May 15, 2014

Let's Be Accurate: The MMR Vaccine is Not Associated With Autism. But Neonatal Hep B in Males...

Here is the link to the study:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24814559

Here is the abstract:

Note that MMR was cleared. MMR was suspected because it is given at around 1 year of life. One year is when children typically walk and talk. If they do not walk and talk, the parents think back to the thing that happened right before they did not walk and talk---and they remember the MMR vaccine. This guilt by association obviously made no sense and it is a good thing that they have finally laid this myth to rest, since folks die of measles.

However, to say that no vaccine has been linked to autism is incorrect. There is one vaccine that is routinely given to newborn infants---infants whose brains and immune systems are so immature that simple viral infections can have devastating consequences. I am referring to the Hepatitis B vaccine. Why is this given to newborn infants? Because decades ago, scientists studied inner city hospitals where a lot of drug addicts gave birth and they discovered that it was cheaper to just immunize all the babies at birth than to test the mothers to see which were infected with Hep B and immunize their babies at birth. Meaning that you---you who are likely not an IV drug addict and who are likely immune to Hep B from the vaccine you received in school---will have a baby who will be given a vaccine shortly after its birth because that was what was best for drug addicts three decades ago.

What could go wrong with giving an extra, unnecessary vaccine to a newborn baby? The only study so far to find any statistical association between a vaccine and autism is one for male infants given the Hep B vaccine at birth.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21058170



Association does not prove causality. This study does not prove your child's autism was caused by a Hep B vaccine. It suggests that male children who get the vaccine at birth may be more likely to show signs of autism. I just did a Medline search and I can not find any more recent studies to either confirm or refute this study, meaning it is still up in the air. So, you get to decide what you do with the information. But, do not leave DU tonight telling all your friends "Great news. A study has cleared ALL vaccines."

May 15, 2014

Does Gilead Know Someone in the CDC?

Just asking. Two years ago, the CDC recommended that every baby boomer get screened for Hepatitis C, even if they had no risk factors. They made this recommendation one year before Gilead was scheduled to introduce its new, blockbuster, easy to take, tres cher (expensive) Hep C drug which costs $1000 a pill or $84,000 for a course. And now, the CDC has recommended that everyone who uses IV drugs and shares needles, has unprotected gay sex with men, has a partner infected with HIV or has an IV drug using or bisexual partner (or does not know what their partner does in his free time) should be on a $13,000 a year Gilead drug forever to prevent HIV. Note that taking the drug does not guarantee that you will not get HIV and Gilead still recommends that you not share needles and that you not have unprotected sex. So, if you are using only clean needles and you are using condoms (correctly) every single time, do you really want to take a medication that can have some pretty serious side effects? If you partner is HIV positive this is a great medication. Or is you are a professional sex worker, yeah, sure. But risking your liver on the off chance that a condom might break and that the partner you are sleeping with when the condom breaks is HIV positive? Is it really worth it? Since there is no way to know if your partner is bisexual or using IV drugs do you just assume that they are? Should every 16 year old girl go down to Planned Parenthood and say "I want some birth control pills and I want some anti-HIV pills, too?"

Note that the VA, which has not been doing a very good job of getting our Vets timely appointments, has rounded up the funds to get the Hep C drug on its formulary. Is this their way of taking care of our vets or their way of showing thanks to Gilead's old owner, Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld? The drug to prevent HIV is already covered by many insurers, though I am not certain if they cover as many people as the CDC is now recommending take it---one source says this will increase usage 50 fold.

Which has me wondering: Who will be the first person at the CDC to leave through the revolving door and get a job at Gilead.

Ok, I am ready for the long list of testimonials from all the folks at DU whose 1) Hep C was cured by the drug above 2) HIV was prevented by the durg above or 3) are absolutely pumped knowing that these medications are available and will be covered by their insurer. But if anyone is at all interested in how private industry uses government regulatory bodies in order to increase their profits--and then turns around and hires former US government officials by way of payment (the so called revolving door), I would be happy to hear from you.

