a wedge issue in a year when they can’t find a wedge issue,"" Assembly Minority Leader Jon Bramnick (R-Union) said before the votes were taken. Our ruling Oliver said in a column that published the day the state Assembly voted on a package of gun-control bills that ""in 2011 alone, 269 New Jerseyans were killed by gun violence."" The FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report for 2011 – the most up-to-date year of complete crime data – verifies that number. It’s worth noting, however, that 12 other states had more deaths attributed to gun violence than New Jersey that year. To comment on this story, go to NJ.com."
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1421
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In sweet-toothed Britain, sugary soda levy may have limited impact.
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With its surprise move to tax sugary drinks, Britain joins several Western countries battling a key suspect in rising rates of obesity and diabetes, but health and industry experts say the levy is limited and its effect may be small.1
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true
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Health News
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To be serious about cutting calorie intake by reducing sugar consumption, they say, authorities would need to go in harder on sugary drinks and much broader too - taking on less obvious targets such as dairy products and processed savory foods. Britain’s finance minister George Osborne, announcing the tax on Wednesday, said it would apply to drinks with a total sugar content of more than 5 grams per 100 milliliters. A higher rate will apply to drinks with more than 8 grams per 100 ml. The exact rate has not been specified, but will be charged on manufacturers and will come into force in April 2018. Fruit juices and milk-based drinks will be exempt, as will diet sodas. France, Belgium, Hungary and Mexico have all imposed some form of tax on drinks with added sugar, while Scandinavian countries have levied similar taxes, with varying degrees of success, for several years. The idea in Britain, Osborne said, is to target the sugar-laden cans of sodas like cola and lemonade often consumed by children in lower socio-economic groups - which studies show have higher rates of obesity and tooth decay. Public Health England says its data show the average five-year-old consumes the equivalent of their body weight in sugar in the course of a year. Yet while health, nutrition and market experts said the planned levy is a nod in the right direction toward encouraging healthier food choices and forcing companies to cut calories, they are skeptical about its likely real-life effect. “Whether it will have any impact on sugar intake is uncertain,” said Tom Sanders, a professor of nutrition and dietetics at King’s College London. “This is a step forward, but only one very small step,” added Naveed Sattar, a professor of metabolic medicine at Glasgow University. That’s partly because in the great British diet - fueled by obvious sweet culprits such as cakes, biscuits and chocolate - sugar is pervasive, and hidden in unusual places. With many consumers already choosing lower-calorie sodas, the British Soft Drink Association said the industry has already reduced sugar intake by 13.6 percent since 2012, while sugar and calorie intake from other food categories is increasing. Nicola Mallard, an analyst with Investec, noted that “substitution is a big issue”. “Yes, people (may) stop drinking soft drinks, but they go and get their sugar fix somewhere else,” she told Reuters. A National Diet and Nutrition Survey in published in 2014 found that Britons get around 15 percent of their daily calories from added sugar - way above recommended levels. “If you asked the majority of the population how much sugar they ate, the amount (they would say) would be much lower,” said Gail Rees, a nutrition expert at Plymouth University’s School of Biomedical and Healthcare Sciences. “This is because so much of our western, processed diet contains hidden levels of the stuff. Sugar is lurking in any number of seemingly innocuous everyday foodstuffs, such as canned tomatoes, salad dressings, peanut butter, breakfast cereals, bread, pasta – the list goes on.” According to the state-funded National Health Service (NHS), up to 27 percent of Britons’ daily intake of added sugar comes from table sugar, jams, chocolate and sweets, while another fifth comes in biscuits, buns and cakes. Hidden below that is the 6 percent that comes in dairy products such as flavored milks, yoghurts and desserts like ice cream, and at least another 5 percent in savory processed foods like ready meals, stir-in sauces, ketchup and even crisps. On its nutrition information website, the NHS cites a study by the consumer campaign group “Which?” that found some ready meals contain more sugar than vanilla ice cream. “This tax on its own..will not solve the obesity crisis,” said Glasgow’s Sattar. “We need more legislation to force food companies to make better quality food products and less unhealthy products which contain less fat, salt and sugar.”
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7365
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Snohomish County health officials probe positive blood tests.
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Two people in Washington state who recall being sick in December have since had blood tests showing they developed antibodies for the coronavirus, but health officials aren’t counting them in their official case counts.
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true
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Seattle, Health, General News, Washington, Virus Outbreak, United States
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The positive serology tests can’t determine whether the people had the coronavirus in December, weeks before the disease was officially detected in the United States. They may have been exposed after the first recorded case. One of the people had lunch with a hospital nurse in Kirkland, for example, site of a large outbreak in a nursing home. “They are being considered ‘probable,’ ” Heather Thomas, a Snohomish Health District spokeswoman, told The Seattle Times. “However, they are not captured in our case counts from Jan. 20 forward.” The two people are residents of Snohomish County, north of Seattle, which has the second-highest number of confirmed cases in the state with more than 2,700. On Jan. 20, a man in Snohomish County became the first person to test positive for COVID-19 in the U.S. The man had been traveling in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak appears to have originated. He returned to the Seattle area on Jan. 15 and days later began showing symptoms. If any Washington cases predated the first known case, there were probably very few that didn’t multiply, Dr. Jared Roach, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Systems Biology, a Seattle-based biomedical research firm, told the newspaper. Chris Spitters, health officer for the Snohomish Health District, said Friday “it’s possible — and frankly, I think more likely” that the two patients with positive blood tests didn’t have COVID-19 in December, but later picked up a mild or asymptomatic case of it. “But we can’t say that with 100 percent certainty,” he said. “I think that’s just the more likely scenario.” Spitters did say it was likely that COVID-19 was introduced in the area before Jan. 20. “And it’s reasonable to assume, given reports like the ones that we’ve had and others around the country, that introduction may have occurred prior to January, as we initially suspected,” he said.
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10426
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Mediterranean diet cuts heart, diabetes risk factors
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This story went beyond the results of the study to opine about obesity in general. The story was good in that it indicated that adopting this type of diet meant more than simply eating more olive oil. But the story was devoid of data – meaningful information about what – precisely – the study showed. And it was wrong to say the study “looked at over half a million people.” It looked at data. Researchers didn’t “look at” even one person. Semantics are important. It’s important to be clear with readers about what has been shown to impact risk factors – intermediate endpoints that may or may not matter – and what impacts end organ endpoints – stuff that really counts. This story didn’t do that.
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mixture
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CNN,Diabetes,Diet studies,heart disease
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Not applicable. There was no discussion of costs, i.e. how consumption of a ‘Mediterranean diet’ compared to more typical diets compare in terms of cost to the consumer. But we think most people would have a pretty good grasp of the general costs of the types of foods involved. But where this becomes an issue, for example, is with what the cost of fresh fish can do to a food budget. The story described the health benefits associated with consumption of a ‘Mediterranean diet’ in the broadest of terms. It was not clear from this story the extent to which improvements in the parameters mentioned would impact health or even the obesity epidemic described in the second half of the piece. What were the data results of the meta-analysis? That’s what supposed to be news here. Not applicable. The study itself didn’t reflect on possible harms that might be associated with consumption of a ‘Mediterranean diet’. The story says that the ‘researchers looked at over half a million people.’ They didn’t “look at” ANY people. They looked at data. That’s misleading. No limitations were addressed, as they were in the competing Wall Street Journal story. The story included data from the American Heart Association about the numbers /percentage of people who met the criteria for metabolic syndrome, and its prevalence in adolescents. But it made an awkward and unsupported transition immediately into obesity and a “global epidemic.” This story – as the opening sentence stated, was about “a cluster of risk factors for heart disease and diabetes.” The study was about risk factors for risk factors. It did not report on end organ disease endpoints. Metabolic syndrome is not a disease. It’s a fine point. It’s semantics. But it’s an important fine point about semantics. So we grade this unsatisfactory. Independent perspective provided by a past president of the American Heart Association. The story did not include information about how this dietary approach to cardiovascular disease and diabetes risk management compared with the use of medication or other dietary approaches. Other studies have compared the Mediterranean diet with a lower carb diet and others, and looked at intermediate endpoints that go along with the metabolic syndrome. This could have been addressed easily in just another line or two. This story opened by indicating that readers had likely heard about or even tried the ‘Mediterranean diet’. The story was clear that the ‘Mediterranean diet’ is not new. Does not rely solely on a news release.
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11439
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Yoga may lessen side effects in men undergoing prostate cancer treatment
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This may be a tough release for readers to sort out because, like the headline (“Yoga may lessen side effects in men undergoing prostate cancer treatment”), and the subhead (“More men willing to participate in yoga therapy than expected, Penn study finds”), the messages the release is sending out are wildly divergent, with scant evidence to back up either thesis. At its core, the release focuses on an unpublished “feasibility study” that was presented at the recently concluded Society for Integrative Oncology annual conference. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine radiation oncology department claim that levels of fatigue, sexual health, and urinary incontinence remained stable among a small group of men (27) undergoing outpatient radiation therapy who completed an intensive yoga program. The idea that more men than expected participated in the yoga class seemingly came out of the blue. It’s unclear where that idea came from. Just as we hold news releases to the same standards as news stories, so do we hold complementary medicine to the same standards as traditional medicine. We need facts. Interventions, including radiotherapy, intended to treat prostate cancer often cause a host of side effects, including fatigue, impotence and urinary incontinence. If yoga were shown to alleviate those effects, that would be important information for men undergoing radiation therapy to know in making decisions about their treatment and its followup.
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false
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Academic medical center news release,Prostate cancer
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The news release did not say how much the yoga classes cost, but that is not a fatal flaw, given that the classes are offered daily to millions of downward dog fans in health centers, living rooms and parks around the world. We’ll rate this Not Applicable. Numbers might have helped the reader decide whether, in fact, the news release was really about how yoga may lessen the side effects associated with prostate cancer treatment, or whether it was about the feasibility of such a study. But numbers were lacking. “Most yoga participants reported a sense of well-being at the end of each class, and upon finishing the yoga program and concluding their study involvement, many patients requested and received an at-home practice routine to fit their needs,” one researcher says. Most? 51%? 99%? Measuring how someone feels is often subjective and can be difficult. In this case, yoga’s effect was measured by participants’ responses to questions about quality of life, cancer-related fatigue and the prevalence of impotence and urinary incontinence. The comment that scores were variable but then improved suggests that they did not achieve statistical significance. Even if they did, the question would be whether the differences were considered clinically important — and how they would compare versus other interventions. There was a substantial loss to follow-up (40%), but the investigator seemed most pleased that 27 men completed the study (and that 45 out of 68 eligible men agreed to participate). We would like to have known what the criteria were for eligibility. This is where it would be be wonderful to have a study to look at. Unfortunately, we’re told only that the study will be published sometime in 2016. The news release does not say whether anyone felt that yoga may have caused any harms. Injuries from the practice of physical yoga (as opposed to meditative) are, in fact, quite common, although most are minor and include pulled muscles and sprains but can extend to more serious injuries such as a ruptured disk in the lower back. The study apparently did not include a comparison group of men who did not take yoga classes. Historical controls are fine when testing a treatment where the benefits are obvious, as occurred after the discovery of insulin. But they are less helpful when trying to measure the impact of an intervention like yoga that may exert a more subtle impact on side effects, as described here in the release: “Severity of fatigue scores demonstrated significant variability over the time of treatment, with increases by week four as expected, but then improving over the course of treatment. Erectile dysfunction, urinary incontinence, and general quality of life scores demonstrated steady trends.” The researchers appear to be aware of a major drawback to the way the work was structured; the news release notes that “the team is randomizing prostate cancer patients to participation vs. no participation in this structured yoga program in order to further characterize the potential benefits of yoga in this population.” And the quality of that evidence took a hit when 40% of the participants “were voluntarily withdrawn early due to unavoidable and unanticipated conflicts between radiation treatment times and the yoga class schedule.” In other words, the validity and importance of findings are uncertain. The news release cites American Cancer Society figures on the incidence of prostate cancer in the United States and therefore cannot be accused of disease mongering. However, a substantial proportion of men diagnosed with prostate cancer in a time of widespread use of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing are found to have low-risk cancers that do not likely require treatment. The best way to prevent treatment complications is to avoid unnecessary treatments. The news release makes no mention of funding or possible conflicts of interest. It does say that the oral abstract was presented at the Society of Integrative Oncology’s 12th International Conference. The news release does not mention any other interventions that might mitigate the side effects associated with prostate cancer treatment. While the release mentions other services available at the cancer center — stress reduction techniques, meditation, reiki therapy — they are not presented in the context of alternatives for improving quality of life for prostate cancer patients and do seem more in line with marketing the cancer center. Although the near ubiquity of yoga classes is well-known, it is not clear how available Eischens yoga classes may be. The release also doesn’t tell us what distinguishes Eischens yoga from other forms of yoga. The news release said this is the first such effort to assess the potential value of yoga in this setting. The lead sentence quotes researchers at the University of Pennsylvania stating that men with prostate cancer who are undergoing radiation therapy “can benefit from yoga.” In her closing quote lead researcher Neha Vapiwala, MD, associate professor at the University states, “We offer several ways to enhance quality of life, minimize or reduce side effects of cancer and cancer treatment, and promote healing and recovery.” But nowhere in the news release are we given more than anecdotal evidence to support those assertions. There was no data supporting the claim that more men than expected participated. Where did that idea come from? Given that the population was men with cancer one would expect them to be more open to alternative therapies.
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8720
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UK orders 10,000 ventilators from Dyson for coronavirus patients.
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Britain has ordered 10,000 medical ventilators designed at breakneck speed by vacuum cleaner-maker Dyson, billionaire founder James Dyson said, as the country tries to boost the number of devices available to treat coronavirus patients.
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true
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Health News
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The government, in anticipation of cases peaking in Britain in coming weeks, had made an urgent appeal to manufacturers to supply the National Health Service and would also use devices from private hospitals and other sources. “We have received an initial order of 10,000 units from the UK Government which we will supply on an open-book basis,” James Dyson said on Wednesday in an email to staff seen by Reuters. “We are also looking at ways of making it available internationally.” The government did not comment on the Dyson email. Britain had been in talks with over 3,000 businesses about supplying ventilators to quickly increase the health service’s capacity, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s spokesman said earlier on Wednesday. But he stressed that any design would need regulatory approval. The country’s existing stock of about 5,000-8,000 ventilators is inadequate if cases jump as predicted. The number of coronavirus deaths in Britain rose by 41 to 465 on Wednesday. Dyson said since receiving a call from Johnson 10 days ago, he had refocused resources at his company, and worked with TTP, The Technology Partnership, to design and build an entirely new ventilator, The CoVent. It deployed its expertise in air movement, motors, power systems, manufacturing and supply chain gained from its products like air purifiers and fans as well as cleaners to develop the ventilator from scratch. The company, which revolutionized the vacuum cleaner market with its bagless cyclonic device in the 1990s, said it would work with regulators and government to ensure that the product and the manufacturing process was approved. Dyson said it was “clearly a time of grave international crisis”, and he would therefore donate 5,000 units to the international effort, 1,000 of which would go to the United Kingdom. Separately, British engineer Babcock International Group Plc said it had joined forces with a leading medical equipment company to design and supply thousands of critical care ventilators. A number of other firms had joined forces to potentially develop and manufacture a ventilator, including Airbus, Smiths Group Plc , Ford Motor Co and McLaren. Reuters had reported earlier that British industry expected the government to give the go-ahead for an emergency ventilator production plan on Wednesday.
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11256
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Magnetic brain stimulation fights depression
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"A few key issues were missed: All patients had ""moderately"" treatment resistant depression, meaning they failed 1-4 prior treatment trials (but not TMS or ECT); TMS is not FDA approved as first-line treatment for depression No discussion of costs or coverage by insurance No discussion of limited TMS availability Finally, it would have been ideal if the story had briefly mentioned the major treatment options for a patient with major depression who fails the first treatment: change in medication or combinations of medication, psychotherapy with or without medication, and neurostimulation such as TMS or ECT. An independent expert perspective could have helped with this. Although drugs can be effective for many patients with depression, they can cause a host of adverse effects and don’t work for everyone. Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) can be helpful for some patients who don’t respond to medication, but it too carries a risk of adverse effects, including confusion, memory loss, and harms related to the anesthesia. TMS has the potential to be a safer, less invasive alternative to ECT for patients who don’t respond to antidepressant drugs."
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mixture
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"The story doesn’t discuss the cost of the TMS machine or the cost of a typical course of treatment. This is a significant oversight considering that many health insurance plans offer limited coverage for mental health expenses. Does a patient who pays out of pocket have any hope of affording TMS treatment? The article doesn’t say. The article describes the percentage of patients who benefited from TMS in absolute terms and tells us that 12 patients would need to be treated with TMS to achieve 1 treatment success. These descriptions give readers a realistic idea of how likely a patient will be to benefit from TMS. An even clearer approach would have been to say that 13 of 92 (14%) benefited from TMS and that 5 of 98 (5%) benefited from sham treatment. The other critical missed opportunity is to remind readers that these are remission rates in those who failed at least 1 prior treatment. For patients who have never been treated for depression, remission rates are much higher with any first-line treatment. The story notes that people in the TMS and sham treatment groups were equally likely to experience side effects including headache, discomfort at the TMS site, and eye twitching. The story could have pointed out that we don’t know much about long-term adverse effects of this treatment, and that a short-term study of 190 subjects has limited ability to identify rare but potentially serious adverse effects. The story gives a satisfactory summary of what happened in this placebo-controlled trial and why it represents an advance over previous research. It provided good detail regarding the researchers’ efforts to develop a sham treatment that would mimic a real TMS treatment session. Although the story states that the optimal length of TMS treatment ""is not yet clear,"" we think the story could have been a bit stronger in cautioning about the short duration of the study and lack of long-term outcomes data. This story doesn’t resort to disease-mongering. As noted above, the story relied on a single source who was also lead investigator on the study being covered. It failed to note that this source has received research grants from, and is an advisor to, several different companies involved in the manufacture of TMS-related technology. To avoid the appearance of any conflict of interest, the article should have disclosed these ties. This story doesn’t do enough to describe the treatment options for a patient with major depression who fails the first treatment: These options include a change in medication or combinations of medication, psychotherapy with or without medication, and neurostimulation such as TMS or ECT. This type of information could have been obtained from an independent expert. The story states that TMS is approved by the FDA for the treatment of depression, but this characterization may give the impression that TMS is more widely available than is actually the case. TMS is cleared for use only in patients with major depression who don’t get better after treatment with an antidepressant medication. Also, while we couldn’t locate data as to how widely available TMS treatment is, it is safe to say that most practitioners don’t have a TMS device in their office. Obtaining access to the machine and trained operators is likely to be a challenge for many patients, especially those in rural areas. The story should have pointed out these important restrictions on the treatment’s availability. The story does not attempt to portray TMS as more novel than is appropriate and notes similarities between TMS and a more established treatment approach known as electroconvulsive therapy. This story doesn’t appear to have lifted any copy directly from an NIH news release about the study. Since it included only one expert source who was also the lead investigator on the study, however, we can’t say for sure how much the story relied on the release. We’ll call it not applicable."
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11297
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A Dutch therapy that stimulates the senses seems to soothe dementia patients
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This story is about “Snoezelen” rooms that include flashing lights, bubble tubes, disco balls, and other stimulations that are meant to soothe patients with cognitive impairment. Our main suggestions for improvement: a stronger evaluation of the evidence, including of a larger, better designed study than the one reported on here; better job exploring evidence of benefit – the types of studies described in this story are hypothesis generating, but not adequate to determine benefit. Innovative methods are needed to treat behavioral problems associated with dementia and many other medical conditions. The Snoezelen rooms are innovative, but we need evidence that there is a benefit before large scale investments can be made. Money for health care isn’t unlimited and there is an opportunity cost to allocating resources to ineffective treatments.
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true
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Philadelphia Inquirer
|
According to the story, a basic sensory room costs $15,000, and a portable cart with Snoezelen devices is sold for under $5,000. While this is adequate for a satisfactory, this doesn’t completely describe the costs involved since the room and equipment will need to be staffed, supplied with utilities, and maintained. There wasn’t quite enough detail to satisfy this criterion. The story says that fewer doses of drugs were needed to calm patients after Snoezelen, and provides the data to substantiate this claim. It also notes that falls dropped from 17 in the month prior to the intervention to 5 in the month after. However, it didn’t quantify the reduction in agitation or depression scores apparently observed in the study. And it didn’t provide any data to back up the claim that grandkids “can have a better visit with their faltering grandparents” because of Snoezelen. Overall, the types of studies described in this story are hypothesis generating (they suggest that Snoezelen might be beneficial), but not adequate to determine benefit. The story hits on at least one potential harm from these rooms — that unscrupulous nursing home staff members might be tempted to hold patients inside until they fall asleep. Another possibility is that some patients might find the stimulation in these rooms to be upsetting rather than relaxing. The story does a good job of emphasizing the lack of research on this approach, quoting an expert who bemoans the dearth of controlled studies and noting that the Dutch developers of the Snoezelen concept were adamantly opposed to researching it. With that being said, the story could have done more to orient the readers to previous research on Snoezelen, which includes a Cochrane review as well as a much larger, better designed study than the one that is the focus of this story. The story also could have been more thorough in its exploration of the evidence offered in the new study. While it acknowledges that the 15-person study was small, the story failed to caution that the researchers didn’t include a control group for comparison. The story also didn’t include important details such as whether the researchers evaluating the study participants knew what was happening in the study. If they weren’t blinded to the interventions, the researchers assessing the patients may have harbored an unconscious expectation of benefit, which could have biased their assessments of agitation. Similarly, if staff members who knew about the study were also responsible for prescribing medication, they may have prescribed fewer doses of medicine(an apparent benefit of Snoezelen) based on biased clinical judgment. There was no disease-mongering in this story. Great sourcing for this story. We get quotes from one of the study authors, another independent researcher who has studied Snoezelen, an official with a company that sells Snoezelen, a consultant who designs multi-sensory rooms, and a staff member at the institution where the Snoezelen study was conducted. There is no mention of other approaches that might be helpful for managing agitation in patients with dementia, such as: – treating common physical sources of agitation (e.g. pain from arthritis or other sources, bladder infections; dehydration) – managing medications to reduce agitation (e.g. avoiding medication interactions and overmedication) – taking measures to improve sleep – treating psychological sources of agitation (e.g. depression, anxiety). Even a line briefly mentioning these alternatives would have satisfied our criterion. There are also data on massage with lavender and other non-traditional approaches that appear to have some benefit in patients with dementia. The story notes that “Snoezelen” brand sensory rooms and products are available in North America from a New Jersey distributor, and that competitors sell similar equipment. It also gives an estimate of the number of nursing homes in the U.S. that have bought Snoezelen brand sensory products (1350), suggesting that the use of these aids is fairly widespread. The story traces the idea for Snoezelen rooms back to Dutch researchers in the 1970s. The story also comments that the reporter couldn’t find an academician at any local teaching hospital with enough knowledge to even discuss the intervention — further evidence that it is novel. This story was not based on a news release.
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32368
|
Red Bull and other brands of energy drinks contain bull semen.
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Red Bull and other brands of energy drinks employ various stimulating ingredients, but none of them is bull semen.
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false
|
Food, Odd Ingredients
|
Energy drinks such as Red Bull have long been dogged by rumors that they contain dangerous ingredients such as “artificially manufactured stimulants,” and in more recent years such rumors have taken a turn towards the bizarre with claims that various brands of energy drink include “bull semen” or “bull sperm.” More outlandish versions of such rumors maintain that some entity such as the “Longhorn Cattle Company” performed tests on energy drinks and “found in fact they do contain bull sperm.” (Why a livestock company would want to test commercial beverages for the presence of bull sperm remains unexplained.) The “bull sperm” rumor seems to stem from the fact that the Red Bull brand of energy drink includes taurine, an organic acid which, among other uses, is often added to infant milk formulas (because taurine is naturally present in breast milk). The composition of that substance’s name — “taur” being a Greek/Latin root for “bull,” and the “-ine” suffix denoting something derived from the preceding root — suggests to the casual observer that taurine is something made or excreted by a bull, possibly something like “bull urine.” And of course the brand name “Red Bull” ties the product to the image of a bull and connotations of the strong, powerful, potent life force that animal represents, so it doesn’t seem like such a stretch that the drink might contain some type of “vital essence” taken from the animal itself. Although taurine is so named because it was first isolated from ox bile, it is actually found in the large intestines and tissues of many different animals, including humans. But the taurine used in Red Bull brand energy drink (and other foods) is not derived from bulls (or any other animal) at all: it’s synthetically produced in laboratories. Since at least 2010, Red Bull’s online FAQ has addressed questions about the taurine used in their popular energy drink being made from bulls’ testicles or derived from bull semen: Q: IS TAURINE MADE FROM BULLS’ TESTICLES? IS TAURINE A DERIVATIVE OF BULLS’ TESTICLES OR SEMEN? A: The taurine in Red Bull® Energy Drink is a purely synthetic substance produced by pharmaceutical companies and is not derived from animals or animal materials. All ingredients for Red Bull® Energy Drink are synthetically produced by pharmaceutical companies. This guarantees the highest quality. The relevant entry from Red Bull’s current FAQ similarly notes that: Q: Is Taurine made from bull’s testicles? A: Many people bet it comes from some delicate parts of the strongest and most potent bulls in the world, but the fact is that the taurine in Red Bull is produced synthetically to the highest quality standards.
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9275
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New Biochip-Based Blood Test Detects Elevated Risk for Alzheimer's Disease
|
This news release, issued by the American Association of Clinical Chemistry in conjunction with the group’s annual meeting, describes unpublished research results showing that a new biochip assay designed to more easily detect a genetic Alzheimer’s disease (AD) risk factor over traditional DNA tests already available. Overall, the release ably reports on the findings of the study, which was set up to verify the precision of the biochip test. And it does a creditable job of explaining the role of the gene variant ApoE4 in assessing risk of AD and making the distinction between elevated risk, and disease causation. It could have been clearer and stronger if it had offered a bit more context for the usefulness of such testing, given there currently is no way to prevent or reverse AD. And it provides no information on the potential costs of the assay or a timetable for its availability. One other concern relates to the lead paragraph which states that the test helps identify “which patients” are at elevated risk of AD, when in fact the blood samples taken from study participants may have included people who were not yet “patients” and — based on their ApoE4 status, at least — are likely never to be. But the bigger question might be: What is the value of the test to patients or would-be patients? APOE testing has been around for about 20 years and the consensus is that it is a research tool, not a clinical tool. As the promise of individualized medicine — therapies based on each person’s genotype — grows, so does public interest in rapid, cost-effective means of identifying relevant gene variants. In the case of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, public and scientific interest is soaring, owing to growing prevalence of the disorders in an aging population, the high financial and social costs of these disabling diseases, and the understandable fear they sow, especially in those with a positive family history. Virtually any research news story about advances in diagnosis of AD is bound to find a wide audience, despite the sad fact that little or nothing can be done today to delay, prevent or reverse AD or its symptoms. The release alludes to lifestyle changes, and in fact there is increasing evidence from both observational and randomized controlled trials that heart healthy lifestyles and higher educational level, for example, are associated with lower dementia risk. Readers should also keep in mind that APOE4 is influenced by many environmental factors and genes. In addition, APOE4 is not specific to Alzheimer’s. It also increases risk for cardiovascualr disease (and its associated vascular dementia), and other neurodegenerative diseases including multiple sclerosis.
|
false
|
American Association for Clinical Chemistry,biochip test
|
The news release states that the biochip array is “more affordable than the andard DNA test” but it doesn’t provide a cost estimate for either. The release names several benefits of the new test — accuracy, speed, affordability, ability to run multiple tests from one blood sample — but provides little quantification, and only in terms of its 100 percent accuracy in detecting a protein in the blood associated with increased AD risk. The release suggests that early testing showing a person carries a genetic risk for AD is a benefit because they can consider medications or lifestyle changes as interventions to stall the disease. However, having a certain genetic profile does not mean a person will develop AD. Nor are there any current medications that effectively prevent or stall AD, or lessen its symptoms. Although there are likely no direct harms from drawing a blood sample, the release could have noted the potential harm of any screening tests for AD risk factors — such as anxiety, depression, misdiagnosis or over-diagnosis — particularly if screening is conducted on those at potentially very low risk. To its credit, the release includes a quote from one of the investigators who makes it pretty clear that the test is intended for those with probable symptoms and family histories of AD. Both the release and the study abstract on which it was based offer little information about the characteristics of the participant population whose blood samples were used, or how the participants were recruited and from where. We would also have liked to see it mentioned that the study data have not yet been peer-reviewed or published. No mongering here. The release doesn’t say who funded the research or whether there were any financial arrangements, only that “Researchers from Randox Laboratories collaborated with research colleagues at the Medical University of Vienna.” The release makes it very clear that the new test was being compared with standard DNA testing. The release should have offered a timetable on availability or next steps in development. The release claims “This is the first time that we have used this biochip technology to test for an increased risk of Alzheimer’s.” But a quick online search found that a biochip assay for AD was reported (also by the University of Vienna) in Acta Neuropathologica in 2014. No problem here.
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29596
|
Price-Look Up (PLU) code stickers on vegetables and fruit are edible.
|
Ultimately, the assertion that fruit stickers are specifically edible appeared to be somewhat misguided. We were unable to determine whether such labels are routinely produced from any specific material at all, much less prove the consistent usage of paper specifically designed to be eaten by produce consumers. Moreover, the stickers are (by all accounts) not intended for general consumption: they don’t taste good, and folks of all ages have inadvertently choked on fruit stickers (which undoubtedly pose a higher choking risk to babies and toddlers). It’s true that consuming a fruit sticker isn’t likely to kill you, but the claim they’re “edible” isn’t precisely correct.
|
false
|
Food
|
Most shoppers are familiar with PLU code stickers on fresh produce, commonly removed prior to the consumption of portable fruits like apples and bananas. Rumors claiming that fruit stickers are edible have long circulated on the internet: A January 2014 HLN article (boldly proclaiming shoppers ought to go ahead and eat the stickers) popularized the idea: Fruit stickers are edible! Should you peel them off? Yes. But, if you happen to eat one or two it’s not a big deal. They’re actually made out of “edible paper” or other food grade materials with that possibility in mind! Even the glue is food grade. The FDA says so. Although the HLN article stated that fruit stickers were “edible,” it immediately cautioned consumers to remove them anyway (adding that “one or two” stickers likely wouldn’t have an adverse effect). Thus we need to consider the meaningful difference between “not harmful to eat” and “genuinely edible.” It didn’t take long for the “fruit stickers are edible” claim to evolve from “eating a few fruit stickers accidentally probably won’t harm you” to “the FDA endorses the consumption of fruit stickers.” Within a few months Reddit users debated the wisdom in consuming PLU code stickers, Quora members asked whether they should be eating fruit stickers, and “facts”-themed Twitter accounts routinely informed followers about the edibility of fruit stickers (as seen in the example above). Before long, it seemed readers were inferring that removing fruit stickers was akin to discarding nutrient-rich skins on certain produce items and detrimental to your health. HLN cited the unreliable WikiHow as a source for its claim that PLU code stickers were made from “edible paper,” suggesting that overall guidance about adding stickers to your diet was scarce. WikiHow’s page didn’t substantiate its claim that fruit stickers are made from edible paper, nor did the site clarify under which regulatory body such a practice might be governed. While our search turned up multiple versions of the rumor, we were unable to find any information supporting the assertion that fruit stickers were routinely made from a substance specifically deemed “edible paper” (versus just “paper,” which is technically edible under a variety of circumstances but inadvisable to eat). Label manufacturers frequently described produce stickers as “FDA compliant,” but clicking through to pages devoted to those stickers seemed to indicate that the paper used was identical to any other sticker. Multiple websites sell produce labels, but none that we found specified the paper was edible or made from a particular sort of paper. One of those manufacturers explained in their sales copy: Some label materials may meet the requirements of one or more FDA regulations — but not all. The label regulations you will need to follow depend on your product and where you expect to put the label. For example, a label used on an orange or banana peel is considered an “indirect food additive” because the actual food stuff is not affected by the adhesive elements on the peel. However, the label is still considered a “food contact substance,” and falls under a separate set of FDA guidelines. The second portion of the claim pertained to label adhesive, which should be noted is no indicator of sticker edibility: any number of inedible things could be affixed to a pear or parsnip with food-grade adhesive and retain the original item’s non-food status. It stands to reason that all produce labels would be affixed with safe-to-eat glue, as trace amounts of the adhesive would likely survive washing. The FDA maintains guidelines governing which adhesives are generally recognized as safe for edible items. A 2007 news report about technology in produce labeling didn’t address whether such stickers are strictly edible; but it described alternatives, suggesting that stickers were not intended for consumption: “The days of peeling pesky stickers off apples and tomatoes may soon be over. A Georgia company is seeking federal approval for a laser that etches indelible but edible labels onto the skins of fruits and vegetables.” Ingredients aren’t the only potential threat posed by fruit stickers. Anecdotal accounts of accidental choking involving produce labels abound on the internet; and a 1998 newspaper article (which described the tags as “edible”) addressed accidental consumption of the stickers: And, as you might have guessed, some less-than-vigilant people wind up swallowing the stickers. “We’ve received five or six complaints about people eating them and one about a person choking a bit,” says a Food and Drug Administration spokeswoman. “As a consumer, you need to take the responsibility to wash the produce and remove extraneous materials, especially for children.” Then, in a lowered voice doused in disapproval, she adds, “The choking person was eating while driving, you know.”
|
38877
|
The FDA has approved a heroin-based vaccine for children to eradicate chicken pox.
|
FDA Approves Heroin-Based Vaccine for Kids
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false
|
Health / Medical
|
A fake news website is behind this hoax. World News Daily Report published a story that claimed the FDA believed its approval of a heroin-based vaccine for chickenpox would be a “death blow” for the viral infection: Although the experimental drug has been highly criticized by some health advisory boards, specialists believe the benefits of eradicating chickenpox “dramatically overweight” the “minute” chances of inducing heroin addiction in young children. “The anti-microbial properties of heroin have been drastically underestimated and understudied because of the taboos concerning the illegal drug” explains Dr Yu Shi Jung, who took part in the 3-year test phase. “Heroin tends to attach to the chickenpox virus which stimulates the body’s immune system to recognize the agent as a threat and destroys unwanted microorganisms” explains Dr Yu Shi Jung. Although the FDA has approved the new vaccine, anti-vaccine groups have responded to the news with extreme prejudice. The fake report, which plays off of public debate about the safety of childhood vaccinations, drew a strong response. Within days, it had been shared thousands of times on social media sites. Comments
|
27332
|
A man received a $153,000 hospital bill after a bite he sustained from a rattlesnake that he was attempting to take a selfie with.
|
We were unable to contact Fassler, but we have reached out to Dan Haggerty (the reporter who first reported the incident for 10News) to see if he was aware of any updates to Fassler’s case, and what the final outcome may have been.
|
true
|
Critter Country, healthcare, insurance, Medical
|
On 4 June 2015, a man named Todd Fassler attempted to take a selfie with a rattlesnake during a trip to the Barona Speedway racetrack. As San Diego’s 10News.com first reported, it did not go well: 10News was the first to bring you the story of Todd Fassler, who was bitten by a rattlesnake at the Barona Speedway on July 4. “He paralyzed my body … My tongue was sticking out, my eyes were to the side,” Fassler told 10News. Fassler was bitten as he was trying to get a selfie with the snake. The story gained a much wider audience after the reporter who broke that story tweeted a copy of the hospital bill Fassler received following treatment of the near-fatal wound. That image continues to be featured in memes and other social media posts years later. Fassler’s stay, which lasted from 4 July 2015 to 9 July 2015, resulted in a bill for $153,000: Remember the Rattlesnake bite story I did Monday? Guy just sent me this pic of his bill. Uhhhhhhh….. pic.twitter.com/ahK2W9KxVg — Dan Haggerty (@HaggertyCBS11) July 16, 2015 The story is factual, and in the words of the Washington Post’s WonkBlog, it represents “everything wrong with American health care.” The most significant cost, at $83,341.25, was for pharmaceuticals. Here, the culprit was a lack of competition in the pharmaceutical industry (aided in part by patent lawsuits) and the resulting ability for a single company to drive the antivenom (also referred to as antivenin) market: There’s currently [at the time of writing in 2015] only one commercially available antivenin for treating venomous snakebites in the United States — CroFab, manufactured by U.K.-based BTG plc. And with a stable market of 7,000 to 8,000 snakebite victims per year and no competitors, business is pretty good. BTG’s latest annual report shows CroFab sales topped out at close to 63 million British pounds, or $98 million dollars, last fiscal year. […] BTG has fought aggressively to keep competitors off the market. […] This lack of competition is one reason that snakebite treatments rack up such huge hospital bills. As a result of the complex process of negotiation between insurance companies, hospitals, and drug manufacturers, the cost of an individual dose of CroFab is not easily represented as a simple dollar figure. As reported by CBS News, the wholesale cost of the drug — then around $2,500 — does not represent what ends up being billed to the patient: The wholesale rate that hospitals pay to the manufacturer is $2,500 per vial and the markup to patients and insurance is much higher. Fassler, it bears mentioning, “depleted the anti-venom stash at two different hospitals,” according to 10News. Due to the rarity of use, the amount of antivenom a hospital has on hand at any time is variable, as is the amount any given patient might need. Other notable rattlesnake bite cases have resulted in similarly astronomical costs. A Maryland woman received a $55,000 bill after a copperhead snake bite in 2013. A North Carolina man was hit was an $89,000 bill for a snake bite that same year. In 2012, a UC San Diego exchange student was given a $144,000 hospital bill after a rattlesnake bite. Beginning in October 2018, a new antivenom drug will be available to the general public, which will introduce competition into the snake bite pharmaceutical industry — although it is unclear what effect this will have on the overall cost of this kind of emergency treatment. The second most significant cost Fassler faced was $22,433.00 in laboratory services. A litany of bloodwork and other tests is indicated for cases of snakebites; these costs are also sometimes high, variable and ultimately negotiable between hospital and insurance company. The third most significant costs were for Fassler’s “Intermediate Care Room” and “Intensive Care Room” stays. According to a 2005 study that attempted (among other things) to quantify average costs of stays in ICUs, the costs of intensive care stays is high right from the moment a patient enters, and higher for people who require mechanical ventilation — something someone who was paralyzed by a venomous bite likely would require for at least some time. The costs estimated in this study are broadly in line with the costs presented in the Fassler’s bill: Daily costs were greatest on intensive care unit day 1 (mechanical ventilation, 10,794 dollars; no mechanical ventilation, 6,667 dollars), decreased on day 2 (mechanical ventilation:, 4,796 dollars; no mechanical ventilation, 3,496 dollars), and became stable after day 3 (mechanical ventilation, 3,968 dollars; no mechanical ventilation, 3,184 dollars). Other services are harder to pin down specifically, but a $947.00 charge for radiology is not out of the question, as X-rays are sometimes used to confirm that no bits of snake teeth remain in a patient’s system. All these costs are real, but they are not necessarily a reflection of what the hospital is expecting to be paid. According to the Washington Post: The other reason hospitals charge so much [outside of the problems caused by pharmaceutical monopolies] is the byzantine negotiating process that happens between hospitals and insurance companies to determine the final payout amount. In the case of the $143,000 snakebite in 2012, for instance, Scripps Hospital in San Diego explained that “it is important to understand that these charges are not reflective of what Scripps will be paid. […] In many cases, a hospital bill isn’t actually a bill, but essentially an instrument in a complex negotiation between insurers and caregivers, with bewildered patients stuck in the middle. It’s difficult to know which charges are real and which ones aren’t, and which bills to pay and which ones to ignore. It’s one reason medical debt is a huge factor in so many bankruptcies.
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19676
|
Harry Reid Says Mitt Romney did not pay taxes for 10 years.
|
"Reid has said Romney paid no taxes for 10 years. It was no slip of the tongue. He repeated the claim on at least two more occasions, at one point saying that ""the word is out"" when in fact it was only Reid who put that ""word"" out. Reid has produced no evidence to back up his claim other than attribution to a shadowy anonymous source. Romney has denied the claim, and tax experts back him up, saying that the nature of Romney's investments in Bain make it highly unlikely he would have been able to avoid paying taxes altogether -- especially for 10 years. Reid has made an extreme claim with nothing solid to back it up."
|
false
|
National, Candidate Biography, Taxes, Harry Reid,
|
"Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., touched off a firestorm last week after he claimed that an unnamed investor in Mitt Romney’s company, Bain Capital, told him that Romney hadn’t paid any taxes for 10 years. In a July 31, 2012, interview with the Huffington Post, Reid attacked Romney for refusing to publicly release tax returns prior to 2010. Reid said, ""His poor father must be so embarrassed about his son,"" referring to George Romney's decision to release 12 years of tax returns when he ran for president in the late 1960s. Reid told the website that about a month earlier, a person who had invested with Bain Capital called his office and said, ""Harry, he didn't pay any taxes for 10 years."" Reid continued, ""He didn't pay taxes for 10 years! Now, do I know that that's true? Well, I'm not certain,"" said Reid. ""But obviously he can't release those tax returns. How would it look? … You guys have said his wealth is $250 million. Not a chance in the world. It's a lot more than that. I mean, you do pretty well if you don't pay taxes for 10 years when you're making millions and millions of dollars."" On Aug. 2, Reid repeated the allegation on the Senate floor, saying, ""As we know, he has refused to release his tax returns. If a person coming before this body wanted to be a Cabinet officer, he couldn't be if he had the same refusal Mitt Romney does about tax returns. So the word is out that he has not paid any taxes for 10 years. Let him prove he has paid taxes, because he has not."" And later that day, Reid tripled down on the accusation, releasing a statement that said in part, ""I was told by an extremely credible source that Romney has not paid taxes for 10 years."" Romney and his allies pushed back hard against the accusation, saying it was not only substantively incorrect but also ethically out of bounds. ""Harry Reid really has to put up or shut up,"" Romney said following a speech in North Las Vegas, Nev., according to CBS News. Romney added, ""Let me also say, categorically, I have paid taxes every year -- and a lot of taxes. So Harry is simply wrong. And that is why I am so anxious for him to give us the names of the people who put this forward. I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear the names are people from the White House or the Obama campaign."" Other Republicans leaped to Romney’s defense, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., (who told CNN’s State of the Union that ""I think he’s lying"") and Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, who called Reid a ""dirty liar"" on ABC’s This Week. Outside commentators, including liberals, have slammed Reid as well. The New York Times’ Frank Bruni called Reid’s charges part of an ""unbecoming, corrosive game."" ""Spew first and sweat the details later, or never,"" Bruni wrote. ""Speak loosely and carry a stick-thin collection of backup materials, or none at all. That’s the M.O. of the moment, familiar from the past but in particularly galling and profuse flower of late."" Many readers asked us to put Reid’s claim to the Truth-O-Meter. We conclude that Reid, despite repeating the claim on at least two occasions, has not produced any solid evidence it is true. An anonymous source? On Aug. 6, a Reid spokesman confirmed to PolitiFact that the majority leader still maintains the information came from the anonymous Bain investor. Our Truth-O-Meter guidelines say we hold officials accountable to back up their words. By those standards, Reid has not proven his allegation. Still, we wondered how likely it was that Romney didn’t pay taxes for 10 years. In an Internal Revenue Service study of nearly 4 million 2009 tax returns of filers reporting more than $200,000 in adjusted gross income, 20,752 of these taxpayers -- or just 0.529 percent -- had no U.S. income tax liability. About half of those did have income tax liability in other countries. But Romney’s recent income has been substantially higher than $200,000, meaning that the size of his deductions and credits would need to be even larger than for many of those included in this IRS study if his tax liability was going to fall to zero. According to the one full return he’s released, for tax year 2010, he and his wife Ann reported an adjusted gross income of $21.6 million and paid taxes of about $3 million. He's also released an estimate of his 2011 taxes, which showed income of $20.9 million and a tax payment of $3.2 million. To gauge tax patterns for even higher-income earners, the best we can do is to look at another IRS study detailing the taxes paid by the top 400 earners in the nation in 2008. To make this list, you would have to have earned roughly $109 million that year. Among those 400 top taxpayers, 30 -- or 7.5 percent -- had an effective tax rate of between 0 and 10 percent. Given how the statistics are calculated, it’s impossible to know how many paid no taxes, but it’s safe to assume it’s well below 7.5 percent. Neither study directly addresses Romney’s situation -- he falls somewhere in the middle of the two studies -- but the data does show that for earners both below and above him, it's unlikely they paid zero taxes for one year, and it’s even more far-fetched to think they did so for 10 years. Salon.com -- which is generally considered a liberal media outlet, thus no friend to Romney -- asked two tax experts whether they thought it was likely that Romney paid no taxes for 10 years. They concluded, ""probably not."" The article quoted David Miller, a tax attorney with the firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft in New York, saying it’s ""highly unlikely"" that he paid nothing. ""It would be easier for someone like Steve Jobs to pay zero, as most of his wealth was in company stock, which isn’t taxed until sold and may never be sold,"" Miller told Salon. The Salon article continued, ""But Romney’s arrangement with Bain is different. He would have earned management fees, and when Bain sold the underlying companies that it invested in, Romney would have been subject to tax on his share. 'It’s possible he paid very little in taxes, but I find it hard to believe that he paid none,' Miller said."" Salon also quoted Joshua Kamerman, a lawyer and CPA in New York, who said while it’s theoretically possible, it’s also ""preposterous."" ""Charitable donations can shield up to only 50 percent of tax liability, while other means can lower the rate,"" the article said. ""But to pay nothing, Romney would have to sustain business operating losses, Kamerman said. The IRS lets people carry over losses for up to 20 years until they make a profit from which to deduct them. But Kamerman said this is almost certainly not the case for Romney."" We asked Lawrence J. White, an economist at the Stern School of Business at New York University, for his view, and he concurred with Miller and Kamerman. ""I agree that it's extremely unlikely that Mr. Romney paid no income taxes for 10 years,"" White said. Our ruling Reid has said Romney paid no taxes for 10 years. It was no slip of the tongue. He repeated the claim on at least two more occasions, at one point saying that ""the word is out"" when in fact it was only Reid who put that ""word"" out. Reid has produced no evidence to back up his claim other than attribution to a shadowy anonymous source. Romney has denied the claim, and tax experts back him up, saying that the nature of Romney's investments in Bain make it highly unlikely he would have been able to avoid paying taxes altogether -- especially for 10 years. Reid has made an extreme claim with nothing solid to back it up. !"
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3792
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GOP, Democrats team up to address surprise medical bills.
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Plunging ahead despite paralyzing partisanship in the nation’s capital, senior lawmakers of both parties Thursday proposed legislation to tackle surprise medical bills and other concerns, from prescription drug costs to uneven vaccination rates.
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true
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Lamar Alexander, Patty Murray, Health, Legislation, Politics, North America, Prescription drug costs, Business, Prescription drugs, Donald Trump, Bills, Political parties
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The draft bill from Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., echoes a time when health care issues often led to dialogue and cooperation between political parties. Alexander chairs the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, while Murray is the ranking Democrat. “We can make progress when both sides are at the table ready to put patients and families first,” Murray said in a statement. Alexander said he wants to bring the bill to the Senate floor in July and get legislation on President Donald Trump’s desk. But with Trump threatening to halt all cooperation with Democrats unless House Democrats stop investigating him, the outlook is unclear. Alexander says his bill represents “common sense steps” — more than 30 specific ideas — that are readily achievable. “Surprise medical bills” are the shockingly high charges insured patients can get hit with when a hospital or doctor is not in their insurers’ network. Earlier this month, Trump held a White House event to declare his eagerness to sign a fix into law. The Alexander-Murray legislation would protect patients by limiting their financial responsibility to their own plan’s in-network rates, when they receive emergency care at an out-of-network hospital, or when an out-of-network clinician provides services at an in-network facility. But the legislation remains a work in progress, since lawmakers still have to figure out how hospitals, doctors and insurers would settle the costs among themselves. Insurers and employers who sponsor workplace coverage favor a set formula for calculating fees, while hospitals and doctors are calling for arbitration. Alexander and Murray have plenty of company on surprise medical bills, since lawmakers in both chambers of Congress have advanced various proposals. A lobbying war has broken out between insurers and employers on one side, and hospitals and doctors on the other, over how to determine payments once patients are no longer liable for out-of-network care. On prescription drugs, the bill includes a smorgasbord of measures aimed at indirectly lowering drug prices. But none of the proposals would require drugmakers to lower their prices or authorize the government to negotiate better deals. Instead, several sections of the bill would discourage industry tactics long used to delay the launch of lower-priced generic medications. For instance, branded drug manufacturers routinely file frivolous petitions with the Food and Drug Administration against potential generic competitors, often delaying their entry to the market for months. The bill would empower the FDA to ignore such petitions. Among other provisions, the bill would: — Authorize a national campaign to promote vaccination to prevent disease and control its spread. The campaign would “combat misinformation” and circulate scientific evidence making the case for vaccinations. The recent U.S. measles outbreak has been blamed on lagging vaccination rates in parts of the country. — Call on the Health and Human Services Department to set up a grant program for improving medical care for pregnant women, with the aim of preventing maternal deaths and complications. Another grant program would focus on improving care for infants. — Broaden consumer access to information from their health plans, including readily accessible lists of network providers, calculators for estimating out-of-pocket costs and medical claims data. — Take steps to promote disclosure of contracting information in the health care industry, where accurate pricing information remains hard to obtain. Missing from the legislation are any provisions to stabilize coverage under the Affordable Care Act, or mitigate the potentially far-reaching consequences if opponents succeed in a lawsuit to strike down the law as unconstitutional. Alexander and Murray had earlier written a bipartisan bill to shore up the health law’s insurance markets, but the effort failed. Before the political wars over the Obama-era health law, it was not uncommon to see lawmakers of both parties working side by side on health care. Federal mental health parity legislation grew out of bipartisan collaboration. The Medicare prescription drug benefit under Republican President George W. Bush had support from key Senate Democrats. ___ Associated Press Health Writer Matthew Perrone contributed to this report.
