News Cut Category Archive: Health

Who smokes synthetic pot?

Posted at 12:13 PM on February 9, 2012 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health

It's been a few weeks since there's been any sort of dust-up surrounding the legal head shop in downtown Duluth, The Last Place on Earth. The shop sells synthetic marijuana.

Jonathan Bothun posted a video on Perfect Duluth Day asking a good question as, he says, a fact finding mission for a longer documentary: Who smokes synthetic pot and why?

Synthetic Marijuana: Man on the Street Questions from jonathan bothun on Vimeo.

In Sioux Falls, KELO TV reports on another growing problem surrounding stores that sell synthetic marijuana: dumpster divers.

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Do you know where your AED is?

Posted at 11:13 AM on February 7, 2012 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Health

An unidentified woman at the airport in Duluth is alive today, because someone knew where an automatic external defibrillator was located and used it to restart her heart.

Many companies -- I think mine is one of them, but I'm not entirely sure -- have AEDs tucked into a wall somewhere, but they're not helpful if people don't know where they are.

New Zealand has the right idea. There, volunteers have set up a directory of AED locations.

A company makes a wireless product that will automatically locate a nearby AED, but the $399 product is mostly intended for emergency responders and most of them already carry a defibrillator.

Then there's the matter of how to use the AED if you can find one. When your cubicle neighbor is toes up, you don't want to be reading instructions. Maybe this will help:

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Planned Parenthood supporters fill funding gap

Posted at 10:51 AM on February 2, 2012 by Bob Collins (11 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

The more we hear about The Susan G. Komen Foundation and Planned Parenthood, the more we wonder how they ever got together in the first place.

On MPR's Midmorning, this morning, Melinda Henneberger of the Washington Post, who writes on the She the People blog, considered the deep political ties of each side involved in Komen's decision to pull a grant from Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screening.

Nancy Brinker, the CEO of Susan G. Komen for the Cure and the sister of Susan G. Komen, is a well-connected Republican.

Brinker and her husband donated $125,000 to Republicans in the 2001-2003 election cycle, shortly before President Bush appointed her ambassador to Hungary.

"Komen, maybe not so incidentally, has a new relationship with the George W. Bush Institute, which is the policy arm of the presidential library which will open next year," she said. "And Planned Parenthood has strong Democratic ties. Its president, Cecile Richards, (is) the daughter of former late Texas Gov. Ann Richards, who was defeated by George W. Bush."

How badly will Komen's decision hurt Planned Parenthood? Not much, apparently. In the 24 hours since the decision was announced, small donors contributed more than $650,000 to Planned Parenthood, nearly matching the $680,000 grant Komen pulled, according to Henneberger.

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Andy Cook's biggest save

Posted at 2:38 PM on February 1, 2012 by Bob Collins (22 Comments)
Filed under: Health

"From the time I was three," Andy Cook says, "my ambition was to be an NHL goalie."

Cook isn't going to to be an NHL goalie, which might be the best thing that ever happened to a lot of other people. Today, he did something more courageous than standing in front of a black piece of rubber heading for him at more than 100 mph: He told his story about the mental illness that derailed his career, even though he's not entirely sure how it'll be received. It has a message he wants others to hear.

His career track was on schedule after high school when he was named starting goalie as a freshman at Colby College in Maine. Suddenly, one January day, he was virtually unable to leave his dorm room, and he wasn't sure why. His goalie play suffered.

"I thought maybe I was homesick so I left and transferred to St. John's to be closer to home," he said today. His mind was turning on him but he didn't consider the possibility of a mental illness. How could it be? He was an athlete and he was a "straight A" student. "I know now that all of these things (anxiety and depression going back to high school days) were connected, but at the time I just figured these are the things were part of being me."

After one year in Minnesota, he returned to Colby and his hockey coach took him back. His play didn't improve and in his senior year, he quit hockey. The dream was finished.

He graduated in 2009 with a degree in political science and returned to Minnesota to work in the communications office at the House Republican Caucus. He worked hard, he said, and masked the struggle from colleagues. "I had no hope," he said. "I couldn't see how anything could get any better."

He never contemplated taking his own life, although he acknowledges being in a high-rise office with large glass windows once when "this thought popped into my head that I could jump through the window and that would be it," he said. "That's when I knew this was not normal."

He sought help when "I was walking down a hallway in the State Office Building and this wave hit me and I said, 'I cannot do this forever.'" He went outside, called his mother, and found a therapist who specialized in athletes.

That's when he began to understand that people like him can have a mental illness. "Having someone tell me, 'you're not going to lose the things about you that you like,' was really important," he said. "And I realized this is a physiological illness."

He was diagnosed with mild depression and an anxiety disorder. The therapy that he initially thought wouldn't work, worked. Medication followed and has made a difference.

Cook worked up the strength to confront the stigma of mental illness and tell his boss, "and he said 'all we're interested in is you getting better,'" he said.

"We think of people who have cancer as being courageous, and they are," he said. "But the person who is suffering from depression and can't get out of bed in the morning, but they pull themselves up and they go off to work, they're courageous, too."

With plenty of help from others, Cook has pulled himself back. He's working in the development department at Regions Hospital, competing in triathlons, coaching the goalies on the Cretin Derham girl's hockey team, volunteering at his hospital's mental health unit, and also helping in the planning of Region's mental health facility, which will open in December.

"You can see it rising up as you drive in on I-94," he said. "It's a big building and that's a statement that means a lot."

He's also not worrying about the future. "I have no idea what the future will bring," he says, acknowledging that he often did. "I just want to make the most of it."

A few weeks ago, Sue Abderholden of the National Alliance on Mental Illness Minnesota spoke to a group where Cook works. "She was giving her presentation on the barriers caused by stigma and what we can do to overcome it," he said. "And she said we need to tell our stories."

That's when Cook decided to "pay it forward for all of the people who helped me" and tell the story of his personal struggle. "You don't have to be in such an acute condition to go get help. It's not any different than any other illness."

And you'll still have the things about you that you like.

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State gives up in fight to store genetic information

Posted at 1:21 PM on January 31, 2012 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Health

You don't usually see press releases from state agencies as pointed as the one from the Minnesota Department of Health today. The department announced that it's destroying "blood spots" taken from newborns under the state's newborn screening program. The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled last November that the department couldn't hold onto the samples (see the MPR story).

Here's the full release:

The Minnesota Department of Health has been given permission by Hennepin County District Court Judge Mel Dickstein to begin destroying the blood spot collection cards of approximately 200 infants born each day in Minnesota in order to comply with a recent Minnesota Supreme Court decision. The destruction will include all those specimens received on or after Nov.16, 2011, the date of the Supreme Court decision.

Judge Dickstein ruled after a Jan. 26 hearing that the department may begin the process of destroying the specimens on Jan. 27, the day after a 71-day retention period sought in court filings. Seventy-one days is the amount of time needed to assure confirmation of a positive diagnosis for the 53 heritable or congenital disorders screened for by the Newborn Screening Program.

"For the first time in almost 20 years, we're going to begin destroying a valuable public health resource, the residual blood spots from about 200 babies born in Minnesota each day," said Minnesota Health Commissioner Dr. Edward Ehlinger. "While we are aware that destroying newborn screening blood spots after 71 days will compromise our ability to assure the quality and accuracy of the newborn screening program, we believe it is necessary to take this step in order to comply with the Supreme Court's decision in the Bearder case."

In the case known as Bearder vs. State of Minn., the Minnesota Supreme Court said the department could retain the blood spots only as long as necessary for "testing the samples for heritable and congenital disorders." The court concluded that the 2006 Genetic Information Act mandated that any other use, storage, or dissemination of the blood samples required written informed consent from parents or legal guardians.

Due to the court's restriction on the use of the blood spots without consent, MDH officials said the program will be hampered in its ability to:

Conduct routine quality assurance and quality control tests of existing screening methods
Evaluate improved tests to screen for current disorders
Validate testing procedures or calibrate instruments to run new screening tests
For example, under the limitations of the court ruling and the Genetic Information Act, implementation of a new screening test for Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID) will be delayed. MDH will have to purchase previously consented specimens from another state to test the lab methods and instruments in order to validate the test. A test must be validated before it can be used to provide results to patients. Additionally, specimens from another state will not be representative of the characteristics of Minnesota babies, such as race or ethnicity, so the validation may not be as robust for Minnesota's population, program officials said.

In addition, storage of the residual dried blood spots provides other benefits to Minnesota families:

>> The baby's screening tests can be repeated if needed without getting another blood sample from the baby.

>>The baby's sample is available to parents for other health-related testing (for example, in the case of unexplained deaths such as SIDS*).

>>The baby's sample is available to parents to help identify a missing or deceased child.

Storage provides a permanent record that MDH completed the screening.

In order to comply with the Supreme Court ruling, the department determined that it needed to destroy the spots. However, two new lawsuits filed against the department, alleging violation of the Genetic Information Act, require that all evidence pertaining to the suits, including blood spots, be retained. Thus, the department concluded that it could not comply with the Supreme Court ruling with regard to babies born since the ruling without being liable for charges of spoliation of evidence in the other cases. So the department sought and was granted an emergency protective order in Hennepin County District Court, where the lawsuits were filed, that gave permission to destroy bloodspot specimens received on or after Nov. 16.

According to the department's plan, all blood spots will be destroyed after 71 days have elapsed since the specimen was received. The spots will be destroyed on a daily basis using the Public Health Laboratory's currently approved methods. For those babies who are found to be affected by one of the heritable or congenital newborn screening disorders, newborn screening staff will seek consent from the parents to retain the spots for future use, such as the improvement of current tests. The records of the results from all screens will be kept for two years as required by federal law, and then destroyed.

Currently, every baby born in Minnesota, within 24-48 hours after birth, has drops of blood placed on a specimen collection card. The cards are sent to MDH for analysis of 53 rare but treatable disorders that can only be found before symptoms occur through newborn screening. If left untreated, the disorders lead to illness, physical disability, mental retardation, or death. Medications or changes in diet help prevent most health problems caused by disorders that are identified through newborn screening. Though newborn screening is mandated, parents and legal guardians may choose to refuse screening of their child or to have their child screened, but to have the spots and test results destroyed.

In 2009, nine families filed the Bearder lawsuit in Hennepin County District Court claiming the newborn screening program fell under the Genetic Information statute and blood spots and data were being stored in violation of the statute. MDH argued that the Genetic Information Act did not apply because the newborn screening statutes gave it "express authorization" to run the program. The District and Appeals Courts agreed, but the Supreme Court disagreed, finding that the newborn screening statutes give "express authorization" only for certain components of the program.

Ehlinger said the department will be pursuing legislation this session that aims at fixing problems with existing statutes. "We will be working with our many public health and children's health partners to seek changes to the newborn screening and genetic information statutes that are needed to maintain the quality program that protects babies and for which Minnesota is recognized nationally," he said.

The action comes six years after some medical privacy advocates called for an end to the storage of genetic information by the state without consent.

Here is last November's full Supreme Court ruling.

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Allergic to cold?

Posted at 3:18 PM on January 24, 2012 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health

What must it be like to literally be allergic to cold weather and live in Minnesota?

The Mayo Clinic National Institutes of Health reports the discovery of a genetic mutation in 27 people from three families who all had "cold urticaria" mixed with other immune system abnormalities and disorders, USA Today reports.

What's it like? Here's the description of Grant Schlager, 12, of Jackson, Minnesota:

So that means he can't play in the cold for hours, the way many Minnesota kids do. "After 15 minutes, my dad or mom will check me to see if I have any bumps," the fifth-grader says. If he is breaking out or feeling itchy, he has to go inside for a while. Swimming in cold water is risky, and so is drinking an icy soda. Just to be safe, he takes a twice-daily antihistamine and stays close to an EpiPen (a dose of epinephrine) -- the same stuff kids with peanut and bee-sting allergies need to inject if they have a life-threatening reaction.

What's additionally fascinating about the story is the number of people who have come forward -- in this case in the comments attached to the USA Today article -- to say, "me too."

I went through this exact experience in 8th grade. It came out of nowhere on a windy day in Chicago. All through high school no one believed me that I was allergic to body temperature change. I finally found a medication balance that works for me (Singular & Zrytec). It still comes every now and then, but it's more manageable than before. I hope your daughter has found a balance! It's an annoying condition that you just have to learn to adapt to.

The CBC this week carried more on allergies to cold, interviewing a woman in Manitoba whose daughter got hives whenever her skin touched snow. Listen to the interview.

"Why do you live here," the CBC host asked.

"We've lived here all of our lives," she said.

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The world of the teenage cooks

Posted at 12:47 PM on January 13, 2012 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Two separate stories in the news today link teenagers and cooked meat. Has that ever happened before?

First, the Associated Press reports, teenagers in South Dakota are being taught how to cook -- and develop a taste for -- bison:

One of more than 30 students from the Flandreau Indian School to take part in cooking workshops with bison as the main ingredient, Blackbird said he now knows how to whip up his own dishes with bison, which has less fat and fewer calories than beef.

"I make basic stuff: tacos, enchiladas, spaghetti, lasagna," Blackbird said.

SDSU researchers want other teenagers to follow Blackbird's lead, creating a market within the tribe for the next 40 to 50 years and changing the way members think about the animal.

The second unrelated story, however, offers this warning: Don't make bison kabobs, or any other kabob, apparently.

NPR's food blog is carrying the story of 29 teenagers in Minnesota, who got sick after they hunted, processed and cooked white-tailed deer, as part of an an outdoor recreation and environmental science class. The problem? They made kabobs:

Unusual as this tale sounds, it carries a food safety lesson for those of us who have not once butchered a deer for homework. The epidemiologists who investigated the outbreak think the teens may have been more likely to be infected with E. coli because they cooked the venison as kabobs.

"One of the risk factors was consuming undercooked meat, or if they reported the interior of the venison kabob being pink," Josh Rounds, an epidemiologist who investigated the outbreak for the Minnesota Department of Health, told The Salt. "We theorize that piercing the meat with the kabob skewer would be a way to introduce bacteria from the exterior of the meat to the interior."

The incident happened last November, but is being reported as a case study this month in a medical journal.

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Depression in the open

Posted at 11:51 AM on January 4, 2012 by Bob Collins (18 Comments)
Filed under: Health

For many people waging war against their own brain, the struggle with depression is often a struggle with loneliness. It's what leads many people to suicide -- the notion that not only is there no hope, but that there is a "failure" involved because few other people seem to be facing similar battles. That's one of the side effects of the societal "norms" that if you've got a mental illness, you best keep it to yourself.

Occasionally, we get a rare glimpse of how many people are facing a similar struggle. Today is one of those days.

Todd Tweedy of St. Paul, left a disturbing message on his Facebook page, and then disappeared yesterday.

One illness I've never been able to defeat is my own depression. I have to say goodbye now. I wish each of you a wonderful New Year!

His friends are trying to find him, and others are trying to reach him in a different way -- by revealing their own struggles.

Like this:

I am praying for your safe return. We don't know each other, but I can relate, as I have battled depression for some time, especially after losing my husband to cancer. So many people love and care about you, and they need you. They all want to help you. I pray that the Lord wraps his arms around you and keeps you safe, and that help is on the way.

and this...

Todd, I saw this post on a friend's wall and in the off chance you might be reading this, please know that you are NOT alone, no matter how much it might feel that way. I have lived a life with Bipolar and well know the feeling of total and utter defeat. The gut-wrenching agony to the point where you just cant take one more second of it. I know the torment of not being able to get out of bed yet not being able to sleep. Let me tell you no matter how bad it seems at any given moment, it DOES and WILL get better. I swear it.

On top of Bipolar, my childhood was one that no one should ever have to experience and by God's grace (and 1 very amazing friend) I made it through the darkness. Let me tell you the light on the other side, not the tunnel of light many talk about after death, but the life of LIFE when you do break through...is simply, indescribably wonderful. You owe it to yourself and your family to fight through and find you light in this world!

I am now and will continue to pray for you and for your family with all of my heart. Even though you don't know me, I am up late, usually all night and I will leave FB open. If you want to talk, about anything at all, to someone who knows exactly what you are feeling, I am here. No questions asked, no need to reveal your location, just talk. Also if it isn't too much to ask, could you please let someone, anyone, know that you are safe?

May God bless you in a very real and tangible way RIGHT NOW to show you just how much you ARE LOVED! May you feel the love of your brothers and sisters (we are ALL God's children) at home and all around the world. Here is a big *hug* from someone way out in California who doesn't know you from Adam in reality but cares for you none the less!

It's an extraordinary outpouring that puts depression where it belongs -- in the open, and shared honestly.

Let's hope it works.

Mr. Tweedy drives a red Volkswagen Passat with Minnesota plate 545 BLM. He's 47, 6'3", 190 pounds and probably doesn't know how many people want him to come home.

Update 6:41 a.m. 1/5 - He's been found OK in western Wisconsin.

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The cozy deals between medical companies and doctors explored

Posted at 1:05 PM on December 27, 2011 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Health

When it comes to writing research papers, doctors are the medical equivalent of journalists. In the ethics department, the two often couldn't be further apart. Few news organizations would put up with a journalist reporting on products while taking money from the manufacturers of the products. But in the world of health care, that's the way the game is played and the head of health care organizations often don't seem to have much of a problem with it.

A couple of stories in the news today underscore the point.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports today on the relationship between Medtronic and Thomas Zdeblick, the chairman of orthopedics at the University of Wisconsin Madison medical school. He received more than $25 million in royalties from the company since 2003, covering the time when the University of Wisconsin Hospital spent $27 million for Medtronic spinal products

"I really don't know how you would manage that conflict of interest," said Jordan Cohen, a former president of the American Association of Medical Colleges. "It (his financial relationship with Medtronic) is bothersome."

Cohen, a professor of public health at George Washington University, said it would be

What does a conflict of interest look like? It may well be a research paper touting the benefits of a product without disclosing the author's financial interest in the product, the paper says:

Consider the issues involved in a single 2003 study authored by Zdeblick and two non-UW doctors who have received millions of dollars from Medtronic. Those surgeons and others with ties to the firm have been criticized for failing to connect the Medtronic spine surgery product BMP-2 with several serious complications in their published research.

The study was published in the journal at which Zdeblick is editor-in-chief. And the study involved another product, the LT-Cage, from which Zdeblick receives royalties. None of his royalties - or those of the other authors - is from BMP-2.

In unusually glowing language, the 2003 study declared the product could become "the new gold standard" in spine surgery - and then the authors went on to say the product was being used "exclusively" at their institutions.

But is it a situation people are concerned about? Take this comment from a reader:

Whats the issue? The guy is well regarded in the industry. The relationship is disclosed and he doesnt receive any commissions from products used at UW. This is the exact incentive you want to give people/doctors -- you want the best and you want to give them incentives to come up with new advancements in medicine. An extreme example of media bias that doesnt make sense.

The story comes just a week after the University of Minnesota announced it would not discipline a spine surgeon for failing to disclose his financial relationship with Medtronic in his two published papers presented at a scientific conference.

At the same time, the Saint Paul Pioneer Press has been reporting recently on the cushy relationship between health care institutions and drug companies, which it says involves much more money than payments to individual doctors in Minnesota.

In all of these cases, few officials seem concerned about the perception of impropriety in the relationship between drug/device makers and the doctors/institutions.

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Time travel: Minnesota's mental health treatment facility

Posted at 12:54 PM on December 23, 2011 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Health

When you read the first two paragraphs in today's Star Tribune story about the way Minnesota treated mentally ill patients in St. Peter, you may have to struggle to remember that this is the 21st century.

Two mentally ill patients at the Minnesota Security Hospital in St. Peter were repeatedly abused by staff members -- including, for one patient, being forced to sleep on a concrete slab for 25 nights -- according to a yearlong investigation by the state Human Services Department.

The abuse, which included isolating the two for extended periods and wrapping their faces in mesh rags, took place in late 2010 and led to a much wider investigation. That examination found evidence that staffers covered up abuses and repeatedly violated isolation and restraint policies.

None of the employees implicated in the abuse has been fired and all continue to work at the hospital, the paper said.

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The dog cure

Posted at 2:12 PM on December 21, 2011 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health

If there were true justice in the world, dogs would live longer. That much was reinforced today when the CBS morning news program focused on a pet therapy program at Children's Hospital in Saint Paul.

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A cure for the common cold

Posted at 10:46 AM on December 20, 2011 by Bob Collins (9 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Science

I've been in house confinement for more than a week now, growing more frustrated each day that for all of its accomplishments, science still hasn't beaten the common cold virus.

But maybe it's about to.

The BBC reports today that Todd Rider, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is developing an antiviral drug that's proven it works against 15 viruses -- including the common cold -- to which it has been applied in mice.

But other scientists are skeptical because the research was published in a journal that doesn't have a peer-review system. They also note a breakthrough could be years away from being tested on humans.

In the meantime, the rest of us will continue to be smitten by viruses passed to us, no doubt, by the colleague who came to work sick to show what a team player he/she is.

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Suicide and the Minnesota National Guard

Posted at 10:33 AM on December 19, 2011 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health

The head of the Minnesota National Guard today said his organization has been singled out for "unsubstantiated notoriety" over the number of military suicides.

Maj. Gen. Rick Nash, adjutant general of Minnesota, told a joint legislative hearing today that suicide is increasing among the entire population, not just the military.

"Since 2007, 24 service members have died by suicide. Each circumstance was unique. Two-thirds had never deployed; that's an important detail because it's a common assumption that suicides are the result of post traumatic stress disorder. This is not true," Nash said.

Minnesota National Guard's 24 suicides are more than any other state, but Nash said only two suicides occurred among active duty soldiers.

"On the two days per month that the part-time force assembles, I can say with certainty, a soldier or airman at risk of suicide is actively engaged by his or her battle buddy or wingman. Our team is trained and ready to link that service member with the resources he or she needs," he said.

Nash said so far in 2011, 34 National Guard soldiers have taken advantage of a program to intervene with soldiers who may be at risk of suicide. Nash was overcome briefly when he told of one soldier who came forward, "after spending the previous evening with a shotgun on his lap."

Saying suicide is a statewide problem, Nash urged lawmakers to fund suicide prevention efforts. But he also said the Legislature should be looking at ways to eliminate some of the contributing factors.

"While I was there (in Kuwait last month) ... we received data from soldier surveys that indicated 28% of that force would be facing unemployment challenges when they returned home. Other sources report... we continue to endure more than 12 percent of our veterans unemployed. Eighteen percent of the women in the Minnesota National Guard are unemployed."

"Why are we unemployed after all this time serving our country?" he asked.

Greg Roberts of Bemidji , a sergeant who served in Bosnia and Iraq, told the committee that returning soldiers face the reality of a changed homefront.

"When you're gone for nearly two years, you spend so much time thinking about home. It's one of the things that keeps you going on bad days. When you get home, it's not what you remember it to be. It's the same, but you're different. Being home is the second war nobody talks about. "

Roberts said he didn't get much of a chance to "meld our military lives and our civilian lives."

"We got put on a bus, sent home, and that was it," he said.

Roberts said he "drank profusely" for three or four months when he returned to Minnesota. "Nobody around me I can relate to, I didn't feel like anybody understood what I was going through with the exception of my Army buddies I served with. Our experience was unique," he said. "But I was not in a position to have contact with them. Due to the nature of PTSD, you avoid anything that reminds you of war. We all avoided each other and it created a situation where we're all hurting in our own ways, we didn't want anything to do with each other. The tragedy is they're really the only ones who could help. They understood what I was going through and I understood what they were going through, but there was no contact. They're the best resources for preventing suicide."

He said the one day they didn't all avoid each other was the day after a colleague killed himself.

(MPR's Tom Robertson provided this story about Sgt. Roberts in February 2010)

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Sex and the teenage brain

Posted at 3:37 PM on December 1, 2011 by Bob Collins (9 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Ohio State University has released research claiming that teenagers who have sex may be at a greater risk of depression and weaker brain development. Maybe.

The problem is the closest test subject researchers could find to a typical teen is a 40-day-old hamster, according to LiveScience.com.

When placed in water, the animals that had sex at 40 days were more likely to stop swimming vigorously, a symptom of depression, than the other three groups. All of the sexually active hamsters showed higher levels of anxiety, measured by willingness to explore a maze, than the virgin hamsters.

The group that had sex in adolescence also showed less complexity in the brain's dendrites, the branching extensions of neurons that receive messages from other nerve cells.

"We used the opportunity to have sex, which naturally increases testosterone levels, to see whether these experiences during early life would have long-term consequence," co-author Zachary Weil, a research assistant professor of neuroscience at Ohio State, told LiveScience.

"There is previous evidence that the age of first sexual experiences correlates with mental health issues in humans," Weil said. "But with all human research, there are a number of other variables involved, such as parental supervision and socioeconomic status, that may be involved with both the age of first experience and depression."

Study researcher Randy Nelson, neuroscience professor and chair at Ohio State, cautioned people not to use the study to promote teen abstinence, because the test subjects were hamsters.

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'When death feels like a good option'

Posted at 10:57 AM on December 1, 2011 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Here I am again, violating the cardinal rule of the news media: If you talk about suicide, there'll be more suicides. I'm pretty sure News Cut doesn't have the influence to lead people to take their own lives (please eschew the obvious joke; this is a serious post), and people who kill themselves don't suddenly realize there's a thing called suicide that they didn't know about until they read about it on a blog, or a newspaper, saw it on TV, or heard about it on the radio.

All of this serves as introduction to a blog post this week from funny guy Ben Huh, founder of the Cheezburger Network, who lives in Seattle.

In "When Death Feels Like A Good Option," Huh describes spending a week in his room contemplating suicide at the age of 23, and how leaving "a really bad situation to go to a bad situation" actually helped:

I spent a week in my room with the lights off and cut off from the world, thinking of the best way to exit this failure. Death was a good option -- and it got better by the day.

I don't remember why I left my room. The most meaningful act I performed on my long climb out was to leave that room. It was the best decision I made in my life. I left that room and I got back to my job managing a very dysfunctional Internet radio startup where I was the cause of the dysfunction. It was a actually a positive thing that I left that room to leave a really bad situation to go to a bad situation.

It wasn't for several months that death no longer became an option, but leaving that room and dealing with reality was the best antidote to a make-belief world where life just wasn't worth it. When I was fantasizing about death as the panacea, the harshness of reality actually helped -- it presented me with problems that I could actually solve.

Find the entire post here.

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The mammogram debate stirs anew

Posted at 11:11 AM on November 29, 2011 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Two years ago this month, a government working group issued new guidelines for women: Get a regular mammogram starting at age 50. It also said mammograms for women in their 40s do not outweigh the risks involved, specifically unnecessarily biopsies.

Today in Chicago, researchers will present their study which says women in their 40s should be getting annual mammograms. That should clear things up.

The findings suggest annual mammograms are beneficial for all women in their 40s, said study researcher Dr. Stamatia Destounis, a radiologist at Elizabeth Wende Breast Care, LLC, in Rochester, N.Y.

"We're identifying a considerable number of breast cancers in that age group," said study researcher Dr. Stamatia Destounis, a radiologist at Elizabeth Wende Breast Care in Rochester, N.Y.

"To do screening early is always better than not," another researcher told LiveScience.com, although she acknowledges there's no evidence that mammograms prolong women's lives.

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Study: More kids blowing out knees

Posted at 8:07 AM on November 19, 2011 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Health

We've observed here on numerous occasions that kids don't play pick-up sports games anymore. Everything is organized under the watchful eyes of adults.

Now, there's growing evidence that's not such a great thing for a lot of kids, if that's the only physical activity they have. More kids are blowing out their knees in sports because they haven't matured physically to meet the demands being placed upon them.

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Cancer's 'what if?' game

Posted at 1:33 PM on November 9, 2011 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Science

Some days it's hard not to play the "what if?" game in the news. What if one day soon, a cure for cancer is discovered?

It's a game being played in the "News Cut Cubicle" because today comes news that a new vaccine has shown some promise when given to women who had breast or ovarian cancer. The vaccine cause the breast cancer's progress to stall for almost three months. The ovarian cancer's spread was stopped for two months.

In one woman -- a young woman whose cancer had her liver, and to her lymph nodes in her chest -- is now cancer free and has been for four years.

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Insurance company reverses rejection of 'hero's' medical claim

Posted at 3:57 PM on October 24, 2011 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Health

The heart -- or possibly, a good head for public relations -- has won out in the story on 5x8 this morning about the Joplin tornado "hero" who was stuck with a $2.5 million health care bill when his insurance company rejected his claim.

"Upon further review of the case, and receiving additional information on the facts involved in this situation, Accident Fund believes the appropriate decision is to honor Mr. Mark Lindquist's claim for worker's compensation benefits," Mike Britt, president of the Lansing, Mich.-based insurance company, said (reported in the Chicago Tribune). "We are committed to working with Mr. Lindquist to ensure he receives all the benefits to which he is entitled and helping him to recover from his injuries."

Mark Lindquist was badly hurt when he tried save three special needs adults. Lindquist said he never even considered trying to get away from the tornado and leaving behind the three men under his care, the newspaper said.

(h/t: Matt Sepic)

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The ER wait

Posted at 11:14 AM on October 14, 2011 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health

A colleague told me of a visit to a Twin Cities hospital ER last weekend, which featured a waiting room full of people and little hope that a physical ailment would get treated quickly. Most of the people waiting for help, she said, were there for mental health issues.

Now, a new study out this week confirms that the growing number of ER visits for children is chiefly because of mental health woes.

"These patients are often in the emergency room for longer than many other patients, and need the most consultations," Dr. Zachary Pittsenbarger, of Chidren's Hospital Boston, tells LiveScience.com. "We need to find out why they are there, and whether they could be better served in an outpatient clinic."

Pittsenbarger is presenting his findings at a conference in Boston today.

He says the biggest likely problem for increased ER visits is parents can't find outpatient services for their children with mental health needs, a common complaint when MPR News took a look at Minnesota's mental health system more than seven years ago.

In one case we profiled then, a teenager had to wait three months for help, and that's not at all uncommon in this and many other states.

There is also, of course, the matter of fewer people with health insurance who have no other place to turn besides the ER, and a shorter, but still torturous, wait.

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The prostate gamble

Posted at 12:58 PM on October 10, 2011 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health

There are some things guys don't want to talk about...

The goal of the Branko the Prostate Czech advertising campaign (no, really, you must check the website) is to try to use humor to get people to talk about prostate cancer.

But no humor was necessary to get people talking about a study late last week that said a fairly routine prostate test -- the so-called PSA blood test -- does little to save lives.

The problem, the study said, is the "cure" -- invasive biopsies, for example -- can be worse than the disease, in this case low-level threats to a man's health that show up as cancer.

"I agree with some of the points they're making," Dr. Badrinath Konety, a urologist at the University of Minnesota, told MPR's Lorna Benson. "But I also am not sure that the current state of the data that's out there supports the strength of their recommendation."

That put him a little at odds with Dr. Timothy Wilt, an internist and a professor at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine, who is also a member of the task force making the recommendations.

"What we know from the good medical science is that PSA testing does not reduce prostate cancer deaths or help a man live longer," he told NPR's Melissa Block.

Case closed? Hardly.

There's always the story about the guy whose life was saved as a result of the test.

That's Will Hubel's story. The Langlois, Oregon man wrote us with it after Friday's news.

At age 64, I've been pretty hit and miss about the PSA test. Last November my PSA went up from a below one to 4.6, but I had a negative digital exam and no inflammation. My MD recommended waiting a few months and repeating the test. By then I had moved to Oregon and through some confusion it took 3 months to get the results, which by then the PSA was 6.1.

I found a urologist, that spoke very down to earth like I would talk to someone. We decided to proceed with a biopsy, given my age etc. The biopsy showed stage 2 cancer in two masses, but probably still limited to my prostate.

I've decided, after talking to 3 doctors, a homeopath and an acupuncturist, and a few close friends, my wife, and wives of deceased friends, that I'll have the surgery. Without the test, I wouldn't have known I had cancer.

The description by Dr Tim Wilt was very much unlike what he describes. First there is really only one type of cancer found in the prostate. The cancer considered more aggressive is when it has spread outside the prostate. The men who are dying in my age group are the ones whose cancer has gone undetected.

Maybe the chances of harm from the test are higher than the chances of discovering something that can kill you. Both present a gamble that men have to make.

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Pulling for a coach

Posted at 11:01 AM on September 29, 2011 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Sports

As far as I can tell, there aren't many people who haven't been charmed by Jerry Kill, the football coach for your University of Minnesota Gophers. He's quite a character and seems to be a likeable guy. And you have to respect a man who won't talk to Sid Hartman.

But the dark side, as we now know, is Kill has a health problem of unspecified sort, which caused him to collapse at the end of one game this year, and sent him to Mayo Clinic after another game last weekend, taking what was reported as a leave of absence from the program for as long as it took to find out what's wrong.

When he returned to the practice field yesterday, he said the report that he'd "checked himself in" at the Mayo, was incorrect, as was the report of a leave of absence. And he insisted that doctors are tweaking his medication to prevent the estimated 20 seizures he has a week, which he indicated in a news conference a week or so ago.