In case people think that this stuff doesn't happen here is a link to a link to some old stuff I wrote about Glaxo-Smith Kline and Dan Troy.

http://foro.univision.com/t5/Democratas-Mas-Temas-Relacionados/Drug-Whores-How-Bush-FDA-Serviced-Glaxo-Smith-Kline-and-Big/td-p/399921973

Links about Gildead.

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/biotech/2014/05/sovaldi-veterans-affairs-hepatitis-c-gilead-gild.html

http://www.truvada.com/

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/biotech/2014/05/gilead-hiv-aids-gild-prep-prophylaxis-truvada.html


PS. Oh, and by all means, buy Gilead stock. If they know someone at the CDC, they are going to make a gazillion dollars. This is meant to be sarcastic in case anyone wonders. I do not bet on stocks or give stock tips. Just thought it was funny that so much medical news pops up in business journals first when you do a google.

May 11, 2014

Ball and Chain: Not Your Usual Mother’s day Thread

There is something visceral about the tie that binds a mother and child. I realized it when I was pregnant. Nothing in the world mattered as much as the child growing inside my womb. Once he was born, the umbilical cord might as well have still been attached. His pain was my pain. His fear was my fear.

Now that my child is grown, the cord has finally been snipped. But during those first eighteen---no, let’s be honest, those first twenty years---one person in my life came first, and it was not me.

But this is not about my son. This is not about me. This about the role women play in capitalist society, and why so many people on the right seem so determined that our daughters will have unprotected underage sex and give birth to children that they are ill equipped to support.

If a young woman has to drop out of school to support a child, she will. She will do anything to take care of her son or daughter. She will drag herself to a dead end, pink collar ghetto job day after day and she will do her boring work with a smile, because she knows that she is doing it for her baby. She will not join a picket line, not when her kids need to eat. She may dream of going back to college to get a degree. But between work and taking care of the children, there will never be enough time. She will always be there for Tyson and for Dixie Cup---Koch owned Dixie Cup. She will always accept a lower wage than male workers, because a man who does not have children to support can walk away, but a mother has to think about her kids first, second and last.

I was lucky. I grew up in the 1960s. I was on birth control before I ever had sex. I was out of medical school, residency and in private practice before I conceived my (planned) son. My mother, from a different generation, was not so lucky. She was also premed. She got married right before she was supposed to go to medical school, the way I did. But birth control in the 1950s wasn't so good. She got pregnant. Having a baby and being forced to get a job put a permanent end to her plans for a career in medicine. Luckily for her and for my sister and me, she majored in math, not English, not Liberal Arts. So, she went on to a career in computer science with NASA and NASA contractors. Not bad. Certainly not the pink collar ghetto, though not the medical career she had wanted. However, the math major was a fluke. She had to pick something, and she was good in math. She liked it. She never thought she would have to make a living from it.

Children are one of the best things in life. The mother-child relationship is something we should celebrate. But the far right has taken something natural and good and perverted it for their own use. They treat pregnancy as a “wage of sin.” They condemn single mothers and their children to poverty under guise of piety—they are serving the will of a deity who demands that women who “fornicate” wear a big scarlet letter. However, they are really serving the will of industry that uses women as a low paid, unskilled compliant workforce to keep down wages for all workers. There are very few unskilled jobs nowadays that cannot be performed by women. Those that absolutely have to be done by men fetch a higher salary. But for how much longer?

And that is why we---all of us, male as well as female--- need pay parity and why we need choice.

Thanks, Mom, for all you did and do! An especially big thank you for raising me with a political conscience. It is so tempting to shelter our children. But if we try too hard to protect them from all the hurt other people are feeling, how can they grow up to be caring adults? I hope I can be half the mother you have been. And thanks for giving me a love of the blues.