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29554
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Parents should be aware that a code for pedophiles inexplicably showed up on a children's toy at motorsport event Monster Jam.
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What's true: Police in Pasco County were surprised to discover a symbol similar to secretive coding used by pedophiles on a Monster Jam souvenir toy. What's false: The presence of imagery similar to the symbol poses a risk to children. What's undetermined: How the symbol came to appear on the Monster Jam toy and the extent of its actual use by pedophiles.
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false
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Uncategorized, coded symbols, monster jam, pedophile
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On 9 March 2016, WFLA released a report claiming that a secretive symbol widely used by pedophiles was discovered on souvenir plush monster truck toys marketed to girls at a Florida Monster Jam event. The article was suspiciously light on details and high on appeals to fear, and made up mainly of shocked parental reactions, comments from local police, a statement from the palpably confused event organizer, and a video assertion that the toy amounted to a “big neon sign that a pedophile would give a child to another sicko.” Its most substantive portion maintained: Here’s what the heart means. When a pedophile sees children with the heart symbol, it’s a code. It means this child is ready to be traded for sex. Pasco Detective Anthony Bassone has been with the agency for more than 16 years. He has one tough job every day. And, what he encounters, he can’t forget. He has to see the worst of the worst. He picks out pedophiles online and busts them, along with two other detectives in the cyber crimes unit at the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office. These investigators have to deal with the most horrendous, gut-wrenching, heartbreaking material. Sadly, they see children tortured and raped on a daily basis. These crime-fighters make it through with their motivation to protect children and keep them safe. What drives these detectives to do their jobs and face another day, they told us, is to put the bad guys away. News footage yielded no additional useful information on the frightening claim, mostly just reiterating the information in the article’s text: The rumor bore many hallmarks of urban legends rooted in fear of lurking pedophiles (particularly popular on social media), and its accompanying news coverage did little to assuage the inevitable fear parents would feel hearing such a report. Missing from the coverage was information on how WFLA came to learn of the toy, who made the connection about pedophile codes, of even any information about how or why such a code might be known or used (except as unspecified signaling between “sickos”). We contacted Pasco County Sheriff’s Office Detective Anthony Bassone, of the jurisdiction’s cyber crimes unit. Det. Bassone was familiar with the story, and provided a wealth of useful information. According to Bassone, the heart symbol in question indeed bore some resemblance to imagery disseminated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Cyber Division Innocent Images National Initiative to law enforcement agencies on 31 January 2007. (We were unable to locate the document anywhere other than Wikileaks, and Bassone told us that slides from the FBI’s release later appeared on an episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.) The communication tipped law enforcement in 2007 to the existence of the symbols and common applications among pedophiles: Pedophiles, to include those who sexually abuse children as well as those who produce, distribute, and trade child pornography, are using various types of identification logos or symbols to recognize one another and distinguish their sexual preferences. To specifically indicate the pedophile’s gender preference, members of pedophilic organizations encourage the use of descriptions such as “boylove”, “girllove”, and “childlove.” These symbols have been etched into rings and formed into pendants, and have also been found imprinted on coins. The application of such symbols was again described in a separate portion of the release: Pedophilia symbols on jewelry, coins, Web sites and other effects are indicative of advertisement methods used by child sexual predators to promote their cause. Pedophile activists advocate for the social acceptance of sexual relationships between adults and children. These organizations seek to decriminalize sexual relationships between adults and children and to legalize child pornography based on their belief that children have the ability to consent to sexual acts. (U//LES) Identical or similar jewelry and symbols as described in this intelligence bulletin should raise suspicion of possible pedophilia activity when found during searches. The document described the symbols as used by pedophiles to denote their own preferences, not ones reserved to mark children as potential or available victims. A later portion read: The GirlLover logo (GLogo) depicted below is a small heart surrounded by a larger heart, which symbolizes a relationship between an adult male or female and minor girl. The release was available in full online [PDF], complete with photographs of the symbols: The symbol on the plush monster truck was similar: It was also similar to the logo of popular surf brand Roxy, which features a large line of clothing for young children and tweens: Bassone told us that the use of interlocking hearts in and of itself was unlikely to put any child in danger, adding that the department was attempting to talk to the designer to learn more about the choice of symbol. However, he explained that the appearance of the symbol on children’s items was off-putting from the perspective of a cyber crimes detective, as they may be widely recognized by pedophiles. Bassone noted that while the symbol wasn’t necessarily dangerous or presenting a risk of child exploitation, it was possible in-the-know pedophiles would find the use of the symbol on children’s clothing or toys to be stimulating or amusing. Feld Inc. responded to our inquiry, confirming that the item was since pulled from their inventory. Spokesman Stephen Payne said in a statement that the company was unaware the heart symbol bore any relation to pedophile shibboleths. The tenor of the statement suggested that the maker of the toy was genuinely horrified to learn of the rumors and took immediate action upon hearing the rumors: On Tuesday, March 8th, when the issue with the Monster Jam toy was brought to the company’s attention by a customer who purchased it at a recent Monster Jam event, we immediately pulled this item from inventory and will no longer sell it. In addition, any customers who have purchased this truck can contact our Customer Service Department for an exchange or refund. The company was not aware of the disturbing message contained in the truck’s design, nor did we intend to use any design that had a secret or double meaning. We are currently reviewing our merchandise to ensure that it’s appropriate for our customers. Feld Entertainment is committed to providing a safe and family-friendly environment at all our shows and through our consumer products. We take this very seriously and are taking steps to ensure that an incident like this never happens again. It’s true that a toy sold at Monster Jam bore a symbol similar to one used by pedophiles, and that toy has since been pulled from the event’s merchandise inventory. However, that symbol was not exclusive to pedophiles and did not “mark” children for abuse. Feld Inc. asserted that they were unaware of the connection, but immediately acted to remove the toys from circulation. After this post was published, a number of readers pointed out a very similar and widely distributed Unilever-brand ice cream logo: Urban legends about use of symbols in crime are rife, as they enable people to feel one step ahead of crafty criminals. Perennially popular warnings about robbery and dog theft were very similar to the pedophile code rumor. But it’s worth keeping in mind that studies have consistently demonstrated strangers pose a far smaller risk than individuals close to a child, such as a relative or a friend of the family. Only 10 percent [PDF] of assaults were committed by a stranger, a number reiterated by the United States Department of Justice. The bulk [PDF] of abuse is committed by family members, family friends, or other trusted adults without the use of coded toys.
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11101
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More Than 22% of Heart-Device Implantations Aren’t In Line With Guidelines
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This blog post about a study revealing some new data about the overuse of heart implants does some things quite well, but it falls short on a number of our measures. See the Los Angeles Times piece which we also reviewed for comparison. While The WSJ blog includes cost information, which is too often missed in stories, it does not provide enough hard data on the risks or benefits of heart implants. It also should have done a better job evaluating the evidence in this study but, instead, left reviewers – and, we bet, readers – confused. When a study this large finds that 1 out of every 5 people may have unnecessarily undergone a surgery that led to longer hospital stays in, in a minority, a shorter life, that’s big news. Reporters need to make sure that they give readers the proper context to process findings this dramatic. Identifying the best candidates for ICD pacement is not an exact science. Guidelines have been developed to help clinicians and patients determine the best course of action. The guidelines are, at best, interpretations of existing information generated in clinical trials. While useful, they are by no means exact. The study in question examined data collected from a national registry on over 100,000 patients and concluded that 1/5th of the implants were outside existing guidelines. While the findings in the study are troubling at face value, the story appears to be a bit more complicated. The accompanying editorial places the results in a slightly different perspective. Of the four criteria examined, only one (placement of the ICD in patients with severe heart failure) is an absolute. The other three criteria are related purely to timing and not to whether the device is of value. Heart failure patients need the tools to help them ask their doctors the right questions. This story did not provide them enough of those tools.
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mixture
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Devices,Wall Street Journal
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The story deserves high marks for bringing costs into the discussion right in the lead. “In more than 22% of cases, implantable defibrillators are given to heart patients who don’t meet the guidelines for receiving the pricey devices, according to a study just published in JAMA.” The story also says, “ICDs, which can cost north of $30,000, monitor the rhythm of the heart and produce a shock to bring irregular beating back to normal.” But just as with the Times story, the cost of the device and hospitalizations is only a piece of the economic picture. Additional costs of maintaining the device and battery replacement drive the costs higher. In reality however the overall economic impact of the devices is just about the same as treatment of high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol when life years (a commonly applied economic marker) is considered. As with the harms, the benefits are not quantified. The story says up high that patients who fell outside the guidelines had a “higher risk of dying in the hospital and of complications from the implantation.” But there are no numbers provided. In fact, there are more percentages provided in this story about the stock prices of the various device makers involved than there are about the harms or benefits. This is the Wall Street Journal, of course, but we still thought some additional numbers about harms or benefits would have been helpful to any reader. The story attempts to evaluate the quality of the evidence, but it falls short. In comparing the way this story brings context to the shocking findings to the way the LA Times does, this story is confusing and potentially misleading. We have read these paragraphs several times and still are not sure what they mean: Did these patients attempt to sign up for clinical trials and were denied? And what is the bill that the 22.5% will not fit? The LA Times story examines the study in much clearer language and provides the right context. The story does not engage in disease-mongering. We spent some time on the fence here, but we were ultimately willing to give the story the benefit of the doubt. The blog calls out a link to a much more complete Wall Street Journal story about the study, and it says, “Read the WSJ story to get perspective from Medtronic and Boston Scientific.” But it spends too much time quoting the lead author and does not quote anyone else. It does, however, provide information that was missing in the LA Times and other coverage. “Authors of the study reported receiving funding from Medtronic and other device- and drug makers.” We thought that context, along with the link and a quote from statement from the Heart Rhythm Society were enough to pass this criteria. As with the LA Times story, though, we don’t understand why the editorial accompanying the journal article wasn’t cited. Neither this story nor the LA Times story compare this approach to existing alternatives, although this story does at least briefly mention medication as the first line of treatment for patients with newly diagnosed heart failure. But no meaningful comparison to other approaches was given. Like the LA Times story we reviewed, this story shows how widespread these implants are by explaining the scope of the study. “The research, based on 111,707 cases submitted to a national registry over a three-and-a-half-year period, also finds that those patients who didn’t meet the guidelines had a higher risk of dying in the hospital and of complications from the implantation.” Both stories could have benefited from a sentence about how likely hospitals in less populated areas are to have access to the implants and to have properly trained staff. The story does not make clear that this approach is novel. Guidelines for the placement of ICD’s have been in evolution for a number of years and have been based on cllinical trials. The use of a registry to identify the clinical outcomes in the real world has been used in a number of scenarios. The information provided by registries provides clinicians with an improved understanding of the value of a technology in a heterogenous patient population. We would have liked to have seen some mention of the intent of the registry in the story. The story does not rely on a news release.
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3352
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West Nile virus case recorded in Crook County horse.
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State health officials say a case of West Nile virus has been confirmed in a horse east of Bend.
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true
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Horses, Health, General News, Oregon, West Nile virus
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The Oregonian/OregonLive reports West Nile virus was first recorded in Oregon in 2003, but this is the first case recorded in Crook County. The virus, which can spread in humans only through the bite of infected mosquitoes, is often fatal to horses. Officials say the virus can also infect chickens, squirrels and dogs. Cases of West Nile virus have been recorded in Multnomah and Clackamas counties, the most recent in 2014 in Clackamas County. Officials say eight people in Oregon contracted the virus in three different counties in 2019. Symptoms include fever, headache, stiff neck, fatigue and confusion, shaking, paralysis, rash and encephalitis - inflammation of the brain. About one in 150 people who are infected develop severe symptoms. ___ Information from: The Oregonian/OregonLive, http://www.oregonlive.com
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41726
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"The 1994 crime law ""worked in some areas. But it failed in others. ... The violent crime rate was cut in half in America."
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Former Vice President Joe Biden defended his support decades ago for a controversial crime bill, saying, “There’s another part of my long record that’s being grossly misrepresented: the 1994 crime bill.” We’ll go through Biden’s points about what was in the bill and what he supported or opposed.
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mixture
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1994 crime bill, crime,
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Former Vice President Joe Biden defended his support decades ago for a controversial crime bill, saying in a speech in South Carolina, “There’s another part of my long record that’s being grossly misrepresented: the 1994 crime bill.”We’ll go through Biden’s points about what was in the bill and what he supported or opposed.Biden spoke about the bill in a speech in Sumter on July 6 in which he addressed his earlier remarks a few weeks ago about working with “some civility” in the 1970s with two segregationist southern Democrats to get “things done” even though “we didn’t agree on much of anything.” Biden, who is leading the national polls for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, apologized in his Sumter speech, saying, “I’m sorry for any of the pain or misconception” his remarks “may have caused anybody.”He also made extensive remarks about the 1994 crime bill, which Biden, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, largely wrote and shepherded through the legislative process. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 received bipartisan support at the time but has been criticized for some of its provisions, such as mandatory minimum sentencing, and its impact on mass incarceration. (When we looked at claims in 2016 from both sides on the law’s role in mass incarceration, we found the trend of increasing imprisonment began well before 1994, but experts told us the 1994 law exacerbated the issue. )The legislation was aimed at addressing rising crime in the country and contained a host of policing and crime prevention provisions — including “three-strikes” mandatory life sentences for repeat violent offenders, funding for community policing and prisons, an assault weapons ban and the Violence Against Women Act. It authorized $30.2 billion, according to a Congressional Research Service report on federal crime measures. It increased federal crimes subject to the death penalty and enabled juveniles to be tried as adults for violent and firearm-involved federal crimes.Here are the points Biden made about the crime law in his South Carolina speech and how they stack up to the facts:Biden: In the 1980s and 1990s violent crime was out of control. The crime bill was designed to deal with that problem. That’s why it was supported overwhelmingly by the Democratic Party, by African American leaders all across the nation, including a majority of the black caucus in the Congress.The bill was aimed at reducing violent crime, which had been rising. The violent crime rate had been on a general trend upward in the decades leading up to the 1994 bill, peaking in 1991, as this chart shows. After dropping in the first part of the 1980s, the violent crime rate, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, increased by 39 percent from 1983 to 1993, the year before the crime bill was passed.And it was supported by the Democratic Party. The Senate initially passed the bill by a 95-4 vote; the final conference report vote was 61-38, with just two Democrats voting no. The House passed the final bill 235-195, with nearly three times as many Democrats supporting it as opposing it.It’s also true that a majority of the Congressional Black Caucus supported the legislation, though then-President Bill Clinton had to meet with the CBC to garner enough votes to get the bill over the finish line. The Baltimore Sun reported on Aug. 18, 1994, that at least three members of the caucus had switched their votes after meeting with Clinton at the White House. Before that meeting, “10 of the 38 black Democrats in the House voted against him when the crime bill, in an embarrassing setback for the administration, failed on a procedural motion. They were protesting the application of the death penalty to 60 more crimes,” the Sun reported. Nearly 40 African American religious leaders released a statement supporting the bill, saying: “While we do not agree with every provision in the crime bill, we do believe and emphatically support the bill’s goal to save our communities, and most importantly, our children.” And 10 African American mayors wrote to the chairman of the CBC, Rep. Kweisi Mfume, pledging their support for the bill, even if it lacked a racial justice provision the White House was prepared to give up to get more votes for the legislation. That provision would have allowed defendants to appeal a death sentence by submitting data that suggested a racial bias in death sentencing in a jurisdiction. “We cannot afford to lose the opportunities this bill provides to the people of our cities,” the mayors wrote, according to the Los Angeles Times on July 15, 1994.Biden: [The crime bill] worked in some areas. But it failed in others. … The violent crime rate was cut in half in America.The violent crime rate has been nearly cut in half — down 46% — from 1994 to 2017, but Biden’s suggestion that the 1994 legislation should be credited is misleading. We looked into a similar claim from Bill Clinton in 2016 and found experts pointed to other factors for most of that crime decrease.For instance, a 2005 report from the Government Accountability Office estimated that funding for Community Oriented Policing Services, which resulted in tens of thousands of additional police officers, “contributed to a 1.3 percent decline in the overall crime rate [from 1993 to 2000] and a 2.5 percent decline in the violent crime rate from the 1993 levels.” But the GAO concluded that other factors were responsible for the majority of the drop in crime during that period. The total decrease in violent crime was 32% from 1993 to 2000.John Worrall, a professor of criminology at the University of Texas at Dallas, told us “the jury is very much still out” on what caused the decrease. “Criminologists and economists are in no agreement as to the causes of the crime declines we’ve seen. Could be economic, demographic, a civilizing effect, possibly because of abortion or lead paint, tougher sentences, etc., etc. A dozen or more explanations have been offered and no one agrees.”Experts with the Brennan Center for Justice wrote in 2016 that the bill “likely helped” in the large decrease in crime “not by locking people up, but by putting more cops on the street, studies show.” The authors said, “Research also indicates smarter policing tactics, like the ones funded by the bill, and social and economic factors — like an aging population and decreased alcohol consumption — played a role in the crime decline as well.”Biden: But it was opposed by Republicans, people like Mitch McConnell, not because they thought it was too tough, because they thought it was too soft. They felt it dedicated too much money to things like prevention. … Remember they had those prisoners dancing in tutus saying Biden wants to have after-school programs, Biden wants to have prevention programs.McConnell, now the Senate majority leader, did vote against the final version of the bill in August 1994, as did all but eight Republican senators. However, months earlier, in November 1993, the original bill had garnered near universal support in the Senate, with McConnell on the “yes” ledger.Why did McConnell switch his vote by the time the House-Senate conference bill had been negotiated? Biden has a point that Republicans thought the bill had grown too “soft”; they objected to additional spending in the final bill, calling it “pork.” McConnell told CNN on Aug. 15, 1994, 10 days before the final Senate vote: “The Kentucky Fraternal Order of Police this weekend came out against this crime bill. … [B]ecause they thought it was porked up, that it was going to be a bill basically about social workers and not police officers.”McConnell said spending in the bill had gone from about $22 billion in the original Senate version to $33 billion in the conference report. He said after-school programs were “a worthwhile expenditure” but objected to spending on a midnight basketball league program, which became a talking point for critics of the bill. (The final bill provided $377 million over five years to states and localities to be used for various education and community prevention efforts, including midnight sports leagues that included job training and other educational aspects. )In an Aug. 23, 1994, letter to Sen. Bob Dole, then the Republican leader, 41 senators said they wanted a “tough crime bill” but the conference report “earmarks billions of dollars for wasteful social programs” and “fails to include a number of important tough-on-crime proposals adopted by the Senate last November.”Biden’s reference to the “prisoners dancing in tutus” is to a 1994 campaign ad for James Inhofe, who went on to win the Senate seat for Oklahoma in that race. The ad mocked Inhofe’s Democratic opponent, Rep. Dave McCurdy, for supporting Clinton’s (not “Biden’s”) crime bill that included “dance lessons” and “midnight basketball.”Biden: I also wrote into that law, drug courts. Anyone arrested for a drug problem because they’re addicted should be going into, diverted into a drug court, not into a prison system.The crime law created the Drug Court Discretionary Grant program, which provides grants to states and localities for drug courts, an alternative to the traditional judicial system for nonviolent offenders with addiction issues with the goal of reducing recidivism and drug abuse.“Broadly, these specialized court programs are designed to divert some individuals away from traditional criminal justice sanctions such as incarceration,” a March 2018 CRS report explains. “Many drug courts offer a treatment and social service alternative for those who otherwise may have faced traditional criminal sanctions for their offenses. In some drug courts, individuals that have been arrested are diverted from local courts into special judge-involved programs; these courts are often viewed as ‘second chance’ courts. Other drug court programs offer reentry assistance after an offender has served his or her sentence.”The 1994 law provided $1 billion for drug courts over six years.Biden: It included my Violence Against Women Act, which I wrote. It included strengthening the Brady Bill on background checks, eliminated assault weapons.Yes, the bill included the Violence Against Women Act, which increased federal penalties for repeat sex offenders and provided grants for victim services among other measures, provided funding for the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, and included a ban on some semi-automatic weapons that was in place for 10 years.Biden: They [Republicans] didn’t like the fact that we removed mandatory minimums for first-time offenders.The final legislation included a so-called “safety valve” provision that limited the use of mandatory minimum federal sentences for some drug offenses. A defendant could qualify to be exempt from those mandatory sentences if he or she met certain criteria, including: that the defendant didn’t use violence or possess a gun or dangerous weapon during the act, no one was killed or seriously injured, and the defendant wasn’t “an organizer, leader, manager, or supervisor of others in the offense.”Biden: The bill also included things I didn’t like. I didn’t support the provision the president wanted in called three strikes and you’re out. Didn’t support it then, don’t support it now.There’s evidence supporting Biden’s contention that he didn’t back the final legislation’s three-strikes provision, but he did vote in favor of one version, a Republican amendment that was added to the Senate legislation. Biden is on record at the time as saying he supported a three-strikes provision for “serious [violent] felonies against a person,” but he was against including nonviolent offenses and expressed concern that minor crimes could get swept up in the measure.The provision in the final bill said anyone with at least two prior convictions for serious violent felonies, or one of those being a drug distribution or trafficking offense, who then committed a federal serious violent felony would be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.During debate over the Senate bill in November 1993, Republican Sen. Trent Lott proposed a three-strikes amendment that ended up passing 91-1. Lott’s amendment applied to a third violent felony involving physical force against another person. In a floor speech on Nov. 8, 1993, before that vote, Biden said, “One of the things that I found out is when you pass these minimum mandatory bills you sometimes end up in your net taking in people who you would never intend by the scope of the law when you write it to take in.”Biden objected to Lott’s definition of “violent felony” as a crime that included the use or threat of physical force against someone punishable by more than one year imprisonment. Biden said that meant the provision could apply to someone who gets into a fistfight in a national park, making their assault a federal felony. He said he had no problem with the provision applying to “a three-time rapist.”In response to Biden’s comments, Lott modified his amendment to apply to violent felonies punishable by more than five years imprisonment. “This is the language basically that was recommended by the Senator from Delaware to get at those most violent crimes and criminals,” Lott said.Biden, though, asked if the stipulation could be 10 years or more “so that we do not end up inadvertently sweeping into our net people that a federal judge would be required to put in jail for life–the drunken brawler who gets in his third fight and he happens to do it in Yellowstone Park while he is there.” He also expressed concern that any crime committed on an Indian reservation would be on federal property.By early 1994, Biden was quoted as saying the three-strikes proposal was “wacko.” When asked about that comment, in light of his support of Lott’s amendment, by NBC’s Katie Couric on the “Today Show” on Feb. 1, 1994, Biden said he was referring to other provisions that included nonviolent crimes.“So, what we should focus on are three strikes, meaning serious felonies against a person that are violent. We should take those predators off the street,” he said, adding that even if the Lott amendment remained in the final bill it would have a “minuscule” impact since the third crime has to be a federal one, and most crimes are state crimes.Biden also suggested limiting the provision to crimes punishable by a decade of prison time or more, according to the Associated Press, which reported on Feb. 23, 1994, that Biden had said “screwy amendments” had been added on the Senate floor. The AP reported: “‘Let’s not take a really solid proposal and because of a half-dozen screwy proposals, trash the whole thing,’ Biden said, urging the House panel to help him rid the bill of those amendments.”In his 1994 State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton had endorsed the three-strikes idea, which was supported and ultimately adopted by many states. One DOJ-funded research report published in 2000 found that, with the exception of California, the state and federal three-strikes laws had “virtually no impact on the courts, local jails or state prisons. Nor does there appear to be an impact on crime rates.” The report said this type of legislation was “carefully crafted to be largely symbolic,” but also that courts and prosecutors had minimized the impact.Biden: I didn’t support any mandatory minimums.There’s some evidence that Biden didn’t support mandatory minimums in the 1994 crime bill, but it’s worth noting he had supported them several years earlier, when he co-sponsored the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. That act set mandatory minimums for crack cocaine offenses, with much harsher sentences compared with powder cocaine.But in 1993 at an event hosted by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, Biden said, according to an October 1993 article in the ABA Journal, “I think we’ve had all the mandatory minimums that we need. We don’t need the ones that we have.”“But quite frankly, I don’t think I will prevail. … I’ve watched how the process works. I am not at all hopeful there will be [enough] senators prepared to vote with me.”The article noted there had been a “change in the winds blowing about mandatory minimum sentencing” from those on both sides of the aisle. It said Biden was among those who had changed. “Two years ago, Biden was cooperating with the Bush administration to support mandatory minimum sentences in federal anti-crime legislation.”The 1994 crime law called for a review of the cocaine sentencing policies by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which determined that the sentencing gap between crack and powder cocaine was too large — a defendant would need to possess 100 times more powder cocaine than crack to be subject to the same sentence — and that the policies resulted in a racial disparity.In 2008, Biden said the 100-to-1 ratio was “arbitrary, unnecessary, and unjust,” and acknowledged that legislation he helped draft was “part of the problem that I have been trying to solve since then.”The sentencing gap was reduced in 2010 by the Fair Sentencing Act.Biden: I didn’t support more money to build state prisons. I was against it. We should be building rehab centers and not prisons.Biden did support $6 billion in funding for state prison construction, but not the $10 billion that was part of the final bill. His campaign says the $4 billion difference is what he means when he says he “didn’t support more money to build state prisons.”The prison funding also came with strings: It went to states that had “truth-in-sentencing” laws requiring that people convicted of violent crimes serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. According to the Department of Justice, 11 states adopted such laws in 1995 and three years later, 27 states and Washington, D.C., met the criteria for the prison construction grants.This is one of the measures experts have cited in saying the 1994 legislation contributed to already increasing incarceration. “Although incarceration was already rising steadily before the crime bill, several of its provisions helped increase incarceration even further,” experts with the Brennan Center said in 2016, citing the increase in federal crimes subject to the death penalty, the three-strikes provision and the incentive for states to make sure convicts served the vast majority of their sentences.The authors said: “On their own, states passed three-strikes laws, enacted mandatory minimums, eliminated parole, and removed judicial discretion in sentencing. By dangling bonus dollars, the crime bill encouraged states to remain on their tough-on-crime course.”— by Lori Robertson, with Eugene Kiely
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Trump drops idea of New York lockdown as U.S. death count crosses 2,000.
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President Donald Trump said on Saturday that he would issue a travel warning for the hard-hit New York area to limit the spread of the coronavirus, backing off from an earlier suggestion that he might try to cut off the region entirely.
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"“A quarantine will not be necessary,” he said on Twitter. Trump’s announcement came as the U.S. death count crossed 2,100, more than double the level from two days ago. The United States has now recorded more than 122,000 cases of the respiratory virus, the most of any country in the world. Since the virus first appeared in the United States in late January, Trump has vacillated between playing down the risks of infection and urging Americans to take steps to slow its spread. Trump said on Saturday afternoon that he might impose a ban on travel in and out of New York and parts of New Jersey and Connecticut, the U.S. epicenter of the disease, to protect other states that have yet to bear the brunt. He offered few specifics. Critics promptly called the idea unworkable, saying it would cause chaos in a region that serves as the economic engine of the eastern United States, accounting for 10 percent of the population and 12 percent of GDP. “If you started walling off areas all across the country it would be totally bizarre, counter-productive, anti-American,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said on CNN. Hours later, Trump dropped the idea, saying he would instead ask the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to issue a “strong Travel Advisory” that would be administered by the three states’ governors. The CDC later warned the states’ residents against non-essential domestic travel for 14 days. It said the warning did not apply to employees of “critical infrastructure industries” including trucking, public health and financial services. It was the latest reversal for Trump, who has been reluctant to order U.S. companies to produce much-needed medical supplies, despite the pleas of governors and hospital workers. Tests to track the disease’s progress also remain in short supply, despite repeated White House promises that they would be widely available. On Saturday, Trump appeared to soften his previous comments calling for the U.S. economy to be reopened by mid-April. ""We'll see what happens,"" he said. Graphic: U.S. coronavirus - here Though Trump has apparently opted not to impose checkpoints on highways and airports leading out of New York, some states have imposed limits of their own. New Yorkers arriving in Florida and Rhode Island face orders to self-isolate if they intend to stay, and the governors of Pennsylvania and West Virginia have asked visiting New Yorkers to voluntarily self-quarantine. New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu on Saturday asked all visitors to his state who don’t come for work reasons to voluntarily self-quarantine. New coronavirus cases in China leveled off after the government imposed a strict lockdown of Wuhan, the epicenter of the disease. The body count continues to climb in Italy, where authorities have blocked travel across the country and prevented people from leaving their houses for all but essential reasons. Any travel restrictions, voluntary or not, might be too late. The number of coronavirus patients in California hospitals increased by more than one-third overnight, Governor Gavin Newsom said. Officials in Louisiana, where Mardi Gras celebrations late last month in New Orleans fueled an outbreak, reported 17 additional deaths and 569 new cases on Saturday. The disease has proven most fatal among the elderly, but Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker said on Saturday that an infant had died in his state. Graphic: Tracking the spread of the global coronavirus - here American healthcare workers are appealing for more protective gear and equipment as they face a surge of patients. Doctors are also especially concerned about a shortage of ventilators, breathing machines needed for those suffering from COVID-19, the pneumonia-like respiratory ailment caused by the highly contagious novel coronavirus. Hospitals have also sounded the alarm about scarcities of drugs, oxygen tanks and trained staff. On Saturday, nurses protested outside the Jacobi Medical Center in New York, saying supervisors asked them to reuse their masks, putting their own health at risk. One medical trainee at New York Presbyterian Hospital said they were given just one mask. “It’s not the people who are making these decisions that go into the patients’ rooms,” said the trainee, who spoke on condition of anonymity."
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Acupuncture May Help Lazy Eye
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This was a so-so account of a study that compared acupuncture to using an eye patch for treatment of a certain type of “lazy eye” known as anisometropic amblyopia. It was better than the competing HealthDay coverage at describing the design of the study and quantifying the benefits that can be expected from acupuncture. It noted that children treated with acupuncture had an improvement of a little more than 2 lines on a vision chart — a practical characterization of the effects that was not provided in the rival report. But the coverage shared gaps with HealthDay when it came to discussion of the costs and availability of acupuncture. This story also failed to point out that the researchers might stand to benefit financially from a patent on vision-related acupuncture sites — a conflict that was disclosed in the original research paper and should have been included in this news story. Amblyopia — a condition which causes reduced vision in one eye because the eye and brain are not communicating properly — is a leading cause of vision impairment in children. Treatment is most successful when the condition is identified and addressed at an early age, but older children can also benefit from patching therapy which forces the weaker eye to work harder and communicate more effectively with the brain. Older children may resist wearing an eye patch, however, and it is possible that using a patch will lead to new problems in the better-functioning eye. This study suggests that acupuncture may be a safe and effective alternative to patching for older children with amblyopia. Now additional research will be needed to confirm whether the benefits of acupuncture are real and sustainable over the long term.
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A source in this story cited time and expense as two factors that might decrease the attractiveness and accessibility of acupuncture. However, it never attached figures to these concerns. We think the story should at least have mentioned the cost of a typical office visit to an acupuncturist. The story did a better job than the competing coverage of quantifying the extent of the benefit observed with acupuncture. It explained that children in the acupuncture group had their vision improve by about 2.3 lines on the vision chart, compared with about 1.8 lines in the patch group. (HeathDay, by contrast, merely said that vision “improved markedly” in the acupuncture group.) It also explained that the amblyopia was considered “resolved” in 42% of acupuncture and 17% of patch patients. (The HealthDay we also reviewed described these patients less precisely as “successfully treated.”) Lastly, this story noted that the benefits of acupuncture were much less pronounced after 25 weeks than they were at 15 weeks, whereas HealthDay only mentioned the 15-week outcomes. This study did not report significant adverse effects with either the patch or with acupuncture. In our view, however, this does not absolve the story from at least mentioning the potential for harm with both treatments. The patch, for example, has the potential to cause new onset amblyopia in the stronger eye. And acupuncture might be painful, cause infections (though rarely), and disrupt a child’s education due to the need for frequent treatments. The story did a good job of describing what happened in this experiment and pointed out a number of key limitations. Importantly, it explained that the children receiving acupuncture were told to do an hour a day of vision exercises in addition to the acupuncture — something HealthDay neglected to call attention to. In addition, it cited the small size of the study; the lack of other research on acupuncture for amblyopia; and the significant time, travel and expense of acupuncture as factors to keep in mind when interpreting the results. We wish it had also called attention to the significant placebo effect that is possible with acupuncture and which may have affected the outcome of the study. No disease-mongering here. This story brought perspective from two independent experts who helped put the results in the appropriate context. Unfortunately, it didn’t point out that some of the study investigators may have a financial incentive to promote acupuncture because they are trying to patent needle placement sites related to vision. The competing coverage also failed to identify this conflict. The story weighs some of the pros and cons of acupuncture compared with the traditional patch therapy. It notes that the patch has the advantage of being inexpensive and that it can be worn at home, making it more convenient. Like the competing HealthDay coverage, this story noted that acupuncture may not be widely accepted in some areas. But it also never cautioned that it might be impossible to find a trained acupuncturist in many places in the U.S. It should have pointed this out and emphasized the need to check for accreditation/licensing when choosing a practitioner. While we can’t vouch for this story’s contention that amblyopia has been successfully treated with acupuncture in the past (the studies which apparently show this are in Italian and Russian), we think it’s important that the story at least mentioned this previous research and noted that there is some scientific basis to believe that acupuncture might be therapeutic. Since the story quotes two experts not affiliated with study, we can be sure it wasn’t based on a news release.
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Ebola crisis highlights China's philanthropic shortfall.
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China has contributed over $120 million to fight the spread of the Ebola virus, but its billionaire tycoons - it has more than anywhere outside the United States - have, publicly at least, donated little to the cause, underscoring an immature culture of philanthropy in the world’s second-biggest economy.
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As the ranks of China’s wealthy and the success of its corporations grow, donating to good causes has yet to take off in a significant way. China sits toward the bottom of the list of countries where people give money to charity, volunteer or help a stranger, according to The World Giving Index, compiled by the Charities Aid Foundation. Donations to charities totaled 98.9 billion yuan ($16.1 billion) in 2013, according to Chinese government data, recovering from two straight years of declines. For comparison, Americans gave more than $335 billion, according to the National Philanthropic Trust website. Many big Chinese companies have invested in Africa - China is Africa’s leading trading partner - and some 200 operate in West Africa, where Ebola has been at its most lethal, killing close to 5,000 people. These include construction, infrastructure and telecoms firms such as Huawei Technology Co Ltd [HWT.UL], China Henan International Cooperation Group and China Communications Construction Co Ltd. A Huawei spokeswoman said Africa was an important market, but declined to comment on philanthropy or specific ventures in Ebola-hit countries. China Henan and China Communications Construction did not respond to requests for comment. The World Food Programme (WFP) last month called on Chinese firms and tycoons to donate more to fighting Ebola. “No one’s been willing to do anything big yet,” said Brett Rierson, the WFP’s China representative. The Ministry of Commerce said Chinese firms and industry associations had pitched in to help transport medical equipment in the region and donated around $600,000 in cash, food, oil and motorcycles to local governments. The state-owned China-Africa Development Fund plans to contribute $450,000 to Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone - the three countries most affected by the Ebola outbreak, said Fang Aiqing, vice minister of commerce. Charity experts say Chinese construction firms with projects in the worst affected regions could donate building materials and labor. “They could easily step in and say: ‘we’ll help you clear roads and put in emergency roads and clinics’,” said Gary Rieschel, managing partner at Qiming Venture Partners. “If they put their shoulders behind moving some of the infrastructure for healthcare, they could be incredibly valuable.” Fang at the Ministry of Commerce said aid from Chinese firms should be led and coordinated by the government. “They’re unlikely to come forward independently and would assume the government, which does have experience in contributing for emergencies, will be better at knowing what to do,” said Deborah Brautigam, director of the China Africa Research Initiative and a professor at Johns Hopkins University. “They probably also wouldn’t trust that cash donations to these governments would be used responsibly.” China’s Foreign Ministry, though, said it was encouraging businesses operating in Africa to make their own contributions, but did not note any specific examples. “We encourage these companies to leverage their strengths and help these countries,” Lin Songtian, director general of the ministry’s Department of African Affairs told a briefing on Friday. “Chinese citizens in those countries have a responsibility to share their experience as long as they can do so while remaining safe.” Dudley Thomas, Liberia’s ambassador to China, said his government was in talks with China-Union (Hong Kong) Mining Co Ltd, a unit of Wuhan Iron and Steel Group [WHISG.UL], and the China-Africa Development Fund, which facilitates investment, about possible donations. He said Liberia secured one donation of $100,000 from a large Chinese construction firm that has projects in the country, but few other contributions. “China’s involvement (in West Africa) has been increasing year by year, the share of their engagements is also becoming much bigger than before,” said He Wenping, director of African Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “I think companies should aid countries impacted by Ebola.” He said Chinese firms operating in West Africa and elsewhere in the developing world are generally more likely to contribute to relief for natural disasters, such as earthquakes and floods. Philanthropy may also have been slow to catch on in China as there’s a lack of trust in non-profit groups after a string of scandals involving charitable donations, experts said. “It certainly makes them more cautious,” noted Rieschel, adding the Chinese government’s lack of transparency in handling the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) just over a decade ago may have contributed to eroding trust. “At an individual level, when you look at how opaque the government was about SARS, there may be a tendency to say ‘we don’t trust any government when it comes to these things,’” he said. In its latest Philanthropy List, released last week, the Shanghai-based Hurun Research Institute ranked Jack Ma, founder and chairman of Alibaba and China’s wealthiest individual, top with donations of close to $2.4 billion. The report noted that most philanthropic money in China goes toward education, ahead of social services and disaster relief. U.S. philanthropist Bill Gates wrote an editorial in the official People’s Daily newspaper in April calling for Chinese businesspeople to give back to the poor, both at home and internationally. His Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged $50 million to fight Ebola, while Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has said he is donating more than $100 million.
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Coronavirus tests are unnecessarily invasive and uncomfortable, and could be accurately performed in the same way home DNA tests are executed.
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: A Quarter of a Million Shares and CountingIn just 48 hours, the Facebook post questioning the invasiveness of COVID-19 testing was approaching a quarter of a million shares. Its third question proposed COVID-19 tests were depositing the virus rather that collecting evidence of its presence — a conspiracy that would literally requiring global compliance (and one easily uncovered should the tests be submitted unused.) The first two points contrasted the seeming ease of buccal or cheek swab DNA tests with nasopharyngeal swabbing for COVID-19, blithely skipping over salient scientific facts to do so.The answer to why DNA tests were simple cheek swabs and COVID-19 tests were invasive and uncomfortable came down to two primary factors — the varying aims of each test and the presence of biological material. To be effective, COVID-19 tests were, as of July 2020, best designed to collect material as seen in the illustration; by contrast, DNA could be obtained from hair or cheek cells, not necessarily saliva. The second factor was the purpose of DNA tests, which are very often taken for entertainment or ancestry research. COVID-19 tests were to some degree a life-or-death matter, and as of July 2020, the “gold standard” remained a nasopharyngeal swab.
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Fact Checks, Viral Content
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On July 7 2020, Facebook user David D Smith shared the following post, questioning why coronavirus testing was so invasive, particularly when compared to DNA test cheek swabs:Smith included a shiver-inducing image but no citations, writing:ATTENTION FRIENDS & FAMILY – Before you run out and get yourself “TESTED” for COVID-19 consider a few facts.1) Modern Science can take a swab from the inside of your cheek and do a COMPLETE DNA MAPPING. 2) If this COVID-19 is so CONTAGIOUS that tiny microscopic particles of Saliva in your MOUTH could spread out in excess of 6 feet and you need to wear a mask to stop the Spread. WHY not Swab the inside of your HIGHLY CONTAGIOUS MOUTH ? 3) When you tilt your head back are you sure that is just a Q-Tip going 6 inches up your nose ? – Is it possible that instead of retreiving a SAMPLE, they could actually be IMPLANTING SOMETHING ? ? ? Again DNA can be done at home through the mail with simple MOUTH SWAB but the HIGHLY CONTAGIOUS COVID-19 in your MASK COVERED MOUTHS can’t be tested with a Mouth Swab ? ? Does this sound LOGICAL ?Three points were presented in the post:This came with three big, entirely baseless assumptions:The Image, and Nasopharyngeal SwabbingThe image was commonly shared from the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to discourage people from placing themselves at risk of contracting SARS-CoV-2. Ten days after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11 2020, the image showed up on Twitter to dissuade others from incautious behavior:Hey everyone out there not taking this seriously and risking peoples lives, take a look. Let me tell you how much this probably hurts! #CoronavirusPandemic #COVID19Ontario pic.twitter.com/bNiaFqFXJz— 🎗 kandisee ⁷ 💜🇨🇦 (@kandise12) March 22, 2020Also on March 21 2020, the image was shared to Imgur in much the same fashion by u/iCuPiCuOp:OuchIncidentally, that post involved a comment by u/Inkfinger, who remarked:Umm I swabbed ten patients today and unless I am doing it wrong, that us 100% not how you stab for corona(In replies, u/Inkfinger clarified that they had intended to type “swab,” not the much more alarming “stab.”) In the comment’s thread, u/BillFromAmerica countered, describing the illustration as representative of a “nasopharyngeal swab”:This is a nasopharyngeal swab. I’m an ED nurse and this is how we have been instructed to swab for covid in my hospital.On March 22 2020, u/Inkfinger published a separate post titled “Setting the Record Straight on Coronavirus Swabbing,” linking back to the original “Ouch” post above along with their comment. They wrote:Alright, I am going to take a moment here to take ownership of something I said. As a healthcare professional, I take the spread of misinformation very seriously and it is important to me that I clarify my position on this.Last night, I made a comment [link]My excuse was, I had just gotten home from a 16hr shift, I was tired, browsing imgur and thought the graphic used was hilarious cause it straight up looks like the poor bastard is being stabbed. I left my comment with one of the best typos of my career and went to bed. Woke up this morning to a shock; I had pissed off the entire medical community on imgur.I do sincerely want to apologize. I like to think I am a big enough person (or at least try to be) to admit when I am in the wrong. It was never my intention to spread misinformation about how to obtain an adequate specimen or to create any confusion. I would also like to affirm that yes, this is technically the correct way to obtain a nasopharyngeal swab. I would like to assure everyone that all medical staff at my facility have been trained or re-trained on how to properly swab for coronavirus. In the ER we do this all the time especially during flu season but we all agreed to do a 4 hours in-service where we took turns swabbing each other just to make sure everyone knew how to do properly and what it would feel like. I would also like to applaud the imgur community for calling me out on my bullshit because it is very important that we maintain a flow of accurate knowledge. Especially during a crisis…Discourse on both points cited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance on collecting specimens for SARS-CoV-2 testing. Reviewing that guidance alluded to why COVID-19 tests were so invasive:Proper collection of specimens is the most important step in the laboratory diagnosis of infectious diseases. A specimen that is not collected correctly may lead to false negative test results. The following specimen collection guidelines follow standard recommended procedures.Reading between the lines helped — and another section explained:Testing lower respiratory tract specimens is also an option. For patients who develop a productive cough, sputum should be collected and tested for SARS-CoV-2. The induction of sputum is not recommended. When under certain clinical circumstances (e.g., those receiving invasive mechanical ventilation), a lower respiratory tract aspirate or bronchoalveolar lavage sample should be collected and tested as a lower respiratory tract specimen.In layman’s terms, a patient with clear symptoms of illness (coughing up sputum) were likelier to produce a positive test through other means — their infected “aspirate,” or mucus. Diagrams similar to the one in circulation but produced in 2005 were available here [PDF].A May 28 2020 item in the New England Journal of Medicine explained the procedure and its application during the COVID-19 pandemic, but that information was developed for healthcare professionals, and so it didn’t really delve into why coronavirus testing was so notoriously invasive. However, a June 5 2020 piece by British tabloid The Sun about the prospect of false negatives did put the issue into layman’s terms, quoting several doctors on why COVID-19 tests were so unpleasant for the person being tested:Dr Andrew Preston, an infectious lung disease expert at the University of Bath, told MailOnline that shallower swabs in the nose and mouth were not as good.He said: “It’s clear the deeper into the nasopharynx, the better it is picking up the virus.”Dr Preston added: “We consider it an unsuccessful swab unless the eyes water. We see real, real issues with the sensitivity of the swab if swabbing in nose.“The further back you go, the more chance you’ve got of getting the virus.”As for the image’s origin, an April 1 2020 New York Daily News piece attributed it to the company Medivisuals. Medivisuals captioned the illustration:The nasopharyngeal swab test, which is being used in hospitals and drive-through testing sites across the country, is done by inserting a long plastic stick deep into a person’s nasal cavity and spinning it for a few seconds to absorb a good amount of secretions. The sample is then refrigerated and sent to a lab.Why COVID-19 Tests Are More Invasive than DNA Testing, and the Evolution of SARS-CoV-2 TestsAlthough some carriers of SARS-CoV-2 might have viral material sticking around in their upper respiratory tract (meaning it is detectable only through nasopharyngeal swabs), DNA is, by contrast, easy to obtain:Genetic tests are performed on a sample of blood, hair, skin, amniotic fluid (the fluid that surrounds a fetus during pregnancy), or other tissue. For example, a procedure called a buccal smear uses a small brush or cotton swab to collect a sample of cells from the inside surface of the cheek. The sample is sent to a laboratory where technicians look for specific changes in chromosomes, DNA, or proteins, depending on the suspected disorder. The laboratory reports the test results in writing to a person’s doctor or genetic counselor, or directly to the patient if requested.That said, not all DNA testing is as simple as a buccal swab. In some cases, it is necessary to draw blood to obtain the proper material for testing.In the Facebook post we quoted above, the poster characterized a buccal swab as merely collecting saliva. But the link above adds a relevant caveat for individuals preparing for at-home DNA collection, noting that buccal swabbing and saliva collection are not the same, and that confusion about the two can invalidate test results:People often confuse collecting DNA via cheek cells and collecting DNA via spit. The two are NOT interchangeable processes. If you are doing a paternity test, do not spit on the swabs. Follow directions in the kit and be sure to scrape the insides of the cheeks only. Rubbing the gums may results in collecting excess saliva. If the swabs seem too wet to put in the paper collection envelopes, your instincts are probably correct. Take a few minutes to air-dry the swabs as much as possible by holding them up and waving them in the air prior to putting them in the envelopes.Another element not addressed in the Facebook post is one that often arises in discussion of managing and understanding the COVID-19 pandemic. Namely that SARS-CoV-2 remained a novel coronavirus, with medical science constantly evolving to meet understanding of the pathogen.A May 19 2020 NPR segment addressed how the medical view of testing had evolved between the image’s first appearance on social media in March 2020, citing two studies and noting that information was at the time still in flux:Information is changing quickly and neither [cited] study has been peer reviewed yet, key for acceptance in the scientific community. While these early studies show promise, there still isn’t enough data or information to say with certainty the best test or testing method.NPR quoted Emily Landon, infectious disease specialist at the University of Chicago, on the subject of COVID-19 testing and its advances in the two previous months. Landon explained that home testing would be a boon, particularly to essential workers who were likelier to be regularly exposed to the virus:“The holy grail of testing is really something where people can test themselves on a regular basis,” Landon said. “You don’t need staff or people to wear [personal protective equipment] to do the collecting. You don’t need them to be there if you just hand people a sample and they can pick up a kit and take it home.”Landon envisions a time when essential workers can test themselves daily before heading to work as we wait for a vaccine or cure.As for why self-testing is allowed now, when it was done only by health care professionals at the start of the pandemic, Landon said this is a routine evolution in how scientists approach new diseases. When there’s a new virus, Landon said guidelines always start out especially conservative. For example, doctors testing for COVID-19 used to collect multiple nose and throat swabs, but also blood and urine samples. As doctors learned more, that changed. They’ve since dropped the blood and urine samples. Now, federal guidelines allow for self-sampling and even at-home tests, which is why different testing sites administer different tests.“It’s an acknowledgement that there are practicalities,” Landon said. “We may not need the redundancy we were having before, because now we’re confident this one method is good enough.”That early, better-safe-than-sorry approach evolved as the pandemic entered its second month and researchers were able to glean more information about the virus:As the federal government has adjusted who can administer a COVID-19 test, they’ve also changed how the test can be conducted. Previously, the preferred test was the nasopharyngeal test, which goes all the way to the back of the nose and is extremely uncomfortable. Doctors and researchers are finding that it’s not always necessary to go back that far.An early study by UnitedHealth out of Washington state found self-collected nasal swabs, even those that don’t feel like a brain scrape, can be just as reliable as those particularly uncomfortable tests administered by health care workers. Another study by Rutgers University found testing saliva was also extremely reliable.To answer the Facebook user’s first question about why testing was so invasive, doctors and researchers at the beginning of the pandemic endeavored to produce the most accurate results. As of mid-May 2020, research into the efficacy of other tests — including saliva tests — was underway.Nevertheless, NPR reported that the depth of the nasopharyngeal swabbing was one of several factors in the constantly-changing COVID-19 testing landscape, observing that the practice was “not just [about] how far back you test within the nasal cavity, but when an individual gets tested compared to when their symptoms began.” Presence of detectable viral matter was, therefore, one of several factors considered when examining the reliability of SARS-CoV-2 tests.By June 12 2020, HealthDay was reporting about the possible advent of less invasive testing:Well, the days of “nasopharyngeal” swab tests, administered only by health care workers, may be drawing to a close: New studies find a much more comfortable swab test, performed by patients themselves, works just as well.One new study of 30 volunteers was conducted by researchers at Stanford University in California. It found near-100% concordance between COVID-19 test results from patient-administered swab tests to the lower nasal passage and the more onerous nurse-delivered test much farther up the nose.Another study, conducted by UnitedHealth Group in Minnetonka, Minn., found that self-administered swab samples taken from the lower nasal passage delivered over 90% accuracy compared to standard tests that reached into the nasopharynx (where the nasal passages connect with the mouth).The report indicated that doctors and researchers wanted simpler testing perhaps even more than the public at large:Dr. Matthew Heinz is a hospitalist and internist at Tucson Medical Center, in Arizona, who’s dealt with COVID-19 testing. Reading over the report from Berke’s team, he noted that shortfalls in staff and supplies for COVID-19 testing “continues to frustrate our response to this viral pandemic.”While more study is needed to confirm the new findings, they “may point to a role for more self-administered testing going forward,” Heinz said.A May 21 2020 page from the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas on SARS-CoV-2 testing reiterated the demand for easier tests — and the need for further inquiry at that point in time. In a section about alternatives to nasopharyngeal swab tests, an answer explained why the invasive test was still preferable — greater accuracy:Yes, tests can be performed on other specimen types that are less invasive, such as a throat swab. But they are less sensitive than the COVID-19 nasal swab test. Saliva is another specimen type that is being explored, but the jury is still out on that one. The preliminary data look really promising. But we’re still waiting on larger studies to confirm these initial findings.In addition to nucleic acid testing, which detects a virus’ genetic material, there is also antigen testing, which detects the presence of viral proteins that spur the production of antibodies, or the immune system’s response to invaders.While antigen tests are quicker, they are also much less sensitive than nucleic acid tests. So, while a positive antigen test is informative, a negative result would need to be confirmed by the more sensitive nucleic acid test.It’s important to obtain the best possible specimens, so COVID-19 nasal swab testing that includes nucleic acid testing, which is what we do for our patients here at MD Anderson, remains the best option. After all, what’s the point of doing a test, if you can’t get an accurate answer?As of July 6 2020, a day before the Facebook post was shared, efficacy was still a sticking point in the development of simpler COVID-19 tests. A New York Times article explained that researchers endeavored to strip the process down and make it more accessible, but the work remained in progress:The latest so-called point-of-care tests, which could be done in a doctor’s office or even at home, would be a welcome upgrade from today’s status quo: uncomfortable swabs that snake up the nose and can take several days to produce results.The handful of point-of-care devices now on the market are frequently inaccurate. The up-and-coming tests could yield more reliable results, researchers say, potentially leading to on-the-spot testing nationwide. But most of the new contenders are still in early stages, and won’t be available in clinics for months.Some of the tests in development swap brain-tickling swabs for plastic tubes that collect spit. Others dunk patient samples into chemical cocktails that light up when they detect coronavirus genes. Another type of test identifies coronavirus proteins in minutes, using a cheap device that’s easy to produce in bulk and deploy in low-resource settings.The same reporting described the original swab test as still being the “gold standard”:The gold-standard method involves funneling a long, absorbent swab a few inches into the nose until it hits the nasopharynx, the part of the airway where the nasal passage meets the throat and a common target of the coronavirus.“The moment you see the swab, you’re like, ‘Oh no, my face isn’t that deep,’” said Fernanda Ferreira, a virologist at Harvard University who took a nasopharyngeal swab test in April [2020]. “Turns out it is.”Another expert explained again why the more invasive COVID-19 test remained so common:These tests are painless, and avoid putting health care workers in harm’s way. But they aren’t always accurate. “Unfortunately, this virus doesn’t hang around in the nose or throat so much,” said Dr. Ravindra Gupta, a clinical microbiologist at the University of Cambridge. […]Researchers are still gauging how the accuracy of spit tests stacks up against that of the deep nasal swabs, but early results are promising. “You put it in a tube — that’s hard to mess up,” said Anne Wyllie, an epidemiologist at Yale’s School of Public Health who is studying the saliva tests.Still, the quick tests available now are frequently inaccurate. Although they “ensure we can get an answer faster,” said Dr. Ibukun Akinboyo, a pediatrician and infectious disease specialist at Duke University’s School of Medicine, “you lose some sensitivity,” she said. “It’s hard to win at both.”That article concluded with an important piece of context:A faster, less invasive test would be nice. But even an unpleasant test is better than no test at all, she said. “If it’s this painful one, so be it.”Summary: A Quarter of a Million Shares and CountingIn just 48 hours, the Facebook post questioning the invasiveness of COVID-19 testing was approaching a quarter of a million shares. Its third question proposed COVID-19 tests were depositing the virus rather that collecting evidence of its presence — a conspiracy that would literally requiring global compliance (and one easily uncovered should the tests be submitted unused.) The first two points contrasted the seeming ease of buccal or cheek swab DNA tests with nasopharyngeal swabbing for COVID-19, blithely skipping over salient scientific facts to do so.The answer to why DNA tests were simple cheek swabs and COVID-19 tests were invasive and uncomfortable came down to two primary factors — the varying aims of each test and the presence of biological material. To be effective, COVID-19 tests were, as of July 2020, best designed to collect material as seen in the illustration; by contrast, DNA could be obtained from hair or cheek cells, not necessarily saliva. The second factor was the purpose of DNA tests, which are very often taken for entertainment or ancestry research. COVID-19 tests were to some degree a life-or-death matter, and as of July 2020, the “gold standard” remained a nasopharyngeal swab.Comments
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14972
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It has been estimated that nearly 40 percent of all guns sold in America are sold by private, unlicensed sellers either online or through gun shows.
