Corporate Ties:
Doctors Under the Influence?
Arlene Weintraub
(Business Week, July 7, 2008)
"In April, four experts on smoking cessation published a paper espousing an unconventional plan for helping hard-core nicotine addicts quit. They proposed treating smokers as if they have a chronic disease akin to diabetes. Such patients should take prescription drugs for years to curb tobacco cravings, the researchers advised. The article, published in the prestigious Annals of Internal Medicine, might have slipped quietly into the vast body of antismoking literature were it not for its two closing paragraphs. There, authors Dr. Michael B. Steinberg and Dr. Jonathan Foulds disclosed that they are paid by manufacturers of smoking-cessation products for speaking and consulting. Among those companies is Pfizer (PFE), whose controversial drug Chantix the researchers mentioned favorably, along with other treatments. Use of Chantix has led to reports of suicidal thoughts and other psychiatric symptoms. To some, the Annals paper smelled suspiciously like disease-mongering to boost pharmaceutical sales…The Annals paper appeared around the same time that Pfizer, at the urging of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, was strengthening warnings on Chantix's label. This timing has fueled concern that company-paid experts are trying to protect a drug with U.S. sales of more than $680 million in 2007. The researchers deny that. They say they follow only their independent judgment when recommending Chantix, a pill, and other drugs. They emphasize that they don't necessarily urge lifetime use of any medicine. But they don't routinely reveal their Pfizer pay to hundreds of patients they've steered to Chantix. That has thrust Steinberg and Foulds into the middle of a raging debate about proselytizing by medical researchers and how corporate relationships should be disclosed to patients."
Related video from CBS Evening News:
Are Perks Compromising MD Ethics?
(June 26, 2008)
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Stephanie Saul
(The New York Times, July 1, 2008)
"The Congressional Black Caucus is calling for changes to a House tobacco-regulation bill, demanding that the legislation place restrictions on menthol cigarettes, the type heavily favored by African-American smokers. The 43-member caucus is taking aim at a provision in the bill that would ban candy-, fruit- and spice-flavored cigarettes but that specifically exempts menthol. In recent weeks the exemption has become the focus of controversy because menthol brands are heavily used by black smokers, who develop a large share of smoking-related cancers and other health risks."
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Kate Connolly
(The Guardian, London, July 1, 2008)
"Dutch coffee shops, long considered as synonymous with the Netherlands as tulips or attacking football, face a new challenge from today when a ban on smoking tobacco in restaurants and cafes comes into effect. The owners claim the law, which will allow customers to light up potent tobacco-free pure cannabis joints but ban milder spliffs in which tobacco is mixed with cannabis, threatens to put hundreds of them out of business."
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Penny Wark
(The Times, London, June 30, 2008)
"A year ago, if you'd asked Professor Robert West to predict the effect that the smoking ban in England would have on smokers he would have reckoned on no change. Yet tomorrow, on the first anniversary of the legislation that banned smoking in public places, he will announce that an estimated 40,000 people have given up since it came into force. This represents a dramatic increase in the rate at which regular smokers are quitting. Smoking rates have gone down by five percentage points over nine months, an average increase of 0.6 per cent each month, compared with 0.2 per cent before the ban. This means that three times as many smokers are now quitting than in the nine months before the ban."
Rob Stein
(The Washington Post, June 29, 2008)
"The campaign to reduce teenagers' smoking has stalled, new federal data show, dismaying federal health officials and anti-smoking advocates who said that one of the nation's most important public health priorities is faltering. Smoking by teenagers fell sharply and steadily between 1997 and 2003, but the latest data from a large federal survey tracking smoking and other risky behaviors among young people found the proportion of teens who smoke leveled off between 2003 and 2007."
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(BBC News Online, June 28, 2008)
"A British tobacco giant is breaking its own marketing code covering the sale of cigarettes to young people in Africa. An investigation for the BBC has found evidence in Nigeria, Malawi and Mauritius of rules being broken. In particular, BBC Two's This World found single cigarettes -- which campaigners say are attractive to young people -- were being promoted and sold…During the investigation carried out for BBC Two's This World programme, British businessman Duncan Bannatyne also discovers tactics used by BAT which circumvent bans on advertising and raise the profile of cigarettes in countries where doctors are warning of a potential epidemic of smoking-related diseases."