May 10, 2014

GOP "Family Values": When Rural Hospitals Close for Lack of Medicaid, Women and Children Die

You should not need a study to prove it, but one was done anyway. In 1991, the Indiana University Department of Family Medicine discovered a statistically significant association between living in a rural county that lacked adequate obstetric coverage and infant mortality. Now, association does not prove causality, but if this is your first baby, and he is coming out breech and gets stuck and there is no one to do a stat c-section, your baby may not survive long. Or, if you go into early labor, and there is no one who knows how to administer the appropriate drugs to stop that labor, you may deliver a baby that is extremely small---with no Neonatal ICU staff around to save its poor little life.

http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/1744606/reload=0;jsessionid=6DDvrJ8h0qU8tBmmnZ45.0

If you read my last journal, you know that Georgia Republican legislators are gleefully forcing “crack addicted” rural hospitals out of business on the grounds that it’s healthier for our country’s economy if we have fewer crack addicted hospitals among us. Unfortunately, it is not healthier for our country’s health. Rural women, in particular, suffer when they are denied access to health care that urban women take for granted.

http://www.acog.org/Resources_And_Publications/Committee_Opinions/Committee_on_Health_Care_for_Underserved_Women/Health_Disparities_in_Rural_Women

Rural women do not have the “Choices” that urban women have (from the link above):



And here, I have to wonder, is this all part of some huge Tea Party conspiracy? Deprive rural women of doctors, hospitals, so that they have no access to birth control or abortion? Force them to deliver their babies at home, without anesthesia, so that they can suffer the “wages of sin”? And what about the children who are born early, who die or who suffer the lifelong effects of prematurity? Is this the Religious Right’s way of ensuring that the “sins” of the mother will be passed on to the offspring? Remember, these are the sickos who objected to the HPV vaccine on the ground that cervical cancer is God’s way of punishing women for having sex, and if the state prevents God from punishing women for having sex, then the state is attacking religion.

Just how bad are things for women in rural America? While life expectancy for most people in the industrialized world keeps rising, women living in rural counties in the south and west of the United States have seen an increase in preventable death.


http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/04/study-life-span-women/1963093/

In Texas last fall, one rural community discovered exactly what can happen when the only hospital in town closes:



http://www.dallasnews.com/investigations/patient-safety/headlines/20130928-loss-of-east-texas-towns-hospital-hits-home-after-toddler-chokes-dies.ece

The hospital in question was kept afloat through fraud and mismanagement. It’s pretty difficult to make a profit from a rural hospital, when you are required by law to provide free care to folks that the law does not care to provide health insurance. When the owner was finally turned in, the hospital shut down, leaving the town---and Edith’s parents---with no place to turn in an emergency.

This is what the “best health care in the world” has accomplished---a system in which rural women and their children are treated as disposable. And the self-styled family values Republicans seemed determined to keep the rural women and children of their own states living---and dying---for lack of health care. This truly is America held hostage.

May 10, 2014

“Rural communities… where 39 percent of the folks who have a stroke or have a heart attack die."

I write a lot about health care for the urban poor, because that is what I know. But there is something much worse than being sick and poor and living in a major metropolitan area in the United States. That is being sick and living in the country.

http://blog.ruralhealthweb.org/2014/05/rural-hospitals-closing-at-alarming-rate/

You can’t blame the press for ignoring the plight of rural America. The press lives in the Big City. To them, the country is what you travel through to get from one urban area to another. It probably never occurs to them that people live there and work there and go to school. And get sick there.

In the city, there are lots of rich people and lots of insured people who can keep doctors and hospitals in business. In the city, there is a big tax base that can pay for health care for the poor. But, in the country, where there are not so many rich folks and not so many insured folks and not nearly as big a tax base, it may be hard to keep a doctor and a hospital in business. Oh, the local folks can keep the hospital busy. But they may not be able to pay their bills. And if no one else---meaning the state or federal government---is willing to step in, then the doctors and the hospital will leave, and the small town will find itself with no health care at all.

This problem is most acute in the 24 states which have rejected the Medicaid expansion.


http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/03/05/3676270/rural-hospital-to-close-naacp.html

Note that Emergency Rooms must treat anyone who shows up at the door regardless of ability to pay. A minor emergency center can turn you away for lack of money. If your town loses its ER and you are broke and uninsured, you could end up dying of a treatable disease, like an infected tooth. And even if you have insurance and/or money, if the closest ER is an hour away, that may be too far if your life is in danger.

