Prometheus 6

Low levels of vitamin D linked to higher rates of asthma in African American Kids

Washington, DC — Researchers at Children’s National Medical Center have discovered that African American children with asthma in metropolitan Washington, DC, are significantly more likely to have low levels of vitamin D than healthy African American children. This study supports recent research that suggests vitamin D plays a greater role in the body than just keeping bones healthy. Vitamin D deficiency has been recently linked to a variety of non-bone related diseases including depression, autoimmune disorders, and now asthma.

“It’s been well-documented that as a group, African Americans are more likely than other racial groups to have low levels of vitamin D,” said Robert Freishtat, MD, MPH, an emergency medicine physician and lead author on the study. “But we were shocked to see that almost all of the African American children with asthma that we tested had low vitamin D levels. After adjusting for differences in age, weight, and the time of year of the testing, the odds of these kids with asthma being vitamin D deficient were nearly twenty times those of healthy kids.”

The study took a one-time measurement of vitamin D in the blood of 85 African American children with asthma, who were between 6 and 20 years old. Additionally, the researchers measured the vitamin D levels of 21 healthy African American children between the ages of 6 and 9 years of age. The research team found that 86 percent of the children in the study with asthma had insufficient levels of vitamin D, while only 19 percent of non-asthmatics had these low levels.

These findings may mean that low vitamin D levels have more serious effects on a child’s lung health than previously believed. Though more research is needed to establish definitively how vitamin D deficiency can contribute to asthma, parents can ensure that their children receive healthier amounts of vitamin D by following the current USDA guidelines for milk consumption and seeking a doctor’s advice about multivitamins.

“The District of Columbia has among the highest rates of pediatric asthma in the United States, and we’re working to find out why,” says Stephen Teach, MD, MPH, senior author of the study. “For African American kids with asthma, vitamin D testing and ensuring adequate vitamin D intake may need to become necessary steps in their primary care.”

High blood sugar levels themselves increase heart disease risk, but it was discovered two years ago that rigorously controlling blood sugar did not prevent heart disease or deaths in people with Type 2 diabetes. Researchers said that failure was probably because most of these patients also have other problems that make their odds of heart disease soar, such as high levels of LDL cholesterol, low levels of HDL high blood pressure. And most are older and overweight. cholesterol, high levels of triglycerides and

Type 2 diabetes “captures all these risk factors in one patient,” said Dr. David Nathan, director of the diabetes center at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Diabetes Heart Treatments May Cause Harm
By GINA KOLATA

Three aggressive treatment strategies that doctors had expected would prevent heart attacks among people with Type 2 diabetes and some who are the verge of developing it have proven to be ineffective or even harmful, new studies show.

The results are surprising and disappointing, heart and diabetes experts say. An estimated 21 million Americans have Type 2 diabetes, the kind once known as adult-onset, and they are at enormous risk for heart disease. The only measures proven to reduce their chances — avoiding cigarettes and taking medication to lower bad cholesterol and blood pressure — still leave diabetics with a heart attack risk equivalent to that of a nondiabetic who already had a heart attack.

So doctors began trying other strategies they hoped would help: get blood pressure to a normal range; raise levels of good cholesterol and lower levels of dangerous triglycerides; or modulate sharp upswings in blood sugar after a meal.

It is not known how many doctors have been encouraging patients to take these extra measures, but medical specialists say it seemed reasonable and tempting to do so.

“Doctors always want to improve the lives of their patients and that often leads to pressure to treat more and more,” said Dr. Henry N. Ginsberg, director of the Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research at Columbia University. The new studies, he says, can save a lot of people from taking drugs that will not help them.

Let's Help Rush Limbaugh Pack His Bags
By Brian Dockstader
March 9, 2010 - 11:46am ET

Did you hear the big news? Yesterday on his show, Rush Limbaugh vowed that he would leave the country if health care reform passes!

LIMBAUGH: I’ll just tell you this, if this passes and it’s five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented — I am leaving the country. I’ll go to Costa Rica.