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"McAuliffe said, ""It has been estimated that nearly 40 percent of all guns sold in America are sold by private, unlicensed sellers either online or through gun shows."" His source is a small-sample survey from 1994 that included firearms that were sold and those that were given as gifts or inheritances. When the results were adjusted to guns sold - the term McAuliffe uses - only 14 percent to 22 percent of the firearms were sold without background checks. The researchers say they ""don’t know"" if their findings are relevant today. No current national study has been published. McAuliffe did not acknowledge these points, all of which have been reported widely."
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false
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Guns, Virginia, Terry McAuliffe,
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"Gov. Terry McAuliffe recently issued an executive order that banned firearms from most state buildings and offered his rationale for a gun control measure he plans to present to the General Assembly this winter. McAuliffe, a Democrat, is calling for a law that would require all prospective gun buyers in Virginia to undergo a background check to determine whether the purchaser has a disqualifying criminal record or mental health history. Although the governor long has supported this action, his intensity grew after the Aug. 26 fatal shootings of Roanoke television reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward near Smith Mountain Lake. Virginia law now requires all licensed gun dealers - those in the business of selling arms - to conduct computerized checks on buyers. But sales between individuals are exempt and that, McAuliffe says, opens a loophole for guns to fall into the wrong hands. A federal law requiring background checks has the same exemption. ""It has been estimated that nearly 40 percent of all guns sold in America are sold by private, unlicensed sellers either online or through guns shows,"" McAuliffe stated in his Oct. 15 executive order. Christina Nuckols, deputy press secretary for McAuliffe, said the source of the 40 percent figure is a 1997 study by the National Institute of Justice that looked at gun owners’ responses to a 1994 national survey asking how they got their weapons. The study found that 30 percent to 40 percent of all gun transactions were made through an ""off-the-books"" transfer in which a background check wasn’t required. The finding has been cited widely by gun control advocates - including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D- Va. - in calling for a federal law mandating universal background checks. But as we and other fact checkers have noted previously, the research is old and limited. Consider: McAuliffe’s statement misses a key distinction in the study: The research looked at all gun transactions - including when a gun was obtained as a gift or as an inheritance - and not just being ""sold,"" as the governor said. The Fact Checker at The Washington Post in 2013 asked one of the co-authors of the study, Jens Ludwig of the University of Chicago, to crunch the 1994 data just looking at sales. Ludwig replied that 14 percent to 22 percent of guns were purchased without a background check. The 1994 data, we also should note, did not have a category for online sales, as McAuliffe’s statement suggests. Earlier this year, we asked the other co-author of the report, Philip Cook of Duke University, what percentage of guns currently are sold without a background check. In response, he sent us an op-ed that he and Ludwig wrote in the National Review after the December 2012 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. - a time when the 40 percent figure was circulating again. ""We’ve been following the give-and-take with some interest because our research is the original source of the 40-percent statistic,"" they wrote. ""Our views may come as a surprise: First, we don’t know the current percentage - nor does anyone else."" The lack of current data is due largely because federal funding for gun studies dried up two decades ago. President Barack Obama issued a memorandum in 2013 directing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to re-examine gun violence. We also should note that Virginia doesn’t keep data about private guns, said Corinne Geller, communications manager for the state police. As a result, we recently gave a False rating to a statement by state Sen. Tommy Norment, R-James City, that only 2 percent of Virginia gun sales are exempt from background checks. The fact is, nobody knows. Our ruling McAuliffe said, ""It has been estimated that nearly 40 percent of all guns sold in America are sold by private, unlicensed sellers either online or through gun shows."" His source is a small-sample survey from 1994 that included firearms that were sold and those that were given as gifts or inheritances. When the results were adjusted to guns sold - the term McAuliffe uses - only 14 percent to 22 percent of the firearms were sold without background checks. The researchers say they ""don’t know"" if their findings are relevant today. No current national study has been published. McAuliffe did not acknowledge these points, all of which have been reported widely. So"
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18624
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Nearly 25 percent of all automobile accidents are caused by texting while driving.
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AstraZeneca Plc said on Thursday its experimental drug to treat moderate-to-severe lupus met the main goal in a late-stage study, an encouraging sign after it failed to meet its main target in the final stage of another trial last year.
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false
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Public Safety, Transportation, Florida, Doug Holder,
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The British drugmaker said anifrolumab under the TULIP 2 program helped patients with systemic lupus erythematosus, commonly known as SLE. The drug had failed to meet its main goal in the final stage of one of the two clinical trials under the TULIP program last year here “These are important results and we will now review the full data set and explore pathways to bring this potential new treatment to patients,” said Mene Pangalos, executive vice president BioPharmaceuticals R&D, adding that only one new treatment has been approved for the disease in the last 60 years. SLE is an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks healthy tissue in the body, with about five million people affected globally, according to the Lupus Foundation of America. AstraZeneca has been in a race with GlaxoSmithKline and French biotech company Neovacs to create new treatments for lupus. GSK received here U.S. approval for Benlysta, the first new treatment for lupus in more than half a century, for intravenous use in children with lupus aged five years and above in April. Anifrolumab, which is also given intravenously, is designed for patients with moderate-to-severe lupus and works by targeting interferon, a protein involved in inflammation.
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26003
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Donald Trump Says 99% of COVID-19 cases “are totally harmless.”
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Based on identified cases, the CDC shows a cumulative case death rate of 4.5% About 4% of new cases require hospitalization. Doctors are beginning to see longer term impacts on patients who had mild cases that never sent them to the hospital.
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false
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National, Coronavirus, Donald Trump,
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"In a Fourth of July celebration with jets flying overhead and soldiers parachuting through the air, President Donald Trump minimized the threat of the coronavirus. With cases surging across many states, Trump said the latest numbers were promising. ""We have tested over 40 million people,"" Trump said July 4. ""By so doing, we show cases, 99% of which are totally harmless. Results that no other country will show, because no other country has testing that we have — not in terms of the numbers or in terms of the quality."" ""Totally harmless"" is a strong term, and while people can debate the finer points of what represents harm, no definition backs up Trump’s 99% figure. We reached out to the White House and the Trump campaign for the underlying data and did not hear back. Death is the least likely outcome of catching this disease. If Trump’s figure was going to be right, it would show up in how many people the virus has killed. Counting deaths from COVID-19 is an inexact science, but no data source shows a rate lower than 4.2%, based on the numbers of identified cases According to the government’s tally at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, since the virus hit, there have been about 2.8 million cases. The death toll has reached nearly 130,000. That would produce a case death rate of 4.5%. Remember, researchers don’t know the number of people infected — only the confirmed cases. The infection tally would be larger than the number of identified cases. Some researchers expect the global fatality rate to come down, with the caveat that it will be higher for more vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and people with underlying health problems. Epidemiologists say we continue to learn more about COVID-19 and the damage it causes short of death. ""To cavalierly say that only 1% of infections result in problems is wildly inaccurate,"" said Donald Thea, Boston University professor of global health. ""We are seeing reports of young people who have recovered from mild cases developing diabetes or blood clots and suffering from chronic fatigue, respiratory compromise, persistent fever or coming back with bacterial sepsis weeks later. There's too many reports of other organ damage that hints that there are possible long term serious implications."" And that doesn’t speak to hospitalizations. By most standards, anything that sends someone to the hospital has done significant damage. Numbers from the COVID Tracking Project give some idea of the hospitalization trends. Unlike the cumulative death rate, this data gives a window into the number of hospitalizations that emerged out of each day’s newly identified cases. The rate has been falling since early June, when it was 8%. But it still sits at 4%, or four times higher than Trump’s 1% figure. Researchers agree that while counting the number of cases is important, one of the most important aspects of the coronavirus remains murky — how many people have been infected by the virus. This is very different from looking at the known cases, because it includes the people who never show symptoms. By one CDC estimate, the total could be 10 to 12 times higher than the number of identified cases. If deaths and hospitalizations remained the same, the threat of death and harm would fall dramatically. The problem is, Thea said, we lack reliable numbers to fill in any of those boxes. He expects the estimated number of infections to grow, but so will the estimated number of deaths. ""We’re undercounting those deaths by 20% to 40%, conservatively,"" Thea said. ""There is a year-to-year-stability in death rates. We’ve seen an enormous amount of excess deaths, and the large majority of the excess mortality is due to the infection itself."" Trump said that 99% of all COVID-19 cases are totally harmless. The White House provided no supporting data. Looking at the worst possible outcome, the government’s numbers show a cumulative death rate of 4.5%, although the actual fatality rate could end up lower once we learn more about the disease The rate at which new cases lead to hospitalizations has fallen, but it still remains at 4%. And public health researchers note that more and more, there are reports that even people with mild cases are hit with medical problems after they’ve recovered. There’s a lot more to be learned about this disease, but nothing says that it’s harmless for 99% of the people it touches."
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9362
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16:8 FASTING DIET LINKED TO WEIGHT LOSS AND HEALTH BENEFITS IN STUDY
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This story described a small study of whether a regime that restricts eating to an eight-hour daily window help people reduce their risk factors for developing metabolic diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. The story’s main strength is that it provided caveats early and often about the small size and short duration of the study and the need for more rigorous trials. However, it didn’t give enough information to help readers understand whether weight loss and blood pressure improvements were sufficient to reduce disease risk. The headline also oversells the findings by stating that the fasting plan is “linked to weight loss and health benefits.” In fact, the study found most metabolic risk factors unchanged. The story also would have been stronger had it used people-first language to help reduce stigma around obesity. There’s a lot of excitement around Intermittent fasting as a strategy to lose weight and reduce risk factors for metabolic diseases like heart disease and type 2 diabetes. The so-called 16:8 fasting diet is just the latest flavor. Early-phase studies like this one provide just a clue of how well they work. News reporting needs to refrain from hyperbole and focus on the many caveats around these trials. This one did a little bit, but not enough.
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mixture
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diet,weight loss
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There’s no cost associated with following this diet. The story said people on the diet “consumed around 350 fewer calories, resulting in a loss of 3 percent body weight, and their blood pressure dropped by around 7mm Hg. However, their fat mass, insulin resistance and cholesterol levels were similar to the control group’s.” That’s a start. The story would have been more informative if it gave actual weights and blood pressure readings along with information on how big the changes need to be to lower a person’s metabolic disease risk, which is the real goal. For example, according to the study, evidence suggests at least 5% weight loss is required to improve cholesterol and glucose regulation. The story incorrectly reported that the results “mirror those” of other intermittent fasting diets. In fact, the researchers said compared with other forms of intermittent fasting, time-restricted feeding “appears to produce less weight loss.” Fasting for brief periods is pretty safe, although the story could have mentioned risks of dehydration, sleep problems, or headaches that might come from getting too hungry. The story did a good job of explaining the need for larger and longer-term studies and the difficulty in conducting diet studies generally. It could have been more direct in explaining that there wasn’t a real control group. Also, it’s unknown whether people could sustain these weight-loss results for a year or longer, especially outside the monitoring of a clinical trial. And these were healthy volunteers, so it’s unknown whether time-restricted eating could help those who have risk factors for metabolic disease. Finally, the story didn’t mention that six people reportedly dropped out of the trial, so only 17 completed it. No disease-mongering here. The story included quotes from a previous story from an independent expert, who spoke on the general topic of fasting diets. More comments from independent sources about this particular study would have strengthened the story. The story should have noted that two of the authors have recently written books about fasting and weight loss. The story mentions other diets such as alternate-day fasting. This is an intervention tied to eating schedules, not a product. There’s no question of availability. The story reported that the findings “shed light on what one type of time-restricted eating does to the body.” According to the study authors, the trial is the first to examine whether time-restricted eating is effective for weight loss and reducing the risk of metabolic disease risk in people with obesity. The story drew exclusively from a news release. It only added some previously reported comments from an independent source.
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3908
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Kamala Harris proposes doubling mental health treatment beds.
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Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris wants to double the number of mental health treatment beds available across the country and increase access to virtual mental health counseling.
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true
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Mental health, Health, General News, Politics, Campaigns, Election 2020, California, Kamala Harris
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Harris on Monday rolled out her mental health platform at a South Carolina event with radio host Charlamagne Tha God, who has spoken about his own mental health struggles. Much of Harris’ plan includes elements she’s teased on the campaign trail, where she frequently says Americans need to put just as much attention on health from the “neck up” as from the neck down. “Instead of letting people silently suffer from depression, from drug addiction, from suicidal thoughts, we need to bring this out of the shadow and discuss it and put resources into it, get rid of the stigma,” the senator from California told a crowd in Iowa this month. Harris’ plan, released by the campaign, lists South Carolina, Iowa and Nevada, all early voting states, as priority states for increasing mental health treatment beds. It also lists Michigan, a key swing state. South Carolina is one of the worst states for access to mental health care, according to rankings by the nonprofit organization Mental Health America. On the trail, Harris, who launched her 2020 campaign in January, has stated the need to put serious resources into mental health treatment. But her plan does not include price tags or details on what it would cost to double the number of treatment beds or cover her other proposals. It does propose a $100 million fund for Native American communities to address mental health. Spokesman Ian Sams did not respond to questions about the plan’s costs. Beyond doubling treatment beds, Harris proposes doubling research dollars for the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs to focus on post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury and other drivers of mental illness. She would direct federal agencies focused on mental health to collect better data on people facing mental illness and reclassify certain disorders, such as schizophrenia, to improve access to treatment. Harris also has proposed a loan forgiveness program for mental health workers who go to areas facing provider shortages. She introduced similar legislation last year as well as a bill to increase telemedicine. The plan goes hand in hand with Harris’ proposed expansion of Medicare. Health care is a major flashpoint in the Democratic primary contest, and Harris has tried to strike a middle ground by proposing a “Medicare for All” system that preserves a role for private insurers. ___ Catch up on the 2020 election campaign with AP experts on our weekly politics podcast, “Ground Game.”
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7608
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Deaths hit 45 at Virginia care home called ‘virus’s dream’ .
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Ronald Mitchell worried about his mother’s care at a suburban Richmond nursing home long before she was swept up in one of the nation’s deadliest coronavirus outbreaks.
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true
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AP Top News, Health, General News, Virginia, Richmond, Nursing homes, Virus Outbreak, U.S. News
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She’s bedbound and susceptible to seizures. A sore on her foot went unnoticed for so long, he said, that it led to the amputation of her leg. When he called her last month after she tested positive for COVID-19, she sounded disoriented, and he stayed on the line as she pressed a call button and waited an hour and a half for a nurse who never came. Mitchell then called Canterbury Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center directly and was told that they were doing the best they could with just two nurses looking after 40 patients at a time in the coronavirus quarantine wing. With the death toll from the Canterbury outbreak rising to 45, Mitchell can only hope that his 62-year-old mother now on a ventilator in a hospital won’t be next. “It’s the worst feeling in the world,” he said. Canterbury, which has surpassed the death toll of 43 in the outbreak at the Life Care Center in suburban Seattle, is the kind of facility that’s particularly vulnerable to a coronavirus wildfire that has raged through the nation’s frail, elderly long-term care populations, claiming more than 4,300 lives. Nearly all of Canterbury’s residents rely on Medicaid funding for care of health problems that in many cases were the product of a lifetime of poverty. It lacks the amenities and space to keep people apart. And it lacks the pay to hire and keep enough staff. “A publicly funded nursing home is a virus’s dream,” said Dr. Jim Wright, Canterbury’s medical director. “It is the best place for a virus to be. People are close together. Their immune systems are compromised. It is just a tinderbox for that match.” Studies have shown nursing homes heavily dependent on Medicaid for revenue have fewer nurses and other staff per patient than average and lower quality of care overall. And some of the biggest outbreaks so far have been at homes tied closely to the government payment program, including ones in Wayne, West Virginia, and the Crown Heights section of New York City’s Brooklyn borough. Canterbury, which had about 160 residents before its outbreak, was thrown into turmoil from the first COVID-19 diagnosis on March 18. Many of the staff who work at multiple facilities — Wright couldn’t say exactly how many — quit because they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to continue at their other jobs. Other workers began to get sick themselves. Around the same time, the second doctor who typically saw patients just stopped showing up, which Wright said had a severe impact on the ability to monitor patients. His wife, a palliative care physician, started volunteering. Everyone at Canterbury had no choice but to take on unfamiliar tasks. “I was changing patients, cleaning beds. My administrator was delivering meal trays,” Wright said. “You pick any element, or any arena in our facility that needed to be up and running at its best and nothing was,” he said. Exactly how the coronavirus got into Canterbury was not clear, though health officials suspect either an infected worker or someone else who came in before visitations and get-togethers were halted in mid-March. COVID-19 tests were available but scarce at the beginning of the outbreak, but Canterbury was not initially able to test all of its residents and staff because of guidance from state and national officials at the time. Virginia’s rules said even long-term care residents had to first be tested to rule out the flu and other respiratory pathogens, something Wright and other medical directors asked the health department to change because of the delay it created. By the time tests were finally conducted on everyone at Canterbury about two weeks after the first confirmed case, more than half the residents infected with coronavirus — 53 out of 92 — showed no symptoms of the disease. “It’s impossible to build walls around something that spreads so insidiously,” said Dr. Danny Avula, the state health department’s area director who has noted that Canterbury has been doing its best. Even in normal times, Canterbury merited just one out of five stars in Medicare’s rating system, with inspection records showing the facility had such poor staffing levels that it impacted patient care. One nurse told an inspector last year “residents would stay in bed because it is almost impossible for two people to assist 62 or 63 residents.” Previous inspections also found infection-control problems and failure to report an attempted rape of a patient. Relatives of Canterbury residents described a facility with long-running quality-of-care problems and said they thought more could have been done to prevent the spread. They also said they had not received adequate communication during the crisis. Kim Thompson’s phone rang before 6 a.m. Thursday, and when Wright told her that her 72-year-old mother, Minnie Brown, had died, she thought it had to be a mistake. Thompson had spoken with her mother over FaceTime two days earlier and she seemed in good health and spirits. Since that phone call, the family had received no updates from Canterbury letting them know her condition had deteriorated. “It’s neglect. It’s negligence,” Thompson said in an interview. Thompson said as Canterbury’s death toll began to climb, she started researching the response at the Life Care Center outbreak near Seattle, where a special federal group of doctors and nurses was sent to help. Since then, several governors have used their emergency power to do the same for their homes. The National Guard was called in to evacuate a home in Tennessee, take over another one in Massachusetts and run tests at a third in Wisconsin. And special “strike teams” have been tapped to run tests and ferry supplies to homes in Ohio, Indiana and Maryland. “Where is the state in some of this? Why wasn’t more done on a state level as well to come in and take over the situation?” Thompson asked, noting that at one point the victims from Canterbury accounted for about a third of the state’s dead. “There’s lots of blame to go around.” Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam recently proposed a budget amendment that increases the rates paid to nursing homes and long-term care facilities by an additional $20 for Medicaid recipients per day. He’s also announced the creation of a task force that is working with such facilities to try and cut the infection rates and deaths. “This boost in funding will help these facilities address staffing issues during this epidemic,” Northam said. Wright, who continues to care for the Canterbury patients who remain, was asked in a news conference last week if he would have done anything differently. “I would have a nursing home that had enough staff around-the-clock, around all the time. I would have a nursing home where everyone had private rooms. I would have a nursing home where there was greater access to the outdoors,” he said. “In other words, I would have a nursing home funded by a society that puts more emphasis on treating our elders the way they should be treated.” ___ Condon reported from New York. News researchers Randy Herschaft and Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.
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28022
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"The word ""maga"" means ""easily fooled idiot"" in Nigerian Pidgin. "
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This fact is often brought up in a way to mock Trump and his supporters. However, it should be noted that this comparison is a bit unfair. In the United States, the word “MAGA” is typically written out in all-capital letters as it is actually an acronym, not a stand-alone word, for the phrase “Make America Great Again.” And, as far as we can tell, the acronym M.A.G.A. does not translate to “easily fooled idiot” in Nigerian.
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true
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Politics
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Homonyms are words that are spelled or sound alike but have different meanings. The word “bow,” for example, can mean the front of a ship, a wooden stick, to bend at the waist, or a tied ribbon. This linguistic oddity can also cross language barriers. These bilingual homophones, or “false friends,” include the words “aloud” (which means “ancient” in Dutch), “gift” (which means “poison” in German), and “fart” (which means “speed” in Swedish). In August 2019, we were alerted to another purported false friend: The word “maga,” which American audiences likely know as the acronym for U.S. President Donald Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again,” means “easily fooled idiot” in Nigerian Pidgin. Author Kurt Eichenwald was one of the first to bring mainstream attention to this translation in May 2018: Most amazing thing I have learned today. MAGA – you know, like Make America Great Again – is in Nigerian parlance a word that means easily fooled idiot. So, hey there all you MAGA folks – Nigeria knew what you were long before the rest of us did. — Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) March 1, 2018 English is the official language of Nigeria. However, pidgin, a grammatically simplified version of a language, is commonly used throughout the country. Nigerian Pidgin, a mixture of English and creole, can also vary slightly depending on the region. As such, it’s difficult to pin down a specific definition for the word “maga.” For instance, Naija Lingo, an online Nigerian Pidgin English dictionary, provided a different definition for the word maga. According to Naija Lingo, this word means “really messed up” and lists “loser” as a synonym. The example sentence for maga is “my guy na so you maga since you lose your job big fool.” Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, a Nigerian linguist who won the Premio Ostana “Special Prize” for Mother Tongue Literature, a prize given to individuals who advocate for indigenous languages, explored the history of the slang term “maga” for an article published on Medium in 2017. Túbọ̀sún explained that the word “múgùn,” which means “fool” in Yorùbá, another common language in Nigeria, was eventually shortened to “maga” in Nigerian Pidgin in the early 2000s: In Yorùbá, a language spoken by about 30 million people mostly in Nigeria but elsewhere around the world, the word múgùn has quite a mischievous connotation. It means “fool”, but when broken down to component morphemes [mú-gùn], it means something like “(someone) to ride about, like an ass”. It is one of those words hard to successfully translate without using too many words. But if someone successfully convinces me to part with $50 with the promise of getting $100 in an hour, and then disappears, I’ve become his múgùn. He rolled me over. In Nigerian pidgin, the word eventually came to be written as mugu, but with the same meaning: A fool. An idiot. Someone easily duped. A victim of a transparent or elaborate con. Sometimes in the early 2000s, at the height of the internet scam generation, when jobless young people used their talents and the newfound efficiency of the internet to trick and dupe people from around the world for thousands of dollars, the word came back into currency, but under another different mutation. Because múgùn was language-specific and mugu was already commonplace enough to be detected when used to describe the victim of one’s mean manipulation, another one had to be coined. That word was maga. According to Túbọ̀sún, maga doesn’t mean much as a stand-alone word, but it is a commonly used expression to describe a specific type of victim: “an online fool who has parted with his/her money and/or emotions for the promise of millions or the promise of a relationship with a prince across the ocean.” The word “maga” has also made it into Nigerian pop culture. Musician Kelly Hansome released a song in 2008 called “Maga Don Pay,” loosely translated to “the maga has paid up,” which, according to Nigerian author Chris Ngwodo, was an “ode to Nigeria’s notorious 419 fraudsters; an unabashed psalm of adoration for their nefarious exploits.” In 2010, the Microsoft Internet Safety, Security and Privacy Initiative for Nigeria produced a music video that also used the word maga. That song, “Maga No Need Pay,” aimed to raise awareness about cybercrime. In a press release for the song, Microsoft defined the word “maga” as “victim” (emphasis ours): This week, a new pop song hits the airwaves in West Africa with a highly unusual message: Don’t be seduced by cybercrime. Cybercrime is a global issue, but perhaps no form of cybercrime has been more associated with a region than the advance fee fraud collectively known as “Nigeria” or “419” scams (419 is the section of the Nigerian Criminal Code dealing with fraud). Through schemes such as fake lotteries, bogus inheritances, romantic relationships, investment opportunities or – infamously – requests for assistance from “officials,” scammers promise an elusive fortune in exchange for advance payments … … MISSPIN Ambassador Ohimai Godwin Amaize is working to shift cultural perceptions of scammers and their victims through the B.L.I.N.G. project, which unites some of Nigeria’s most influential musicians around the problem of cybercrime. Their song, “Maga No Need Pay,” challenges young Nigerians to resist the temptation of “yahoo-yahoo” and avoid creating more maga, or victims. The song, an Afro Hip-Hop and R&B fusion, is intended to help inspire both national and international audiences. So, in Nigerian Pidgin, the word “maga” refers to a person who falls victim to an online scam.
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9939
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Pills Offer Easier Way to Treat MS
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While the headline makes it sound easy, the story gives useful context on just how different patients respond to different medications – both oral and injected. Managing multiple sclerosis is a complex balance in which each patient has to find the drugs that are the right “fit” for them. This story explains that balancing act. Multiple sclerosis is a chronic disease for a lifetime for the estimated 400,000 sufferers in the United States. As a chronic disease with no cure, the managment of it becomes key to helping patients minimize the disability they suffer. Accurate reporting about new drugs, which describe the pluses and minuses, helps patients make better decisions.
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true
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Wall Street Journal
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This story lists both the costs of the newest drug – Gilenya – and the costs of existing injectable treatments. This is a great bonus for the reader. This is tricky. We had a couple of issues with the way in which the benefits are described. The use of relative changes (‘…reduced relapses among MS patients by 54%. Disability progression was reduced by 30%, using a standard measurement of this process.”) and comparisons to other drugs studied in other clinical trials without a bit more clarification was troubling. Patients with the most common form of MS suffer between 0.4 and 0.6 relapses a year (according to Up to Date). Although the story does note that, “..it is difficult to directly compare two different clinical trials,” it does this anyway. Providing apparently comparative data from different studies does not educate the reader on the relative value of different treatment options. A few extra words would have clarified: “None of the available drugs to treat MS have been compared directly in a large enough clinical trial to identify true differences.” We get some valuable description of how other oral medications have come into question (even after FDA approval) because of side effects, and this context allows the reader to judge that perhaps it is too soon to see the new drug – Gilenya – as a complete home run. Side effects mentioned for Gilenya include liver toxicity, infection risk and eye problems. We are given a diversity of voices talking about the overall question of pill vs. shot. But we aren’t told much about the quality of research on the particular oral medications grouped together in the story. Just “large clinical trials” showing they are “effective.” Direct comments on the strength of that data from an outside expert would have been better. The sentence about the “recent analysis by Novartis” troubled us on a number of fronts. Were these results published in a peer reviewed journal or just reporting from the manufacturer? We have more to say in the benefits section. The story does not resort to disease mongering. We get three different physicians from New York University, Mayo Clinic and the MS Society. No conflicts are reported. In future stories, it is always better to state whether a patient who comments is someone whom the drug company provided to the reporter or whether he/she was independent of that. This story gives us a patient but does not explain whether she has ties to Novartis – makers of Gilenya. The story gives us the existing alternatives (shots) and puts the new oral drug in perspective. The comment from neurologist Mark Keegan about why a patient might choose not to switch is very telling and might have been put higher in the story. Good job explaining which oral drugs are pending approval, and which is approved. The story says 6,000 patients are already taking Gilenya, the oral drug that is first in this family to win FDA approval. Gilenya belongs to a family of oral medications, which the story explains are novel in the method of administration for multiple sclerosis. (Oral instead of injectable.) It also outlines different dose forms, such as once-a-day or once-a-week injections. No, the story quotes four people and does not appear to rely on a release.
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8697
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Schools, universities to stay shut as Italy coronavirus death toll rises.
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Schools and universities will stay closed for a second consecutive week in three northern Italian regions in an effort to contain Europe’s worst outbreak of coronavirus, dashing any hopes of a swift return to normality.
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true
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Health News
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The decision was taken as the death toll from the contagion rose by eight during the day to 29, while the total number of cases jumped by 240 to 1,128 — the vast majority in the wealthy regions of Lombardy, Veneto and Emilia Romagna. Besides a growing human cost, the government is also worried by the likely impact on Italy’s fragile economy, with the respected REF Ricerche thinktank warning that the crisis could cut national output by between 1%-3% in the first half of 2020. Deputy Economy Minister Antonio Misiani said on Saturday the government was working on a slew of measures to “boost growth at national level” and would ask parliament next week to let it push up the 2020 budget deficit to help pay for the move. “The decree will mobilize very substantial resources,” he said, without giving precise details. Looking to halt the spread of the highly infectious disease, the government last week banned public gatherings across much of northern Italy and shuttered educational centers. The virus is concentrated in just a few, relatively small areas and locals had hoped restrictions would ease elsewhere. However, government experts said all nurseries, schools and universities in the three worst-hit regions must remain closed until at least March 8. Discussions were still continuing into when museums, theaters and cinemas, that have also been closed since last Sunday, might be able to re-open there. By contrast curbs in neighboring Liguria and Piedmont, which have seen very few infections, were relaxed and classes are expected to resume in these regions next week. Italy’s neighbors are also taking measures to contain the spread of the virus. France on Saturday put a temporary ban on public gatherings with more than 5,000 people, while Switzerland on Friday banned events expected to draw more than 1,000. The Italian cabinet introduced limited measures on Friday to help businesses in the so-called redzone — two areas of Lombardy and Veneto that are under quarantine — and has promised broader help for impacted companies in the coming days. One of the hardest hit sectors is tourism, with hotels and travel agents reporting a wave of cancellations across the country since the outbreak came to light. Italy’s hoteliers warned that a U.S. government advisory calling on Americans to reconsider non-essential travel to Italy could prove the “final blow” to the embattled sector. Italy’s sporting world has also suffered. Five Serie A matches, including a key clash between Juventus and Inter Milan, have been postponed because of the coronavirus crisis, Italy’s soccer League said on Saturday. The matches had been due to go ahead behind closed doors after the ban on public gatherings, however a soccer official, speaking off the record, said broadcasters and fans did not want the matches to be played in empty stadiums and the clubs themselves were concerned about the loss of gate receipts. Highlighting the high rate of infection, one Serie C soccer team from the region of Tuscany, Pianese, has put its squad in quarantine for two weeks after four of its players plus a club official tested positive for coronavirus. Twenty of the 30 Serie C matches scheduled for this weekend have been postponed because of the virus.
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9626
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Statins 'could be valuable addition to breast cancer treatment'
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This story springs from a recent lab study in the UK showing that breast cancer cells can use cholesterol molecules to mimic estrogen in order to grow, offering a potential reason why some breast cancers resist standard anti-hormone treatments. The headline makes a quantum leap in logic in declaring that statin drugs used to lower cholesterol “could be valuable addition to breast cancer treatment.” Similarly, the opening paragraph states that researchers “have raised the possibility of using statins” to stop breast cancer recurrence. That’s rampant speculation, not supported by the research being reported on, and the story should have clarified this. Offering hope that a potential new discovery could curb recurrence makes for intriguing journalism, but if not framed correctly, it is a disservice to breast cancer survivors, especially with such nascent science. More than 2.8 million U.S. women have been diagnosed with breast cancer. After initial treatment, breast cancers that have a large number of estrogen receptors — which constitute the majority of cases — can continue to be treated with hormone therapies such as tamoxifen and aromatase inhibitors, which help prevent recurrence by cutting off hormones that feed the cancer cells. But resistance to these drugs remains a problem. About a third of women with estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer experience a recurrence, often more than five years after the initial diagnosis and treatment. For many breast cancer survivors, the chance of recurrence constitutes an ongoing trauma.
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false
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breast cancer,statins for breast cancer
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There’s no discussion of the cost of statins, which is readily available data. At this point, there are no demonstrable benefits to quantify, even though the story states that the research “demonstrates that statins could be a valuable addition to breast cancer treatment” warranting more investigation. What the scientists found was production of a cholesterol molecule in cancer cells–and that there was potential to slow the cancer cells’ growth by interfering with this molecule. Whether this translates into clinical benefits for women is not known, and won’t be anytime soon. The story should have said this. Statins are among the most commonly prescribed drugs in the U.S. but do carry risks including muscle damage, diabetes and memory loss. This isn’t addressed in the story. The story acknowledges in the fourth paragraph that this is “early research — most of it still in the lab.” Further down it says, “The research has not yet been tested in humans.” It should have gone farther by pointing out that lab studies are often poor indicators of how cells behave in the human body. Further, it would take years of clinical trials to generate data to support the use of statins for breast cancer. Such caveats would help to temper a researcher’s puffery that the study is “hugely significant.” No disease mongering here. It states that the research was funded by Breast Cancer Now, the UK’s largest breast cancer charity. It also quotes a clinical nurse specialist from an unrelated UK charity, Breast Cancer Care. This is sufficient enough to be Satisfactory. However, It does not mention funding from the National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre at the Royal Marsden National Health Service Foundation Trust and the Institute of Cancer Research, also based in the UK.The story could have quoted more outside experts in order to shed light on the challenge of hormone resistance. Some discussion of other avenues of research into hormone therapy resistance would have been helpful, especially other therapies that are further along in human clinical trials. The story says statins are currently used for lowering cholesterol. However, it should have described the clinical trials and government approval processes required for statins to become a treatment for breast cancer. It’s important to add that the headline says statins “could be” added to breast cancer treatment. This sort of statement may mislead some patients who feel desperate to try anything and therefore may seek out and take statins not currently prescribed for them. The story makes it clear that statins would be novel in a possible treatment for breast cancer, but statins by themselves are not novel. While the story does include unique quotes not found in the news release, it also uses quotes directly from the news release without attribution, such as this one: “During the course of treatment, ER-positive breast cancers that are ‘fed’ by oestrogen often become resistant to standard hormone therapy. Our research has demonstrated that these cancer cells can use a cholesterol molecule to mimic oestrogen so that they continue to grow without it. “This is hugely significant. Testing the patient’s tumour for 25-HC or the enzymes that make it may allow us to predict which patients are likely to develop resistance hormone therapy, and tailor their treatment accordingly. “Our study also demonstrates that statins could be a valuable addition to breast cancer treatment, and that this warrants investigation in clinical trials.” And this quote: “This is a really crucial discovery. Far too many women have to deal with the potentially devastating consequences of their breast cancer coming back and this research presents an important opportunity to improve the effectiveness of today’s most commonly used treatments. “This study breaks new ground in uncovering how some breast cancers continue to survive without oestrogen and suggests that women could benefit from adding statins to standard anti-hormone treatments. “But this is early research and greater clinical evidence is now needed to understand the potential risks and benefits of this approach.”
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27503
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A man was burned to death attempting to rescue his dog from a boiling hot spring.
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While no dog was involved, the June 2016 death of a Portland, Oregon man who wandered off the designated path at Yellowstone National Park and fell into the water near Noris Basin Geyser made headlines because of its gruesome and unusual nature. His sister — who was walking with him at the time and saw him fall in — contacted authorities immediately, but due to the heat and acidity of the water, they were unable to find his remains.
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true
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Horrors, freakish fatalities
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Self-preservation is one of the most powerful instincts a human being — or any animal — possesses. Human intelligence gives us the ability to detect dangers other creatures may not perceive, but it also endows us with emotions that can sometimes overpower our rational judgment. When someone near and dear to us — a spouse, a child, a beloved pet — is threatened, our impulse to act in aid can overcome our instinct for self-preservation and lead us to confront death in ways we would never otherwise conceive. The tale that follows is one example of this phenomenon, concerning a man who died in one of the most gruesome ways imaginable in an attempt to rescue a friend’s dog. The hot springs found in abundance throughout Yellowstone National Park’s thermal areas are bubbling cauldrons of steam and boiling water, most of them hotter than 150°F, and many of them in the 185°-205°F range. (Due to the elevation, water boils at about 198° in Yellowstone.) Twenty-two scalding deaths have been recorded in connection with Yellowstone’s hot springs since 1870, all of them known or believed to have involved people who inadvertently fell into the springs through accident or carelessness — save one. On 20 July 1981, 24-year-old David Allen Kirwan from La Cañada, California, was driving through Yellowstone’s Fountain Paint Pot thermal area with his friend Ronald Ratliff and Ratliff’s dog Moosie. At about 1:00 P.M. they parked their truck to get out and take a closer look at the hot springs; Moosie escaped from the truck, ran towards nearby Celestine Pool (a thermal spring whose water temperature has been measured at over 200°), jumped in, and began yelping. Kirwan and Ratliff rushed over to the pool to aid the terrified dog, and Kirwan’s attitude indicated he was about to go into the spring after it. According to bystanders, several people tried to warn Kirwan off by yelling at him not to jump in, but he shouted “Like hell I won’t!” back at them, took two steps into the pool, and then dove head-first into the boiling spring. Kirwan swam out to the dog and attempted to take it to shore; he then disappeared underwater, let go of the dog, and tried to climb out of the pool. Ratliff helped pull Kirwan out of the hot spring (resulting in second-degree burns to his own feet), and another visitor led Kirwan to the sidewalk as he reportedly muttered, “That was stupid. How bad am I? That was a stupid thing I did.” Kirwan was indeed in very bad shape. He was blind, and when another park visitor tried to remove one of his shoes, his skin (which was already peeling everywhere) came off with it. He sustained third-degree burns to 100% of his body, including his head, and died the following morning at a Salt Lake City hospital. (Moosie did not survive, either.) Perhaps David Allen Kirwan didn’t realize just how hot the thermal springs really are, perhaps he didn’t consider the deadly effect submersion in water of such temperatures would have on him, or perhaps blind emotion drove him to act without taking even the briefest moment to consider his own safety. Foolish, brave, rash, or otherwise, can any of us imagine a circumstance, no matter how dire, under which we would willingly dive head-first into a pool of boiling water? Yet another (non-fatal) incident of this type occurred in Yellowstone in 2001 when a 39-year-old tourist from Washington state entered a thermal pool in an attempt to rescue a dog which had bolted from his family’s motor home and jumped into the scalding waters. The man was fortunate to have suffered only second-degree burns and was released from the hospital the next day. On 10 October 2014, another man was hospitalized in Reno after he jumped into a hot spring at Black Rock Desert in an effort to save a dog from the scalding waters: Firefighters received a call at about 4 p.m. of a man jumping into the Double Hot Springs at Black Rock Desert, Fire Chief Willard Gooch said. The man was taken to Renown Regional Medical Center via Care Flight, Gooch said. The extent of his injuries was not immediately known. “There’s three (hot springs) that’s out there that you can get pretty burned from,” Gooch said. “There are several out there that people need to pay attention to.” The hot springs at Black Rock Desert can be streams or deep ponds of boiling water, he said. The Double Hot Springs reach about 180 degrees with very steep and slippery banks, according to the Friends of Black Rock High Rock. Although the area around the springs is fenced, dogs have been known to jump into or drink from the springs, the Friends of Black Rock said on the organization’s website. It [is not yet] known what type of dog jumped in the hot spring, whether the man owned it or if it survived the scalding hot water.
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35781
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In 2019 and 2020, Democratic and Independent U.S. Senators voted to allow health care practitioners to let babies die, untreated, if born alive after an abortion.
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What's true: By voting to block Senate Bill 311, Democratic and Independent U.S. senators prevented the advancement of a bill that would insert into federal law a uniform, nationwide obligation on health care practitioners to provide medical care to babies born alive after failed abortions and introduce uniform, nationwide criminal penalties for failing to uphold those obligations. What's false: In explaining their reasons for voting against the bill, senators did not express indifference to the fate of newborn babies, but rather argued that the bill was legally unnecessary (existing federal law and some states' laws already protect babies born alive after abortions), unfairly criminalized health care practitioners, and inappropriately interfered in the doctor-patient relationships.
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false
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Politics
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In the summer of 2020, Snopes readers asked us to look into the accuracy of social media posts that claimed to list the names of 41 U.S. Senators who had “voted to let babies scream until they die if born alive.” The meme referred to Senate Bill 311 (SB 311), which was introduced in the Senate in January 2019 by Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb. The non-partisan Congressional Research Service summary of the legislation reads as follows: This bill establishes requirements for the degree of care a health care practitioner must exercise in the event a child is born alive following an abortion or attempted abortion. A health care practitioner who is present must (1) exercise the same degree of care as reasonably provided to another child born alive at the same gestational age, and (2) immediately admit the child to a hospital. The bill also requires a health care practitioner or other employee to immediately report any failure to comply with this requirement to law enforcement. A person who violates the requirements is subject to criminal penalties — a fine, up to five years in prison, or both. Additionally, an individual who intentionally kills or attempts to kill a child born alive is subject to prosecution for murder. The bill bars the criminal prosecution of a mother of a child born alive for conspiracy to violate these provisions, for being an accessory after the fact, or for concealment of felony. A woman who undergoes an abortion or attempted abortion may file a civil action for damages against an individual who violates this bill. The text of SB 311 can be read in full here. It’s true that Democratic and Independent senators did vote to block that bill’s progress, but the above-displayed Facebook meme leaves out crucial context — federal and state laws already provide protections for babies born alive after abortions — and obscure the stated reasons for those votes, an essential component of any evaluation of a legislative vote. The proposed “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act” has been stuck in the Senate since February 2019, despite efforts by Republicans to revive it in February 2020. The bill has not been forwarded to any Senate committee, and Republicans have failed on two occasions to obtain the votes necessary to advance the legislation through the Senate. Those two votes, in February 2019 and February 2020, were on motions of cloture. A motion of cloture is, roughly speaking, a proposal signed by at least 16 senators to close debate on a particular bill. At first glance, that might suggest that those in favor of the cloture motion are opposed to the content of the legislation itself, but in fact, “invoking cloture” is a way to advance a bill’s progress in the Senate by pushing through the debate stage and arriving at a full-Senate vote on the legislation itself. Cloture is a key mechanism for breaking a filibuster in the Senate. On most matters, a cloture motion must be agreed to by 60% of senators, which usually means 60 votes (except in cases where a Senate seat is temporarily vacant). In the 2019 vote, only 53 members voted “Yea,” and in 2020 that number was 56 — below the 60-vote threshold on each occasion. It’s worth noting that the Senate has not yet voted on whether to pass SB 311 itself, so a vote in favor of a motion for cloture should not be conflated with a vote in favor of the substance of the legislation. However, it is reasonable to assume, in general, that senators who voted to push SB 311 through to the next stage towards enactment were also in favor of enacting the bill itself, and those who voted against the cloture motions were doing so in order to halt the legislation’s progress because they opposed its contents. This assumption is borne out in the partisan contours of the 2019 and 2020 cloture votes: On both occasions, no Republican voted against the motion, and only Democrats voted against it (including Independent Sens. Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who both caucus with the Democrats). On both occasions, three Democrats crossed the floor and voted in favor of the cloture motions: Sens. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and Doug Jones of Alabama. The exact claim in the Facebook meme is somewhat confusing. The caption refers to 41 senators, but the list contains 44 names. In February 2019, all 44 of the senators listed in the meme voted against the Republican cloture motion. However, in February 2020, 41 of them voted against the cloture motion, with the remaining three not voting (Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Sanders). So it’s not clear to which vote the meme refers. However, on each occasion the wording of the cloture motion and the question put to senators was identical, so the distinction is only a formal one. In evaluating whether the Democratic senators listed in the meme did, in fact, “vote to let babies scream until they die if born alive,” it is necessary to assess the reasons for their votes against cloture motions and the effect of the failure of the cloture motions. It hardly needs to be said, but neither the bill itself, nor any statements made by the Democratic senators who opposed it, contained any mention of “babies screaming until they die.” So in voting against the progress of SB 311, no senator was explicitly voting in order to bring about that outcome, in those terms. Rather, that phrase was a characterization of the effect of the votes, which originated from the creator of the Facebook meme. By voting against the cloture motions, the senators halted the progress of a bill that, if enacted, would mean that federal law required health care practitioners to provide the same life-saving treatments and interventions for a baby born alive after a failed abortion (including admitting the baby to a hospital) as they are currently required to provide to babies born alive under other circumstances. The bill would also mean that health care practitioners would be required, under federal law, to report to law enforcement if they became aware that someone else had violated those requirements. Any health practitioner convicted of failing to fulfill those requirements, or failing to report someone else’s violation, would be liable to be fined and/or imprisoned for up to five years. SB 311 would also mean that a person found to have intentionally killed a baby born alive after a failed abortion would be liable to conviction and punishment under the federal prohibition against murder. Does this mean that by preventing the passage of SB 311 Democratic senators were allowing health care practitioners to lawfully let babies die, without rendering aid, if they are born alive after a failed abortion? Not really. Federal law already explicitly states that babies born alive, regardless of the circumstances, are human persons and should be treated as such in the context of criminal law. The Born-Alive Infants Protection Act was signed into law by U.S. President George W. Bush in 2002. It states that: (a) In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the words “person”, “human being”, “child”, and “individual”, shall include every infant member of the species homo sapiens who is born alive at any stage of development. As used in this section, the term “born alive”, with respect to a member of the species homo sapiens, means the complete expulsion or extraction from his or her mother of that member, at any stage of development, who after such expulsion or extraction breathes or has a beating heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord, or definite movement of voluntary muscles, regardless of whether the umbilical cord has been cut, and regardless of whether the expulsion or extraction occurs as a result of natural or induced labor, cesarean section, or induced abortion. This means that intentionally killing a baby born alive can be, and is, prosecuted as murder, since the baby is defined under the 2002 act as a human person. In principle, it also means that doctors and nurses have the same professional, legal, and ethical responsibility to babies born alive after failed abortions as they do to babies born alive in other circumstances. The 2002 law does not include an explicit, affirmative duty of care for health care practitioners and does not stipulate any penalties for failing to provide appropriate care. However, many individual states do. Based on research originally published by the anti-abortion Family Research Council, Snopes checked legislation in all 50 states and found that, as of Aug. 20, 2020, 34 states have laws that explicitly either: affirm the equal right to medical care of a baby born alive after an abortion; or assert an affirmative legal obligation for medical practitioners to provide care; or set out criminal penalties for failing to provide care; or all of the above provisions. A full list of each state’s “born alive” abortion laws, including links to the original legislation, can be found here. (Note: At the time of the first cloture vote in February 2019, the number of states with “born alive” abortion laws was 33. West Virginia’s Senate passed the state’s own Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act on Feb. 10, 2020, and Gov. Jim Justice signed it into law on March 2, 2020. By the time the U.S. Senate had its second cloture motion on Feb. 25, 2020, Justice had already vowed to sign the West Virginia law, meaning the number of states with “born alive” abortion laws was imminently about to become 34.) The effect of the decision to block the progress of SB 311 through the U.S. Senate was to preserve the legal status quo around the country, namely that: two-thirds of states already had laws offering various levels of protection for babies born alive after failed abortions, and various levels of criminal penalties set out for health care practitioners who fail to provide care for them; and that federal law already recognized that babies born alive after failed abortions should be treated as human persons in the context of criminal law. This significantly undermines the Facebook meme’s claim that the 44 senators had voted to allow babies to be left to die if they are born alive after a failed abortion, because that it isn’t the case in most states. However, passing SB 311 would mean that there would be no ambiguity about the criminal implications and consequences of the 2002 law. Under SB 311, federal law would unequivocally set out a legal duty of care and a reporting obligation for health care professionals, as well as specific criminal penalties. While the 2002 law empowered states to enact their own “born alive” abortion laws, and 34 states have opted to do just that, 16 states have not, and SB 311 would introduce a “born alive” abortion law that would apply uniformly throughout the entire country. By voting to block the progress of SB 311, the Democratic and Independent senators did undoubtedly prevent that outcome from becoming much more likely. In evaluating whether voting against the cloture motions on SB 311 meant the 44 senators were voting to allow babies born alive after abortion to simply die without medical aid, it is also necessary to examine the reasons why the senators voted the way they did. In general, the Democratic senators who gave statements about their votes on SB 311 said that they had opposed the passage of the bill because they felt it was unnecessary in light of existing law and because they felt it inappropriately criminalized health care practitioners and interfered in the doctor-patient relationship. None said they had voted against the cloture motions in order to allow babies to be left to die or expressed indifference about that outcome. Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, for example, wrote, “We should not unnecessarily create new federal crimes and penalties to punish behavior that is already illegal under existing state and federal laws.” Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland wrote, “It has always been illegal to kill or harm a newborn infant, and this bill had nothing to do with that. Instead, this bill would have subjected medical professionals to unprecedented criminal liability and inappropriately comes between a woman and her doctor.” Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii said SB 311 was “a solution in search of a problem,” adding, “Contrary to what the proponents of this bill argue, it is and has always been a crime to harm or kill newborn babies. And people guilty of this crime can already be charged and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” Speaking from the floor of the Senate, Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois emphasized the fact that abortions that take place late enough for a fetus to show vital signs overwhelmingly occur in the context of a late diagnosis of a fetal abnormality that will, in short order, prove fatal. She stated that her reason for opposing SB 311 was that it would exacerbate the suffering of parents in such scenarios and force health care practitioners to attempt medical interventions that they know to be futile. … Imagine the heartbreak of going to the doctor one day and learning that there’s no chance your baby will survive… that there’s no hope your baby girl will ever speak her first word or take her first step … Or that delivering her would put your own life at risk, leaving your firstborn to grow up without a mother. These are the types of scenarios that lead to the heart-wrenching decision to terminate a pregnancy later on. As the mom of two little girls, I can’t begin to fathom that kind of pain.