Rural hospitals in Red states did not just miss out on extra Medicaid funding. They are being hit with a federal funding cut. Since all 50 states were slated to receive Medicaid money, the federal government predicted that it would not have to subsidize rural hospitals as heavily as it has done in the past.




http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/04/30/3432599/tennessee-medicaid-hospital/

Ouch. Some things just aren't fair.

The people who wrote the Affordable Care Act could not have planned for the Supreme Court, which said, in effect, states have a right to deny their poorest citizens health care. And they could not have anticipated the Congressional gridlock that has prevented anyone from amending the ACA. However, people like Texas Governor Rick Perry surely knew that the people they were going to hurt the worst when they said “No” to all that free money were the same salt of the earth rural voters whom they hold up so proudly as their base.


http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/02/18/3299961/fourth-georgia-hospital-shuts/

To put the numbers in terms that may be easier to understand:



http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/01/10/gop-refuse-medicaid-expansion/

Why did this young woman have to suffer? Because of people like Jason C. Spencer of Georgia:



http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/12/28/republican-fighting-obamacare-calls-hospitals-crack-addicts-photo/

Benefit? That's an interesting way to describe the massive closure of rural hospitals and the genocide being waged against rural citizens of the 24 states which refused the Medicaid expansion. Someone may be benefiting from that decision, but I don't think it is the hospitals or the people they used to serve.

May 10, 2014

The Plight of Red State Public Hospitals and the Patients They Serve

As I wrote a while ago, the Red State public hospital where I work realized that a bunch of our low income patients were being suckered into signing up for useless “bronze” insurance plans. Plans that would cost them pennies a month—making them affordable---but which piled the entire $5000 out of pocket expense up as a deductible and which had very limited provider lists and benefits (such as prescription services etc.) The companies offering these extra cheap insurance plans would receive several thousand dollars from the feds per person for writing polices that would probably never be used. These plans were designed to appeal to 20 something guys who never saw a doctor and only wanted the insurance in case they got run over by a truck and so they could avoid paying the fine. This kind of insurance was absolutely no use for the average public clinic patient—age 50, with diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, coronary artery disease, asthma, a bad back, depression---you know, the typical working guy that got laid off from his job in 2008 and who now works in fast food . The guy who would be dead if his city did not spend tax dollars paying for a county clinic and hospital to take care of the medical needs of people like him. This guy needed the silver plan. But even making a low wage, his monthly premium for a silver plan would have been a whopping
$100-200---and he did not have the money. Some months, he could not even come up with the $5 for the copayment for his heart medication. So, he signed up for the only one he could afford---the useless one.

When I reported on the plight of people like these---my own patients---I was called a liar. By now, I assume that enough people have talked to enough other people to know that these folks really do exist---because, hey, private insurance companies have absolutely no qualms about collecting several thousand federal dollars per person selling poor saps an insurance plan that they will not be able to afford to use. Hell, that is how they make money. And it isn’t as if anyone in the federal government can do anything to stop them. Congress is tied up in gridlock. No matter what loopholes are uncovered in the ACA, no one will be fixing them anytime soon. So, all you folks who take any criticism of any aspect of the ACA as criticism of the POTUS, please calm down. This is not about Obama. This is about sick folks who are not keeping their appointments for checkups because they think they are going to get stuck with a bill.

Attendance at the family clinic where I work if down. Down, because so many of our patients think that they can’t be seen “for free” now that they have that $5000 deductible. Those that come in anyway look scared. They ask how much it is going to cost. Boy, are they relieved when they find out that it isn’t going to cost them anything. The county isn’t going to abandon them just because some private insurer is ripping them---and Uncle Sam---off.

http://www.jpshealthnet.org/The-Affordable-Care-Act-and-JPS-Connection.aspx

http://www.jpshealthnet.org/For-Patients/Low-Cost-Medical-Care.aspx


Good news for the folks who thought that their tarnished bronze plans meant no more health care. Possibly not such good news for the private plans which sold the policies hoping that the $5000 deductible would be an insurmountable barrier to health care for most enrollees.