As if we needed any more reason to want health care reform passed as soon as humanly possible!

And sure, why wouldn't Rush Limbaugh want to move to Costa Rica? They have a higher life expectancy than we do, and they don't spend nearly as much on health care as we do. Of course that might be because they already have a public health care system:

I suppose there are political considerations that make Obama keep extending offer after offer. In fact, I realized the other day this is a pretty standard tactic by Black politicians: yield first and let your opponents' objections prove them unreasoning. It's a variant of being hosed down and gettingthe shit beat out of you, of Artur Davis' “If Obama is president, it will no longer be tenable to go to the white community and say you’ve been victimized. And I understand the poverty and the condition of black America and the 39 percent unemployment rate in some communities. I understand that. But if you go out to the country and say you’ve been victimized by the white community, while Barack Obama and Michelle and their kids are living in the White House, you will be shut off from having any influence,” of David Paterson's confession of tapping external ass as soon as he hit the Governor's office (which is to say it don't always work).

But goddamn, man!

Obama Offers to Use Some G.O.P. Health Proposals
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — President Obama offered Tuesday to address some of the concerns expressed by Republicans in the health care debate as the two parties maneuvered for advantage heading into the legislative end game.

In a letter to Congressional leaders of both parties, Mr. Obama said he was open to four specific ideas raised by Republicans at the daylong health care forum last week, including encouraging the use of tax-advantaged medical savings accounts and increasing payments to doctors who treat Medicaid patients.

By signaling that he is open to the opposition’s ideas, Mr. Obama struck a bipartisan tone even as the White House prepared the ground for Democratic efforts to pass comprehensive legislation on a party-line vote. Mr. Obama is scheduled to speak about his strategy for passing the bill in remarks at the White House on Wednesday.

Democrats are planning to use a parliamentary device known as reconciliation that would allow them to complete the process with a simple majority vote in the Senate rather than subjecting the bill to the 60-vote requirement to overcome a filibuster. Republicans have denounced the use of the device on the health bill as short-cutting the regular process.

In response, the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, warned that Republicans would use the health issue to bludgeon Democrats in this year’s midterm elections. If the Democrats “jam” an expansive bill through Congress, Mr. McConnell said, “it will be the issue in every single race in America this fall.”

Yesterday I linked UAB Study Shows African-Americans Have Highest Stroke Rate, Southerners More Likely to Die. ptcruiser sent it to...well, read it  yourself.

I sent a link to this article to one of my oldest friends, Larry Adelman. Larry has been at California Newsreel since we were in college and is the executive producer of, among other films, Unnatural Causes, which is a documentary examining the causes and consequences of health disparities in the United States. Here is Larry's response to the article:

So here we have yet another paper revealing yet again what hundreds of scientific studies have long demonstrated and what most African Americans, even if not a scientist, intuitively know:  on average African Americans have worse health outcomes.  But isn’t the issue not unequal outcomes but rather the inequities that drive those outcomes?

While progressives my see unequal outcomes as ipso facto evidence of injustice, for most Americans (and not just white Americans), unequal outcomes in health or elsewhere only reaffirm the way the world works:   hierarchy is everywhere and it’s ‘natural.’  Some people are smart, others stupid; some work hard while others are lazy; some eat right and exercise;  some are just lucky.   Inequality may be unfortunate, they say, but not necessarily unjust.  Studies that document unequal outcomes without exploring the “upstream” inequities that generate and drive those outcomes inadvertently re-affirm those assumptions.

The risk factors for stroke are complex, dynamic, mutually constitutive, and cumulative over time. But in essence they stem from the same inequities that drive many other class and racial health inequalities:  differences in exposures to lifelong stressors and lack of access to resources to cope with and manage the stressors that threaten to upset our lives (job insecurity, foreclosure or even worry about children’s schools and safety, etc.) and trigger corticosteroids that if chronic can prematurely “weather” the body.  This life-long wear and tear on our “engines” increases the risk for all the chronic diseases, including stroke.