Still, his quote -- reported in the Star Tribune today -- is cringe worthy to anyone who's had a father or uncle or brother with a serious medical problem who declared, "it ain't nothin'."

"I can't take two weeks off. I can't take three weeks off. Minnesota hired me to turn a program around, so that's what I'm trying to do. I can't do it not being here. If I have to be a little different at practice or whatever, that's fine. But I have to be here."

That comes on the heels of a news conference on September 20 that set a new local record for tough talk from a coach in Minnesota:

It's hard to hear those words without thinking about a 2009 study that said men with "macho attitudes" are less likely to seek health care, or the analysis of that study that suggested that -- at least for the health problems cited -- they were right.

We have to take the coach at his word, believe that he has his priorities in order, and assume he's not in any life-threatening danger. There's zero evidence that we know more about the threat to the coach's health than he and his family do, nor that we're in a better position to decide what's best for him.

But on Sunday morning, for example, Twitter lit up with concern for the guy and a hope that he can get whatever medical problems he has under control, regardless of what it means on Saturday afternoons.

That concern in Gopher Nation does not appear to be because it needs him to fix a football program, a testament to how quickly he's worked his way into Minnesota's heart.

Minnesota wants a winner, but this ain't Texas.

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Suicides in Minnesota

Posted at 12:23 PM on September 28, 2011 by Bob Collins (11 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Let's reopen an old wound. Why don't news organizations report suicides and when they do report suicides, how do they decide which ones are worthy?

The question resurfaces after last week's coverage (including on NewsCut) of the suicide of 14-year-old Jamey Rodermeyer, who took his own life, apparently after being bullied in his first weeks of high school.

Suicide, as I've written here plenty of times, is an epidemic, yet we don't connect the dots with only occasional coverage of a suicide here or there -- the slumber party that ended in a suicide pact in Marshall, the suicide in New London that got coverage because a father spoke out about it and because it was the second one in town, or the suicide that is news because of the murder that preceded it.

In Minnesota, the latest statistics say, suicide dropped by 17 from 2008 to 2009. Someone took their own life every 38 hours in the state instead of every 39 hours.

While 15-24 year olds accounted for the most suicides by age group (82), it was only one more than the 50-54 year old age group. But suicides of people in their 50s accounted for 1 of every four suicides.

Today, columnist Tina Dupuy says it's time for a different approach to covering this:

I don't know how to eradicate bullying. I don't know if we need more people in jail in this country, especially teenagers like those who bullied Jamey. I don't know how to make kids nicer to each other. I don't know how to make being a teenager less painful.

I do know that suicide needs to be taken out of the closet. The idea that if we talk about suicide - if we read about it in the paper - it'll be so tempting more people will kill themselves is ridiculous. It reeks of superstition. Censoring stories doesn't save lives.

Eighteen U.S. military veterans a day kill themselves. It's a kind of Don't Ask, Don't Tell that's still being implemented. Over 6,500 vets a year die this way. That's more soldiers dying at home in one year than in 10 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. And among those currently serving, in 2010 suicide took more lives of our military personnel than battle. The problem is so prevalent Obama is the first President in history to send letters of condolences to military families of troops who committed suicide.

Suicides for Native American males ages 10-24 are almost three times the national average. Also, Alaska has the most suicides per capita. In case you think it's from lack of sunlight, New Mexico ranks number two. The vast majority of suicides are gun deaths.

Dupuy figures the suicide rate in America is probably rising. She speculates that as mental health services are cut, the number will rise. We'll see. It may not be an important issue outside of the circle of people and families who needed mental health services and the occasional police officer who has to live with killing one who didn't get them.

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How others treat the mentally ill

Posted at 1:54 PM on September 14, 2011 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Health

This is what mental health care looks like in Indonesia.

NPR.org has the hard-to-fathom look at what happens to the mentally ill in Indonesia. It's a post today that originated at Global Post.

Nengah, whose full name is confidential, suffers from schizophrenia. After the 35-year-old violently attacked her stepmother in a blind rage nine years ago, her family decided they had to restrain her.

Her situation improved after local psychiatrist Luh Ketut Suryani arrived in the village in June to find Nengah naked, caged and filthy. The doctor consulted the family and prescribed medication. Later, Suryani helped get Nengah's family to free her from bondage.

Nengah's situation is not unique in Indonesia, where the mentally ill are often locked in chicken coops or chained up in family yards to prevent them from disturbing the community.

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Not my kid

Posted at 2:38 PM on September 13, 2011 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Health

How clueless are parents when it comes to evaluating the likely use of alcohol and marijuana by their dear ones? Pretty clueless, a new study suggests.

The National Poll on Children's Health asked parents asked parents of teens about their perceived use of the substances by their own kids and other people's kids.

Only 1 in 10 believe their teens have drunk alcohol in the last year. Only 1 in 20 say their kid has used marijuana in the last year. It's possible they're right, but they're probably not.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse's most recent annual survey recently found 65 percent of high school seniors, 52 percent of 10th graders, and 29 percent of eighth graders have used booze in the last year.

More than a third of the 12th graders said they've used pot in the last year. Twenty-eight percent of tenth graders said they had, too.

The survey says, however, that parents are overestimating drug and alcohol abuse by other kids. They believe other kids -- 10th graders in this case -- use marijuana at the rate about about 40% and alcohol at the rate of about 60%.

But the data from the National Institutes of Health says they're not that far off.

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Everything you need to know about suicide

Posted at 12:54 PM on September 7, 2011 by Bob Collins (19 Comments)
Filed under: Health

People who follow me on Twitter probably know that I have a habit of reading every obituary in the Sunday paper, trying to pick out the people who took their own life. I don't do it for entertainment; I do it to see if there's any breakthrough in the willingness to confront an epidemic head-on by acknowledging it exists. Last Sunday, for example, one obituary for a 15-year old said only, the youngster "chose to be with the Lord."

This is National Suicide Prevention Week, something you're not likely to hear about because the journalism community generally believes that talk of suicide encourages suicide. But they give me this blog to make a difference.... so...

Here are some statistics, courtesy of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

General

-Over 34,000 people in the United States die by suicide every year.
-In 2007 (latest available data), there were 34,598 reported suicide deaths.
-Suicide is the fourth leading cause of death for adults between the ages of 18 and 65 years in the United States (28,628 suicides).
-Currently, suicide is the 11th leading cause of death in the United States.
-A person dies by suicide about every 15 minutes in the United States.
-Every day, approximately 90 Americans take their own life.
-Ninety percent of all people who die by suicide have a diagnosable psychiatric disorder at the time of their death.
-There are four male suicides for every female suicide, but three times as many females as males attempt suicide.
-There are an estimated 8-25 attempted suicides for every suicide death.

Youth

-Suicide is the fifth leading cause of death among those 5-14 years old.
-Suicide is the third leading cause of death among those 15-24 years old.
-Between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s, the suicide rate among U.S. males aged 15-24 more than tripled (from 6.3 per 100,000 in 1955 to 21.3 in 1977). Among females aged 15-24, the rate more than doubled during this period (from 2.0 to 5.2). The youth suicide rate generally leveled off during the 1980s and early 1990s, and since the mid-1990s has been steadily decreasing.
-Between 1980-1996, the suicide rate for African-American males aged 15-19 has also doubled.
-Risk factors for suicide among the young include suicidal thoughts, psychiatric disorders (such as depression, impulsive aggressive behavior, bipolar disorder, certain anxiety disorders), drug and/or alcohol abuse and previous suicide attempts, with the risk increased if there is situational stress and access to firearms.

Older People

-The suicide rates for men rise with age, most significantly after age 65.
-The rate of suicide in men 65+ is seven times that of females who are 65+.
-The suicide rates for women peak between the ages of 45-54 years old, and again after age 75.
-About 60 percent of elderly patients who take their own lives see their primary care physician within a few months of their death.
-Six to 9 percent of older Americans who are in a primary care setting suffer from major depression.
-More than 30 percent of patients suffering from major depression report suicidal ideation.
-Risk factors for suicide among the elderly include: a previous attempt, the presence of a mental illness, the presence of a physical illness, social isolation (some studies have shown this is especially so in older males who are recently widowed) and access to means, such as the availability of firearms in the home.

Depression

-Over 60 percent of all people who die by suicide suffer from major depression. If one includes alcoholics who are depressed, this figure rises to over 75 percent.
-Depression affects nearly 10 percent of Americans ages 18 and over in a given year, or more than 24 million people.
-More Americans suffer from depression than coronary heart disease (17 million), cancer (12 million) and HIV/AIDS (1 million).
-About 15 percent of the population will suffer from clinical depression at some time during their lifetime. Thirty percent of all clinically depressed patients attempt suicide; half of them ultimately die by suicide.
-Depression is among the most treatable of psychiatric illnesses. Between 80 percent and 90 percent of people with depression respond positively to treatment, and almost all patients gain some relief from their symptoms. But first, depression has to be recognized.

Alcohol and Suicide

-Ninety-six percent of alcoholics who die by suicide continue their substance abuse up to the end of their lives.
-Alcoholism is a factor in about 30 percent of all completed suicides.
-Approximately 7 percent of those with alcohol dependence will die by suicide.

Firearms and Suicide

A-lthough most gun owners reportedly keep a firearm in their home for "protection" or "self defense," 83 percent of gun-related deaths in these homes are the result of a suicide, often by someone other than the gun owner.
-Firearms are used in more suicides than homicides.
-Death by firearms is the fastest growing method of suicide.
-Firearms account for 50 percent of all suicides.

Medical Illness and Suicide

-Patients who desire an early death during a serious or terminal illness are usually suffering from a treatable depressive condition.
-People with AIDS have a suicide risk up to 20 times that of the general population.

And here are some resources in Minnesota.

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Is our love of hockey enforcers killing them?

Posted at 11:18 AM on September 3, 2011 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Sports

Earlier this year, former Minnesota Wild enforcer Derek Boogaard died from a combination of painkillers and alcohol. Rick Rypien, was found dead in his home in Alberta on Aug.15, an apparent suicide. Earlier this week, Wade Belak was found dead in a Toronto hotel on Aug. 31. His mother says he suffered with depression and anxiety.

Is there a link?

A neurosurgeon says a study of NHL enforcers has found serious brain injuries. Dr. Robert Cantu tells CBC News...

We've studied several deceased NHL players who were enforcers and the two that we brought public so far -- Reggie Fleming and Bob Probert -- both died with chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

We have also had a number of brains come to us, mostly from NFL players who committed suicide, and their brains have shown chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

So anytime I hear of an athlete who has had a lot of head trauma who commits suicide, I am immediately concerned that chronic traumatic encephalopathy may have played a role. And I would like to study their brain to see whether the presence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy is there.

Cantu says chronic traumatic encephalopathy makes it difficult to handle depressive emotions, and depression is linked to suicide.

He says NHL enforcers told him that about one out of every four or five times they fight, they suffer what sounds like a concussion.

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Heaven.

Posted at 7:30 AM on August 26, 2011 by Eric Ringham (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Life, When people do good

It's now two weeks since the last day of my vacation, when I took this not very good photo on the Heartland Trail between Walker and Akeley, Minn. It was a moment I wanted to remember: The trail was like a lesson on perspective in art class, heading perfectly straight to its vanishing point. The air was rich with forest smells. Not for the first time, I thought of what a gift these old railroad routes have become, and what a great way they are to travel through the woods.

For my money, the Heartland is the best, but I also admire the more challenging Paul Bunyan. What's the best bike trail in the state?

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Who's a good boy?

Posted at 3:44 PM on August 18, 2011 by Michael Olson (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Be sure to give Fido an extra pat on the head today after work. That good boy might be able to detect if you have cancer.

Four family dogs - two German shepherds, one Australian shepherd and one Labrador retriever - smelled test tubes containing breath samples of 220 patients, both those with lung cancer and those without it. The dogs were trained to lie down in front of the test tubes where they smelled lung cancer and touch the vial with their noses. According to the study, the dogs successfully identified lung cancer in 71 out of 100 patients with the disease. CNN

The American Cancer Society has embraced the idea.

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Why Sen. Scheid took the health care debate personally

Posted at 3:03 PM on June 3, 2011 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

Sen. Linda Scheid, a DFLer from Brooklyn Park, has entered hospice after an extended fight against cancer. There's really not a lot to say at a time like this that isn't already obvious. But a glance at her Caring Bridge guest book reveals quite a few entries from lawmakers past and present, from both the DFL and GOP, each written with a love and obvious respect that provides its own measure of comfort to the state.

Sen Scheid publicly revealed her cancer in March 2007. It was in the middle of a debate on a bill from Sen. Linda Berglin that established expenditure limits and insurance rate restrictions on health care. Sen. Berglin said the market-based means of controlling health care costs "doesn't work."

Sen. Scheid says she didn't like the bill because government health care doesn't work.

Despite her moving speech and acknowledgment of her illness, the bill passed the Minnesota Senate. It never got a hearing in the House.

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Enjoy sitting? We stand by you

Posted at 7:50 AM on May 12, 2011 by Jon Gordon (2 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Bob Collins is off today, and no one can do 5x8 like him, so we won't even try

This just in: The rapidly-spreading "Sitting is killing you" meme may killing you faster than sitting is killing you. It's producing a lethal cocktail of guilt for enjoying sitting and frustration over the inability to do much about it in the workplace.

You've seen this infographic, right?

Via: Medical Billing And Coding

Some people are, ahem, taking a stand -- take Steve Mullis of MPRnews.org, for example.

We even have a treadmill in the MPR newsroom now. Fighting the good fight.

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New ER opens in St. Paul

Posted at 3:13 PM on April 15, 2011 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health

A line of ambulances moving through the streets of St. Paul is like bait to old newspeople. It worked this afternoon, when an elderly one sprinted several blocks to witness the unfolding disaster that turned out not to be a disaster at all.

It was a parade to mark the opening of United Hospital's new emergency room. The new facility triples the size of the old one, doubles the number of beds and increases the annual capacity of patients from 44,000 to 58,000, according to the hospital's news release.

If you've ever been to United's old ER, you might well have experienced the pain of having to be wheeled to the other side of the hospital -- often through the middle of the hospital lobby -- to get to x-rays, ultrasound or CT scans. Those days are over. The equipment will now be available in the ER.

The new facility cost $25 million. It's named for Peter J. King, a member of the planning group for the ER. He died a month ago.

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Happy hour could save your life

Posted at 5:00 PM on April 12, 2011 by Michael Olson (2 Comments)
Filed under: Health

It's 5:00 and many worker-bees are heading to the pub to gather with friends and co-workers to raise a glass. Here's some fodder for your barroom banter:

The ills of alcohol are well known. However, study after study indicates that people who drink in moderation live longer and are happier. The studies point to alcohol's magical power to; increase your "good cholesterol," thin your blood of stroke-inducing clots and help your body absorb glucose.

These studies haven't helped to resolve why a drink or two a day can be good for you.

The inquisitive Canadians at the National Post apparently weren't pleased with these findings alone.

Further away from the hard science is some interesting speculation from Stephen Braun, the author of Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine:

...alcohol as a muscle relaxant. "The heart is a muscle and there are muscles around the blood vessels; so if you relax those muscles, you're going to lower the blood pressure," he says. "It's plausible."

How about alcohol as a mind relaxant or a stress reliever?

"You have to take into account the mind-body connection here," he says. "It does help people relax in more of a mental way. If you are relaxing your mind and that could lower your cortisol levels; it could have other physiological effects that come with relaxation that are good for you."

That being said, it still might be more beneficial to perform yoga than swig a bottle of beer. "Have a beer and do yoga and it'll probably be better," Braun says with a laugh.

Even better: have a beer, do yoga and invite some friends. People with more social connections are generally healthier and people tend to drink socially. So having a drink or two with friends is good for the soul and good for the body. The operative words are "a drink or two."

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STDs at record-high in Minnesota

Posted at 11:41 AM on April 6, 2011 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health

It's hard to believe the problem of sexually transmitted disease among Minnesotans could get worse. But, it did.

The Minnesota Department of Health's annual report on STDs shows record-high cases -- and that's just the ones that are reported.

"Chlamydia reached a record level of 15,294 cases this past year," Peter Carr, manager of the STD and HIV Section at MDH said in a news release. The number of syphilis cases rose to a 30-year high of 347 cases. Most of the syphilis cases involve men having sex with men.

Sixty-nine percent of the cases of chlamydia occurred in people between the ages of 15 and 24, and 63% of them occurred in suburbanites or in people in outstate Minnesota.

A Centers for Disease Control 2009 report said the state ranked 37th in the rate of syphilis.

In 2009, by the way, the rate of chlamydia in 15-24 year olds who were tested at family planning clinics, was half that of women tested at other sites.

Find the full report here.

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The lure of the hookah

Posted at 10:49 AM on April 6, 2011 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health

True or false: Hookahs are safer than cigarettes? False, according to the facts, but true according to a survey that's out today of some college kids, Live Science reports. Hookahs are gaining favor on campus, apparently.

The researchers found that 40.3 percent - more than one-third of the students surveyed - reported having ever smoked tobacco from a hookah, while only a slightly higher percentage (46.6) reported having ever smoked a cigarette. Nearly 25 percent of students reported being current smokers of cigarettes, and 17.4 percent said they actively use hookahs.

The survey results showed that freshmen and males were more likely to use hookahs, and that there was an association between those who used hookahs and those who smoked cigarettes, smoked marijuana, had a history of other illegal drug use, and had consumed alcohol in the 30 days prior to the survey.

Another study -- this one from the University of California San Diego -- found hookah use is increasing in high school, partly because it's perceived as more acceptable than cigarette smoking. The school's news release said...

Understanding the hookah habits of teens is important because a person's tobacco use pattern - whether or not, and how often - is usually established by age 18," said Al-Delaimy. "Hookah use is related to diseases, including coronary heart disease, adverse pulmonary effects and cancers of the lung, mouth and bladder. Hookah smoke also contains many of the same carcinogens and heavy metals as cigarette smoke; longer hookah smoking sessions, combined with increased smoke volume, makes it potentially more dangerous than cigarettes."

In Minnesota, however, hookah use still carries a stigma, a story in the U Daily said last fall. Many people think it's a bong.

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Church suppers will get you every time

Posted at 3:18 PM on March 24, 2011 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Religion

We acknowledge falling into the trap of academic public relations in telling you this, but a study out of Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine today says people who participate in religious activities are more likely to be obese.

But does that mean that participating in religious activities makes you fat?

"It's possible that getting together once a week and associating good works and happiness with eating unhealthy foods could lead to the development of habits that are associated with greater body weight and obesity," said Matthew Feinstein, the study's lead investigator.

The study tracked 2,500 men and women over 18 years who were 50 percent more likely to be obese by middle age after adjusting for differences in age, race, sex, education, income, and baseline body mass index, the survey said.

The study also acknowledges that "previous studies have shown religious people tend to live longer than those who aren't religious, in part because they tend to smoke less."

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The private lives of public individuals considered

Posted at 1:13 PM on February 15, 2011 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Health

There's a small update and a larger question about the Los Angeles TV reporter who had some sort of health problem that everyone but she and the TV station she works for seems ready to acknowledge.

Serene Branson talked unintelligibly in her live-shot from the Grammys. Her TV station said paramedics said she was fine and she refused treatment, although today the station says she's consulting a doctor.

"That's exactly the wrong thing," an expert on strokes tells the New York Times about her refusal to seek immediate help. "Even if it wasn't a stroke, you need to get it checked out. It's a tremendous opportunity for her to talk about what stroke is and what T.I.A. is, and what to do. You don't go home. This is a 911 scenario. Her risk of stroke for the first few days after an event like that is extremely high," according to Dr. Daniel Labovitz, assistant professor of neurology at Einstein School of Medicine and attending stroke neurologist at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.

Which brings up the question: Does a reporter have any obligation to reveal things about his/her personal life in the interest of telling a story that needs to be told?

"The nature of this kind of injury is that the patient is the last to know there is a problem," he said. "I would guess that until she saw the video she wasn't aware of how bad it was. You can only feel for her. She's got a real chance here to get a message out," Dr. Labovitz tells the New York Times.

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Live coverage of a stroke?

Posted at 10:55 AM on February 14, 2011 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Media

There's an awful story developing out of Los Angeles today, made worse by the initial viral nature of this video by people who at first thought it was funny. CBS reporter Serene Branson stumbled badly during a live report during the Grammy awards last night, giving every outward sign she was having a stroke.

(Update 2:21 p.m. - CBS is working hard to get all video of the incident taken down. As usual on the Internet, it pops up in different places every time they succeed in shutting one down.)

Unfortunately, we don't have anything more on the story except that Branson has been hospitalized. The station's Web site says nothing about the incident.

Update 1:02 p.m. - Station Web site says no hospitalization.

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Health care pushback

Posted at 11:38 AM on January 27, 2011 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

The White House has been cranking up the pushback against criticism of the new health care law.

Today, it's distributing the story of Kayla Holmstrom of Brookings, South Dakota, who was hurt in a motorcycle accident...

Today, however, things got a little hotter for the White House. A Virginia court expedited the challenge to the law's requirement that people buy health insurance.

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Opposition to health care bill fading?

Posted at 8:34 PM on January 16, 2011 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

Can America make up its mind?

This week, the Republican-controlled U.S.House will consider -- and likely approve -- legislation to repeal the health care bill. The GOP gained control, mostly on the strength of lingering anger that the bill was passed in the first place, according to many analysts.

Fast-forward from November, however, and it gets more confusing. A new poll from the Associated Press says only 1 in 4 of those surveyed favors repealing the health care bill.

Even among Republicans, the desire to repeal the law completely has diminished.

At the same time, however, opposition to the mandate that everyone carry health insurance remains strong.

Beyond that, however, the poll tells us nothing about why people's overall attitudes about the bill are changing.

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What about the mentally ill?

Posted at 10:45 AM on January 10, 2011 by Bob Collins (22 Comments)
Filed under: Health

After tragedies such as that which took place in Arizona on Saturday, what if people were as quick to ask about mental health services as they are to place events in a political equation?

Over the weekend, I asked such a question on Twitter and one reply was that Arizona Republicans pushed a health care package that cut mental health services. We have a hard time not framing things in the context of political philosophy.

Lots of radio talk shows -- including ours -- are asking about political rhetoric today. That's a valid topic, to be sure. But ignoring the aspect of the mentally ill seems invalid.

Time's Joe Klein phrases it this way:

Have we abdicated our responsibility, as a society, to protect ourselves from potentially harmful people like Loughner? We no longer lock up the mentally ill, which reflects two benign tendencies in society: we have become more humane and we have developed drugs that mitigate most forms of mental illness. My old mentor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, used to lament the explosion of homeless people in New York--the vast majority of them either mentally ill or drug addicts--and he wondered whether, in the name of humanity, we had become inhumane in the treatment of those who couldn't take care of themselves, even when medicated. A corollary worry was this: Had we exposed ourselves to more violent crimes by assuming the innocence of those, like Jared Loughner, who seemed capable of violence?

Merely "locking up the mentally ill" seems illogical, but how we get to them and provide help to them seem like a reasonable question, especially after Mr. Loughner's now well-documented community college behavior. Consider this e-mail from a student, obtained by the Washington Post:

"We have a mentally unstable person in the class that scares the living crap out of me. He is one of those whose picture you see on the news, after he has come into class with an automatic weapon. Everyone interviewed would say, Yeah, he was in my math class and he was really weird. I sit by the door with my purse handy. If you see it on the news one night, know that I got out fast..."

Seung-Hui Cho also showed signs of an untreated -- or not adequately treated -- mental illness just before he shot up Virginia Tech in 2005. A review panel assessed the availability and quality of treatment:

"Virginia's mental health laws are flawed and services for mental health users are inadequate. Lack of sufficient resources results in gaps in the mental health system including short term crisis stabilization and comprehensive outpatient services. The involuntary commitment process is challenged by unrealistic time constraints, lack of critical psychiatric data and collateral information, and barriers (perceived or real) to open communications among key professionals."

Dr. Keith Ablow, a FoxNews blogger, says the fact the suspected shooter in Arizona was mentally ill may have more to do with Saturday's events, than political rhetoric:

As a forensic psychiatrist who also has run community mental health centers, hospitals and clinics, I can tell you for sure, without any question, that the mental health care delivery system in this country is shoddy and shattered and without any hope at present of dealing effectively with sick individuals like Jared Loughner. There are slim resources and no strategy, whatsoever

Last year, Minnesota moved to cut the already patchwork services to the mentally ill. It was a budgetary issue, it was an issue over whether the role of government includes health care. It was never considered a public safety issue.

Is it?

Update 12:45 p.m. - MPR's Public Insight Network has been soliciting information about availability of mental health care in Minnesota. If you have information you'd like to share, please use this form.

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Health care repeal attempt: Whom do you believe?

Posted at 12:03 PM on January 6, 2011 by Bob Collins (7 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

Two of the main goals of House Republicans in Congress are repealing the health care bill and cutting the deficit. Today the Congressional Budget Office tossed a grenade into the plan when it issued a report suggesting repealing the health care bill will increase the deficit.

According to the CBO blog:

As a result of changes in direct spending and revenues, CBO expects that enacting H.R. 2 would probably increase federal budget deficits over the 2012-2019 period by a total of roughly $145 billion (on the basis of the original estimate), plus or minus the effects of technical and economic changes that CBO and JCT will include in the forthcoming estimate. Adding two more years (through 2021) brings the projected increase in deficits to something in the vicinity of $230 billion, plus or minus the effects of technical and economic changes.

The Congressional Budget Office acknowledged that the repeal of the health care law would allow health insurance premiums to drop slightly, but that's only a technical savings. Reality is much different.

Although premiums in the individual market would be lower, on average, under H.R. 2 than under current law, many people would end up paying more for health insurance--because under current law, the majority of enrollees purchasing coverage in that market would receive subsidies via the insurance exchanges, and H.R. 2 would eliminate those subsidies.

Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor dismissed the CBO's assessment. "I think what we do know is the health care bill costs over $1 trillion," Cantor said. "And we know it was full of budget gimmickry. And it spends money we don't have in this country."

Pick your poison.

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Death of a doc

Posted at 10:14 AM on December 31, 2010 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Icons

A few months ago on a segment of 5x8, I passed along this story of Dr. David Nichols, a doctor who "adopted" an island in the Chesapeake Bay and brought health care to those who needed it. Even after he retired, he continued to fly to the island. He said it was "a moral obligation."

Word comes today that Dr. Nichols died yesterday.

NBC's Nightly News did this segment on Dr. Nichols a few months ago. Here's a Kleenex.

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Trauma doc: 'Get off the roof!"

Posted at 11:09 AM on December 30, 2010 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health

A follow-up to the ice-dam item in this morning's Five by Eight (5x8) on News Cut:

The "Trauma Professional's Blog,' written by Dr. Mike McGonigal at Regions Hospital, carries a startling statistic:

There have been five admissions to Regions Hospital's Level I Trauma Center for adults after people fell from the roof in St. Paul since Christmas eve. All of them had serious injuries. Two died, and three sustained fractures involving elbow, spine or pelvis. I've seen lots of similar injuries after Christmas, when it's time to take the lights down.

It also took some issue with yesterday's statement from the City of St. Paul that people call a professional if they don't feel safe going up on the roof to clear the snow.

Dr. McGonigal says no non-professional should feel safe up on the roof:

The problem with this statement is that the men (the majority of those injured) who climb up onto the roof do feel safe clearing the roof! They believe that this is something that they are quite capable of doing themselves.

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The woman cut in half

Posted at 12:00 PM on December 20, 2010 by Bob Collins
Filed under: Health

Generally speaking, we're inclined to read any story that is attached to a headline "Mother of two was cut in two to remove her cancer ." That was certainly the case today with the story of Janis Ollson of Manitoba, who underwent a surgery that had never been performed at Mayo Clinic in Rochester before.

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This morning, according to the Mayo Clinic's blog, she was the hit of the Surgical Quality Conference, a quarterly meeting of all of the departments involved in surgery at Mayo Clinic.

Here's the whole story.

March of the diabetics

Posted at 3:22 PM on December 6, 2010 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Slate magazine has an utterly fascinating visual depiction of a developing health crisis in America: diabetes.

Here's the rate of diabetes in 2004

And just four years later, it looks like this:

Compared to the South, as you can see, Minnesota gets off pretty easy. But it's not too hard to see why diabetes is going to cost the U.S. over $3.4 trillion, by one estimate.

Type 2 diabetes can be prevented with a simple change in diet in many cases. But many people don't bother.

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Can we afford to reverse the aging process?

Posted at 1:00 PM on December 1, 2010 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

Harvard researchers have appeared to reverse the aging process in mice...

Next, the researchers will try to better understand precisely what causes the youthful bloom to return to the mice when the telomerase switch is flipped on, and also follow mice for a longer time to assess whether there may be a risk of cancer, according to the Boston Globe.

The obvious benefit would be that you could live to be 100 -- or more -- and not have the bad health that usually goes with being 100.

Is that good or bad?

The ethical question in all of this is can the nation afford for people to live longer?

"Are we set up for people to live 50 years after they retire?" ethicist Jason Roberts asks. "Do you change the retirement age? If you live to 120, do you retire when you are 90?"

No hurry on this question, apparently. Today the the commission considering ways to cut the deficit released its report. Despite criticism, it's recommending the Social Security retirement age go up to to 68 by 2050 and 69 by 2075.

The Harvard researchers might finish their work before the country agrees on the Social Security changes.

In the meantime, to what age do you want to live?

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Fat: It's what's for lunch

Posted at 2:12 PM on November 29, 2010 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Nothing says "fun" like a wad of fat stuffed in collagen casings.

The "Fun Lunch" for Marcy Open School in Minneapolis today turned out to be "crackers, a beef stick, peaches in syrup, and yogurt," a parent reported to me today after she checked out what was in the "fun lunch" that appeared on the sent-home school lunch menu. "They had a choice of a pizza stick or a beef stick," a school spokesperson confirmed for me this afternoon.

The beef sticks are billed as "all natural." Check out the label, though. They'll keep until November of next year.

"This sounds like something you get when you are drunk and only have $.59 at The Holiday Station, not something to feed children who do not/cannot bring a nutritious lunch from home," the parent said.

Minnesota schools are at the front lines of the battle against fat, an MPR series last March proclaimed. It noted that Minneapolis schools removed "all fryers from schools so french fries are no longer available. Cookies have also been removed from menus."

Beef sticks? Still good. But the students may not have the same opinion. A table in the middle of the lunch room -- where students put the food they don't want -- was reportedly full of "beef sticks" and yogurt today.

Last month, the beef stick manufacturer -- Klement -- recalled 2,800 pounds of beef sticks after a retail chain reported consumer complaints about finding hard plastic and pieces of glass in the meat. Today's meal was not part of the recall, however.

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Health and the food court

Posted at 11:40 AM on November 18, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Here's a little video company for your lunch today. Food courts can make you sick. A Today Show reporter finds more than 60-percent of the vendors in the food court at the Mall of America have had violations since 2009.

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The MOA response was well hidden on the Today Show web site:

Statement from Mall of America spokesperson Dan Jasper:

"Our goal at Mall of America is to provide a safe and welcoming environment for all of our guests. With more than 40 million visitors a year enjoying our more than 500 retail stores and 60 restaurants, we recognize that exceeding our own expectations is not always easy. However, it is a challenge we have embraced for our 18 years of operation, and a challenge we fully expect our tenants to embrace along with us. Mall of America restaurants are inspected regularly by the City of Bloomington and held to the highest standards. The inspection process serves a vital role -- to protect the health of all of us. While Mall of America management is not involved in the inspection process, we take such violation notifications very seriously and work with tenants to make sure the problem is corrected. All violations cited in the NBC report were addressed promptly by our tenants. The City has an inspection process to follow up on violations cited.

"That said, we take several steps to ensure a continued safe food environment, including: Our tenants take prompt action when notified of any violations or issues. We have instituted a texting campaign that will allow guests to quickly and easily share any concerns they have regarding food safety or cleanliness issues; texts will be monitored during all operational hours, with responses to the guest, as well as the tenant. We contract with a well respected professional firm to identify and resolve any pest issues. The City of Bloomington gives awards each year for outstanding food safety. Several of our tenants have received this award and as landlords we sponsor this award and encourage all of our restaurants to participant. Mall of America has always taken the safety of our guests seriously, and we will continue to do so. We remain committed to responding quickly to any issue whether we discover them, are notified by the City or by a guest. We do everything within our power to resolve all issues promptly."

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The suicide peg

Posted at 11:50 AM on October 4, 2010 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Jeff Jarvis, the media commentator, drops the suicide version of "guns don't kill people" in assessing the role of the Internet in the death of a Rutgers University student. He says CBS' Katie Couric tried to get an answer out of him that blamed the sins of the Internet for the young man's suicide.

