Swine flu blues: Vaccinations could be delayed
Filed under: Hot Health Headline, Public health, Uncategorized
Summertime and forgetting about swine flu is easy. But the World Health Organization yanked us back to reality.
The H1N1 virus isn’t taking a vacation. Dr. Marie-Paule Kieny, WHO director of the Initiative for Vaccine Research, said the “pandemic is unstoppable” and “all countries will need to have access to vaccines” in a briefing yesterday.
But making a swine flu vaccine looks more difficult than expected, which could delay when folks could get immunized against the bug.
Even when a vaccine becomes available there won’t be enough to go around. So WHO recommends that health-care workers get jabbed first.
A big problem remains that there simply aren’t enough vaccine factories to supply the world’s needs, WHO Director General Margaret Chan said today. She defended the patent system and called for incentives to encourage innovation by drugmakers.
Ex-Hill honchos make lobbying roundtrip
You can’t tell the health-care lobbyists without a program. So The Washington Post, working with data from the Center for Responsive Politics, has come up with one just in time for the next round of health-reform negotiations on Capitol Hill.
More than 350 former congressmen, committee staffers and federal bigwigs are busily advancing the interests of drugmakers, insurers, hospitals and medical groups, the Post reports.
Buying influence is easy but it ain’t cheap. The Post calculates the “record-breaking” campaign is costing the health-care industry more than $1.4 million a day.
What does it get for the money? A seat at the table, for starters, and maybe much more. For their part, the ex-government employees get a pretty rich payday.
“For people like me who are on the outside and used to be on the inside, this is great, because there is a level of trust in these relationships, and I know the policy rationale that is required,” Richard Tarplin, a lobbyist working for the American Medical Association, told the Post. Tarplin used to work for Health and Human Services and Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who’s a key player in the health debate.
From The Washington Post
If you do nothing else, check out the slick graphic showing the influence of ex-staffers from the Senate Finance Committee.
Obama to answer videos, tweets on Wednesday
At 1:15 ET on Wednesday, President Barack Obama will answer questions about health care reform at a live, online town-hall meeting.
In a new wrinkle, the administration will consider questions submitted through several social media outlets:
- On YouTube, people can post brief video replies to Obama’s video invitation
- Twitter users can hashtag their questions with “#WHHCQ“
- On Facebook, people can visit the administration’s page and post their questions there
(Hat tip to Chicago Health Matters)
NY stem cell researchers can pay egg donors
The ethical thicket that is stem cell research just got a little more complex. New York became the first state to allow taxpayer-funded researchers to pay women to donate eggs specifically for stem cell experiments.
"Stripped" human oocyte; granulosa cells that had surrounded this oocyte have been removed. Courtesy: RWJMS IVF Laboratory via Wikimedia Commons
The compensation could run as high as $10,000. Supporters argue it will spur better, quicker research results. Opponents say paying for eggs crosses an ethical line.
The state board that made the new policy says it’s just like compensating women for donating eggs for reproductive purposes. But the National Academy of Sciences doesn’t see it that way, saying in its guidelines for stem cell research that payment to donors for eggs is a no-no.
Some scientists in the field say the main source now — eggs left over from in vitro fertilization procedures — hasn’t been adequate. (New York won’t pay for those eggs under the new policy anyway.)
Scientists outside New York are already envious. Harvard stem cell researcher George Q. Daley, told The New York Times, the payment policy “will mean a tremendous advantage” for labs in New York.
Shriners may shutter six hospitals
John Barry of the St. Petersburg Times reports that declining membership and a weak economy are conspiring to force cutbacks at Shriners Hospitals for Children, which offer free pediatric care in 22 cities.
Under one proposal, six underutilized hospitals would be closed outright (see CNN’s map here). Shriners also are considering heavy cutbacks across the board, unsustainable withdrawals from the hospitals’ endowment fund, or allowing member hospitals – none of which even have billing offices now – to accept funds from Medicaid and insurance.
The hospitals’ future will be decided at the Shriners’ Imperial Council Session, July 6-8, when about 1,400 Shiners are expected to gather in San Antonio, Texas.