See also:
Illinois: Smoke Ban Often Defied Downstate
(Chicago Tribune, June 30, 2008)
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Claudia Wallis
(Time, July 14, 2008)
"The disorder [fragile X syndrome], as its name implies, is the result of a defective gene on the X chromosome, one of the pair of chromosomes that determines gender. FXS affects roughly 1 in 2,500 boys, causing autism spectrum disorders in about half of them. That makes FXS the most common known cause of autism, responsible for roughly 5% of all cases. It is also the most common inherited cause of mental retardation. Though the FXS defect occurs just as frequently in girls, they tend to be less severely affected. Fragile X has been known for decades, but an explosion of new research, prodded along by advocacy groups like the National Fragile X Foundation and FRAXA, is yielding insights that have implications for understanding and treating autism--and perhaps a number of other conditions too."
Shankar Vedantam
(The Washington Post, July 1, 2008)
"Rachel has autism, and there are tens of thousands of children like her…'It is an ever- increasing snowball of horror -- one disappointment after another,' Rachel's father, Peter Hotez, says about the challenge of dealing with an autistic child…Hotez's feelings as a parent of an autistic child might seem unremarkable, except that he also happens to be one of the country's more prominent vaccine researchers…The notion that a vaccine expert would deliberately cover up the cause of a growing public health problem cuts Peter Hotez to the quick. That narrative suggests that someone like him -- with firsthand knowledge of the devastation autism can cause a family -- would stand by idly as medical science knowingly allowed thousands of Rachels to be put through the suffering that she and her family have endured."
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Gardiner Harris
(The New York Times, June 28, 2008)
"Federal health officials on Sunday will call together some of the world’s leading experts on an obscure disease to discuss the controversial case of a 9-year-old girl from Athens, Ga., who became autistic after receiving numerous vaccinations. But the government has so far kept quiet a second case that some say is more disturbing and more relevant to the meeting."
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(Reuters, July 2, 2008)
"President George W. Bush urged Congress on Wednesday to approve funds to fight AIDS in Africa and other countries, and said the issue was high on his agenda for a Group of Eight summit in Japan next week. Members of the U.S. Senate sought last week to pass legislation to more than triple funds to fight AIDS, but some Republicans vowed to block it because of its cost."
Josephine Marcotty
(Star Tribune, Minneapolis, June 30, 2008)
"At first glance, Sexpulse looks like a sexually explicit gaming website, with provocative pictures of nude men, cartoons and cheeky icons. But it's not a game. Far from it. The website, in development at the University of Minnesota, is the newest strategy to slow a second wave of the HIV/AIDS epidemic rising among young gay and bisexual men…Experts debate whether the Internet is driving risky sexual behavior, but one thing is clear, they say: To stop the epidemic, they have to go to where those connections are being made -- which is less and less often in gay bars and neighborhoods, and increasingly online."
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Eun Lee
(The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 29, 2008)
"Dr. Veronika Steenpass recalls the time two years ago when an 81-year-old woman arrived at Grady Hospital complaining of unexplained weight loss. The woman had lost 20 pounds in six months. A thorough round of lab tests was ordered. When the results of the tests came back, Dr. Steenpass had to tell a woman old enough to be her grandmother that she was HIV-positive. In the last 10 years, the number of newly diagnosed HIV/AIDS cases in Georgia in people over 50 has nearly doubled, according to data from the state Department of Human Resources (DHR) Division of Public Health. In 1998, there were 189 new cases of HIV/AIDS in that age group and by 2007, the number was 341, which was 15 percent of all newly diagnosed HIV/AIDS cases in Georgia."
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Amelia Hill
(The Observer, London, June 29, 2008)
"Britain's most eminent psychiatrist has launched a powerful attack on the state of Britain's acute psychiatric care system, saying many inpatient units are unsafe, overcrowded and uninhabitable, adding: 'I would not use them, and neither would I let any of my relatives do so.' Professor Dinesh Bhugra, new president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, will use his inauguration on Wednesday to deliver a damning verdict on the system. He will reveal the findings of a major report into problems faced by the service and launch a three-year manifesto to achieve a better deal for patients."