We can't pretend to give young people lessons in the Internet if we don't understand how they see it. For example, I've learned lately that young people use Facebook's Wall to hold conversations in public while people my age use it -- with media reflex -- as a place to publish or broadcast. Same platform, different uses, different worldviews, different impact. When I was in Berlin talking about publicness and privacy, Renate Künast, head of the Greens in Parliament, said she talked to a young person who took a cooking course instead of an a computer course because in the latter "what the teachers wanted to teach me was something I learned five years ago." We have things to learn from children about the future, for the future is theirs and they're building it right in front of us.

We've reached the part of the story, frankly, when news anchors and editors are looking for angles to keep it going. So far, there's the issue of bullying, there's the issue of whether gay teens are more likely to commit suicide, and there's the issue of the Internet.

This is part of the "peg" problem with journalism. In order to do a story about something, it must have a "peg," an event to tie it to.

Suicide has been the second-leading cause of death of Minnesota young people for years. The "peg" in Minnesota for teen suicide stories recently is that 4 of 7 students in the Anoka-Hennepin school district who killed themselves may have been gay.

The issue should have had more attention years ago. Bring up the closeted issue of suicide in area high schools, and most every student knows of someone who's killed himself or herself. Read the obituary page, scan to the death of a teenager, and read between the lines.

That would be a good peg for keeping the story going until officials aren't quite so afraid to discuss it.

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Study: Hearing loss in young people overstated

Posted at 11:09 AM on September 20, 2010 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health

University of Minnesota researchers have blown a hole in one of the basic assumptions of life: That loud music is destroying the hearing of young people.

According to a news release from the U today, researchers have determined that the amount of hearing loss in young people is much lower than previously reported:

"Most media have emphasized the link between exposure to loud sounds and hearing loss when referring to the JAMA study," says Bert Schlauch, professor in the university's Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences. "However, many of the findings of the JAMA study are not consistent with hearing loss caused by exposure to loud sounds." These conclusions were drawn from an ongoing study of the hearing of the University of Minnesota Marching Band and a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research authored by Schlauch and Edward Carney.

The researchers studied the U's marching band and initially found 15 percent had hearing loss. But by conducting other tests, it found nearly half of the original group didn't lose their hearing and that the tests were false positives.

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The things that can kill you

Posted at 10:48 AM on September 14, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Forget bed bugs; there are smaller critters out there ready to do us in and, apparently, they know just how to do it.

A superbug, tracked to India, has caused people in three states to become sick and it's starting to pop up all over the world. For a few decades now, scientists have been warning that our dependence on antibiotics will oneday create an organism you can't kill. Maybe this is the one.

The organism -- NDM-1 -- depends on unsanitary conditions. Apparently, kids in India play in sewage. But then technology does its thing; it spreads thanks to the airplane.

"There are certain factors in the Indian subcontinent that are going to make this spread quite widely,'' Timothy Walsh, who helped discover the germ, told the Boston Globe. "It's very easy for us to forget in the Western world how desperate the conditions are in some of these countries.''

There's not much sense fretting about it. Just wash your hands, remain calm, and don't play in sewage.

The thing is: You just never know how smart germs can be. Take Legionnaire's disease. The illness -- a fatal lung illness first discovered in Philadelphia -- was caused by a microbe in water. But it could only affect you if you inhaled it. You can drink contaminated water and not get Legionnaire's disease, but you shouldn't breathe it.

The illness died out, but came back in a city in Spain in 1999 2009. Researchers couldn't figure out why, LiveScience reports today, until they noticed everyone who was infected had been on a street under construction.

It came from an asphalt paving machine that sprayed water to keep the dust down.

It gets ickier. Some scientists are theorizing that the answer to superbugs, may be found in cockroaches.

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Thudy reveals damage from tongue pierthings

Posted at 11:57 AM on August 3, 2010 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Health

A few years ago, I asked a young man why he had his tongue pierced and a ring put in. "Ith a thatement of who I am," he said.

He is -- or was -- a candidate for braces, according to research from the University of Buffalo.

"It is a basic tenet of orthodontics that force, over time, moves teeth," said Swansan Tabbaa, an assistant professor of orthodontics at the university's School of Dental Medicine and lead researcher on the case study, told LiveScience.com.

The problem, the university says, is that people with pierced tongues "play" with their new friend. Its study, though, seems to involve one woman:

The tongue was pierced seven years earlier and every day for seven years she had pushed the stud between her upper front teeth, creating the space between them and, subsequently, habitually placing it in the space. The patient did not have a space between her upper front teeth prior to the tongue piercing.

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NPR and the long goodbye

Posted at 11:11 AM on July 3, 2010 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Media

A few weeks ago, I posted the story of Barry Peterson, the CBS News correspondent who has written a book (Jan's Story) about his wife's descent into Alzheimer's. This morning, he appeared on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday with host Scott Simon.

The interview documented Peterson's struggle with living up to his wedding vows -- in sickness and in health -- while being able to have a life of his own. But something was missing from Peterson's account that he gave to Simon, and the segment that aired on CBS a few weeks ago.

Here's the NPR interview.

There was an important angle, however, in the CBS segment that NPR must have deliberately chosen to leave out, considering how important it is to the story of a husband choosing between wedding vows and life -- Peterson fell in love with another woman.

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"It (Alzheimer's) presented me with one of the most difficult decisions I've ever had to make," Peterson said of the new woman in his life. That statement alone should've made it important enough to be in the NPR story about how Alzheimer's challenges families in ways few people can imagine.

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Multiple suicides plague some area schools

Posted at 1:14 PM on June 2, 2010 by Bob Collins (18 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Schools

A 17-year Woodbury High School student killed herself yesterday. A senior boy at the same school killed himself a few weeks ago. A 9th grader in Mounds View killed herself at her home last weekend. She wasn't the first student in the district this year to take her own life, either.

I've just violated the experts' advice for how the media should report on teen suicide.

"The best advice I can give you is it's not a headline story; it's not a front page story or above the fold," Dr. Dan Reidenberg of Suicide Awareness Voices of Education (SAVE) told me this afternoon when I asked him for advice on reporting on the issue of teen suicide in the wake of these latest suicides. "The story should be preventive and educational in approach."

Dr. Reidenberg was at the Mounds View Woodbury (Note: Dr. Reidenberg misspoke during the interview and originally indicated Woodbury) school this morning to help teachers anticipate what the students needed today. He'll make a community presentation next Tuesday. "Some (teachers) don't want to deal with this at all. Some are grieving themselves. They feel very guilty. They feel very responsible that they should have known more or done more. Some are very angry; they're angry that these things have occurred and the districts haven't done more. Some are angry at the students. They really want to know what they can do so this doesn't happen again."

"The teachers are really struggling with this. They want information and they want to get a message out to students," he said. But he said the biggest challenge teachers and schools face is that students usually know more about the suicide before they do because of social networks. "That poses a tremendous challenge for schools and teachers with what they can and can't do around helping their students."

Reidenberg says the extent to which teachers can help depends on school policies. "Some school policies don't permit you to speak at all about a suicide; there's only a message that goes out from the principal or the superintendent and they're not allowed to do anything. Other schools are allowed to let students grieve and talk about the loss that they're suffering, but it needs to have some boundaries and parameters around that so that it doesn't take over their lives and it doesn't take over the reason that they're there, which is to go to school."

He says the most important thing in the wake of a suicide, is to prevent another one -- a copycat suicide. "It's not recommended to have a memorial at the school, or a special chair for the student who's no longer there, or a mural, or a painting, or even a page in a yearbook " he said. "That potentially is a risky kind of thing. So we help the schools learn how to teach the kids appropriately and move on with their life -- being able to move on with their friend... but not have it raise the risk for those who might be vulnerable."

The rate of teen suicide is up slightly in Minnesota, Reidenberg reports, but not to a statistically significant degree. Nationwide, about 11 kids kill themselves every day -- about 95 people in all age groups kill themselves each day and there is no single time of the year when it's clearly more common. "It's a myth that suicides occur more frequently around the holidays. November and December are the lowest months of the year when suicides occur," he said.

"Ninety percent of the people who die by suicide have a psychiatric illness at the time of their death," he said. "It's not just one thing that leads to a suicide. People often think it's one thing that happens, and it might be the last thing that happened, but somebody doesn't just wake up in the morning and say, 'today is my last day.'"

These are the warning signs of suicide, according to Reidenberg:

-- Suicide is expressed. People talking about or writing about suicide. Looking for suicide sites on the Internet.
-- Dramatic mood changes.
-- School challenges that come about seemingly unexpected. High-risk behaviors -- driving more erratically or climbing onto high places and jumping down, he said.
-- Changes in substance abuse. "Although we don't want kids to be using substances at all," Dr. Reidenberg said, "when there's a marked change in what they're using or how frequently they're using, we want people to pay attention to them."
-- Behavior changes in school, such as irritability, fighting with everybody all the time. Fighting with peers or faculty.
-- Withdrawing from social things they used to be involved with.

"Suicide is one of the most preventable deaths there is, " he said. "But until we break through this stigma and shame around the word, that it's not a character flaw or a moral deficiency, then we're going to continue to see these things happen."

Listen to the entire interview.

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Autism and divorce

Posted at 3:50 PM on May 19, 2010 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Health

A study out today debunks the notion that autistic children lead to divorced parents.

'There really weren't any significant differences in terms of family structure when you consider children with autism and those without," said Brian Freedman, PhD, clinical director of the Center for Autism and Related Disorders at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore.

Advocacy groups for autism have often quoted the 80-percent figure but nobody seems to know where it came from. There appear to have been no studies examining the divorce rate of parents of autistic children.

But there's been evidence that it's a made-up number. In a 2008 study, Easter Seals reported that only one-third of divorced parents of autistic children said the stress of a special needs child contributed to the end of the marriage.

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Beating the clock

Posted at 1:37 PM on May 18, 2010 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health

If the guy on the right looks pretty healthy to you, it's because of the two guys on the left.

Nic Kuehneman, left, and Robb Prechtel, middle, were honored at Regions Hospital in St. Paul this afternoon for the fastest time between the moment a call came in of a person having a heart attack, and the moment at which a surgical team at the hospital opened a blocked artery. Dan Campeau, 62, of Fridley had the heart attack.

Campeau was picking up some documents at the Ramsey County Law Enforcement Center last February when he slipped on some snow. Sitting in his van a minute later, he realized he was having a heart attack. "I went into the police station and told them to call 9-1-1," he said today.

A minute later, Kuehneman and Prechtel showed up. The clock was ticking. "A lot of people talk in terms of mortality with heart attacks," Dr. R.J. Frascone, the medical director of Regions, said. "They don't think in terms of morbidity. They can survive but be 'cardiac cripples.'" He says heart attack victims have 90 minutes to have a blocked artery open if they want to live; substantially less than that if they want to live without heart damage. Prechtel and Kuehneman, and Regions' staff, did it in 30 minutes -- 1 minute less than last year's record, and 6 minutes less than the record set a year earlier.

"I have no ill effects now," says Campeau, who was in the hospital for two days and met Kuehneman and Prechtel today for the first time since. "I thank the Lord for them every day. If you're going to have a heart attack, the best place to have it is in St. Paul."

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Mississippi dioxins linked to clean hands

Posted at 10:38 AM on May 18, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Science

Et tu, soap?

The University of Minnesota is out with a study today showing chemicals from hand soap are polluting the Mississippi.

Researchers found four dioxins in sediment samples from Lake Pepin. They say they could only have come from triclosan, a chemical added to hand soap in 1987.

They don't know yet if the dioxins are toxic. According to a release from the university, the Food and Drug Administration is studying the chemical, "which has been linked to disruptions of hormonal function (in animals) and may also play a role in the evolution of bacterial resistance to antibiotics."

Is it toxic to humans? "It is not known to be hazardous to humans," the FDA says, which is a bit of short of saying it's not.

The European Union has moved to ban the substance in any product that comes into contact with food. It's also used in toothpaste and deodorant.

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No miracles at Moose Lake

Posted at 4:07 PM on April 22, 2010 by Bob Collins (17 Comments)
Filed under: Crime and Justice, Health

MPR's Rupa Shenoy takes the latest look at the sex offender treatment/prison in Moose Lake, which is expected to get more business in the coming years as the state sends sex offenders to "treatment" after they serve their prison sentences. Only there's very little treatment going on and no way for the "patients" to get out.

In her story today, Shenoy, notes that 90 percent of the people in Moose Lake, don't undergo treatment:

Among them is Wallace Beaulieu. He was in pre-treatment therapy at Moose Lake but stopped participating.

"Anybody can say they're providing treatment, but if you're never giving anybody the opportunity to be released, what's the treatment then?" asks Beaulieu, 38.

Beaulieu said he was convicted twice for a forced sexual encounter -- one of a woman, in 1990, and 1992, a teenage girl. He said he spent four years in prison and was released in 1996.

Beaulieu said he did not register as a sex offender and was sent back to prison. When he finished that sentence, a Cass County judge ruled he was still a danger to the community and civilly committed him.

Beaulieu complains that Moose Lake is designed not to release patients.

"The treatment program right now is so vague," Beaulieu said. "They don't really talk about any sex offender issues that a person should be addressing.

It's a complaint that isn't new, and one that raged in the '90s when the state Supreme Court ruled that the law that keeps people locked up after their sentences was unconstitutional because the burden for proving the offenders didn't belong in the "treatment facility" rested with the offenders. They couldn't prove it, because they would have to be released to prove they weren't a threat to the community.

The Legislature changed the provisions under which "sexual psychopaths" are locked up after one came close to being released. The law shifted the burden to the state. It hasn't been much of a burden, however. Nobody has ever been released from the Moose Lake facility.

And for the most part, few people care. The only time the issue of Minnesota's sexual psychopath law comes up, are times like last October, when a reporter found out the "patients" got to watch big-screen TVs.

"It's questionable whether these men are rehabilitatable with the current modalities of treatment," Michael Farnsworth, a psychiatrist and former medical director for the Department of Human Services, told All Things Considered host Tom Crann at the time. "These are men who've had a long history... of dangerous sexual behavior. It's like taking people who are in the final stages of a terminal disease, placing them in an intensive care unit, providing millions worth of treatment, and expecting them to recover. Most of these men will not fully recover."

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Key provision of health care law for business unresolved

Posted at 3:33 PM on April 13, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

The Obama administration has insisted that Americans will see the benefit of the new health care law if it does a better job of explaining to the American people what's in it.

Who will explain it to the Obama adminstration?

MPR's health care law reporter, Elizabeth Stawicki, has been trying to update this presentation, which we posted on News Cut while the House and Senate were debating separate proposals. It explained the impact of each law on a typical small business.

Now that the law is finalized, it seemed like a good time to update the presentation.

She found a discrepancy on the upper limit of employees to get a small business tax credit under the law. One government site said 25. Another government site said 24. The law, itself, says 25 (Page 120 or 906 here).

But a release from the Internal Revenue Service says it's 24 or fewer.

The Web site for Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius also says the credit goes to businesses with fewer than 25 employees.

When quizzed by Stawicki about the discrepancy, Sibelius' spokesman, Nicholas Papas, said the correct answer is "fewer than 25."

"Do I have the wrong version of the law, then?" Stawicki asked in an e-mail.

Papas referred her to a White House fact sheet that confirms the credit goes to businesses with fewer than 25 employees.

There's only one problem. That's not what the law says.

"Check with Treasury on this," Papas advised.

Update 3:50 p.m. - The Treasury Department's ruling: It's available to small businesses who employ up to 24 full-time employees. Nonetheless, the law as passed actually says 25 "fulltime equivalent" employees.

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Nebraska's new abortion law

Posted at 11:05 AM on April 13, 2010 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

Nebraska has became the latest battleground in the war over abortion. The Legislature this week passed a bill that requires a full physical and mental assessment of any woman seeking an abortion.

Says the Omaha World Herald:

Under the bill, women would have to be assessed for any indication they felt pressured to have an abortion, as well as for risk factors that could predispose them to mental or physical complications.

Risk factors could include any identified in any research report published a year or more before in any peer-reviewed journal indexed by one of two major scientific indexing services.

The bill may be aimed at creating more pressure for the abortion provider. In the bill (available here) the only requirement on the woman is that she undergo the assessment. However the bill, which is to be signed into law today, includes penalties for doctors who don't comply.

The burden would also rest with the doctor to prove that the reason parents weren't notified of an abortion by a minor is that the minor was fully capable of making the decision herself.

The doctor also has the burden "of proving that the pregnant woman had sufficient reflection time, given her age, maturity, emotional state, and mental capacity, to comprehend and consider such information." It's not clear how one goes about proving that.

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Playing both sides of the health care debate

Posted at 3:37 PM on March 25, 2010 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

If there's one feature that has stood out in the health care debate, it's the ability to argue in circles, the role of the federal government in health care offered by private business.

Today provides one such example.

The National Republican Congressional Committee today sent an alert to area media:

With the Democrats' healthcare takeover now the law of the land, we're slowly starting learn that these so-called "reforms" come at a steep price for the nation's job creators. Construction manufacturer Caterpillar, which has a parts distribution center in Owatonna, is bracing for a $100 million tax increase, compliments of the Democrats' healthcare bill:

Caterpillar Inc. said Wednesday it will take a $100 million charge to earnings this quarter to reflect additional taxes stemming from newly enacted U.S. health-care legislation. The world's largest construction equipment manufacturer by sales, warned last week that provisions in the legislation would subject the company to federal income taxes on the subsidies it receives for providing prescription drug benefits for its retirees and their spouses. ... "From our point of view, a tax increase like this cannot come at a worse time," said Jim Dugan, a Caterpillar spokesman.

(Bob Tita, "Caterpillar Takes Hit on Health Care," Wall Street Journal, March 25, 2010)

These tax increases, which are part of a bill that Rep. Tim Walz proudly supported, come at a time where many businesses, especially manufacturers, are struggling to make ends meet. With Tim Walz heading home this weekend to kick his spin machine into overdrive, it's important to keep in mind that Walz's healthcare takeover will put the squeeze to Minnesota employers.

Reality check. It's true that the companies are being taxed under the legislation. But the complaint challenges the underlying argument of health care opponents that the federal government shouldn't be messing with people's health care.

Caterpillar -- and some other large companies such as John Deere and Boeing -- get a federal subsidy -- about $665 per retiree -- to provide prescription drug benefits to retirees that are far more attractive than what Medicare recipients get. Where does the money come from? The U.S. taxpayer.

It's free money that corporations get from the federal government and under the health care law, it will now be taxable as income.

There are arguments for the subsidy. It keeps retirees off a Medicare Part D plan. And taxing it may force companies to cut benefits to retirees, eliminating anticipated revenue under the tax.

But in opposing the subsidy's taxation, Republicans are faced with turning their back on a principal principle upon which much of their opposition to the health care law is based in the first place -- that taxpayers shouldn't be paying for health care provided by private corporations.

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Debunking the Facebook-syphilis connection

Posted at 1:57 PM on March 25, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Tech

Talk about your computer virus.

In a stunningly bad example of "reporting," a UK tabloid reports a public health director in Britain has determined that Facebook is responsible for an increase in the number of syphilis cases.

According to the Telegraph, the popularity of Facebook has led to more unprotected sex with casual partners.

"There has been a fourfold increase in the number of syphilis cases detected with more young women being affected," professor Peter Kelly said. "I don't get the names of people affected, just figures, and I saw that several of the people had met sexual partners through these sites."

But the BBC debunked the assertion and the reporting by the Telegraph:

So what are the facts? Apparently, in 2008 in the NHS Tees area (Middlesbrough, Stockton-on-Tees, Redcar and Cleveland) there were fewer than 10 cases of syphilis - so few that, under data-protection rules, the NHS can't give out the exact number.

But in 2009, 30 cases of heterosexual syphilis were notified to the NHS. So, yes: a four-fold increase, but a very small sample from which to drawn any very big conclusions.

So what is the connection with social networks?

Mr Kunonga says that in all these cases there is a thorough examination of the patient's sexual history and connections - and a significant number of people mentioned having casual sex with people encountered through social networks.

In other words, it's casual sex that caused the increase in syphilis.

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Health care and homelessness

Posted at 3:17 PM on February 25, 2010 by Bob Collins (35 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

Douglas and Anita "Annie" Gervais weren't watching the big health care summit in Washington at their St. Paul apartment this afternoon. There's not much they need to know about health care that they haven't learned firsthand. And there's nothing going on there that will save them from what's going to happen here in the next 24 hours.

A couple of miles away from the Gervais' apartment, the Minnesota Senate overrode Gov. Pawlenty's veto of a bill that would extend a program providing health care to the state's poorest citizens. The fate of the override effort in the House, however, is less clear. "If they would get out and see the people he (Gov. Pawlenty) is trying to shut the door on..." Douglas Gervais says, without finishing the sentence.

Annie has breast cancer. Douglas, who has had a kidney transplant, has mental health issues. They'd be wondering how they're going to provide for themselves when MinnesotaCare cuts them off if they weren't preoccupied with where they're going to live after tomorrow.

Mrs. Gervais, 48, was a victim of the collapsing economy before the cancer moved in. She was an assembly line temporary worker at Colder Products Company in St. Paul until the hours started drying up last spring. "Finally, they didn't call at all," she said today. A few months later, she felt a lump in her breast. A mastectomy followed, and now she's undergoing once-a-week chemotherapy.

"I put applications for work in, but that chemo really knocks me out," she says. Her husband works as a building manager but his hours have been cut to about 10 a week. He's trying to care for his wife, but his mental health issues have flared with every piece of bad news. He recently checked himself into the mental health unit at Regions Hospital.

"My nerves are completely shot. I have to work around her appointments," he says. "When she's down, I'm the caregiver. I'm a lunatic trying to care for her."

MinnesotaCare has been providing coverage for most of the health care costs. Their $40 monthly premium had been cut to $16 and now to $8. "I've got the monthly bill here," she says, "but I don't have $8."

She also doesn't have the $720 rent payment that's overdue. Last week, the couple went to court to learn that they have to be out of their apartment by Friday if they don't come up with the rent, plus penalties, which now totals $1,145. The Minneapolis-based Angel Foundation, which provides financial assistance to cancer patients, helped pay last month's rent but while it bought them some time, it didn't buy an answer or a job.

"If we have to, we'll live in the truck," Douglas says. They'll have to. Even if that's a solution to their housing, it's not a solution to their health care. "Look at all these medications we have to take. A $3 co-pay doesn't sound like much, but it adds up pretty quick."

They may qualify for free health care. Annie has an appointment with a Ramsey County financial aid worker on Friday morning. But most other efforts are stuck in a fact of life -- it takes time, and the couple doesn't have it. A disability application with Social Security hasn't been processed yet and even if everything fall into place, the earliest they can get help is April.

(Disclaimer: The East Metro Adult Crisis Stabilization Partnership is trying to assist the Gervaises. My wife, Carolie, is one of the E-MAC team members on the case.)

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Republicans voted for health care extension before they voted against it

Posted at 8:55 PM on February 18, 2010 by Bob Collins (8 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

There was back-patting all around at the Capitol on Thursday as Republicans and Democrats joined forces to approve a 16-month extension of a state health care plan for thousands of low-income adults, many of them mentally ill.

Republicans and Democrats didn't get everything they wanted, but that's the way compromise worked before it became a dirty word.

Then Gov. Pawlenty vetoed the bill:

The Senate will vote to override the governor. Then it will go to the House, where it passed 125-9, more than enough votes to override the veto.

But late this afternoon the Republican caucus in the House announced they'd vote against the bill and vote to uphold the governor's veto.

Here's the statement from Rep. Kurt Zellers:

"Governor Pawlenty wants to push for more reforms to the state's health care programs, and our caucus will support that effort. We will uphold the Governor's veto.

"Representatives Matt Dean and Steve Gottwalt offered real reform ideas during today's floor debate and we will bring those ideas back to the table as we try to achieve a solution. This is difficult work. We'll roll up our sleeves and get back at it."

What does this mean? It means Zellers' caucus voted for a bill they thought was bad, or intend to vote against a bill they think is good.

Ninety votes are needed in the House to override the governor's veto. There are 87 DFLers in the House.

Suppose you have three Republicans sitting with you now who say they're on the fence. Given your opinion of the bill, what would you tell them to get them to your side?

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Around the world in 42 years

Posted at 12:15 PM on February 17, 2010 by Bob Collins (12 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Sports

It seemed like a good idea back in the '60s when Thor Kommedahl, a former University of Minnesota faculty member in the Department of Plant Pathology, decided to chart how far he jogged each day. He looked up how many miles it would take to jog around the world.

"I found the mileage around the equator and I thought I'd keep going for that," he said today. He recently met his goal when he jogged his 24,902.55th mile around the University of Minnesota gym. "Of course it took a long time. I'm sure a lot of these marathon runners have done it but they haven't recorded their mileage."

Let's do the math on that. He was 47 years old back then. "Normally if you run four miles a day, five days a week, you can run 1,000 miles a year and it'd take you 25 years to run around the world," he said. That's if you don't factor in the fact that you're getting older and running four miles a day is a near impossible feat for that long.

Thor Kommedahl is 89. He's still running.

He didn't realize that achieving his goal of running the equivalent of around the world was doable until he got to around 15,000 miles in his 70s. "I got to thinking I could live long enough to do that. I kept looking at the equator as a goal and to keep on going. Even though I got into my 80s. Fortunately I've had good health and have been able to go to the gym and do that."

"Obviously, I don't run as fast or as vigorously as I did when I was younger. I used to run four miles a day," he said today. "In my early 80s, I'd run three miles a day and now I'm down to two miles a day."

He's seen a lot of changes at the gym over that time. When he started hardly anybody else was jogging. Then Kenneth H. Cooper wrote the book, Aerobics, and "it was like you almost couldn't get a locker anymore. Jogging was kind of a fad there for awhile," he said.

He doesn't see as many people jogging as he used to; it might because more people are using machines, now. "Running around the gym is kind of a boring event," he acknowledges. "You're just running in circles, but the social part is kind of fun. There are other people there who are running. The gym is a very friendly atmosphere."

Especially if you have a cheering section:

Mr. Kommedahl is still running his two miles a day.

"I'd like to go to 25,000 because 24, 902 isn't an even number," he said. "So at least I'd like to run to 25,000. I just want to keep going for my health. I feel good from running. I sleep better. I eat better. I recover better from minor illnesses. I just think it's a good healthy program."

On Friday at 2 p.m., the university will honor Mr. Kommedahl with a party and a plaque.

Audio
· How he achieved his goal. Listen

· The original goal was 1,000 miles per year. Listen

· What's the next goal? Listen

· Was there any point where he didn't think he'd make his goal? Listen

· The changing nature of exercise. Listen

(Photos courtesy of the University of Minnesota)

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Should the cigarette tax be raised in Minnesota?

Posted at 2:47 PM on February 11, 2010 by Bob Collins (12 Comments)
Filed under: Health

A national anti-smoking group today issued a report saying a $1 increase in the tax per pack on cigarettes could raise almost $100 million toward Minnesota's budget deficit.

An increase in the current $1.56-per-pack tax would also lead 19,400 Minnesotans to quit smoking, and save 18,200 residents from premature death, according to the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids. Here's the full report.

New Yorker Mark Haines on CNBC (ignore the blubber at the beginning from the other anchor) gives the researcher-proponent the admirably curmudgeonly treatment, include the idea that the proposal "contains the seeds of its own destruction." If you're trying to get people to stop smoking, doesn't that decrease the revenue to the state?

Unfortunately, the other co-host can't keep his ego out of the conversation.



Bob Moffitt of the American Lung Association in Minnesota, says 17.6 percent of Minnesotans over 18 smoke. That means the $1 increase would force only 1 of 204 current smokers to quit smoking.

Wisconsin's cigarette tax, incidentally, is $2.52 per pack. The group says 20,500 people there would quit smoking with a $1 increase. According to the state of Wisconsin, 19.6 percent of Wisconsinites smoke. So the $1 increase would force 1 in 210 people to quit smoking.

It would appear, then, that for every $1 increase, about 1 out of 208 people quits. If the state(s) were interested in eliminating smoking, why not raise the cigarette tax to $208 per pack?

Other research suggests that for every 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes, consumption is reduced by 3 to 5 percent. That would mean -- if the napkin calculations are correct -- that a $29 per pack price should eliminate the problem.

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Third-hand smoke

Posted at 3:06 PM on February 8, 2010 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Now that Minnesota has had the debate over second-hand smoke in passing a statewide smoking ban, we can move on to the next topic: third-hand smoke.

New Scientist reports on research that nicotine collecting on carpets and furniture poses a hazard to young children. The researchers reportedly are suggesting people who have smoked in their homes, remove both.

That paves the way for the ELA ("elusive local angle"):

Stephen Hecht at the Masonic Cancer Center at the University of Minnesota thinks that this could be an overreaction. There is as yet no direct evidence that chemicals formed in this way have proved harmful. "I personally feel that exposure by this route would be minimal, but the studies need to be carried out," Hecht says.

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One giant clinical trial

Posted at 10:25 AM on February 3, 2010 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Health

"We have gone away from the community we are; the fact that we really do love each other and want to care for each other," Jamie Heywood says in a TED video that's just been posted.

He describes an alternative to the health care discussion we've heard for the last year: What if we shared more about our illnesses, and converted all of that into useful data?

His inspiration for the idea was his brother's spiral from ALS. The result, he says, would put medical care in the hands of people.

Here's his Web site.

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Fresh Eye on the Radio: What you know can kill you

Posted at 5:36 PM on February 2, 2010 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Fresh Eye on the Radio (with Mary Lucia), Health

Maybe it's true; what you don't know can't hurt you. Research from Harvard says men who are told they have prostate cancer, have a greater risk of dying by suicide or heart attack. The study says men have a 60 percent greater risk of heart attack in the first month after they get their diagnosis.

You can also subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or by going here.

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Study: Abstinence education works

Posted at 9:56 AM on February 2, 2010 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Can a message of abstinence delay teens from having sex? Yes, as long as it's not accompanied by a moralistic tone, a new study says. Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the study focused on 662 black children in Philadelphia.

The students were assigned to one of four options: eight hour-long abstinence-only classes; safe-sex classes; classes incorporating both approaches; or classes in general healthy behavior. Results for the first three classes were compared with the group that had only the general health classes. That was the "control group" the study used for comparison.

Two years later, a third of the kids in the abstinence-only classes had had sex, compared with half the kids in the general health class.

Lyla Alphonse, a Boston Globe writer, isn't buying it.

For one thing, the students in this study supporting abstinence-only education are young. Really young: tweens -- 11- and 12-year-olds, maybe 13, max -- whose sexual activity was surveyed again just two years later, when they were 13 or 14 years old. But the stats on teen pregnancy are for kids aged 15 to 19 -- a completely different age group. Also, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which documented the rise in teen pregnancies, African-American teen pregnancies increased less than other groups, so an abstinence-only study that focused only on urban African-American middle-school students may not be easily applied to teenagers in general.

On MPR's Midmorning, Kerri Miller looked at the question of teen pregnancy and abstinence.



Sarah Brown, of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, told Miller the issue should be considered an economic one in schools. "I don't think we've really communicated to teens that this issue of child bearing is about avoid poverty and having a job, which is getting harder in this economy all the time," she said. "We know that children need adult parents and we also know when children have babies as teens, they're often single and remain single."

"It immediately devolves into a conversation about sex," she said, "but I don't think that's the place to start."

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The press and private lives

Posted at 9:05 AM on January 13, 2010 by Bob Collins (10 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

MPR's Midmorning is exploring where to draw the line between the public's right to know and a political candidate's private life. The show is motivated by the Star Tribune's questioning of all gubernatorial candidates about their substance abuse and mental health, which followed and acknowledgment by Mark Dayton that he suffers from alcoholism and depression. (I've written about this issue here)



The guests are:
Carol Dahmen: Political strategist who worked for former California Gov. Gray Davis. She also advised Gary Condit and the California secretary of state Kevin Smalley, who resigned in 2005 amidst charges of sexual harrassment.
Florence Graves: Founding Director, Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.
Frank Farley: Psychology professor at Temple University. He studies risk taking and mental health issues.
Bob Shrum: Longtime Democratic political strategist. He's now retired and teaches at New York University. He has worked with many campaigns including John Kerry's presidential bid and Sen. George McGovern's in 1972. He also advised Mark Dayton's first Senate campaign.

LIVE BLOG
Graves: "It's a legitimate query. It might affect his right to govern and the public has the right to know." She says the question should be directed at whether or not there's been treatment. She says Bush acknowledged being close to being an alcoholic. If he had not addressed it, she thinks it would've become a bigger issue. "The fact he did address it allows people to move on."

Should politicians ask whether candidates have ever had sex with a woman not the wife? "No," she says. "That's over the line."

Dahmen: "Once they (politicians) drink the Kool Aid of the power, they become cloaked in invincibility and they don't recognize the behavior they're engaging in is bad." Do more mainstream media organizations feel more compelled to ask these questions? "Mainstream media ... is no longer around," she says. Oh. I thought this show was based on the actions of a mainstream media organization.

Dahmen says "everything is on the table." Graves nodded (verbally), but didn't Graves just say asking a candidate whether they've had an affair is "over the line?" If everything is on the table, there isn't a line.