(Hat tip to Al Tompkins at Poynter Institute)
Newsweek pans Oprah’s health advice
In this week’s cover story, Weston Kosova and Pat Wingert devote about seven pages to the health information Oprah Winfrey and her guests have imparted. Much like the Vital Signs column written by Rahul K. Parikh, M.D., at Salon.com last month, the reporters point out the lack of medical evidence for many of the claims about bioidentical hormones, thyroid disease, plastic surgery, vaccines and autism.
The article points out that, during a show featuring Suzanne Somers promoting bio-identical hormones, doctors who appeared on the show had to sit in the audience and had to be called on to dispute Somers’ claims. Kosova and Wingert say that Mehmet Oz, M.D., a frequent guest, usually sticks to the facts but sometimes doesn’t speak up when Winfrey’s “out-there experts are spouting their questionable theories. There seems to be an unwritten rule that one Oprah expert may not criticize or correct another.”
She has the power to summon the most learned authorities on any subject; who would refuse her? Instead, all too often Oprah winds up putting herself and her trusting audience in the hands of celebrity authors and pop-science artists pitching wonder cures and miracle treatments that are questionable or flat-out wrong, and sometimes dangerous.
On a lighter note, Stephen Colbert discussed Winfrey’s health shows.
Have reporters written off single-payer system?
Filed under: Health policy, Hospitals, Member news, Uncategorized
American Journal of Nursing’s Jacob Molyneux writes about the nurses who were arrested while protesting a lack of representation for those who support a single-payer health care system at a Senate Finance Committee meeting about health care reform.
In his blog post, Molyneux points out that some people and organizations say the press isn’t giving adequate coverage to the single-payer option.
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) published a media advisory in March that said out of “hundreds” of news stories, only 18 mentioned the single-payer option. FAIR’s advisory fails to tell us exactly how many “hundreds” of stories it searched and the full study doesn’t appear to be on the organization’s Web site.
The “Report on Health Care Community Discussions” on HealthReform.gov says that 27 percent of the groups participating “discussed the merits of a single-payer system, and the majority of those groups supported this idea.” The report does note that “Supporters of a single-payer system submitted numerous reports, in part due to the encouragement by advocacy groups to participate in Health Care Community Discussions.”
At a town-hall meeting last week, President Obama said “if he were building the health care system from scratch, a single-payer system would be the best approach.”
So, health journalists: Have you been reporting on the single-payer option? Why or why not? Feel free to point out coverage you find worthwhile.
Travel data, dollar bills may predict H1N1 spread
In The New York Times, reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. details efforts by researchers to predict the spread of H1N1 using air traffic and commuter traffic patterns combined with data taken from currency-tracking site wheresgeorge.com.
AHCJ resources for covering flu, pandemics and preparednessSo far the predictions of researchers from Northwestern University, and those by a similar effort at Indiana University, have proven to be reasonably accurate. Both models foresee about 2000 cases by the end of the month, concentrated in urban areas.
Detailed projection maps can be found at the effort’s Web site.
H1N1 roundup: Headlines outpace cases
Swine flu stories are practically their own pandemic.
Confirmed cases of illness caused by the H1N1 virus in the U.S. surpassed 100 on Thursday. Swine flu news items indexed by Google in the U.S.? More than 31,000 and counting Friday morning.
AHCJ resources for covering flu, pandemics and preparednessSome highlights from the latest coverage:
The Los Angeles Times reports H1N1 has done the impossible: stilled Mexico City’s busy streets. “Fear of infection and government restrictions on public gatherings have combined to produce something like a city in hiding,” the Times writes.
The Wall Street Journal reconstructs the story of how public health officials determined a new flu bug was on the loose in Mexico. Another WSJ story says flu cases in California may have a “separate origin.”
Closer to the border, the Houston Chronicle reports that Continental Airlines is cutting flights to Mexico, a temporary move that will slash capacity in half, starting Monday.
Cable, Web coverage of swine flu increases anxiety
Tim Arango and Brian Stelter of The New York Times report that the “24-hour news cycle of cable news and the Internet have amplified” the swine flu story.
AHCJ resources for covering swine flu, pandemics and preparednessOne Long Island doctors says patients’ anxiety has been raised by watching cable news from their hospital beds.
An infectious disease specialist “complained that the news media have not focused sufficiently on the fact that not a single person had died of swine flu in the United States during the current outbreak and that it could not be contracted from cooked meat.”
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