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6804
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Trump to hold a sports field day at the White House.
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President Donald Trump wants to reverse a trend of fewer children participating in sports and make youth sports more accessible to economically disadvantaged students.
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true
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Youth sports, Health, Politics, North America, Sports, Ivanka Trump, Golf, Barack Obama, Donald Trump
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The White House is promoting the goals of the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition on Wednesday and will hold a field day with the president on the South Lawn. Trump is expected to join athletes at stations that will include flag football, baseball, volleyball, golf, soccer and track and field. Trump issued an executive order in February refocusing the council on youth sports as opposed to President Barack Obama’s emphasis on fitness and healthy eating. Trump, who played high school sports and is a competitive golfer, has sought to work with groups in the public and private sectors to address declining participation in youth sports. Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and senior adviser, noted that the Aspen Institute found that 37 percent of children played team sports on a regular basis in 2016, down from nearly 45 percent in 2008. She told reporters in a conference call ahead of the event that sports participation lags disproportionately among young girls and children who live in economically distressed areas. Many high schools have “pay to play” policies requiring students to pay a fee to join a school sports team, making it difficult for families to afford afterschool sports. “We must break down barriers to youth sports participation and empower each child to reach his or her full potential through sport and play,” Ivanka Trump said. She said that by the time girls reach age 14, they drop out of athletics at two times the rate of boys. Participants at the White House event will include “The Incredible Hulk” actor Lou Ferrigno, who befriended Trump while appearing on “Celebrity Apprentice”; former New York Yankees’ baseball players Johnny Damon and Mariano Rivera; former football star Herschel Walker; beach volleyball Olympic gold medalist Misty May-Treanor; and professional golfer Natalie Gulbis. The President’s Council was established in 1956 by President Dwight Eisenhower to promote youth fitness and sports. Each president has often placed his own stamp on the council and its priorities. During Obama’s presidency, first lady Michelle Obama launched the sports council in 2010 in conjunction with her “Let’s Move!” initiative and took part in hula-hooping and jumping rope as ways to fight childhood obesity. Trump’s administration plans to create a national strategy to promote youth participation in sports and set the stage for a series of events that will culminate around the 2020 Summer Olympics. Trump has bragged about his athletic abilities, telling The Wall Street Journal in a January interview: “I was always the best athlete. People don’t know that.” The president was once the owner the USFL’s New Jersey Generals — his team was led by Walker, a Heisman Trophy-winning running back — and Trump frequently plays golf with members of Congress and world leaders. His White House doctor said earlier this year that Trump acknowledged he’d be healthier if he lost a few pounds by exercising more and eating better. Dr. Ronny Jackson, who has since left that post, told reporters that he’d arrange for a dietitian to consult with the White House chef to cut calories and recommend a low-impact, aerobic exercise program for Trump with the aim of shedding 10 to 15 pounds this year. __ On Twitter follow Ken Thomas at https://twitter.com/KThomasDC
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2621
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Biology gives American psychopaths a legal break.
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Criminal psychopaths in the United States whose lawyers provide biological evidence for their brain condition are more likely to be sentenced to shorter jail terms than those who are simply said to be psychopaths, according to new research.
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true
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Science News
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A study published in the journal Science found that if judges were told a criminal was a psychopath, they considered it an aggravating factor. But if they also heard biological explanations for the disorder, they gave shorter sentences. Researchers from the University of Utah who conducted the study said the findings were surprising and worrying, and external experts said they had problematic implications for how brain science might affect criminal justice in future. “In the coming years, we are likely to find out about all kinds of biological causes of criminal behavior, so the question is, why does the law care if most behavior is biologically caused?” said Teneille Brown, an associate professor at the university’s college of law. Seena Fazel, a clinical senior lecturer in forensic psychiatry at Britain’s Oxford University, noted there are already known biological bases for many disorders criminals suffer from, including drug abuse, alcoholism and antisocial personality disorder. “So if psychopathy reduces your sentence because it has a biological basis, why shouldn’t these other more common conditions also result in reduced sentences?” he said. The Utah team carried out a survey of 181 judges in 19 U.S. states who were given a hypothetical case of aggravated battery to consider. They found that when judges were given a “biomechanical” explanation for a criminal’s psychopathy, they saw this as a mitigating factor and reduced the sentence, on average by about a year. “Judges that heard information about the genetic and developmental causes of psychopathy gave significantly shorter sentences,” said Lisa Aspinwall, a psychologist who worked with Brown on the study. Brown said what was “so striking” about these results in psychopaths was that it was likely there may be even sharper reductions in sentences for defendants with more sympathetic diagnoses such as mental retardation or schizophrenia. Several studies in recent years have found that psychopaths who have committed serious crimes like murder and rape have faulty connections in their brains which show up on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. These and other advances in neuroscience have led some to worry that such scientific evidence may be used increasingly in court to explain criminal actions or argue mitigating circumstances. In a report earlier this year by Britain’s national academy of science, the Royal Society, leading scientists and lawyers advised extreme caution on the use of brain scans and genetic data in court. Interest in the minds of violent criminals has also been sharpened by the trial of Anders Behring Breivik, who massacred 77 people in Norway in July 2011, in which the prosecution argued Breivik was insane. If judges agree, he will go to a mental institution instead of a prison. The verdict in his trial is due to be announced on Aug 24. Brown and her colleagues said their study raised ethical questions: Whether it was right to reduce a criminal’s sentence because defective genes or brain function meant he had less self-control and ability to tell right from wrong. Or whether such evidence should be an argument for a harsher sentence because the criminal may be more likely to reoffend. The study’s results showed that judges who were given a biological explanation for a convict’s psychopathy imposed sentences averaging 12.83 years - about a year less than the 13.93-year average imposed by judges who were only told the defendant was a psychopath. Even though a year is a relatively small reduction, Brown said she was “amazed the sentence was reduced at all given that we’re dealing with psychopaths, who are very unsympathetic”. Fazel said he would be very concerned about the reliability in legal terms of the idea of psychopathy. The condition is not currently in diagnostic classification systems, he said, and two separate experts may come to very different conclusions about whether or a not a criminal is psychopathic. “If a condition or disorder is going to be used to mitigate sentence length, it should have high levels of reliability, as found with severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia,” he said.
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15916
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When I came into office, our vaccination rate in Texas was 65 percent. When I left two weeks ago, it was 95 percent.
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"Perry said: ""When I came into office, our vaccination rate in Texas was 65 percent. When I left two weeks ago, it was 95 percent."" These percentages trace to reported immunization rates for different populations of youngsters. And by inappropriately pairing the figures, Perry left the incorrect impression of great progress on his watch when there actually was less dramatic improvement--with kindergartners almost uniformly getting all their shots, as required by law, as they did before his reign. The statement is not accurate. UPDATE, 3:48 p.m., Feb. 12, 2015: After this story published, a reader prompted us to notice that a Perry spokesman had told the Texas Tribune the ex-governor used ""incomplete numbers."" We amended our fact check to note that. This did not affect our rating of what he said."
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false
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Corrections and Updates, Health Care, Public Health, Texas, Rick Perry,
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"Rick Perry, saying parents should get their children vaccinated, went on to say his home state greatly stepped up vaccinations in his 14 years as Texas governor. In a Feb. 5, 2015, interview with The Washington Post and Texas Tribune, Perry said national and state leaders should use their power to encourage the childhood shots. ""I think governors, elected officials, people in positions of authority and power and influence, should use those positions to make sure that the people they either represent or have the opportunity to work for are as healthy as they can be,"" Perry said. ""Obviously vaccines are a very important part of that."" In the interview, Perry also said that when he came into office, ""our vaccination rate in Texas was 65 percent. When I left two weeks ago, it was 95 percent."" He continued, according to video placed online by the Tribune: ""We know that vaccines — science backs it up every day — that vaccines are a very very important tool to keep our citizens safe."" The next morning, the Post’s Fact Checker gave Perry three Pinnochios for those declared percentages, saying that according to federal data, nearly 64 percent of preschool children in Texas obtained all recommended vaccinations in 2000, the year Perry became governor, and about 73 percent of such children did so in 2013, his second-to-last year in office. Also, the story said, the latter rate was a decrease from 2007. (A Perry spokesman later told the Tribune Perry had used ""incomplete numbers."") State-provided charts For our own review, we asked Perry how he reached his figures and we turned to the Texas Department of State Health Services, whose spokeswoman, Carrie Williams, emailed us a couple charts indicating the state’s vaccination rates over the years. In 2000, one chart says, 69.5 percent of Texas children aged 19 months through 35 months had received recommended shots against diptheria/tetanus/pertussis, polio and measles, mumps and rubella, in accordance with state law. In 2013, the latest year on the chart, 80.1 percent of children in the age range had received those shots. On Perry’s watch, according to the chart, year-by-year shot rates for preschoolers ranged from a low of 71.3 percent in 2002 to a high of 81.7 percent in 2010. One takeaway: The share of Texas preschool toddlers getting basic shots was up about 10 percentage points toward the end of Perry’s time as governor. Perry's '95 percent' backup So, how did Perry arrive at his statement that 95 percent of Texas children were immunized? Perry spokesman Travis Considine offered as backup for this part of Perry’s statement an October 2014 CDC press release stating that in the 2013-14 school year, 97 percent or more of Texas children enrolled in kindergarten had gotten required-for-enrollment shots for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR); diptheria and tetanus toxoids as well as acellular pertussis (DTaP); and varicella. Another chart in the release indicates 7,803 children were exempted from getting all the shots, amounting to 2 percent of all the kindergartners. Then again, the statistic for kindergartners getting shots is a different measure than the statistic for toddler immunizations. Indeed, the second State Health Services chart shows that nearly all the state’s kindergartners got fully vaccinated in all the years Perry was governor--and nearly all students had done so for years before. In 2000, Texas children in kindergarten had vaccination rates for different shots ranging from 95 percent to 99 percent, according to the chart. In 2013, the last year on the chart, kindergartners had vaccination rates of 97.2 percent to 98.1 percent depending on the shot being gauged. Shot rates for kindergartners were in the high 90s since the earliest year on the chart, 1993. We figure those particular rates have remained high because the shots are required by law before a student enters public school, as a state handout makes clear. A wrinkle: Parents may seek to exempt their children from the required shots for ""medical contraindications"" and ""reasons of conscience, including a religious belief,"" according to state regulations. To claim an exemption due to reasons of conscience, a student's parent or legal guardian must submit a State Health Services affidavit to the child's school; it’s valid for two years, the agency says. In 2013-14, 0.76 percent of children received conscientious exemptions, according to an agency chart. We forwarded what State Health Services gave us to Considine and didn’t hear back. Finally, for scientific perspective we reached Catherine Troisi, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. By phone, Troisi looked over CDC figures and the charts we fielded from the state. She said the contrast between young preschoolers' vaccination rates in 2013 to rates in 2000 reflected a ""statistically significant"" improvement. As governor, Troisi said, Perry had some oversight of State Health Services. But she said she also credits the federal government, through the CDC, for improved immunization rates; federal aid helps low-income residents get shots, she said. Our ruling Perry said: ""When I came into office, our vaccination rate in Texas was 65 percent. When I left two weeks ago, it was 95 percent."" These percentages trace to reported immunization rates for different populations of youngsters. And by inappropriately pairing the figures, Perry left the incorrect impression of great progress on his watch when there actually was less dramatic improvement--with kindergartners almost uniformly getting all their shots, as required by law, as they did before his reign. With all this in mind, – The statement is not accurate. UPDATE, 3:48 p.m., Feb. 12, 2015: After this story published, a reader prompted us to notice that a Perry spokesman had told the Texas Tribune the ex-governor used ""incomplete numbers."" We amended our fact check to note that. This did not affect our rating of what he said."
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37918
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Wondering about Kyle Rittenhouse's father? Call the Kenosha Sheriff's Dept and ask for Deputy Rittenhouse.
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‘Deputy Rittenhouse’ and the Kenosha Sheriff’s Department
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unproven
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Disinformation, Fact Checks
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On August 27 2020, amid algorithmically-charged discourse about teenaged shooting suspect Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin, rumors on Facebook and Twitter appeared with claims that Rittenhouse’s father was “Deputy Rittenhouse” of the Kenosha Sheriff’s Department:Wondering about Kyle Rittenhouse's father? Call the Kenosha Sheriff's Dept and ask Deputy Rittenhouse?— Kathy Davoll (@Kathy5751) August 27, 2020ExamplesIn the first post above, from Facebook, somebody wrote:Wondering about Kyle Rittenhouse’s father? Call the Kenosha Sheriff’s Dept and ask for Deputy Rittenhouse.In a Twitter reply above, a separate account asked:Wondering about Kyle Rittenhouse’s father? Call the Kenosha Sheriff’s Dept and ask Deputy Rittenhouse?Another reply made the same claim:The father of this terrorist is Deputy Rittenhouse.— Barin Nelyse, PhD (@BarinNelyse) August 28, 2020Kyle Rittenhouse and the August 25 2020 Kenosha ShootingAs of August 28 2020, most social media users were familiar with Kyle Rittenhouse’s name.He came to national attention during protests over the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha in August 2020. Rittenhouse was arrested and charged after allegedly shooting three protesters, killing two of them:Kyle Rittenhouse, a white 17-year-old from Illinois, was captured on video seconds after the first of two fatal shootings [on August 25 2020] during the third straight night of unrest in Kenosha over the police shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake. Still, questions remain surrounding Rittenhouse’s presence at the protests and the moments leading up the gunfire.In a video on social media, Rittenhouse, seen carrying a semi-automatic rifle, appears to say he “just killed somebody” while jogging away from a man who had just been fatally shot in the head.Rittenhouse, of Antioch, faces charges of first-degree intentional homicide and first-degree reckless homicide, among others, following the shooting, which took place amid turmoil after a Kenosha police officer shot Blake seven times in the back [August 23 2020], potentially paralyzing him. Rittenhouse was taken into custody in Lake County, Illinois, [on August 26 2020] and is scheduled for an extradition hearing on [August 28 2020]. He was officially charged [on August 27 2020].Video of an individual believed to be Rittenhouse, captured in the course of the chaotic incident, circulated on Twitter:(Warning, Graphic/Violent) A crowd chases a suspected shooter down in Kenosha. He trips and falls, then turns with the gun and fires several times. Shots can be heard fired elsewhere as well, corroborating reports of multiple shooters tonight #Kenosha #KenoshaRiots pic.twitter.com/qqsYWmngFW— Brendan Gutenschwager (@BGOnTheScene) August 26, 2020Rittenhouse’s mother, Wendy Rittenhouse, has been mentioned in much of the extensive reporting on the shooting and her son’s arrest. The Washington Post reported on August 27 2020 that Wendy and Kyle Rittenhouse lived in Antioch, Illinois at the time of the incident:Before the deadly shooting, Rittenhouse lived with his mother, Wendy Rittenhouse, a single mom and nurse’s assistant, in a quiet apartment complex beside a park in Antioch, a bedroom community that sits just south of the Wisconsin border.According to court records reviewed by the Chicago Tribune, Wendy Rittenhouse sought an order of protection from police in January 2017, claiming that a classmate of her son’s had been threatening him and calling him “dumb” and “stupid.” The Washington Post was unable to reach her for comment.Mention of her attempt to obtain a protection order appeared in multiple articles, but little else was known about Rittenhouse’s family. His father was not mentioned in any reporting we located.Kyle and Wendy Rittenhouse did not live in Kenosha at the time of the shooting; they were residents of nearby Antioch.Call the Kenosha Sheriff’s Dept. and Ask for Deputy RittenhouseWe called the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Department on August 28 2020 to ask about the rumor. However, no one was available for comment; we sent an email as well, but we have not yet received a response.On the Kenosha County website, a “Sheriff” section provided information about the Department. A page on that site, “Administration (Home > Departments > Sheriff > Administration),” included information about Sheriff David G. Beth, as well as Chief Deputy Marc Levin.Levin’s portion showed that he was elevated to the position of Chief Deputy in 2017:Chief Deputy Marc Levin was hired as by the Department in July of 1990. In 2001 he was promoted to Sergeant after working for 11 years as a patrol deputy on all three shifts. As a Sergeant, Levin supervised first and third shift patrol until 2011 when he was promoted to Lieutenant and was in command of the Conveyance Bureau and a member of the Courthouse Security Advisory Committee.Levin was then promoted to the rank of Captain in 2015. Captain Levin commanded the Detentions Division overseeing the Kenosha County Detention Center and the Kenosha County Jail Pre-trial Facility. There he was responsible for over 200 full and part-time staff members.Chief Deputy Levin holds a bachelor Degree from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee majoring in Criminal Justice.On January 4, 2017 Levin was promoted for the fourth time to the rank of Chief Deputy where he serves as second in command of the entire Kenosha Sheriff’s Department and is charged with administrating daily operations.No mention of a “Deputy Rittenhouse” appeared on the “Administration” page of the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Department. Neither was the page hastily changed in the wake of Rittenhouse’s identification and arrest — it was most recently archived in March 2020, and the content was identical when we accessed it on August 28 2020.A search for “Rittenhouse” across the entire site yielded no results on August 28 2020. Finally, a “Staff” page (Home >Staff Directory) did not mention anyone named Rittenhouse in the Kenosha Country Sheriff’s Department’s employ. Again, that page was most recently archived in March 2020, and no one with the surname “Rittenhouse” was scrubbed from the page in August 2020.We replicated our searches on the City of Kenosha’s website, yielding no results for “Rittenhouse.” August 28 2020 reporting on Kenosha’s Sheriff typically referenced Kenosha County, not the City of Kenosha. The only result for a “Deputy” on the City of Kenosha’s website referred to a Deputy of Human Resources.VerdictA number of social media posts advised social media users to “call the Kenosha Sheriff’s Department and ask for Deputy Rittenhouse,” a directive we attempted to follow to verify the claim. Although we were unable to make contact by phone, we did send an email. Moreover, both the “Administration” and “Staff” pages for Kenosha County and City yielded no results for the name “Rittenhouse.” None of the posts provided evidence; due to the lack of any supporting evidence and extensive evidence showing otherwise but given the difficulty of proving negatives, we currently rate this claim as Unknown.Comments
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29104
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List reproduces various statements made by Hillary Clinton.
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How accurate is collection of controversial statements reportedly made by Hillary Clinton?
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mixture
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Politics, hillary clinton
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Attempting to assign any kind of status to this 2007 collection of purported quotes by Hillary Rodham Clinton poses something of a problem. All of them have appeared in print as things the former first lady and current U.S. senator from New York supposedly said (although some of them are missourced in the example reproduced above), but they are stripped of explanatory context (and/or accompanied by misleading explanations), and they range from scripted public statements to spontaneous private utterances, from reports by mainstream journalists to revelations by unnamed or anonymous sources to mere hearsay repetition of rumor. We have attempted to trace each entry back to its first print source, provide a reasonably full context for the given quote, and note where the print source came by its information: While this quote is included in more than one book about the Clintons, its original source was a January 1994 American Spectator article by David Brock, who interviewed four state troopers who had worked for the Clintons while Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas. The quote was taken from information provided by Arkansas state trooper Larry Patterson: The troopers were also objects of Hillary’s wrath. Patterson recalled the early morning of Labor Day in 1991, when Hillary came out of the mansion, got in her car, and drove off. Within a minute or so of leaving the gate, her aging blue Cutlass swung violently around and came charging back onto the grounds, tires squealing in the dust. “I thought something was terribly wrong, so I rushed out to her. And she screamed, ‘Where is the goddamn f — -ing flag?’ It was early and we hadn’t raised the flag yet. And she said, ‘I want the goddamn f — -ing flag up every f — -ing morning at f — -ing sunrise. '” But in 1998, David Brock himself expressed skepticism about the validity of some of the claims he made in his American Spectator “Troopergate” article and doubts about the truthfulness of the sources he depended on for it: I guess that I should confess that as the author of the infamous piece, I think “proving Troopergate” may be a tall order. I was as sure of that story when I wrote it as any journalist can be of any story. But in the years since then, the troopers have greatly damaged their credibility. I’m sure you remember that during the Senate Whitewater hearings, the troopers made fools of themselves with improbable claims about the circumstances of Vincent Foster’s death. One of the two troopers who went on the record with me, Larry Patterson, helped promote the infamous Clinton Chronicles, a crackpot video accusing [Bill Clinton] of drug running and murder. Patterson was also recently cited as a source for The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, by British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. So I’ve had occasional pangs of doubt: Is it possible that they took me for a ride, embellishing their account for fame and fortune? Attorney Joseph Califano worked in the Pentagon under Robert McNamara (who was Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations), served as an aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson, and held the cabinet position of Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in the Carter administration, and he remained involved in national politics while in private practice. In 1970, when Senator Walter Mondale (then chairman of the Subcommittee on Migratory Labor, under the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare) was conducting an investigation into migrant labor problems, Califano was retained by Coca-Cola chairman and CEO Paul Austin to represent that company. (Coca-Cola was involved in the issue Mondale was investigating due to its 1960 acquisition of Minute Maid, whose Florida groves employed migrant farm workers.) According to Califano’s 2004 memoir (Inside: A Public and Private Life), Hillary Rodham, then a first-year law student at Yale, was present at the Senate hearings and chastised him for daring to represent corporate interests: On July 24, 1970, at 10 A.M., the hearings were held in the Senate Caucus Room in the Russell Building, the scene of many great Senate confrontations, include the McNamara muzzling-the-military hearings, which I had lawyered almost ten years earlier. As [Paul] Austin, [Coca-Cola food division head] Luke Smith, and I entered the Caucus Room on that steamy Washington morning, it was so jammed with spectators that many were standing and sitting on the floor. A large number were student interns working on the Hill that summer, angry about Nixon’s bombing Cambodia, dispirited about the four students killed at Kent State University that May. Many in that room had been among the 100,000 young Americans who had earlier that summer clogged the city to protest the war. Anti-establishment fervor, at a fever pitch that July, was palpable in the hearing room. About half way down the aisle, a young woman with dark hair and thick-rimmed glasses abruptly came in front of me and said, “You sold out, you motherfucker, you sold out!” I kept walking, pretending to ignore her. Two and a half years later, at 11:00 A.M. on Monday March 19, 1973, that same young woman walked into my office at Williams, Connolly & Califano for a job interview. It was Hillary Rodham, who was graduating from Yale Law School later that year. Neither of us mentioned the incident in the Senate Caucus Room. I offered her a job, but she decided to go to Arkansas rather than practice law in Washington. An endnote indicates Califano confirmed the date and time of Hillary Rodham’s 1973 interview at his firm through a notation in his daily calendar, but how he recognized her from having encountered her fleetingly on a single occasion years earlier is not explained. (No other reference to her appears in the book, and Califano said the Senate incident wasn’t mentioned by either party during the interview.) Possibly he crossed paths with Hillary Rodham at other times, or had other opportunities for learning about who she was, that were not mentioned in his memoirs. On 16 April 2004, Dateline NBC aired an interview with New York’s junior senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton, conducted by Katy Couric. The following question-and-answer exchange regarding the 9/11 Commission (which was then investigating the September 11 terrorist attacks upon the United States) was part of that interview: Couric: “How do you feel when people say, ‘Well the Clinton administration should’ve done this, they should’ve responded more forcefully to the USS Cole. There were many things that could’ve been done prior to the Bush administration taking over, things that weren’t done. '” Clinton: “I think that is one of the questions that this commission should help us answer. It’s been said, and I think it’s accurate, that my husband was obsessed by terrorism in general and al-Qaida in particular. And they did a lot. But there’s always room for analysis about what more could’ve or should’ve been done. And I think that’s true with the Bush administration.” Chapter 4 of the 9/11 Commission Report (“Responses to Al Qaeda’s Initial Assaults”), issued a few months later, noted: [White House Terrorism Advisor Richard] Clarke hoped the August 1998 missile strikes [launched by the Clinton administration against Bin Ladin camps in Afghanistan] would mark the beginning of a sustained campaign against Bin Ladin. Clarke was, as he later admitted, “obsessed” with Bin Ladin, and the [August 1998] embassy bombings [in Kenya and Tanzania] gave him new scope for pursuing his obsession. Terrorism had moved high up among the President’s concerns, and Clarke’s position had elevated accordingly. The first U.S. presidential reception celebrating Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim fast-breaking festival that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan, was held at the Old Executive Office Building on 20 February 1996. On that occasion, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton addressed about 180 Muslims in attendance, including members of the American Muslim Council. The web site truthinmedia.org reported the following about her remarks at that reception: I have to admit that a good deal of what my husband and I have learned (about Islam) has come from my daughter,” said Hillary Clinton, addressing the members of the American Muslim Council (AMC) at the first-ever White House celebration of Eid al-Fitr (a Muslim religious holiday) on February 20, 1996. “(As) some of you who are our friends know, she (Chelsea) took a course last year in Islamic history.” Chelsea has been educating her parents about Islam ever since, the First Lady explained. As she accepted the two AMC gifts of Qur’an, the Muslim holy book, Mrs. Clinton said: “I am honored to have these gifts … one for my husband, and one for me, as Chelsea already has her copy.” As the Washington Post noted of that same event: American Muslims marked a milestone in the growth and acceptance of Islam in the United States with the first presidential reception to celebrate the end of the holy month of Ramadan. “It’s only fitting that, just as children and families of other faiths come here to celebrate their holy days … [Muslims] come here, too,” first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton said at the family event in the Old Executive Office Building. The reception marked the day Muslims call Eid al-Fitr — the feast of the fast-breaking. It signals the end of Ramadan, a month of self-reflection and self-imposed discipline during which observant Muslims do not eat or drink during daylight hours. Clinton called the Eid “an American event” and said White House recognition of the holiday was “historic and overdue.” She said Muslims — who number as many as 5 million in the United States — were the latest immigrant group to enrich the United States by contributing to its religious heritage. About 180 Muslims attended the reception. Besides African American converts, immigrant Muslims from the Middle East, India, Pakistan, Indonesia and elsewhere were in attendance. Khaled Saffuri, assistant executive director of the American Muslim Council, a Washington-based public-policy agency, said the Clinton White House has been more welcoming to Muslims than any previous administration. “We have asked before for recognition of the Eid, but our request always went unanswered,” he said. This quote is taken from Christopher Andersen’s 2004 book, American Evita: [Hillary] also resented [the state troopers’] constant presence and the loss of privacy that entailed. At times, a simple “Good morning, Mrs. Clinton” could provoke an attack. “Fuck off!” she would bark. “It’s enough that I have to see you shit-kickers every day. I’m not going to talk to you, too. Just do your goddamn job and keep your mouth shut.” The endnotes for the corresponding chapter reference a number of conversations and print articles but don’t indicate which might have been the source for this putative quote. This quote appears in Joyce Milton’s 1999 book, The First Partner, but no source is provided for it — the statement is simply reported (without detail) as a comment the First Lady purportedly made to an unnamed “agent”: One [Secret Service] agent, who politely explained to Mrs. Clinton that his duties did not include toting suitcases from their airplane to their limo, was shocked when she replied, “If you want to remain on this detail,” get your fucking ass over here and grab those bags.” This statement is taken from the 2003 book Hillary’s Scheme, where it is quoted from a February 2000 article published in the supermarket tabloid Star and attributed to an unidentified “informed source”: Star has learned that on nearly a dozen occasions in the last three months, Hillary has viciously lashed out at numerous Secret Service agents for getting in her way — or for simply doing their jobs … A young Secret Service officer stationed at the South Portico says he did nothing more than smile and say, ‘Good morning, Mrs. Clinton.’ Mrs. Clinton brushed by him, actually shoving him out of her way, an informed source tells Star. As she did, she snapped at him and cursed, ‘Get f____d!’ That officer made a report of Mrs. Clinton’s behavior to his superiors and Star has learned that about 10 other similarly ugly incidents have also been reported in recent months. In other cases she is reported to have said such things as: ‘Get the f___ out of my way!’ Or, ‘Get out of my face!’ This quote is taken from (the 1998 edition of) former FBI agent Gary Aldrich’s 1996 book, Unlimited Access. The passage in which it appears is part of a section detailing President Clinton’s supposed habit of sneaking out of the White House to evade his Secret Service detail while on his way to trysts at a nearby hotel and is attributed to an unnamed source identified as “a senior law enforcement officer with more than twenty years’ service in a federal agency”: My source used the term “the first family” rather than simply “the president” because he says Hillary Clinton is as bad as the president. She has told her Secret Service Protective Detail agents in public to “Stay the f–k back, stay the f–k away from me! Don’t come within ten yards of me, or else!” When the agents have tried to explain to the first lady that they cannot effectively guard her if they must remain so far away, her reply is, “Just f–king do as I say, okay?” In 1997, David Brock, author of the American Spectator “Troopergate” article cited above, wrote of Aldrich’s book: In his best-selling exposé on the Clinton White House, Aldrich reported as fact a wild rumor about Bill Clinton sneaking out of the White House to a Marriott hotel to meet women for trysts. Because Aldrich had been assigned to the White House during the first two years of the Clinton presidency, I had asked him about this piece of gossip, which I’d heard while I was digging for damaging material for my own book. He told me then that he knew nothing about the rumor. [After Unlimited Access was published,] I called Aldrich, who verified that I, in fact, was the sole source for his supposed scoop. My public comments, other glaring holes in the book, and Aldrich’s loopy tales of X-rated ornaments on the White House Christmas tree led the mainstream press to deep-six Unlimited Access. But as someone who tries hard to practice credible journalism from a conservative perspective, I was outraged when conservative outlets … let Aldrich brazen it out and perpetrated a hoax on the public by celebrating Unlimited Access as legitimate and well-researched. On 28 June 2004, New York senator Hillary Clinton appeared at a San Francisco fund-raising event for California senator Barbara Boxer, where she explained that Democrats hoped to overturn tax cuts enacted by the Bush administration that they felt had unfairly favored the wealthy over middle- and lower-class taxpayers. Senator Clinton was not addressing her remarks to the general public; she was speaking to a group of mostly well-off Democratic supporters who had paid several thousand dollars each to attend the event: Headlining an appearance with other Democratic women senators on behalf of Sen. Barbara Boxer, who is up for re-election this year, Hillary Clinton told several hundred supporters — some of whom had ponied up as much as $10,000 to attend — to expect to lose some of the tax cuts passed by President Bush if Democrats win the White House and control of Congress. “Many of you are well enough off that … the tax cuts may have helped you,” Sen. Clinton said. “We’re saying that for America to get back on track, we’re probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” In his 2005 book about Bill Clinton in the White House, The Survivor, John F. Harris (a Washington Post national correspondent who covered the Clinton administration for six years) wrote of Hillary Clinton’s 2000 campaign for a seat representing New York in the U.S. Senate: One way that [Hillary] was not like her husband was in how she responded to the rigors of political combat. Criticism might make him indignant in the moment, but he regarded it as part of the game; he was resilient. She, however, was sensitive. Beneath a tough exterior, criticism was personal and painful to her. During one sordid moment in summer 2000, a character from the president’s Arkansas past surfaced, leveling charges of anti-Semitic utterances by Hillary Clinton. The alleged episode was more than a quarter century old, from Clinton’s unsuccessful 1974 campaign for Congress. Hillary Rodham, not yet married to Clinton, supposedly hurled the epithets at a campaign staff aide in an argument. An angry dressing-down was certainly plausible; crude religious epithets were not. After denying them heatedly in public, she privately began to sob to an aide, “Why do I keep having to prove that I am not a liar?” The endnotes to Harris’ book indicate his source for this quote was an interview with an unnamed Hillary Clinton adviser. This quote appears in Edward Klein’s 2005 book, The Truth About Hillary. As with much of the information contained in that work, the documentation behind this quote is rather weak: no details of when, where, or other context are provided, and the source was apparently an interview subject who was simply repeating a rumor he’d heard rather than relating an account of something he’d witnessed: Another time, it was reported, she had burst into a room looking for her husband, and shouted at a Secret Service officer, “Where’s the miserable cocksucker?” On 28 January 2005, the following statement on the upcoming Iraqi elections was posted to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s web site at clinton.senate.gov: “No matter what you think about the Iraq war, there is one thing we can all agree on for the next days – we have to salute the courage and bravery of those who are risking their lives to vote and those brave Iraqi and American soldiers fighting to protect their right to vote. They are facing terrorists who have declared war on democracy itself and made voting a life and death process. We hope this vote succeeds and pray for a safe election day.” This passage is taken from Dereliction of Duty, a 2003 book by Air Force Lt. Colonel Robert Patterson (who served as a military aide to President Clinton for two years): On a similar trip, as we lifted off a helicopter pad in Marine One en route to Air Force One for the journey home, Hillary suddenly shouted, “Put this back on the ground! I left my sunglasses in the limo.” By this time, however, Marine One was safely scooting to an awaiting 747. The required support for even a helicopter flight was involved and extensive. The Secret Service, White House Communications Agency, and administration staff were pulling down communications lines, lifting barricades, and driving off in vehicles. “Ma’am,” my fellow military aide responded, “we can’t safely do that.” “I need my sunglasses. We need to go back!” The onboard Secret Service agent chimed in, “Yes, ma’am, the milaide is correct. That wouldn’t be wise.” She acquiesced, but not without obvious disdain in her eyes. During a Barbara Walters interview with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton that was aired on the ABC news magazine program 20/20 on 8 June 2003 (corresponding with the upcoming release of the latter’s new book, Living History, the next day), the following question-and-answer exchange took place: Walters: “If I asked you straight out, was there and is there a right wing conspiracy to destroy your husband’s Presidency, would you today say yes?” Clinton: “I would say that there is a very well financed right-wing network of people that was after his Presidency from the very beginning. Really stopped at nothing, even to the point of perverting the Constitution in order to undermine what he was trying to do for the country.” This statement echoed a similar remark Hillary Clinton had made five years earlier (27 January 1998) during an interview with Matt Lauer aired on NBC’s The Today Show: Lauer: “I’m sure you like [Democratic political strategist James Carville], especially at this time. He has said that [the Monica Lewinsky scandal] is war between the president and Kenneth Starr. You have said, I understand, to some close friends, that this is the last great battle, and that one side or the other is going down here.” Clinton: “Well, I don’t know if I’ve been that dramatic. That would sound like a good line from a movie. But I do believe that this is a battle. I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this, they have popped up in other settings. This is the great story here, for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it, is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president. A few journalists have kind of caught onto it and explained it, but it has not yet been fully revealed to the American public. And, actually, you know, in a bizarre sort of way, this may do it.” In the aforementioned book The Survivor, John F. Harris recounts Hillary Clinton’s addressing her 1998 statement during the first televised debate of the 2000 Senate campaign in New York: [Hillary] grasped control of the race for good one September evening in Buffalo. It was the first televised debate between her and [Republican candidate Rick] Lazio. Buffalo native Tim Russert, the NBC newsman, was on hand to moderate. It was a crackling evening of charge and countercharge, of the conventional political sort, when Russert took the debate in a personal direction. He recalled the day, nearly three years back, when she had blamed the newly erupted Lewinsky scandal on a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Since the Lewinsky allegations had turned out to be true, he asked her, did she regret having misled the nation? Seemingly taken aback by the bluntness of the question, she grabbed a breath and slowly and deliberately answered. “That was a very painful time for me, my family, and our country,” she said. “Obviously, there’s a great deal of pain involved with that.” In American Evita, Christopher Andersen wrote the following about Senator Clinton’s 2003 Thanksgiving holiday visit with U.S. Troops in Afghanistan and Iraq: After she left the dining hall [at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan], Hillary learned the stunning news: President Bush had made an unannounced, lightning-swift trip to Iraq, where he served Thanksgiving dinner to American troops before chowing down with them. For security reasons, the top-secret mission remained under wraps until the President was safely on his way home. Back in the U.S., video of the President’s surprise visit — and his emotional reaction when the troops leaped to their feet to cheer him — preempted virtually all television programming for hours. It was a major news event, and an undeniable coup for the President. Hillary put on a dignified front in front of the troops, but when she thought she was out of earshot she mumbled her reaction to Bush’s preemptive visit: “Son of a bitch.” As throughout Andersen’s book, the endnotes for the corresponding chapter reference a number of conversations and print articles but don’t indicate which might have been the source for this putative quote. John F. Harris wrote in The Survivor that: Far more than her husband, [Hillary] harbored deep suspicion about the motives and tactics of political opponents. One day that fall [of 1993] she got word that a political aide, Rahm Emanuel, who was helping to try to pass the NAFTA legislation, had planned an event for the White House East Room. Many wavering legislators would be invited to hear a bipartisan delegation, including former Republican secretary of state James A. Baker, speak in support of the measure. Emanuel expected praise for creative use of the elegant White House social room, something he believed the administration had been too shy in using to win support for its goals. Instead, he picked up the phone to hear the first lady calling from Camp David, nearly sobbing in anger: “What are you doing inviting these people in my home?” she said. “These people are our enemies. They are trying to destroy us.” Harris’ endnotes indicate his source for this quote was interviews with (unnamed) West Wing aides. During an interview with First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton conducted by Steve Scully (aired on the C-SPAN cable channel on 17 January 1997), the following question-and-answer exchange took place: Scully: “Do you think there’s a bias in the press?” Clinton: “No, I don’t think there’s a bias but I think there are a lot of factors at work that are very interesting and that, as an observer of the press, I find worth thinking about. There certainly is an advocacy press. There is a very effective, well-organized advocacy press that is, I think, very up front in its right-wing, conservative inclinations and makes no apologies. And I have no problem with that. That’s absolutely their right. There’s not something comparable to that. If there were left in the United States something called the left wing or the liberal press, there’s no balance there. I mean, you’ve got a conservative and/or right-wing press presence with really nothing on the other end of the political spectrum, so that most of what is left in what you might call the middle or the establishment or the mainstream tries to be objective and tries to be thoughtful. But it is difficult sometimes to strike the right balance when you get constantly — and I have friends in the press who tell me they get constant faxes from the, you know, right-wing think tanks and the right-wing publications, and there’s a, you know, real concerted advocacy effort which is quite effective. There’s nothing really to counterbalance that. So I don’t know that there’s a bias in the mainstream press, but I think it’s difficult to get a well-argued presentation of issues that is really reflective of different points of view in the media today. Hillary Clinton did not really say (as claimed in the text accompanying this quote) that the “mainstream media are all conservatives in her opinion” (in fact, she stated twice during this portion of the interview that she didn’t believe there was a bias in the mainstream press), but rather that she thought there was no liberal or left-wing equivalent to what she termed the political “advocacy press.” This is another quote that originated with David Brock’s January 1994 American Spectator article and was taken from information provided by Arkansas state trooper Larry Patterson: When [Bill] Clinton spent an inordinate amount of time speaking with an attractive woman at a public event — apparently a common occurrence — several troopers said they have heard Hillary complain bitterly. “She would say, Come on Bill, put your dick up. You can’t f–k her here,” as Patterson remembered the unforgettable phrasing. (As noted above, David Brock later expressed skepticism about the truth of Patterson’s accounts.) These words were spoken by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton during an interview with Michael Kelly for a 1993 New York Times magazine piece, but the context presented here is completely misleading: Ms. Clinton did not say this about herself; she offered it as a hypothetical example of something someone else might think to himself: If you break down the Golden Rule or if you take Christ’s commandment — Love thy neighbor as thyself — there is an underlying assumption that you will value yourself, that you will be a responsible human being who will live by certain behaviors that enable you to have self-respect, because, then, out of that self-respect comes the capacity for you to respect and care for other people. And how do we just break this whole enterprise down in small enough pieces? Well, somebody says to themselves: ‘You know, I’m not going to tell that racist, sexist joke. I don’t want to objectify another human being. Why do I want to do that? What do I get out of that kind of action? Maybe I should try to restrain myself.’ Or maybe somebody else says: ‘You know, I’m going to start thanking the woman who cleans the restroom in the building that I work in. You know, maybe that sounds kind of stupid, but on the other hand I want to start seeing her as a human being.’ At the end of January 1993 (just weeks after being inaugurated for his first term of office), President Clinton arranged a weekend retreat for his cabinet and senior White House staff at Camp David to discuss the direction he hoped his administration would take. After the President spoke, according to journalist Bob Woodward (as reported in his 1994 book, The Agenda), First Lady Hillary Clinton “took the floor to address some practical questions”: The problems from the 12-year Republican mess would not be solved overnight, she said. The administration would have to communicate to people that the country was going on a journey — a long journey, with milestones along the way to mark progress. Let me tell you how this guy works and how we operated in Arkansas, she said. During his first term as governor, he set about attacking all the problems at once. He was the darling of the reform-minded, liberal press. But he didn’t communicate a vision or describe the journey he intended. In 1980, she said, when Clinton lost his bid for reelection as governor, the lack of a coherent story had disconnected him from the people he was trying to help. In 1983, when he came back, they had devised a simple story, with characters, with an objective, with a beginning, middle, and end. And it had all come from a moral point of view. They had taken on education reform, the hardest issue, whose benefits would not be seen for a generation. Talk about a long journey, she said. They realized the need for a story, complete with enemies and villains. They even villainized the teachers’ union, which had been their ally, for resisting “accountability” when it opposed teacher testing. “You show people what you’re willing to fight for when you you fight your friends,” Hillary said. Though the battle was long and a painful political experience, there were benchmarks of progress every two years or so along the way: Class sizes shrank, teacher testing was implemented, reading scores improved slightly. “It took years to see results,” she said. But by the end of Clinton’s time as governor, people understood his commitment to education was genuine. Isolated initiatives worked less well, she added. “People have got to understand where he wants to take the country.” Woodward doesn’t cite specific sources in his book, noting in the Acknowledgements section at the end that “virtually all the information in this book comes from my own reporting.” Although this quote is cited in some books as such, it did not come from a commencement address delivered by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin in 1993. (According to the Houston Chronicle, the 1993 commencement speaker at that school was the university’s president, Robert Berdahl, not Hillary Clinton.) Rather, this is a sentence taken from Hillary Clinton’s appearance at UT on 6 April 1993, where she was honored by the Liz Sutherland Carpenter Distinguished Lectureship and gave a talk entitled “Remolding Our Society,” which opened thusly (as recorded in Michael Lerner’s The Politics of Meaning): We are at a stage in history in which remolding society is one of the great challenges facing all of us in the West. If one looks around the Western world, one can see the rumblings of discontent, almost regardless of political systems, as we come face to face with the problems that the modern age has dealt us. And if we ask, why is it in a country as wealthy as we are, that there is this undercurrent of discontent, we realize that somehow economic growth and prosperity, political democracy and freedom, are not enough — that we lack meaning in our individual lives and meaning collectively; we lack a sense that our lives are part of some greater effort, that we are connected to one another. All of us face a crisis of meaning. Coming off the last years when the ethos of selfishness and greed were given places of honor never before accorded them, it is certainly timely to ask about this problem. This problem requires all of us to play a role in redefining what our lives are and what they should be … This quote is found in another Christopher Andersen work about the Clintons, his 1999 book Bill and Hillary: The Marriage: As her senior year drew to a close, Hillary pondered what to do after graduation. Even though she adhered generally to his anti-establishment philosophy (“You know, I’ve been on this kick for twenty-five years,” she would say after becoming First Lady), Hillary turned down an offer to work with [Saul] Alinsky as a paid community organizer in Chicago. “She just didn’t think she could bring about real social change that way,” said her political science professor, Alan Schechter. According to Schechter, who gave Hillary’s senior thesis an A, she wrote that “organizing the poor for community actions to improve their own lives may have short-term benefits for the poor but would never solve their major problems. You need much more than that. You need leadership programs, constitutional doctrines.” “The only way to make a real difference,” Hillary told one friend, “is to acquire power.” According to Schechter, his prize pupil decided the best way to accomplish this was by finding a way to “use the legal system” as an agent of change. As is common in Andersen’s books, the endnotes for the corresponding chapter reference a number of conversations and print articles but don’t indicate which might have been the source for this putative quote. This quote comes from a conversation relayed by Rep. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, then the chairman of the Republicans’ House task force on health care, at a 1993 meeting with Hillary Clinton (as reported in David Brock’s The Seduction of Hillary Rodham): Dennis Hastert … began meeting in February [1993] with Clinton administration officials as part of an effort to craft a bipartisan approach to [health care] reform. One evening in June 1993, a group of Republican congressmen, including Hastert, met with Hillary at the Alexandria home of Republican Representative John Kaisch of Ohio. One of Hastert’s ideas under discussion that night would have allowed employers the option of establishing medical savings accounts for their employees as an alternative to a government-managed system. Under Hastert’s plan, employers would put the money they were willing to spend into tax-deferred accounts. Employees would be encouraged to buy high-deductible catastrophic care policies and pay for rudimentary services with the remainder of the money. At the end of the year, the unused funds could be rolled over tax-free into the next year and, like an IRA, be withdrawn at retirement. Hastert and other advocates believed that as people shopped around for insurance and spent their own money to purchase care, costs would be controlled and competition enhanced. But critics said the accounts would benefit healthier people, who would spend less than what employers contributed, and hurt the poor, who might pay higher premiums as healthier and wealthier people formed their own insurance purchasing pools. Hastert soon concluded that there was little common ground on which to negotiate with the administration. “I guess the straw on the camel’s back was a meeting that I had one evening with Mrs. Clinton,” Hastert recalled: I mentioned … to the first lady about medical savings accounts and just right away she said, “We can’t do that.” And I said, “Well, why?” And she said, “Well, there’s two reasons.” And I said, “Well, what are they?” [And she said] “The first reason is with the medical savings account, people have to act on their own and make their own decisions about health care. And they have to make sure that they get the inoculations and the preventative care that they need, and we just think that people will skip too much because in a medical savings account if you don’t spend it, you get to keep it or you can … accumulate it in a health care account. We just think people will be too focused on saving money and they won’t get the care for their children and themselves that they need. We think the government, by saying, ‘You have to make this schedule. You have to have your kids in for inoculations here, you have to do a prescreening here, you have to do this’ — the government will make better decisions than the people will make, and people will be healthier because of it.” I said, “Well, part of that’s an education process. People have to understand that [if] they behave in a certain way, they’re going to save money, [with the] preventive medicine issue — you get the prescreenings, if you can inoculate your kids you save money on it. I mean, they’re not sick. You save money.” She said, “No. We just can’t trust the American people to make those types of choices … Government has to make those choices for people.” In a 3 March 1996 Booknotes discussion with Brian Lamb about her recent published book, It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Our Children Teach Us, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton said: Lamb: “You talk about both the French and the Germans [in your book]…” Clinton: “Right.” Lamb: “… as having some things that are better than what we do here [in the U.S.].” Clinton: “And other cultures as well.” Lamb: “How about the Germans?” Clinton: “Well, I am a fan of a lot of the social policies that you find in Europe, and I know that they, too, are going through a rethinking about how to afford some of their policies. But in my conversations with people like Chancellor [Helmut] Kohl or President [Jacque] Chirac, they are not talking about cutting back on their support for families to the extent that they are talking about doing some other things that would free up some dollars for the economy. That’s because they see raising children as a social obligation, not just a parental obligation, even though parents have the primary responsibility, so that the kind of leave policies that they have for employees, particularly young mothers taking care of babies — the health-care policy in Germany that is a public-private mixture is something that I think is worth looking at. “The visiting nurses program in England where people come into the home to try to make sure the parents know what they’re doing, and that’s for everybody from Princess Di down to a single teen-age mother. There’s just more of a recognition that the entire society has a stake in making sure parents do as good a job as they can.”