9:18 a.m. - One of the guests just repeated that the stigma of alcoholism and mental health disorder isn't what it was. I hear this a lot but few people ever offer any evidence to prove it. And Kerri Miller points out that a recent survey said at least half of those surveyed would hold it against a candidate.

Caller:: If a candidate can't abstain from these things, how would they be able to govern? (Not sure how one abstains from mental illness)

Online comment: Just knowing whether a person has depression doesn't say anything about a person's ability to governor.

9:23 a.m. - Miller says there's a perception to facing down cancer and beating it. But there's not the same perception about alcoholism. Guest notes that certain conditions have been hidden from the public, such as FDR having "paralysis issues." And JFK was on many drugs. Did we have a right to know that? She says we did. She says people need to be educated to know that people need to be educated.

9:26 a.m. - Caller Sarah notes that JFK was blackmailed by J. Edgar Hoover because of an affair he had. "If this is not public information, then this is information that can be used against certain politicians."

Carol Dahmen acknowledges it's a concern but "we may be missing a larger piece when it comes to politicians. There needs to be more research done on narcissistic personality disorder. Seventy-five percent of men suffer from it," she says. Here's the Wikipedia entry on that.

9:28 a.m. - Online comment: "The only thing that matters is can they do their job."

Right, Graves says. "Can they do their job in light of these things." She says Justice Brandeis said politicians have renounced their right to privacy.

Graves, who broke the Robert Packwood story, says "you could not have gotten the story into the Washington Post pre-Anita Hill.... Times have changed."

(News break. Then Farley and Shrum)

9:36 a.m. - We're bringing up the Sen. Tom Eagleton situation in which Eagleton, the VP pick of George McGovern in 1972, was dumped after he acknowledged treatment for depression. "We need to grow up as a society," Shrum says. "We need to understand that mental illness is an illness."

9:37 a.m. - Miller says that implies there's still a stigma associated with that. Could a candidate today disclose what Eagleton did and stay on the ticket? "It'd be difficult for the presidency and vice presidency," Shrum says. "For other offices, the problem would've been much different today than a generation ago."

Farley: "We're becoming more sophisticated about mental health and mental illness." (Bob: If that's true, why did the Star Tribune separate mental health from "normal" health and associate it with substance abuse?).

"Fifty percent of Americans would be nervous about someone who might be bipolar," Farley says. "If someone has been treated in the past, it's in the past. Treating mental illness as other illnesses, if the candidate says 'I've been successfully treated for more illness, the electorate should move on."

Shrum says if a candidate discloses the information, it shows they're honest. "We wouldn't elect a candidate who has a debilitating physical illness that could result in incapacitation or death."

(Bob notes: By the way, several guests here have indicated Bush acknowledged alcoholism. Technically, he didn't. He insisted he wasn't an alcoholic, only that he "drank too much' before a religious conversion).

9:42 a.m. - What would happen if we asked a woman candidate if they'd had an abortion?

This brings up an ethical situation in the past. When Alan Quist was running for governor, his wife acknowledged she had had an abortion many years ago. Was that relevant to the campaign?

Farley and Shrum disagree. "Abortion is off the table," Farley says. Again, this brings up the question: Why?

"You may have changed your views," Farley says.

"Then you state that," Shrum replies. "If rank hypocrisy is involved, things that aren't relevant become relevant."

9:45 a.m. A fascinating observation in the comments section:

As a psychologist who often has to write evaluations of people for work or disability applications, I can tell you that there is almost no diagnosis that makes a prima facie case for disability. Churchill led the British through WWII on two quarts of brandy, several martinis and a bottle of champagne per day. Lincoln's depression was extremely severe but didn't keep him from leading the country with wisdom, grace and beauty. I thinbk perhaps the best contribution of your guests this morning is to light a fire under the mental health professions to do a much better job of educating people about the meaning of these diagnoses.

9:47 a.m. - This e-mail just arrived:

The Midmorning guest's comment that 75% of men had Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) was grossly in error. Presumably the guest was mislead by a published estimate that as many as 75% of the sufferers of NPD might be men, which is quite a different thing. Even that estimate may be too high, though the evidence does indicate a higher prevalence among men than women:

"Prevalence of lifetime NPD was 6.2%, with rates greater for men (7.7%) than for women (4.8%)."

(Stinson FS, Dawson DA, Goldstein RB, Chou SP, Huang B, Smith SM, Ruan WJ, Pulay AJ, Saha TD, Pickering RP, Grant BF. Prevalence, correlates, disability, and comorbidity of DSM-IV narcissistic personality disorder: results from the wave 2 national epidemiologic survey on alcohol and related conditions. J Clin Psychiatry. 2008 Jul;69(7):1033-45.)

9:48 a.m. - A caller with bipolar disorder asks, "If all things are equal, why would you pick the candidate with a mental illness?"

Farley says mental health is directly related to decisions in an emergency situation, "so you want a clear mind and a rational thinker."

Bob notes: But that's the problem, the fact someone acknowledges he/she has had a mental illness, doesn't really tell you anything about that ability. We've got a lot of people coming home from war who are now getting into politics. If they answer "yes," to the question the Star Tribune posed, how is the distinction made about counseling they had for their war experiences, and any number of other mental health issues?

-- End of show -- 11:11 a.m. - An e-mail from Eden Prairie:

I was so offended by Kerri Miller's coverage of this topic that I had to turn off the radio. Although it is very common and highly treatable, depression still has a stigma which prevents many from seeking treatment. I see Mark Dayton's openness as a role model. Yet Kerri and her guests aligned this with infidelity - "Do we have the right to know if someone has suffered from depression? How about if they lack integrity and ethics?" Wow! I see this more as akin to FDR and the press hiding the fact that he was in a wheel chair. Today we wouldn't do that with a physical disability, but we feel the need to shame someone for having a very common illness like depression.

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Study links TV and heart disease

Posted at 10:47 AM on January 12, 2010 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)
Filed under: Health

A study from Australia reports that every hour you spend watching television increases your risk of heart disease by 18%. "What has happened is that a lot of the normal activities of daily living that involved standing up and moving the muscles in the body have been converted to sitting," Dr. David Dunstan says in a news release.

It also contends that each hour of TV is also associated with an 11% increased risk of death from all causes, and a 9% increased risk of cancer death.

Let's do the math. The average person watches five hours of television per day. If Dr. Dunstan's theory is true, our risk of heart disease nearly doubles each day.

It's a good example of framing a study in a way to get the most media coverage. The study is actually about the lack of exercise that people get. It's true, much of their day is spent sitting watching TV, but a lot of people in America's cubicle farms -- work -- are sitting, too. Theoretically is your work increasing the chance of death? Yes.

But the authors said they focused on TV because it's a leisure activity. Still, sitting and reading a book for an hour, could also increase your risk of death.

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How much alcohol would a .708 BAC equal?

Posted at 10:34 AM on December 31, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Health

We have a winner at the wire in the drunkest person in the Upper Midwest contest. Marguerite Engle, 45, of Sturgis, South Dakota, was found to have a blood alcohol level of.708 earlier this month.

An MPR listener writes in to ask, "How many drinks is that?"

It's difficult to know for sure because BAC depends on several factors including a person's weight, how long it's been since the alcohol was consumed, and the metabolism of the nearly dearly departed.

But we won't let that stop us.

Using the BAC calculator here, and guessing that she's 150 pounds, and guessing that she consumed them in one hour, we find that... well... we don't know. It only allows for 9 drinks in an hour and that's only a 0.2624 BAC.

The Police Notebook calculator, only goes up to 8 drinks.

This calculator at Beertown, suggests something on the order of 25 beers in one hour.

But reality suggests that the woman involved was not of average size nor average metabolism because the alcohol didn't kill her.

This chart from Texas doesn't have anything close to the woman's blood alcohol content in its evaluation of the range of lethal amounts.

Consider this description from the University of Texas on a .40 to .50 blood alcohol level:

You are probably in a coma. The nerve centers controlling your heartbeat and respiration are slowing down, and it's a miracle if you survive.

The woman recently moved to South Dakota from Minnesota.

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The effect of health care reform on small business

Posted at 12:26 PM on December 22, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

MPR's Elizabeth Stawicki has a short series this week explaining the effect of health care reform on small business. She visits several small businesses and analyzes the two health care reform plans -- House and Senate versions -- and their impact.

As part of the effort, we've created this element to help small business owners gauge whether and to what extent the legislation will affect them.

---

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Little Los Angeles

Posted at 1:15 PM on December 18, 2009 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Weather

If you squint a little bit and ignore all the snow, downtown St. Paul could easily be mistaken for Los Angeles today. Officials are calling it "haze," but you may know it better as smog.

Here's a sample courtesy of the Midwest Hazecam Web site:

We're not alone. The whole Upper Midwest is breathing foul air today. Right, Milwaukee?

Minnesota's air quality today is listed as "unhealthy," according to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

What's happening here? An "inversion," in which air doesn't rise (and disperse) as quickly as you might expect. That's trapping all the pollution near the ground. Throw in light winds and, voila! We're Los Angeles.

It'll be that way until Sunday, according to the experts.

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Live-blog: The health care debate

Posted at 2:58 PM on November 30, 2009 by Bob Collins
Filed under: Health, Politics

The Senate is taking up the health care bill today. The session will last longer than my ability to follow it for the duration, but I'll be following it nonetheless.

What's going on behind the debate? The Wall St. Journal has interesting analysis:

What's happening on the floor may not bear much resemblance to the ideas being discussed privately, and the bill could take a sudden shift if the private ideas become part of Reid's official plan. Case in point: On Feb. 6, the Senate spent most of the day debating a $930 billion stimulus package. But that night, Senate Democratic leaders reached a deal with three Republicans on a leaner package that ultimately was valued at $787 billion. That's the one that passed the Senate.

So the floor session today may be being held primarily for the benefit of The Daily Show?

1:56 p.m. - Sen. John Kyl says Republicans will try to amend the bill, otherwise they'll vote against it.

2:00 p.m. - The Senate is still working on morning business. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (DFL-Minn.) is making a statement on three Americans -- including a Minnesotan -- being held in Iran.

2:05 p.m. - Debate has begun. Sen. Harry Reid speaking. In the typical style of Congress, the description of HR 3590 gives no indication of what's actually in the bill:

To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify the first-time homebuyers credit in the case of members of the Armed Forces and certain other Federal employees, and for other purposes.

Here's the full text of the bill. Don't try to print it.

It's always hard to tell on CSPAN, but it appears few senators are in the Senate chamber at the moment.

2:14 p.m. - Reid says "each and every American has had the opportunity" to read the bill online. He then offers an amendment to require amendments to be available on the senator's Web site before it is considered. It's worth pointing out that, at least in comparison to the Minnesota House and Senate Web sites, the congressional Web sites are a joke when it comes to following legislation as it's offered and debate.

2:19 p.m. - A CSPAN wide shot reveals an empty chamber. We're not likely to get any interesting debate anytime soon.

2:20 p.m. - One of Reid's amendments would have prevented money set aside from Social Security from being used for anything but Social Security. Sen. Mike Enzi says the one program that needed to be protected from siphoning funds wasn't in the amendment -- Medicare.

2:24 p.m. - The Congressional Budget Office today released a report on what will happen to health insurance premiums if the health care bill passes. Here's the full report. Premiums on non-group policies would increase by an average of 10 percent to 13 percent before figuring in the federal subsidies that are designed to defray the cost, the report said. Once the government aid is included in the calculations, average premiums would be as much as 59 percent lower than is now the case.

2:26 p.m. - Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-MD: "Simply being a woman is a pre-existing condition." She's offering an amendment requiring access to screening by eliminating copays and deductibles. "Women will have access to the same preventive health services as women in Congress have," she said. She cited mammograms, screening for cervical cancer, and diabetes checks. She said the current bill does not provide for these preventive services.

2:34 p.m. - Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., says 80 percent of the health care decisions in families are made by women. "Women themselves are often discriminated against," he says.

Baucus says every 30 seconds, another American files for medical bankruptcy. FACT CHECK: Not likely true, at least as far as a medical reason. The number is actually for total personal bankruptcies. It was much higher in 2005.

Baucus wrote the Senate version of the health care reform legislation. He's describing the highlights of the package. He says the bill prevents insurance companies from raising rates for an entire small business just because one employee got sick. He says the legislation repeals the "hidden cost" of treating the uninsured in hospital emergency rooms. He pegs the cost at $1,000 per year per family.

Tangent time: Six hospitals sue Massachusetts over that state's universal health care law. They say the state is shortchanging them for treating patients with public insurance.

2:54 p.m. - Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyoming, leads the opposition. Calls the Democrats' amendments "a stunt." I should point out that none of the amendments have been posted on the Democratic Senate sponsors' Web sites.

3:03 p.m. - Enzi says nobody will see any benefit from the bill until 2014. "The Reid bill mandates that Washington bureaucrats ration care," he said. Mikulski admitted as much, he suggested, by offering an amendment that clearly was a response to the government's medical panel that recommended women not have mammograms as part of routine screening until age 50.

3:10 p.m. - Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Ct., invokes Ted Kennedy. "The idea that this is being jammed down peoples' throats... is not born out by the facts."

Tangent time: 7 Things You Didn't Know About Senate Health Bill (NPR)

3:21 p.m. - Dodd relays tale of a youngster in Connecticut who needed a medical device but couldn't get it. "That won't happen under our bill," he shouts. "Millions of Americans go to bed knowing that if they wake up sick, they might not be able to get care."

3:42 p.m. - Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. Says the health care plan as a "revenue neutral" bill requires 10 years of taxes for 6 years of program.

3:46 p.m. - We have the first chart of the debate: Grassley's graph of the federal debt. Grassley says the CBO report -- referenced above -- "confirms our worst fears." He points out the part that says premiums will go up, but he leaves out the part about premium subsidies from the government.

Grassley says the government shouldn't force people to buy insurance. "Never in the 200-plus years of our country has the government forced you to buy anything," he said. He also called for medical malpractice reform, and a denial of benefits to undocumented workers.

Tangent time: Illegal immigrants becoming a flashpoint in health care reform (Christian Science Monitor)

4:05 p.m. - Sen. John McCain, R-AZ., says Democrats are asking "us to commit to cuts that are unspecificed." He says hospice care funding is also being cut under Medicare. He calls on Democrats to explain how "half a trillion" in cuts can be implemented without removing programs under Medicare.

"Seniors all over America... are outraged and the more they find out about it the more angry they've become," Sen. McCain said.

4:11 p.m. - McCain cites this story via the Associated Press:

President Barack Obama's top aides met frequently with lobbyists and health care industry heavyweights as his administration pieced together a national health care overhaul, according to White House visitor records obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press.

The records disclose visits by a broad cross-section of the people most involved in the health care debate, weighted heavily toward those who want to overhaul the system.

"Health care reform should've been about both sides sitting down and fixing what's broken," McCain said. "Somewhere we've lost sight of what's wrong with health care in America and that's the cost of health care in America."

McCain says when the bill is signed, "immediately programs start being cut... and you don't get any benefits of the program for three years."

4:34 p.m. McCain: "I don't think the American people want their health care decisions coming from a panel in Washington." He's pushing the impact on senior citizens hard.

4:42 p.m. - Sen. Bob Casey, D-PA., is up. He says Medicare will go broke in 8 years "if we don't take action." He asks why the GOP hasn't proposed its own health care reform bill.

The debate continues. Not a lot of new content is being provided, so I'll discontinue the live blog for now.

Who's got the vaccine?

Posted at 11:29 AM on November 30, 2009 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Enter "H1N1" in Google and a neat app pops up -- a list and map of flu vaccination sites around the Twin Cities. Take Minneapolis, for example. It's handy if you're looking for a regular seasonal flu shot, but not if you want an H1N1 vaccine.

The Minnesota Department of Public Health today unveiled a flu shot clinic search engine. But it, too, won't help you if you're looking for H1N1 vaccine. A search for flu shot clinics within 30 miles of downtown St. Paul today, for example, revealed this:

There are no clinics currently scheduled within 30 miles of the 55101 zip code you used. You can look again by increasing the radius of your search (more than 30 miles) or change the zip code or extend the date range. To try that, click your Back button or the button below.

Don't bother. A search for a flu clinic within 300 miles of St. Paul yielded the same result.

Last week, the department announced plans to expand the number of people eligible for a flu shot. All people from 6 months to 24 years old are now eligible to receive the vaccine, as well as people from 25 to 64 years old with an underlying medical condition. You'll have to call your local medical clinic. It's clear that the online resources for finding H1N1 vaccine are of no use.

Update 12:59 p.m. -- Hennepin County just announced three flu shot clinics:

• Thursday, Dec. 3, 4 to 8 p.m., Eden Prairie High School, 17185 Valley View Road, Eden Prairie.
• Wednesday, Dec. 9, 3:30 to 8 p.m., Park Center High School, 7300 Brooklyn Boulevard, Brooklyn Park.
• Wednesday, Dec. 16, 3:30 to 8 p.m., Wayzata High School, 4955 Peony Lane N., Plymouth
The three clinics will offer H1N1 flu vaccine to:
• Anyone between the ages of 6 months through 24 years.
• Adults aged 25 to 64 with chronic health conditions (such as asthma, diabetes, lung conditions, cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy).
• All pregnant women.
• Health care providers and emergency medical services personnel.
• Anyone who lives with or provides care to infants under the age of 6 months.
The vaccine will be offered in both the nasal spray and injected shot forms.

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Apples-to-oranges polling

Posted at 7:49 AM on November 27, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

Quick! What do the latest polls show about Americans' attitudes toward health care reform?

Pollster Scott Rasmussen doesn't blame you if they've provided no clarity. The commentary surrounding the polls is to blame, according to Rasmussen, who writes a treatise today explaining why one of his and one from the Kaiser Foundation appear to show two entirely different results.

For example, the Rasmussen Reports poll found that in late November 38% favored the plan working its way through Congress and 56% are opposed. At the same time, a majority of Americans say that major changes are needed in the health care system.

The Kaiser Foundation poll found that 35% want reform and like what they hear about the current proposals in Congress. Fifty-nine percent (59%) either don't like the current proposals (33%) or don't want Congress to pass health care reform at all.

The difference between 35% who like the current plans in the Kaiser poll is essentially the same as the 38% who favor it in the Rasmussen poll. So is the opposite--59% in the Kaiser poll and 56% in the Rasmussen poll. Both polls show a majority desire to pass some kind of reform.

So, how did the blog posting conclude that the results were so different? Because they compared a Kaiser question about health care reform in general to a Rasmussen question about the plan working its way through Congress. At a time when people want reform but don't like what they're hearing about the Congressional plan, that's a pretty big difference. Compare apples to oranges and you make a mess.

Here's Rasmussen's post.

Meanwhile, a poll out today shows 57 percent said their access to health care would stay the same under the reform plans. And 61 percent said their personal financial situation would stay about the same

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Mammogram panels?

Posted at 9:08 AM on November 17, 2009 by Bob Collins (11 Comments)
Filed under: Health

The timing couldn't possibly have been worse for the government to release new guidelines on when women should have mammograms to detect breast cancer early enough to save their lives -- right in the middle of the nation's health care debate over the role of government in health care decisions.

The guidelines, if you haven't heard, recommend women not have mammograms until age 50, instead of age 40, as most groups who research the issue suggest.

"There is no doubt that mammography screening in women in their 40s saves lives. To recommend that women abandon that is absolutely horrifying to me," Dr. David Dershaw, director of breast imaging at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center said.

So why did they? Dr. Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society suggests cost is behind this:

The USPSTF says that screening 1,339 women in their 50s to save one life makes screening worthwhile in that age group. Yet USPSTF also says screening 1,904 women ages 40 to 49 in order to save one life is not worthwhile. The American Cancer Society feels that in both cases, the lifesaving benefits of screening outweigh any potential harms. Surveys of women show that they are aware of these limitations, and also place high value on detecting breast cancer early.

"With its new recommendations, the USPSTF is essentially telling women that mammography at age 40 to 49 saves lives; just not enough of them.

And what Brawley didn't say, Dr. Sanjay Gupta did. Gupta, who was Barack Obama's initial choice for surgeon general before he decided to stay at CNN, speculated today that once the government recommends guidelines for medical care, private insurance companies will be quick to stop covering anything else.

Not death panels, mamography panels. It's worth pointing out, perhaps, that the government's guidelines now match Canada.

But Susan Pisano, spokeswoman for American Health Insurance Plans, appears to dismiss the concerns:

"Most of our member companies look at [the task force's guidelines] as the standard. But if you are in your 40s and have a discussion about risk and benefits and your doctor gives you a referral slip, then that generally is going to be covered."

Still, the story does highlight the extent to which cost factors into health care decisions, even after the possibility a life being saved is recognized.

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The story Wally couldn't tell

Posted at 4:30 PM on November 12, 2009 by Bob Collins (10 Comments)
Filed under: Health, War

If you've ever attended a Twins game and sat upstairs behind home plate at the Metrodome, the chances are pretty good that you know Wally Englund, 85, of Richfield. For 14 years he was an usher at the Dome and other sports facilities in the Twin Cities.

But only his wife, a few family members and some season ticket holders who've become his close friends over the years know the secret that, until recently, he couldn't talk about: He is still suffering from an incident in the South Pacific during World War II.

Eileen Smith (center below), one of the Twins' season ticket holders, contacted me about Wally. She only found out about his struggle during an enlistment ceremony at the Metrodome in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. "You walked back in the well and said 'they have no idea what they're getting into,'" she said today as we sat in his living room.

Wally told me his story because he doesn't want returning soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq to live with the post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that began in August 1943, about a year after he graduated from high school in Alexandria and convinced his parents to allow him to enlist and go to war.

"Things were hot and heavy in the South Pacific, so they were sending everybody. I took a bus over the San Francisco bridge, and sailed under the San Francisco bridge in August 1943. About the beginning of November, I was down in the engine room with some motor machinist mates and some electricians, and a guy all of a sudden appeared -- I didn't know who he was -- I knew everybody by their faces but not everybody by their name. And he says, 'You don't belong here. Go upstairs.' So I obeyed his command and then just seconds later the ship went down real fast and heavy. A few of us jumped into the water and then the ship went down real fast and most of the guys were sucked down with the ship. I saw a piece of board or something and I swam to that and hung on for several hours until I was rescued." (Listen)

Englund knew everybody on the ship. But he'd never seen the person who saved his life. There were about 100 men on board the U.S.S. Artisan ( AFDB-1) -- a floating dry-dock -- but only he and one other man survived.

"Everything happened so fast. It was early in the morning; I don't know if we hit a mine or what. It happened fast and all hell broke loose," he said.

When the war ended and he returned to Minnesota, he tried to tell his mother and father about the morning that was now haunting him at night. Every time he'd try, he'd start to cry. And men don't cry. Today, he fought tears each time he remembered. (Listen)

"I was having these nightmares and flashbacks in the middle of the night and when I first came back, I'd try to tell people my story and I'd start crying. So I thought, 'I'm a man now, I'm not supposed to cry,' so I quit sharing. And the longer I did that, the worse it got. I kept shoving it down and down, and I went through all these years with flashbacks and anger came in, and guilt and all kinds of things. I had a rough time for many, many years," he said.

"I lived and I was one of two survivors. All the rest of the guys that I talked to 'em the night before and the next morning they were gone. We were like family. We worked together; we slept together. Ate together. We were a pretty close outfit."

It wasn't until 1950, the year he and his wife, Katie, were married, that he was able to tell his story to someone. (Listen)

"One of the nights in bed , the next morning Katie says, 'Wally what's going on, the bed was just shaking all night. Are you holding something inside you're not sharing?' I told her the whole story and cried like a baby. What a release it was. I didn't care whether I cried or what happened."

And that was the last he spoke of it for more than 40 years. About 20 years ago he got a letter from the other survivor, who described a similar suffering to what he was going through. But he lost the letter and couldn't write back.

About 10 years ago, he tried to talk to his older brother, Bob, about it.

"His ship was sunk in the South Pacific, not too far from where I was about the same time," he said. "He was a few days in a life raft and he was rescued, and they took him to Hawaii and he spent one month in the hospital and all he did was cry every day.

"I asked Bob a few years ago about our experiences. I says, 'Bob, how are you doing with your experiences when that ship was sunk?' And he said, 'I'm fine.'

"I said, 'How do you do that, I'm still having problems?' and he says, 'I don't think about it.' I said, 'Well, I don't either but it's still there.'"

Sadness, depression, anger, guilt. Wally felt them all. But since he had no obvious wounds, he didn't know the Veterans Administration could've helped him. A few years ago, however, another stranger -- he thinks it was someone at a Twins game -- showed him the path out, telling him the VA could help him.

And it did.

"I love the VA; they helped me so much. I want to say to these guys coming home from Iraq or Afghanistan, I want to say if they've gone through an experience like I have, get help right away. Don't wait as long as I did," he said.

He now sees a psychologist every other month. He also found out he's not the only World War II veteran still suffering from the wounds of war.

"After 60 years I thought time would heal and it still hasn't," he said. "But it's much better."

His grandson is in the Marines. Wally says he's told him his story, but never tried to change his mind.

"I still don't tell many people," he said

(Click for larger image)

You probably know someone with an interesting life's journey. News Cut loves to tell their stories. Contact me.

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Health care: Better than nothing?

Posted at 11:40 AM on November 11, 2009 by Bob Collins (13 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

The health care reform effort at the Capitol is raising an old dilemma for some politicians: Is a bill always "better than nothing"?

North Dakota Nebraska Democrat Sen. Ben Nelson is the latest facing the issue, and he's decided it's not.

"Faced with a decision about whether or not to move a bill that is bad, I won't vote to move it," Nelson told ABC News.

Nelson is opposed to a public option.

Minnesota politicians may be faced with the same dilemma, only this one is over a tax on the medical device industry that's in the House bill, according to MPR's Elizabeth Stawicki.

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Behind the health care vote

Posted at 8:46 AM on November 8, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

The House last night voted 220-to-215 to pass the health care bill. The vote was not surprising. All but one Republican voted against it, joined by mostly conservative Democrats, including 7th District Rep. Colin Peterson of Minnesota.

The New York Times, however, has a fascinating graphic showing the "no" Democrats. Peterson had the 4th largest margin of victory in his last election of those who voted no (and weren't unopposed).

Not far behind was Stephanie Herseth Sandlin of South Dakota.

Eight of the Democrats represented districts carried by Barack Obama in the last election, an increasingly questionable yardstick for political punditry, since the presidential election is at least as much about the opponent who's running (and his vice presidential pick, occasionally) as it is about the candidate who carried the district.

The Times attempted to link the percentage of uninsured residents of each district (who weren't elderly) with the "no" vote. In Peterson's district, for example, only 11% of non-elderly residents don't have insurance.

The intent of the graphic appears to be to show the factors that went into the "no" vote besides the bill itself. But it actually suggests that most of the "no" votes among Democrats had more to do with their opinion that it's a bad bill.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, took a different approach to linking external factors to the votes. It provides a graphic showing campaign contributions from the health care industry. Curiously, however, it shows that most of the lawmakers with the biggest war chests from the health care industry voted "yes."

And with all of the votes displayed, rather than just the Democrat "no" votes, the Post does a better job of relating the percentage of uninsured in a district, with the representative's vote.

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Today in flu

Posted at 1:44 PM on November 6, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Media

It seems like only yesterday when the news media was being skewered for overblowing the H1N1 flu (which for some reason is increasingly being referred to as the "swine flu" again). Now, a survey by Pew Research Center suggests the news consumer can't get enough.

According to the survey of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press:

About three-in-ten (29%) name reports about the fast-spreading flu and its vaccine as the story they followed more closely than any other last week, according to the latest weekly News Interest Index survey, conducted Oct. 30-Nov. 2 among 1,001 adults by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Somewhat fewer mention news about health care reform (22%) or the economy (17%) as their top story.

But a second survey, from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), shows a disconnect between what the people want and what the people are getting:

The national news media devoted 5% of the newshole to swine flu, much less than the coverage given to the health care debate (16%), Afghanistan (13%) or the economy (12%).

Let's see if we can adjust that a little bit. Here's some H1N1 news:

Most people who are looking for the H1N1 vaccine can't find it, Harvard reports today.

Since the H1N1 flu vaccine became available in October, 17% of American adults, 41% of parents, and 21% of high-priority adults have tried to get it. Among adults who tried to get it for themselves, 30% were able to get the vaccine and 70% were unable to get it. Among parents who tried to get the H1N1 vaccine for their children, 34% were able to get it and 66% were unable to get it. Among high priority adults who tried to get the H1N1 vaccine, 34% were able to get it and 66% were unable to get it.

So far Minnesota has ordered more than 460,000 doses of vaccine from its share of the federal supply, MPR's Lorna Benson reported today. The state health department has been using a random lottery system to select sites from among thousands of clinics who'll get the vaccine.

Officials are worrying that people are getting frustrated in their search for the vaccine, and will just give up looking.

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Mythbusting H1N1: Hand sanitizer

Posted at 2:32 PM on November 5, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Today's H1N1 mythbuster is one that's been circulating around the News Cut Cubicle over the last day or so:

Hand sanitizer can make germs and bacteria more "super" and using it in the long run can hurt you.

True or False?

False, according to Dr. Mike Osterholm, who appeared on MPR's Midday and got a similar question from a caller. Osterholm, an expert on the flu, says he's not sure using hand sanitizer is reducing your risk of contracting H1N1, but it's helping with a lot of other things:

We often think about antibiotics that we take and because the viruses can mutate when they are exposed to these kinds of things, we get resistance; some of them that are growing in your body develop through mutation, a way to get around the antibiotic and they become the prevalent one.

What we're killing these bugs with is alcohol, which is like boiling. You don't get resistance. So we're not worried about breeding superbugs by using alcohol-based handrubs. That's a good thing. Don't worry about that.

Not only does that kill a great deal of the microbial life on your hands -- viruses and bacteria -- but in Minnesota we all know that in Minnesota, hands become more chapped. Hangnails become more common. It turns out that some of the bad bugs actually do much better on our hands and actually survive quite well when our hands are under challenge of the elements.

What happens with these alcohol-based handrubs, they not only have alcohol in them, they have emollients in it. And it turns out, we have shown in studies in health care studies, we can greatly reduce the burden of bad bugs on your hands by using these hand gels routinely. You can't use them too much.

One interesting point: Osterholm says that hands play a much less role in the transmission of the flu than previously thought.

Today, I would never tell someone to scrub down a workplace if someone had influenza there. Schools needlessly are scrubbing themselves down after cases of influenza there; that's not where the transmission is occurring.

So the key message is I'm not sure how much all this hand hygiene is really doing to reduce flu transmission, but it's sure good for a lot of other things.

Keep in mind, however, that some research a few years ago found that if the hand gel isn't at least 60-percent alcohol, it won't be very effective. Think about that before you give some to your kids:



Here's the entire show:

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Live-blogging: Flu vaccine update

Posted at 12:21 PM on November 4, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health

As Minnesota officials announce four more deaths from H1N1, Flu.gov is hosting a webcast with the latest information on the H1N1 flu vaccine. The experts are: Dr. Anne Schuchat, Director, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Dr. Gloria Addo Ayensu, MD, MPH, Director of the Fairfax County Department of Health, Fairfax, Virginia; Dr. Pierre Vigilance, Director, District of Columbia Department of Health, Washington, DC.

Here are the highlights.

Q: What do you need to do at vaccine clinics to prove you're in the "risk" groups.

A: It's an honor system. We publish the target groups but we don't check. We hope people will do the right thing and if they're not part of the high-risk category (currently children, health-care workers etc.), they'll wait their turn.

Q: How long do people have to wait once a clinic has been announced?

People have been lining up a couple of hours ahead of time (in DC). People who show up once a vaccine session starts don't have to wait so long.

Q Why has there been a delay?

A: Flu vaccines are made in a method that's tried and true, but not reliable. The viruses that are inoculated into eggs were growing too slowly -- more slowly than expected. So the initial amounts that we had aren't what we hoped. We don't know exactly when the amount of vaccine "out there" will be enough. It may be things get better sooner in one area than another. Demand can change all the time.

Q: When will communities see more vaccine?

A: More is hard to quantify (huh?). It could be "some time" before the amounts that are out in communities feel very ample.

Q: If my child has been diagnosed with the flu, should she still get the H1N1 and seasonal flu vaccine?

A: Even if you believe your child has had the H1N1 flu, getting vaccinated makes sense. If you know your child has had H1N1 -- through state labs -- then the child probably wouldn't need the vaccine.

This year the seasonal flu vaccine has been in short supply, too. But getting the H1N1 flu ivaccine is more important. For seniors, the seasonal flu vaccine is important.

Q: Are you worried about running out of anti-viral medicine?

A: The commercial supply for adults is good right now. The availability for children has been spotty but getting better. We've released the liquid form of Tamiflu. There's also capsules that can be turned into pediatric doses by pharmacists, mixing adult capsules into liquid that children can have.

Q: If my children and I have asthma but we can't get vaccine in our community, should we go to a neighboring state?

A: Yes. But check with private providers and state health departments first.

Q: Why was decision made to put out vaccine when you knew there would be shortages?