Now, those who wish to complain that this will bankrupt the private insurance industry which carefully prices premiums and deductibles in order to ensure the most profit for the least amount of expenditure---i.e. the least amount of actual health care---go right ahead. I am sure that the private health care industry appreciates your efforts on their behalf. However, before you start complaining about all the “rich” charity hospitals getting fat off the ACA, you might want to read this:


http://www.breckinridge.com/insights/whitepapers.html?id=1421

May 7, 2014

Dear Ted Cruz, My Religion Tells Me You are a Murderer, and Therefore I Must Not Save Your LIfe

Dear Ted Cruz,

As a Buddhist I would never take a life. However, you are an advocate of ritualized murder---also known as the death penalty in the United States. Most civilized countries in the world have outlawed this barbaric practice. It does not deter crime. It does not bring a sense of closure to those who have lost loved ones. All it does is perpetuate the myth that some people are expendable---and if we rid the world of them, the world will be a better place. And, in a country like the United States, where people are taught to be rugged individualists who value their own opinion over that of the government, it is much too easy for people to take the law into their own hands and "execute" the guy who just cut them off in traffic.

As an advocate of ritualized, deliberate murder, you are responsible for scores of deaths everyday. And therefore, my religion---my own personal interpretation of my own religion as I see it at this moment as I am writing this piece using my Constitutionally protected freedoms of speech and religion---my religion tells me that were I to have anything to do with you, I would become an accessory to murder. That means I can not donate money to your campaign. That means I can not sell you a sandwich. That means if I am staffing the Emergency Room where you are brought one night when you have a heart attack, I will have to decline---politely--to do "business" with you, because it would violate my religious beliefs, the way that Obama is attempting to violate the religious beliefs of those poor little nuns by forcing them to offer rape victims the emergency contraception they need to prevent being forcibly impregnated by their rapists.

So sorry I won't be able to help you. And sorry about the firefighter who won't be able to pull you from your burning house, because he is a Quaker and he couldn't answer to his God if aided a murderer. But you said yourself that religious freedom trumps all else. We promise we will never do anything to harm you. And we promise that if you ever come into harms way we will pray to God and Buddha to save you---or at least save your soul before you die and are damned to the Hell of Murderers.

Sincerely,

A physician who is just kidding, she will do everything in her power to pull you back from the brink of death if you ever die in her Emergency Room, although, were she to follow your logic, there is absolutely no reason that she should not put you outside on the curb and say "There is a Catholic hospital down the road. Your type isn't welcome here." Be very careful when you start calling health care "business". One day the "business" could be the "business" you or your loved ones need in order to survive.

May 5, 2014

The Inconvenient Poor

Shameful. The House is going to hold a hearing on poverty but they will not let the poor testify. How can you claim to speak for the poor if you will not let the poor speak?

Ask some of the self-styled supporters of the Affordable Care Act who now take any mention of the plight of the uninsured as an act of treason. To hear them talk, there is no longer a health care crisis in this country. No more unemployment either. The administration has taken care of all that. As this fall’s midterm elections near, the sick and poor are told to keep their mouths shut for their own good. If they talk about their misery, this will only help the GOP---and they would not want to do that. Oh, no.

My friend is sorry to be an inconvenience. But he has worked himself half to death. Literally. He used to be a full time school teacher. Now, his heart is so weak that he is on disability and Medicare. But since no one can live on $800 a month, he substitute teaches for just over minimum wage. Twenty hours a week on his feet. His swollen feet. His heart has about one third the pumping power of yours and mine. When he gets home and props up his legs, the swelling goes down. Mostly. But not all the way. Little by little, the fluid accumulates in his legs. And then in his liver. And then in his lungs. And, when he can no longer breathe, it’s back to the hospital to get the fluid out. So he can go home and start the cycle all over again. And he’s one of the lucky ones. He has insurance. He has a job, of sorts. He is not on the street. He is not starving. Good thing, too, because even the Republicans who call food stamp recipients wild animals might shed a tear or too at the thought of the teacher who taught their children being homeless. But being poor and breathless and constantly living under the shadow of death at 60---hey, for a lot of us, that is as much of the American Dream as we are ever going to get----

No moral here. I just wanted you to meet my friend. His story is inconvenient for some folks at the moment, but it is his story and his life. He's a nice man, gentle and patient, even when he is doubled over from lack of oxygen. A good teacher. He does not expect miracles. He is just glad to know that someone cares.