The result is a wealth-health gradient throughout the class pyramid. While the poor die on average seven years earlier than the rich, even the middle class, on average, die more than two years sooner than the rich.  Poor smokers die earlier than rich smokers.

Racism (structural, interpersonal and internal), operating both upstream and independently of class, adds an additional health burden on African Americans.  Biology does not drive the racial differences;  the lived experience of race, or more precisely, racism, drives the biological differences.

By now, the studies on racial health inequities legion (see especially David Williams and Camara Jones and others available in the Health Equity Database on the Unnatural Causes companion web site: www.unnaturalcauses.org).

The answers, of course, lie ultimately not in the medical nor even behavioral arenas but in political change. But in a nation that seems to accept without a blink the great bankers’ robbery, continuing 10% unemployment, refuses even to provide health insurance for all, is it but wishful thinking to expect we’ll take on the racialized structures that disproportionately channel these added health burdens to black people?

But I do wish, and don’t think it unrealistic to expect, that at the very least the researchers writing these studies, and their press office acolytes publicizing them, would jettison the word “Caucasian” from their vocabularies.

Use of such a dated term only reinscribes old ideas of innate, biological racial difference by making racial categories appear fixed and scientific and inborn rather than fluid and socially constructed.  The late Stephan Jay Gould tells the fascinating story of how 230 years ago Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the German founder of anthropology, decided to name white people after a mountain range in Georgia in arguably Gould’s greatest book, The Mismeasure of Man (here’s an article on Blumenbach that Gould adopted for Discover magazine:  http://www.learntoquestion.com/resources/database/archives/003318.html )  Is it not too much to ask that at least those who advocate for racial justice give the term Caucasian back to the those who live in the Caucuses?

Larry Adelman
CALIFORNIA NEWSREEL
500 Third Street, #505
San Francisco, CA 94107
415-284-7800
LA@newsreel.org
www.newsreel.org
www.unnaturalcauses.org

I agree that this particular Congress doesn't do comprehensive well. It doesn't do anything well, but that's because Republicans reject anything that proceeds from a Democratic mouth or pen. Even when it's their own idea a Democrat is agreeing with. With the current cloture process, Republicans have the means to totally derail government activity at the same time they have motive to do so.

But for a person who lives in Tennessee to claim the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 wasn't, or isn't, subject to attempts to reverse it would be unbelievable but for the facts that he said it really loud, he said it on the air, on the video and that prevarication is the norm for Confederate race politics.

Really. Every Confederate response, governmental, institutional and personal, has followed the same pattern: agree to the law while there are watchers about and ignore the law when they leave. Confederates have historical reason to believe they can say or do anything and non-Confederates will do no more than wave the bloody shirt.

Do you KNOW how much I wanted to title this "Racism Causes Strokes"?

The study also shows a stroke rate greater than 12 percent higher in eight Southeast states known as the Stroke Belt - Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina and Tennessee - with the highest stroke rate in the coastal states of Georgia, North and South Carolina.

UAB Study Shows African-Americans Have Highest Stroke Rate, Southerners More Likely to Die
February 26, 2010

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - African-Americans age 65 and younger are more than twice as likely to have a stroke compared with Caucasians in any region, and people who have a stroke are more likely to die in the South than elsewhere, according to researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) School of Public Health.

The findings are from UAB's Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study, one of the largest ongoing health studies that includes more than 30,200 U.S. participants.

This new report is among the first to show major regional and racial disparities in stroke rates. It also underscores the need for targeted stroke-prevention and care strategies in those at greatest risk, said Virginia Howard, Ph.D., a UAB associate professor of epidemiology and a REGARDS co-principal investigator.

The study was presented Feb. 26 at the International Stroke Conference in San Antonio.

"This is the first study to take national data and really lay it out on the table," Howard said. "We found in the 45-54 age group that blacks have a 2.5-fold greater stroke rate compared to whites, which is startling."

The Commonwealth Fund estimates that the nation would be spending hundreds of billions of dollars less than it does today if any of the health care legislation proposed by previous administrations had been enacted, assuming that they reduced costs by about 1.5 percentage points. If President Nixon’s plan had passed, the United States might be spending a trillion dollars a year less than it does now, and President Clinton’s plan would have reduced spending by some $500 billion a year.