A: We had a choice to make between protecting people and having things be neat and orderly. We couldn't tolerate withholding a vaccine that could protect some people.

Q: If a young child misses the window for the second dose, should they start over?

A: No, if you miss the four-week mark, it's OK. What you don't want is to get the second dose too soon. Two doses are needed in children under 10.

Q: Are health care workers considered a priority at clinics if vaccine isn't available at work?

A: Yes.

Q: What can we be doing to protect ourselves while we wait for more vaccine to become available?

A: The ones we've been recommending: Cover your mouth, wash your hands, stay home if you're sick, get a seasonal flu shot.

Q: What's the difference between the mist and a shot?

A: The shot it is made from a killed virus. Mist is a virus that is diluted. Anyone over six months can get the shot. If you have an egg allergy , we recommend you not receive the vaccine.

Q: How can I be sure the vaccine is safe?

A: It's made the same way as seasonal flu vaccine. We're using the same processes and the same companies. 100 million people get the flu vaccine every year and we have an excellent safety record. We've increased safety monitoring. The risk from the flu is very real.

Q: How can you tell the difference between seasonal flu and H1N1?

A: The population affected by H1N1 is a younger than those affected by seasonal flu.

Q: Would someone with a suppressed immune system, would it be better to get two shots?

A: One dose should be fine. H1N1 vaccines in clinical trials have worked really well.

Q: Do children have some protection against H1N1 between the time they get the first dose and the second dose?

A: Yes, but only a little.

Q: Is vaccine linked to autism?

A: There's no scientific evidence of that. Some people have been concerned about primerisol -- a mercury-based preservative -- and we've asked manufacturers to make some that is primerisol free.

Q: Is H1N1 associated with more gastrointestinal symptoms than season flu?

A: We're seeing that.

Q: Are school nurses part of the priority group?

A: Yes.

(End)

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Can your pet get H1N1?

Posted at 11:09 AM on November 4, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health

A cat in Iowa has tested positive for the H1N1 influenza virus, according to the American Veterinary Medicine Association. It's the first time, apparently, that a cat has been diagnosed with the flu strain, raising a new concern: the health of your pet during flu season.

"Indoor pets that live in close proximity to someone who has been sick are at risk and it is wise to monitor their health to ensure they aren't showing signs of illness," said Dr. David Schmitt, State Veterinarian for Iowa.

Two of three family members had H1N1; both have recovered. It's believed the cat caught the flu from the people, not the other way around.

But the cat backlash has begun. In Beijing a university is rounding up homeless cats, according to one report. And a cat shelter was set on fire.

"There is not a single medical expert or research to suggest any connection between the H1N1 virus transmission and cats," a retired professor is said to have told the Web site.

Until now, that is.

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How much will health care cost you?

Posted at 3:29 PM on November 2, 2009 by Bob Collins (20 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

How much will the middle class pay for health care under the House bill being considered in Washington?

The Congressional Budget Office today released its assessment of how much you and your family will pay for health insurance under the various plans being considered in Congress. You can read the entire letter to Rep. Charles Rangel, the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee here, but here are the major examples it gives under the House bill:

♦ A single person with income of $26,500 in 2016 (225 percent of the FPL) would pay a premium of about $1,900 (after getting a premium subsidy of 64 percent) and could expect to pay another $900 in cost sharing (net of federal subsidies); thus, the average payment by such a person for the premium and cost sharing combined is projected to be $2,800, or about 11 percent of income.

♦ A family of four with income of about $54,000 (also 225 percent of the FPL in 2016) could expect to pay about the same share of its income for premiums and cost sharing.

♦ The average premium for a family policy would be $15,000 -- $9,500 after subsidies.

♦ A family of four making $102,500 (four times the current federal poverty level) would pay $15,000 a year plus $5,500 in "cost sharing" (such as co-pays and percentages not covered by insurance) for a total of $20,500 per year.

Question: How many of you keep track of what your health care is costing you now? If so, would you care to share? I'll be happy to go first. It's about half of these numbers, but my plan is shared by my employer).

Meanwhile, a North Carolina congresswoman had an interesting take on this today. Rep. Virginia Foxx said health care reform is a greater threat to the country than any terrorist in any country.

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Today in the flu

Posted at 12:26 PM on October 28, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Health

A quick trip around Planet Flu:

• Wisconsin announced today that four more people have died from H1N1. The state also said it will tell health care providers to stop conducting mass swine-flu vaccinations starting next week until vaccine supplies increase. Only target high-risk groups will get the vaccine.
(Minnesota reported two more deaths today.)

• "Swine flu police" told elderly California people to leave a vaccination clinic. "We're doing this for the children," a health official said. "Local government officials, hospital workers and doctors in private practice are being conscripted as ad hoc swine flu police," the New York Times reports. Some people appear to be sneaking into clinics to get the shots.

• In Texas, more than 45,000 at-risk prisoners will receive the swine flu vaccine, Texas prison officials said. They're at-risk, too.

• President Obama's daughters got vaccinated this week. There was no favoritism involved, the White House suggested. They received the vaccine "using the same process as every other vaccination site in the District," according to the first lady's Press Secretary Katie McCormick-Lelyveld. The president has not had the vaccine yet. Should he? When is someone supposed to be important and when is someone just one of the people?

• If enough people are afraid of H1N1, the Internet will get sick.

• What's the first thing people ask when someone says, "I don't feel good."? Usually it's "do you have a fever?" Now, MPR's Lorna Benson has revealed, you can have H1N1 and not have a fever.

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Predicting the flu

Posted at 1:37 PM on October 22, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Three more people in Minnesota have died as a result of complications from the flu, all had the mysterious "underlying medical conditions," MPR (AP) reports today.

Meanwhile, the latest government survey finds that 1 in 5 children in the U.S. "had a flu-like illness earlier this month, and most of those cases likely were swine flu," the Associated Press reported. Still planning on opening your front door to the kids on Halloween?

Try running the numbers on this and you'll see how impossible it is to put the flu into any sort of historical context.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, 38,000 people a year in the U.S. die as a result of flu or associated complications (like pneumonia). But the CDC doesn't really know this to be true since not all states have reported flu deaths and, if they do, they're not all reported the same way.

The CDC reset this year's count to zero in August after revamping the mechanism for reporting hospitalizations and deaths. According to its Web site, there've been 292 deaths since the end of August. Minnesota says there've been 10 deaths here.

The CDC does track pediatric deaths and through last week, there have been 43 reported -- about half the number of recent flu seasons and we're only at the beginning of the flu season now. Let's just say the CDC graphic-makers aren't producing the most intuitive graphs on the subject (click for larger image):

Nothing about the flu is predictable, it seems, including the arrival date of a flu vaccine. But that doesn't stop health officials and other experts from making predictions, the LA Times notes:

Statistician Sherry Towers and Zhilan Feng of Purdue University reported last week in the journal Eurosurveillance that a mathematical model of the swine flu pandemic predicts the disease will peak this week.

But officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have emphasized repeatedly that trying to predict what any form of flu will do in the future will most likely be an exercise in futility.

"We may see in any particular community illness going down in the next several weeks, but we don't know whether it is going to go up again," Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease, said Tuesday.

If the statisticians are right, and the flu is peaking this week, then the number of pediatric deaths may be smaller than usual. If the current statistics from the CDC hold up for the entire flu season, the number of pediatric deaths will be substantially higher than usual.

Everyone's guessing, and there appears to be no reliable historical context for what's going on.

Some graphs from the Minnesota Department of Public Health try, like this one showing the number of doctor visits compared to previous years:

But is that because of a difference in severity of the flu, or the fact that every news organization is talking about it constantly?

Probably the former if the results of viral cultures are an indication:

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The cancer question

Posted at 11:07 AM on October 22, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health

This video of Sen. Al Franken "schooling" an opponent of health reform proposals has been making the Internet rounds over the last few days.

"The fearsome Harvard math major punished conservative economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth for claiming that Democrats' reforms would jack up bankruptcies for medical reasons," the Minnesota Independent reported.

Clearly, Franken was a senator prepared for combat, though conservative blogs have jumped on Franken's comeback for Furchtgott-Roth's attempt to point out that the U.S. has better cancer survival rates than European countries.

"That's because we find easily survivable cancers to count as ones that we survive," he said. If you're tallying cancer survival rates, shouldn't the "easily survivable" ones be counted?

Well, yes, except Franken's response claims the U.S. figures are cooked. He's referring to this "study" by Betsy McCaughey, the health care reform opponent who is, perhaps, best known as the person who started the "death panels" controversy.

There is a more recent -- perhaps more scholarly -- evaluation of cancer survival rates. A London researcher found the highest survival rates were found in the U.S. for breast and prostate cancer, in Japan for colon and rectal cancers in men, and in France for colon and rectal cancers in women.

The same study also found wide differences in survival rates among U.S. states, especially when race is considered.

Another study, this one from Canada, found that poor people in Canada had better survival rates for breast and prostate cancer than some U.S. states. Hawaii narrowed the gap, however. Hawaii mandates employer-provided health care.

While partisans are quick to jump on any factoids that prove their side is correct on the health care issue, FactCheck.org suggests there are too many variables to make the statistics meaningful one way or the other:

Dr. Marie Diener-West, a professor of biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, told us that it would be a stretch to draw too many conclusions from comparing survival rates. "Part of the problem with the comparison is that it might not actually be comparable populations," she said. "It could be [one is] an older population, it could be they have more comorbidities [other conditions] that are affecting their survival in addition to cancer, there could be occupational differences. There are many different factors that could be playing a role." Diener-West pointed out that the uninsured, for instance, are generally poorer and may have different diets, different lifestyles and different exposure to tobacco and other drugs than the privately insured. And when you compare across countries, of course, you're also looking at two different gene pools.

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H1N1 threat overblown, report says

Posted at 1:31 PM on October 21, 2009 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Health

We're six months into the outbreak of H1N1 flu and we still can't seem to get a clear picture of how serious the outbreak is.

True, some hospitals in the Twin Cities have turned away patients because they're overwhelmed with people who either have or think they have H1N1, but a CBS News investigation this afternoon claims the statistics are overblown.

It's impossible to know for sure because the Centers for Disease Control in July told states to stop testing patients for H1N1.

Had the states conducted the testing, CBS says, we would have found out that most people who have H1N1, really don't:

We asked all 50 states for their statistics on state lab-confirmed H1N1 prior to the halt of individual testing and counting in July. The results reveal a pattern that surprised a number of health care professionals we consulted. The vast majority of cases were negative for H1N1 as well as seasonal flu, despite the fact that many states were specifically testing patients deemed to be most likely to have H1N1 flu, based on symptoms and risk factors, such as travel to Mexico.

Meanwhile, Minnesota has set up a "flu hotline" for those people who think they've got the flu. The FluLine number is 1-866-259-4655.

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Patients or prisoners?

Posted at 3:08 PM on October 20, 2009 by Bob Collins (8 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

Gov. Tim Pawlenty's reaction to a Star Tribune story on TVs for sex offenders confirms the reality of Minnesota's "treatment program" for sex offenders -- it's really just a jail for people who haven't been charged or convicted of crimes they might commit in the future.

"They don't need 50-inch, flat-screen plasma televisions for sex offenders," Pawlenty said today of the $1,576 TVs in the Moose Lake facility."Clearly, somebody just made a bonehead decision, and I'm going to reverse it."

The reversal comes over the objection of some of the staff at the facility who say there is a clinical benefit to the TVs. Indeed, the Associated Press refers to the people housed in the facility as "patients," not inmates.

"Patients" in Minnesota's sex offender "treatment" program have already served their jail time. They're housed under the guise of being in treatment, even though experts say there is no evidence that there's a treatment for sex offenders, and nobody who was committed under state law has ever come out of the program.

Dennis Linehan came closest. In 1965, Linehan kidnapped, raped, and killed a Minnesota teenager, was sentenced to 40 years in prison, escaped and was captured after sexually molesting a 12-year-old in Michigan. When he was scheduled for supervised release in 1994, then Gov. Arne Carlson ordered him held until he could get the Legislature to enact the Sexually Dangerous Persons Law, which allows Minnesota to lock up people who haven't been charged, under the theory -- upheld by the courts -- that the rights of the public outweigh the rights of the individual.

The Moose Lake "treatment" facility is, in fact, a wing of a prison. Whether the "patients" are pampered -- as suggested by the Star Tribune's TV story -- is a matter of some dispute, especially considering a complaint from the ACLU earlier this year:

* Detainees are subjected to strip searches and are handcuffed and shackled as part of standard operating procedure whenever detainees are transported (for example, to attend patient advisory committee meetings at the MSOP facility) and after contact visits in violation of their Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.

* Detainees' incoming legal mail has, on numerous occasions, been opened outside the presence of the detainee in violation of their Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

* Detainees allege that they are not allowed incoming calls and that their calls are monitored in violation of their First Amendment right to telephone access.

* Detainees are denied their right to Procedural Due Process by being deprived of their access to freely move around the Annex without escorts, and, consequently, access to the privileges afforded to all other civilly committed detainees including daily access to the gym, access to library services, the ability to communicate with other Annex detainees, and free access to outside activities. The conditions imposed on Detainees are similar to what the Minnesota Department of Corrections imposes on inmates who are in Administrative Segregation. Inmates in A-Seg are entitled to procedural due process before being housed in that restrictive setting.

* Detainees are subjected to potentially severe health risks due to inadequate sanitation in violation of their Eighth Amendment rights includinng:

1. Communal showers and bathrooms are only cleaned once a day;
2. Urine and fecal matter are frequently found on the bathroom floor or toilet seats;
3. No sanitizer is readily available to disinfect the floors and toilet seats;
4. Dining room tables are not adequately sanitized prior to serving each meal;
5. Mops and brooms used to clean the bathrooms and showers are also used to clean cells, thereby spreading germs to their cells;
6. Towels, blankets and cleaning rags are washed in one unit washer and the water does not reach a temperature needed to properly sanitize them.

* Detainees who had purchased 20 inch televisions at the Annex had their property seized and were forced to send them out of the facility at their own expense to comply with a MNDOC rule allowing only 13 inch clear televisions on the Moose Lake prison property.

* MSOP retaliated against two of the plaintiffs (Beaulieu and Yazzie) for their participation in litigation challenging their access to religious activities while civilly committed to the MSOP. The retaliation took the form of a reduction in their access to religious services, attorneys, the court and visitation by family; unreasonable restraint of Yazzie leading to injury; unreasonable searches of Beaulieu's property; and the seizure and copying of Beaulieu's legal papers.

"It has to be treated like a hospital -- it is not a prison," said Rep. Thomas Huntley, DFL-Duluth.

Wink.

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Got questions about the flu?

Posted at 12:00 PM on October 15, 2009 by Than Tibbetts (4 Comments)
Filed under: Health

The flu hasn't shown any signs of slowing down in Minnesota — 215 schools reported outbreaks last week — and this will be a great opportunity to clear up any lingering questions you might have about the flu.

We had a flu Q&A with MPR health reporter Lorna Benson here on Thursday at noon. You can replay the chat below; there were a lot of interesting questions and enlightening answers.

Also, check out MPR's H1N1 Flu Facts & Information portal. It's continually updated with the latest flu info.

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In the pink

Posted at 1:58 PM on October 6, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Marketing and advertising

How much pink is too much pink?

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and each year more and more consumer products "go pink." Is it about a good cause, selling products, or a little of both?

"If the AIDS organizations had backed off for one minute on red ribbons, think of where we'd be today," Nancy Brinker of Susan G. Komen for the Cure told MSNBC.

"Does it trivialize it?" countered Barbara Lippert, a writer. "I think it's done more good than harm but anything that becomes a big business has a danger of exploitation.

"My daughter-in-law died of breast cancer," Helga Russell told GoErie.com. "At the end, she told us she was tired of pink. We held a benefit and we wanted to wear pink T-shirts, and she said, 'No.' She said, 'Who knows whether the money is actually given to research?'"

The accompanying story points out, for example, that Diet Coke is festooned in pink, but nowhere on the packaging does it indicate any money is going to breast cancer research.

"I think that the pink ribbon, as a symbol, tends to pretty up what is a pretty crappy disease," a breast cancer survivor told the Boston Globe. "But a pink ribbon is easier to look at than the disease itself."

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Did money talk?

Posted at 2:04 PM on September 29, 2009 by Bob Collins (7 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

The so-called "public option" component of health care reform died today when the Senate Finance Committee's Health Care Subdivision (essentially the entire committee) rejected an attempt to include it in legislation the panel is considering. Other bills circulating at the Capitol still have "public option," but Sen. Max Baucus removed it from his bill under pressure from Republicans, who considered it Socialist. The number of Democrats refusing to support the idea pretty much sinks it.

The vote was 15-to-8, with Democrats Baucus, Sen. Tom Carper, Sen. Kent Conrad, Sen. Blanche Lincoln, and Sen. Bill Nelson joining all of the committee's Republicans with "no" votes.

Most of the Democrats voting against the bill, were among the biggest Democratic recipients of health care cash in campaign fundraising. Coincidence? Who can say? The campaign finance system is such that one can only speculate what role it plays when legislation is considered that affects the campaign contributors. So you have to decide.

Here's the breakdown by committee members. The numbers in parentheses represents its rank for that senator in the grouping of contributions by industry. Keep in mind, these numbers are the amount raised through the end of June, well before the health care issue dominated the national dialogue.

DEMOCRATS

John D. Rockefeller, West Virginia (Chairman) - $255,950 from health professionals (2nd),

Jeff Bingaman, New Mexico - $210,563 from health professionals (3rd) and $92,000 from pharmaceutical industry (7th).

Sen. Kent Conrad, North Dakota - $239,533 from health professionals (3rd), $233,625 from the insurance industry (4th).

John Kerry, Massachusetts - $91,036 from insurance industry (7th). $64,948 from health professionals (13th)

Blanche Lincoln, Arkansas - $298,700 from health professionals (2nd), $153,304 from pharmaceutical industry (5th) and $131,850 from insurance industry (8th).

Ron Wyden, Oregon - $173,475 from health professionals (1st), $83,299 from insurance industry (7th).

Charles Schumer, New York - $155,300 from insurance industry (5th) , $108,650 from health professionals (9th).

Debbie Stabenow, Michigan - $338,455 from health professionals (4th). Second-biggest contributor was Blue Cross Blue Shield ($59,700)

Maria Cantwell, Washington - $206,001 from health professionals (11th).

Bill Nelson, Florida - $332,179 from health professionals (6th)

Robert Menendez, New Jersey - $256,950 from health professionals (7th)

Thomas Carper, Delaware - $238,680 from insurance industry (2nd), $139,520 from pharmaceutical industry (7th).

REPUBLICANS

Sen. Charles Grassley, Iowa - $241,856 from health professionals (1st), $201,148 from insurance industry (2nd), $152,650 from pharmaceutical industry (3rd), $139,137 from hospitals and nursing homes (4th). Blue Cross Blue Shield ($26,750) is second-largest contributor. Select Medical Group is third-largest contributor ($23,000).

Orrin G. Hatch, Utah. Ranking member - $481,081 from insurance industry (1st), $242,550 from health professionals. Blue Cross Blue Shield is second-largest contributor ($45,603)

Olympia Snowe, Maine - $174,074 from health professionals (2nd), $163,585 from insurance industry (3rd). Aetna Inc., is second-biggest contributor.

John Ensign, Nevada - $269,325 from health professionals (3rd), $211,462 from insurance industry (7th).

Michael Enzi, Wyoming - $218,700 from pharmaceutical industry (1st), $144,049 from health professionals (2nd), $124,250 from insurance industry (4th). Blue Cross Blue Shield is fifth-largest contributor ($15,000).

John Cornyn, Texas - $759,113 from health professionals (4th), $350,294 from insurance industry (9th).

John Kyl, Arizona - $649,383 from health professionals (4th).

Jim Bunning, Kentucky - $86,433 from insurance industry (1st), $63,650 from health care (3rd). Kindred Healthcare is fourth-largest contributor ( $12,100).

Pat Roberts, Kansas - $178,299 from pharmaceutical industry (9th).

(Source: OpenSecrets.org)

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Strung out on sanitizer?

Posted at 1:50 PM on September 21, 2009 by Bob Collins (9 Comments)
Filed under: Health

How desperate do you have to be for an alcohol fix to eat/drink hand sanitizer?

The Chicago Tribune says some people are raising concerns about the hand sanitizers school districts are providing to combat H1N1 flu.

"H1N1 has certainly created a different way of thinking about what we're doing in the way of influenza prevention," said Darlene Ruscitti, DuPage County's regional superintendent of schools. "But these are things we have to be aware of, and we need to make superintendents aware that people have brought up the issue of the alcohol content in these."

Hand sanitizer has to be 60-percent alcohol to work, and apparently some school districts have banned it because authorities suspect students would try to get drunk with it.

Has there been a big outbreak of drunken -- but sanitary -- schoolchildren? No.

The Duluth News Tribune reprinted the story today and some of the reader comments were actually worth reading.

I used to eat rock salt when I was in grade school. The janitor just left it sitting by the door, and I thought it was tasty. I lived to tell. A friend of mine was filling out the paperwork to purchase some cough medication at Wal Mart. She asked them to also shoot the information back to the automotive department because she needed to buy some windshield washer solvent, too. Still makes me laugh.

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What's so scary about H1N1?

Posted at 3:05 PM on September 14, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Health

There was an odd moment on early morning TV today when an anchor for the CBS Early Show announced that the regular host wasn't in today because he's out sick. "It could be H1N1," she said.

Harry Smith, the regular host, then hauled himself off his deathbed and called into the show to reveal that he's feeling OK, but he's achey and feverish.

Runny nose? Temperature of 99.6? Why is this a big deal?

Meanwhile, in Minnesota today, it's reported that a vaccine against H1N1 "may get here too late?"

It's pretty clear by now that H1N1 isn't a death pandemic for most people. You get a runny nose. You get some fever. You feel lousy. And your best friends will make a bigger deal out of it than it needs to be.

Of course, if everyone comes down with H1N1 at the same time, companies will be hard-pressed to have enough workers to operate; every day will be like Fridays in the summer.

But the flu only last a few days and, so far, doesn't appear to present the threat to elderly people than the "regular flu" does, a fact that doesn't yield a very interesting headline..

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Can undocumented immigrants get government subsidized health care?

Posted at 9:34 AM on September 10, 2009 by Bob Collins (23 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. The reforms -- the reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.

That was the point at which Rep. Joe Wilson shouted, "you lie," and led to today's national dialog about whether people who are here illegally will have access to health care. Notice, however, that the president didn't say they would. He didn't say they wouldn't. He said "the reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally."

That's different than saying government won't pay for access to health care for people who are in the United States illegally. It already is. Technically.

Take Minnesota, for example.

Technically, "Nonimmigrants" and "undocumented persons" are not eligible for General Assistance, welfare, Minnesota Supplemental Aid, SSI, Food Support, Emergency General Assistance, and MinnesotaCare. But, again technically, they have access to government-subsidized health care even though they don't. How can both be true?

The 2003 Legislature eliminated GAMC coverage (General Assistance Medical Care) for nonimmigrants and undocumented persons who are under age 18, age 65 or older, blind, or disabled. It also eliminated GAMC coverage for all other nonimmigrants and undocumented persons.

But, according to the Minnesota House of Representatives Research Department, "Nonimmigrants and undocumented persons who meet MA eligibility criteria, such as children under age 21, parents of children under age 18, people who are age 65 or older, blind, or disabled, may be eligible for treatment of emergency medical conditions (including labor and delivery costs for pregnant women) under Emergency MA." That's federally funded.

In Minnesota and the U.S., SCHIP, the children's health insurance program, provides undocumented and nonimmigrants prenatal and delivery care through the end of the month in which the child is born.

Technically, that's government-subsidized health care.

So who's right? That's the problem. Technically both sides are. Especially when it's boiled down to sound bites and talk show rhetoric. That's why there needs to be more attention to the details of the various plans being discussed. The "immigrant issue" is a technicality being used to sway people who can't be bothered with such things.

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The "M" word in health care

Posted at 4:55 PM on September 9, 2009 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Health

You know by now, probably, that President Obama is coming here Saturday to turn up the heat for his health care plan. And, of course, he's speaking this evening to a joint session of Congress.

The White House has put together a well-crafted presentation about three people in need of health care, one of whom is from Wisconsin:

For many reasons, stories of people battling cancer or heart problems resonate with America. Most people accept that they could easily be in that situation. But few imagine a life of schizophrenia or other mental illness.

Access to mental health care has been mostly left out of the public debate., and
it's not because we've got the greatest mental health care system in the world. While there are defenders of the health care system in America, there are few who'll proudly defend the mental health care system here.

So, perhaps, it's a good time to revisit this MPR series, A Bad State of Mind, about Minnesota's mental health system, because things haven't changed much since 2004. Unlike people with heart attacks or people with cancer, even people with health insurance get turned away when searching for help because there aren't enough beds in mental health wards in hospitals, especially for kids in crisis. And mental health units were closed down earlier this decade because hospitals could make more money with pricier cardiac care facilities.

There are reasons this happened. Government regulations, for one, provided incentives for hospitals to close their mental health facilities.

Recent legislation provided for mental health "parity," but as WHYY in Philadelphia reported today, that doesn't mean people are getting it. It may be the one area where insurance companies are most dictating health care treatment. "In every hospital with every therapist office, somebody is recommending eight session, and the insurance company says, 'No, we think six is enough,'" according to Trevor Hadley at the center for Mental Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

All of this is grist for the health care debate, far more, anyway, than death panels. But people would rather not talk substantively about the problem.

Count President Obama in that group. At least in initial drafts of the speech, there is no mention of mental health. Will Rep. Charles Boustany, a heart surgeon who's giving the GOP response, bring it up?

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H1N1's big numbers

Posted at 7:00 PM on August 25, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Health

After the hype surrounding H1N1 flu last April, and the resulting less-than-disastrous result ("only" 522 people have died), the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology isn't backing off from the big numbers. A report says that up to 90,000 people may die.

It's not that the H1N1 flu will be more severe that a typical flu-season strain, it's that more people will get it and, thus, more people will die. Up to half the population of the U.S. will get H1N1. There also isn't the immunity to this strain of flu.

During an online "chat" with Amy Garcia of the National Association of School Nurses today, a questioner from Minneapolis on the Washington Post site asked if the "concern that we just don't know how it will react, as compared to the flu that we usually get every year? Or is it something more than that?"

This strain of H1N1 flu is novel, meaning new. So it spreads easily because people have not been exposed and do not have antibodies to it. This strain of H1N1 concerns me for several of reasons:

1. It disproportionately impacts children and pregnant women.

2. There seems to be a higher incidence of pneumonia, possibly because this virus replicates deep inside the lung.

3. It spreads very easily and quickly. My school nurse friends who have witnessed outbreaks describe large numbers of children getting very sick, very quickly.

4. The H1N1 virus may mutate to be more deadly, and still very contagious.

The experts issue the same recommendations to people they've been issuing since last April: Wash your hands regularly, don't cough in someone's face, and stay home when you're sick.

That last item is the big nut in all of this. People who don't have any sick time, tend not to take days off regardless of their medical woes and the threat to the rest of us. So the same experts are asking employers to "be flexible," another way of saying "don't penalize them for staying home."

After last spring's build-up and resulting backlash, who's left who's still listening to the warnings and advice?

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The health care debate: Marginal treatments

Posted at 2:00 PM on August 25, 2009 by Bob Collins (11 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

Sen. John McCain is back on the stump with a "town meeting" style event for health care today.

"You know in England, the NICE (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) has denied treatment for women with breast cancer, and people with Alzheimer's, and denied life-saving drugs for people with MS," the former presidential candidate said to a group of mostly senior citizens, the one demographic he won in last year's election.

True?

Apparently so. And it comes directly from a briefing paper prepared by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which said:

* NICE restricted access to two drugs for Age-Related Macular Degeneration, Britain's leading cause of blindness.[6] The first drug, Macugen, was completely blocked, while the second, Lucentis, was limited to the approximately one in five disease sufferers who have a specific type of the disorder.[7] Even then, Lucentis was restricted to patients with that type of the disorder in both eyes--and could only be used in the less-diseased eye. In the words of Tom Bremridge, chief executive of the Macular Disease Society, "allowing one eye to go blind before treating the second eye is cruel and totally unacceptable." Winfried Amoaku of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists explained, "There are differences in action between these two drugs, which may be important in individual cases, and so we do not wish to be limited in our treatment options in this way."

* NICE limited several Alzheimer's drugs to use in patients whose disease had advanced from early to middle-stage. Even though doctors argued that starting treatment at the onset of dementia would be most effective in slowing the progression of the disease,[8] NICE decided that patients would have to wait until they became sick enough for the treatments to meet the cost-effectiveness threshold. A charity has taken legal action, accusing NICE of "ignoring totally the proven benefits of the drugs for careers of those with mild symptoms, and grossly underestimating the savings they bring to the state by enabling suffers to remain in their own homes longer. [The charity] accused NICE of implying careers are far better off when the condition of their sick relative deteriorates so much that they are forced to move into a residential home."[9]

* NICE blocked access to Glivec, a leukemia treatment. Ann Tittley, a 55-year-old patient, was being treated for breast cancer when she was diagnosed with leukemia. After realizing she would be denied access to Glivec even though her physician had recommended she start it immediately, Ms. Tittley wrote a letter to then-Prime Minister Tony Blair. "Glivec was my lifeline, at least it would give me a chance of beating this disease," wrote Ms. Tittley. "Life is precious.... I appreciate that cost is important, but to deny patients this potentially life-saving treatment on this basis is totally unforgivable and criminal."[10]

In a June article, the Economist noted the concerns and suggested, however, there are provisions which could prevent them in a reformed health care system:

In America, the drugs and devices lobbies are violently opposed to a NICE-style agency that could issue mandatory rulings. They paint a scary picture of Americans being denied access to life-saving new drugs by faceless bureaucrats. In Britain NICE has come under fire for rulings that limited access to expensive drugs for Alzheimer's and cancer on the NHS. America could get around this problem by requiring and perhaps even funding studies, but leaving insurers and individuals to decide whether to pay for treatments.

As with many aspects of the health care debate, there's more to the story. Aricept is the drug NICE originally kept off its formulary, according to the New York Times. It costs about $2,200 a year and some Medicare drug plans pay for it; some don't, says The Times' Caring and Coping blog.

Daniel Callahan, a bioethicist at the Hastings Center, says the drug -- and several others that are linked to the anecdotes above, can slow the progression of a disease, but only for a short time and have only marginal benefits given their cost. It's a question, he says, Americans don't want to ask or discuss.

The most generic way this is done is to declare that life is priceless and even to pose such a question is immoral; and so also with the idea of rationing beneficial treatments. Considerations of cost should simply have no place in our reform calculus.

But there are more subtle ways that cost are sidelined in the reform debate. One of them is the powerful role of the pharmaceutical industry, also taken up in the New Old Age. By treating any consideration of cost as a threat to innovation, both the profit motive is protected (patents run out), and the American romance with endless medical progress is pandered to.

At the end of the debate where McCain traveled today, each side -- proponents and opponents -- can approach the same issue with two different questions.

(1) Why should the government tell me what drugs I can have when it should be my choice?

- or -

(2) Why should taxpayers -- or the other members of your insurance pool -- pay for a drug for you that has little value?

Pick your poison.

(AP Photo/Matt York)

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Who gets the flu vaccine first?

Posted at 4:14 PM on August 20, 2009 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Science

Some scientists are questioning whether the first people to get inoculated against the H1N1 flu should be the ones that are scheduled to.

The current formula calls for the people most likely to die to get the vaccine first. An article in Science Magazine, by way of Time.com, says it should, perhaps, be the people most likely to spread the illness.

"If you can stop transmission, you can protect the people who are vulnerable," says Jan Medlock, a mathematician at Clemson University and one of the authors of the Science paper.

That would be kids and the age group of their parents -- basically 20- and 30-somethings. Those are the people who, not coincidentally, have been the hardest-hit Minnesotans by the H1N1 outbreak so far.

The Minnesota plan for inoculation follows the federal guidelines: Health care workers, pregnant women, young children and people who care for infants under 6 months of age go first.

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Health care rationing?

Posted at 9:53 AM on August 19, 2009 by Bob Collins (13 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

At the same time MPR's Kerri Miller was hosting a discussion today on where the money goes that's dumped into health care, and why health care costs so much, a Harvard professor was sounding an alarm that health care reform will lead to rationing, and getting significant pushback from an unlikely source.

"The best solution to this problem of private overconsumption of health services would be to eliminate the tax rule that is causing the excessive insurance and the resulting rise in health spending, Martin Feldstein wrote in a Wall St. Journal column today called ObamaCare is all About Rationing." Alternatively, Congress could strengthen the incentives in the existing law for health savings accounts with high insurance copayments. Either way, the result would be more cost-conscious behavior that would lower health-care spending."

Feldstein went on CNBC this morning, where anchor Mark Haines found his view objectionable.

Haines: Why would that lead to rationing?