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11404
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B vitamins don’t boost energy drinks’ power
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This is a another very informative column in the continuing excellent “Healthy Skeptic” series in the Los Angeles Times. This column examines health claims made about certain energy drinks. It provided some insight about the grain of truth that could possibly be said to underlie the claims made about thes products and then provides a clear explanation as to why the asserted claim is not relevant in the context of the product making the claim. This was a real strength of the story. Perhaps readers will take away a more generalizable message about how they should think about product claims. Kudos to the writer for making the informational points in an engaging fashion – and to the paper for finding time and space for such work.
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true
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The story included prices for several of the products described. The story debunked the company claims of benefit about vitamin B supplementation of energy drinks. The story provided accurate information about a potential harm of excess consumption of vitamin B-6. The story debunked product information propagated by the companies with information from an individual with relevant expertise. The story included anecdotal information about the ‘research’ findings of the writer. It couched this appropriately. The story did not engage in overt disease mongering. The story utilized product claims from advertisements and comments from an individual with relevant expertise in the field. The story mentioned means, other than the featured products, for obtaining recommended levels of vitamin B-6 and B-12. The story mentioned the availability of the products discussed. The story mentioned that highlighted inclusion of B vitamins in energy drinks is a relatively new phenomena. There is no evidence that this article relied on a news release.
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16247
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Rick Scott vetoed funding for 30 Florida rape crisis centers. Scott said the centers weren’t needed.
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"A TV ad on behalf of Crist said ""Rick Scott vetoed funding for 30 Florida rape crisis centers. Scott said the centers weren’t needed."" The ad omits that Scott vetoed an increase in funding for the centers in 2012. He never said the centers weren’t needed -- he said that particular extra $1.5 million wasn’t needed. The ad omits that in 2013 he supported a $2.5 million increase, which also remained in the budget in 2014. The ad overall is misleading because it fails to make it clear that funding for rape crisis centers increased under Scott's watch."
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false
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Health Care, State Budget, Women, Florida, Charlie Crist,
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"In the homestretch, Charlie Crist is pushing hard for the women’s vote in his battle against Gov. Rick Scott. Crist has vowed to protect abortion rights and fight for equal pay for women for months. Scott has attacked Crist for taking money from strip club owners. Now a TV ad attacks Scott’s record on funding rape crisis centers. ""No one saw it coming. With the stroke of a pen, Rick Scott vetoed funding for 30 Florida rape crisis centers. Scott said the centers weren't needed. But they’ve helped over a million Florida women who’ve been sexually assaulted get care, counseling and legal help. These centers were a place for women who have nowhere else to turn. And Rick Scott turned his back on every single one of them."" (Technically the Florida Democratic Party released the ad, but the Crist campaign has promoted it.) The ad leaves viewers with the impression that Scott completely rejected funding for rape crisis centers, a serious attack against the governor. Did Scott veto funding for 30 rape crisis centers and say that the centers weren’t needed? Scott’s veto The state funds rape crisis centers through various pots of money. A portion comes from the Rape Crisis Trust Fund, which comes from fines assessed on felony criminal defendants. Additionally, some money comes from the Attorney General’s Office, and in some years the Legislature and governor approved additional money. In the fine print, the ad cites a TV report from April 2012. In 2012, Scott vetoed $1.5 million of additional money for the rape crisis centers. The 30 centers still received $1.4 million from the Trust Fund and $500,000 from the attorney general. The Florida Council Against Sexual Violence, which lobbies on behalf of the centers, issued a statement criticizing the veto, ""especially when the need for increased funding is so clear, waiting lists for core services are growing, and programs can’t meet the needs of those whose lives have been devastated by sexual violence."" Scott’s veto during Sexual Assault Awareness Month drew much scrutiny -- especially in left-leaning websites. The TV ad says ""Scott said the centers weren’t needed"" but that’s not actually a reference to a direct quote by Scott. We found no statement by Scott to suggest he thought the centers were unnecessary -- only that he thought the new funding wasn’t necessary. The Crist campaign points to a statement by Scott’s spokesman at the time, Lane Wright, who told the Huffington Post, ""This new funding of $1.5 million would have been duplicative, since, as a state, we already fund sexual violence programs. There was no information suggesting any needs in this area weren’t already being met."" Scott, while attending an event for Crime Victims Rights Week, said he thought the centers were adequately funded, not that they were unnecessary. ""We have increased funding for domestic violence. We have money that goes into rape crisis centers already,"" Scott said, according to a column in the Palm Beach Post. ""So it was additional money that was already funded."" Scott later recommended an increase in funding There’s more to the story, though. Advocates for the rape crisis centers met with state staff after the veto, and the next year Scott recommended additional money. ""There were a number of people in the Legislature who spoke with the governor’s office about the need, and in 2013, there it was in his recommended budget,"" said Jennifer Dritt, director of the Florida Council Against Sexual Violent, who spoke with PolitiFact Florida in September. ""We were never in any governor’s recommendation for funding until Gov. Scott recommended $2.5 million in 2013."" Scott highlighted his funding boost for rape crisis centers in a 2013 press release, which included praise by Dritt: ""This appropriation will make a world of difference in the lives of Florida’s citizens, and we’re grateful for his commitment,"" Dritt said. The increase in money allowed some centers to hire additional staff which helped reduce waiting lists and expand services, Dritt told PolitiFact Florida. Under Scott, the $2.5 million remained in the budget for a second year in a row in 2014. Based on our interviews with women’s advocates and state officials in September, here is the amount of state dollars that went to rape crisis centers statewide under Crist and Scott: Legislative session Money from state AG (usually from general revenue) Other general revenue Trust Fund Total 2007-Crist $400,000 0 $1.5 million $1.9 million 2008-Crist $400,000 0 $2 million $2.4 million 2009-Crist $250,000 0 $2 million $2.25 million 2010-Crist $250,000 0 $1.8 million $2.05 million 2011-Scott $250,000 0 $1.8 million $2.05 million 2012-Scott $500,000 0 after Scott vetoed $1.5 million approved by Legislature $1.4 million $1.9 million 2013-Scott $500,000 $2.5 million $1.3 million $4.3 million 2014-Scott $500,000 $2.5 million $1.3 million $4.3 million Our ruling A TV ad on behalf of Crist said ""Rick Scott vetoed funding for 30 Florida rape crisis centers. Scott said the centers weren’t needed."" The ad omits that Scott vetoed an increase in funding for the centers in 2012. He never said the centers weren’t needed -- he said that particular extra $1.5 million wasn’t needed. The ad omits that in 2013 he supported a $2.5 million increase, which also remained in the budget in 2014. The ad overall is misleading because it fails to make it clear that funding for rape crisis centers increased under Scott's watch."
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7351
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Wolf to ease restrictions elsewhere, but still has concerns.
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Gov. Tom Wolf will announce Friday that more counties can see some of his tightest pandemic restrictions lifted, as counties and lawmakers kept up pressure on him to ease up on his orders.
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true
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Health, General News, Tom Wolf, Pandemics, Nursing homes, Beaver, Virus Outbreak, Huntingdon
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In a telephone news conference Thursday with reporters, Wolf said he will make his decision on Friday morning. However, he has not changed his criteria for deciding which counties can emerge from his stay-at-home order and his order for non-life-sustaining businesses to close, he said. His health secretary, Dr. Rachel Levine, echoed that, saying that the administration will continue to count cases in prisons, factories, nursing homes and other large settings prone to outbreaks against a county’s total. That is bad news for counties such as Beaver and Huntingdon that blame much of their outbreak on a single institution, like a prison or nursing home, and remain under the governor’s tightest restrictions. “We are bending the curve, we are having some success and that is reflected in over half the counties that, as of tomorrow, will be open, and there will be more coming,” Wolf told reporters. Critics, primarily Republicans, contend that Wolf has changed his goals over time, and say his shutdown orders are inflicting undue suffering and are no longer warranted. He has met his original goal of ensuring that hospitals did not become overwhelmed by a surge in extremely ill coronavirus patients, they say. Instead, they say, Wolf’s focus on a broad shutdown is misplaced, since nursing homes and personal care homes for the elderly account for two-thirds of the state’s more than 4,200 reported coronavirus deaths. In a growing chorus, Republicans and Democrats alike cite the opinions of doctors at health systems in Pennsylvania who say the economy can safely reopen and co-exist with the virus. Wolf agreed that Pennsylvania is “in a better place now.” But, he said, he still has concerns with the availability of personal protective equipment and hospital capacity in some areas, and he still wants to see a flatter curve. Wolf allowed 24 counties in northern Pennsylvania last week to emerge from his tightest restrictions and another 13 counties in western Pennsylvania to emerge starting Friday. That leaves another 30 counties, primarily in hard-hit eastern Pennsylvania, that are home to two-thirds of the state’s 12.8 million people. Nine counties that remain under Wolf’s tightest restrictions meet one of his criteria of no more than 50 cases per 100,000 residents over the past 14 days. That includes York County, the state’s eighth-most populous. At least seven other Republican-controlled counties, including Beaver, Huntingdon and Lancaster, the state’s seventh-most populous, have signaled that they will defy Wolf’s orders starting Friday. Many of them say Wolf’s administration has been opaque in how it is making decisions and, on their own, they will consider at least some of Wolf’s restrictions lifted for businesses that can adhere to state or federal health safety guidelines. With political tensions boiling, Wolf has reached out to county commissioners this week after he suggested Monday that politicians encouraging people to defy his orders and “quit the fight are acting in a most cowardly way.” He also threatened to withhold aid from counties that defy his orders. In the meantime, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives on Thursday approved a bill on a party-line vote that, among other things, strips the state of the authority to close businesses during a disaster emergency. Rather, it forces the state to follow federal guidelines, but also let counties select businesses to remain open. Wolf will veto it, his office said. In other coronavirus-related developments Thursday in Pennsylvania: ___ BARBERS A half-dozen Republican state lawmakers came to the defense of a barber, Brad Shepler, who has reopened his doors, despite barbers and hair salons being under Wolf’s statewide orders to remain closed. Shepler received a visit from police and a letter from the state’s licensing agency warning that he is violating Wolf’s order. At a news conference attended by Shepler and dozens of his supporters outside his barber shop in Enola, a few miles from the state Capitol, the lawmakers said Shepler should be allowed to work to feed his family, not threatened with closure. “Folks, that is not the America our founding fathers dreamed of,” state Sen. Mike Regan, R-York, told the crowd. For his part, Shepler said people who come to his barber shop do so voluntarily, and he doesn’t want anyone to take a risk that they are not comfortable with. “They all exercise their freedom to choose,” Shepler said. “All I ask is that you respect my rights as I respect yours.” On Thursday, the state House passed legislation to force Wolf to allow barbers, hair salons, realtors, car dealers, garden centers, animal grooming services, manufacturers and messenger services to reopen. Wolf will veto the bills, his office said. Around the state, a growing number of gyms, barbers, hair salons and restaurants have defied Wolf’s orders to stay closed, despite the threat of losing a business license or certificate. Asked about it, Wolf said the state has an obligation to certify to customers that those businesses are operating safely. “How can the state be relied upon to do that or be trusted to do that if we’re going to turn a blind eye to that kind of thing?” Wolf said. ___ CASES Confirmed cases of the coronavirus are approaching 60,000 in Pennsylvania, the state Department of Health reported Thursday. The department reported 275 additional coronavirus deaths, with 44 of them newly recorded and the rest the result of an ongoing reconciliation of its own records with those of local agencies, hospitals and others over the past several weeks. Philadelphia has surpassed 1,000 deaths alone, officials there said Thursday. Health officials also reported 938 new infections. The number of infections is thought to be far higher than the state’s confirmed case count because many people have not been tested, and studies suggest people can be infected with the virus without feeling sick. There is no data on how many people have fully recovered. ___ Associated Press reporter Claudia Lauer in Philadelphia contributed to this report. Follow AP coverage of the virus outbreak at https://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak
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Government plans to ban flavors used in e-cigarettes.
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The federal government will act to ban thousands of flavors used in e-cigarettes, President Donald Trump said Wednesday, responding to a recent surge in underage vaping that has alarmed parents, politicians and health authorities nationwide.
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true
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AP Top News, Alex Azar, Health, General News, Politics, Business, Melania Trump, Tobacco industry regulation, Donald Trump
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The surprise White House announcement could remake the multibillion-dollar vaping industry, which has been driven by sales of flavored nicotine formulas such as “grape slushie” and “strawberry cotton candy.” The Food and Drug Administration will develop guidelines to remove from the market all e-cigarette flavors except tobacco, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told reporters during an Oval Office appearance with the president, first lady Melania Trump and the acting FDA commissioner, Ned Sharpless. Trump, whose son Barron is 13 years old, said vaping has become such a problem that he wants parents to be aware of what’s happening. “We can’t allow people to get sick and we can’t have our youth be so affected,” he said. Melania Trump recently tweeted her concerns over the combination of children and vaping, and at the meeting, the president said, “I mean, she’s got a son — together — that is a beautiful, young man, and she feels very, very strongly about it.” Trump’s first public comments on vaping come as health authorities investigate hundreds of breathing illnesses reported in people who have used e-cigarettes and other vaping devices. No single device, ingredient or additive has been identified, though many cases involve marijuana vaping. The restrictions announced by Trump officials would only apply to nicotine vaping products, which are regulated by the FDA. The FDA has had the authority to ban vaping flavors since 2016, but has previously resisted calls to take that step. Agency officials instead said they were studying if flavors could help smokers quit traditional cigarettes. But parents, teachers and health advocates have increasingly called for a crackdown on flavors , arguing that they are overwhelmingly to blame for the explosion in underage vaping by U.S. teens, particularly with small, discrete devices such as Juul’s. “It has taken far too long to stop Juul and other e-cigarettes companies from targeting our nation’s kids with sweet-flavored, nicotine-loaded products,” said Matthew Myers, of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, in a statement. Federal law prohibits e-cigarette and all other tobacco sales to those under 18. But federal health officials said Wednesday that preliminary data shows more than 1 in 4 high school students reported vaping this year, compared with 1 in 5 students in 2018. Federal health officials have called the trend an “epidemic,” and they fear teenagers who vape will eventually start smoking. More than 80 percent of underage teens who use e-cigarettes say they picked their product because it “comes in flavors that I like,” according to government surveys. A ban on flavors would be a huge blow to companies like San Francisco-based Juul, which sells mint, fruit and dessert flavored-nicotine pods. Juul and others have argued that their products are intended to help adult smokers wean themselves off traditional paper-and-tobacco cigarettes. But a Juul spokesman said in a statement that the company “strongly” agreed with the need for “aggressive action” on flavors. “We will fully comply with the final FDA policy when effective,” he stated. The Vapor Technology Association said in a statement the flavor ban would force smokers “to choose between smoking again ... or finding what they want and need on the black market.” The group represents vaping manufacturers, retailers and distributors. Some health experts have seen vaping as offering an “off ramp” for smokers, but the proposed ban casts enormous uncertainty over those hopes. A 2009 law banned all flavors from traditional cigarettes except menthol. But that law did not apply to e-cigarettes, which were then a tiny segment of the tobacco market. “We simply have to remove these attractive flavored products from the marketplace until they can secure FDA approval, if they can,” Azar said. Azar said flavored products could apply for FDA permission to reenter the market. But under agency standards, only products that represent a net benefit to the public health can win FDA clearance. Azar said the administration would allow tobacco-flavored e-cigarettes to remain available as an option for adult smokers until May 2020, before undergoing their own mandatory FDA review. But he said that if children begin using those products, “we will take enforcement action there also.” It will take several weeks to develop the flavor restrictions. Azar said the policy could be implemented as soon as 30 days after it is finalized. Significantly, the Trump plan is expected to bar menthol and mint vaping flavors. FDA officials have previously exempted those products from any sales restrictions because they were thought to be useful to adult smokers. Anti-vaping advocates criticized that decision, pointing to survey data showing more than half of teens who vape use mint and menthol. “Finally, the FDA is doing its job,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who has prodded the agency for months to take action on flavors. Scott Gottlieb, who stepped down as FDA commissioner in April, said in a tweet that Juul bore particular responsibility for forcing the administration’s hand. “Unfortunately the entire category of e-cigs was put at risk largely as a result of the youth abuse of mostly one manufacturer’s products,” Gottlieb said. Wednesday’s announcement came despite months of aggressive lobbying by Juul, which spent $1.9 million in the first half of the year to try and sway the White House, Congress and the FDA. Several former White House officials, including communications aide Josh Raffel, and Johnny DeStefano, who served as counselor to Trump, have gone on to work for Juul. A few local governments, including San Francisco, have passed bans on flavored tobacco. And this month Michigan moved to become the first state to ban flavored electronic cigarettes. E-cigarettes have been on the U.S. market for more than a decade. But FDA officials have repeatedly delayed enforcing regulations on them, referencing industry fears that regulation could wipe out thousands of small companies. Most experts agree the aerosol from e-cigarettes is less harmful than cigarette smoke since it doesn’t contain most of the cancer-causing byproducts of burning tobacco. E-cigarettes generally heat liquid containing nicotine. But there is virtually no research on the long-term effects of vaping. ___ Associated Press writers Darlene Superville and Jill Colvin contributed to this report. ___ Follow Matthew Perrone on Twitter: @AP_FDAwriter
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6738
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Maryland House speaker Michael Busch has liver transplant.
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Maryland Speaker of the House Michael Busch has undergone a liver transplant.
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true
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Michael Busch, Health, Liver transplants, University of Maryland, Maryland
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The speaker’s office said in a statement that the 70-year-old Busch had the procedure Thursday at the University of Maryland Medical Center. Busch’s sister provided the donation. The speaker’s office says Busch was recently diagnosed with nonalcoholic steatohepatitis. Busch said in an interview Wednesday with The Capital of Annapolis (http://bit.ly/2rgOLbw ) said his health had gotten worse in recent weeks. He attributed his recent health problems to medication for skin cancer. Busch says his doctors expect recovery will take seven weeks. His adult daughters will spend the next few months at home with him and his wife. Busch, a Democrat, is the longest serving speaker in Maryland history.
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9386
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Prostate-Cancer Gene Test Helps Patients Decide on Treatment
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This Wall Street Journal story discusses available genetic tests which can theoretically distinguish between prostate cancer cases that require immediate treatment and those that need only regular monitoring for change. The latter group avoids possible surgery or radiation treatments, both of which can result in side effects that can affect a patient’s quality of life. Much of the story focuses on anecdotes about patients and their experiences, without providing data that gives us the bigger picture about what’s known–and not known–about these tests. To its credit, the story does discuss the rather expensive costs of the tests and quotes various sources. The story states that, “In the U.S., there are 165,000 new cases of prostate cancer a year and about 29,000 deaths from the disease. Researchers say some men with low-risk prostate cancer, which may not require intervention, have been overtreated.” The genetic tests, the story suggests, may be effective in reducing the cases of overtreatment. But that remains to be seen, and the story didn’t emphasize that enough.
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mixture
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genetic testing,prostate cancer
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The story offers clear information on the cost of the genetic tests by saying,”The various genomics tests, which have a list price between $3,800 and $5,000, generally are covered by Medicare and some private insurers.” To its credit, it mentions the costs fairly early in the story. The presumed benefit of a test like this is the ability to avoid/delay treatment without ever being harmed from cancer progression. The story doesn’t provide data on this benefit. We’re left to wonder: How does the test compare to other tools that assess risk? Is it as useful as some of the claims being made? How accurate is it? Also, the story mentions several different companies make prostate-cancer gene tests, but the reader is left to wonder how they differ, and if accuracy varies among the products. There is always a risk of false positives or false negatives with such tests, but the story didn’t address those risks. It did do a good job discussing the harms of overtreating prostate cancer. Much of the story centers on the anecdotes about two men and their experiences having been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Their stories, while interesting and humanizing, don’t really provide any real evidence of research results. Information that actually focuses on evidence is confined to a single paragraph. Fortunately the story did include this line: The prostate-cancer genomics test is still fairly new, he says, and there isn’t enough data on it. But more should have been said about that means–when there isn’t enough data? [In part, it means we need longer follow-up to determine whether men with negative genomic tests had no evidence of cancer progression as predicted by the tests–and whether these test results subsequently affected their willingness to stay on the monitoring protocols (PSA, biopsy).] Men diagnosed with prostate cancer often have to make difficult treatment decisions that reconcile their fears of cancer progression against their fears of treatment complications. This story did a good job of pointing out the challenges here. The story uses multiple sources and in one case points out that the source was not part of the study. In another case, the story points out that a source “has been a paid consultant for the makers of Oncotype DX and Decipher, but has no financial interest in the companies.” One quoted source, however, is part of a company “whose aims include curbing overtreatment,” which using these tests apparently might prevent. The story did not provide any discussion of other risk assessment tools, such as the PSA test, Gleason score, biopsy results, and sometimes MRI scans. It would be helpful to know the independent contribution of the expensive new test to decision making after adjusting for the other known risks. It is clear from the story that these genetic tests are currently available. A diagnostic test that night provide an alternative to the sometimes risky treatments for prostate cancer is certainly novel enough to warrant a story. The story does not appear to rely on a news release.
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7346
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Age and pandemic: Time lost, plans canceled, dreams deferred.
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Elizabeth Hubbart was booked for a cruise that followed the path of Lewis and Clark’s expedition in the Pacific Northwest. Joel Demski was set to watch and cheer his grandson graduating from the Naval Academy. James Kelly planned a trip to Scotland, to scatter his father’s ashes in the Clyde River near Glasgow.
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true
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AP Top News, Health, General News, Weekend Reads, Scotland, Lifestyle, Pandemics, Virus Outbreak, U.S. News
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They are all older than 60. And like millions of others, they now face the painful realization that their plans, their hopes, their bucket-list items, were not simply deferred but in many cases denied thanks to the coronavirus. The global pandemic has left them wondering about the time they have left, and how to spend those moments when movement is severely limited. Instead of taking in the Seven Wonders of the World or making family memories, many are worried about the mundane, like whether it’s safe to grocery shop or even go outdoors. Guilt, anger and frustration seep in, with all this precious time lost. “One less year is one less trip,” said 72-year-old Bob Busch, an avid traveler from Sarasota, Florida who canceled a 35-day camping trip with his wife. They are healthy this year, but what about in the future, after the pandemic has passed? “How many times can you hook up the trailer and head west?” Demski, who lives in Vero Beach, Florida, was crestfallen when the Naval Academy canceled its graduation ceremonies. Instead of taking in the celebration in Annapolis with his grandson, he is left with concern as the young man ships out on his assignment. Plans to see another grandson graduate from UCLA in California have also been scrapped. “I’m really just sad. It’s sadness for the whole country,” said Demski, who is a few months shy of his 80th birthday. Mick Smyer, a psychology professor at Bucknell University who studies aging and the elderly, said the Baby Boom generation is among the first to have additional years of vitality. This pandemic is hitting in the middle of their generation’s “developmental task,” which, as the American Psychological Association defines it, is “the fundamental physical, social, intellectual, and emotional achievements and abilities that must be acquired at each stage of life for normal and healthy development.” In other words, boomers are feeling their mortality. As headlines blare about elders being more susceptible to dying of Coronavirus, the healthy wonder: Will I be able to achieve, see, and do everything I wanted out of life? “Boomers are thinking back about whether it has it been a good life, and what was it all about,” he said. “Now there are fewer options in the near term. The next two years are off the table, and how many good years are left?” Kelly, a 63-year-old psychologist, also plays guitar and writes country rock and Americana songs. Lately, he’s been pondering his fate as he sits alone in his Atlanta home, thinking about when he’ll be able to bring his father’s ashes to his native Scotland. “My most recent songs have been about aging. Dealing with life and loss. The road behind and the road ahead, about how much is behind me and how little is in front of me.” “There’s not a lot more road in front of me,” he recently wrote in a song lyric. At the same time, many acknowledge that their sacrifices are also a product of privilege. Millions of people who are unemployed or working in essential, yet low-wage jobs, don’t have that luxury now — or possibly ever. “Some of my emotion, in all honesty, is guilt,” said Judy Forman, a 70-year-old from Flourtown, Pennsylvania. “We’re inconvenienced and we’re scared and we’re able to handle it. I try to help as much as I can. When I get a food order, I leave a huge tip. I give to food pantries.” But the feeling that time is slipping away grates on her. She can’t travel to visit one of her daughters in California. She can’t even hug her three grandsons, who live across the street. “It’s depression, loneliness. It’s boredom. Fear. Mostly fear.” She spends hours wiping down groceries, sanitizing doorknobs, thinking about how the future will be permanently different from now on. “I do all this because I don’t want to die. So yeah, I’m feeling my mortality,” she said in a quiet voice. Helen Miltiades, a professor of gerontology at Fresno State in California, said older adults are struggling in ways younger folks aren’t. “The whole phrase ‘the new normal.’ People are using that, but what does that mean? People make jokes about it. That’s a way of coping with change without really understanding what the change entails. I don’t think we have that figured out yet.” Hubbart, who was supposed to go on the cruise with her husband, canceled that. The 70-year-old Miami resident is holding onto a shred of hope that she can see Hugh Jackman — her favorite actor — on Broadway this fall, but she’s prepared for disappointment. “This was supposed to be my decade,” she said. “And it’s going to be very different than I expected.” Dena Davis is more optimistic. She’s a 73-year-old professor of bioethics at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She has postponed her sabbatical because of the pandemic and figures her plans for retirement have been pushed back. “If you’re lucky, the reason there isn’t that much more time is because you’ve already had a lot of time. ... It depends on the way you look at it,” she said. “I’m not seeing endless vistas in front of me. There are pretty big vistas behind me. You can’t have it both ways.” ___ Follow Tamara Lush on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tamaralush
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28071
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The Forest Hill High School band performed a half-time show that depicted police officers being shot.
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What's true: The Forest Hill High School band did indeed perform a skit in which student performers, wielding toy guns, appeared to hold police officers hostage. What's false: The performance appears to have depicted police officers being held at gunpoint but not being shot, in keeping with its status as a parody of the 2002 film John Q.
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true
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Politics, blue lives matter
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In October 2018, controversy surrounded a half-time performance by a Jackson, Mississippi, high school band when viral social media posts, as well as local and national news reports, appeared to show students holding toy guns and “shooting” other students dressed as police officers. Evangelical Christian activist Joshua Feuerstein shared a screen shot from video footage of the performance, writing: SHOOTING COPS!!! This is the HALF TIME show performed by Forest Hill High School where young black students SHOOT police officers in a dramatized skit!!! ARE YOU KIDDING ME???? This is ACCEPTABLE??? SHARE THIS until something is done about it! In another widely-shared Facebook post, Lisa Grantham pointed out that two police officers had recently been shot dead in Brookhaven, where the football game took place: A post on the web site DefenseMaven.io asserted that the performance had depicted the “execution of SWAT officers.” These posts prompted multiple inquiries from readers about the facts surrounding these images and the performance itself. The Forest Hill High School band did indeed perform a show which depicted law enforcement officers being held at gunpoint by other student performers during half-time of the Forest Hill Patriots football game held at Brookhaven High School on 5 October 2018. Footage of the performance was streamed live on Facebook by Nick Hodges. The relevant section begins at around the 8:35 mark, and lasts around 35 seconds: The fallout from the performance was significant. On 6 October, Jackson Public Schools Superintendent Errick Greene apologized for the half-time show, which he said had been “based loosely on the movie ‘John Q'” and “depicted a hostage scene that included toy guns.” Greene said the school district had “taken some initial actions in response,” including starting an investigation: According to Jackson television station WAPT, the office of Jackson mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba confirmed that the Forest Hill band’s director Demetri Jones had been placed on administrative leave. In response to our request for confirmation of this action, a Jackson Public Schools spokesperson told us “we do not discuss personnel matters.” In a separate statement, Lumumba expressed his “sincerest regrets” to the people of Brookhaven: I offer my sincerest regrets to the Brookhaven community for the insensitivity that [was] portrayed during the Friday evening halftime show. There is an active investigation into the circumstances that led to this performance,” said Mayor Chokwe Lumumba. “While I do not believe that there was a malice [sic] intent on behalf of the students that participated in this halftime show, I understand that we are ultimately not defined by the things that we set out to do, but rather how we respond to the things that actually do take place. It is the responsibility of adults to offer guidance to youth. Our students should have been instructed that this was neither the time or place for that performance. Brookhaven mayor Joe Cox called the half-time show “a horrific display of disrespect” and referenced the deaths of Brookhaven police officers Zach Moak and James White, who were killed in a shootout on 29 September: In the 2002 thriller movie John Q, Denzel Washington played a desperate father who, with no ability to pay for a heart transplant for his son, took hostages at a hospital at gunpoint, demanding that his son be placed at the top of the organ recipient list. It is worth noting that Washington’s character did not actually shoot any law enforcement officers in the movie, just as the Forest Hill parody does not appear to have depicted the shooting of any police officers, but rather an armed hostage-taking. The image used by Feuerstein and others in their social media posts depicted student performers holding SWAT members at gunpoint as the officers held their hands up — not “shooting cops,” as Feuerstein claimed, or the “execution of SWAT officers,” as DefenseMaven.io claimed:
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29013
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PETA workers are stealing family pets and euthanizing them.
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What's true: PETA associates have been involved in some incidents involving the alleged theft and/or euthanization of family pets. What's false: PETA workers do not routinely lure pets away from families for the sole purpose of euthanizing the animals.
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mixture
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Critter Country, Crusader Habit
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People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is an American animal rights organization often embroiled in controversy, even among animal lovers, because the group’s practices and policies are viewed by many as too extreme and strident. One such subject of controversy is the organization’s view on euthanizing unwanted pets: Rumors of pets’ being kidnapped and put down by PETA-affiliated individuals have circulated on the Internet for years: Rumor circulating in the rescue world that PETA is rounding up healthy pets and killing them wholesale without trying to find homes for them. Supposedly, PETA staffers average admitted that the are doing this to healthy kittens, pups, dogs, cats, and that they will go into neighborhoods and steal animals out of yards b throwing treats to them. This is pretty rank stuff-PETA is out there, but this is way over the line. In at least two cases, PETA workers have been arrested in incidents involving the taking of companion animals that were not subsequently surrendered to shelters On 28 January 2015, the Virginian Pilot published a full-page advertisement regarding one such incident which took place in October 2014. Animal rights advocate Nathan Winograd posted a scanned copy of the ad that detailed how a family’s chihuahua, Maya, was taken and euthanized by PETA workers: WARNING: PETA may be in your neighborhood rounding up animals to kill. Today, this full page ad appeared in The Virginian Pilot (www.pilotonline.com), the newspaper of PETA’s hometown. I and other animal lovers paid for it. We will not stand by and allow PETA to get away with “murder.” The Theft and Killing of Maya On October 18, 2014, in Parksley, VA, PETA stole Maya, a happy and healthy dog, from her porch while her family was out. They killed her that very day. According to a spokesman for Maya’s family, PETA came to the trailer park where the family lives, where most of the residents are Spanish speaking with few resources. The PETA representatives befriended the residents. They got to know who lived where and who had dogs. In fact, they sat with the family on the same porch off which they later took Maya. Waiting until the family was away from the home, PETA employees backed their van up to the porch and threw biscuits to Maya, in an attempt to coax her off her property and therefore give PETA the ability to claim she was a stray dog “at large.” But Maya refused to stay off the porch and ran back. Thinking that no one was around, one of the employees — who was later charged with larceny — went onto the property and took Maya. When the family returned and found their beloved Maya missing, they searched around the neighborhood before checking the video on the surveillance camera. That is when they saw the PETA van on the film and recognized the woman who had come to their house on prior occasions to talk to them about Maya. They called PETA and asked for Maya’s return. According to a family spokesperson, PETA claimed it did not have the dog. When PETA was told that its employees had been filmed taking the dog, they hung up. Shortly afterward, a PETA attorney called and informed the family that Maya was dead. PETA had killed her. She may not be the only one. On the day they stole Maya, other animals went missing as well. Had a surveillance video not been available, the killing of Maya would have remained unknown, as are the fates of the other animals. In the last 11 years, PETA has killed 29,426 animals. The ad’s claims were corroborated by a number of local news articles that reported the chihuahua’s capture and death. The two PETA workers involved in incident were arrested but not prosecuted due to a lack of evidence they possessed criminal intent, according to a statement from Accomack County’s commonwealth’s attorney Gary Agar: The facts appear be that PETA was asked to help when an adjacent landowner reported that they should see how his cow with her udders ripped up from abandoned and stray dogs in the trailer park area amounted to a menace not to be tolerated. He complained to PETA that the abandoned and stray dogs attacked his livestock, injured his milking cow, killed his goat and terrorized his rabbits. Abandoned and/or stray dogs and cats have appeared to have been considerable in what is known as Dreamland 2. PETA responded and the trailer park management encouraged their efforts in an attempt to gather stray/abandoned cats and dogs. Additionally the leases provided that no dogs were allowed to run free in the trailer park. Approximately three weeks before Mr. Cerate’s dog [Maya] was taken by the women associated with PETA, Mr. Cerate asked if they would put traps under his trailer to catch some of the wild cats that were in the trailer park, and traps were provided to him as requested. Additionally, parties associated with PETA provided Mr. Cerate with a dog house for two other dogs that were tethered outside of Mr. Cerate’s home. On or about October 18 a van that was operated by the ladies associated with PETA arrived the at the trailer park. The van was clearly marked PETA and in broad daylight arrived gathering up what abandoned stray dogs and cats could be gathered. Among the animals gathered was the Chihuahua of Mr. Cerate. Unfortunately the Chihuahua wore no collar, no license, no rabies tag, nothing whatsoever to indicate the dog was other than a stray or abandoned dog. It was not tethered nor was it contained. Other animals were also gathered. Individuals living in the trailer park were present and the entire episode was without confrontation. Mr. Cerate was not at home and the dog was loose, sometimes entering the shed/porch or other times outside in the trailer park before he was put in the van and carried from the park. The dogs owned by Mr. Cerate that were tethered were not taken. Whether one favors or disfavors PETA has little to do with the decision of criminality. The issue is whether there is evidence that the two people when taking the dog believed they were taking the dog of another or whether they were taking an abandoned and/or stray animal. There have been no complaints on the other animals taken on that same day, and, like the Chihuahua, [they] had no collar or tag. From the request of the neighboring livestock owner and the endorsement by the trailer park owner/manager the decision as to the existence of criminal intent beyond a reasonable doubt must be made by the prosecutor. More clearly stated, with the evidence that is available to the Commonwealth, it is just as likely that the two women believed they were gathering abandoned and/or stray animals rather than stealing the property of another. Indeed, it is more probable under this evidence that the two women associated with PETA that day believed they were gathering animals that posed health and/or livestock threat in the trailer park and adjacent community. Without evidence supporting the requisite criminal intent, no criminal prosecution can occur. In 2007, a PETA worker in Virginia was arrested and charged with a felony count of theft after she was found to be in possession of a sheriff’s hunting dog. The charge was eventually reduced to a misdemeanor and dismissed entirely in 2008: A judge on has dismissed a misdemeanor charge against a worker for Norfolk-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals who had been accused of stealing a hunting dog’s tracking collar. The circuit judge overseeing the case of Ondrea Harris , 26, called her a “meddlesome do-gooder” for picking up a foxhound on a Southampton County road that leads to North Carolina. Harris and another outreach worker saw the hound on the side of the road. A motorist who witnessed the pickup called Southampton County Sheriff’s Deputy J.T. Cooke Jr., an animal control officer. The hunting dog happened to belong to Cooke. Harris, who was driving a PETA van, and co-worker Carrie Beth Edwards were accused of stealing the dog and charged with felony theft. The charge against Edwards was later dropped, and the charge against Harris was reduced to misdemeanor petty larceny, for the alleged theft of the collar. She had removed the collar and left it on the roadside. Harris contended that she was attempting to save a dog that she found on the edge of a road where the speed limit is 55 mph. Assistant Southampton Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Edwards said the judge ruled prosecutors failed to prove Harris had intended to permanently deprive the collar’s owner of its possession. David Perle, a PETA spokesman, praised the decision. “Resources would have been better spent investigating the poor condition and abandonment of hunting dogs instead of impugning the motives of a decent young woman who tried to help a dog,” he said. “Our employee acted out of a humane desire to try to protect a dog from getting hurt on the highway.” Partially at issue in many of the claims regarding PETA’s handling of companion animals appears to stem from their “uncompromising” stance on euthanizing shelter animals: Euthanasia literally means “good death,” and true euthanasia — delivered by an intravenous injection of sodium pentobarbital — is painless, quick, and dignified. Because of the high number of unwanted companion animals and the lack of good homes, sometimes the most humane thing that a shelter worker can do is give an animal a peaceful release from a world in which dogs and cats are often considered “surplus.” The American Veterinary Medical Association and the Humane Society of the United States agree that an intravenous injection of sodium pentobarbital administered by a trained professional is the kindest, most compassionate method of euthanizing animals. Until dog and cat overpopulation is brought under control through spaying and neutering, we must prevent the suffering of unwanted animals in the most responsible and humane way possible. Euthanasia, performed properly, is often the most compassionate option. Many critics contend PETA’s policies extend to its putting down tens of thousands of healthy, adoptable stray and homeless animals without having made sufficient (or any) effort to find homes for them: In the last 12 years, PETA has killed 31,250 companion animals. While PETA claims the animals it takes in and kills are “unadoptable,” this is a lie. It is a lie because employees have admitted it is a lie. They have described 8 week old, 10 week old, and 12 week old healthy kittens and puppies routinely and immediately put to death with no effort to find them homes. It is a lie because rescue groups, individuals, and veterinarians have come forward stating that the animals they gave PETA were healthy and adoptable and PETA insiders have admitted as much, one former intern reporting that he quit in disgust after witnessing perfectly healthy puppies and kittens in the kill room. It is a lie because PETA refuses to provide its criteria for making the determination as to whether or not an animal is “unadoptable.” It is a lie because according to a state inspector, the PETA facility where the animals are impounded was designed to house animals for no more than 24 hours. It is a lie because PETA staff have described the animals they have killed as “healthy,” “adorable” and “perfect.” It is a lie because PETA itself admits it does not believe in “right to life for animals.” And it is a lie because when asked what sort of effort PETA routinely makes to find adoptive homes for animals in its care, PETA had no comment. While PETA’s stance on euthanasia is controversial, we could find little evidence it has been extended to family pets with any frequency. PETA workers were arrested over pet theft incidents in 2007 and 2014, but the intent of the workers in those cases was not sufficiently clear to consider their actions unlawful. Aside from those two incidents, we’ve found no evidence supporting the claim that PETA regularly takes household pets from their homes and euthanizes them. PETA did not respond to a request for comment.
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6731
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Iowa hospitals say Medicaid change will cost them millions.
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Iowa officials running the state’s Medicaid program have changed the way hospitals are paid for emergency room care which allows insurance companies to deny or reduce payment for hundreds of symptoms causing hospitals to absorb millions of dollars in unpaid bills.
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true
|
Iowa, Health care industry, Health, Privatizations, Kim Reynolds, Medicaid
|
Iowa hospitals have warned Gov. Kim Reynolds and the Iowa Department of Human Services administrator who oversees the Medicaid program that the changes will cost the state’s largest hospitals tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue a year and will lead to layoffs. “The privatization of Medicaid has been a disaster for the health care industry in this state. We’re not getting paid for our work and our patients aren’t getting adequate coverage,” said Dr. Hans House, an emergency room doctor at University Hospitals in Iowa City and a professor of emergency medicine. He spoke on behalf of the Iowa chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians, an organization challenging such cost-cutting moves by insurers. Medicaid privatization has become a central issue in a tight race for Iowa governor. Reynolds says she’s fixing the system and stands behind privatization carried out by her predecessor Terry Branstad in 2016 to save the state money. Democratic challenger Fred Hubbell said it was a mistake and the state must regain control of the program that cares for 680,000 poor and disabled people. The non-partisan Legislative Services Agency reported last month that per-patient costs have risen an average of 4.4 percent per year since privatization began and the state approved in August $344 million more in funding for the current fiscal year, an 8 percent increase. Health department officials told Iowa hospitals in July that the two insurers managing Medicaid in Iowa, Amerigroup and UnitedHealthcare, would no longer fully reimburse for emergency room care if the primary symptoms the patient initially reported turned out not to be an emergency. The change went into effect in August. In a letter to hospitals and other medical providers obtained by The Associated Press, DHS officials also said they were reclassifying more than 700 symptoms to non-emergency status including head contusions and generalized gastric pain. That means the costs for testing and diagnosis wouldn’t be fully reimbursed. Similar changes in Georgia by Anthem’s Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia led to a federal lawsuit filed in July by health providers, alleging the policy violates federal law. In court documents filed in September, Anthem said up to 24 percent of patients going to emergency rooms are treated for non-emergency conditions and its efforts are an attempt to discourage the unnecessary and costly use of emergency services. Iowa medical professionals say the changes run the risk of discouraging patients from seeking emergency room care and people could die. “A patient who has health insurance should not be expected to decide for themselves if their condition is an emergency or not, that’s not their job that’s my job,” House said. One condition Iowa officials excluded is epigastric pain, which is pain just below the ribs in the upper abdomen and a common symptom of a type of heart attack that occurs in more than 1 million people a year. Often the only way to exclude heart attack is by running tests including an EKG, House said. If the tests show no heart problem the Medicaid insurers will deny the charges saying the pain was not an emergency and the hospital won’t get paid. Officials from Iowa’s largest hospitals including Mercy Medical Center, UnityPoint Health and Genesis Health System unsuccessfully appealed to state human services Director Mike Randol and Reynolds to reconsider the changes. Reynolds’ spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a message. Human services department spokesman Matt Highland said the changes were made with input from medical providers “to ensure the health care needs of Medicaid members are provided in the appropriate health care setting.” University of Iowa Health Care declined to comment but its officials reported to the Iowa Board of Regents in April that it has cut about 487 jobs this year as payments from government sources, largely Medicaid, fell $6.5 million for the second half of the year. Its denial rate from the Medicaid insurers is 2 ½ times greater than other commercial hospital payers. Genesis Health Systems, Mercy and UnityPoint officials did not immediately provide comment but they said in a letter to Randol in August that the new policy “will harm patients and severely harm providers.” ___ Ryan Foley contributed to this report from Iowa City.
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10109
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A new knee built for women only
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This is a nice, concise piece that highlights a new surgical device designed to fit into an already crowded field. On its face, implants tailored for women’s knees have a certain appeal. This story asks whether their merits extend beyond marketing to improved outcomes after surgery—in the form of greater pain relief or patient satisfaction. Readers quickly learn that no one knows. The unfolding story covers a lot of ground in a very short space (375 words). It points out that there is so far no credible evidence to show whether the Gender Knee by Zimmer is as good as, better than, or worse than other artificial knees designed by competing manufacturers. Though it’s more expensive than other implants, quantifying the benefits of the Gender Knee is currently an exercise in speculation. Three different sources fill out the tale—a spokesperson for the medical society representing the nation’s orthopaedists, a spokesperson for knee implant manufacturer Zimmer, and chief of the knee service at one of the busiest joint replacement centers in the world (who has consulted for one of Zimmer’s chief competitor, the story notes)—a balanced group whose potential conflicts readers can judge for themselves. Unfortunately, the focused piece leaves out important information that would provide even more balance. For example, an extra sentence could have explained that knee osteoarthritis is a degenerative condition that causes pain and impairs mobility in mostly older men and women. Moreover, all knee operations have potential harms (e.g. blood clots, infection, even death), and all require time for recovery. In part, that’s why some people choose to opt out. For those that do, there are reasonably effective nonsurgical options. Aside from these relatively minor caveats, however, this is a well done story.
|
true
|
The story says the implant designed especially for women is “more expensive” (presumably in comparison to most other options) even though its cost-effectiveness remains unknown. Still, we wish the story included an actual cost estimate of the device and its implantation. Readers aren’t given any idea of whether this is a ballpark of $200, $2,000 or $20,000. The article explains that there is so far no independent data quantifying the benefits of the new Gender Knee implant for women. All patients who undergo knee replacement operations have a small risk of complications (e.g. blood clots, infection, even death). Does the new gender-specific knee implant increase or reduce these or other potential harms? The article does not pose this question. At the moment, no one knows the answer. The news brief points out that there is so far no credible evidence to show whether the Gender Knee is as good as, better than, or worse than other artificial knees designed by competing manufacturers. Research is in the works, according to the report, but early results won’t be ready for another year or so. Though the article does not mention the scientific literature on the differences between men’s and women’s knees, it generally supports the manufacturer’s assertions reported in the article. There are no obvious elements of disease-mongering. An extra sentence could have explained that knee osteoarthritis is a degenerative condition afflicting mostly older men and women. Three different sources fill out this compact story—a spokesperson for the medical society representing the nation’s orthopaedists, a spokesperson for knee implant manufacturer Zimmer, and chief of the knee service at one of the busiest joint replacement centers in the world (who has consulted for one of Zimmer’s chief competitor, the story notes)—a balanced group whose potential conflicts readers can judge for themselves. The story notes that other manufacturers make implants that may be just as good as or better than the Gender Knee for women. We wish the story had included an additional sentence on nonsurgical alternatives to remind readers that surgery is a matter of patient preference—and many patients choose to opt out. The story makes it clear that the Gender Knee is generally available to women who are candidates for total knee replacement. The news brief explains that the Gender Knee is new, but asks whether it is really all that different from existing implants designed for smaller patients. No obvious use of text from the press release.
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9624
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Dermira's drug for excessive armpit sweating succeeds in key studies
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This is a brief story about two studies of a topical skin treatment for excessive sweating, directed at an investor/financial audience. The story has several major deficiencies, the most egregious being the lack of any specific, useful details of the new treatment, and the research so far conducted on it. We actually found the drug company’s news release to be more informative. The story borders on disease mongering as well, since few details are given what makes this condition more than just a variation of a normal state of health. While it may not be a disease per se, excessive sweating can be an embarrassing condition to live with, and new topical treatments would likely be welcomed by people who want to avoid oral medications, injections or surgery.
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false
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dermatology,dermira,underarm sweating
|
The product is not yet on the market, and is defined as experimental, so we’ll rate this as N/A. But readers would still benefit from seeing the projected steps needed to get on the market, which isn’t made clear here. Not enough detail is contained in the description of the drug’s benefits: “a significant improvement in the severity of sweating was seen in 52.8 percent of the patients treated with the drug, compared with 28.3 percent patients in the control group, on a scale designed by the company. (and 66.1 percent versus 26.9 percent in the control group in the second trial). How are we to know what this means when we don’t know how “improvement” or “severity” is measured? No harms are mentioned, and given the lack of details on what the topical medication is made of, it would be difficult find out via independent research. The story didn’t include enough information on the quality of the evidence. For example, how valid and reliable is the proprietary scale the drug company created to measure sweating? What are the measurement tool’s limitations? And the studies’ limitations? Also, the story didn’t indicate that this data hasn’t been reviewed by independent experts, nor published in a peer-reviewed journal. We’re told in the story that about 3.9 million Americans suffer from excessive underarm sweating. But based on what analysis? What’s the source for that figure, and is it trustworthy? A spokesperson from the company is quoted. However, no independent sources are used. Many alternatives are mentioned, and that’s enough to skirt by as Satisfactory. However, the discussion of alternatives (such as antiperspirants and Botox injections) seems mostly to revolve around pointing out how problematic they are, without any discussion of actual comparative effectiveness, which is a disservice to readers. We learn it is still in its experimental stages. The story makes no unfounded claims about novelty, and the story makes it clear that an effective topical treatment via wipes would be new for this condition. The story didn’t appear to rely primarily on the news release, as we don’t see signs of quotes or text being lifted directly without acknowledgment. We’ll rate this N/A. However, the release does have additional valuable context that we wish had been included (with acknowledgement), such as study details and adverse effects of the medication.