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Related story:
U.K.: The Mental Health Units that Shame the NHS
(The Observer, London, June 29, 2008)
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(Associated Press, July 2, 2008)
"Danish health officials fear more than 4,000 people may be infected with salmonella and are checking everything from refrigerators to credit card receipts to find the source of what may be the worst outbreak in 15 years. Kare Moelbak of the Ministry of Health said 330 cases have been confirmed and about a quarter of those people have been hospitalized. No deaths have been reported. He said officials at the government's center for prevention and control of infectious diseases say the real number probably exceeds 4,000 people."
Jonathan D. Rockoff
(Baltimore Sun, July 1, 2008)
"A growing number of health officials fear that investigators made a terrible mistake in blaming tomatoes for the sickening of more than 800 Americans, and they increasingly suspect jalapeno peppers, cilantro or some other food commonly found in Mexican restaurants, health officials involved in the investigation say. The salmonella outbreak should be petering out if contaminated tomatoes were the cause, because tomatoes have a limited shelf life and many consumers have been avoiding them. Yet, the number of reported cases has continued to grow, and investigators have failed to identify the source."
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Stephen Smith
(The Boston Globe, July 3, 2008)
"Boston researchers have developed a test that can identify minute amounts of tumor cells floating in the blood of cancer patients, a discovery that could lead to better treatments with fewer side effects. The technology, invented at Massachusetts General Hospital, uses a microchip scanner no bigger than a business card to analyze a patient's blood, hunting for stray cells shed by tumors. The device is so powerful that it can detect a single cancer cell among 1 billion healthy blood cells."
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Shari Roan
(Los Angeles Times, June 30, 2008)
"Californians who use hands-free cellular devices while driving may be doing themselves a favor in the long run. That's because scientists still can't say with certainty that placing a cellphone against the head is completely safe, especially for heavy users and people who began using the devices as children. They point to lingering questions over the potential health effects from the energy emitted by the phones, specifically the long-debated risk of developing brain cancer."
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(Reuters, June 29, 2008)
"A drug developed using nanotechnology and a fungus that contaminated a lab experiment may be broadly effective against a range of cancers, U.S. researchers reported on Sunday. The drug, called lodamin, was improved in one of the last experiments overseen by Dr. Judah Folkman, a cancer researcher who died in January. Folkman pioneered the idea of angiogenesis therapy -- starving tumors by preventing them from growing blood supplies. Lodamin is an angiogenesis inhibitor that Folkman's team has been working to perfect for 20 years. Writing in the journal Nature Biotechnology, his colleagues say they developed a formulation that works as a pill, without side-effects."
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(The Times of India, June 30, 2008)
"Indians lead fulfilling sex lives but get their first formal sex education at a little over 15 years of age as compared to the West where lessons on the birds and the bees start from 12, says a new global study. Though Indians know how to protect themselves from sexually transmitted infections and HIV/AIDS, awareness on how to avoid pregnancy is very low."
Lisa Anderson
(Chicago Tribune, June 29, 2008)
"Pregnancies -- whether they end in birth, miscarriage or abortion -- among women age 15 to 19 dropped to 72.2 per 1,000 women in 2004, down from a peak of 117 per 1,000 women in 1990…The not-so-good news: The pregnancies at Gloucester High School on the Massachusetts coast spotlight a potentially bigger problem. Despite decades of improvement and for reasons yet unknown, there is statistical evidence that the drop in pregnancy rates, the age of first sexual activity and contraceptive use among teens stalled after 2001. The exception may be in the teen birthrate. After a 14-year decline, the birthrate, meaning the number of live births, among women age 15 to 19 rose 3 percent in 2006 to 41.9 per 1,000 women from 40.5 per 1,000 women in 2005, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."
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(BBC News Online, June 29, 2008)
"Sexually transmitted infections have doubled in under a decade in people over 45 and are now rising faster than in the young, research suggests. The Health Protection Agency (HPA) study said internet dating and erectile dysfunction drugs were partly to blame. Men were most likely to be affected, with increases in herpes, syphilis, gonorrhoea and genital warts. The study, published in Sexually Transmitted Infections, looked at those attending sexual health clinics."
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Editorial
(The Boston Globe, July 2, 2008)
"Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts announced an agreement recently to give members access to their records via the new Google Health service. This venture is part of a movement to put consumers in charge of their medical records as the healthcare system edges into the Internet era. It’s unclear, however, whether patients want this control. What’s more important is getting doctors and hospitals connected into a single system. Blue Cross is doing its part by financing an experiment in three Massachusetts communities."