“It makes a huge difference over a long period of time,” said Ms. Davis of the Commonwealth Fund.

The Cost of Doing Nothing on Health Care
By REED ABELSON

“Hands off my health care,” goes one strain of populist sentiment.

But what if?

Suppose Congress and President Obama fail to overhaul the system now, or just tinker around the edges, or start over, as the Republicans propose — despite the Democrats’ latest and possibly last big push that began last week at a marathon televised forum in Washington.

Then “my health care” stays the same, right?

Far from it, health policy analysts and economists of nearly every ideological persuasion agree. The unrelenting rise in medical costs is likely to wreak havoc within the system and beyond it, and pretty much everyone will be affected, directly or indirectly.

“People think if we do nothing, we will have what we have now,” said Karen Davis, the president of the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit health care research group in New York. “In fact, what we will have is a substantial deterioration in what we have.”

Nearly every mainstream analysis calls for medical costs to continue to climb over the next decade, outpacing the growth in the overall economy and certainly increasing faster than the average paycheck. Those higher costs will translate into higher premiums, which will mean fewer individuals and businesses will be able to afford insurance coverage. More of everyone’s dollar will go to health care, and government programs like Medicare and Medicaid will struggle to find the money to operate.

Policy makers, in the end, may be forced to address the issue.

...is that when you're getting slapped around in public, it doesn't matter if the slapper is sitting at a table or standing behind a podium

What the health-care summit taught us

The Republicans simply don’t want to pass comprehensive health-care reform. That is the main lesson of today’s health-care summit. It started, as Steve Stromberg pointed out earlier, with the Republicans wanting to talk more about process than about the content of the various health-care bills. It approached an end with House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) delivering the core Republican message: “Scrap this bill.”

As I argued in a post I put up before the summit began, this discussion would be successful if it simply revealed the stark philosophical differences between the parties. That’s exactly what it’s done. Now it is absolutely clear that the only way health-care reform will pass is through majority rule in the Senate, otherwise known as the “reconciliation process.” Democrats will have to have the guts to do it on their own. Republicans wanted to talk about process or tried to poke holes in President Obama’s proposals. They sought not to emphasize their own ideas because their own bills are so much smaller and do so much less.

Obama sent a very strong signal toward the end of the summit: He wants a bill even if the only way to get it is through the reconciliation route. “I don’t think that the American people are interested in the process inside the Senate,” Obama replied in response to Sen. John McCain’s criticism of the idea that the Senate might try to pass a bill with fewer than 60 Senate votes. Most Americans, Obama said, believe in “majority rule.” So they do. The president was telling members of his own party: Press on.

Afflicting the Afflicted
By PAUL KRUGMAN

If we’re lucky, Thursday’s summit will turn out to have been the last act in the great health reform debate, the prologue to passage of an imperfect but nonetheless history-making bill. If so, the debate will have ended as it began: with Democrats offering moderate plans that draw heavily on past Republican ideas, and Republicans responding with slander and misdirection.

Nobody really expected anything different. But what was nonetheless revealing about the meeting was the fact that Republicans — who had weeks to prepare for this particular event, and have been campaigning against reform for a year — didn’t bother making a case that could withstand even minimal fact-checking....

What really struck me about the meeting, however, was the inability of Republicans to explain how they propose dealing with the issue that, rightly, is at the emotional center of much health care debate: the plight of Americans who suffer from pre-existing medical conditions. In other advanced countries, everyone gets essential care whatever their medical history. But in America, a bout of cancer, an inherited genetic disorder, or even, in some states, having been a victim of domestic violence can make you uninsurable, and thus make adequate health care unaffordable.

One of the great virtues of the Democratic plan is that it would finally put an end to this unacceptable case of American exceptionalism. But what’s the Republican answer? Mr. Alexander was strangely inarticulate on the matter, saying only that “House Republicans have some ideas about how my friend in Tullahoma can continue to afford insurance for his wife who has had breast cancer.” He offered no clue about what those ideas might be.