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3974
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Eastern Indiana farmer charged after dead cows found.
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An eastern Indiana farmer faces charges after 38 dead cows were found on his property.
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true
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Health, Animal health, Crime, Richmond, Indiana
|
The (Richmond) Palladium-Item reports 42-year-old Rodney Sintz of West College Corner is charged with three counts of failure to properly dispose of a dead animal and three counts of cruelty to an animal. Court documents say an Indiana State Board of Animal Health field veterinarian found the dead cows in various stages of decomposition on March 5. Under state law, animals must be properly disposed of within 24 hours of an owner’s knowledge that they have died. The veterinarian said other cattle appeared below normal body weight and about half of the herd didn’t have access to adequate food and water. A phone call to Sintz’s home rang unanswered Tuesday. ___ Information from: Palladium-Item, http://www.pal-item.com
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29934
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"A person can be seen committing suicide by jumping from a bridge in the background of a scene in the movie ""The Basketball Diaries."
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The small object in this clip could certainly be a garbage bag or some sort of debris. A popular suggestion during a discussion among the Snopes staff was that the object could be a large bird diving from the bridge toward the water. We can’t definitively identify the object falling from this bridge, but we note that the rumor about its being a suicide victim is based purely upon speculation, is not supported by any news reports or other accounts, and is disputed by one of the actors present on the scene during filming.
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false
|
Entertainment
|
On 17 January 2019, a video purportedly showing a person committing suicide by jumping off of a bridge in the background of a scene from the 1995 film The Basketball Diaries was posted to the Reddit community: Suicide caught in the 1995 film “The Basketball Diaries” (Look at the bridge behind Mark Wahlberg) A small, blurry object can be glimpsed just over the left shoulder of actor Mark Wahlberg (the person standing nearest to the cliff’s edge) and starts to fall just as Wahlberg steps down to look over the water. If you’re still having a difficult time locating the object, a larger version of this clip can be viewed here. A cropped version centered on the mysterious falling object can be glimpsed below: While the Redditor who originally shared this clip asserted that it captured a suicide in progress, that claim was not based on anything other than personal observation. In other words, the rumor was spawned solely based upon what could be glimpsed in the video and not on news reports, police records, interviews with the actors and filmmakers, or even years-old gossip: Q: “So sad. Was this only now discovered?” A: “I noticed it last night, and couldn’t find any past posts about it. So seemingly so.” Based solely on this clip, it’s difficult to determine exactly what, if anything, was falling from the bridge in the background of this scene. The object is too small, blurry, and distant to definitively determine its shape, but it appears oblong but with no discernible appendages. The Basketball Diaries, a film adaptation of a Jim Carroll novel about a high school basketball player’s struggle with addiction, was filmed in various locations around New York and New Jersey in the Spring of 1994. The scene captured in this clip was filmed atop cliffs known as “C Rock” over the Spuyten Duyvil Creek in Inwood Hill Park and shows the Henry Hudson Bridge in the background. Our search of news archives for any reports concerning a person’s jumping from this bridge, the nearby George Washington Bridge, or even from these cliffs between March and May 1994 yielded no results. Furthermore, we managed to get in touch with one of the movie’s stars, James Madio, who was on set the day this scene was shot. Madio, who played Pedro in the movie and can be seen standing closest to Wahlberg in the clip in question, told us that he had no recollection of even hearing about anyone’s jumping off a bridge during the shooting of The Basketball Diaries: “My thoughts: I spent many fun hours on that hot rock in Harlem, with a group of extremely talented actors that I admire. I had fond memories across the board on the production of The Basketball Diaries. Throughout the years, I’ve never remembered or heard of anyone committing suicide off the GW Bridge while we were shooting. It’s safe to say that this is FALSE!” “In the attached clip — it looks more like a large garage bag then a human, and the so called body appears to be way too big in frame in comparison to how far [away] the bridge actually is.”
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7441
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Some counties undeterred by Wolf’s threat; others back down.
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Two days after Gov. Tom Wolf lambasted them as “cowardly” and vowed to withhold funding, several Pennsylvania counties signaled Wednesday they are moving ahead with plans to defy him by lifting some pandemic restrictions. Others backed down under the governor’s threat.
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true
|
Harrisburg, Health, General News, Pennsylvania, Business, Tom Wolf, Pandemics, Beaver, Virus Outbreak, Public health
|
Commissioners in many GOP-controlled counties where the Democratic governor has yet to ease any restrictions say they can manage the public health impacts of COVID-19 and reopen safely. They say the shutdown threatens to destroy local economies — especially small businesses — the longer it goes. “Come this Friday, we plan on opening because we’ve been getting hundreds of emails, text messages and phone calls that these business owners are on the brink of closing down,” Daniel Camp III, the Republican chairman of the Beaver County Board of Commissioners, told a state Senate hearing Wednesday. Beaver County, home to a severe nursing home outbreak, said it plans to operate as if Wolf had already eased restrictions there, meaning residents can freely leave their homes and retailers, offices and other kinds of businesses can reopen. Because of the outbreak, Beaver is the lone western Pennsylvania county that remains locked down. Columbia County, meanwhile, voted Wednesday to join Beaver and other counties that plan to lift Wolf’s stay-at-home orders and allow nonessential businesses to reopen Friday without his blessing. Columbia said its coronavirus numbers have been inflated by reporting irregularities, and accused the governor’s office of failing to communicate why it hasn’t been allowed to emerge from some pandemic restrictions. But Columbia’s resolution also warned businesses reopening in defiance of the state shutdown that they do so at their own peril, noting the county “cannot protect county businesses and individuals” from state retaliation. Wolf has said that businesses that open without his permission jeopardize professional and business licenses, certificates of occupancy and insurance policies. “We didn’t want to do what we did today,” said Columbia County Commissioner David Kovach, a Democrat who joined the board’s Republican majority. “But we felt we needed to make a statement.” Counties that still plan to lift restrictions despite Wolf’s threat to withhold billions in COVID-19 funding also include Lebanon and Lancaster, the state’s seventh-most populous. But county officials elsewhere — including Schuylkill County and Dauphin County, home of the state capital — took heed and backed down, even as they continued to press Wolf for a more ambitious reopening timetable. “For us to threaten and then execute a ‘Hey everyone go back to green in Berks County,’ we will suffer the consequences,” said Berks County Commissioner Kevin Barnhardt, a Democrat, referring to Wolf’s color-coded reopening plan. “And I don’t want to be the one saying that, gee, I held up the money, or we were denied money ... because of a foolish decision.” George F. Halcovage Jr., Republican chair of the Schuylkill County board, said the governor took a more conciliatory tone in a conference call with county commissioners. “That phone call, hearing the governor say, ‘We need to collaborate and cooperate with county commissioners,’ that was extremely important,” he said. “This is the first time I’ve heard that said.” A message was left with Wolf’s office late Wednesday seeking comment. The governor’s earlier warning to counties came amid increasing pressure from Republican lawmakers who want him to lift his pandemic restrictions more quickly in additional areas of Pennsylvania. Wolf has said that moving too fast risks jeopardizing the progress Pennsylvania has made against a virus that has sickened some 59,000 and killed nearly 4,000 statewide. In Berks County, commissioners on Wednesday said they couldn’t in good conscience advise businesses to reopen in defiance of Wolf, given the risk. But at a video news conference at which they invited several struggling small business owners to speak, the board called on Wolf to take action immediately to allow Berks to reopen, saying it can do so safely. Big-box retailers that have been deemed essential and allowed to operate during the pandemic are steadily putting locally owned competitors out of business, they said. “Governor Wolf, we are are begging you to reconsider what you are doing to the commonwealth of Pennsylvania and to Berks County,” said Christian Leinbach, GOP chair of the Berks County board. “Do you really believe a small flower shop is less safe than thousands of people flocking Walmart and Lowe’s for their Mother’s Day flowers?” In other coronavirus-related developments: ___ CASES The Pennsylvania Department of Health on Wednesday reported 137 additional coronavirus deaths, raising the statewide total to 3,943. The deaths occurred over the past several weeks. The Health Department has been reconciling its records with data provided by hospitals, health systems, municipal health departments and nursing homes. Over two-thirds of the state’s virus deaths have occurred among residents of nursing homes and similar institutions. Health officials reported 707 new infections, bringing the statewide total to nearly 59,000. The number of infections is thought to be far higher than the state’s confirmed case count because many people have not been tested, and studies suggest people can be infected without feeling sick. There is no data on how many people have fully recovered. For most people, the virus causes mild or moderate symptoms that clear up in a couple of weeks. Older adults and people with existing health problems are at higher risk of more severe illness, including pneumonia, or death. ___ EDUCATION FUNDING Pennsylvania schools will get $524 million in federal funding to help them respond to the virus, the governor’s office said Wednesday. The U.S. Department of Education approved Pennsylvania’s application for the one-time emergency allocation, which was part of the federal coronavirus relief law signed by President Donald Trump in late March. Schools may use the funding for a wide range of purposes, including food service, professional training, technology purchases, sanitization and cleaning supplies, summer and after-school programs and mental health supports, the governor’s office said.
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10546
|
New test under development could find single cancer cell in blood
|
Researchers and company cut a deal to support research on a test that finds circulating tumor cells. Company announces the deal. News story regurgitates the company announcement without examination. If CNN was going to rewrite someone else’s work, it would have been better off rewriting Dr. Len Lichtenfeld’s blog post from the American Cancer Society website, since it gave a cautious, analytical overview that this piece lacked. Lichtenfeld was quoted at the very end of this piece, but the quote was far less meaty than what appeared on his blog. A case in which medical blogger outshines international news network? Cancer is a leading cause of death. No disease incites greater fear. There is great demand for tests that could improve cancer outcomes. Stories about potential advances in this area should be careful not to make promises that are not supported by evidence and they should also clearly outline the risks and limitations of testing.
|
false
|
Cancer,CNN
|
The story does not offer any information about costs. It refers to an early technology for detecting circulating tumor cells marketed by the same company, but then doesn’t tell readers how much the existing test costs. As mentioned above, the story regurgitates unsupported promises that early detection of cancer is inherently beneficial. But it gives no data on how the test has fared in studies to date. There is no mention of harms, not even the obvious possibility that this sort of test could detect cells that don’t actually present a serious health threat or aren’t susceptible to treatment. It perpetuates the myth that early detection is always beneficial and turns a blind eye to the harms of overtreatment. By comparison, see what Dr. Susan Love said on the ABC News website: “Having the cells in the bloodstream does not necessarily mean that the cancer will spread and kill you. Just because you find them does not mean you know what to do with the information. …We all have cancer cells in our body that are dormant,” Love said. “We need to be careful not to over react to the presence of cancer cells when the treatment may actually be worse than the cure.” The story does not tell readers anything about the state of the evidence that is currently available. No overt disease-mongering. Too much of the story comes from conflicted sources. There is input from Dr. Len Lichtenfeld of the American Cancer Society at the very end. But the story fails to mention that the American Cancer Society has supported research in this area. And the story didn’t even include the much stronger types of comments Lichtenfeld made on his own blog, such as: “…this is an announcement of a research deal. Nothing more, nothing less. It is not a new breakthrough. It is not something that has been proven effective in improving cancer detection and treatment. Not that it is anything less than stunning to develop and demonstrate that this technology works – but as with all research it is a giant step to go successfully from the laboratory phase of development to the clinical phase of making a real difference in patients’ lives. So that in essence is what the fuss is all about: the researchers have signed a contract with a company to further develop this research and determine whether in fact it can be applied successfully to large numbers of patients in a more efficient and less expensive manner.” There is no meaningful discussion of any testing alternatives – only brief mention of another test from the same company making this new announcement – but without any details about how the two are different – much less anything about any other testing research. As Len Lichtenfeld of the American Cancer Society reminds readers: “…we are seeing many tests that are being touted as important in answering various questions about the future behavior of an individual’s cancer but we are not seeing the type of validation we need to know whether or not such claims are in fact clinically relevant. There are so many markers and genetic tests out there that even the most knowledgeable experts in the clinical treatment of patients with cancer are having a hard time separating the proverbial wheat from the chaff.” The story quotes a researcher saying it “it will take at least five years before the test is on the market” but treats that as a fait accompli. But the story doesn’t make clear the staggering amount of testing that remains ahead. It was hard to judge the story on this criterion. It includes a quote that calls the technology “new” and then in the next paragraph tells readers of a test the same company has been selling since 2004 that detect circulating cancer cells. There is no explanation of what the difference is between the “new” test and the one that has been available for several years. Nonethless, we’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. This story is merely a condensed version of a news release. Some quotes appear to be lifted directly from the news release. “Veridex, LLC Announces Collaboration to Develop Next-Generation Circulating Tumor Cell (CTC) Technology with Massachusetts General Hospital” http://www.jnj.com/connect/news/all/Veridex-LLC-Announces-Collaboration-to-Develop-Next-Generation-Circulating-Tumor-Cell-Technology-with-Massachusetts-General-Hospital
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6620
|
Roseburg woman breathing easier after double-lung transplant.
|
Jennifer Myers of Roseburg can breathe easier now that a double lung transplant has given her a new lease on life.
|
true
|
Cystic fibrosis, Health, Oregon, Lung transplants, Portland, Roseburg
|
Cystic fibrosis was taking away her ability to breathe, and she got to the point where she was going to need the life-saving procedure to survive. Myers, 34, was born with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder that causes severe damage to lungs and other organs. For Myers, the disorder was diagnosed on her second birthday. But it wasn’t until 2014, when her health took a bad turn and she got pneumonia, that her lung capacity became severely reduced and it was much tougher to breathe. She spent a month on a ventilator at Oregon Health Sciences University Hospital in Portland fighting for her life, where it was eventually decided that she would need a lung transplant. Just getting on the list for new lungs is tough, but then the lungs have to be both available and compatible. So, a lot of things have to fall into place to make it happen. Myers knew the journey was going to be difficult and risky. “I’m not going to lie, it was pretty scary,” Myers said, “Not being able to breathe, or really function anymore, and depending on supplemental oxygen and doing therapies around the clock, just not knowing when you’re going to get that phone call.” She was on her fourteenth day as an inpatient at CHI Mercy Medical Center in Roseburg when she finally got the call. She was loaded into a private plane and headed for Seattle at the fastest possible speed. Then, on Feb. 4, 2015, she finally got a new pair of lungs. “It hurt like the dickens, because they break your sternum, and I was scared, terrified and nervous,” Myers said. The family took her out to a restaurant to celebrate and when the waitress brought her a cake with a candle Meyers was able to blow it out for the first time that she can remember. “I got to blow the candle out and I just started crying. I don’t know the last time I was ever able to do that,” Myers said. One of the most gratifying moments for her was meeting Harry Wood, the husband of Debbie Wood, her lung donor. In February 2015, while they were watching the Seattle Seahawks play in the Super Bowl in their residence north of Seattle, Debbie Wood suddenly grabbed her head and died in the middle of conversation. Two years later, Myers’ family met with Harry Wood and daughter-in-law Martha Wood in Portland. Because Harry Wood was still dealing with the emotional loss of his wife, he needed a couple years before he was emotionally ready to meet Myers. Two years after the transplant, when Myers and Wood finally got together, the emotions came flooding back. “It was a very emotional day, because you’re telling your side of the story and they’re telling their side, and I am beyond grateful for their decision,” Myers said. Wood got to listen to his wife lungs with a stethoscope and was overwhelmed. “I had no clue how to wrap my arms around this emotion,” he said. “I was happy, then crying, then happy, then crying again, over and over and over.” For Harry Wood and Jennifer Myers, and all their friends and relatives, the importance of being an organ donor has taken on a much different perspective. Wood said he gave the hospital permission to use any organs from his wife’s body that that could be donated. “Deb would be totally on board with that, and it looks like her organs will help upwards of 80 people,” Wood said. “I’m just overwhelmed with gratitude that they’ve done that.” Meyers’ transplant team has been happy with the progress they’ve seen in her pulmonary lung function test, which measures how much air you can breathe in and push out. “I was probably a child the last time I had that much lung function. I’m very avid about working out, and I’ve been given a second chance, and I’m going to use these new lungs to my full advantage,” Myers said. The more time that passes, the less that Myers has to worry about a rejection. But Myers takes precautions just the same. She still has to wear a mask when she’s around kids or goes to the doctor’s office, because getting an infection could cause rejection. She always get a flu shot and keeps her distance from sick people. Myers has been overwhelmed by the community support. “You just can’t say thank you enough to all the people that contributed and have given up their time and donations for this,” she said. “Thank you is just not adequate.” “That door swings both ways,” Harry Wood said. “She actually saved my life, because I was struggling in the grief process. Deb lives through her.” Myers said the best part about getting two new lungs, “was to be able to take a deep breath, and not struggle.” Myers’ boyfriend, Brian Boswell met her a little over a year ago at a gym when they were both doing boot camp classes. He soon found out just how strong-willed she is. “One class is enough for me, but she was doing three. She has more strength and sheer will and determination than anybody I’ve seen,” Boswell said. “It’s really exciting to be a part of someone who’s been given a second chance and see what they choose to do with their life, and how they choose to live it.” Jennifer’s mother, Teresa Myers, said it was a helpless feeling watching someone you love so much going through the cystic fibrosis and the whole lung transplant process. “She is one of the most courageous, strong people that I have ever met and will probably ever meet,” said Teresa Myers. “She went through a lot and always managed to smile.” Molly Boye, a teacher in Canyonville, became good friends with Myers when they were both teaching. Myers would come to her classes to talk about the cystic fibrosis and later about the transplant. “I wish she could be a teacher again, because she really loves kids,” Boye said. Boye organized fundraisers to help with expenses, and she said the turnout to support Myers was beyond her expectations. “I can’t believe how many came, there was such support and the small community really came together,” Boye said. For Jennifer Myers, she is doing some things that she never had a chance to do in the past. She has gone skydiving, auto racing, and a lot of other adventures that have been on her bucket list. She was a substitute teacher before she had to have the transplant, and she is back to work doing part-time home instruction tutoring for a couple of hours a day with the Roseburg School District. “It’s so awesome to get back to teaching and helping kids and doing what I love to do,” she said. ___ Information from: The News-Review, http://www.nrtoday.com
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34166
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In October 2019, the Rev. Robert Morey of St. Anthony's parish in Florence, South Carolina, refused former Vice President Joe Biden the Catholic rite of communion.
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Until and unless we receive information that corroborates Morey’s account.
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unproven
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Politics
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In October 2019, we received multiple inquiries from readers about the accuracy of news reports that claimed former Vice President and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden had been refused communion by a Catholic priest in South Carolina on the basis of Biden’s support for abortion rights. The story was covered by several major national news outlets but originated in a statement sent to the Florence Morning News by Robert Morey, a priest in the Catholic parish of St. Anthony in Florence, South Carolina. On Oct. 28, the Morning News reported that: Former Vice President Joe Biden, a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 presidential race, was denied Holy Communion on Sunday morning at a Florence church. Father Robert E. Morey of Saint Anthony Catholic Church confirmed Monday afternoon that he had denied the presidential candidate Holy Communion because of his stance on abortion. Biden, a lifelong Catholic, had attended the church’s 9 a.m. Mass… “Sadly, this past Sunday, I had to refuse Holy Communion to former Vice President Joe Biden,” Morey told the Morning News via email. “Holy Communion signifies we are one with God, each other and the Church. Our actions should reflect that. Any public figure who advocates for abortion places himself or herself outside of Church teaching.” Morey said that as a priest, it is his responsibility to minister to those souls entrusted to his care and that he must do so in even the most difficult situations. “I will keep Mr. Biden in my prayers,” Morey added. Asked by Snopes to confirm, deny, or clarify Morey’s account, a spokesperson for the Biden campaign declined to comment on the story. Biden himself did likewise on Oct. 29, during an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, saying, “I’m not going to discuss that, that’s just my personal life and I’m not going to get into that at all.” In the Catholic tradition, Holy Communion (or eucharist) is an important rite that symbolizes the Last Supper and the sacrifice made by Christ on the cross, with communicants receiving the “body and blood” of Christ (sacramental bread or wafer and sacramental wine). In a typical Catholic mass, the eucharist is the portion of the liturgy during which mass-goers are most openly visible to each other. Those who are receiving communion (and are physically able) leave their seats and stand in a line leading to the altar, where a priest or bishop, or a specially designated layperson, administers the sacrament by placing the host (consecrated bread) either in their hand or on their tongue. If Morey refused Biden communion at the altar (that is, at the point where the communicant receives the host), it’s quite likely this denial would have been seen by others in attendance at the mass. To a devout Catholic, such a gesture would likely be extremely embarrassing and deeply wounding. However, no witness accounts or other corroborating evidence have so far emerged. That doesn’t mean the incident did not occur. It’s perfectly plausible, for example, that Morey might have gone to Biden or his aides before mass started and quietly informed them he would not administer communion to him. In that way, the refusal would not have been witnessed by a third party. We put a series of questions to Morey requesting details about the sequence of events, including whether any third parties actually witnessed his purportedly refusing Biden the eucharist. Unfortunately, despite repeated attempts to contact Morey, we did not receive a response of any kind. We also contacted the Diocese of Charleston, the administrative subdivision of the church that oversees Morey’s parish, asking several questions and attempting to obtain information or details that might corroborate and verify Morey’s account. A spokesperson for the diocese did not respond to our questions but instead repeatedly directed us to Morey himself. Morey’s account, which was the sole basis of the multiple news reports that followed, remains unverified. The alleged other party in the purported incident, Biden, is declining to comment and therefore has not confirmed anything, and neither Morey nor his employer, the diocese, responded to our requests for further information. Furthermore, we cannot rule out the possibility that Morey might have fabricated or exaggerated or misrepresented the incident in some way based on a preexisting ideological antipathy towards Biden or the Democratic party. First, Morey’s very explanation of his purported actions (“Any public figure who advocates for abortion places himself or herself outside of Church teaching”) clearly indicates at the very least a strong, preexisting disagreement with Biden, on his part, with regard to reproductive-health issues. Second, Morey has in the recent past made donations to Republican political campaigns — contributing to the presidential primary campaign of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in 2015, and to the primary campaign of then-U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, in 2011. We found no record of Morey having contributed to Democratic candidates. This indicates clear, preexisting support, on Morey’s part, for the political party opposite to Biden’s. Those facts might not have any significance, and Morey might well have been entirely accurate in his account. However, such background details necessarily mean it is appropriate to reserve judgement on the accuracy of what he presented as having happened. If information emerges that corroborates Morey’s account, we will update this fact check accordingly. Church leaders and clergy members in the United States have, from time to time, refused the eucharist to pro-choice politicians (or threatened to refuse it). In 2004, Catholic bishops warned Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry that he would be denied communion based on his political support for abortion rights and stem cell research, which the church also opposes. In 2008, the Bishop of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Joseph Martino, made various statements suggesting that then vice-presidential candidate Biden, a native of the city, should be barred (or should refrain) from taking communion, based on his support for abortion rights. Martino also suggested that anyone within the diocese of Scranton who even voted for the Obama-Biden ticket should not receive communion. The following year, Martino went so far as to suggest that U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pennsylvania, was not “worthy to receive communion.” Casey is famously an avowedly pro-life Democrat, one of very few in national politics, but his purported malfeasance in that instance was voting in the Senate to confirm Kathleen Sebelius, who holds strong pro-choice views, as Secretary of Health and Human Services. These interventions might suggest that the Catholic church has a clear-cut policy on the question of refusing communion to pro-choice politicians, and that there is a straightforward, linear relationship between professing views that go against church teaching, and being denied the sacraments. The reality is much more complicated, and Morey — if he did refuse Biden communion — may even have violated church law himself. Catholic doctrine forbids abortion. The church’s catechism states: “Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person — among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life … Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law.” Canon law explicitly states that anyone who procures an abortion (or directly assists in one, such as a doctor) is automatically excommunicated, and therefore ineligible to receive the sacraments, including communion. (Canon 1398: “A person who procures a completed abortion incurs a latae sententiae excommunication.”) However, the question of whether a Catholic public figure who supports or advocates for abortion rights can be excommunicated or denied communion, within the tenets of Church law, is the subject of significant dispute within the Catholic church. It’s not a debate we’ll outline in this article, but good introductory explanations of the legal and doctrinal principles involved can be found here, here and here. Canon 912 of the Code of Canon Law states that, “Any baptized person not prohibited by law can and must be admitted to holy communion.” This places an obligation on a clergy member or eucharistic minister to administer the sacrament of communion unless the person seeking it has, according to Canon 915, “been excommunicated or interdicted after the imposition or declaration of the penalty” or is “obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin.” We asked Morey for his precise reasoning in purportedly denying Biden communion, and we also asked the diocese of Charleston whether Morey had, in the view of the diocese, acted in accordance with canon law, if he did refuse Biden the sacrament, and whether (in Morey’s words) “advocating for abortion” was officially sufficient grounds, in the diocese of Charleston, for being denied communion. Furthermore we asked both Morey and the diocese whether he had acted independently or under instruction from someone else within the church hierarchy. Neither Morey nor the diocese answered any of our questions, and a spokesperson for the diocese repeatedly referred our questions to Morey, even though it was pointed out to them that some of those questions were specific to the diocese. News reports in October 2019 claimed that a Catholic priest in South Carolina, Robert Morey, had refused Biden communion on Sunday, Oct. 27. The only source for that claim was a statement written by the priest himself. Morey might well have given an accurate account of what took place that morning, but we cannot verify its accuracy for several reasons: The only other party to the alleged incident was Biden, and he has declined to comment; no witnesses have so far publicly corroborated Morey’s account; we asked Morey and his employer, the Charleston diocese, to provide further corroborating details, but they failed to do so; and Morey’s past political contributions and strong, pre-existing disagreement with Biden on abortion rights mean that a plausible motive exists, in principle, for Morey to seek to embarrass or harm Biden’s reputation, although we have no specific evidence that those factors did, in fact, inform Morey’s actions.
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6939
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Canadian marijuana imports OK’d by US for California study.
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In a rare move, the U.S. government has approved the importation of marijuana extracts from Canada for a clinical trial, highlighting a new avenue for American researchers who have long had trouble obtaining the drug for medical studies.
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true
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Global trade, AP Top News, San Diego, University of California, Clinical trials, Medical marijuana, Tilray Inc, North America, Business, Legal Marijuana, California, Marijuana, U.S. News, Canada
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The University of California San Diego’s Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research announced Tuesday the Drug Enforcement Administration has OK’d its plans to import capsules containing two key cannabis compounds — CBD and THC — from British Columbia-based Tilray Inc . to study their effectiveness in treating tremors that afflict millions of people, especially those over 65. Marijuana remains illegal under federal law, making it impossible for researchers to simply obtain forms of the drug from one of the many medical marijuana programs approved by individual states — even a state with a pot culture as prevalent as California’s. Instead, federal law dictates that researchers typically must obtain any weed for clinical trials through the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which uses cannabis grown at the University of Mississippi. Scientists have long complained about the difficulty of obtaining that marijuana, as well as its limited quality, variety and usefulness for clinical research. The University of California San Diego researchers said they needed marijuana extracts in capsule form because it’s easier to monitor the doses that patients receive, compared to having patients smoke or vaporize it. They also believed many older patients would be reluctant to participate in the study if they had to inhale the drug, according to Dr. Fatta Nahab, a UCSD neurologist and the tremor study’s principal investigator. NIDA doesn’t offer capsules, so the researchers spent about two years going through regulatory hoops to obtain permission to import the drug from Canada, where medical marijuana is federally legal and where recreational sales begin nationwide next month. Paul Armentano, deputy director of the marijuana law reform organization NORML, said that illustrates how badly American researchers need alternative sources for cannabis. The House Judiciary Committee last week passed a bill to require the Justice Department to issue at least two more licenses to U.S. facilities to grow pot for research. “It’s very telling that you have researchers in the U.S. willing to exert the patience and go through the regulatory hurdles to make this happen at the same time the United States has its own domestic supply source,” Armentano said. Marijuana compounds have been imported for clinical trials before, including by Britain-based GW Pharmaceuticals, which won approval this year to sell its purified CBD capsule, Epidiolex, to treat severe forms of epilepsy — the first cannabis drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. While GW Pharmaceuticals developed that drug in-house before bringing it to the U.S. for testing, Tilray, which recently became the first marijuana company to complete an initial public stock offering in the U.S., said it can work with researchers to develop the cannabis formulations they hope to study. “It’s a really big milestone for Tilray and also just for the whole industry,” said Catherine Jacobson, Tilray’s director of clinical research. “Researchers in the U.S. have really been limited to doing research using dried flower. We have been able to prove to the FDA that we can manufacture investigational study drugs containing cannabinoids that meet their standards.” Neither the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates clinical trials, nor the DEA had immediate details on how often the agencies have approved the import or use of foreign-made cannabis drugs in research, but DEA spokeswoman Katherine Pfaff said: “It is done. There are definitely situations where, when there’s no source in the U.S., a registrant can import a cannabis-derived drug from another country.” The National Institute on Drug Abuse usually provides marijuana as bulk flower or joints to be vaporized or smoked, though it also can supply cannabis oil. NIDA intends to expand how much marijuana the University of Mississippi grows for research. The agency’s contract with the university provides for the possibility of offering cannabis capsules, but it has not yet done so, said Don Stanford, assistant director of the Research Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the university. There is no drug designed to treat essential tremor, a shaking condition. Unlike Parkinson’s disease, which causes shaking when someone is not moving, people with essential tremors shake when they are, making everyday activities like writing, drinking and speaking difficult. The condition afflicts 10 million people nationally and millions more across the globe, according to the International Essential Tremor Foundation. Many patients try to control the shaking by repurposing other drugs, such as blood pressure medicine, with limited success. Nahab said he started looking into whether marijuana could be used to treat essential tremor after two patients showed sudden improvement after smoking pot or consuming CBD purchased online. The FDA application outlined the drug formula — a 20:1 ratio of CBD to THC, to minimize any high study participants might feel — as well as its purity, toxicity, shelf life and other details. Researchers also had to get safety approvals from the university and present their plans to a California research advisory panel. The university hopes to have 16 to 20 patients in the study, which will begin early next year. Researchers will monitor the tremors with a device placed on the wrist and record changes in the severity of the shaking. Tilray is providing the drug and limited financial support but said it will have no role in reviewing the study’s results. “Essential tremor is 10 times more common than Parkinson’s and yet nobody really knows about essential tremor,” Nahab said. “That we’re finally getting to a potential therapeutic option in an area that is untapped is a big deal.” ___ Johnson is a member of AP’s marijuana beat team. Follow him at https://twitter.com/GeneAPseattle . Follow Julie Watson at https://twitter.com/watson_julie . Find complete AP marijuana coverage here: http://apnews.com/tag/LegalMarijuana .
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38631
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A viral Facebook post warns that Nylabone dog treats are toxic and can cause seizures.
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Nylabone Dog Treats Are Toxic and Cause Seizures-Reported as Fiction!
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false
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Animals
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There’s no proof that Nylabone dog chews are toxic, or that they can give dogs seizures. Those rumors surfaced with a Facebook post from a woman who said she was passing along a message “from a friend” about her 2 year-old dog having a seizure while eating a Nylabone dog chew: From a friend please read!!! FYI. To all my friends and family who have a pet. This weekend I bought a couple bones at “pets mart” for Guido and Smudge. The name of the bone is “NYLABONE” chicken flavored. Smudge had a seizure while chewing the bone. He is two. My sister googled the Nylabone. One of the side effects is they are toxic and can cause seizures. Your pet can not digest the bone if they swallow it. And you’ll need to have it surgically removed. There is a push to get them pulled off the shelves. So pet owners beware. I’m buying only natural bones and horns to chew. It’s true that chicken flavored Nylabone FlexiChew Bones are “not recommended for strong chewers.” That doesn’t mean they’re toxic or can cause seizures, however. Rather, according to the company’s chew style guidelines, its bones are formulated for specific chewing styles to prevent damage to dogs’ teeth, and to prevent dogs from being able to bite off and swallow large pieces: Get to know your dog’s chewing style – It is important to select the appropriate chew type, size, and formulation based on your dog’s age, breed, chewing style and weight. The pressure exerted by a dog’s jaw is considerable, and when directed straight down can put tremendous stress on their teeth. It is recommended that non-edible chews be large enough to encourage chewing from the side rather than the top and bottom. If your dog is between sizes, choose the larger-size chew item. If you have more than one dog in your household, select chews appropriate for the largest, strongest chewer. If your dog is an especially strong chewer, a larger chew may provide more of a challenge. Nylabone product warnings state that dog owners should call a veterinarian if a dog swallows a large piece of a bone, but there’s been no indication that that would cause seizures. The Canine Journal reports that Nylabones are made from compounds that are very difficult for dogs to digest, which can cause blockage or other severe medical problems: If your dog has eaten part of a Nylabone, you need to go to the vet immediately! The components of a these bones are very difficult for your dog to digest and can cause many problems, not only to your pup’s health but also to your bank account. It’s important to watch your dog and check his toys each time before giving them to him to make sure the toys are still in good condition and that there aren’t any pieces missing. If your dog swallows a large piece of Nylabone or other chew toy you may have to get an x-ray, have him stay overnight at the vet’s, have him undergo expensive emergency surgery or worse. For its part, Nylabone released a statement calling accusations that its products are toxic and cause seizures incorrect: Recently there has been some misinformation about the safety of our products circulating on Facebook. The negative information—mostly originating from and being spread by fake spam accounts—is incorrect, and we would like to set the record straight. All of our products are made from non-toxic, pet-safe materials and are designed for the specific chewing style and size of your dog. From gentle teething puppies to extreme power chewers, Nylabone has a safe, healthy chew for every dog. Nylabone stands for the highest quality in chews and treats. It is our goal to exceed consumer expectations for our products in innovation, safety, quality, and the enjoyment of the people and pets we serve. For decades pet parents like you have trusted Nylabone to help your dog develop positive and healthy chewing habits. If you have any questions or concerns about Nylabone or our products, please contact us at (855) 273-7527 or at http://www.nylabone.com/about/contact-us/ If you see one of these posts on your Facebook newsfeed we encourage you to share the above information in order to help us set the record straight. So, in conclusion, its true that Nylabone dog chews can be dangerous for dogs if large pieces are swallowed. But there’s no proof that Nylabones are toxic, or that they cause seizures. That’s why we’re reporting this one as fiction. Comments
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3918
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Inspectors wanted: New Mexico sets sights on public health.
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From taco stands to toxic waste, environmental regulators in New Mexico are tasked with inspecting tens of thousands of businesses, restaurants and industrial sites every year, but some officials are concerned that demand has far outpaced the number of available inspectors.
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true
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Legislature, Health, General News, Environment, State legislature, Public health, New Mexico
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Environment Secretary James Kenney says the state Legislature needs to make a bigger investment to bolster the tools his agency has so it can meet its regulatory responsibilities. “We have a direct correlation to public health and I think people don’t often remember that is in the forefront of our mission — protecting public health and the environment,” Kenney told The Associated Press this week. Kenney is asking for an additional $8.8 million in state general funds and for flexibility to increase fees that would bring in more revenue from the permitting and other services the state environment department already provides. The money would help pay for nearly 70 more employees and help the agency fill dozens of existing vacancies. The request will be among many when the Legislature meets in January for a 30-day session to determine spending priorities. Another surplus is expected because of the continued record revenues coming from oil and gas drilling, but some lawmakers have warned that spending should be kept in check in case of a future downturn. The environment department’s request has the support of first-year Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who has spoken about curbing emissions from the oil and gas sector and creating new industries to offset reliance on drilling. One of those burgeoning industries is hemp manufacturing. The environment department is establishing the permitting and inspection infrastructure needed for the industry. Without legislative appropriations, Kenney said his agency has been forced to move inspectors from the food program to work on hemp and that has cost the state about $60,000 in federal grant money. “That’s happening time and time again to the point where we are not — I will say it — we are not sufficiently implementing our mission in a way that I think this department could and should,” he said. There are more than 9,200 food preparation and manufacturing spots that the environment department is responsible for inspecting. The current budget includes 22 full-time positions for the task. That caseload has resulted in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration chiding the state for not having the capacity for follow-up inspections at problem sites. “That’s largely a staffing and budgetary issue,” Kenney said. “We don’t have the luxury of going back to these places to confirm that they made the recommendations to bring them into compliance.” The workload is just as high for inspectors overseeing drinking water sources, hazardous wastes, workplace safety, petroleum storage tanks and medical equipment, according to figures from the environment department. When it comes to air emissions, the state has five inspectors to monitor 7,700 sources. Despite the personnel shortage, the agency has turned to technology for help. Thousands of air inspections recently were done across New Mexico’s portion of the Permian Basin using a helicopter and an infrared camera that can spot methane emissions. “There comes a point where our staffing needs to rely on technology because the universe is so large,” Kenney said. “We have to think that way. We don’t have the luxury to not think that way.”
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10205
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Eating your way to lower cholesterol
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This article puts several disparate pieces about dietary interventions that can be made to improve cholesterol profile together in one place in a helpful manner. The article covered the results of a recent study that showed that the addition of what was terms a ‘portfolio of heart friendly foods’ to the diet can result in a significant reduction in the level of ‘bad’ cholesterol. This ‘porfolio’ included viscous fiber, soy protein, plant sterols and nuts. What the article failed to mention that this cholesterol reducing portfolio was added to a heart healthy diet, not a standard American diet which is higher in saturated and trans fats. Thus it may be necessary to first be consuming a diet low in these fats before adding the portfolio components to the diet will results in a decrease in LDL or ‘bad’ cholesterol. The article did include examples of the types of foods to be added with an explanation for the mechanism by which it appears that each lowers cholesterol. The article began with material on an updated approach to heart healthy eating which includes the notion that is possible to work any food into diet by considering portion size and comensating with other foods; and secondly that the consumption of foods (such as eggs or shellfish) that are high in cholesterol does not have a large affect on circulating levels of cholesterol. The article could have done a better job of setting the stage for readers to evaluate the impact of the dietary changes described by more clearly detailing the benefits and providing information on the potential harms and costs.
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mixture
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There was no discussion about how the addition of these foods affected the total food budget for the study participants. While the article does provide some comparison between the group of individuals who were most compliant with including all the diet additions (a 20% reduction) and those who “fell off the wagon” (a 10% reduction), the article should have included absolute to better enable the reader to understand whether these changes were meaningful to them. There was no discussion of any potential downsides to the dietary changes recommended, though the article to start off with a section that touched on the idea that dietary changes can be ‘negotiated’. The addition of foods to a diet without reduction in intake of other food will lead to an increase in total calories consumed which could lead to weight gain. The evidence provided comes from a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Medicine which was cited in the article. The article did not clearly represent that the foods added to the diet were added to a heart healthy diet. However, the article did include the extent to which ‘bad’ cholesterol was lowered in those adhereing rigidly and less strictly to the diet. Although the article did cast heart disease as’ the country’s No. 1 Killer’, the overall tone was not one of disease mongering. There were several experts interviewed for this story and the study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition was mentioned as the source of the dietary information provided. The article reported on a study in the American Journal of clinical Nutrition that found these food additions lowered cholesterol levels as much as “first-generation statin drugs”. There was no information on effectiveness of other drugs to lower cholesterol or interventions such as weight loss or exercise. The article provides a very clear list of the heart friendly foods that contain each of the categories of cholesterol lowering foods. However, it neglected to mention that the research only demonstrated that these foods lower cholesterol when added to an already heart-healthy diet (i.e. < 7% of calories from saturated fat and < 200mg dietary cholesterol/day) The three recommendations about diet to lower cholesterol are not new and are not presented as novel. However, putting these concepts together in one place is handy. This article does not appear to rely on a press release.
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10670
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Doctors study osteoporosis screening and treatment choices to lessen risk of fractures
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The scientific evidence in this area seems to be changing by the month—and those at potential risk of fractures need to stay informed about key developments. The Boston Globe article clearly gave women and men enough information to at least start a discussion with their doctors about these issues. Many news stories on osteoporosis simply parrot the opinions of experts and present them as the last word on the subject. This article avoided that trap, clearly distinguishing the proven from uNPRoven, and opinion from fact. It accurately observed that there is no conclusive evidence regarding the indications for, and the timing of, bone density screening. It hammered home the key point that rigorous scientific trials have not yet proven that screening prevents fractures. The article identified the substantial uncertainties regarding the use of both calcium and vitamin D in the prevention of osteoporosis. It discussed the potential of hugely popular medications such as Fosamax and Boniva to prevent fractures—as well as to cause serious side effects such as cancer of the esophagus and pathological fractures of the thigh bone. It there is a shortcoming in this article, it might be the way it presents medical decision-making in this area. At a couple of junctures, the story came close to endorsing traditional “doctor knows best” paternalistic decision-making. “In the absence of clear guidelines, many physicians make their own judgment calls,” the story suggested at one point. “Physicians face a tough choice when it comes to frail patient with brittle bones,” the story speculated at another. Yet in medical encounters it is (or should be) the patient who is the ultimate decision-maker. Only in the last paragraph did the article acknowledge the modern paradigm of shared decision-making, where informed patients make therapeutic decisions based on their values, goals and tolerance for risk. In areas of medical uncertainty, it is the role of the healthcare provider to help patients make the right decision—not to dictate the therapeutic approach. Osteoporosis is both a serious and controversial condition. As much as 50% of the U.S. population older than 50 will be at risk for osteoporotic fractures over the course of their lifetimes, according to a recent report from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. This could translate into 12 million people with osteoporosis by 2012, according to this panel. Fractures can lead to functional disability, chronic pain, and high levels of medical utilization. All types of osteoporotic fractures are associated with elevated death rates. There is a general sense in medicine that osteoporosis is under-detected and inadequately treated. Yet, as the Preventive Services Task Force pointed out, the indications for screening aren’t clear. And the Task Force couldn’t find a single well-designed study that clearly documented the risks and benefits of screening. There is controversy about how to define the population at risk of developing osteoporotic fractures. Should this be confined to those with very low bone density, with or without other risk factors? Or should medicine also target those with osteopenia—modestly reduced bone density? The expansion of osteoporosis screening and treatment into the population with osteopenia has led to charges of medicalization and disease mongering. So given the aging of the general population, coming up with better evidence on the prevention, screening and treatment of osteoporosis is a key public health issue.
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true
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The article did not discuss the costs of various management approaches. A simple statement about the costs of screening and the annual costs of bisphosphonates would have been useful. The article provided adequate discussion of the relative benefits of the treatments and screening methods under discussion. The article provided substantial information about potential side effects such as cancer of the esophagus and thigh fractures related to the use of bisphosphonates. However, it would have been useful for the article to also report the conclusion of the US Preventive Services Task Force that bisphosphonates are not consistently associated with serious adverse events. The article provided accurate information on the quality of evidence supporting different management approaches. The article did not engage in overt disease-mongering. However, it would have been useful if the article could have addressed the potential for disease-mongering among patients with osteopenia. The article included commentary from several independent experts who provided useful insights. The article did not discuss potential conflicts of interest among these experts. However, the journalist’s hard work in soliciting a diversity of comments outweighs the lack of discussion of financial conflicts. The article discussed multiple treatments: bisphosphonates, calcium, and vitamin D. It would have been useful to at least mention some other drug treatments that were discussed in the recent report of the US Preventive Services Task Force: estrogen replacement therapy, parathyroid hormone, and raloxifene. All the screening, prevention, and treatment approaches described in this article are widely available and their availability doesn’t merit extensive discussion. The article discussed management approaches to osteoporosis that are well established—though in some cases uNPRoven. Discussion of their novelty wasn’t necessary. The article did not appear to rely on a news release.
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40040
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This is a forwarded email that advises singers of the National Anthem at sporting events to stop styling it up and sing the song like it was written and taught in schools. The writer is alleged to be a former U.S. Marine Colonel.
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The National Anthem isn’t a Pop Song
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false
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Crime / Police, Miscellaneous
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This eRumor appears to be taken from an opinion written on February 8, 2011 by Mark Corallo, a veteran of the U.S. Army and who said that the National Anthem is sacred to him and his family of veterans. The opinion was found posted on the Daily Caller. Here is the complete opinion piece: The National Anthem isn’t a Pop Song By Mark Corallo I’ve heard quite a bit of criticism of Christina Aguilera’s embarrassing rendition of our national anthem prior to kick-off Sunday night. Most of the comments have been focused on her botching the lyrics. Fair enough. But why should we be so critical of a pop star who probably has no idea of the origins of “The Star Spangled Banner” or any sense that the song’s designation as our national anthem makes it about all of us, not about her moment on the stage? She is no different than the dozens of pop stars who over the years have treated the national anthem like a tone poem open to their artistic interpretation, no matter how bad or inappropriate that interpretation may be. Granted, Christina’s was worse than several we’ve been forced to endure prior to past Super Bowls, World Series, NBA All Star Games and other sporting events, but not by much. By today’s standards, hers was pretty much par for the course. She just happened to bogey the lyrics as well as murder the tune. Like most human beings, I love music. I have a tremendous amount of respect for musicians and performers of all kinds. Theirs is not an easy profession, no matter how much money, fame and success they attain. I couldn’t get through the day without them. But as an Army veteran in a family of veterans, the national anthem is sacred to me. Not because it’s a beautiful melody, or because it’s a great piece of poetry. It is neither. It is sacrosanct because it is about the flag that represents the God-given freedom we all have defended. I still stand at attention when I hear it. It is not a pop ballad or a soul tune. Nor is it a Broadway standard or a heavy metal song. It is not something that the American Idol judges should ever have to critique (though Randy would undoubtedly declare any rendition of it “pitchy”). It is a song about the courage and devotion shown by a group of Americans who in the course of a raging British naval bombardment refused to let the Stars and Stripes fall, no matter the cost to life and limb. And it became a song about the kind of nation we have been and still are, through war and peace, boom and bust. It is about the never-say-die, never-give-in, never-yield attitude that has been the hallmark of our national character and our military’s steadfast defense of freedom from Valley Forge to Fort McHenry to St. Lo to Inchon to Baghdad and Kandahar. It’s about firemen and policemen running into the World Trade Center on 9/11. It’s about that flag flying proudly and defiantly over the land of the free and the home of the brave. So, with all the kindness I can muster, I give this one piece of advice to the next pop star who is asked to sing the national anthem at a sporting event: save the vocal gymnastics and the physical gyrations for your concerts. Just sing this song the way you were taught to sing it in kindergarten — straight up, no styling. Sing it with the constant awareness that there are soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines watching you from bases and outposts all over the world. Don’t make them cringe with your self-centered ego gratification. Sing it as if you are standing before a row of 86-year-old WWII vets wearing their Purple Hearts, Silver Stars and flag pins on their cardigans and you want them to be proud of you for honoring them and the country they love — not because you want them to think you are a superstar musician. They could see that from the costumes, the makeup and the entourages. Sing “The Star Spangled Banner” with the courtesy and humility that tells the audience that it is about America, not you. Posted 01/22/14 Comments
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6
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More drugmakers hike U.S. prices as new year begins.
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Drugmakers including Bristol-Myers Squibb Co (BMY.N), Gilead Sciences Inc (GILD.O), and Biogen Inc (BIIB.O) hiked U.S. list prices on more than 50 drugs on Wednesday, bringing total New Year’s Day drug price increases to more than 250, according to data analyzed by healthcare research firm 3 Axis Advisors.
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true
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Health News
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Reuters reported on Tuesday that drugmakers including Pfizer Inc (PFE.N), GlaxoSmithKline PLC (GSK.L) and Sanofi SA (SASY.PA) were planning to increase prices on more than 200 drugs in the United States on Jan. 1. Nearly all of the price increases are below 10% and the median price increase is around 5%, according to 3 Axis. More early year price increases could still be announced. Soaring U.S. prescription drug prices are expected to again be a central issue in the presidential election. President Donald Trump, who made bringing them down a core pledge of his 2016 campaign, is running for re-election in 2020. Many branded drugmakers have pledged to keep their U.S. list price increases below 10% a year, under pressure from politicians and patients. The United States, which leaves drug pricing to market competition, has higher prices than in other countries where governments directly or indirectly control the costs, making it the world’s most lucrative market for manufacturers. Drugmakers often negotiate rebates on their list prices in exchange for favorable treatment from healthcare payers. As a result, health insurers and patients rarely pay the full list price of a drug. Bristol-Myers said in a statement it will not raise list prices on its drugs by more than 6% this year. The drugmaker raised the price on 10 drugs on Wednesday, including 1.5% price hikes on cancer immunotherapies Opdivo and Yervoy and a 6% increase on its blood thinner Eliquis, all of which bring in billions of dollars in revenue annually. It also raised the price on Celgene’s flagship multiple myeloma drug, Revlimid, 6%. Bristol acquired rival Celgene in a $74 billion deal last year. Gilead raised prices on more than 15 drugs including HIV treatments Biktarvy and Truvada less than 5%, according to 3 Axis. Biogen price increases included a 6% price hike on multiple sclerosis treatment Tecfidera, according to 3 Axis. Gilead and Biogen could not be immediately reached for comment. 3 Axis advises pharmacy industry groups on identifying inefficiencies in the U.S. drug supply chain and has provided consulting work to hedge fund billionaire John Arnold, a prominent critic of high drug prices.
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27781
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Facebook has banned the sale of firearms
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Facebook’s ban on unlicensed peer-to-peer gun sales also applies to Instagram.