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Josh Goldstein
(The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 1, 2008)
"Bar codes, those omnipresent catalogers of everything from cereal to CDs, were long touted as the perfect solution to medication mistakes in hospitals. But bar codes make new problems and aren't the panacea that safety advocates expected, a research team lead by Ross Koppel of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine has concluded…Bar coding has not yet been proven to reduce medication errors, and often the shortcuts that caregivers develop undermine its effectiveness, the researchers found."
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Deborah L. Shelton
(The Chicago Tribune, July 1, 2008)
"During a brainstorming session on ways to implement health interventions for residents of Chicago's Austin neighborhood, someone tossed out an idea that struck a chord. How about inviting small groups of neighborhood residents to meetings in intimate settings similar to the homey way families swap stories around a kitchen table? From that simple concept, Kitchen Table Interventions was born. Launched in January as a pilot project by Northwestern University in partnership with Westside Health Authority, Kitchen Table Interventions was designed to study urban health problems and help residents of the underserved West Side community live healthier lives. Taking a novel approach, project staff trained everyday people to conduct research and teach other residents healthy behaviors."
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Jordan Rau
(Los Angeles Times, June 30, 2008)
"Last October, a technician at the children's hospital at Stanford University improperly connected a ventilator hose, accidentally pumping too little oxygen into a 9-day-old infant's lungs. A month later, technicians at Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz unintentionally placed a CT scan of one patient into the electronic file of another, leading physicians to remove the wrong person’s appendix…Those incidents were among 1,002 cases of serious medical harm disclosed by California hospitals between July 2007 and May of this year. The disclosures are the first under a state law that requires hospitals to inform health regulators of all substantial injuries to their patients…California patients are being injured at a rate of about 100 a month, according to data compiled by the state Department of Public Health."
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(Associated Press, July 2, 2008)
"Drugs designed to control type 2 diabetes should be subjected to more thorough safety reviews to ensure they don't raise the risk of heart problems, U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisers said Wednesday. The panel of outside experts voted 14-to-2, at the end of a two-day meeting, to recommend that all makers of these drugs conduct long-term cardiovascular trials, even if the drugs show no signs of heart problems in initial trials."
(The Sydney Morning Herald, July 1, 2008)
"Two new cases of childhood Type 1 diabetes are diagnosed in Australia daily as researchers battle to unlock links between environmental factors and the disease. Between 2000 and 2006, more than 6,000 new cases of Type 1 diabetes were diagnosed in children aged up to 14, according to an Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) report. The rate of Type 1 diabetes in children is climbing at a rate of three per cent a year."
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Andrew Pollack
(The New York Times, July 1, 2008)
"A drug under development by Myriad Genetics to treat Alzheimer’s disease failed in a closely watched late-stage clinical trial, dealing another blow to efforts to combat the illness…The failure is significant because Flurizan was one of the first drugs to reach late-stage testing that was seen as working by trying to prevent the buildup of toxic amyloid plaques in the brain. Such plaques are the focus of the leading theory for the cause of Alzheimer’s disease. The drug’s failure might cast some new doubt on that theory as well as on other experimental drugs to block amyloid plaques."
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Carly Weeks
(The Globe and Mail, Toronto, July 1, 2008)
"Contrary to commonly held views, giving newborns sucrose does not significantly reduce the pain they suffer while undergoing routine procedures shortly after birth, according to a new Canadian study that may throw the common practice into question…The study's findings, published today in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, could have significant consequences for the way health professionals approach infant pain management."
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Melissa Healy
(Los Angeles Times, June 30, 2008)
"California motorists…will be prohibited from talking on hand-held cellular phones while driving [starting July 1, 2008]. Most, however, will likely continue their wireless business using headsets, speakers or other hands-free devices. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says the new law will reduce accidents…That, however, is not what the research finds. Scientists say that when mixing cellphones and driving, the number of hands available for the tasks is not the limiting factor. Instead, it's a driver's attention and processing capacity. These are often stretched beyond safe limits when someone juggles the complex tasks of negotiating traffic and conversing with another remotely."