In reality, House Republicans don’t have anything to offer to Americans with troubled medical histories. On the contrary, their big idea — allowing unrestricted competition across state lines — would lead to a race to the bottom. The states with the weakest regulations — for example, those that allow insurance companies to deny coverage to victims of domestic violence — would set the standards for the nation as a whole. The result would be to afflict the afflicted, to make the lives of Americans with pre-existing conditions even harder.

ROSS DOUTHAT
Let’s Make a Deal

There is room for real compromise on health care, if Democrats put the overall structure of the bill up for debate and Republicans offer proposals with more heft and bipartisan appeal.

Giving up the overall structure of the bill would be redundant; and Republicans have no proposals with heft and have no interest in bipartisanship.

Bills Stalled, Hospitals Fear Rising Unpaid Care
By REED ABELSON

President Obama says he aims to keep trying. But what happens if the health care legislation cannot be revived, and tens of millions of uninsured Americans continue without coverage?

For the nation’s hospitals, at least, the cost of doing nothing in Washington translates into tens of billions of dollars each year in medical bills that go unpaid by patients with little or no insurance.

Nationwide, the cost of unpaid care for hospitals, which includes charity care as well as money that could not be collected from patients, was around $36 billion in 2008. It is expected to spiral higher. The number of people without insurance in this country could increase to as high as 58 million by 2014, from about 49 million now, according to an estimate by the Urban Institute.

No wonder hospital systems like Park Nicollet Health Services near Minneapolis worry about their futures if the health care legislation remains stalled.

“Our business model will continue to falter,” said Dr. David Abelson, chief executive of Park Nicollet, a not-for-profit system that runs a 426-bed hospital and a chain of clinics.

Park Nicollet has had to cut back services and lay off hundreds of employees as its level of uncompensated care rose — to $43 million last year, up from $29 million in 2007.

And when the hospital provides care under state and federal programs like Medicaid and Medicare, it is already reimbursed below its costs, Dr. Abelson said. Park Nicollet, whose revenue was $1.2 billion last year, says it expects to lose $120 million on government programs in 2010.

Quick Response to Study of Abstinence Education
By TAMAR LEWIN

A study of middle-school students that found for the first time that abstinence-only education helped to delay their sexual initiation is already beginning to shake up the longstanding debate over how best to prevent teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

“This is a rigorous study that means we can now say that it’s possible for an abstinence-only intervention to be effective,” Dr. John B. Jemmott III, the University of Pennsylvania professor who led the study, said Tuesday, hours after results of the study were released. “That’s important, because for some populations, abstinence is the only acceptable message.”

Sadly for some folks, like the executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association, Valerie Huber, this rigorous study STRONGLY implies the programs Ms. Huber would have funded are not effective. We have past documentation of the failure  of those plans, plus we have this case, in which the theory-based abstinence only plan

...centered on people with an average age of 12 and that unlike the federally supported abstinence programs now in use, did not advocate abstinence until marriage.

The classes also did not portray sex negatively or suggest that condoms are ineffective, and contained only medically accurate information. Dr. Jemmott’s abstinence-only course was designed for the research, and is not in current use in schools.

Now, if the programs Ms. Huber would advance consists of one class containing only medically accurate information, we can give it a shot. But under no circumstances should we see the crap Bush paid for ever again.

Obama Weighs Shift in Health Plan, Seeking G.O.P. Backing
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON — President Obama signaled on Wednesday that he might be willing to scale back his proposed health care overhaul to a version that could attract bipartisan support, as the White House and Congressional Democrats grappled with a political landscape transformed by the Republican victory in the Massachusetts Senate race.

Obama considers shift in health-care reform debate

Says "core elements" of plan remain popular, and urges the Senate not to act until newly elected Mass. lawmaker is seated and can participate

Were you in the country at all last year?

Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate

Christ. Only reason I have not to unregister as a Democrat is to make sure I vote against Harry Ford if he runs in the primary...