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true
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Politics Guns, facebook
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On 29 January 2016, Facebook announced changes to their Community Standard Regulated Goods Policy, banning the use of the social media network by unlicensed individuals to sell firearms. This is not the first time Facebook has explicitly banned sales of a particular item. The regulated goods policy, which can be read here, previously prohibited the unlicensed sale, purchase, or trade of prescription drugs, illegal drugs, and marijuana via Facebook. According to the The New York Times, the move comes as the social networking site moves closer to a proprietary e-commerce model: In December, the company introduced a project that directs users to local businesses and services that are well-reviewed on Facebook. Facebook can also store users’ credit card information. And in recent months, Facebook made it possible to send peer-to-peer payments through Messenger. Facebook’s progression toward on-site payments underscored the need to update the company’s content policy, a Facebook spokeswoman said. Monika Bickert, Facebook’s Head of Product Policy, added in a statement that the change was made because more and more users were turning to Facebook to facilitate the sale of goods (including firearms): Over the last two years, more and more people have been using Facebook to discover products and to buy and sell things to one another. We are continuing to develop, test, and launch new products to make this experience even better for people and are updating our regulated goods policies to reflect this evolution. Shortly after Facebook announced their policy change, a rumor began circulating that the company was banning all pro-gun rights groups from using their social media network. This is not the case: the new policy change only applies to private gun sales, which are often transacted without background checks. Firearms enthusiasts and licensed gun dealers can still post about firearms (and firearms sales) on Facebook. Advocacy groups Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America told NBC News they were pleased with the move. “We’re gratified that our continuous conversation with Facebook over the course of the last two years has culminated in the company prohibiting all unlicensed gun sales arranged on its platforms,” said John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety. “Our undercover investigations have shown that criminals are active in the online market for guns, where unlicensed sellers can offer guns with no federal background check required.”
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468
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Australian PM apologizes for vacation as firefighters killed in huge blazes.
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Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison issued a rare public apology on Friday and cut short a Hawaiian vacation in response to mounting public anger after two volunteer firefighters were killed battling bushfires sweeping the country’s east coast.
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true
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Environment
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Some areas of Sydney are set for “catastrophic” conditions on Saturday, and the deadly fires are now engulfing other parts of the country. One person was killed in a car crash on Friday near South Australia’s capital city of Adelaide where an emergency warning is in place, though the precise circumstances surrounding the death is not yet clear. Australia has been fighting wildfires across three states for weeks, with blazes destroying more than 700 homes and nearly 3 million acres (1.2 million hectares) of bushland. The death of the two firefighters overnight when their fire truck was struck by a falling tree as it traveled through the front line of a fire brought the fires death toll in New South Wales to eight since the start of October. Ten more firefighters were seriously injured on Thursday, with four in South Australia being treated for burns and smoke inhalation. “The worst imaginable set of circumstances unfolded,” New South Wales (NSW) Rural Fire Service (RFS) Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons told reporters in Sydney. “This hurts everybody to the core.” Shortly after the pair’s deaths were announced, Morrison issued a statement saying he would return as soon as possible from a family holiday in Hawaii, a trip that has drawn sharp criticism in recent days as the wildfires crisis deepened. “I deeply regret any offence caused to any of the many Australians affected by the terrible bushfires by my taking leave with family at this time,” Morrison said in the statement. Morrison later told 2GB radio that the trip had been planned as a surprise to his young daughters to replace leave originally scheduled for January that he had canceled because of official trips to Japan and India. His return comes as firefighters prepare for “catastrophic” fire danger - the most severe level - in NSW on Saturday as searing heat and high winds are forecast, leading officials to urge people to evacuate their homes early if they live close to bushland. “It is a fairly strong likelihood that we will lose homes tomorrow, it would be a miracle if we don’t,” RFS Deputy Commissioner Rob Rogers told reporters in Sydney. There are more than 200 fires burning across Australia - 70 of which are classified as uncontrolled, mostly in NSW. In South Australia, more than 120 blazes have broken out in catastrophic conditions. Bracing for more potential fatalities, authorities said an emergency fire in Lameroo, 210 km (130.5 miles) east of Adelaide may pose a threat to lives directly in its path and urged residents to flee now. Morrison’s conservative Liberal-National coalition government has been under sustained pressure to defend its climate change policies as it has downplayed links to the unprecedented early arrival and severity of this year’s bushfire season. Hundreds of protesters gathered outside Morrison’s Sydney residence on Thursday. One protestor, wearing an Hawaiian shirt, carried a sign reading, “ScoMo, where the bloody hell are you?” referencing the leader’s nickname and a well-known international advertisement for Tourism Australia. Australia is one of the world’s largest carbon emitters per capita because of its reliance on coal-fired power plants. It has pledged to cut carbon emissions by 26% from 2005 levels by 2030, but critics accuse Morrison of paying lip service to that commitment. In June, the government approved the construction of a new coal mine in Queensland state by India’s Adani Enterprises that is expected to produce 8 million to 10 million tonnes of thermal coal a year. As Morrison was apologizing on radio on Friday morning, opposition Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese was serving breakfast to firefighters near the front line of a fire in rural Bilpin. The fires have resulted in days of heavy pollution in Sydney, pushing air quality to unprecedented hazardous levels and resulting in viral images of heavy smoke haze over the usually sparkling harbor and landmarks like the Opera House. The fires are being spurred this week, by record temperatures across the country which led NSW, the most populous state with 7 million people, to declare a seven-day state of emergency. Thursday’s declaration gave firefighters broad powers to control government resources, force evacuations, close roads and shut down utilities. Days out from Christmas, a time when many Australians head to the coast for the holidays, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian urged people to reconsider travel plans. “What is most important for us is that everyone is safe and if that means changing your plans for Christmas, we ask you do to that,” Berejiklian told reporters in Sydney. (GRAPHIC: Forests in flames: Images from space show Australia's bushfires in different light - here)
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24324
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We have over 300 state agencies. Forty-five of those agencies are related to health care.
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Hutchison says Texas has 45 health-related state agencies
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false
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Health Care, Texas, Kay Bailey Hutchison,
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"Republican U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, running for governor, said she wouldn't hesitate to trim state spending to cope with a looming state revenue shortfall of up to $17 billion. ""We should start cutting across the board now in our state agencies,"" she said during the GOP gubernatorial debate Jan. 14. ""We have over 300 state agencies. Forty-five of those agencies are related to health care. I'm just wondering if we couldn't consolidate some of those state agencies."" Forty-five agencies, all concerned with health care? We decided to check. Hutchison's campaign sent us a list of 50 councils, boards, committees and state departments, all characterized by Hutchison's camp as relating to health care in some capacity. The 50 were plucked from a list of more than 300 entities that the governor was making appointments to as of February 2008. Case closed? Not quite. The veracity of Hutchison's statement depends on how broadly ""agency"" is defined. Two experts we spoke with understood how Hutchison made the stretch. But Harvey Tucker, a political science professor at Texas A&M, said that according to how state law defines what constitutes an agency, Hutchison ""probably went too far."" Ken Levine, interim director of the Sunset Advisory Commission, which reviews government agencies and makes recommendations to the Legislature about what services can be consolidated, declined to weigh in on the truthfulness of Hutchison's claim. But he said that it's not realistic to count all the entities on Hutchison's list as full-fledged agencies. For instance, the governor appoints members of advisory committees — we counted four of them on Hutchison's list, including the Dental Hygiene and the Family Practice Residency advisory committees. But ""I wouldn't count those as state agencies,"" Levine said. Also, some of the entities Hutchison may envision as targets for possible consolidation to cut costs don't cost much money now. The vast majority of advisory committee members are not salaried state workers. Put another way, panels including the Dental Hygiene Advisory Committee do not have line-item appropriations in the budget. The dental hygiene panel's six members only get state money to reimburse travel expenses. Separately, we found three published state lists that put Hutchison's claim of 45 health-related agencies in question. According to an appendix to the latest state budget and compilations by the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts and the Texas State Library and Archives, Texas has no more than 15 health-related agencies including the mammoth Health and Human Services Commission, which oversees smaller units. One way Hutchison gets to a higher number is by counting components of some agencies as if they were separate entities. For instance, Hutchison includes on her list the Executive Council of Physical Therapy and Occupational Therapy Examiners plus the Texas Board of Occupational Therapy Examiners and the Texas Board of Physical Therapy Examiners. A council spokeswoman told us that those three entities amount to one state agency. Except for a section of the state ethics code relating to financial disclosure by public officials, it's difficult to find a strict definition or criteria for what constitutes a state agency in Texas. We decided to take the state's word for how many health-related government agencies it has: 15, including the five health and human services agencies traditionally associated with health care. Hutchison's list — ranging from the sprawling HHSC to itty-bitties like the Chronic Kidney Disease Task Force — shapes up as overly long. We rule her claim ."
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9543
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Calcium supplements and your heart: Researchers send mixed messages
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The story examines the potential risks and benefits associated with the use of calcium supplements, and discusses two recent studies (found in the Journal of the American Heart Association and the Annals of Internal Medicine) that address the issue. On the whole, the story is strong: It offers guidance to readers about the state of research regarding calcium supplements, providing balanced information they can use to make informed decisions about their health. Yet, the story would have been stronger if it also had discussed the evidence around taking calcium to prevent osteoporosis-related bone fractures in older women. Failure to consume an adequate amount of calcium can be a contributing factor to osteoporosis, a condition in which a patient’s bones become weak and brittle — making osteoporosis patients more likely to suffer broken bones. However, there is concern among some healthcare providers that taking calcium supplements increases heart disease risk. In a 2012 report, the National Institutes of Health reported that heart disease was the leading cause of death in the U.S. So, given the dueling concerns over heart disease risk and osteoporosis risk, where does this leave patients? This story attempts to answer that question, and it overall does a good job.
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true
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osteoporosis,supplements
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Cost is not mentioned. While calcium supplements are not prohibitively expensive for most patients (prices vary, but tend to cost less than $10 for several months’ worth of pills), they are not free — and expense can be an important consideration for many patients. Also, given that most people can get enough calcium through foods and beverages, and yet more than one-third of Americans take calcium in supplement form, it would be informative for the reader to understand how much is spent annually on supplements that may not provide additional benefit. This story does several things well here, but it does not give us any sense of the measured benefits of taking calcium supplements–a systematic review determined the evidence was “weak and inconsistent.” That lack of quantification is why this earns a “not satisfactory” rating. That said, let’s look at the things the story does well. First, the story makes clear that many people do not need calcium supplements, discussing what constitutes the recommended level of calcium intake per day, and that fact that many people meet that mark through their daily diet. Second, the story also makes clear that some people can benefit from calcium supplements, pointing specifically to older adults who have been diagnosed with osteoporosis and teen girls, whose diets may not include the recommended 1,300 milligrams of calcium per day. While we discussed benefits above, the focus of the story is primarily on potential harms. Namely, the story looks at potential risks to heart health associated with the use of calcium supplements. And the story does a fine job here, particularly given the fact that, as one source in the story notes, “The public has been receiving very confusing and alarming messages about calcium supplements.” Specifically, the story explains that there is some concern that the use of calcium supplements may lead to a build-up of calcium in the arteries, which may contribute to risk of heart attack or stroke. The story then fleshes out the arguments of both sides in this debate, without making any sweeping judgments about which side of that argument is correct. In other words, the story gives readers information without telling readers what conclusions they should draw. In a case like this one, we think that’s the responsible position to take. Given the scope of this piece, involving two studies and a slew of background information, the story does a good job of offering readers adequate insight into the evidence. First, the story includes links to both of the relevant studies. That’s always a good thing. Second, the story describes the scope of both studies (3,000 adults for the observational study in JAHA, 31 studies in the meta-analysis in AIM). Third, the story addresses the shortcomings of the relevant studies. For example, the story notes that the JAHA study “was not designed in a way that could prove the supplements caused the artery changes.” Similarly, the story notes that some critics feel the AIM meta-analysis “did not include all potentially relevant studies.” In both cases, those are points worth making. No disease mongering here. If anything, this is quite the opposite: giving readers more information in order to help them make informed decisions. This is a strong point. The story not only incorporates input from multiple sources, but clearly identifies any affiliation that could be perceived as influencing their perspective (e.g., noting that one source wrote an editorial that was published in conjunction with the JAHA paper). In addition, the story clearly notes that the meta-analysis was done with support from a pharmaceutical company that manufactures calcium supplements. On its face, the story deals with two options: taking calcium supplements or not taking them. Both options are addressed here, so it earns a “satisfactory” rating. But this story also goes a step further, highlighting other factors in supporting bone health, including vitamin D consumption and exercise. The story does not address calcium supplement availability. However, given that these supplements are not new, and are widely available, we’ll rate this as not applicable. The story does note that “Over the past decade, some studies have raised the possibility that calcium…might raise heart risks.” That is enough — barely — to earn it a “satisfactory” rating, in part because one of the two studies being discussed is a meta-analysis of 31 previous studies. However, a brief dive into the history of calcium supplementation and the public’s perceptions on the issue would add weight to the impact of these newer studies. The story does not appear to rely on a news release.
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11103
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New Test for Colon Cancer Under Development
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"A journalist wrote us this week asking, ""What’s up with HealthDay and its news release rehashes? This is important because many mainstream media outlets and consumer health websites publish HealthDay stories."" We can’t answer that but we wish it would change. There are active debates about the competing technologies for colon cancer screening and what evidence is best for any of them. This story didn’t touch on those debates, choosing to take only what the Mayo Clinic news release gave them."
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false
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"No discussion of costs. The story did an adequate job of quantifying the benefits seen in two trials, but didn’t comment on the small sample size in one study and didn’t disclose the size of the sample studied in the other. No discussion of false positives with this method. One study was in 10 people. No comment on the limitations of drawing conclusions from such a small sample. We weren’t told how many people were in the other study. No overt disease-mongering. Only the Mayo Clinic researcher quoted in the news release is quoted in the story. Given all of the competing approaches to colon cancer screening, someone independent of this work needed to comment to put this research into perspective. No comparison with colonoscopy or flexible sigmoidoscopy or with iFOBT or immunochemical fecal occult blood tests. At one point the story says the test is ""under development."" In another place it says the methods ""were developed."" No where is it clear if this is a method that is currently available. The story didn’t establish the true novelty of the approach. All information and quotes appear to be drawn from a Mayo Clinic news release. There is no sign of any independent reporting."
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26574
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Facebook post Says a study projects Wisconsin’s coronavirus cases will peak on April 26, 2020
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The first iteration of a study estimating coronavirus peak dates for each state pegged Wisconsin at May 22, last in the nation by two weeks. But updates to the model used in the study changed the dates for almost all states, affecting Wisconsin the most. The organization now predicts an April 26 peak in Wisconsin. That’s about middle-of-the-pack among the 50 states, but still 11 days after the projected peak for the nation as a whole.
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true
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Wisconsin, Coronavirus, Facebook posts,
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"Specifics have been hard to come by in this pandemic. We don’t know how many people are infected, how fast the coronavirus is spreading or how long we may need to quarantine. So the first study to project a date when each state’s cases would peak drew a lot of interest -- especially since Wisconsin jumped off the virtual page. The study, released March 26, 2020, said cases wouldn’t peak in Wisconsin until May 22, 2020 — a month later than most states, and nearly two weeks later than any other state in the nation. The date went viral. News outlets across the state picked it up, and one writeup of the story from Madison365.com received nearly 40,000 comments, reactions and shares on Facebook in a day. And then the study changed. An updated analysis posted four days after the original study moved Wisconsin’s projected peak by almost a month to April 26, 2020. So what’s up with the shift? Which date is right? This post, when the study offered a May peak, 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.) Here’s what we found. The analysis from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation — an independent research center based at the University of Washington — developed a model projecting coronavirus growth across the United States for the next four months. It projects deaths as well as a variety of measures of hospital utilization — beds used, intensive care unit days and ventilators days used. That estimate was based on COVID-19 deaths so far, data on hospital capacity and use and more detailed coronavirus hospitalization data available in some localities. The institute estimates the pandemic would peak nationally around mid-April and result in more than 80,000 deaths, a summary of the study said. The state-by-state projections were based on a statistical model — essentially a detailed formula that projects the future virus spread based on death rates and other data available to this point. And those projections moved a lot after the initial release. Four days after the original publication, on March 30, 2020, researchers added 1,730 nationwide deaths to the model and tweaked the methodology. They said the updates created more precise estimates The updated projections changed the estimated peak for all but four states. Wisconsin moved the most, to 26 days earlier, but several others saw dramatic shifts as well. Maryland’s estimated peak moved to 25 days later, Missouri to 21 days later and Idaho to 13 days sooner. Ali Mokdad, a senior faculty member at the institute, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel the original model – started around the beginning of March – assumed Wisconsin would have a Safer at Home-style order in place about two weeks sooner than it did. Gov. Tony Evers issued the order banning all but essential services and travel on March 24, 2020. The update factors in that actual date along with additional death data, which dramatically changed the model’s analysis of the state. The new projected peak for Wisconsin, April 26, 2020, is still later than what state health officials are saying. Wisconsin Department of Health Services Secretary Andrea Palm said March 30, 2020, the state expected the curve to begin flattening (i.e. peaking) in about 10 days. ""It’ll be a couple of weeks before we start to really understand how well we are doing, social distancing, safer at home, to really judge ourselves against the worst case models,"" Palm said in a media briefing with Evers and other officials. ""We really do believe it’s another 10-plus days before we are going to be able to see evidence of a flattening off of the new daily cases."" The viral story from Madison365.com quickly updated to reflect the new numbers, so Facebook posts of that story shared before or after that update now show a headline that accurately references the new April 26 peak. Instead of being the latest peak in the country, Wisconsin is now right in the middle of the pack – tied for 20th-latest with three other states. The peak is two weeks after the projected national peak of April 15, 2020. Facebook posts now circulating say Wisconsin will hit the peak for coronavirus cases on April 26. That gives us an unusual fact check, since at the time most of those stories were shared, the post referenced a May 22 date that is no longer the best estimate from this study. But Facebook’s design updates a linked story when the story is updated. We aren’t getting into whether this is an accurate model, since it’s a prediction of the future and there’s no way to say for sure. But we can examine the accuracy of the Facebook post itself. What is currently online in this viral post is an accurate reflection of the study, albeit one that requires a bit of extra context to understand the genesis of the current figures."
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4096
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Study looks at ways to control dust coal miners breathe.
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A new report examines the way coal dust inhaled by miners is regulated as health and safety officials grapple with an increase in cases of severe black lung disease in Appalachia.
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true
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Health, Lung disease, Science
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The National Academy of Sciences report released Thursday explores dust sampling approaches and limiting miners’ exposure to dust. Controlling dust exposure is critical to preventing black lung disease, or pneumoconiosis. The disease has killed about 77,000 coal miners since 1968. The 148-page report suggests that monitoring standards that go beyond current federal regulations may be necessary to protect more coal miners from the disease. The U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration reduced the allowable dust levels in mines in a 2014 rules change. Miners also wear personal dust monitors underground. Amy Louviere, a spokeswoman for the mine safety agency, said officials are reviewing the study before publicly commenting on its findings. Black lung deaths have declined since the 1970s, but since 2000 there has been an increase in the number of rapidly progressing cases in certain regions, including central Appalachia. In those cases, the signs of serious black lung disease appear rapidly in a period of five years or less. The cases were found in a “hot spot” of Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia, and the miners in those instances were younger than typical patients and more likely to be employed by smaller mines, according to the report. The report suggests one of the culprits of the spike in black lung cases could be crystalline silica, which is found in rock dust. Miners are working with thinner coal seams, meaning they are cutting into more rock that contains the silica, which is more damaging to lungs than coal dust. “Increased silica exposure appears to explain at least some of the observed cases of rapidly progressive” black lung disease, the report said. It recommended the development of a silica monitor that detects those levels in the air. The report also said stronger machinery and faster coal-loading is kicking up more dust. “Higher productivity certainly increases the total dust load generated,” it said. The report calls for a comprehensive study with industry, unions and the government to identify key challenges in implementing better dust monitoring techniques. Congress directed the Academy of Sciences to conduct the study in 2016.
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1887
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U.S. group sues to halt artist Christo's project.
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A coalition of environmentalists, outdoor enthusiasts and wildlife advocates have filed a federal lawsuit to block a project by the artist Christo that would drape fabric canopies along a long stretch of the Arkansas River in Colorado.
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true
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Environment
|
"Artist Christo receives his ""Goldene Henne"" (Golden Hen) media award in the category ""Life Achievement"" during the prize ceremony at the Friedrichstadtpalast in Berlin, September 15, 2010. REUTERS/Michael Kappeler Opponents of the Bulgarian-born Christo’s proposed “Over the River” project sued the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Denver, saying the agency violated federal law and its own policies when it gave final approval to the project last fall. The flamboyant Christo, known for his massive outdoor artworks, including erecting 7,500 fabric gates in New York City’s Central Park, plans to hang 5.9 miles of “silvery, translucent” panels intermittently along the river between Canon City and Salida, Colorado, according to his web site. But opponents seeking to halt the project argued in their lawsuit that allowing the drilling of some 9,000 bores to anchor 925 fabric panels would adversely impact wildlife, cause traffic tie-ups and disrupt recreational activities. “Installing the anchor bolts and other hardware requires large drilling equipment normally used for mining and heavy construction activities. The art project is, in fact, more similar to mineral resource extraction and development than recreation,” the suit said. Bureau of Land Management spokeswoman Tina Brown said the agency was aware of the lawsuit, filed by Denver University law students on behalf of nonprofit Rags Over the Arkansas River Inc. (ROAR). Brown said the bureau does not comment on pending litigation. Christo is not a defendant in the lawsuit. But his lawyer, Steve Coffin, said the project went through a comprehensive and thorough review by federal land managers. “We’re confidant that it will withstand legal scrutiny,” Coffin said. ROAR spokeswoman Joan Anzelmo characterized the case as a classic David versus Goliath battle. “ROAR is aiming its slingshot directly at the Goliath Over the River project and at the Bureau of Land Management that gave the go-ahead despite its federal stewardship responsibilities for public lands, water and wildlife,” she said in a statement. Of particular concern to ROAR is the potential impact to a herd of bighorn sheep, Colorado’s state mammal. “The (project) will increase the bighorn sheep’s susceptibility to disease, disperse sheep from their primary habitat along the Arkansas River, and will likely increase the mortality rate in young lambs,” the lawsuit said. The project, which has been in the works for more than a decade, still needs the green light from local jurisdictions before construction gets underway. Christo’s plans call for it to be unveiled in August 2014 and stay up for a two-week period. The river project is not Christo’s first foray in Colorado. In 1972, his “Valley Curtain” project consisting of a fabric curtain suspended across the Rifle Gap in western Colorado was shredded by high winds hours after it was unveiled."
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2073
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Popularity can come at a price: getting flu first.
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Think you’re popular? Well, name a friend. It turns out that this person is probably more popular than you, a tendency that scientists might be able to use to predict the spread of disease.
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true
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Health News
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But the popular pay a price: they get flu first, on average two weeks sooner than most others, two experts report in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE. “Being at the center of the network tends to make you happy but it also exposes you to disease,” James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview. Fowler and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University in Massachusetts said the so-called friendship paradox could be important to working out how a flu pandemic or some other nasty virus is likely to behave. “This would allow an earlier, more vigorous, and more effective response,” Christakis said in a statement. This is how the friendship paradox works. If a person is asked to name a friend, that friend is statistically likely to be more popular than the original individual. That is because if people are asked to name a friend or two, they are more likely to choose someone who connects them to others, Fowler says. An example is a party, where most guests would name the host as a friend as opposed to the wallflowers at the fringes of the gathering. Fowler and Christakis are experts on social networks and have used their methodology to show that obesity, smoking and other behaviors are directly related to a person’s friends, and the friends of their friends. They teamed up again to study the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic among 744 Harvard students. Their findings are published here “Our method goes and picks people at random and then we ask them who their friends are and then we study the friends,” Fowler said. “We studied the H1N1 pandemic last fall in a small group of students. This friend group — they got the flu about two weeks earlier than the other groups.” Fowler would like to work with other experts on tracking disease, such as Google Flu Trends, a free service of Google. Google Flu Trends works on the premise that people’s Web searching behavior matches circulating disease. When people feel ill, they look up terms such as “fever” and by watching when and where these search terms become more common, health officials should be able to track disease trends. It does not yet work perfectly but Fowler thinks there may be a way to get the popular “friends” at the hubs of social networks to volunteer to let their Web searches be monitored in such a database. “This is one way we could really turn friends into our crystal ball,” Fowler said.
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9207
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Tablet devices show promise in managing agitation among patients with dementia
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Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) on Thursday said it was in talks to discuss a settlement with German vehicle owners who are suing the carmaker over excessive pollution caused by VW’s diesel cars.
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true
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computer tablets,dementia,McLean Hospital
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In 2015 the carmaker admitted to using manipulated engine management software to mask excessive pollution levels in its diesel cars, sparking a raft of prosecutions and lawsuits that have led to at least 30 billion euros in legal costs and fines. “Volkswagen and the Federation of German Consumer Organisations vzbv have agreed to enter into discussions regarding a possible settlement,” the carmaker said. “The discussions are at a very early stage, and there is no guarantee that they will result in a settlement. Both parties have agreed that the discussions should remain confidential.” German consumers have had less success than vehicle owners in the United States in securing compensation from VW because German cars did not lose their road worthiness certification in the wake of the diesel scandal. In Germany VW’s diesel vehicles retained their road worthiness certification if customers agreed to an update of vehicle engine management software, leading VW to take a different approach to compensating consumers.
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41949
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Irrespective of efforts that were made in 2016 by foreign powers, it is the universal conclusion of our intelligence communities that none of those efforts had any impact on the outcome of the 2016 election.
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Japanese officials have culled 753 pigs in Saitama Prefecture north of Tokyo after detecting an outbreak of swine fever, the Yomiuri newspaper said on Sunday.
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false
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Russia investigation,
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The cull, which took place on Saturday, was necessary after it was determined that pigs raised in the prefecture for shipment to central Japan were infected, the Yomiuri said. Saitama also decided to halt shipments from two other pig farms in the area of the outbreak, the Yomiuri said. Officials from the Saitama Prefecture government were not immediately available to comment. Last year, Japan confirmed the first outbreak of swine flu in 26 years in the country. The fever was found in a farm in the Gifu Prefecture, central Japan. The fever detected in Japan is a different strain from the deadly African swine fever that China has been battling, Japan’s agriculture ministry has previously said. The disease found in Gifu is also known as hog cholera. It occurs among pigs, wild boar and is not infectious for humans. Japan is the world’s 10th largest pork producer, and exports about 12 billion yen ($111 million) worth of pork products annually. Pork prices in China, the world’s top consumer of the meat, have hit a record after an epidemic of African swine fever swept through the country’s pig herd, killing millions.
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32053
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Life expectancy in the United States is now lower because of Obamacare.
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It is unclear, based on the Natural News story, what specific mechanisms of the ACA’s rollout would have affected mortality rates. While some of the Affordable Care Act’s provisions first launched in 2010, the majority of its more substantial provisions (such as the individual mandate) didn’t take effect until 2014, which is a year that the SOA study’s dataset didn’t even include in its entirety.
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false
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Medical, affordable care act, american health care system, natural news
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On 2 November 2016, the conspiracy-obsessed alternative health website Natural News posted a story with the headline: “Americans’ Health Deteriorating Under Obamacare as Life Expectancies Plunge.” Although the article does not directly demonstrate that ObamaCare is the cause of this “deterioration,” the headline’s claim is what is being shared online. The actual text of the article — a brief description of an annual report that adjusts an actuarial life expectancy calculation — proffers no information about causation: For many years, the assumption has been that the United States leads the world as an advanced civilization, dominating in categories like education, quality of life, and life expectancy. But a new study released this year by the Society of Actuaries (SOA) paints a much different picture, suggesting that Americans are less healthy and will more than likely live much shorter lives compared to those in previous generations. Over the past several years, the report explains, American health has taken a major downturn. Life expectancy amongst 65-year-olds is down by about six months, on average. It’s also down for younger Americans, who are likewise expected to live about six months less than in previous generations. In nearly every generational category, including “Baby Boomers,” “Generation X,” and “Millennials,” life expectancy is down, and will likely continue to go down. The report to which Natural News is referring (“Mortality Improvement Scale MP-2016”) was released by the Society of Actuaries on October 20, 2016, per an SOA release: Society of Actuaries (SOA) today released its annually-updated mortality improvement scale for pension plans, MP-2016, incorporating three additional years of Social Security Administration (SSA) data on U.S. population mortality. The updated improvement scale suggests U.S. mortality continues to improve, but at a slower average rate of improvement than previous years, which may decrease pension plan obligations slightly. A distinction glossed over in the Natural News story is that the actual number the SOA is changing is an algorithmic factor used to predict future changes to life expectancy improvements based on past mortality data; the study does not suggest that current generations will live fewer years than their predecessors, as life expectancies overall are rising. The change in the estimate of life expectancy presented here stems from the fact that its prediction a year earlier was based on what looked to be — but turned out not to be — a trend toward increasing improvements in mortality rates across the country. The change reported in this new study results from tempering that earlier projection. However, life expectancies are still expected to rise across the board, just at a slower rate than was predicted in 2015. This lagging rate of improvement to mortality rates in the United States compared to other developed nations is a well-documented observation with no single, widely accepted answer. What is important to note, however, is that not every group in the United States is seeing its mortality rates improve at similar rates. There are major differences depending on your income level, ethnicity, and economic mobility. A landmark 2006 study by a team of Harvard investigators divided the country into “eight Americas,” based on race and county combinations across the U.S., in order to compare the mortality rates of each group. The study concluded that it is unlikely that a single factor — i.e., health care access — can be solely responsible for this disparity: Disparities in mortality across the eight Americas, each consisting of millions or tens of millions of Americans, are enormous by all international standards. The observed disparities in life expectancy cannot be explained by race, income, or basic health-care access and utilization alone. A study published a decade later in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported: Between 2001 and 2014, individuals in the top 5% of the income distribution gained around 3 years of life expectancy, whereas individuals in the bottom 5% experienced no gains. As a benchmark for this magnitude, the NCHS estimates that eliminating all cancer deaths would increase life expectancy at birth by 3.2 years. This same study, which uses data as recent as the SOA report, suggested that insurance access in the lowest income bracket did not appear to play a role in determining life expectancy: Measures of health insurance coverage and spending (the fraction of uninsured and risk-adjusted Medicare spending per enrollee) were not significantly associated with life expectancy for individuals in the bottom income quartile. What these detailed studies of mortality rates suggest is that treating longevity predictors as a single number based on age and gender masks their more nuanced realities, which impedes efforts to identify any cause (or causes) for potential changes to them. The goal of the SOA report was not to identify a cause, but to create an improved algorithm to allow pension funds to estimate how long their clients might be alive, based on the most recent data from the Social Security Administration. A final flaw in the Natural News-insinuated link between Obamacare and lower-than-expected improvements to life expectancy predictions is that the most recent data the SOA used was from the early months of 2014, and most of the changes to its earlier assessment came from the addition of data from 2012 and 2013.
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6254
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Ohio governor asks lawmakers to ban flavored vape products.
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Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has asked lawmakers to ban the sale of flavored e-cigarette products as concerns grow about the health effects of vaping.
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true
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Mike DeWine, Health, Ohio, Vaping, Tobacco industry regulation
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DeWine, a Republican, said Tuesday the ban is needed to protect children from addiction. Although other states have issued emergency bans, DeWine said he doesn’t have such authority and is seeking legislation. One such Ohio bill was already introduced last week, banning the sale of flavored vaping products and creating a committee to study the effects of vaping products on health. The Ohio Health Department has identified 22 cases of severe breathing illnesses likely caused by vaping, and is investigating 19 additional cases. More than 800 cases of similar lung illness have been reported across the U.S., including several deaths.
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3948
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Flu symptoms sending many to Indianapolis-area hospitals.
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Influenza and flu-like symptoms were contributing to more visits to Indianapolis-area emergency rooms than at any point during the past decade, officials said.
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true
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Health, Indianapolis, Flu, Indiana
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The primary complaint of 6.2% of ER visits in the week ending Dec. 28 was flu-like symptoms, according to the Marion County Health Department. The previous high of the past 10 years was about 5.3% during the 2017-18 flu season, The Indianapolis Star reported. Health officials have urged those with mild or minor symptoms to see their doctor or go to an urgent care center. They said the recommendation came after hearing from area ER departments. Typical symptoms of a mild flu are cough, sore throat, fever, muscle aches, headaches, fatigue and gastrointestinal issues. Health officials have recommended a flu shot for anyone at least 6 years old. Indiana flu activity last week was higher than at any time during the last year’s flu season, according to a state report.
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5272
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Massachusetts health officials warn of measles exposure.
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Health officials in Massachusetts say a child has tested positive for measles after visiting a number of locations in the Boston area that could have resulted in exposure to other people.
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true
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Quincy, Health, Boston, Massachusetts, Measles
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The Massachusetts Department of Public Health confirmed Saturday that the child was diagnosed Friday. This is the second case of measles this year in Massachusetts. The department says during the infectious period, the child visited the Weymouth Club in Weymouth last Saturday; Jack ‘n’ Jill Childcare at Marina Bay in North Quincy on Tuesday and Thursday; Star Market and the Quincy YMCA in Quincy on Wednesday; and the Crown Colony Medical Center in Quincy on Friday. Measles is highly contagious and is transmitted to others by airborne droplets when an infected person exhales or coughs. There have been outbreaks in several states recently.
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21878
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"National Republican Senatorial Committee Says that Sherrod Brown ""voted to cut Medicare by over $500 billion in order to fund government-run health care."
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NRSC claims Sen. Sherrod Brown voted to cut $500 billion from Medicare
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false
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Ohio, Health Care, Medicare, Voting Record, National Republican Senatorial Committee,
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"When Sen. Sherrod Brown spoke at a Youngstown senior center against a Republican proposal to convert Medicare to a voucher system, the National Republican Senatorial Committee had a ready response. The NRSC revised and reissued a three-day-old news release that targeted virtually identical statements at Brown, of Ohio, and four other senators who all are Democrats up for re-election next year: Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jon Tester of Montana, Ben Cardin of Maryland and Bill Nelson of Florida. ""Despite Sherrod Brown's transparent political strategy to mislead Ohio seniors and demagogue Medicare, this serves as another reminder he is the only candidate in Ohio who has voted to cut Medicare by over $500 billion in order to fund government-run health care,"" said NRSC spokesman Jahan Wilcox. Wilcox cited the New York Times, Washington Post and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office as supporting sources. PolitiFact has examined at least four previous claims that the health care reform bill -- formally known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and informally tagged as Obamacare -- would cut Medicare by $500 billion. The important point in each examination is that $500 billion -- the figure confirmed by the NRSC's citations -- are not taken out of the current Medicare budget and are not actual cuts. Nowhere in the bill are benefits actually eliminated, experts said. The $500 billion are reductions to future spending. The health care law attempts to slow the projected growth in Medicare spending by that amount over 10 years. Medicare spending will still increase. The Congressional Budget Office estimated it will reach $929 billion in 2020, up from $499 billion in actual spending in 2009. Some of the changes in the health care law increase Medicare spending ""to improve benefits and coverage, Tricia Neuman, director of the Medicare Policy Project at the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation told PolitiFact. Other provisions reduce the growth in Medicare spending by helping the program operate more efficiently and fund coverage expansions to the uninsured. Other provisions are designed to improve the delivery of care and quality of care, she said. The projected $500 billion in savings will come from changes that include higher insurance premiums for wealthier seniors, reductions in payments for Medicare Advantage plans, a new panel to oversee reimbursement rates, and a slowing of increases in payment rates to hospitals and other service providers each year. (Neuman explains the changes in a video tutorial on the Kaiser Family Foundation's website.) The NRSC recycled another talking point when it further asserts that the changes in the health care law will ""fund government-run health care."" PolitiFact has repeatedly issued Truth-O-Meter ratings of or for claims that the law represents a government takeover of health care. The claim was selected as PolitiFact National's 2010 Lie of the Year. We found that critics of the law are correct that it significantly increases government regulation of health insurers. But it is, as noted previously, a system that relies on private companies: The NRSC’s claim cites a real figure -- $500 billion -- that is part of the health reform debate. But it incorrectly describes it as $500 billion in Medicare cuts, rather than as decreases in the rate of growth of future spending. And the NRSC piles on the incorrect talking point about ""government-run health care."" On the Truth-Meter, the NRSC’s claim rates as ."
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37338
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This is a forwarded email containing six trivia questions alleging that Hillary Clinton is a socialist with Marxis’ leanings.
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Hillary Clinton Six Quotes on Socialism
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false
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Politics
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The words came out of the mouth of Hillary Clinton but they were taken out of context. Let us examine these one at a time. 1) “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” According to an Associated Press June 29, 2004 article found in San Diego’s Union Tribune Hillary Clinton was in San Francisco campaigning for Barbara Boxer and Democratic Party candidates when she told supporters to anticipate the loss of the tax cuts that were passed by the Bush Administration if Democrats in the Presidential election and gain full control of the Legislature. Clinton said, “Many of you are well enough off that … the tax cuts may have helped you. We’re saying that for America to get back on track, we’re probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” 2) “It’s time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by the few, and for the few…… And to replace it with shared responsibility, for shared prosperity.” According to a May 29, 2007 article by the Boston Globe, while at the Manchester School of Technology, Clinton delivered a policy speech unveiling a nine-point “progressive vision to aid the middle class, address rising income inequality.” Trying to present a vision contrary to that of the Bush Administration, she said, “They call it the ownership society, but it’s really the ‘on your own’ society,” Clinton said. “It’s time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by the few and for the few, time to reject the idea of an ‘on your own’ society and to replace it with shared responsibility for shared prosperity. I prefer a ‘we’re all in it together’ society.” 3)”(We)…..can’t just let business as usual go on, and that means something has to be taken away from some people.” and 4)”We have to build a political consensus and that requires people to give up a little bit of their own … in order to create this common ground.” On June 4, 2007 Clinton appeared with other Democratic presidential hopefuls Barack Obama, and John Edwards on the Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer on CNN. The quotes were taken from a response to a question from Monsignor Kevin Sullivan of Catholic Charities USA. The monsignor asked,”You have spoken a lot about our need to work for the common good. In an age in which there is, oftentimes, narrow and excessive individualism, how will you speak to our country about the need for sacrifice, restraint, when it comes to the critical issues of taxes, gun control, health care, and energy consumption?” Below is an extract as it appeared in the official CNN transcript. We have put the questionable quotes in italics: CLINTON: I think we could reach that agreement, and then we would have to start doing the hard work of deciding what we were going to do to make sure that they were not uninsured, because an uninsured person who goes to the hospital is more likely to die than an insured person. I mean, that is a fact. So, what do we do? We have to build a political consensus. And that requires people giving up a little bit of their own turf, in order to create this common ground. The same with energy — you know, we can’t keep talking about our dependence on foreign oil, and the need to deal with global warming, and the challenge that it poses to our climate and to God’s creation, and just let business as usual go on. O’BRIEN: Senator… CLINTON: And that means something has… (APPLAUSE) CLINTON: … to be taken away from some people. 5) “I certainly think the free-market has failed.” This appeared later in the same CNN transcript after Dr. Joel C. Hunter, senior pastor of Northland, a Church Distributed of Longwood, Florida asked,”Abortion continues to be one of the most hurtful and divisive facts of our nation. I come from the part of the faith community that is very strongly pro-life. I know you’re pro-choice, but you have indicated that you would like to reduce the number of abortions. Could you see yourself, with millions of voters in a pro-life camp, creating a common ground, with the goal ultimately in mind of reducing the decisions for abortion to zero?” CLINTON: Yes. Yes. And that is what I have tried to both talk about and reach out about over the last many years, going back, really, at least 15 years, in talking about abortion being safe, legal, and rare. And, by rare, I mean rare. And it’s been a challenge, because the pro-life and the pro- choice communities have not really been willing to find much common ground. And I think that is a great failing on all of our parts, because, for me… (APPLAUSE) CLINTON: … there are many opportunities to assist young people to make responsible decisions. There is a tremendous educational and public outreach that could be done through churches, through schools, through so much else. But I think it has to be done with an understanding of reaching people where they are today. We have so many young people who are tremendously influenced by the media culture and by the celebrity culture, and who have a very difficult time trying to sort out the right decisions to make. And I personally believe that the adult society has failed those people. I mean, I think that we have failed them in our churches, our schools, our government. And I certainly think the, you know, free market has failed. We have all failed. We have left too many children to sort of fend for themselves morally. And, so, I think there is a great opportunity. But it would require sort of a — a leaving at the sides the suspicion and the baggage that comes with people who have very strong, heartfelt feelings. You know, when I first started thinking about this very difficult issue — because it is. It’s a moral issue. And it should not be in any way diminished as a moral issue, no matter which side you’re on, because I have seen cases where I honestly believed that the — the moral choice was very complicated and not so straightforward as to what a young woman, her family, her physician, her pastor should do. And what concerns me is that there’s been a — a real reluctance for anyone to make a move toward the other side, for fear of being labeled as turning one’s back on the moral dimensions of the issue from either direction. So, I would invite you, and I would be willing to work with you, to see whether there couldn’t be some common ground that one could find. 6) “I think it’s time to send a clear message to what has become the most profitable sector in (the) entire economy that they are being watched.” According to a September 3, 2005 article by the Washington Post Clinton accused the oil companies of making a profit from the Katrina disaster by skyrocketing prices. The article said that Clinton had made clear her concerns over the “anxiety and anger felt by motorists was evident at nearly every turn in her travels throughout the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York.” Clinton said, “I think it’s time to send a clear message to what has become the most profitable sector in our entire economy that they’re being watched. I think human nature left to itself is going to push the limit as far as possible, and that’s what you need a government regulatory system for: to keep an eye on people to make the rules of the game fair, to make a level playing field and not give anybody some kind of undue advantage.” Posted 1/24/14
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3137
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Superfund cleanup considered for Detroit ‘green goo’ site.
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An industrial site in suburban Detroit from which a greenish stream of contaminated water leaked onto a freeway will be considered for the federal Superfund cleanup program, Michigan officials said Friday.
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true
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Environment, General News, Industrial waste, Detroit, Michigan
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The state Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy said an evaluation of the Electro-Plating Services Inc. site will be completed this spring. It will be based on dozens of soil and water samples being taken by the department and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The chrome plating company in Madison Heights was shut down by state regulators in 2016 due to mismanagement of industrial waste. An EPA cleanup removed toxic chemicals and contaminated liquids. The leak of bright green goo onto the shoulder of Interstate 696 last month prompted a new investigation. It found high levels of numerous toxins in soil and groundwater at the site, including hexavalent chromium, which is associated with cancer, kidney and liver damage. The Superfund program enables EPA to arrange cleanup of highly contaminated sites by requiring polluters to pay for the work or using government funds when responsible parties can’t be found. Michigan officials said Friday they also had detected high levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, in water collected by a sump pump in the facility’s basement. PFAS are chemicals used in a wide variety of industrial and household products that have been linked to kidney and liver damage, thyroid disease, fertility problems and low birth weight. The Michigan agency said water sampled from the basement pit contained levels of one PFAS compound, known as PFOS, at a level of 742 parts per trillion, far exceeding Michigan’s groundwater standard of 70 ppt. The environmental department said the recovered water will be treated to remove the compounds and other pollution before disposal.
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10211
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Essure tubal coil permanent birth control catching on
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"Essure is a permanent sterilization system that has been available in the US since 2002. Placement does require a procedure and sedation. It typically lasts about 30 minutes and is called hysteroscopy. To accomplish placement the cervix is dilated and a hysteroscope inserted into the uterus to see the fallopian tube openings and to place the coils. Essure is a highly effective birth control method, however it is significantly more expensive than other long-term birth control methods such as the IUD or vasectomy. This story adequately represents the availability and novelty of Essure. It quotes multiple sources that provide very valuable perspectives for the reader. The story does a good job describing side effects around the time of placement but fails to note risks of complication and harms from the procedure, rates of failure of the procedure, or risk of complications from the radiology study required at 3 months after placement that injects dye into the uterus and uses x-ray imaging to assure the tubes are blocked. The story could have been improved by not merely mentioning the insurance coverage of Essure but also describing the actual costs, which are higher than other methods. Finally, the story does not adequately describe the strength of the evidence to support Essure. It mentions that Essure is 99.8% effective according to company studies. How does this level of effectiveness compare to other methods discussed in the article? Does that mean that no studies have been done that are not company-sponsored? How reliable are the results of those studies? One ob-gyn said IUDs were ""safer and cheaper"" but how much safer and cheaper?"
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mixture
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"The story mentions ""Insurance typically pays for the full cost when performed in the hospital, except co-pays and deductibles."" But we are never given the actual cost of the device itself. Estimates of the cost of the device vary from $1300 to $3500, and a hysterosalpinogram is required at 12 weeks to check for tissue growth and tubal blockage, which also adds to the cost. By comparison, an IUD costs less than $500. The story correctly represents the effectiveness of Essure. The story should have compared Essure to other long-term birth control methods such as the IUD and vasectomy. For women for whom the procedure works it has the same effectiveness as the progesterone containing IUD (0.2% per year) and not quite as ""perfect"" as male sterilization (which is also the most cost-effective method) with a failure rate of 0.15% in the first year and 0.1% thereafter. Male sterilization is even more effective when combined with repeated late semen analysis (similar to the HSG used to confirm Essure has ""worked""). The story provides some information on the harms of the procedure, however it understates the risk of hysteroscopy by calling it a ""non-invasive"" and ""non-surgical method."" Hysteroscopy is associated with risk of uterine perforation, infection and bleeding. The story does not adequately describe the strength of the evidence to support Essure. It mentions that Essure is 99.8% effective according to company studies. Over what time period? After 12 weeks? Does that mean that no studies have been done that are not company-sponsored? How reliable are the results of those studies? The story does not engage in disease mongering. The story quotes multiple sources who provide very valuable perspectives for the reader. The story mentions other long-term birth control methods such as vasectomy and the IUD. But it missed the opportunity to compare effectiveness with other methods. (See ""Quantification of Benefits of Treatment"" criterion above.) The story explains that ""Some 290,000 women worldwide have undergone the Essure procedure since 2002, according to the company."" But it does not discuss how many physicians are trained in implanting the device. Clearly Essure is not a new idea. The story clearly states that it has been on the market since 2002. Because the story quotes multiple sources the reader can assume the story did not rely on a press release as the sole source of information."
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2849
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Canada Supreme Court to revisit decision banning assisted suicide.
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The Supreme Court of Canada agreed on Thursday to take another look at a decision it made in 1993 upholding a ban on assisted suicide, setting up a new battle over the right to die.
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true
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Health News
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The case involves Gloria Taylor, an Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) patient and activist, who joined the right to die lawsuit in 2011. Taylor died of her illness, informally called Lou Gehrig’s disease, in 2012. The family of a second woman, Kay Carter, who traveled to Switzerland to end her life, were also plaintiffs. Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland, along with a handful of other European jurisdictions and a few U.S. states. “This is a big one dealing with something we will all one day face - how, when and under what circumstances we head for the exit sign,” said constitutional lawyer Eugene Meehan, who has argued numerous cases before the court. Canada’s Supreme Court last considered assisted suicide two decades ago with the case of Sue Rodriguez, who also suffered from ALS. The court ruled nobody could legally assist in another’s death, regardless of terminal illness, pain, prolonged suffering or an expressed wish to die. A lower court in the western province of British Columbia has since struck down Canada’s ban on assisted suicide. But the B.C. Court of Appeals reversed the decision last year and made it clear that any reversal of the ban would have to be done by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court majority was a narrow 5-4 in the 1993 Rodriguez decision that it was constitutional to prohibit doctor-assisted suicide. Meehan noted that the sole judge left on the court from that time is Beverley McLachlin, now chief justice, and she was in the dissent. Since 1993 pressure for assisted suicide has persisted. Last year the Quebec government introduced a bill to legalize it, arguing this was a matter of health care under provincial jurisdiction, not a criminal matter in the federal bailiwick. Opposing it are religious groups as well as organizations representing people with disabilities, which argue that making it easier to end people’s lives is a slippery slope that makes them feel vulnerable. In her 1993 dissenting opinion in Rodriguez, McLachlin admitted to some evidence in other countries “that legal codes which permit assisted suicide may be linked to cases of involuntary deaths of the aging and disabled.” However, she wrote that such unwanted actions should be caught by Canada’s Criminal Code, which could be strengthened if necessary by requiring a judge’s order to allow doctor-assisted suicide. One principle guiding courts generally is that of “stare decisis,” meaning that precedents should stand. However, the rule is not cast in stone, and Meehan said the Supreme Court of Canada has tended to be willing to revisit specific areas after about a decade. The name of the current case is Lee Carter et al. v. Attorney General of Canada et al. (35591)
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9805
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Electrical Brain Stimulation May Strengthen Memory, Study Says
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This story gives readers a good sense of the tentative nature of this research. It points out that the results seen in patients with epilepsy might not be replicated in those with Alzheimer’s disease. But the story should have done more to point out the inherent risks of pushing wires deep into a patient’s brain. Some comparison to the size of the temporary memory boost provided by available drugs would have helped put the results of this test in better context. The terrible effects of Alzheimer’s disease and the lack of effective treatments create desperate desires for new options. Stories that report on this line of research should emphasize the caveats and cautions in order to take into account the power of wishful thinking by families and friends of people with dementia.
