Public/Global Health

The advocacy group USAgainstAlzheimer’s is applauding the Obama administration’s goal of eliminating the disease by 2025.

The Department of Health and Human Services on Monday announced a draft framework to tackle the disease, the first time the government has adopted a timeframe to stop Alzheimer’s. The plan calls for increasing access to clinical trials, identifying early stages of the disease and expanding public outreach campaigns.

More than 5 million Americans have the disease, contributing to the nation’s runaway health costs.

Four out of five British doctors say patient care suffered in 2011 as a result of cuts to Great Britain's government-run healthcare system, according to a new poll from the left-leaning Guardian newspaper.

Conservative groups in the United States quickly disseminated the findings to bolster their arguments against European-style socialized medicine — and, by extension, President Obama's healthcare reform law. 

The polled doctors cited "hospital bed closures, pressure to give patients cheaper, slower-acting drugs, cuts to occupational health support, and reductions in community health services as examples of recent cost-cutting measures," according to The Guardian. The cuts to healthcare funding are part of conservative Prime Minister David Cameron's efforts to reel in the nation's deficit.

Great Britain has the most socialized medical system in Europe, with doctors working directly for the National Health Service. Obama's healthcare law, by contrast, creates new requirements for health insurance plans while expanding Medicaid and giving citizens subsidies to buy private coverage.

Military service members who have been the victim of a sexual assault now have the right to request an expedited transfer from their unit and installation, the Department of Defense announced Tuesday.

The new policy requires the service member's unit commander to respond within 72 hours and also creates a right of appeal to a higher officer if the request is denied. The Defense Department also announced the adoption of standardized retention periods of 50 years for sexual assault records in unrestricted cases. 

The new policies were announced along with the release of the 2010-2011 annual report on "Sexual Harassment and Violence at the Military Service Academies." The latest report showed an increase in sexual assault reports over the preceding year, with a total of 65 reports of sexual assault involving cadets and midshipmen compared to 41 reports for 2009-2010.

"One sexual assault is one too many," Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in a statement. "Whether it's in our academies or our ranks, at sea or ashore, there's no place for this unacceptable behavior. We treat each other with dignity in this institution. I expect everyone in this department to live up to that high standard. This is a leadership issue, first and foremost, so I also expect us to lead with integrity and with energy to eliminate sexual assault and harassment from our culture. I'm confident the steps we are taking are the right ones, but we must continue to improve."

Newt Gingrich wants to boost federal funding for medical research, a stance that puts the GOP presidential candidate sharply at odds with Republican lawmakers intent on shrinking the federal deficit.

"I strongly opposed House Republicans when they tried to cut $1 billion from the [National Institutes of Health] budget earlier this year," Gingrich wrote in response to a questionnaire from the research advocacy group Research!America. "Cutting funds from the NIH may create short-term savings, but it will cost us dearly in the long run."

The comments are included in a national voter education initiative that tracks presidential candidates' stances on medical research. Only Gingrich and President Obama have answered so far.

The comments could hurt Gingrich with conservatives who are wary of his past support for government programs and for requiring that everyone carry health insurance. 

The Department of Agriculture said Wednesday the agency has not changed its position on the use of antibiotics after public health advocates latched onto comments from Secretary Tom Vilsack as signaling a tougher stance.

"Secretary Vilsack’s comments do not reflect a change in policy for the Department," said USDA Spokeswoman Courtney Rowe.

"Working with the farm community, I think it's clear we would like to see those antibiotics used in the context of disease control and disease response as opposed to any other reason or purpose for using them," Vilsack said Wednesday. "And we're working with state veterinarians and veteranians' associations and land-grant universities to ensure that there's a better understanding of the importance of using antibiotics judiciously."

Public health advocates quickly jumped on the comments as evidence that the agency that regulates meat and poultry is changing its stance because Vilsack made no mention of disease prevention, which includes fortifying healthy animals raised in unsanitary conditions. Critics of the practice — including some Democrats in Congress — say the abundant use of antibiotics in animal agriculture is putting people at risk by creating disease-resistant superbugs.

The obesity rate among New York City's K-8 public-school students declined by more than 5 percent over the past five years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Thursday.

The numbers mark the largest documented decline to date in a large city in the United States. 

"I'm not aware of a large community actually reversing obesity anywhere in the world, other than in famine situations, obviously," CDC Director Thomas Frieden told The Hill. "It's definitely good news. It tells us that, yes, it's possible to make a difference."

An expert panel on Wednesday recommended high standards for allowing tobacco companies to market their products as low-risk.

The Food and Drug Administration has the power to approve “modified-risk” tobacco products, which can be marketed as safer than cigarettes. FDA regulators should demand a rigorous scientific evaluation before classifying products as low-risk, the Institute of Medicine said in a report released Wednesday.

The IOM specifically said the FDA should not rely on research from tobacco companies.

“The industry’s history of improper manipulation of data undermined the credibility of its research and left it isolated from the mainstream scientific community,” the IOM said in a release.

Read more...

A federal judge said he won't hold the FDA in contempt for ignoring a 2009 order to reconsider whether Plan B and related generic drugs should be available without a prescription to girls under age 17, Bloomberg reports.

Hospitals have adopted the drug industry's sales calls tactics to get doctors to refer more patients to their institutions, reports Kaiser Health News.

Doctors groups are already conceding that a one-year "doc fix" might be the most they can hope for this year, Inside Health Policy reports.

A federal appeals court in Washington ruled in favor of the FTC's antitrust probe of condom maker Church & Dwight Co., whose Trojan brand holds 70 percent of the market, Legal Times reports.

Enrollment in consumer-driven health plans rose to 7 percent of the population this year from 5 percent in 2010, according to an annual report from the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) and Mathew Greenwald & Associates.

Enhanced funding for the National Institutes of Health is supporting about 21,000 jobs, the Government Accountability Office said Monday.

The economic stimulus included $8.2 billion for the NIH, which awards grants to fund private research. According to the GAO, the money is supporting an increasing number of jobs. Stimulus funding for the NIH supported about 12,000 jobs in December 2009, which grew to 21,000 this past June.

Researchers have mostly used the money to avoid losing their existing employees, the GAO found. At five research institutions GAO surveyed, 29 percent of the jobs supported by NIH funding in the stimulus were new positions.

The GAO's findings echo the arguments that universities and other NIH advocates have made all year — they have said throughout Congress's various budget-cutting efforts that NIH funding should be protected because it helps create high-tech research jobs.

The NIH estimates that its stimulus funding will eventually support 54,000 jobs, according to the GAO report.

A Senate panel is delving into state and federal reporting requirements in the wake of scandals at three educational institutions.