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(The Economist, June 28, 2008)
"Personalised medicine offers a huge promise. It would, in theory, be possible to identify what diseases someone risks getting as they age, predict how those diseases will progress and show how they will respond to therapy -- all before any symptoms are present…Metabolomics studies metabolites, the by-products of the hundreds of thousands of chemical reactions that continuously go on in every cell of the human body…If, say, a tumour was growing somewhere then, long before any existing methods can detect it, the combination of metabolites from the dividing cancer cells will produce a new pattern, different from that seen in healthy tissue. Such metabolic changes could be picked up by computer programs…How far away is this vision? It is beginning."
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(BBC News Online, June 30, 2008)
"The World Health Organization is working with partners to make a rapid test -- which gives results in two days -- more widely available. Currently, standard tests take up to three months to produce a result. There are also plans to boost the supply of drugs to treat MDR-TB in 54 countries -- and cut their cost."
(Mail & Guardian, South Africa, July 1, 2008)
"Both the Nigerian branch of the private United States-based company Xechem International and its Nigerian state-owned partner, the Sheda Science and Technology Complex (Shestco) are under investigation over alleged fraud involving 400-million Nigerian naira ($3,5-million) of public funds…The Nigerian government funded Shestco to help Xechem Nigeria produce and commercialise Nicosan, a drug based on a local herbal medication that combats the painful symptoms of sickle-cell anaemia, the inherited red-blood-cell disease common in West Africa…According to the International Biomedical Research Institute (Ibri) in Abuja, about 70% of sickle-cell anaemia patients reside in Africa -- estimated at more than 12-million people. About 80% of rural babies with the genetic illness die by five years of age in Africa."
(The Economist, June 28, 2008)
"Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe's opposition leader, has called for the United Nations to help manage a transition of power in his ravaged country. Others, including Jacob Zuma, leader of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress, have begun calling on the 'international community' to intervene. At the same time, the International Criminal Court (ICC) is being urged to investigate Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, for crimes against humanity. What is the legal basis for such moves, and how likely are they to take place?"
(The Washington Post, June 30, 2008)
"North Korea has agreed to a major expansion of international food aid inside the closed totalitarian country, while promising to give United Nations monitors more access than ever before to find out who is eating the free food, a senior U.N. official said Monday. The U.N. World Food Program announced it has signed an agreement with North Korea that would increase the international feeding operation there to more than 5 million people from the 1.2 million people now being fed."
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(The Bangkok Post, June 29, 2008)
"Lack of awareness of early screening is putting Thais at greater risk of infection from the hepatitis B virus which could lead to liver cancer, say medical experts. An estimated three million Thais are thought to be carrying the virus today. However only 15% are undergoing proper treatment, Teerha Piratvisuth, deputy director of the Prince of Songkla Hospital's Gastrointestinal and Liver Institute, said."
(The Economist, June 28, 2008)
"The latest bout of bird flu was first detected in four wet markets in Hong Kong on June 11th. Since then there has been no panic. But fear has advanced in baby steps. The government at once ordered a cull of 3,500 birds being held for sale, and banned imports of live chickens from China for 21 days…The source of the original infection remains a mystery. So the government decided to preclude future problems with its drastic decision to end the live-chicken trade. The traders, many from families that have used the same stalls for generations, have rejected the offer of compensation for their licences as mean and misguided."
(The New York Times, July 3, 2008)
"When Roger Kusch helped Bettina Schardt kill herself at home on Saturday, the grim, carefully choreographed ritual was like that in many cases of assisted suicide, with one exception. Ms. Schardt, 79, a retired X-ray technician from the Bavarian city of Würzburg, was neither sick nor dying. She simply did not want to move into a nursing home... Ms. Schardt’s suicide -- and Mr. Kusch’s energetic publicizing of it -- have set off a national furor over the limits on the right to die, in a country that has struggled with this issue more than most because of the Nazi’s euthanizing of at least 100,000 mentally disabled and incurably ill people."
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(The Independent, London, July 3, 2008)
"Up to 18,000 females, including girls as young as 14, are working in brothels across Britain after being smuggled into the country to meet the booming demand for prostitutes. Police, unveiling the results of the largest ever crackdown on people smuggling yesterday, revealed that nearly five times more women than previously thought are working under duress in massage parlours and suburban homes."
(The New York Times, July 3, 2008)
"People living within the European Union will be able to receive most health care treatment anywhere in the 27-nation bloc without getting prior authorization if a long-awaited proposal published on Wednesday becomes law."