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true
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Epilepsy
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This line of research is so preliminary that we won’t criticize a story for omitting cost estimates. However, as the story notes, similar technology is used to treat some people with Parkinson’s disease and other disorders, so the story could have told readers how much those applications cost. The story reports that the test looked only at a simulation of learning how to navigate a virtual city. It points out that this test does not prove that electrical brain stimulation can overcome memory problems caused by Alzheimer’s disease or other types of dementia. An independent source quoted in the story points out the experiment did not show if the effects last. Even though the researchers did not report any harms to participants in this study, the story should have mentioned that while similar treatments are considered safe enough in the right circumstances, implanting electrodes and electrical stimulation devices can cause bleeding, strokes, infections, mood changes, movement disorders, sleep problems and other harms. A recent study of deep brain stimulation (DBS) involving 99 Parkinson’s patients concluded that DBS “has an adverse effect on executive functions with implications for daily life of the patients and their relatives.” Almost 10% of those DBS patients had psychiatric events including a suicide attempt. The story notes that this test included only a small number of participants, and that while it is called “promising” and one quote said it is a “first, important step,” there were also quotes and comments pointing out that many questions remain. Specifically, the story noted that the patients in this test were being prepared for treatment to reduce epileptic seizures and that there may be important differences between them and typical Alzheimer’s disease patients. The story does not exaggerate who might eventually benefit from this line of research. The story includes an independent source. Although it does not mention whether the researchers have any conflicts of interest, the authors reported no conflicts in the disclosure forms posted online by the New England Journal of Medicine. The story should have made some mention of the drugs currently available to improve memory function of people with Alzheimer’s disease. Although these drugs do not alter the progression of the disease, a comparison of their memory-enhancing effects to the level of improvement seen in this test would have given readers a useful way to better understand the size and duration of the effect these researchers saw. The story is clear that this research is in its early stages, though devices are available that provide similar deep brain stimulation to patients with other disorders. The story notes that brain stimulation is already used to treat other disorders, but that using it to boost memory would be new. The story does attribute quotes from a researcher to a news release, but it also includes quotes from at least one other source, so it does not appear to rely only on the release.
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11862
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We’ve cut taxes 75 times, cut $7.5 billion worth in taxes, and as a result we’ve added over 1.3 million jobs.
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"Scott said, ""We’ve cut taxes 75 times, cut $7.5 billion worth in taxes, and as a result we’ve added over 1.3 million jobs."" Scott is including anything that reduces government revenues to claim he's cut taxes 75 times. But, as we've said before, the list includes things that are clearly not tax cuts. In addition, Scott is claiming those tax cuts have resulted in the creation of 1.3 million jobs. The fact is, state economists predicted Florida would add 1 million jobs in over the same time period before Scott was even elected governor and had an opportunity to enact his policies. Experts say tax cuts may be a reason the state has seen jobs rebound, but it's not the sole or even most important reason. Scott’s claim is partially accurate and overplays the connection to more than 1 million jobs."
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mixture
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State Budget, Taxes, Florida, Rick Scott,
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"For years, Republican Gov. Rick Scott has touted an ever-growing pile of tax cuts he has achieved for the state. In 2013, he claimed he cut taxes 24 times. In 2014, that number grew to 40. Now, as Scott rounds out his last full year in office (and ponders a run for the U.S. Senate), the tally has been raised once more. ""We’ve cut taxes 75 times, cut $7.5 billion worth in taxes, and as a result we’ve added over 1.3 million jobs,"" Scott said Nov. 9 during a news conference in Tampa. Scott's past boasts rated , because Scott relied on some creative math to reach his tax cut total. He did that again in this claim, but he went even further when he said those tax cuts resulted in the creation of 1.3 million jobs. Experts say the cuts may be a factor in job growth, but they're likely not the most critical one. ""The governor takes credit for all the jobs created since he took office, but with so many other driving factors at play, it's difficult to attribute these jobs to the tax cuts,"" said Joe Pennisi with the Florida Policy Institute. Scott’s team sent PolitiFact Florida a list of 82 ""tax cuts"" that reduced government revenues by a combined $7.7 billion. (You can see the list from 2011-16 here; the 2017 list is here.) As in times past, the list counts Florida's mostly annual sales tax holiday, includes reductions in fees such as lowering the cost to obtain a concealed weapons permit, and counts a measure that stopped an automatic fee increase to obtain a hunting or fishing license. Many of the measures are extremely targeted and many only affect businesses. However, they do reduce state government revenue, which is why Scott broadly defines them as a tax cut, even if they aren't. Asked to back up the governor's statement, his office sent us a more nuanced statement about how the tax cuts ""helped"" contribute to positive economic growth — it did not as directly link the cuts to jobs. ""As the governor has said for the past seven years, cutting taxes has helped turn around Florida’s economy, made our state more business-friendly, and has allowed job creators to invest more in creating new opportunities — all of which has helped Florida businesses create more than 1.3 million new jobs,"" said Scott spokeswoman Kerri Wyland. We organized the list into four broad categories: targeted breaks (21 items), sales tax reductions or exemptions (25), breaks for businesses (17), and fee reductions (12). The largest chunk of tax cuts reduce the amount of taxes collected on a very specific good, service or industry. Examples include tax exemptions for first responders and surviving spouses, eliminating the sales taxes on repairs to planes between 2,000 and 15,000 pounds, and increasing financial assistance for businesses to donate to community development and housing projects for low-income residents. Also counted is a renewable energy tax exemption that exempts 80 percent of the value of a renewable energy source from tangible personal property tax for all applicants, residential and nonresidential. One thing to remember about sales tax exemptions and reductions: You have to consume the goods to get the break — and most offered temporary relief. The tax cut package from 2014 included several exemptions, including a temporary cut for the purchase of cement mixing drums for cement trucks. Scott’s list also counts about $20 million worth of sales tax exemptions for child car seats and youth bike helmets, prescribed diet pet food, and prepaid college meal plans. These last until the end of 2017. The agriculture industry has also seen sales tax breaks, such as the 2015 exemption that was extended for trailers and irrigation equipment related to production. The manufacturing industry also got a permanent exemption on mechanical equipment. Exemptions in 2017 include health products for livestock poultry and aquaculture, construction building materials, feminine hygiene products and medical marijuana delivery devices. Scott counted the mostly annual tax-free shopping holiday around seven different times since 2017. From 2011-17 there was a tax-free holiday in the month of August for shoes, clothing and school supply purchases. It also exempted sales taxes on laptops and tablets, up to $750 in four of the years. Most of the holidays were three days, but in 2015, there was a 10-day period for the break. The state has offered the holiday since 1998 except in 2002, 2003, 2008, 2009. Kurt Wenner, Florida TaxWatch vice president of research, pointed out that several tax cuts on Scott’s list aim to build a more competitive business climate, such as the permanent sales tax exemption for manufacturing equipment. He said targeting capital expenses, particularly in industries with high wages, stimulates the economy. Scott and the Legislature have worked to expand tax credits for businesses for areas such as research and development; cleaning up contaminated sites known as brownfields; and increasing the amount of money available for credits under a ""new market"" program. Per Scott’s wishes, the Legislature expanded the exemption for corporate income taxes from $5,000 to $25,000 in 2011, and again in 2012 to $50,000, sparing thousands of businesses from paying the tax. The hit to the state budget for both is about $30 million a year. Another notable example in this section came in the most recent legislative session when lawmakers pared the sales tax on the total rent paid for any commercial property from 6 percent to 5.8 percent, a loss of $25 million in tax revenue in 2017. The Legislature has targeted fees for specific licenses during Scott’s tenure. Lawmakers blocked an automatic inflation adjustment for hunting and fishing license fees costing the state almost $20 million from 2013-17. They also reduced the cost of licenses renewal for concealed weapons from $60 to $50, and then again in 2017 to $45. One significant fee reduction came in 2014 with SB 156, which rolled back motor vehicle registration fee increases, saving motorists about $25 a year per vehicle registration. No doubt, Scott has cut taxes in his seven years as governor. Our quibble is with the claim that he did it 75 times, which is an inflated statistic. His claim that those tax cuts created 1.3 million jobs, however, is on shakier ground. ""It’s hard to determine exactly how many jobs the tax cuts produced; however, it's economically expected that spending more is going to help the economy and in turn create jobs,"" Wenner said. Experts said a bulk of the tax cuts (especially the sales tax holidays and narrow sales tax exemptions) have a minimal effect on the economy. ""What causes businesses to hire more employees is demand for their services,"" said Jonathan Hamilton, an economic professor at the University of Florida. ""The (tax cuts) on Scott’s list all account for a relatively small reduction in their costs."" Pennisi pointed to research from left-leaning organizations that show tax cuts and business incentives fail to have a significant impact on economic activity and job creation. Businesses don’t necessarily use extra savings to hire more employees. ""Hiring is driven by the demand for a business’ goods and services rather than the presence in the owner’s pocket of a few more dollars made available through tax cuts,"" Pennisi said in a 2016 brief. He said the bulk of the governor’s tax cuts would not be expected to create that demand. Looking for more evidence Scott's tax cuts can't solely be the reason the state added 1.3 million jobs? In July 2010, before Scott was elected governor, state economists predicted that the national economic recovery would mean 1 million new jobs for Florida by 2017. That was before Scott was elected or ever cut a tax. Scott said, ""We’ve cut taxes 75 times, cut $7.5 billion worth in taxes, and as a result we’ve added over 1.3 million jobs."" Scott is including anything that reduces government revenues to claim he's cut taxes 75 times. But, as we've said before, the list includes things that are clearly not tax cuts. In addition, Scott is claiming those tax cuts have resulted in the creation of 1.3 million jobs. The fact is, state economists predicted Florida would add 1 million jobs in over the same time period before Scott was even elected governor and had an opportunity to enact his policies. Experts say tax cuts may be a reason the state has seen jobs rebound, but it's not the sole or even most important reason. Scott’s claim is partially accurate and overplays the connection to more than 1 million jobs."
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34538
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"Secret Service and military personnel have used the designation ""Broomstick One"" for aircraft carrying Hillary Clinton."
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Broomstick One #BasketOfDeplorablespic.twitter.com/Rskde22TOC — Morally Correct? (@DisruptGBM) September 10, 2016
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unproven
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Politics, 2016 presidential campaign, air force one, hillary clinton
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On 27 October 2016, during an otherwise typical on-air rant against Democrat Hillary Clinton, conservative radio pundit Rush Limbaugh had this to say about the presidential candidate’s primary means of transportation: Do you know what they call Hillary’s campaign plane? Broomstick One. That’s the name for her campaign plane given by Secret Service and State Department agents because of how rudely she treated them. This is in the emails as well, in addition to forthcoming books, that she was mean and rude and had no time for people she thought were there to serve her, foul mouth and liberal use of the F-word in dealing with these people, and they named her plane Broomstick One. Though Limbaugh didn’t cite a source for that tidbit, it was quite possibly The Washington Times, which had run an editorial saying much the same thing two weeks earlier: Hillary, by the published accounts, is an equal-opportunity offender, insulting people, dogs and cats, even the flag, going back to her late and lamented days as a governor’s wife in Arkansas. She was particularly abusive to troopers and agents assigned to make her life easier and who were in no position to do anything but take her abuse. She was so verbally abusive to the pilots of Marine One, the presidential helicopter, that the crew called the chopper “Broomstick One.” Just not in her presence. Like the more general partisan caricature of Hillary Clinton as an evil witch, the charge that she is vulgar and verbally abusive with subordinates is longstanding (Snopes.com assessed such claims as far back as 2007). Most of the commonly cited instances, however, which allegedly took place while the Clintons resided in the White House between 1993 and 2001, have proved to be anecdotal and impossible to confirm. The specific claim that military and/or security personnel have at one time or another designated Hillary Clinton’s aircraft “Broomstick One” first surfaced in December 2003, a few weeks after Clinton (then a U.S. Senator from New York) toured military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a typical example of what circulated via forwarded e-mail: GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS!! Regardless of where you stand in the political spectrum, everyone should recognize humor as only the troops can dream it up. Did you hear what call sign the military used for Hillary’s Blackhawk helicopter during her tour in Iraq? “Broomstick One” … and she never knew! The above text is similar to a variant posted 18 December 2003 on the political message board Free Republic, where commenters found it simultaneously questionable and amusing: Subject: New Call Sign Clever… Never accuse the American Military of not having a sense of humor ! Have you heard what the troops are calling the Sikorsky Blackhawk helicopter Hillary Clinton used on her Iraq tour? “Broomstick One” Its veracity was rightly questioned from the start. In addition to being purely anecdotal — not a single source was cited, then or since — every telling of the story omitted a crucial detail about Sen. Clinton’s four-day trip, namely that she wasn’t traveling alone. According to newspaper accounts, she toured Afghanistan and Iraq in the company of fellow senator Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island). And while the fact that it was a joint mission doesn’t, by itself, invalidate the notion that the troops could have came up with a special nickname for “Hillary’s Black Hawk helicopter,” it does cast doubt on it. In any case, the claim has never been proved. Apart from forwarded e-mails, the story’s next appearance was in a collection of Marine Corps humor, The Older We Get, the Better We Were: More Marine Corps Sea Stories and Politically Incorrect Common Sense, written by Andrew Anthony Bufalo and published in 2004: In 2003 now-Senator Clinton visited Afghanistan, ostensibly on a “fact finding” tour. The troops who were there knew it was really a political trip designed to build her resume and get some press, and naturally they felt the whole dog and pony show was an unnecessary distraction for them. So when it came time to choose a designation for the helicopter she would be riding in someone came up with a call sign that was both accurate and poetic — Broomstick One! “Broomstick One” made a brief Internet comeback during Clinton’s 2008 presidential primary campaign against Democratic rival Barack Obama, appearing in joke posts like this one, dated 9 April 2008: Eight years later, it would become a staple of the 2016 election cycle, often accompanied by additional spurious claims such as that “Broomstick One” is Clinton’s Secret Service “codename” (her actual codename is “Evergreen”), and that “Broomstick One” was referenced in one or more WikiLeaks e-mails (we’ve searched in vain for any such reference). Here is a sampling of what the joke looked like on Twitter, right up until a month before the election: The new presidential plane – Air Witch One. The U.S. FREEDOM ARMY awaits your enlistment. http://t.co/oSPeY3QMpH. pic.twitter.com/ah072S874T — U.S. Freedom Army (@USFreedomArmy) May 19, 2015 Looks like the Flu uhh Pneumonia is keeping @HillaryClinton from getting back in the Sa… errr Broomstick One pic.twitter.com/gyRnJFbD1h — Zeb (@PaynefulPolitic) September 14, 2016 BROOMSTICK ONE? pic.twitter.com/ZssAfxsyBY — Tom DeVette (@TomDeVette) October 12, 2016
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15752
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Today roughly half of born-again Christians aren’t voting. They’re staying home.
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For two men trained as scientists, the bosses of Britain’s major insulin providers have had to become experts in ferry schedules, trucking laws and warehouse capacity as they seek to guarantee the supply of life-saving drugs through a chaotic Brexit.
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false
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Corrections and Updates, Elections, Religion, Texas, Ted Cruz,
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With Britain set to leave the European Union within weeks, Pinder Sahota at the world’s biggest insulin maker Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi’s Hugo Fry have rebuilt operations to withstand the most turbulent of events. The two companies told Reuters they had spent millions of pounds, which they cannot recoup, stockpiling millions of packets of insulin - used to treat diabetes - inside Britain and building new shipping and air freight routes. Their plans, formulated over three years, show the lengths companies across the continent are having to go to overhaul long-standing supply chains that may not survive Britain’s biggest trade upheaval in half a century. “There is nothing comparable to this,” Novo Nordisk’s UK General Manager Sahota told Reuters of the Danish company’s preparation. “It’s unprecedented from a logistics point of view. We’re preparing for the worst-case scenario, the most extreme.” With two Brexit deadlines already been and gone, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has vowed to take Britain out of the EU with or without a deal by Oct. 31 - increasing the chance of a sudden departure that brings trade tariffs and customs checks with the continent for the first time in decades. The government’s own planning shows that, in a worst-case scenario, lorries seeking to enter Europe at the French port of Calais could face delays of two-and-a-half days, creating supply disruptions that could last for months. That poses a real risk for the pharmaceutical industry which imports 37 million packs of drugs from Europe a month. According to the government, three-quarters come via that route. While Britain’s GSK and AstraZeneca are world leaders in respiratory and cardiovascular treatments, Britain’s insulin is imported. “In the case of pharmaceuticals, you can’t just throw things onto a boat or a lorry, you have to test and validate these routes into the country,” Fry told Reuters in his office to the west of London, adding they had backups to their backup plans. Both Sanofi and Novo Nordisk have reserved space on ferries going the longer route to eastern English ports to avoid the main Calais-Dover crossing if needed, and also air freight if required. “We anticipate that route is going to become congested so what we’ve done is open up other routes,” said Sahota. “So two other routes that we’ve opened up are Denmark to Immingham (in north-east England) and Netherlands to Immingham.” SKY-HIGH STOCKPILES Novo Nordisk, Britain’s biggest insulin supplier, has tripled its warehouse capacity to hold 18 weeks’ worth of stock - 3.8 million packs that piled high would stand 12 times the height of the London Shard skyscraper. Eli Lilly of the United States and France’s Sanofi, the country’s second and third-biggest suppliers, have similar stockpiles. Frustration is growing that while they dedicate huge resources to such preparation, they are spending less time on their normal jobs. “When we’re doing this, we’re not doing other stuff,” Fry said. “We’re not working on projects that will bring our most innovative products to the market. “Although we are happy to do it, it is starting to weigh on our balance sheet, on our logistics, keeping all this additional stock in the country. It’s not an ideal situation.” The companies are confident they will be able to guarantee the British supply of insulin to the around 1 million diabetes patients who need it. But some patients like Georgina from London, who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes more than 30 years ago, have become increasingly alarmed as the chances have grown of Britain leaving the EU without a deal to govern their trading relationship. “For me, I can’t tell you how worried I am about that. It’s life-threatening for me,” she said, declining to give her last name. She added that she also worried about older patients she encountered at clinics. The British government is organising a regular freight service reserved just for drugs as part of its preparations alongside industry for Brexit on Oct. 31. “We are doing everything we can to help ensure the supply of medicines and medical products remains uninterrupted, including insulin,” said the department of health and social care. The two drug companies did not say how much their Brexit preparations had cost, beyond many millions of pounds. With fixed contracts with Britain’s health service, they cannot raise prices. Both Fry and Sahota have had to delve into arcane areas of transport. As part of their planning, for example, they have had to factor in how many drivers are needed to avoid breaking legally mandated rest laws, how long refrigerated lorries can operate in one stretch, and what happens in the event of fuel shortages. “We’re doing everything we can,” said Fry. “I know more about ferry crossings now than I ever thought I would.”
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3670
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California governor seeks $1 billion to target homelessness.
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A billion-dollar investment last year has yet to curtail California’s growing homeless crisis, and with the state awash in revenue, Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to spend a billion more on programs aimed at getting people off the streets.
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true
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California, Health, General News, Business, Medicaid, Homelessness, Gavin Newsom, U.S. News
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He signed an executive order Wednesday creating what he intends to be a $750 million fund that providers could tap to pay rents, fund affordable housing or aid boarding and care homes. Newsom also wants to use vacant state property to house homeless people and is seeking changes to the state’s Medicaid program to increase spending on preventive health care. In addition, the Democratic governor said the final portion of $650 million in emergency homeless aid to cities and counties approved in June was being released Wednesday after a final federal homelessness count. The report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found California’s homeless population increased 16% last year, to about 151,000 people. That’s more than a quarter of the national total. President Donald Trump continued his criticism of California’s Democratic leaders this week, and especially those in Los Angeles and San Francisco, for failing to adequately address homelessness. In a tweet, he called it a local issue but said that if city and state leaders “acknowledge responsibility and politely” ask for help, then his administration “will very seriously consider getting involved.” Newsom made no mention of Trump in his announcement but acted with an eye toward an inevitable economic downturn that wouldn’t allow the state to spend billions on the problem. Although California is projected to have a $7 billion surplus, the state’s bipartisan legislative analyst said only $1 billion should be spent on programs that will last beyond the year. Because Newsom’s proposal on homelessness would eat up the bulk of that $1 billion, the governor proposed to “seed” the fund with one-time state revenue and called on philanthropic and private sector groups “to step up as well.” His order comes two days before he’ll unveil his annual budget plan, which he said includes $695 million of state and federal matching funds to increase spending on preventive health care. The money would go to things that can prevent homelessness, like helping people find housing. A portion could even go to rent assistance if it helps people not use health care services as often. A group representing the directors of California’s county behavioral health programs praised Newsom’s proposed budget increases. Newsom said many of his proposals were inspired by advisers, including Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, who said the governor is using California’s “real estate and human capital in ways never proposed before to confront this humanitarian crisis.” David Wolfe, legislative director of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, was skeptical. He noted that taxpayers in 2018 also approved $4 billion in bonds for existing affordable housing programs for low-income residents, veterans and farmworkers. They also allowed the state to use up to $140 million each year in existing county mental-health funds to pay for housing for homeless people with mental illness. Lawmakers also allocated $1 billion in the budget last year for homeless and mental health services. “You can’t just throw money at homelessness and a lack of affordable housing and expect that you’re going to achieve the result that you’re hoping to achieve,” Wolfe said. He and Republican Assemblyman Tyler Diep, vice chairman of the chamber’s housing committee, said the state also needs to streamline its strict environmental protections to speed up housing construction. And California must address that portion of the “homeless population that is resistant to help,” Diep said in a statement. Lawmakers last year allowed San Francisco to test a program making it easier to have a court-appointed conservator take control of treatment for someone who’s mentally disabled. And a proposed ballot measure would send those caught violating laws against public urination, drunkenness, drug use and the like to special homeless courts intended to get them help as a condition of avoiding a criminal conviction. Republican Sen. John Moorlach, an accountant on the Senate Housing Committee, said Newsom seems to be acting prudently but that the state needs to expand involuntary treatment. “We’ve got to start protecting our constituents, with housewives even concerned about going to the grocery store” for fear of being accosted, Moorlach said. “If you cannot take care of yourself and you’re a danger to yourself, then we should have some kind of hold program.” The governor also directed the state to provide 100 travel trailers and modular tent structures to cities and counties for use as temporary housing. Newsom said a year ago that he wanted to build housing on unused state property. His new order directs his administration to identify some of those properties by month’s end that local governments or nonprofits can use for emergency homeless shelters, as long as it doesn’t delay developing of affordable housing. That includes state property alongside highways or state roads; vacant hospitals and health care facilities; and state fairgrounds. “Californians are demanding that all levels of government — federal, state and local — do more to get people off the streets and into services — whether that’s emergency housing, mental health services, substance abuse treatment or all of the above,” Newsom said. Nearly $25 million more would go to test programs in three counties to put those deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial into community programs instead of state psychiatric hospitals.
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39808
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The writer of the email says she had a bad experience with Zicam nose spray for colds. She felt an immediate reaction after using it and realized that the result was that she lost all sense of taste or smell. She says she found stories of other people on the Internet who also lost the ability to smell because of Zircam. She warns not to use it and also includes a website of a law firm handling personal injury cases about Zircam.
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Zicam Nose Spray Can Kill Your Sense of Smell
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false
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Medical, Warnings
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We don’t know whether this particular first-hand account is true but the concerns about Zircam are not fabricated. Zicam is the brand name of products from Matrixx Initiatives. The company promotes its Zicam Cold Remedy nasal gel by saying that it shortens your cold. Their website says it will “…help you get over your cold three times faster.” Matrixx has several other Zicam products for both adults and children that are for flu, allergies, congestion, and sinus problems. Concerns about whether Zicam might be causing a loss of smell began accumulating in 2004. Zicam contains a form of zinc (zinc gluconate) and medical researchers pointed to the 1930’s when another form of zinc (zinc sulfate) was used nasally in an attempt to protect from polio. One of the results was that some users lost their sense of smell. Matrixx countered by saying that the two forms of zinc should not be equated. The anti-polio products had concentrated forms of the sulfate which, according to Matrixx, reacted with water to create a strong acid. The gluconate in their product, said Matrixx, is a weak organic salt that dissolves into a “…naturally occurring, non toxic compound found in all human tissue.” Matrixx had strongly denied that Zicam destroys the sense of smell and taste and when contacted by TruthOrFiction.com about this story sent us a summary of a two-day meeting of its Scientific Advisory Board in September, 2004. It said, “was the unanimous opinion of the Scientific Advisory Board that the cumulative scientific evidence does not support the contention that Zicam® Cold Remedy zinc gluconate nasal gel is associated with disorders of smell.” The panel concluded that a loss of smell is most commonly associated with the common cold, sinusitis, and nasal injury and that there are statistically significant associations between the pernament loss of smell and numerous other medical conditions and multiple classes of drugs. In other words, the board felt that there was not enough evidence in the midst of all those other factors to pinpoint Zicam as the culprit. Nonetheless, the lawsuits kept coming and in January, 2006, Matrixx, without admitting any fault, settled a class action lawsuit with 340 people for nearly $12 million. As of this writing, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had not looked into the Zicam complaints. Updated 10/27/06 Comments
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10062
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New mammogram study stirs debate for women in 40s
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This story gives readers a balanced view of the benefits and harms of screening mammography among women in their 40s based on the results of study comparing the areas in Sweden that offered routine screening to those that did not. It tells readers not only the percentage difference in death rates but also the number that need to be screened to prevent one breast cancer death and statistics on the overall breast cancer death rates among women in this age group. The clear description of some of the limitations of mammography helps readers see some of the complexity of decisions about screening.
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true
|
Although the story notes the number of women who would need to be screened to prevent a breast cancer death and the risk of overtreatment, it does not discuss the costs of annual mammography screening, or even provide a range of costs. The story does not discuss any health care policy cost repercussions of breast cancer screening recommendations. The story does not discuss the cost of unnecessary biopsies or other treatments for women who have a false positive diagnosis via mammography (greater in women 40-49). This story reports the percentage difference in death rates in the lead sentence, but then it also includes several comments and statistics that help readers put that first number in perspective. It includes the number of women in their 40s (1,252) who would need to be screened for a decade in order to prevent one breast cancer death, according to the results of this study. It also includes a quote applying that figure to the United States, suggesting that screening 22 million women could prevent about 2,000 deaths. This story also pointed out that the study did NOT report the true breast cancer mortality rate – in other words, the number of women who died of breast cancer versus the number who were diagnosed with breast cancer. This story gives readers some details about the potential harms of screening, including “unnecessary stress, unwarranted biopsies and overtreatment.” The story outlines the key features of the study, noting both strengths (it included over a million women and looked at real world experience) and limitations (lack of information about harms related to screening or differences between the women in the study groups). As noted in our reviews of other stories (and as will be addressed in a separate blog post on Monday October 4), there are many other methodological questions that could have and perhaps should have been raised. But this story nonetheless met the criterion for a satisfactory score. A strong point of this story is that it tells readers the number of women in the US who die of breast cancer before age 50, so that readers can see it makes up a part (12%) of the total breast cancer death toll. The story includes comments from more than one independent expert. It does not refer to any potential conflicts of interest, but the researchers did not report any in their journal article. Although there is not a detailed discussions of alternatives, this story does highlight the fact that “an influential panel of U.S. science advisers” and others say women in their 40s should make individual decisions about screening mammography. The story doesn’t explicitly address the availability of mammography but we can’t criticize it for that. We can only give it a score of Not Applicable for this criterion. The story includes some information about what is new or different about how this study looked at the question of the effectiveness of mammography among women in the 40s. It’s clear that this story did not rely on a news release.
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7425
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Fauci says he can’t stop Trump from talking at briefings.
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Dr. Anthony Fauci says he can’t jump in front of the microphone to stop President Donald Trump from speaking at daily White House briefings on the coronavirus outbreak.
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true
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Health, Anthony Fauci, General News, Politics, Infectious diseases, Science, Virus Outbreak, Donald Trump
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The nation’s top infectious disease expert told Science magazine in an interview that Trump listens “even though we disagree on some things.” “He goes his own way. He has his own style,” Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in the telephone interview with the magazine Sunday. “But on substantive issues, he does listen to what I say.” Trump complained at a recent briefing that China should have told the world about the virus much earlier. The new coronavirus originated in China. Fauci said he told the “appropriate people” after Trump made the comment that “it doesn’t comport, because two or three months earlier would have been September.” The coronavirus emerged in central China in December. Fauci said Trump’s aides may caution him against repeating the statement but if the president chooses to say it again, “I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down.” Trump and Fauci sparred politely but publicly last week over whether a malaria drug would work to treat people with the coronavirus disease. Asked about being present when things are said that he disagrees with, Fauci said: “I don’t disagree in the substance. It is expressed in a way that I would not express it, because it could lead to some misunderstanding about what the facts are about a given subject.” “I like Dr. Fauci a lot,” Trump said when the questioning turned to Fauci’s absence from Monday’s briefing. On Friday, the doctor put a hand over his face when Trump injected a conspiracy theory into the proceeding by referring to the State Department as the “Deep State Department.” Fauci’s brief hand movement and facial expression became an internet meme. Asked if he’d been criticized for it, Fauci said, “No comment.” For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. The vast majority of people recover from the new virus. According to the World Health Organization, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe illness may take three to six weeks to recover. ___ The Associated Press receives support for health and science coverage from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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26513
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Louie Gohmert Says a powder has been developed that, when mixed with water, “is being used in Germany as a mist. Health care workers go through a misting tent going into the hospital and it kills the coronavirus completely dead not only right then, but any time in the next 14 days that the virus touches anything that’s been sprayed, it is killed.”
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Germany health officials from three federal agencies in the country said no such product or disinfecting stations are being used at hospitals in the country. No product appears to exist that meets the parameters Gohmert identified in his statement. Most disinfectants have a limited window of effectiveness, ranging from 5 seconds to 15 minutes.
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false
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Texas, Louie Gohmert,
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"During a live interview on a local television station in East Texas, U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert discussed the coronavirus and measures he says some health care workers around the world are taking to stay safe while treating patients who have tested positive for the virus. Gohmert, a Republican from Tyler, said he recently spoke with an Arizona-based company that is producing a powder that, when mixed with water, can kill the coronavirus on contact. He said the same product, or one like it, is already in use in Germany, and he is trying to get the Arizona-based product ""fast-tracked"" in the United States. ""It is being used in Germany as a mist,"" he said. ""Health care workers go through a misting tent going into the hospital and it kills the coronavirus completely dead not only right then, but any time in the next 14 days that the virus touches anything that’s been sprayed it is killed."" The problem with Gohmert’s statement? No such product exists and nothing similar is in use in Germany. ""What your congressman said is absolute nonsense,"" said Dr. Jörn Wegner, a spokesman for Deutsche Krankenhausgesellschaft, or the German Hospital Association. ""There are no such tents and there’s no powder or magical cure."" Gohmert’s office did not return a request for more information about his statement, including what substance constitutes this powder and the name of the company in Arizona that he says is working on such a product. It is possible Gohmert was thinking of recent news reports of sterilization stations in use in China — images show individuals being sprayed with mist as they walk through a tunnel — but experts said the bleach-type sprays being used at these stations are likely not effective against the coronavirus. Protective measures in Germany A search of top news publications in Germany and the United States revealed no recent articles published about a powder or disinfectant being used on hospital employees that kills the virus on contact and for 14 days after the fact. While Germany has been hit hard by the coronavirus, it is also among the countries with the lowest fatality rate. News outlets have explored why Germany has reported such a low fatality rate, including analyzing how its hospitals are handling the outbreak. But those reports have not mentioned a substance like the one Gohmert described. In Germany, health authorities at the state level are responsible for hospital planning and operation while the Federal Ministry of Health drafts overarching policies and regulations. Sebastian Gülde, spokesman for the Bundesministerium für Gesundheit, or Federal Ministry of Health, said he is aware of some hospitals that are using tents for screening for symptoms of the virus, but he did not have knowledge of a product like the one Gohmert described. ""I did not hear of a disinfecting agent that keeps pathogens away for two weeks,"" Gülde said. Gülde directed PolitiFact’s inquiry to the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Krankenhaushygiene, the German Society of Hospital Hygiene, which issues recommendations on best practices for hospital hygiene and health. Thomas Ruttkowski, the organization’s spokesman, said there is no product like the one Gohmert described. ""I’m sorry, but we did not heard about that magic powder,"" he said in an email. ""Thank you for your mail. … Finally, something to laugh about."" Protecting against the virus During the interview, Gohmert mentioned that a company in Arizona was developing a similar product, but his team did not return a request for more information about the company or its product. A thorough web search did not return results for news stories or company websites for a business that may be working on producing this kind of powder-like product that can kill the coronavirus on contact. Currently, no disinfectant of this nature has been highlighted by the Environmental Protective Agency as being effective for use against SARS-CoV-2 (the coronavirus that causes COVID-19). None of these products registered with the EPA are approved for use on people. They are strictly surface disinfectants. Amy Cross, project coordinator at the National Pesticide Information Center, said she is not aware of a product on the list of EPA-regulated surface disinfectants that meets the description Gohmert offered. There are some products that are powder-based and can be combined with water and used in a liquid form, Cross said. But like all of the disinfectants on the list, the product is a liquid and has a set contact time — the amount of time a surface needs to stay wet with a product for it to be effective. Cross said this time varies by product, ranging from 15 seconds to 15 minutes. ""The idea that it would have residual activity after the surface is no longer wet to kill that virus is incredibly surprising to me, because I haven’t found any other products that have those similar claims,"" she said of the powder Gohmert described. When reached for comment, a World Health Organization spokesperson pointed to the group’s guidelines for ""infection prevention and control"" geared towards health care workers treating individuals who are likely infected with the coronavirus. The guidelines do not make mention of a disinfectant like the one Gohmert mentioned. They emphasize the need for workers to use personal protective equipment when necessary and practice rigorous hand hygiene. The WHO guidelines also emphasize the importance of ""environmental cleaning and disinfection procedures"" and state that washing surfaces with ""water and detergent and applying commonly used hospital-level disinfectants (such as sodium hypochlorite) are effective and sufficient procedures."" Wegner of the German Hospital Association echoed these recommendations. ""The only protection against the virus are personal protection equipment – masks, disposable coats and gloves – and proper hygiene,"" he said. Our ruling Gohmert said that there is a powder substance that, when mixed with water, is being used as a disinfecting mist in Germany. ""Health care workers go through a misting tent going into the hospital and it kills the coronavirus completely dead not only right then, but any time in the next 14 days that the virus touches anything that’s been sprayed it is killed,"" he said. But no such product seems to exist and no similar product is in use in Germany. There are no products currently in use as disinfecting agents in the United States that come close to meeting the description Gohmert offered. Gohmert did not return a request seeking more information about his statement. His statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim;"
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2461
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For 'Biggest Loser' trainer, diet trumps exercise in weight loss.
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Celebrity trainer Bob Harper, of the weight-loss TV show “The Biggest Loser,” has built a career putting very obese people through some grueling fitness paces but if he’s learned anything from the experience, it’s that diet trumps exercise every time.
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true
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Health News
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The Los Angeles-based trainer, who was born on a cattle farm in Tennessee and arrived in California some 20 years ago, said gone are the days when he believed it was possible to just exercise the pounds away. “It is all about your diet,” Harper, 48, said during a break from filming Season 15 of the long-running U.S. show. “I used to think a long time ago that you can beat everything you eat out of you and it’s just absolutely not the case.” Harper has spun his TV fame improving the fitness of people who are 100 pounds (45 kg) or more overweight into an empire with DVD workouts and the best-selling book “The Skinny Rules,” which offers tips to drop excess weight. He said if the ‘Skinny’ of his book titles and fitness DVDs is meant tongue-in-cheek, it is also the word that his morbidly obese clients attach to most. “People say, ‘Shouldn’t I be fit? Shouldn’t I be healthy?’, and I say ‘Yes, absolutely. But what I always hear from my contestants on the show is, ‘I just want to get skinny.’” In addition to promoting a healthy diet, a big part of his exercise routine includes lunges and other core-strengthening moves to burn enough fat to let the inner six-pack shine through. Harper said the workout is aimed at getting the heart rate up because that’s when people are going to be able to burn fat and when fat is burned off, the abdominal muscles are exposed. He also adheres to the no-frills strength and condition program called CrossFit, which is a series of timed, ever- changing physical challenges that he says are suitable for everyone. “I’m working with people who are 500 pounds (227 kg) and doing CrossFit on a regular basis,” said Harper, who described the approximately 20-minute workout as well-balanced. “To me CrossFit just completely makes sense (as long as) you work at your level doing the things you can do with proper coaching,” he explained. But Dr. Mark Kelly, an exercise physiologist at the American Council on Exercise, said that even with supervision, CrossFit can be risky if the fitness groundwork isn’t in place. “CrossFit has very ballistic training. You’re asking people to move fast through a large range of motion. Even with coaching, the foundation of stability, mobility and psychomotor skill has to be laid (first),” he said. Kelly agrees that diet is the main factor that can lower weight, but it’s exercise, he adds, that allows that lower weight to stick. He cited the National Weight Control Registry, a research study that includes people 18 years or older who have lost at least 13.6 kg (30 lb) of weight and kept it off for at least one year. Ninety percent of those in the study exercise regularly. “They’re the biggest losers across the nation,” Kelly said. “And the No. 1 thing they did was exercise on a regular basis. Many simply through walking.” Harper said he values working with people who have gotten far off the diet and fitness track more than the celebrity status conferred upon him by reality TV. “Of course with everyone being on a television show, from people working on fishing boats to people being interior designers, you get this platform,” he said. “But I think for me, celebrity trainer is not who I am.” He is, he said, someone who has found what he loves to do. “When you find your passion, it makes for a good life.” (This story was refiled to fix name to CrossFit from Crossfit throughout)
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29191
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A 1951 United Nations convention gives migrants fleeing violence in their home countries the legal right to enter the United States.
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What's true: The 1951 Refugee Convention gives migrants the right to apply for asylum in the United States, regardless of whether they entered or remained in the country legally or illegally. What's false: It is illegal to enter or be present in the United States without authorization or proper documentation, regardless of the circumstances a migrant might have fled. Under a June 2018 ruling by the U.S. Attorney General, escaping gang violence is unlikely to form the basis of a successful application for asylum in the United States.
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false
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Politics, asylum, immigration, migrant caravan
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In the autumn of 2018, controversy surrounded a caravan of thousands of migrants travelling mainly from Honduras, but also from Guatemala, towards Mexico and the southern border of the United States. President Donald Trump claimed (without presenting evidence) that the contingent included “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners,” and as the caravan slowly approached Mexico, some conservative opponents of illegal immigration stoked fears with false or misleading claims that the migrants were burning U.S. flags, and that the caravan was a liberal conspiracy funded by the financier George Soros. Public attention was also focused on the personal circumstances of some of the migrants and their motivations for travelling to the United States. Like Guatemala and El Salvador, Honduras is the site of rampant violence related to gangs and drug trafficking and has one of the highest murder rates in the world. In June 2018, the Council on Foreign Relations, a non-partisan think tank with a focus on international affairs, wrote of this crisis that: Tens of thousands of Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans, many of them unaccompanied minors, have arrived in the United States in recent years, seeking asylum from the region’s skyrocketing violence. Their countries, which form a region known as the Northern Triangle, were rocked by civil wars in the 1980s, leaving a legacy of violence and fragile institutions. The region remains menaced by corruption, drug trafficking, and gang violence despite tough police and judicial reforms. While the United States has provided the three governments billions of dollars in aid over the past decade, some analysts believe U.S. immigration policies have exacerbated threats to regional security. The number of asylum seekers worldwide originating from the Northern Triangle reached 110,000 in 2015, a five-fold increase from 2012. Unaccompanied minors accounted for much of this surge. Migrants from all three countries cite violence, forced gang recruitment, and extortion, as well as poverty and lack of opportunity, as their reasons for leaving. Against that background, observers sympathetic to the plight of those who were part of the October 2018 caravan began sharing a meme which sought to reject an argument frequently made by those who opposed the migrants’ right to enter the United States: that the migrants’ actions were illegal. On 22 October, the General Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church, one of the largest Christian denominations in the United States, posted the following meme to Facebook: Myth: Crossing a border without proper authorization and documentation is an illegal act. Reality: The Geneva Convention, established after WWII, gives migrants fleeing violence the right to enter legally. The following day, the meme was further promoted (in a modified format) by the left-wing Facebook page “The Other 98%”: A convention in Geneva vs. “the Geneva Conventions” Article 14 (1) of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.” Built on this foundation, the two major pieces of international law which set out the rights and obligations of countries as regards refugees and asylum-seekers are the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (commonly known as the Refugee Convention) and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. Both documents can be found here. The 1951 convention took place in Geneva, Switzerland, which occasionally prompts observers to refer to it as the “Geneva Convention,” as the October 2018 meme does. However, “Geneva Conventions” should be reserved for describing a separate series of agreements signed in 1949 (and afterwards) which set out the humanitarian rules of war, placing obligations on countries around the treatment of wounded enemy combatants, prisoners of war, and so on. With that clarification in mind, let’s look at what international and U.S. law says about the legality (or otherwise) of entering the United States “without proper authorization and documentation.” ‘An illegal act’ The U.N. Refugee Agency describes the 1951 Refugee Convention as follows: The 1951 Convention protects refugees. It defines a refugee as a person who is outside his or her country of nationality or habitual residence; has a well-founded fear of being persecuted because of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion; and is unable or unwilling to avail him— or herself of the protection of that country, or to return there, for fear of persecution … People who fulfill this definition are entitled to the rights and bound by the duties contained in the 1951 Convention. Those rights include: As one of the signatories to the Refugee Convention, the United States is obliged to honor these provisions. Federal law (U.S. Code Title 8, Section 1158) sets out the following: Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters), irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section or, where applicable, section 1225(b) of this title. The key phrase there is “irrespective of such alien’s status.” This means that, whether a migrant entered or is present in the United States legally or illegally, they still have the right under international and U.S. law to apply for asylum and remain in the United States while their application is being processed. So the language in the meme is somewhat inaccurate or muddled. Firstly, it is not a “myth” that entering the U.S. “without proper authorization and documentation” is illegal. It is illegal, by definition. But when it comes to asylum, the point is that whether a refugee entered the country legally or illegally doesn’t impinge on their right to apply for asylum. Article 31 (1) of the 1951 Refugee Convention states: The Contracting States shall not impose penalties, on account of their illegal entry or presence, on refugees who, coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened in the sense of article 1, enter or are present in their territory without authorization, provided they present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence. Second, the meme claims that the Refugee Convention “gives migrants fleeing violence the right to enter legally.” This is a somewhat confused assertion. Non-citizens don’t exactly have a “right” to enter the U.S. Rather, the U.S. government and its agents and officials can give non-citizens conditional permission to enter the United States. The 1951 Refugee Convention has no bearing on whether or not a migrant or non-citizen has permission to enter the United States. What the meme appears to be claiming is that if a migrant is fleeing violence, their entry into the United States is legal by virtue of the fact that they are fleeing violence. This is inaccurate. Whether a migrant is fleeing violence or persecution does not have a bearing on the legality or illegality of their entry into the United States, although obviously such factors could potentially form the basis of a successful asylum application later on. The asylum application process The procedures involved in requesting and getting asylum in the United States can be relatively complicated and time-consuming. However, based on guidelines published by the American Immigration Council and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, the following is a rough outline of how a migrant can obtain asylum in the United States: ‘Fleeing violence’ As we have outlined, the legality of a migrant’s entry or presence in the United States is determined by whether they have the correct authorization and documentation, and not whether or not they are fleeing violence or persecution in their home country. Likewise, migrants have a right to apply for asylum in the U.S., regardless of whether they entered or remained in the country legally or illegally. However, it should be pointed out that fleeing gang violence of the kind often seen in Honduras and Guatemala, the home countries of those who joined the “migrant caravan” in October 2018, may well not form the basis of a successful asylum application. In June 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions published a major ruling which overturned a 2014 decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals, relating to domestic abuse and gang violence as grounds for asylum. In brief, Sessions ruled that asylum should be reserved for individuals who are suffering persecution or violence on the basis of their membership of a group that has a “common immutable [unchanging] characteristic”: An applicant seeking to establish persecution on account of membership in a “particular social group” must demonstrate: (1) membership in a group, which is composed of members who share a common immutable characteristic, is defined with particularity, and is socially distinct within the society in question; and (2) that membership in the group is a central reason for her persecution. When the alleged persecutor is someone unaffiliated with the government, the applicant must also show that her home government is unwilling or unable to protect her … The mere fact that a country may have problems effectively policing certain crimes or that certain populations are more likely to be victims of crime, cannot itself establish an asylum claim. To be cognizable, a particular social group must exist independently of the harm asserted in an application for asylum. The Attorney General drew a distinction between victims of group-based persecution and violence, and what he called “victims of private criminal activity.” On the question of gang violence, Sessions wrote: Victims of gang violence often come from all segments of society, and they possess no distinguishing characteristic or concrete trait that would readily identify them as members of such a group … A criminal gang may target people because they have money or property within the area where the gang operates, or simply because the gang inflicts violence on those who are nearby. That does not make the gang’s victims persons who have been targeted “on account of” their membership in any social group. The American Civil Liberties Union has challenged Sessions’ ruling in federal court, in a case that was still pending as of 25 October 2018. For the time being, however, the Refugee Convention alluded to in the United Methodist Church’s meme may not offer much protection or assistance to those Central American migrants approaching the U.S. in the October 2018 caravan, even if they are fleeing violence, and regardless of whether they enter the country legally or illegally.
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26106
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“If we stopped testing right now, we'd have very few cases, if any.”
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The swelling pandemic requires a more aggressive response than the White House has so far outlined. Halting testing wouldn’t eliminate COVID-19 cases. It would conceal them and could fuel an even greater crisis.
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false
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Health Check, Coronavirus, Donald Trump,
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"President Donald Trump sought to downplay the numbers associated with COVID-19 in the United States — which have passed 2 million confirmed cases and are nearing 120,000 lives lost — by arguing that the soaring national count was simply the result of superior testing. ""If you don't test, you don't have any cases,"" Trump said at a June 15 roundtable discussion at the White House. ""If we stopped testing right now, we'd have very few cases, if any."" It’s a talking point the administration is emphasizing. Vice President Mike Pence reiterated it during a phone call to Republican governors that evening, recommending they use the argument as a strategy to quiet public concern about surging case tallies in some states. It’s also a variation on a tweet the president sent earlier in the day. With that in mind, we wanted to dig deeper. We reached out to the White House for comment or clarification, but we never heard back. Independent researchers told us, though, that the president’s remarks are not only misleading — they’re also counterproductive in terms of thinking through what’s needed to combat the coronavirus pandemic. Essentially, the president is arguing that the United States is finding more cases of COVID-19 because we are testing more – and our increased testing makes it look like we have a worse epidemic than other countries do. ""We will show more — more cases when other countries have far more cases than we do; they just don’t talk about it,"" he added. But that isn’t true. The numbers paint a stark picture. The United States has recorded 2.1 million cases of the novel virus so far, about a quarter of the global total and more than any other country. To Trump’s point, the country is testing more now than it did at the start of the outbreak — per capita, the U.S. is in the top 20% of countries when it comes to cumulative tests run. But this beefed up testing is still likely undercounting. The problem is that the U.S. outbreak is worse than that of many other countries – so we need to be testing a higher percentage of our population than do others. A way to understand this: the number of tests necessary to identify a positive case. If it’s easier to find a positive case, that suggests the virus has spread further and more testing is necessary to track the spread of COVID-19. For instance, statistics from the United States and the United Kingdom are fairly similar in terms of how many coronavirus tests are done daily per million people. But those tests yield far more positive cases in the United States. That suggests the outbreak here requires more per-capita testing than does the U.K.’s. ""We have a much bigger epidemic, so you have to test more proportionately,"" said Jennifer Kates, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. Put another way, a larger health crisis means — even after controlling for population size — the United States will have to test more people to find out where and how the virus has spread. (KHN is an editorially independent program of the foundation.) And while the U.S. has ramped up its testing since March, many parts of the country still don’t have sufficient systems in place — from facilities to staff to medical supplies — for diagnosing COVID-19, researchers told us. And what about the president’s assertion that ""if we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases"" or none at all? On its literal phrasing, it’s absurd, experts said. ""The implication that not testing makes the problem go away is completely false. It could not be more false,"" said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean for public health practice and community engagement at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. That’s because testing doesn’t create instances of the virus — it is just a way of showing and tracking them. (The president made a similar point during the same White House roundtable event.) But even if you take it figuratively – the idea that our expanded testing resources have inflated our sense of the epidemic – it’s still misleading. ""We’re seeing a lot of cases because we’re testing? It just doesn’t ring true,"" Kates said. ""The U.S. has made a lot of progress for sure. But that job is not finished."" The president’s claim is part of a larger re-election strategy, argued Robert Blendon, a health care pollster at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The idea is to suggest that the health crisis is mostly exaggerated – and that things are getting better, and Americans should feel comfortable going back to work. ""If the economy takes off, the president has a chance of re-election,"" Blendon said. ""If it contracts as a result of expansion of cases, and the only way we know how to respond is restriction of economic activity, he’s gone."" But the problem, Blendon added, is that COVID-19 counts are still climbing in multiple states. And people are still dying of the virus. That gets at another point: Diagnostic testing isn’t the only data source to reveal the pandemic’s existence. Let’s not forget about hospitalization rates and death counts. The number of deaths continues to rise, and hospitalizations are higher than they would be in the virus’s absence. Trump argued that the nation’s high count of COVID-19 cases is simply a result of our expanded testing capacity. His point is entirely incorrect. The most relevant data suggests that the U.S. isn’t testing enough to match the severity of the pandemic. Even with our higher testing ratio, we’re probably still undercounting compared to other countries. Testing doesn’t create the virus. Even without diagnostics, COVID-19 would still pose a problem. We just would know less about it. And in fact, eliminating testing may alter the public’s perception of the pandemic, but it wouldn’t conceal it. If anything, it would likely worsen the crisis, since the public health system wouldn’t know how to accurately track and prevent the spread of the virus. The claim has no merit and seriously misrepresents the severity of the public health crisis."
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