Feldstein: Because that's what the administration strategy is. They've said they're going to cut the projected rate of growth on health care spending by 30 percent over the next two decades. That came from a White House study released in June. And the way they're going to do that is by setting rules for doctors and hospitals, what they call 'cost effective forms of treatment' that will limit the kinds of things that can be done.

Haines: And we don't have rationing now?

Feldstein: We have some of it, but this...

Haines: You bet your bippy we've got it. C'mon. You have profit-motivated bureaucrats making rationing decisions.

Feldstein: But I can talk to my doctor. I can talk to my hospital and say, 'should we do this or not do that?' And people with private insurance today have those kinds of options.

Haines: And then the insurance company has the final say on whether it actually happens, right? Rationing care.

Feldstein: They turn down very, very few things and, again, it is not the government that's doing it. So if my insurance company doesn't allow certain drugs, or doesn't allow certain kinds of treatment, I can choose a different kind of policy. And the idea as I see it in the Obama proposal is to force us all into a certain kind of spending pattern because the government is concerned -- the administration is concerned -- about how much the government is spending on health care, and Medicare, and Medicaid, but in order to control that, they want to change the kind of treatments that you and I -- outside the Medicare and Medicaid system -- can get on our own.

Haines. I'm sorry, but how are you being... how are we being forced into anything? You will be allowed to keep your private insurance.

Feldstein: Yes, but what the administration is talking about, what they describe in this White House report, is what they call 'comparative effectiveness research.' In other words: Their studies will say whether a particular kind of treatment is worth the money. And that's what concerns me.

Haines: Wait a minute! You want to be able to have anything regardless of its cost vs. its effectiveness?

Feldstein: No, I want to make that decision.

Haines: How are you qualified to make that decision?

Feldstein: I and my physician together will talk about whether something is worse spending the money to do. Whether the risks associated with not doing this test or that test are risks that we want to take. And I think that individuals who want to pay out of pocket, there ought to be higher co-payments. But I think individuals and their physicians rather than a bureaucratic process should be making the choice.

Haines: First of all, the private insurance companies are a bureaucracy, so this bureaucrat argument is nonsense. And, second, you'll pardon me sir, but your argument is a very easy one to make by someone who has money.

Feldstein: But 85 percent of Americans have insurance. So it's not that we're talking about a small handful of people who have insurance. And one of the nice things is there's choice. I can, here in Boston, I can join any of a number of plans and they're going to differ (Bob notes: He didn't mention that Massachusetts has universal health care) in the kinds of hospitals I would have access to and the kinds of limits on various things. So there's choice and it seems to me that's one of the things that's made the American health care system so good. That it has stimulated research. It has stimulated new technologies...

Haines: Well I'll say, again, sir, you have these choices because you can afford them. A lot of people can't afford them. And we're 29th in the industrial world in infant mortality. We spend two-and-a-half times what Britain spends for worse outcomes...I'm sorry.

Haines got so worked up, he turned the interview over to his co-anchor.

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Little evidence that sexual orientation change efforts work

Posted at 4:57 PM on August 5, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Case closed. There's no evidence that therapy can transform a homosexual into a straight person. So says the American Psychological Association, which approved two years of research on a 125-to-4 vote at its annual convention.

"There's no evidence to say that change therapies work, but these vulnerable people are tempted to try them, and when they don't work, they feel doubly terrified," said Judith Glassgold, who chaired a task force. "You should be honest with people and say, 'This is not likely to change your sexual orientation, but we can help explore what options you have.'"

At issue is how therapists should handle gay clients who are caught between their sexual identity and a religion that disapproves of them. One of the solutions, the report said, is suggesting they change churches.

Dr. Warren Throckmorton, who writes a blog at Crosswalk.com, sees elements of the report differently from its bottom line, and suggests there's a solution to gays in crisis with their faith:

There are different assumptions about what best constitutes the answer to the question: 'who am I?' This paper nicely addresses these assumptions and acknowledges that people who are deeply committed to a non-gay-affirming religious position may stay same-sex attracted but not identify as gay. As the paper notes, this is an acceptable alternative.

... which sounds somewhat like a "don't ask don't tell" policy to oneself. But the report makes clear that -- at least in terms of therapy -- the issue isn't necessarily only about how one lives out one's sexual orientation, but also about how one identifies his or her sexual orientation, suggesting the two are not always the same.

Here's the full report.

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The hidden issue of health care

Posted at 11:55 AM on July 23, 2009 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

When I checked a few minutes ago, of the few dozen people who answered the question posed in this morning's Five at 8, 83% said they knew little to nothing about the specifics of the health care debate taking place in Washington.

How could that be? Because it's happening in Washington where process is most important.

Example. Read this article from the Associated Press. I'll wait right here.

Welcome back. Did you notice something about the article? There wasn't a single word about what's in the legislation or what the major points of contention are. Not one word. There is a reference to the Blue Dogs -- conservative Democrats -- being concerned about "tax increases and the impact on rural health care and small businesses." That's it. So what's in the House bill that specifically has them concerned?

It's no wonder that talk shows -- which boil legislation down to small talking points, some of which are occasionally in context and accurate -- steer the political debate.

But what if you want to be informed about the specific issues?

For the most part, it's piecemeal. Pick an editorial here or there, read a blog and piece it together.

Here are a few salient points.

Des Moines Register editorial

Democrats propose increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans - about 2 million taxpayers - to help pay for reform. The surtax would be imposed on families earning more than $350,000 a year and individuals earning more than $280,000 a year. The tax rate would range from 1 percent to 5.4 percent.

The New York Times provided separate views of this proposal in a blog post here. "Should the Rich Pay for the Uninsured?" Included were these details.

Doctors' reimbursements:

The baseline budget calls for large cuts over the next decade in doctors' reimbursements under Medicare. Congress has always voted to waive these cuts. The health care reform bill will make this waiver permanent at a cost of more than $200 billion. It is disingenuous to get outraged over this expense, since we always knew that Congress would not allow the baseline cuts to go into effect.

Capping health insurance premiums:

Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, wants to cap the tax exclusion to put a lid on inflationary health insurance and restore fairness to the tax code. Workers could still keep their health insurance at work, but they would have a new incentive to stay under an annual cap of, say, $15,000 for a family policy.The company could still deduct any amount it spends on insurance, but employees would be motivated to stay under the cap.

Maggie Mahar, who writes the Health Beat blog for the Century Foundation, says misinformation is growing. She took apart a Wall Street Journal editorial which, she says, are full of falsehoods. She provides a few more details of what's actually in the bill.

The House bill actually protects and increases employer-sponsored insurance. According to official CBO numbers, 2 million more people would be covered under employer-sponsored insurance than is projected to be the case today - 164 million compared to 162 under current law.

But the best analysis of what's in the House bill -- which is H.R. 3200, by the way -- may be the Congressional Budget Office:

The legislation would establish a mandate to have health insurance, expand eligibility for Medicaid, and establish new health insurance exchanges through which some people could purchase subsidized coverage. The options available in the insurance exchange would include private health insurance plans as well as a public plan that would be administered by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The specifications would also require payments of penalties by uninsured individuals, firms that did not provide qualified health insurance, and other firms whose employees would receive subsidized coverage through the exchanges. The plan would also provide tax credits to small employers that contribute toward the cost of health insurance for their workers.

... and ...

Changes to the Medicare Part D program... would establish a new prescription drug rebate program for some people who are eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare, while expanding drug coverage to beneficiaries that are currently subject to a gap in coverage (often referred to as the Part D "doughnut hole"), saving $30 billion over the 2010-2019 period.

A read of the actual bill shows a few other provisions: >> A grant to train more nurses, and to provide more diversity in the nursing profession.
>> Health clinics in schools
>> Low-interest student loans for primary care students.
>> Home visitation programs for families expecting children.
>> Optional Medicaid coverage for low-income HIV individuals.

It's not a perfect way to get up to speed on the actual issue of health care, but it's better than what we've had so far.

As for the politics of the debate, which are getting the lion's share of coverage, a guest on this morning's Midmorning program succinctly told us all we needed to know about that:

"Every dollar in the health care system is someone's income."

It was good listening.

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The health care debate

Posted at 1:01 PM on July 22, 2009 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

Rochester's Mayo Clinic is getting plenty of attention as the health care debate has eclipsed the economy as the number one domestic issue.

President Obama holds a news conference tonight (7 p.m. CT with live-blogging here) to try to win support for his proposals, amid growing punditry that his entire presidency is on the line.

Mayo Clinic, and particularly its CEO Denis Cortese, doesn't like the president's proposals. In a story on National Public Radio on Tuesday's All Things Considered, it was described as "one of the health-care industry's great bargains, with costs 28 percent below the national average."

So when Mayo speaks, people in high places tend to listen. Here's the clinic's blog speaking:

"The proposed legislation misses the opportunity to help create higher-quality, more affordable health care for patients. In fact, it will do the opposite."

... and ...

"Unless legislators create payment systems that pay for good patient results at reasonable costs, the promise of transformation in American health care will wither. The real losers will be the citizens of the United States."

Dr. Cortese told NPR further that "by higher value, we mean better outcomes, better results, better safety, better service -- at lower cost over time."

How to do that isn't exactly spelled out. But in a response to a New York Times blog post on how much health care really costs ($15,000 a year per family), a Mayo physician, Randall Walker, offered his idea.

It's a lengthy comment that deserves a full reading (several times, in my case. Such is the nature of the health care debate).

The government simply needs to do what it has always done best: to obtain money from those who have more to help those who have less.

The key is to structure this within a frame-work that nonetheless gives everyone, across all levels of income and employment conditions, more first-dollar responsibility for health care expenses, with the opportunity that comes with it to directly retain the savings of their wiser health care choices.

Dr. Walker says later in life, health savings accounts could be tax-free gifts to heirs...

In this way, many consumers would forgo a lot of the futile, expensive medical interventions toward the end of life that do not significantly improve the quality or duration of one's life -- knowing they and their heirs can directly enjoy the financial benefits of these choices.

It all starts, quite simply, with comprehensive means-adjustment -- for both the below-deductible payments to providers and the premiums to insurers that consumers would pay in relatively high-deductible / low-premium insurance policies.

At the heart of much of the health care debate, it seems to me, is the notion that people are simply wasting the health industry's time by seeking treatment without regard for its true cost. Perhaps, but is that what you"re seeing at the end of the health care food chain?

I don't dismiss the logic, but I also don't see how it meets the intent to raise the quality of care. There are plenty of stories about people who die of heart attacks because they didn't choose to go to the ER when the chest got tight.

The other day, a family member told me the story about getting hit in the head during an athletic contest. His head hurt and his vision was blurry and common sense dictated a trip to the doctor was in order. But he didn't go because he knew a CT-scan would be prescribed and those cost too much.

I fell off a roof last year and didn't go to the doctor for exactly the same reason. That might make financial sense, but it doesn't make medical sense.

And that's the issue that's making everyone's head hurt in the health care debate. How can a system do both?

Writing on the Health Care Blog, Matthew Holt suggests the question doesn't matter, because the legislation being considered doesn't do either.

Of course we'll be back here in a few years because the fundamental problems of the health care system--employment-based insurance & fee-for-service medicine--will remain whatever happens this summer. And they continue to be a recipe for disaster. Although of course it's a disaster that has lots of supporters.

It's almost enough to make you tune out and turn on Fox. Almost.

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Is West Nile Virus hype too?

Posted at 2:33 PM on July 16, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health

West Nile virus is getting its moment in the sun today with news that the first case of the illness has been reported in Minnesota. Fourteen people have died since the virus was first discovered in the state in 2002, state health officials say.

But this would most likely fit the conventional definition of "overhyped." Since H1N1 (swine flu) was "hyped," as many say it was, anything less severe is also "hype".

From April through early July, Minnesota has had 634 cases of H1N1. The state has had about 450 cases of West Nile since 2002. It had only 10 last year.

211 people nationwide have died from H1N1 since April. 44 died from West Nile in 2008.

Hyped? Maybe. But maybe the reason only 44 people died last year is because someone hyped the disease in 2002, when 284 people died from West Nile. The number has been steadily dropping since people became more aware of how to avoid it.

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One person's health care

Posted at 11:02 AM on July 14, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health

The story of health care in America is loaded with lives that changed in a split second.

One year ago next week, Alan Henley, a popular airshow performer, was doing some chin-ups on a bar when it collapsed. He was playing with his kids at the time. He hasn't walked -- or done much else -- since.

His wife has been relentless in posting updates to his Caring Bridge site. But today, there's the desperation in her words that serve as a reminder that for millions of Americans, there's more to the health care debate than politics.

You all know how hard it is for me to update when things are not going well, but I so believe in the power of prayer that I'm just going to say, things are not going well at all. I'm assuming it has to be because we are almost upon the year anniversary of that night...the night that has forever changed our lives irreversibly. We had so hoped for more return but it's just not coming back, so now instead of hope we have to face reality.

Yes I believe that Alan will be able to do so much more in time but he needs help and equipment that BCBS just won't pay for. His therapy visits will be up in the beginning of August and then we are on our own. He said, "I guess they just give up on you when they no you have no hope of getting better." To say that this has impacted his frame of mind and determination is an understatement. I can't blame him and I find it hard to help him and relate from my able bodied state. I would be a fool to think I get it. But what breaks my heart is how do I get him back? He feels like he has nothing to live for and is just a burden. How did it get to this?

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Inclusion

Posted at 10:30 AM on July 13, 2009 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Schools

There's a documentary coming to Public Television in October that has the ability to change and amplify the debate over special needs in public schools, a debate that is now mostly faceless.

Photojournalist Dan Habib produced the film after his son, Samuel, was born with cerebral palsy. Now he's considering how his son is going to grow up and keep up in public schools.

"What makes inclusion successful? What makes it fail?" he asks.

"Everybody else in life is going to limit him; I can't do it," Samuel's mother says.

Here's a preview:

Related: In its story today about the difficulty young teachers in Minnesota are having getting and keeping jobs in a time of school cutbacks, this lone sentence jumped out:

What's more, with the exception of math, science and special education areas, Minnesota already is overloaded with teachers.

If you have a story to share on the subject, please drop me an e-mail.

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The health care bills

Posted at 12:02 PM on July 2, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

As the economy continues to collapse, it appears health care has overtaken it as the most important issue facing Washington politicians.

The Senate's giant health care bill has been posted here. It's 615 pages long. The chairman's amendments are another 175 pages.

How many people who boil the characterization of the bill down to talk-show-sized bites will actually read it? How politicians will actually read it? And this is just the Senate version.

Most people won't. But that won't stop them from having an opinion.

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The amazing shrinking and expanding Minnesota

Posted at 11:44 AM on July 1, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Surveys and trivia

Oh for the love of the sweet, sweet paradox.

Two stories in the news today could be related. But they're not.

First:
We're shrinking.

Second:
No, we're not.

As long as we're on the subject, let's talk about obesity and the half-full/half-empty coverage.

Twenty-five percent -- one in 5 3 4 of us -- in Minnesota aren't just fat We're obese. Twenty-three percent of Minnesota kids are overweight, according to a survey out today from The Trust for America's Health.

"Obviously, Minnesota is doing something right," said Serena Vinter, one of the authors, told the Star Tribune.

We are?

Here's a line from her press release:

Adult obesity rates increased in 23 states and did not decrease in a single state in the past year, according to the F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies Are Failing in America 2009.

Maybe we're not as fat as, say, Wisconsin, but how is it possible to categorize this as a success story?

The situation remains a disaster waiting to happen -- except it's happening now. Since the data shows Minnesota is not improving, this 2003 MPR series -- The Fight Against Fat -- remains timely.

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Mapping HIV

Posted at 11:11 AM on June 22, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health

The National Quality Minority Forum today unveiled its National HIV/AIDS atlas, showing county-level prevalence data of the illness throughout the United States. The licensing agreement is pretty restrictive -- you need to register and, technically, you're barred from linking to the site -- which would seem to defeat the purpose of providing more information.

It's not exactly ready for prime time. The data loads slowly -- if at all. And, at least in the case of Minnesota, it's not something we couldn't have gotten from the state.

For example:

Through the end of 2008, 8,819 people in Minnesota have been diagnosed with HIV; 2,976 have died.

Hennepin County has the most AIDS cases, not surprisingly. Several cases were diagnosed in greater Minnesota in 2008, however.

White people had the largest share of HIV diagnosis in 2008. The infection rate increased for white men in 2008, but dropped for African American and Hispanic men.
The rate increased for white and African American women.

The primary mode of exposure for males continues to be male-to-male sex (MSM) while for females the predominant mode of exposure is heterosexual sex.

Nationwide, New York and California have the highest concentrations of HIV/AIDS, which isn't new. However, parts of the South appear especially hard-hit by the virus, the Associated Press reported today. More than half the 48 counties with the highest rates of the AIDS-causing infection were in Georgia.

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Wisconsin's safety net

Posted at 1:18 PM on June 16, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Gov. Tim Pawlenty is fond of comparing Minnesota's social service programs with neighboring states -- usually Wisconsin -- to show that the state is overly generous.

Today, he is expected to announce further cuts in health care coverage for the poor. Ironically, it comes at the same time Wisconsin is expanding its state subsidized health care plan to cover adults with no children.

Starting yesterday, the state began enrolling adults with family income at or below 200% of the federal poverty level guidelines ($1,805 for a single person and $2,428.33 for a married couple) into its Badgercare program.

Under the plan, residents must not have any access to insurance from an employer, and must not be gettingMedicaid or Medicare.

In Minnesota, adults without children can enroll in MinnesotaCare under the General Assistance Medical Care program (GAMC).

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Live-blogging: Single-payer health

Posted at 9:02 AM on June 16, 2009 by Bob Collins (19 Comments)
Filed under: Health

I generally find discussions about health care to be endless and unenlightening. So why am I live-blogging today's Midmorning discussion about the future of a single-payer health plan proposals? Because today the game changes for health care when thousands of Minnesotans are thrown under the bus through Gov. Pawlenty's unallotment plan for balancing the state budget. And thousands more will lose their health care as they continue to lose their jobs. Health care in tough times is a different beast than health care when times are good.

You can listen to today's show here. I hope you'll share your stories.

Guests: David Himmelstein, primary care doctor and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program. He's also associate professor of medicine at Harvard University.

Thomas Miller, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He was former senior health economist for Congress' Joint Economic Committee.

9:09 a.m. - Kerri just promoted a July 9 event in the UBS Forum on health care. However her instructions won't work. It's not listed on the MPR page. I'll try to get that fixed.

9:11 a.m. - Hillmelstein says the Canadian system has only a few people in a hospital for sending out bills. Back in Boston, a local hospital had 350 people doing the same task. "Each doctors office has to have the clinical staff to fight with the insurance companies," he said. He says $400 billion could be saved with single-payer.

9:13 a.m. - Miller says "going down a different trail doesn't deliver all those things that are promised." He says it'll just create a different bureaucracy. "Most of the problem is in how health care is delivered.... choices we make." We hear the choice thing all the time. What does that mean? Getting you to understand the cost more. If you had chest pains and the ambulance costs $900, would you be less likely to pay attention to the chest pains?

9:16 a.m. - Thirty-one cents of every health care dollar goes to bureaucracy, Himmelstein claims. Miller disagrees and cites this data. There, by the way, you'll find a list of how fast health care costs are growing (thru 2004). In Minnesota -- 7.6%.

"He's absolutely lying" Himmelstein counters. Oh dear. This has potential to be YouTube comments section.

9:21 a.m. -- Caller: Sheila in St. Croix Falls. Would there be an option so that insurance are run as non-profits?

Miller: There've been different ways to propose that. Sen. Conrad of North Dakota reflected uneasiness among moderate Democrats who want to have a cooperative insurance plan through the government w/o heavy hands. Howard Dean rejected this idea.

Miller says we're not going to take profit out of the health-care system in this country. Himmelstein says the idea would help, but not that much.

9:25 a.m. - "Why is single payer a non-starter on Capitol Hill," Kerri Miller asks.

"Most doctors aren't going to be activists," Himmelstein says. "The majority of doctors are with us, but I think the reason it's not on the agenda in Washington is clear. There's an industry here that does nothing useful and is taking money from the American people -- the health insurance industry." The industry is a big campaign contributor, he says.

9:27 a.m. - OpenSecrets.org: Health Insurers Owe Policyholders, But Pay Congress Instead

9:29 a.m. - Obama referred to a 'public plan option' yesterday. Is that single-payer? "Same railroad track, different speeds, reflecting political realities," Miller says. "We've already overloaded the government with massive amounts of debt; You just can't absorb that much."

9:30 a.m. - Caller Tim from Duluth says Canadians come to the U.S. for their health care needs. "The Canadian insurance industry wants to portray that as true," Himmelstein says, "but it's not true." He says surveys of hospitals along the border -- including the Mayo Clinic -- and they found a few Canadians come across the border for care, but not many. The Mayo Clinic, by the way, actively recruits Canadian patients.

9:33 a.m. -- Here are the details of the July 9 event in the UBS Forum on health care. (h/t: Michael Wells)

9:35 a.m. - Recommended reading during the news break:

Kathleen Sibelius "This is not a trick"
Red State Single Women: Support Single Payer Healthcare, or Stay Virgins

9:38 a.m. - Caller John from Minneapolis. "The paperwork has gotten out of hand. We do less paperwork than the nursing staff but it increases all the time. I've yet to take care of a disgruntled Canadian patient." (He works for HealthEast)

Tom Miller says "I don't want to make up numbers." He gives his email address: tmiller@aei.org and says he'll email information comparing the two systems. "There's not a gigantic pile of money (through cutting waste) that's going to solve all of our problems."

9:41 a.m. - An online commenter says he/she worries that a single-payer plan would operate "like the DMV," slow and inefficient with poor service. "That's what we have now," Himmelstein counters.

9:42 a.m. - Doctors weigh in on health care plan as outlined by President Obama.

9:47 a.m. Caller Henry in Owatonna: "I lived and practiced in Canada and I now practice in the U.S. When it (Canadian system) first started, I thought I'd gone to heaven. 100% were insured and it made no difference to how I related to patients. After about 15 years, the government found the plan was too expensive for them and the government started budgeting hospitals the way you do school districts... They would give a hospital administrator $100 million to run the hospital for a year. To get the cost down, the administrator finds things that don't cost much -- my mother had a stroke and spent 9 months in the hospital. Here in Owatonna, they'd have spent a week."

9:48 a.m. - "We spend $8,000 per person, they spend $4,000 per person and they deliver better care," Himmelstein says. He says for whatever money is spent, a Canadian-style plan gets you better care.

9:52 a.m. - Would it make sense to try it on a state level? No, says Miller. There are three barriers: "Politics, economics, compulsion," he says.

Himmelstein says there should be an option to buy supplemental coverage over a state or federal single-payer plan. "You can't make the system run with private insurers in the middle of it," he says.

9:55 a.m. - Online comment from Eagan:

I keep excellent health and pay $600 a month premium and my employer pays atleast that much towards my health care. Literally I dread the occassions to visit a doctor. As much as I can, I keep fit by good eating habits and exercise routine.

I feel sorry for those people who donot have health insurance and my heart goes out to those who file for bankruptcy because of health care costs.

Medicine in USA is treated as money making machine for business and not as keeping healthy citizens and treating deceases. Now the entities who fear loss of their profits are fighting tooth and nail to protect, all the in the name of free choice. Only people waking upto this reality and actively participating in the debate will make a difference.

9:56 a.m. - Miller and Himmelstein debate whether one of them is lying. Welcome to TV cable talk show.

9:58 a.m. - I'm not sure anything much has been accomplished. This remains a hot-button issue, of course. BTW, here's an interesting blog post on NPR Check on how the issue was covered recently.

// end of live blog

==> An additional blog post with more information can be found here.

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What's the health care solution?

Posted at 8:09 PM on June 15, 2009 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Health

President Obama heard the boos from doctors on Monday when he said he wouldn't support limits on jury awards in malpractice cases. The president spoke to the American Medical Association in Chicago (See transcript), warning doctors that if something isn't done about health care, the country might go the way of GM.

But at the same time, he seemed to allay fears of a big upheaval.

"If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what," he said.

"What's the 'reform' about simply allowing you to keep your present plan as is?" ABC's medical editor, Dr. Tim Johnson, wrote in an online column.

"Obama wants single payer, government controlled and operated. He is a facist (sic) who will stop at nothing but total control," a commenter wrote.

About that single-payer stuff. We heard from Doug Miron, of Solway, Minn., in advance of a show Kerri Miller is doing Tuesday on the subject.

We, as a young family, lived in Canada from 1970-1979. Before then, I grew up in Conn. from '41. After that, we lived in Brookings, SD until '99, and have lived here near Bemidji since 2000. I have 60 years experience with American medicine and 9 years with the Canadian system.

Right off, let me say that we much prefer the Canadian system. It is simpler for everybody involved. The medical service is as good as anything we found in the U.S. The main cost control is that the provincial governments negotiate the prices with the physicians. In neither Clinton's effort nor the present effort aimed at real cost control through negotiation of prices charged by the providers.

I have heard on NPR that some rich opponent of single-payer coverage is going around the world collecting horror stories for commercials against it. On the one hand, I think somebody should check the facts if these commercials hit the air. On the other hand, I think supporters ought to make horror-story commercials about our system. The other day we heard stories about farmers and rural workers who either couldn't afford medical insurance or were one serious illness away from bankruptcy. My wife, Molly, remarked that this would be a strange conversation to a Canadian. In the past, we've heard stories about indigent patients who show up at places that don't want to give free medical treatment and are trucked off and dumped at a county hospital or a free clinic.

Of my own experiences, I think the most damning was one in the mid '70s. We were visiting Molly's sister on her dairy farm in upstate New York. Our middle son, then a crawling baby, sustained a head injury. I held him to me while we all piled into cars and drove to the Ogdensburg Hospital. I walked in with blood all over my shirt holding the baby and the first thing said to me was something to the effect that we need to do the financial paperwork. I growled "Fix the baby first, then we'll talk about paperwork." They stabilized him and we were sent to a hospital near Watertown, where they could really deal with the injury. Luckily, while his skull was penetrated, his brain sheath was not.

Opponents of the plan now in Congress say that the public insurance component is a step toward socialized medicine. I hope it passes and they are right.

Midmorning will, indeed, tackle the subject at 9 a.m. on Tuesday. I'll live-blog it here.

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Inside the world of mental health

Posted at 7:14 AM on June 13, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health

The Mental Health America media awards were announced last night. The pieces that won are worth looking at.

PBS won for Depression: Out of the Shadows, which was produced for WGBH in Boston and Twin Cities Public Television in Minnesota. Particularly compelling is the Faces of Depression section of the Web site.

National Public Radio won for a two-part series -- Two Families Grapple with Sons' Gender Preferences -- which shows how two psychologists can have two entirely different views of the same symptoms.

And Newsweek magazine won for Growing Up Bipolar: Max's World.

Max Blake was 7 the first time he tried to kill himself. He wrote a four-page will bequeathing his toys to his friends and jumped out his ground-floor bedroom window, falling six feet into his backyard, bruised but in one piece. Children don't really know what death is, as the last page of Max's will made clear: "If I'm still alive when I have grandchildren," it began. But they know what unhappiness is and what it means to suffer.

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Honor amid the gathering gloom

Posted at 2:10 PM on May 19, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

A ceremony to honor emergency medical services personnel couldn't escape the long shadows cast by the nearby Capitol and the looming gubernatorial race today.

On the former helipad of Regions Hospital in St. Paul, Mayor Chris Coleman, a possible gubernatorial candidate, said, "We all need to stand up... to protect people who don't have the ability to provide for themselves," referring to Gov. Pawlenty's promise to cut medical care for the poor and mentally ill. "Let's not lose what we have here," he said outside a new wing of the trauma hospital.

Hospitals have started -- or are expected to start -- laying off people in anticipation of the cuts. "I'm humbled in light of what all of you are facing in the next few months," Rep. Paul Thissen, DFL-Minneapolis, (on the right in the photo below) told the crowd of mostly hospital employees. He has announced plans to run for governor.

Sen. Tom Bakk, DFL-Cook, (on the left in the photo above) who is also a candidate for governor, claimed some victory in the tax bill sent to Gov. Pawlenty; a provision that extends the ability of communities to increase the property tax for emergency medical services. "It was one line in a 300 page tax bill," he said.

By the time the ceremony got around to the people who provide those services, however, most of the politicians had disappeared.

While the Capitol's eight-month summer vacation is underway, the EMS people have gone back to work, stopping long enough for a rare moment in the spotlight.

Moses Alejado, Scott Swenson, Tony Vanneli, and Michael McGaene - St. Paul's Medic 23 C Shift unit -- responded when Mike Popovich felt his chest tighten during a post-bike-ride shower. They treated him, and took him to Regions, where the cardiac team performed an angioplasty. It took all of 31 minutes.

"There was a time, there, that I thought I might, perhaps, die," Popovich told them today, shortly before asking them to sign a picture he took of them.

A helicopter medical team was also honored for rescuing a young girl in Baldwin, Wisconsin.

And representatives of Hennepin County Medical Center EMS, Allina Transportration, North Memorial Hospital, Lakes Region EMS and Kannebec County EMS were acknowledged for their works at the I-35W bridge collapse.

"In one hour and 35 minutes, they had cleared all four sections of the bridge and treated and transferred over 50 patients," Minneapolis Fire Chief Alex Jackson said. "By the time the national media flew in to see the rescue, it was over."

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Taking women's heart attacks seriously

Posted at 1:56 PM on May 18, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Emergency medical personnel don't take women seriously. That's the takeaway from a University of Pennsylvania study released today that found no differences in the time of EMS care given to African Americans and white patients, but found women don't get the same medical care when exhibiting signs of heart attacks.

The researchers looked at whether patients got aspirin and nitroglycerin -- two immediate treatments for chest pain, and whether they were put on heart monitors and had IV lines put in while enroute to the hospital.

"Results showed that women were significantly less likely than men to receive aspirin while in the care of EMS - 24 percent of them were given the drug, compared to 32 percent of men," according to a report.

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The legacy of Chad Green

Posted at 1:12 PM on May 8, 2009 by Bob Collins (7 Comments)
Filed under: Crime and Justice, Health

I won't wade too deeply into the story of the Sleepy Eye couple who want the right to have their son's cancer treated as they see fit, other than to point out that the story mirrors one of the landmark cases pitting a family with religious convictions, a child with cancer, and a government that sees things differently.

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Are journalists class clowns on swine flu coverage?

Posted at 3:27 PM on May 6, 2009 by Bob Collins (10 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Media

One of the harshest criticisms about coverage of the swine flu comes today from a journalist. Stacey Woelfel, the chair of the Radio Television News Directors Association, calls journalists "class clowns" for their coverage.

Now, let me get it on the record here that I think there is some news value to this story. Any time there is a communicable disease on the loose that can make the sufferer uncomfortable for a time, it's worth a report or two. Since death is rare (there's only been one in the entire United States so far), it's not like this is as serious as a major foodborne illness like Hepatitis A. Remember the outbreak in Pennsylvania in 2003 when a Chi Chi's served some bad green onions. Six hundred fifty people got sick and four people died--all from one bad batch of green onions in one city. Compare that to the 226 cases and 1 death we have as I write this. The green onion/hepatitis story was a big one about a threat than anyone could face in the grocery store or restaurant. The swine flu story just isn't. Note this sentence from the CDC website on the swine flu: "It is expected that most people will recover without needing medical care." That's right. If you get swine flu, you probably don't even have to go to the doctor to get it looked at. It's a virus. It has to run its course. Only those in special at-risk categories even need to worry about it. So why all the coverage?

Why all the coverage? It could be, perhaps, because the characteristics of the flu that Woelfel describes as fact, have only appeared to be fact in the last day or so, and that quite often coverage of the flu involved relaying the comments of the experts who were trying to figure out what was going on.

While Woelfel says "the swine flu story just isn't," no responsible journalist could make that declaration a week ago when the nature of the strain hadn't even been determined yet. It was only Tuesday that officials announced, for example, the flu is not as bad as first thought. So saying the story was worth only one or two mentions stretches credibility somewhat.

Woelfel says death is rare. Last week, the people who were telling us the flu story is not a story because 36,000 people die from the flu each year, this week are saying it's not a story because death is rare. You can't have it both ways.

To be clear, there's been some really terrible coverage. But critics are being sweeping in their condemnation by not naming specific journalists or news organizations they allege are being unethical in their coverage, painting all journalists with a broad brush. Most ethical journalists -- and that's the majority -- have done nothing more than what good journalists do: tell you what is known and what isn't.

On National Public Radio's Morning Edition on Tuesday, Gary Schwitzer, the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communications professor who writes the Health News Blog (and who called my attention to the RTNDA article via his blog), said "When you start fear mongering in all of your messages on air and on your Web site, I don't think we're serving the public in the best way." No argument there.

The story on NPR also criticized CNN reporter John Roberts, for asking the question:

"Is this the killer virus that we've all been hearing about. Is it just a threat? Is it like 1986 when we had a small outbreak, or is it like 1918 when 20 million people died worldwide?"