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(The St. Petersburg Times, Russia, July 1, 2008)
"Acetone, mercury, chloroform and high concentrations of copper, iron, aluminum, and lead abound in the waters of the River Neva and other local waterways, according to a new study released by the local branch of the international environmental pressure group Greenpeace. The levels of aluminium exceeded the norm by a staggering 775 times, and levels of iron by 320 times. Oil levels in the city waterways were 164 times above the norm, the research discovered."
(The Guardian, London, June 30, 2008)
"A draft NHS constitution giving patients a new legal right to select a GP practice and choose between different types of treatment was unveiled by the government today after a year-long review of the health service in England by the surgeon-minister Lord Darzi. He said the NHS will expand the family doctor service to give patients a genuine choice between GP practices, providing more information about the range and quality of care on offer. The constitution will guarantee patients' rights to choose a hospital and stipulate the type of treatment they want…But patients will not be allowed to choose between individual surgeons in an NHS team. And their rights will be balanced by responsibilities."
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(The Observer, London, June 29, 2008)
"Millions of pounds' worth of lifesaving new drugs will be fast-tracked to NHS patients under a ground-breaking overhaul of the NHS to be unveiled this week. Primary care trusts will be pushed to provide new treatments even if they have not yet been assessed by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) -- the independent body that rules on whether new treatments should be available on the NHS -- as long as there is clear benefit to patients. Clearer principles for making such decisions will be established, ensuring that drugs cannot be denied on cost grounds alone."
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(The Jerusalem Post, June 30, 2008)
"A private member's bill to automatically update the basket of health services by two percent a year -- described by the Israel Cancer Association (ICA) as 'the most humanitarian in the state's history' -- passed on its first reading in the Knesset plenum on Monday…The health basket includes all the medications and treatments that the health funds are required to provide their members, in exchange for health taxes, partially with Treasury subsidies"
(The Washington Post, July 3, 2008)
"High levels of formaldehyde found in trailers provided to Hurricane Katrina evacuees on the Gulf Coast probably resulted from cheap wood and poor ventilation in designs used by manufacturers under permissive government standards, federal scientists reported yesterday…The new findings appear to confirm the role that manufacturers' practices and weak federal regulation played in the public health disaster after the August 2005 storm. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has called trailermakers to testify Wednesday."
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(The New York Times, July 1, 2008)
"People are often advised to try to keep up their levels of so-called good cholesterol to reduce their risk of heart disease. But high levels may also help prevent a decline in memory, a new study says."
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(The Washington Post, June 30, 2008)
"The Defense Department, the nation's biggest polluter, is resisting orders from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up Fort Meade and two other military bases where the EPA says dumped chemicals pose 'imminent and substantial' dangers to public health and the environment…The actions are part of a standoff between the Pentagon and environmental regulators that has been building during the Bush administration, leaving the EPA in a legal limbo as it addresses growing concerns about contaminants on military bases that are seeping into drinking water aquifers and soil."
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(The Boston Globe, June 30, 2008)
"There are so many needles -- and so many more patients expected to need them -- that Massachusetts health authorities are moving to end the practice of patients depositing them with the rest of their waste. Kiosks that look like black mailboxes have begun popping up at pharmacies and in city halls so that needles can be dropped off, disinfected, and destroyed. Plans are being hatched to let the elderly and infirm mail their carefully packaged needles directly to a medical waste company, sparing patients a trip to disposal sites. And, in the most sweeping measure of all, it will be illegal starting in July 2010 for patients to place their needles with their regular household waste, making Massachusetts just one of a handful of states to embrace such an aggressive policy."
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(The Boston Globe, June 30, 2008)
"Boston police largely missed brewing gang conflicts and paid scant attention to the steady increase in gang killings between 2000 and 2006, failures that damaged law enforcement's ability to deal with the violence that erupted earlier this decade and contributed to the crumbling of the so-called Boston Miracle, according to a recent study by researchers at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government."
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(The Economist, June 28, 2008)
"After 217 years, the Supreme Court appears finally to have settled one of the most hotly disputed questions in American constitutional law: who has the right to pack heat?...On June 26th, five of the nine justices ruled that the right to bear arms is an individual right. In DC v Heller, they struck down a near-total ban on handgun ownership in Washington, DC. But they allowed for some restrictions on gun ownership. States or cities may still continue to prohibit the carrying of concealed weapons, and 'dangerous and unusual weapon' may still be barred."
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