Hmm. Maybe the Senate should hold some hearings on poverty, too. Maybe the Senate could invite my friend and others like him to speak. I am sure that there are plenty of people in America who would like to hear their stories.

May 2, 2014

Meet Mike Christian (R) Oklahoma, the politician responsible for the 43 min. torture/execution

of Clayton Locke in Oklahoma, along with Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin (R)

Here is Mike Christian bragging to Fox News before the execution that

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/04/28/oklahoma-lawmaker-to-impeach-justices-who-delayed-death-row-executions/

Rep. Christian claimed that the Court overstepped its bounds because this was not a civil case. However, the defense attorney claimed that it was, because the state would not reveal the drug cocktail that it planned to use to execute his client, and therefore, his client had no way to know if his execution would be lawful, i.e. not cruel and not unusual.

Turns out that poor, dead from a heart attack not from a legal lethal injection Clayton Lockett may have had good reason to file a suit.



Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2014/05/01/5785427/botched-execution-should-cause.html#storylink=cpy

The state is claiming that the IV failed. However, how can we trust a state government that has kept such a process shrouded in secrecy? For all we know, they chose to use drugs that were inappropriate when administered intravenously or which had never been tested or were not licensed for use in humans. Rep. Mike Christian chose to pander to his base and abuse the power of his office in order to deny a condemned man his rights under the law. Rep. Mike Christian made this decision knowing that the drug combo was shrouded in secrecy, knowing that something might well go wrong with the execution----and therefore, he deserves to wear a crown of shame for the part he played in this sorry story. So, this one is for you, Mike Christian. May this be your last 15 minutes of fame.

?ve=1&tl=1

April 27, 2014

When I see articles like this, I just naturally think of 5 letters. C-R-E-E-P.

As in the way the Republicans get involved in internal Democratic politics in order to shoot down candidates whom they think they can not defeat in the general. This was a strategy that Pat Buchanan outlines in 1972 for Tricky Dick Nixon:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/watergate/stories/buchananmemo.htm

"Hillary the Unrepentant Hawk" is an actual phrase used as part of this strategy in 2008. Maybe it made some sense back then. However, in the intervening 6 years, she has been Obama's SOS. Meaning that Hillary's foreign policy is Obama's foreign policy. So, if she is an unrepentant hawk, then so is Obama. Therefore, rehashing the whole "Hillary supported the invasion of Iraq and Obama didn't" issue makes no sense. Someone in corporate management may have told this guy "We've got to turn dems against Hillary. The polls show she beats any of the Tea Baggers we can run against her." Or maybe Steve Chapman comes by his hatred of Hillary honestly and one of his bosses is as happy as a clam to let him bash the candidate that has the Tea Baggers quivering in their boots.

BTW, I have collected a bunch of mainstream media propaganda from 2008 and put it together in a e-book I call "Food Fight at a Monster Truck Rally". It is available for less than a buck at Amazon for your kindle, but I can send anyone who wants a copy free a word document, just send me an email at McCamyTaylor@earthlink.net. It is all there. The Press v. Hillary. The Press v. Obama. The Press v. The Democratic Primary. Forewarned is forearmed. The so called Race Memo almost certainly was written by Pat Buchanan---or someone who had studied Pat Buchanan---and was supposed to be leaked to the press after the Democratic convention in order to tarnish Obama's image as a values candidate,a uniter not a divider. Smart thinking on the part of a lot of dems including the Huffington Post and Hillary and Obama kept that dirty trick from becoming the Thomas Eagleton (1972) affair of 2008. The GOP won't be deterred. They will try again.

Oh, and I am declaring "Hillary the Unrepentant Hawk" the first official GOP Big Lie of the 2016 Democratic Primary. Part of the Karl Rove "attack them on their strengths" strategy. Everyone loved her as SOS? Make her out to have been the worst mass serial killer since Pol Pot. From the folks that told you that John Kerry was single handedly responsible for the illegal incursion into Cambodia and Laos.