With the benefit of a week since the story broke, that might be low-hanging fruit for media critics, but it ignores an important point: There's nothing wrong with asking a question if the answer to it is something we want -- if not, need -- to know. What offended sensibilities was any following speculation that pretended to have an answer different than the one the experts were offering.

While I give CNN a pass on the question, it's hard to argue with criticism of the network. When I asked him about what TV outlets he considered "class clowns" Schwitzer cited CNN's "Bracing For the Worst" and "Outbreak of Fear" graphics. Good examples.

But when you ask critics who level allegations on an entire industry for specifics -- in this case the media -- they almost always cite CNN or Fox or a major TV network. The problem with that, as I mentioned yesterday, is that there's much more to journalism than CNN or Fox or a major TV network, a fact that usually surprises people who work at CNN, Fox, or a major TV network.

"If only RTNDA and its chairman and its website and its terrific code of ethics seemed to make any difference with its members!" Schwitzer wrote on his blog post today. He comes by his expertise honestly, he once headed CNN's medical unit.

But he hasn't watched any of the coverage with which he disagrees, he confirmed for me in an e-mail this afternoon. "I still haven't watched one minute of TV coverage. All the examples I gave you were things I read about from newspaper TV columnists across the country like Howard Kurtz, James Rainey, David Zurawik, Al Tompkins and others. I have no reason to question the accuracy of their accounts of the specific instances they've written about."

It's a pity all of them have chosen to ignore some of the solid reporting on the story.

(Photo: Getty Images)

update 9:13 p.m. - The RTNDA chair who said TV reporters are "class clowns" and who said the flu story is a story that isn't, is news director of KOMU TV in Columbia, Missouri. Let's check and see what the top story on the station's Web site is this evening:

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The other side of the story

Posted at 10:49 AM on May 5, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Testifying on the flu-that-must-not-be-named at the Capitol today In a Morning Edition interview today, former state epidemiologist Mike Osterholm, also one of the premier experts in the country on the subject of pandemics, provided a real glimpse into the workings of the major American news media:

"I actually had a reporter from a major media venue on Thursday of last week interview me about was the government doing enough, quickly enough, you know had they failed to act in this very important public health problem? And yesterday called me and now is doing a story on did the government hype it. The story line went that quickly from 'they didn't act fast enough' to 'now they hyped it.'"

Some things can mutate faster than the flu.

Unfortunately, that one reporter -- probably from CNN or Fox -- becomes "the poster child" for "the media," and paints an unfortunate picture that ignores the work of hundreds of well-informed, calm, and ethical journalists who have worked tirelessly on the subject. And, yeah, I'm talking about MPR's Lorna Benson, for one. Her appearance with Tom Crann a week ago, was nothing short of magnificent.

Media anecdotes provide great sound bites, but they do as much damage as the approach the journalist in question is taking and undermines legitimate efforts to inform you. Why should you trust any journalist?

Somewhat related to this, Mark Henderson, the science editor of The Times (London), wrote today that there's still plenty of reason to take the outbreak seriously:

Most health scares are indeed groundless, and some, such as MMR, have caused grave damage to public health. Swine flu, however, is not one of them. It is a threat that must be taken extremely seriously, even if the death toll does not rise sharply in the next few weeks.

While scientists are describing swine flu as a mild strain, this terminology is relative. There is no such thing as mild flu -- it is always a serious infection that can be life-threatening. The danger from this particular virus is especially acute because it is new: our immune systems are naive to it, and this raises the likelihood that it will infect a very large number of people.

There is also no guarantee that this virus will continue to be comparatively benign. It is a fact of life that flu mutates fast, and there is every possibility that H1N1 will become more virulent, or resistant to antiviral drugs. The 1918-19 Spanish flu began as a mild virus in the northern hemisphere spring. It returned with a vengeance in the winter, bearing a mutation that enabled it to kill 50 million. If swine flu disappears over the summer, we can expect it back when the weather gets colder and wetter. It might well have turned nastier by then.

But, overall, this remains a no-win situation for health authorities. There are too many agendas in play to expect otherwise.

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The myth of the health care access fund

Posted at 5:14 PM on May 4, 2009 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

At the Capitol today, some health care advocates pushed for a higher "provider tax" to avoid health care cuts proposed by Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

The 2 percent tax -- known as a "sick tax" in health care provider circles -- is part of the funding mechanism for the Health Care Access Fund, which also uses premiums paid by enrollees of MinnesotaCare, the state-subsidized health care plan for low-income Minnesotans. The tax is levied on doctors, dentists, and other health care providers.

"MinnesotaCare is an excellent program providing coverage for the working poor in Minnesota and if it requires some additional tax on health care providers to keep those services in place, our members as a whole are willing to step forward and do that," said Lawrence Massa with the Minnesota Hospitals Association.

If you didn't know any better, you'd think the HCAF had run out of money, so the governor is imposing the cuts. You'd be wrong.

The Health Care Access Fund is one of the few dedicated taxes in Minnesota that actually works for the limited goal that spawned it. It works so well, in fact, that it often runs a surplus, which is why the governor and Legislature have regularly used it as a "slush fund" to balance shortfalls in the state budget, over the objection of the health care providers.

Last year, for example, the governor proposed pulling $149 million from the fund. Over his term, he's diverted more than $400 million from the fund.

Writing in the Spokesman Recorder last month, Rep. Bobby Joe Champion criticized the governor for proposing the HCAF money go directly into the General Fund.

The governor wants to keep collecting the Provider Tax while diverting it away from the people it was created to help. That's on top of the hundreds of millions of dollars that his administration has already shifted out of the fund to balance previous deficits. Those shifts have resulted in fewer people able to access MinnesotaCare and other programs.

Such a move would have allowed Pawlenty to spend the health care tax on anything but health care, and avoid the annual attention of raiding the fund. Tax bills emerging in the House and Senate, however, did not include Pawlenty's plan.

The people Massa represents -- hospitals -- have a serious problem, to be sure. The Bemidji Pioneer's Brad Swenson admirably describes the health care mess (registration required), partially created by years of shifting money from areas for which it was intended.

The situation is the underpinning of the coming showdown between the governor and Legislature. But its core is simple.

1. Health care providers pay a tax to provide health insurance for low-income Minnesotans.
2. The fund that provides the insurance often runs a surplus.
3. The governor diverts the surplus -- and more -- to other uses and notes the spiraling cost of health care, while cutting reimbursements to hospitals who end up providing care to those who can't afford to pay for it.
4. Pressure builds to remove more people from health insurance coverage.
5. Proposals surface to increase the tax to provide health insurance for low-income Minnesotans, even though it ends up being used for something else.

The problem, of course, is exacerbated by the reality of the economy and the state budget which -- even if the health care fund were used for other things -- is still going to lead to major cuts in Minnesota health care.

Does anybody see a solution here?

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The flu picture

Posted at 2:31 PM on May 4, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Whether the fill-in-the-name-you-wish-to-use-here flu outbreak is overstated is a matter of some conjecture, but perhaps we can agree that attempts to graphically represent the outbreak generally fail miserably.

Take the government's PandemicFlu.gov Web site's map above. We're a red state now and it looks bad -- real bad. Severe, even. An epidemic, perhaps.

Reality: Minnesota has had but one confirmed case of the flu-that-must-not-be-named as of 11 this morning. In the great flu pandemic of 1918, it took only a week for the state to go from one confirmed case of the flu, to 1,000.

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The flu formerly known as swine

Posted at 3:02 PM on April 30, 2009 by Than Tibbetts (6 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Media, Politics

What's in a name?

We've moved beyond the "panic" stories to the politically tinged debates over what to call that nasty virus traversing the globe.

World Health Organization officials today begin referring to the virus formerly known as swine flu as "influenza A (H1N1)." (Though the WHO has shown it isn't above industry meddling.)

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has this note posted on one of its flu pages:

This is a rapidly evolving situation and current guidance and other web content may contain variations in how this new H1N1 virus of swine origin is referred to.

Over the coming days and weeks, these inconsistencies will be addressed, but in the interests of meeting the agency's response goals, all guidance will remain posted and new guidance will continue to be issued.

But they might have trouble switching things up as they've been giving out cdc.gov/swineflu as the site for information.

The City of St. Paul just sent out a press release titled "Information available on H1N1 (swine) flu threat."

Then there's the World Organization for Animal Health which, so far, has the most novel approach:

No current information in influenza like animal disease in Mexico or the USA could support a link between human cases and possible animal cases including swine. The virus has not been isolated in animals to date. Therefore, it is not justified to name this disease swine influenza. In the past, many human influenza epidemics with animal origin have been named using geographic name, eg Spanish influenza or Asiatic influenza, thus it would be logical to call this disease "North-American influenza".

MPR received a letter from a pork producer representative that laid bare the industry's objections to calling it swine flu:

[Please] reference the present flu virus by its appropriate name, the 2009 N1H1 flu.

Referring to the present flu virus as "swine flu" is not only damaging to MN pork producers, but demonstrates an uneducated, reckless approach, which is undoubtedly uncharacteristic of MN Public Radio.

The negative connotations to swine, unfairly made and scientifically unsupported, affect consumer confidence and therefore have a significant negative impact on pork production.

There is scientific evidence that the virus is genetically connected to pigs, but you cannot get the flu by eating pork products. It's not like we're not calling it bacon flu, though. To be fair, when your industry is under sudden and near total onslaught, you have a right to be defensive.

When it comes down to it, the media, at least for now, will likely stick with swine flu.

Today on Talk of the Nation, host Neal Conan was asked by a caller why he was not using the term "correct" term of H1N1. Said Conan, "We call it swine flu because that's what people call it."

So... what do you call it?

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The changing flu landscape

Posted at 10:05 AM on April 29, 2009 by Than Tibbetts (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Media

What you knew yesterday about the swine flu might not be true today. Are you keeping up with the information fast enough? Have you passed on information that's incorrect?

Mexico's death toll appeared to be rapidly accelerating, some reports yesterday had put the total at more than 150. But...

Only 26 cases, including seven deaths, have been definitively confirmed to be swine flu, [Mexico Health Secretary Jose] Cordova said.

The virus is suspected in 159 deaths, and other reports suggest that some of these might be caused by unrelated respiratory ailments.

And then there's the big number, you know, of people who die from the flu every year.

U.S. officials stressed there is no need for panic, noting that flu outbreaks are quite common every year. The CDC estimates about 36,000 people in the U.S. alone died of flu-related causes each year, on average, in the 1990s.

Do the math, that's just shy of 100 a day.

We were also told yesterday to call it "H1N1" and not "swine flu," because "this really isn't swine flu," as Agriculture Secretary (and former Iowa governor) Tom Vilsack said. The name change was ostensibly because the virus had genetic components from humans, birds and swine, and not to assure the weary consumer that pork is safe. But...

The deadly H1N1 influenza virus that's fueling fears of a global pandemic is a hybrid of two common pig flu strains, scientists who have studied the disease told Wired.com Tuesday. Earlier reports called it a combination of pig, human and avian influenza strains.

"This is what we call a reassortment between two currently circulating pig flu viruses," said Andrew Rambaut, a University of Edinburgh viral geneticist. "Why it's emerged in humans is anyone's guess. It hasn't been seen before in pigs as far as I know."

Sorry, pork producers, you're probably just going to have to tough this one out. "Swine flu" is easier to say and understand than "H1N1."

So, to some it all up: Take caution, but don't panic. But you haven't been watching 24-hour news channels, right?

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Bedbugs

Posted at 11:29 AM on April 14, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health

The EPA is holding a two-day summit on bedbugs at a suburban Washington hotel that apparently didn't mind being associated with a talk about the critters. Bedbug infestations are on the rise across America.

If you don't mind the "ick factor", try out the Bedbug Registry, an online record of bedbug complaints. Enjoy reading the complaint against the Disneyworld Contemporary Resort.

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You're 22? It's all downhill from here, kid

Posted at 11:09 AM on March 16, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Health

When does old age begin? Around 27, according to some new research out of the University of Virginia. Professor Timothy Salthouse has published the results of a seven-year study into aging, asking the study's participants to remember words and do puzzles etc. He found the age of optimum performance is 22. And the age at which things begin to fall apart is 27.

This might explain why my 23-year-old son received an AARP membership solicitation last week. Welcome to the club, old timer!

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Vets: Who pays for their treatment?

Posted at 3:21 PM on March 11, 2009 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Politics

Veterans who are injured in battle would be required to pay for treatment of their injuries with private insurance under a plan being considered by the Obama administration, CNN reports. It says the idea has been confirmed by Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki. Currently, vets' insurance companies are billed when they're treated for non-service-related injuries and illnesses.

It's also a plan that's dead on arrival if the president decides to propose it, according to some influential lawmakers and , as you might expect, veterans groups are vehemently opposed to the plan (See a letter sent to the president).

Even the usually Obama-friendly Talking Points Memo criticizes the plan, saying it would put Obama further to the right of John McCain.

The idea, not surprisingly, never came up during the campaign, particularly at a stop in Fargo last year when Obama outlined his veterans' policy. "Caring for our veterans," he said, "is one thing that we can still get right," and promised to "fully fund VA health care."

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An HIV blocker discovered?

Posted at 12:00 PM on March 4, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Was the cure for the virus that causes AIDS really under our noses all this time?

The University of Minnesota researchers found that the cheap ingredient, used in ice cream, cosmetics and breast milk appears to protect female monkeys against the primate form of HIV.

According to MPR's Lorna Benson, "U researchers say that GML temporarily shuts down the cells that tell the body's immune system to ramp up. That's good when dealing with HIV because the virus uses the immune system to spread itself throughout the body."

According to the latest report from the Minnesota Department of Health, over 8,000 people in Minnesota have been diagnosed with HIV infection. Nearly 3,000 have died.

It's important to point out that the researchers are not saying that glycerol monolaurate (GML) prevents the transmission of HIV in humans, but the possibility that it does has got the science world buzzing this afternoon.

The findings are published in this week's edition of the journal Nature. The magazine's podcast has more on the findings:



Hopes for an anti-HIV vaccine have been rising -- and falling -- for a few decades now.

One of the big problems with HIV is it mutates quickly. In Houston, doctors have found a section of HIV's structure that doesn't change. They're racing to see if they can develop a vaccine for HIV, although when their work was publicized last August, it was thought a vaccine is still at least five years away.

Last month, it was revealed that doctors in Germany gave a bone marrow transplant to an American who had taken "antiretroviral" drugs, and hasn't had to take them since. But the treatment costs tens of thousands of dollars.

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Step away from the screen

Posted at 4:20 PM on February 25, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Health

It doesn't take much to get the social networking sites going but they're abuzz today over the comments of Lady Greenfield, a neuroscientist in the UK who is theorizing that relationships online -- via Twitter and Facebook, for example -- are doing things to our brains that we probably don't want done.

On Tuesday she said social networking sites remind her of the way that "small babies need constant reassurance that they exist, according to the NY Times.

Asked to explain further, she suggested it may even have something to do with ADHD and autism.

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Why insured people aren't paying their medical bills

Posted at 2:32 PM on February 20, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Last week I blogged about an increase in the number of people with insurance who aren't paying medical bills. At North Memorial, for example, $1 million in unpaid bills by people with insurance in 2007 swelled to $8 million in 2008.

So MPR's Michael Caputo, of the Public Insight Network, solicited your stories about this factoid.

One of the things he found is that a lot of unpaid bills are the result of battles that consumers are waging with insurance companies, health care providers, or the go-betweens that are supposed to prevent bureaucratic nightmares with insurance companies and health care providers.

Liz Shatek of Cambridge tells the story of not having nearly enough money to pay for health costs, including those around the birth of a child. So she was counseled by her insurance provider to use a financial services provider - MedCredit - that gives loans to patients who can't afford the bill.

"Anyway, once we started questioning whether insurance had covered the appropriate amounts, we started getting caught in between the MedCredit company and the insurance company. Both would tell us we needed to talk to the other first, no one seemed able to get at the information we were asking for and I wanted to pull my hair out! I was trying to take care of a new baby in between insurance phone calls and waiting on hold for hours (our phone bill was astronomical for a few months). Eventually we just used tax money to pay off the last of the balance with MedCredit and stopped worrying about whether the insurance company had paid for what they said they would."

Find some of Michael's stories here. He's still looking for yours.

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Peanut butter widget

Posted at 10:18 AM on February 2, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health

I'm not sure how many Web sites are out there that would be interested in posting a widget about the peanut butter salmonella recall, but you have to give the Food and Drug Administration credit for trying new ways to get information out.



Today, however, President Obama put the FDA in his crosshairs. "I think that the FDA has not been able to catch some of these things as quickly as I expect them to catch," Obama said in an interview. "And so we're gonna be doing a complete review of FDA operations."

(h/t: Ross Holtan)

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Hope for MS patients

Posted at 3:18 PM on January 30, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Science

Over the last few months, I've neglected the science beat a bit, but a story out today cannot be ignored.

Scientists have reversed the effects of Multiple Sclerosis... they think.

The research comes from Northwestern, according to the Chicago Sun-Times:

The successful use of stem cells to reboot MS patients' immune systems could be a big step forward in the treatment of the disease, in which the immune system attacks the protective covering of nerve fibers in the brain and spinal cord -- the myelin sheath.

Still, Burt cautioned that his results -- being published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet Neurology -- need to be duplicated in a broader study. "It's encouraging, but, honestly, it's unproven until you have a randomized trial that proves it," he said.

One of the people in the study was Barry Goudy, 51, of Michigan who now says, "Life is very good. I have no restraints anymore because of MS."

It's only coincidental that the news came on the same day that a company in Toronto announced that its drug to treat MS doesn't work.

Meanwhile, Wendy Booker isn't waiting around. She plans to climb Mt. Everest this spring, becoming the first person with MS to climb the tallest peak on each continent.

"I wanted to show what life with MS is like," she says. "It's a struggle. You can't always get to the top."

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Pandemic plans

Posted at 10:45 AM on January 30, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Health

The state's Web site that outlines the ethical considerations of a pandemic flu has now gone live.

The report, called For the Good of Us All: Ethically Rationing Health Resources in Minnesota in a Severe Influenza Pandemic, is available here.

Among the items in it:

Thirty percent of Minnesotans will get the flu during the pandemic.

Minnesota will have enough antivirals to treat 21 percent of Minnesotans. It the duration or dosage is doubled, it'll be 10 percent.

The state has stockpiled 2.4 million respirators.

The notion of age-based rationing as the most controversial for the panel that devised the framework.

172,000 people will be hospitalized.

The pandemic will last two years.

Morgues and mortuary services will be overwhelmed.

The U.S. GDP will drop by around 5 percent.

The first goal is to make sure that no group suffers more deaths than another.

The panel rejected social value (race, gender, education, religion or citizenship),quality of life, duration of benefit (with the exception of persons who are imminently and irreversibly dying) and first-come, first-served as methods for rationing health care.

Suggested considerations for who gets resources in the event of rationing are: exposure to one of the earliest cases of influenza or to a contained outbreak;risk of exposure; risk of influenza-related mortality and serious morbidity; key role in supporting basic health care, public health, public safety or other critical functions; risk of transmitting influenza to persons at high risk of flu-related mortality; and possibly age.

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Who's the most important in a flu pandemic?

Posted at 3:32 PM on January 29, 2009 by Bob Collins (8 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Around 10 a.m. on Friday, you can go online and see the draft framework the Minnesota Department of Public Health is going to use to determine who gets "critical health care resources" in the event of a flu pandemic. It's more a matter of when, not if, a pandemic hits us, the Minnesota Department of Health says.

When it does, up to 30,000 Minnesotans may die.

Who should get first crack at life-saving vaccines, drugs, or equipment such as antiviral masks? That's what the guidelines will reveal. For example, health care workers would seem to be first in line for vaccine, but there won't be enough vaccine, so which health care workers should get it first?

One of the things the federal government has advised states is to be prepared for strong suspicions and distrust. Guidelines also said "social worth" should be considered.

In ordinary circumstances, the distribution criterion, 'to each according to his or her social worth,' is not morally acceptable. However, in planning for a pandemic where the primary objective is to preserve the function of society, it is necessary to identify certain individuals and groups of persons as 'key' to the preservation of society and to accord to them a high priority for the distribution of certain goods such as vaccines and antiviral drugs. Identification of key individuals for this purpose must be recognized for what it is: it is a social worth criterion and its use is justified in these limited circumstances. Care must be taken to avoid extension of the evaluation of social worth to other attributes that are not morally relevant.

Here's the Web site that will be active at 10 a.m. You'll be able to comment on the draft framework.

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The peanut butter chronicles

Posted at 8:15 AM on January 19, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Any minute now, perhaps, the peanut butter industry will file its request for some bailout money. It has to be reeling as health investigators from Minnesota and across the country continue to track the salmonella outbreak

We should emphasize Minnesota more than across the country there.

A Seattle Post Intelligencer blog writer takes note of that.

Seattle lawyer Bill Marler, the guru of the nation's food safety investigators, is spitting mad about the way the Food and Drug Administration failed to take any definitive action when the first case of peanut-butter spawned salmonella surfaced in Minnesota in September.

"What in the hell are they thinking?" Marler told me today. "The FDA knew there was a problem on Labor Day and they wait for inaugural day to do anything."

Marler says he just returned from Minnesota where the nationwide outbreak of 500 or so cases of illness and at least six deaths were first reported by Minnesota's top notch health detectives.

The peanut butter contamination has been traced to a plant in Georgia, and companies that don't use the plant's peanut butter are issuing claims of innocence. No matter, consumers mostly can't tell what peanut butter in what cookie or other snack came from one plant. Better to avoid it altogether, said the Food and Drug Administration on Sunday.

Because identification of products subject to recall is continuing, the FDA urges consumers to postpone eating commercially-prepared or manufactured peanut butter-containing products and institutionally-served peanut butter until further information becomes available about which products may be affected. Efforts to specifically identify those products are ongoing.

If you'd like to check your current stocks against the list of products that have been traced to the salmonella-contaminated plant, here's a list.

update - Via comments, the above list are product that contain peanut butter, not necessarily the bad peanut butter. A link to recalls is in comments.

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Bed bugs

Posted at 4:49 PM on January 15, 2009 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Health

We don't have a shortage of things to worry about these days but just in case, here's a little number from Worthington: a bed bug infestation. A local motel had an infestation and the Daily Globe newspaper reported a private residence also had to be fumigated. Back in the day, our parents' greatest nightmare (other than that we wouldn't duck under our desks quickly enough when the nuclear bomb exploded over our town), was that we would be sent home with head lice. But at least the local newspaper didn't tell the rest of the town.

The description of a day in the life of a bed bug reads like a cheap sci-fi thriller:

Bedbugs are nocturnal feeders, meaning they come out at night and feed on human an animal hosts. They are similar to a mosquito in that they bite their host, suck blood, detach and then go back into hiding.

Bedbugs leave behind a bite mark on the host that may itch and cause skin irritations or lesions.

"Some will have bites that really itch," said Kloss.

The next night or a couple of nights later, the bedbugs return for another blood meal. The population grows as adults lay eggs that hatch into nymphs.

"The opportunities for bedbugs will only increase if they have human hosts," Kloss said.

Bedbugs can live dormant for up to six months without a human host.

Now comes the really worrisome news: Bed bugs are making a comeback because they've developed a resistance to poisons. Some experts say regular vacuuming take care of the problem, but many of us have developed a resistance to that.

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The peanut butter mystery

Posted at 11:29 AM on January 12, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Schools

On Friday night, the Minnesota Department of Public Health traced a salmonella outbreak to a peanut butter sold primarily to institutions such as nursing homes and schools.

Today, a press release from the the Minnesota Pubic Schools trumpets:

Minneapolis Public Schools not affected by King Nut peanut butter recall

And it takes the honor also for world's shortest press release:

MINNEAPOLIS - MPS Nutrition Services does not serve peanut butter. We are not affected by the King Nut peanut butter recall.

A sign of my age, however, is that I think the big news here is that Minneapolis public schools don't serve peanut butter. I'll bet they don't even have "mystery meat" anymore. The times have changed, you whippersnappers.

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Minnesota health agency cracks salmonella mystery

Posted at 6:55 PM on January 9, 2009 by Bob Collins (9 Comments)
Filed under: Health

When he was on MPR's Midday on Friday, former state epidemiologist Michael Osterholm said this about the Minnesota Department of Public Health investigation into a nationwide salmonella outbreak:

The first cases occurred in early October. This has been gaining a head of steam with most cases occurring in the last six weeks. This is a common strain of salmonella. We have the ability to fingerprint the organisms. It took time for the "fingerprints" to be obtained. It has increased in the number of states which tells us a lot about the product involved. It's probably a store-shelf product.

The cases in Minnesota are more recent nature. It's likely that the Minnesota Department of Public Health will be the one to crack it.

He got all but the store-shelf product part right. Late Thursday afternoon the department determined it was from peanut butter, that's delivered to hospitals, nursing homes, schools and other locations. But it's not available on the store shelf.

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Questions and answers about the salmonella outbreak and flu

Posted at 10:59 AM on January 9, 2009 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Science

Michael Osterholm, the former Minnesota state epidemiologist and now director of the , the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy is on MPR's Midday (Listen here), discussion the nationwide salmonella outbreak.

I'm live-blogging the pertinent questions and answers. He's also talking about other issues facing health investigators. The other big health story today is the word that Tamiflu may not be effective on this year's strain.

Osterholm says there's actually three strains of flu that float around the world, one of which was an "escapee" from a Russian lab years ago.

Q: Why isn't Tamiflu working?
A: The strain changed in a way that makes it resistant to the flu. The good news is (a) the change may not stay. Next year's strain may lose the resistance, and (b) this year "we have a great match on the vaccine with the strain that's in Minnesota.

Q: Has the possibility of a pandemic or bird flu changed?
A: We're closer to a pandemic today than we were yesterday. When people say "if it were to happen it would've happened by now, H3N8 strain jumped from birds to horses in the 1960s and we have no idea why. The same strain then jumped to dogs and we're seeing problems with dogs. We know little about influenza.

Q: Why are we just hearing about the salmonella outbreak now?
A: The first cases occurred in early October. This has been gaining a head of steam with most cases occurring in the last six weeks. This is a common strain of salmonella. We have the ability to fingerprint the organisms. It took time for the "fingerprints" to be obtained. It has increased in the number of states which tells us a lot about the product involved. It's probably a store-shelf product.

The cases in Minnesota are more recent nature. It's likely that the Minnesota Department of Public Health will be the one to crack it.

Q: Has something changed in the food environment?
A: Even a loaf of Sara Lee bread, the ingredients are likely from 10 different countries. It's remarkably how safe food really is, given how much food we eat. The average person has two food-borne illnesses a year. But we have so many more processes than we had before.

Q: Is food illness more insidious?
A: Think of all the food that you don't cook. Even the things you do cook, there are things you don't cook adequately. Part of the problem is some contamination occurs in plants (such as deli meats) after the cooking process.

Q: When the CDC investigated the "tomato outbreak" (which turned out to be wrong), does the CDC get gunshy about publicizing an investigation?
A: You're right, but having been at the Minnesota Department of Public Health as long as I was, Minnesota doesn't get it wrong and they get it quickly often. When the first outbreak of Salmonella St. Paul was identified in Minnesota, they identified it quickly that it wasn't tomatoes, it was peppers. Had the other states been half as competent as Minnesota, it could've been picked up much earlier.

Osterholm says he's worried the Health Department will "take a hit" in the coming budget cuts.

Q: Is there a fear that publicizing these things too early will hurt industry?
A: Yes, but I don't think that's the case here. Once the number of cases grew here quickly, they (the MDH) jumped on it. I wouldn't be surprised to see this solved in just a couple of days.

Listener questions

Q: What advice would you give to Obama?
A: Osterholm says he's working with the Obama transition team on who to bring in. "I'm excited about the interest in solid science," he said. As a world, we are going to have to take major cuts in programs. What I worry about is public health, which is only 1% of the budget and much of that funding is in jeopardy right now. If you cut out some basic public health programs, you'll pay more down the road. If the pandemic flu hits tomorrow, it'll make everything else seem like child's play.

Q: Should people have faith in federal health agencies?
A: I was critical of the CDC in the tomato vs. peppers outbreak, but I also saw the CDC do a great job overall. Is some of it a problem? Absolutely. But it's unfortunate that people label everything dark or light or right or wrong.

Q: What do you think of Sanjay Gupta as surgeon general?
A: He's a friend and his knowledge is exceptional. He'd make a great surgeon general. Having known past surgeon generals, the office has been "dumbed down." The Obama administration wants to restore that to a very strong voice to the world. There's very few health communicators out there than Sanjay Gupta. He's an actively practicing physician. Every Monday morning he scrubs in and does some amazing brain surgery.

Q: What is the health impact of people coming across the border from the south?
A: At Hennpin County Medical Center, they needed to have 65 interpreters to provide health care. Of 65 6.2 billion on the face of the earth, 2 billion have TB. We want to make sure we deal with the populations from their health perspective. We don't want it to spread to others and that's where I get people's concern about people coming in from other countries... there's been very limited transmission of disease to other groups. We see it within their own family. We shouldn't use it as a wedge issue to say "they shouldn't be here."

Q: Why is Minnesota better than other states at finding the answers to food-borne illnesses?
A: In 1965, we had three people who worked in infectious diseases. Over the years we built the group up through outside resources -- research money, grant money -- and since the early '80s, the MDPH has had an ethic of excellence where some of the top people in the country have been trained and have stayed. We have people at the U who are on call all of the time. We can do some testing in three days that takes the state of Texas 6 weeks. Our laboratory is one of the best -- if not the best -- in the country. There's been a sense of excellence that has stayed and we're lucky to live in a state that values that.

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Salmonella outbreak

Posted at 12:08 PM on January 8, 2009 by Bob Collins (8 Comments)
Filed under: Health

There's a salmonella outbreak in Minnesota.

The factoid was contained in a nationwide Associated Press article, quoting the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

The Minnesota Department of Public Health has made no announcement of the outbreak. The University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research, however, quotes the DPH spokesman:

Doug Schultz, a spokesman for the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH), told CIDRAP News that Minnesota has confirmed 30 cases that are linked to the national outbreak and that the department expects to detect additional cases. Experts from the MDH, including Team Diarrhea, a group that conducts case-control studies in foodborne disease outbreaks, are continuing their investigation into the source of the Salmonella, he said.

With no leads, it's difficult to say what to avoid, so health officials advise only to cook meat thoroughly and wash your hands often.

However, the CDC is theorizing that it may have something to do with chicken. If that's true, and if 34 states are involved, doesn't that suggest one of the big chicken processing companies as a source?

Stay tuned for more today.

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Bottoms up

Posted at 8:02 AM on December 29, 2008 by Bob Collins (10 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Many of the budget-cutting antics of state government in recent years have shifted costs to Minnesota's counties, allowing state politicians to cluck about local governments and counties not doing more to cut their budgets.

The Park Rapids Enterprise (registration possibly required) is carrying the story today about the cost of sobering up drunks. The economy being what it is, people are drinking more and requiring more time in detox, the paper says.

The cost of one day in detox, usually at Pine Manors, has risen from $260 per day to $275. There is a sliding fee schedule depending on the patient's financial status, but most patients are without the means to pay.

And that bothers (Hubbard County social services director Daryl) Bessler. "The state sells the stuff, they allow the license for booze to be sold, they put a tax on it and then they don't assist in the payment of the costs," he said.

The state requires detox services to be provided and the counties have to pay for them. The county official says the declining amount of money should be spent elsewhere. "I have to deny day training services to a mentally retarded person who was born that way versus somebody I had to provide services for because the law said I had to," Bessler told the paper.

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Alzheimer's

Posted at 11:02 AM on December 26, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Science

Ten million of us baby boomers are going to develop Alzheimer's. Expect coverage of research to increase. Let's begin with this one that's out today.

At Northeastern University in Boston, researchers say the disease may get its start by an insufficient blood flow carrying sugar to the brain. They suggest that exercise -- now -- may be the answer.

Meanwhile, a researcher at McGill University is out with a study today that says patients who frequently kick or cry out in their sleep may be at an increased risk of developing a neurodegenerative disease, such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's.

There's no simple test for Alzheimer's. The Alzheimer's Foundation of America is suggesting a five-minute test, which others say is hugely controversial. Why? Take it and see if you can figure it out:

Tell someone three random words: car, pencil, banana. Then have the person draw a clock with the correct time, as a distraction. A little later, can he or she recall the words?

As a Chicago Tribune article pointed out, "Failing such a test doesn't mean someone has dementia. But it signals there might be a problem with short-term memory that should be checked by a doctor. Maybe it's something fixable, such as depression or thyroid disease. Maybe it is an Alzheimer's warning sign. Or maybe the person just isn't a good test taker."

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The first face transplant

Posted at 11:41 AM on December 16, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Health

This one takes some thinking. In Cleveland, it was announced today, doctors have performed the country's first near total face transplant

Reconstructive surgeon Dr. Maria Siemionow replaced nearly all of the woman's face - 80 percent - with that of a dead female donor in an operation a couple weeks ago.