Side effect of white supremacy, donchaknow.

[M]any others seek to lighten their entire face or large swatches of their body, a practice common in developing countries as disparate as Senegal, India and the Philippines, where it is promoted as a way to elevate one’s social standing. A small percentage of men in such countries also use the creams.

In November, some fans of Sammy Sosa, the former Chicago Cubs slugger, were surprised when photographs from the Latin Grammy Awards ceremony showed his face as uniformly lighter. Online critics accused him of wanting to be white. Mr. Sosa, a Dominican-born American citizen, told a reporter from ESPNDeportes.com that he had used a cream nightly to “soften” his skin and that it had bleached it, too. “I’m not a racist,” he said in the interview. “I live my life happily.”

Creams Offering Lighter Skin May Bring Risks
By CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS

For years, Allison Ross rubbed in skin-lightening creams with names like Hyprogel and Fair & White. She said she wanted to even out and brighten the tone of her face, neck and hands. Mrs. Ross, 45, who lives in Brooklyn, also said that she used the lightening creams “to be more accepted in society.”

After months of twice-a-day applications, her skin was not only fairer, it had become so thin that a touch would bruise her face. Her capillaries became visible, and she developed stubborn acne. A doctor told her that all three were side effects of prescription-strength steroids in some of the creams, which she had bought over the counter in beauty supply stores.

“I never read the labels,” Mrs. Ross said. Instead, she took her cues from friends, many of them, like her, from the West Indies. “Once somebody told me Fair & White was the one they were using, I’d go to the Korean store and ask for it,” she said.

Some of the most troubling test results were for bracelet charms sold at Walmart, at the jewelry chain Claire's and at a dollar store. High amounts of cadmium also were detected in "The Princess and The Frog" movie-themed pendants.

"There's nothing positive that you can say about this metal. It's a poison," said Bruce A. Fowler, a cadmium specialist and toxicologist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On the CDC's priority list of 275 most hazardous substances in the environment, cadmium ranks No. 7.

Some Popular Kids' Jewelry Contains Dangerous Metal
Justin Pritchard

LOS ANGELES (Jan. 10) - Barred from using lead in children's jewelry because of its toxicity, some Chinese manufacturers have been substituting the more dangerous heavy metal cadmium in sparkling charm bracelets and shiny pendants being sold throughout the United States, an Associated Press investigation shows.

The most contaminated piece analyzed in lab testing performed for the AP contained a startling 91 percent cadmium by weight. The cadmium content of other contaminated trinkets, all purchased at national and regional chains or franchises, tested at 89 percent, 86 percent and 84 percent by weight. The testing also showed that some items easily shed the heavy metal, raising additional concerns about the levels of exposure to children.

Cadmium is a known carcinogen. Like lead, it can hinder brain development in the very young, according to recent research.

Children don't have to swallow an item to be exposed - they can get persistent, low-level doses by regularly sucking or biting jewelry with a high cadmium content.

Every society or culture, by its nature, provides certain things, consumes other things, makes specific demands and creates particular options. It rewards and punishes, nurtures and damages in ways determined by its nature and members of the culture must assemble their lives around the holes and using the pieces that culture creates.

American culture, being the only one that is actively marketed to the world since the end of the Cold War, and the uniform nature of the benefits and harms it creates is evidence of a uniform human nature.

The Americanization of Mental Illness
By ETHAN WATTERS

Race-based misdiagnosis still remains a health care problem

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Black men are over-diagnosed with schizophrenia at least five times higher than any other group—a trend that dates back to the 1960s, according to new University of Michigan research.

Race-based misdiagnosis emerged in the context of the civil rights era of the 1960s and 1970s, when activism became equated with mental illness, says Jonathan Metzl, an associate professor of psychiatry and women's studies.

Metzl examined archives of Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and learned that black men, mainly from Detroit during the civil rights era, were taken there and often misdiagnosed with schizophrenia.

"Some patients became schizophrenic because of changes in their diagnosis rather than their clinical symptoms," said Metzl, a 2008 Guggenheim award recipient.