The patient's name and age were not released. The hospital plans a news conference Wednesday and would not give details until then.

My question if I get to ask it on Wednesday: Does the recipient look exactly like the donor? If so, isn't that kind of strange for the donor family?

The Discovery Health Web site has a slideshow of some face transplants (partial, I presume). Some may consider these graphic.

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Ray's story

Posted at 2:43 PM on December 15, 2008 by Bob Collins (7 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Lorna Benson's story today about Ray Sandford is one of the most compelling -- and sad -- stories about mental illness we've heard in a long time.

He wants to stop the court-ordered electroshock treatments for his psychotic episodes, but it's not his choice. Lutheran Social Services is his guardian.

His mother thought the sessions would help, but she thought they'd stop after a few treatments. They didn't.

"I don't care if he forgets the birthday of his nieces and nephews, although it's very important to him to remember that and probably more important to him that it is to anybody else in the family. But I do care that he can remember the names and know that they're born and remember what he did last Christmas if it was a happy memory, remember the good times. It's too bad to take away that."

Ray will be in court tomorrow for a hearing on this.

Be sure to read Lorna's story. What do you think is the proper course of action here?

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Why Angie died

Posted at 11:07 PM on December 7, 2008 by Bob Collins (14 Comments)
Filed under: Health

A couple of years ago on my personal blog, I wrote a scathing (even for me) piece against news editors who ignored the story of a seven-year-old girl who died a day after being physically restrained by employees at a Rice Lake, Wisconsin counseling center. News editors like me; I had ignored the story, too.

In late May 2006, Angellika Arndt was placed in a "control hold" after several infractions, such as gargling her milk, an initial state investigation showed. She died the next day at Children's Hospital in Minneapolis and, for the most part, her case was -- and continues to be -- ignored.

Last week, the Wisconsin Protection & Advocacy Agency (Disability Rights Wisconsin), an independent agency, released its investigation and I won't make the same mistake twice.

In its 75-page report to the state, called "A Tragic Result of a Failure to Act," investigators chronicled the very definition of tragedy in such a short life. Angellika was only three when she was taken from her biological parents for physical and sexual abuse. She roamed the foster care system and by age five, she'd been diagnosed with a host of psychological problems. But she'd made progress with a new foster family and was sent to the Rice Lake facility to "help prepare her for first grade."

Subsequent investigations showed the girl was placed in restraints for hitting her chin with her hand and in some cases -- said to be routine -- staff members held her face-down on the floor for an hour and a half. This was how children looking for help transitioning to first grade were treated in 2006. They still may be.

Here is the account of her final hours:

Angie arrived at RLDTC around lunch time, and a short time later found herself in a "cool down" precipitated by staff's determination that she had not followed directions for talking and was gurgling her milk with her straw. When Angie couldn't sit still in the chair for her time out, staff took her to the special cool down room. This was the special seclusion room that had no window or furniture besides the single "cool down" chair. The hard floor was covered with a thin carpet glued down to the concrete below. Staff reminded Angie that her cool down time didn't begin until she sat still and in the proper position. Instead of obeying, Angie curled up in the chair, began to cry and soon appeared to fall asleep.

After about five minutes Angie awoke and began to swing her legs back and forth in the chair. Staff warned her that if she didn't stop, they would have to place her in a control hold for safety. Undeterred, Angie continued to swing her legs and cry. Eventually, staff reported that Angie made an aggressive move as she sat in the cool down chair, so they took her down with a prone restraint. More staff were called to assist with the restraint.

One staff person placed his body across Angie's small back and held her head face down on the floor. Three others held her arms and legs immobile. Angie was restrained in this position for over an hour until they felt she was calming down. In the RLDTC report written after her death, staff reported that Angie stayed on the floor making cooing noises after they freed her. Staff left her there for about five minutes, thinking she had fallen asleep. Only then, when Angie failed to respond to questions, did staff roll her over and discover that her lips were turning blue.

One staff member was sent to jail for 60 days. The facility was closed and just when you think this tragedy couldn't be any more senseless comes the revelation that nowhere near enough has been done as a result of Angie's death to prevent it from being repeated with another child.

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services formed a committee to create a plan for training and technical assistance. It still hasn't finished its work. A memo on prohibited restraint practices has never been issued. And worst of all, "nothing has been done to review or revise the children's day treatment regulations," the report said.

After Angie's death DHFS did cite the facility for numerous violations, leading to the facility's closure. However, the Department has been slow to take action to decrease the use of seclusion and restraints in children's programs and goals dealing with care planning, training, quality assurance, and monitoring have not been met. In November 2007 a number of mental health advocacy groups wrote the DHFS Secretary requesting an official DHFS memo to providers that would identify prohibited practices in the use of restraint with children, so that additional deaths such as Angie's would not occur. That memo has not been issued.

Well more than a year later, nobody has provided a fit answer for why children are treated as Angie Arndt was.

Here's a full copy of the report.

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The sandwich generation

Posted at 12:48 PM on November 10, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Life

A national law firm is providing a benefit unique to a generation. A support line for members of the "sandwich generation," the baby-boomers who are trying to raise their own kids, while also taking care of their parents, according to the Boston Globe. Goodwin Proctor is setting up a hotline specifically for care-givers in its employ:

Staffed by registered nurses and geriatric social workers, it will help employees navigate the complex maze of medical and social services for the elderly and disabled, including housing, transportation, insurance, nutrition, and nursing care.

It will also offer assessments and referrals, and will field questions such as how to persuade aging parents to move into assisted living or give up their driver's licenses.

In turn, the firm hopes the service will improve productivity and reduce turnover, since the time demands and emotional toll of caregiving can have a deleterious effect on workplace performance.

About 20 million people are in the "sandwich generation." Joan Brunwasser, who heads a national group for election reform, described the challenges last week when her mother got sick near Election Day:

My mother was most considerate about when she get sick. Timing really is everything. Had she been ill on Monday night, I would have been hard pressed to be downtown with her and at my polling place by 5:00 the next morning. (I was a volunteer poll watcher on November 4th.) Likewise, if she had gotten sick on Election Day itself, I would have been physically incapable of responding that evening. After that long, long day, I felt like I had been hit by a Mack truck. At least I was able to rack up one good night's sleep before the flu struck. Way to go, Mom!

Companies have good reason to consider adding the benefit. Members of the "sandwich generation" are more likely to get sick themselves, or lead an unhealthy life, according to a study this month from Indiana University.

Compared with people caring for a single generation, people in the sandwich generation were less likely to check food labels, wear seat belts or choose foods based on health values. They also smoke more.

Are you a member of the sandwich generation? Tell me about your life. You can either post in the comments below, or write to me using this form and we can talk about it.

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Cindy Lander

Posted at 11:51 AM on November 9, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health

We received a sad update today to a story MPR's Lorna Benson did in August 2007 about the pioneering open-heart surgery by doctors at the University of Minnesota

It focuses on Cindy Lander, who had a hole in her heart and wasn't expected to live past 20 without help. She was just 11 when she had her surgery.

In August 2007, she returned to the U of M to celebrate 50 years of life thanks to the surgeons at the U.

Her cousin wrote today to tell us that Cindy has died.

I am sorry to report that the subject of this article, my cousin Cindy Lander, passed away on November 6, 2008. She will be buried on November 11, 2008. You can view the obit .

She was a wonderful, kind, joyful person who will be greatly missed by her family.

The family is requesting donations to the Lillehei Heart Institute.

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When people do great things

Posted at 6:51 PM on November 7, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Let's leave this week behind on an uplifting note.

Lost among all of the political stories this week was a charming story from MPR's Lorna Benson on the 40th anniversary of the Bone and Marrow Transplant Program at the University of Minnesota.

The story started with this passage:

Dr. John Kersey was a U of M medical student when his mentor Dr. Robert Good used bone marrow stem cells to successfully treat a 4-month old boy. The baby suffered from a genetic immune system disease that had killed 11 male children in his extended family.

Dr. Good and his team were determined to figure out a way to save the infant, Kersey says.

"Back in those days it was very common for people to say if a child has a very severe disease there's nothing that can be done about it. And the attitude amongst my colleagues here was, 'No. We should be trying new things. We should be doing things we can to cure these diseases.'"

It took two transplants, but eventually the baby recovered.

U of M doctors succeeded where others had failed because they focused on getting the best bone marrow match possible for their young patient, Kersey says.

This afternoon, we received this e-mail from Cynthia Olson of Minneapolis:

As I listened to your story about the first bone marrow transplant on a baby at the U of M hospital in 1968, I went flying back in time, to a rocking chair in the nursery with that baby in my arms. I was a nursing student working nights that summer. One night I was charged with caring for that little guy. As I rocked the baby in the quiet darkness a doctor entered the nursery. He told me (playfully) not to drop the baby because this baby was making history. It was so thrilling to hear a forty year old man talking about his life saving procedure. Thanks for the update.

And thanks for the reminder that people can do great things.

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A win for MinnesotaCare

Posted at 3:59 PM on November 5, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Gov. Pawlenty's office announced this afternoon that it's received an extension of a waiver to allow MinnesotaCare to cover 18,000 parents to remain eligible for the state subsidized health care plan. The feds had previously decided against renewing the waiver, which would've cost thousands of people their health care coverage.

"Our administration has been negotiating with the federal government to ensure that funding was preserved for this program," Governor Pawlenty said. "I appreciate the help of our state Congressional delegation to obtain this waiver," he said in his press release which was headlined slightly less modestly:

Governor Pawlenty secures Federal Waiver to Allow MinnesotaCare Funding to Continue

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Turn back the risk of a heart attack

Posted at 4:00 PM on October 29, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Research from Sweden today says there may be a connection between turning your clock back an hour (which we are to do on Sunday morning) and a lower risk you'll have a heart attack on Monday, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association. Likewise, there are more heart attacks on the first three days after clocks are set forward.

"The finding that the possibility of additional sleep seems to be protective on the first workday after the autumn shift is intriguing," the authors wrote.

Monday is the most common day of the week for heart attacks anyway, but other researchers have suggested it may just be the stress of a new work week.

This isn't the first link between heart attacks and sleep. Last summer, the Mayo Clinic researchers found that the risk of heart attacks is higher among people with sleep apnea.

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Science: What if?

Posted at 7:33 AM on October 16, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Science

It's always a bad idea to get too far ahead where medical research is concerned, but it's hard not to play "what if" with a science story being reported now.

Researchers have found monkeys, taught to play a computer game, can regain use of paralyzed muscles and even learned to use muscles that previously had nothing to do with wrist movement.

The significance? According to the Associated Press:

Remarkably, the monkeys regained use of paralyzed muscles by learning to control the activity of just a single brain cell.

The result is "an important step forward," said Dawn Taylor of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, who studies the concept of using brain signals to overcome paralysis. She wasn't involved in the new work.

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Study shows low rate of cervical cancer vaccination

Posted at 2:01 PM on October 9, 2008 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Health

I've detected another round of TV ads touting the benefit of cervical cancer vaccinations. "We chose to help protect ourselves against cervical cancer and other HPV diseases. Now the choice is yours," women in the ad say. Major guilt trip.

The Minnesota Legislature dabbled with the idea nearly two years ago before the sponsor withdrew the bill. There was already some pushback from some parents who said vaccinating girls against a sexually-transmitted disease was tantamount to saying "it's OK to have sex."

There was also some discomfort with some of the cash supporting the pro-vaccination campaigns around the country was coming from Merck, the company that made the drug, Gardasil.

Today, federal researchers report that only 1 in 4 girls have gotten the vaccine. About 4,000 people are dying from cervical cancer every year.

"The overall trends are good news," said Dr. Lance Rodewald, director of the Division of Immunization Services at the CDC′s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. His study measured progress on four area of immunizations, including the virus that causes cervical cancer.

Part of the reason for the low immunization rate -- aside from moral objections -- is the cost : about $360. Three doses are required before a girl is sexually active. But a recent study suggests another reason: the vaccine may not be cost effective.

Still, the issue is one where the feds and the state of Minnesota disagree. Federal health authorities recommend the vaccination. The Minnesota Department of Public Health does not recommend it because after five years, the effectiveness is in question.

Some people may not have a choice. A federal rule added Gardasil to the list of vaccinations that female immigrants ages 11 to 26 must get before they can obtain "green cards."

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Whatever happened to the flu pandemic?

Posted at 5:01 PM on October 6, 2008 by Bob Collins (8 Comments)
Filed under: Health

It wasn't that long ago -- within the last two years, actually -- that a flu pandemic was our biggest worry. Here at the world headquarters of News Cut, we even had a meeting or two about how we would function if we were all sick or half of us dead.

Those were the days.

A new report from Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, however, has reminded us -- in the event we weren't depressed enough already today -- that a pandemic is still a real possibility.

Says the report's outline:

This article provides ethics guidance for pandemic planning, response, and resource allocation--that is, what ethical considerations determine which public health responses are implemented, who will be restricted and who will be helped, what will be communicated to the public, and how will the public be included in decisions and responses?

In other words: Who's going to get first crack at vaccine and other treatment? Their suggestions are surprising. First responders? Sure. The sickest? Not so fast.

While some have suggested that scarce medical countermeasures be allocated primarily to first responders and then to the sickest, we suggest that an ethical public health response should set priorities based on essential functions. An ethical response also will engage the public, will coordinate interdependent sectors as a core preparedness priority, and will address how plans affect and can be understood by the least well off.

Public health "experts" and "government officials to whom the public will turn for information and direction" are on the priority list. So are utility workers, truck drivers, and people who work in grocery stores.

"Alongside healthcare workers and first responders, priority should be given to the people who provide the public with basic essentials for good health and well-being, ranging from grocery store employees and communications personnel to truck drivers and utility workers," said Nancy Kass, deputy director of public health at the Berman Institute.

Nothing about bloggers.

Minnesota, however, is way ahead of Johns Hopkins. In 2006, a task force outlined a strategy for who's the most important and who should be "saved" first.

It recommends young, healthy people get the vaccine first. The report also says that giving priority to health care workers won't work because there won't even be enough vaccine to go around.

And you? How critical do you think you would be during a pandemic?

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The smoking ban -- One year later

Posted at 12:34 PM on September 25, 2008 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Health

I'm generally suspicious of polls that are put out by groups with a special interest in the results, but a poll out today from ClearWay Minnesota provides the basis for an ongoing discussion on the smoking ban in Minnesota.

The poll says that one year after the beginning of the Minnesota smoking ban, 77 percent support it.

From the looks of things, a year of living under the smoking ban hasn't changed many minds. Those who were against it, may still be against it. Those who were for it, are still for it. The 2006 State Fair survey, for example, found about the same level of support for the ban (71%). Another poll in 2007 found 77% favoring some form of smoking ban.

This latest poll didn't ask how people think the law is working and only 17% of the people surveyed were smokers. (Download poll questions in Word format). One wonders what percentage of the 23% who don't favor the ban, are the 17% who smoke?

Is that number going down as a result of the smoking ban? It's too early to know officially. According to the Minnesota Medical Association, 17% is the percentage of Minnesotans who smoke, citing the Minnesota Adult Tobacco Survey.

The survey found that Minnesota's adult smoking rate has declined to a new low of 17 percent. That figure is down approximately 5 percentage points since 1999 and represents 164,000 fewer smokers. Minnesota's declines are impressive compared to national trends, where smoking rates appear to have stalled at about 20 percent since 2004.

However, the reduction in smoking cited in the survey had nothing to do with the smoking ban (and so far there's no indication the ban has led people to quit smoking) because it used statistics through 2007.

Has the smoking ban had any effect on you or your business?

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Treating depression

Posted at 1:51 PM on September 22, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Two interesting -- and unrelated -- stories about treating depression are in the news today.

A new analysis of phone therapy research by Northwestern University shows that when patients receive psychotherapy for depression over the phone, more than 90 percent continue with it, according to the New York Times.

Perhaps it's a sign of our non-face-to-face generation but the number of people who dropped therapy after getting it by phone was only 7.6 percent, compared to 50-percent for the in-person kind, which few people apparently want anyway. Among patients who say they want psychotherapy, the story says, only 20 percent actually show up for it,and half of those drop out.

Therapy, massage, and other techniques not spelled "drugs" was the message behind a Star Tribune piece today on a movement to treat depression in children with "mind-body therapies."

At Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota, kids are being taught how to manage depression and anxiety with everything from scented oils to deep-breathing, exercise, prayer and "quiet reflection."

"I think people are fed up with having their kids medicated as the only option," said Dr. Timothy Culbert, head of integrative medicine at Children's, and Henry's doctor.

The reaction to the article mirrored the national debate that's been going on for years in the area of mental health and children. Some alleged mental health treatment is a "legalized drug addiction," another -- like this one -- said chemical imbalances cannot be ignored in an organ that communicates with itself via chemicals.

Would we tell a diabetic to use vitamins or stress-relief techniques to help with their insulin? This is just another article perpetuating the idea that mental illness is not a real, medical condition needing treatment, that we can "think" our way out of it.

But there is a developing concern about the side effects of a new class of antipsychotic drugs. Prescription rates for the newer drugs have increased more than fivefold for children over the past decades and a half, and doctors now use them to settle outbursts and aggression in children with a wide variety of diagnoses, despite serious side effects, the New York Times said.

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MinnesotaCare cuts loom

Posted at 1:14 PM on September 17, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Gov. Pawlenty and state officials are trying to talk the Bush administration out of cutting $135 million over three years to the state's MinnesotaCare program.

This afternoon the governor released a statement on a meeting with the Department of Health and Human Service's secretary, Michael Leavitt.

"In our meeting today with Secretary Leavitt, we expressed our goal to maintain federal funding for the 18,000 Minnesotans who would be put at risk by the federal government's proposal. The meeting was constructive and HHS has agreed to consider our request to maintain this critical federal funding and address numerous other outstanding issues between Minnesota and HHS. The Secretary and I will be speaking again regarding these matters in the coming days.

An estimated 18,000 low-income adults would lose their health insurance coverage. Most of them are parents of children who are covered.

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Safe or not?

Posted at 4:26 PM on September 16, 2008 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Health

What we have here... is a failure to communicate.

Today, the first major study of the effect on humans of BPA -- a common ingredient in plasticware and baby bottles -- showed that among 1,455 U.S. adults, those with the highest levels of BPA were more likely to have heart disease, diabetes and liver-enzyme abnormalities than those with the lowest levels.

Says The Washington Post...

Dr. David O. Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany in New York, noted that he has shown that these very same diseases are associated with PCBs, dioxins and chlorinated pesticides.

"I have a strong suspicion that BPA is doing exactly the same thing," he said. "I have been arguing that BPA should be banned for a long time just on the basis of its effect on endocrine systems. The industry reports that argue that it has no adverse effects are simply wrong," he said.

So what are we supposed to do now? The Food and Drug Administration is sticking with its position that the plastics are safe, according to FDA official Laura Tarantino...

"We have confidence in the data that we've looked at and the data that we're relying on to say that the margin of safety is adequate..."

On the other hand...

"There are things you can do if you choose to reduce your level of bisphenol A..."

Alright, then.

"... but we have not recommended that anyone change their habits or change their use of any of these products because right now we don't have the evidence in front of us to suggest that people need to."

I see.

Canadian health authorities have announced plans to ban some products. The U.S. National Toxicology Program has "some concern" it may harm development of the prostate and brain.

Studies have shown that BPA is in the urine of more than 90 percent of people in the United States.

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Drugs in drinking water

Posted at 8:39 PM on September 11, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Last March, I wrote in this space about the abundance of pharmaceuticals found in the source water for drinking supplies. A study out today updates the situation: It's worse than we thought.

The AP reports:

Chicago, for example, found a cholesterol medication and a nicotine derivative. Many cities found the anti-convulsant carbamazepine. Officials in one of those communities, Colorado Springs, say they detected five pharmaceuticals in all, including a tranquilizer and a hormone.

"This is obviously an emerging issue and after the AP stories came out we felt it was the responsible thing for us to do, as a utility, to find out where we stand. We believe that at these levels, based on current science, that the water is completely safe for our customers," said Colorado Springs spokesman Steve Berry. "We don't want to create unnecessary alarm, but at the same time we have a responsibility as a municipal utility to communicate with our customers and let them know."

Fargo found small amounts but they were so small the water director sent them to the health director to figure out how to interpret the results.

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Why are fewer young people smoking?

Posted at 7:59 PM on September 11, 2008 by Bob Collins (7 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Do they still sell candy cigarettes? When I was a kid, we'd ride our bikes down to the co-op store and plunk down a nickel and we'd get horrible tasting candy cigarettes, with a little swipe of red on the end (I guess that was the ash). Then we'd stand out on steps and pretend we were smoking because it's what made us look cool. It was only when we didn't get dates for the prom years later that we realized that it'd take more than candy cigarettes. And, by then too, we learned more about what smoking can do to you.

Still, even fairly recently, kids started smoking, partly because they thought it made them look cool.

But what's happened here?

A new Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota survey finds a big drop in the number of young adults smoking in Minnesota. And it's not just this state; other states are reporting similar findings over the last few years. The research shows the state's 75 cent a pack "health impact fee" introduced in 2005 played a role in curbing smoking as did smoke-free policies on campuses and other public places.

MPR's Paul Tosto wants to hear from you if you've tried to quit.

"We've heard already from several folks in our Public Insight Network," Paul says. "One young woman told us she quit when she got pregnant and the 'increasing lack of social tolerance for smoking,' together with the memory of how hard it was to quit, kept her from going back. Smoking 'was an almost instant passport into a social group anywhere you went' when she started in 1997 but by 2007 when she quit for good most people looked down on it.

"A 24-year-old tells us that smoking was not even an option for her growing up. 'No one did it at home and I was too involved in activities like sports to get involved in smoking.'"

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Leroy Sievers, 1955-2008

Posted at 7:31 AM on August 18, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Icons

Leroy Sievers died Friday of the cancer about which he's blogged for the last few years.

He made several appearance on MPR's Midmorning. This one in 2006, this one last November, and this one just last month, when he acknowledged his disease was gaining on him.

The last post on his blog came from his wife, Laurie Singer, last Thursday:

On any normal day, this would just be a really bad thunderstorm rumbling its way across the summer sky.

But it's not a normal day and the rumbling is more like the growl of a predator stalking its prey.

Leroy's cancer is making its move.

I guess we all knew this day would come. The day when his doctor would say the medicine needs to be stronger.

The day when I would need to be stronger still.

The thunderstorm has passed, but I can still hear the growl.

-- Laurie

Have you ever seen 954 (at last count) comments to a blog post before? Me neither.

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To be old, frail, and evicted

Posted at 8:30 AM on August 11, 2008 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Health

A peek at the National Public Radio story board this morning shows All Things Considered is planning on a story this evening on "assisted living evictions." No details are provided, but that's what Google is for.

As near as I can tell, this subject starts in New Jersey where the most vulnerable among us are, as usual, the victims of apparent greed, according to thepressofAtlanticCity.com.

The investigation by the state Department of the Public Advocate comes after complaints from residents who spent tens of thousands of dollars paying for assisted living. When the residents prepared to switch to Medicare after draining their life savings, the company involuntarily discharged them.

From there it became obvious this is something of a nationwide problem, the Wall Street Journal reported. Long-term residents of facilities are being replaced by short-term residents. There's more money in it.

Those on Medicaid bring facilities as little as half what they can get from residents who pay out of pocket, with private health insurance or through Medicare, the federal-state health program for the elderly.

No one counts evictions nationwide. But formal complaints about nursing-home discharge practices have doubled over a decade, to 8,500 nationally in 2006, making it the second-biggest category tracked by the federal Administration on Aging, trailing only complaints about unanswered calls for assistance.

Part of the problem is that assisted-living facilities are often below the radar of regulation. And old people's needs change over time, often to the point where a facility almost can't afford to care for them, anymore. That's something that often doesn't get mentioned in the glossy brochures. Here's a view of things from a couple of consultants for the long-term health care industry.

A typical disclosure provides details on services included in the base rate and a listing of additional services available for purchase. More importantly, the form "should" include critical information regarding staffing patterns, staff licensing and staff training. Equally important, the form should disclose what changes in health status will result in a discharge or transfer. While the resident, the family and the facility may all agree that aging in place is the optimal goal, full disclosure assists everyone in the decision-making process and eliminates future surprises regarding the facility's capacity for delivering increased services.

For nursing homes, Minnesota has been a battleground for a few years now. The Tower Timberjay, for example, pointed out the situation in an article just last Friday.

The decisions to reduce beds and increase the levy are both driven by economics. State payments to nursing homes have not kept pace with rising costs. In three of the past six years, nursing homes saw no increases by the state.

Although the state approved a modest cost-of-living increase for fiscal year 2009 and agreed to re-evaluate the rate cap for the first time since the 1990s, the gap between revenues and expenditures remains daunting. More than 50 percent of nursing homes in northeastern Minnesota are posting losses of minus five percent per year or greater, according to a 2007 study of the industry.

The situation is critical, and it's not getting much attention. I'm guessing there are News Cut readers who are living this situation. If so, I'd like to hear from you.

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Slugs in training

Posted at 4:03 PM on July 15, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Our stop-the-presses scientific study of the day comes from the University of California San Diego. When kids hit the teen years, they become sluggish, and don't get much exercise.

It's reported by the Associated Press:

The latest study, appearing in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association, tracked about 1,000 U.S. children at various ages, from 2000 until 2006.

Special gadgets were used to record their activity. Average levels of moderate-to-vigorous activity fell from three hours a day at age 9 to less than an hour at age 15.

(Dr. Phillip) Nader said he was "surprised by how dramatic the decline was,"and cited schools dropping recess and gym classes and kids' increasing use of video games and computers as possible reasons.

As usual, video games, DVDs and Internet use get the blame.

Boys were more active than girls at every age. But by age 15, even boys' average activity levels fell short of recommendations, particularly on weekends, the study said.

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Talking cancer

Posted at 9:25 AM on July 3, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health

What do you say to someone who has cancer? That was one of the questions a caller asked earlier this week when MPR's Midmorning talked with Leroy Sievers, a journalist who has been writing about his battle with cancer on an NPR blog.

Yesterday, Sievers wrote about the question on his blog:

Cancer patients know how difficult it is to talk about our disease. It's hard for us. I have broken down into tears any number of times recently.

But what's more important, more important than the words you might say, is the effort to simply say anything. And if that "anything" isn't about cancer, that's even better.

The best conversations I have these days are about something, anything else. Politics, sports, books, whatever.

If cancer is not in the room for even an hour or two, that's a gift.

The difficulty, of course, is sometimes "How 'bout those Twins?" sounds a lot like "this is me not talking about cancer." The comments section of the blog post provided a good example: a mix of highly sensitive thoughts mixed in with questions about politics and the Red Sox.

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A patient's view of bipolar

Posted at 11:34 AM on June 25, 2008 by Bob Collins (14 Comments)
Filed under: Health

A passage of her book that Marya Hornbacher read on MPR's Midmorning this morning, described pretty well why I tend to think people who battle depression and bipolar disorder are some of the most courageous people among us.

Here's the hell of it: Madness doesn't announce itself. There isn't time to prepare for its coming. It shows up without calling and sits in your kitchen, ashing in your plant. You ask how long it plans to stay, it shrugs its shoulders, gets up, and starts digging through the fridge. But even that implies some sort of lag time between the arrival of madness and the actual experience of it.

In the early years, it's like a switch flips on and though only a moment before you were totally sane, suddenly you've gone mad. But as you learn to manage madness, you begin to notice sooner that it's on its way. I lick my finger and hold it up to detect the direction of the wind. Madness is in the air. I can smell it like I can smell snow. It's in the vicinity though I don't know where or long it will be until it comes.

The trick is to shut the gate, throw sheets over the roses, go inside, lock all of the windows and doors and go to the basement and sit on a chair and wait. Sometimes these preparations are enough. The locks on the windows and doors are tight, you've taken the medication faithfully, you've exercised to induce a sense of Dopamine calm, you've put every lamp in the house in your office and flipped on the light box (it mimics sunlight for people who get depressed in winter.),and the room is lit up as if by floodlights and you're so hot you're working in your bra.

You've stayed off the coffee, you've taken the supplements, you've worked starting at the same time for the same length everyday. You've interacted with human beings at least a few times this week. You've gotten yourself to the point where you can sleep in the normal timeframe from night until morning, and your mornings are not a horrible struggle to stay out of bed, and you make the bed so you aren't tempted to get back in it. You check off the entires on the list that runs your life.

But sometimes the system fails. Maybe it's a chemical shift in the brain that the medications don't block. Maybe it's a stressor in your life that you didn't expect. Maybe there is no reason and you're just going mad for the hell of it, but you try not to think about that because that would imply that no matter what you do, no matter how tightly you batten the hatches, madness can get in.

You wake up one morning and there it is, sitting in an old plaid bathrobe in your kitchen, unpleasant and unshaved. You look at it, heart sinking. Madness is a rotten guest. You can tell it to leave 'til you're blue in the face, you follow it around the house, explaining that it's come at a bad time and could it come another day?

Eventually you give up and go back to bed, shutting the door. But, of course, it barges in and demands to be entertained. Before you know it, it has strewn its stuff all over the house, and there are sticky plates in its bed and it has refused to change its sheets. Madness lounges all day in front of the TV, watching Oprah, and munching on a bag of chips, and drinking milk from the carton and getting crumbs between the cushions of the couch.

Soon, your life revolves around it. You do everything you can to keep it comfortable because you don't want to upset it. You tiptoe around the house and wait for it to leave. In most cases you wake up one morning and it's gone. There's minimal damage. You pick up its mess and get on with your day. But sometimes it settles in to stay. Immediately it is all demands: it starts bossing you around, interrupting your conversations, refusing to let you out of the house. The phone stops ringing. Soon it's just you and madness. You circle each other like boxers, throwing punches to the jaw, but sometimes it takes round after round and you lie on the living room floor, unable to get up.

It refuses to let you sleep. You run out of food. It draws all the blinds and stands peering through the slats. It convinces you you're in danger. It says that people are coming and they will hurt you if you let them in.

Soon, madness has worn you down. It's easier to do what it says than to argue. In this way it takes over your mind. You no longer know where it ends and you begin. You believe anything it says. You do what it tells you no matter how extreme or absurd. If it says "you're worthless," you agree. You plead for it to stop, you promise to behave. You are on your knees before it, and it laughs.

A rather frightening account.

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Drug abuse snapshot

Posted at 3:32 PM on June 16, 2008 by Bob Collins (33 Comments)
Filed under: Health

The Minnesota Department of Human Services is out with its drug trend report in the Twin Cities today. Here's the bottom line:

Heroin use and prescription drug abuse rising

Marijuana use increased to 33 percent of high school seniors in 2007, compared with 29.2 percent in 2004, although declines were seen for grades nine and six.

Cocaine treatment admissions are gradually declining.

Marijuana continued to account for more admissions to addiction treatment programs than any other illicit drug, with 3,067 admissions that represent 16.1 percent of total admissions in 2000.

Cocaine treatment admissions are gradually declining.

Ecstasy use rose from 4.3 percent in 2004 to 5.7 percent in 2007.

LSD use rose from 4.9 percent in 2004 to 6.2 percent in 2007 among Twin Cities metropolitan area high school seniors.

Here's the entire report.

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Drunks on the road

Posted at 12:03 AM on April 23, 2008 by Bob Collins (11 Comments)
Filed under: Health

It's established fact that the upper Midwest can -- and does -- outdrink the rest of the nation. And one out of three high school students binge drinks, so it's not a problem that's going to disappear anytime soon.

What happens to all these people? They get in their cars. A government report out today says the upper Midwest has the worst drunk driving rates in the country. Nationally, nearly one out of 6 drivers on the road has driven drunk in the last year.

Wisconsin -- and this will knock you over with a feather -- is the worst with more than a quarter of the adult drivers reporting they've driven drunk. North Dakota is #2, Minnesota 3, Nebraska 4 and South Dakota rounds out the top five.

"It's not surprising, but it means that these jurisdictions should take this data and think about how they approach public education campaigns and enforcement campaigns," said Dr. H. Westley Clark of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Another expert, Eric Goplerud, research professor at George Washington
University Medical Center, cites cultural and demographic issues for the high rates of drunk driving in these parts. He said strong religion in the southeast discourages drinking, which perhaps is a slap at the heathens in this neck of the woods.

This area, the experts say, is also suspect because of its predominantly white racial makeup. Blacks, they say, drink at substantially lower rates than whites.

(Posting will be light this morning; I'm speaking to a journalism class at the U and then will hunker down on stuff later.)

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What we've learned

Posted at 8:05 AM on April 16, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Health

Today is the one-year anniversary of the shootings at Virginia Tech that left 32 people dead. What have we learned? Perhaps quite a bit, a story in the Fargo Forum newspaper (reg. possibly required) suggests. It details how colleges and universities in that region are responding to the mental health needs of the students.

In some cases the efforts were underway even before last year's killings, but a subsequent study of Minnesota college students showed a significant number have been diagnosed with a mental health condition at some point in their lives.

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