Pain management failing as fears of prescription drug abuse rise

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Millions of Americans with significant or chronic pain associated with their medical problems are being under-treated as physicians increasingly fail to provide comprehensive pain treatment – either due to inadequate training, personal biases or fear of prescription drug abuse.

A pharmaceutical expert in pain management in the College of Pharmacy at Oregon State University says the issue is reaching crisis proportions, and in two new professional publications argues that health consumers must be aware of the problem and in many cases become more informed, persistent advocates for the care they need and deserve.

"We have more sophisticated pain management techniques available now than ever before," said Kathryn Hahn, a pharmacist, affiliate faculty member at OSU and chair of the Oregon Pain Management Commission. "But many doctors are not fully informed about all the options available, and also often turn patients away because they're very concerned about the problems with prescription drug abuse.

"Because of this, many people suffer needlessly with pain that could be treated, and almost 80 percent of visits to community pharmacies involve pain issues," Hahn said. "We're in the middle of a storm here, and have to figure out some way to navigate through it."

The study found that youth who experienced death of loved one during the storm had the strongest association with SED. Exposure to physical adversity was the next strongest.

Study shows serious emotional disturbances among children after Katrina

Blacksburg, Va. -- A team made up of mental health professionals, emergency response experts, and researchers from several universities, including Virginia Tech, has published the results of a study that shows serious emotional disturbances among children who were affected by Hurricane Katrina. The Category 3 storm ravaged the Gulf Coast in August 2005.

The study, published in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, showed the estimated prevalence of serious emotional disturbances (SED) among residents of the affected areas was 14.9 percent. Of those, 9.3 percent of youths were believed to have SED that was directly attributable to Hurricane Katrina.

Characteristics of SED include inappropriate behavior, depression, hyperactivity, eating disorders, fears and phobias, and learning difficulties.

"Stress exposure was associated strongly with serious emotional disturbances," said Russell Jones, professor of psychology in the College of Science at Virginia Tech and member of the research team. "More than 20 percent of the youths with high stress exposure had hurricane-related SED."

The study found that youth who experienced death of loved one during the storm had the strongest association with SED. Exposure to physical adversity was the next strongest.

"The prevalence of SED among youths exposed to Hurricane Katrina remains high 18 to 27 months after the storm," Jones said. "This suggests a substantial need for mental health treatment resources in the hurricane-affected areas."

Katrina was the costliest hurricane in United States history as well as one of the five deadliest. Four years after the storm, nearly thousands of residents of Mississippi and Louisiana are still displaced from their homes.

Daniel Drake's blood pressure came in at an eye-popping 200/120. He chalks it up to lack of sleep and an energy drink, and leaves happy when a pill brings it down enough to get his tooth fixed. But Dr. Alan Weder, a University of Michigan researcher volunteering for the weekend, shakes his head with concern.

"If that's the way he's walking around, his risk of having a heart attack or a stroke in the next five years is probably 20 to 30 percent," Weder says. "And that's for want of 30 cents in medicine."

Lessons of a weekend of free health care
BY ADAM GELLER
The Associated Press
Sunday, January 3, 2010; 12:01 AM

MAYNARDVILLE, Tenn. -- The two-hour drive is done, but Hannah and Jack Hurst leave the Honda's engine running.

Hannah's prayers have brought them here. Now there's little to do but turn up the car's heat, try to get some sleep and wait for morning - and a set of glass and metal doors to open.

Still, Hannah doesn't complain. The 26-year-old mother of three has waited "pretty much as long as I can remember" to escape the pain throbbing through her jaws. Jack lost his road construction job a year ago and health insurance is out of the question. If the answer to Hannah's misery can be found behind those doors, then what's 10 hours more?

Out in the dark, the Hursts have plenty of company. Even before 10 p.m. on Friday in late fall, nearly 50 cars ring the ball field parking lot. By 6 a.m. Saturday, more than 400 men and women - some wrapped in blankets, others leaning on walkers - stand tightlipped and bleary-eyed under the Big Dipper.

They clutch numbered tickets, ready to claim the prize for perseverance: By day's end, as long as they can keep appetites and tempers in check and the sleep from their eyes, they will win the privilege of care from a dentist or a doctor.

In a country convulsed over health care, the scene would be alarming if it wasn't so predictable.

That said, it occurred to me while reading this that the people who fear "death panels" most will be the first to implement them. They've already said the only way to control health care costs is to cut payments to, and restrict treatment for, the elderly. So when they are required to cut costs (and reality already requires that; politics will eventually follow along as it always does...eventually), what do you think they're going to do?

The first thing they think of. That's what.

Montana Ruling Bolsters Doctor-Assisted Suicide
By KIRK JOHNSON

DENVER — The Montana Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that state law protects doctors in Montana from prosecution for helping terminally ill patients die. But the court, ruling with a narrow majority, sidestepped the larger landmark question of whether physician-assisted suicide is a right guaranteed under the state’s Constitution.

The 4-to-3 decision, in a case closely watched around the nation by physicians and advocates for the disabled and terminally ill, was a victory for the so-called death-with-dignity movement. But it fell short of the sweeping declaration advocates had hoped for.

And by avoiding the question of constitutional rights entirely, the court kept the debate in the Montana Legislature, where passions over the issue run high and where tinkering with existing laws is much easier than changing the Constitution.

The state attorney general’s office, which had argued to the court that the Legislature and the democratic process — not seven Supreme Court justices — should decide the weighty philosophical questions raised by the case, Baxter v. Montana, said in a statement that the questions were still alive and still to be answered.

“The Montana Supreme Court recognized that physician-assisted suicide is a policy question for the people of Montana and their Legislature,” the Montana state solicitor, Anthony Johnstone, said in the statement. “As we have argued, that is where the resolution of this important issue belongs.”

A spokeswoman for Compassion and Choices, a group that supports physician-assisted death for terminally ill people and which participated in the case as a plaintiff and co-council to the lead plaintiff, Robert Baxter, conceded that a broader ruling would have been better for their interests.

Mr. Baxter, a retired truck driver from Billings, died last year of complications related to lymphocytic leukemia at age 76.

“We would have welcomed a broad and robust constitutional ruling,” said Kathryn L. Tucker, the legal affairs director for Compassion and Choices. But Ms. Tucker said there was also no doubt that the court had expanded the choices available to the dying in Montana, and extended protection to their doctors, too.

“The court recognized that this is a right patients have,” she said.

Limbaugh Recovering In Honolulu Hospital
Medical Teams Treat Radio Show Host For Chest Pains

HONOLULU -- Conservative radio talk host Rush Limbaugh was rushed to a Honolulu hospital on Wednesday afternoon with chest pains, sources told KITV.

Paramedics responded to the call at 2:41 p.m. at the Kahala Hotel and Resort.

Limbaugh, 58, suffered from chest pains, sources said. Limbaugh was sitting in a chair in his ninth-floor hotel room at the Kahala when emergency crews arrived, sources said. He told medical crews that he was taking medication for a back problem, sources said.

Paramedics treated him and took him to Queen's Medical Center in serious condition. He will not be released from the hospital on Wednesday night, sources said.

In New Way to Edit DNA, Hope for Treating Disease
By NICHOLAS WADE

Only one man seems to have ever been cured of AIDS, a patient who also had leukemia. To treat the leukemia, he received a bone marrow transplant in Berlin from a donor who, as luck would have it, was naturally immune to the AIDS virus.

If that natural mutation could be mimicked in human blood cells, patients could be endowed with immunity to the deadly virus. But there is no effective way of making precise alterations in human DNA.

That may be about to change, if a powerful new technique for editing the genetic text proves to be safe and effective. At the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Carl June and colleagues have used the technique to disrupt a gene in patients’ T cells, the type attacked by the AIDS virus. They have then infused those cells back into the body. A clinical trial is now under way to see if the treated cells will reconstitute a patient’s immune system and defeat the virus.