Latest KFF Health News Stories
Polio Eradication Must Not Fail
“[P]eople everywhere have a stake in eradicating polio, as we have stamped out smallpox,” a Bloomberg View editorial states, adding, “Immunizing the last unvaccinated children on the planet is an expensive and complex undertaking, and worth it in the long run.” The editorial notes, “If polio transmission could be stopped by 2015, the net benefit from reduced treatment costs and productivity gains through 2035 would be $40 billion to $50 billion, according to a 2010 study.”
School Districts, Hospitals Cut Nurses
Nurses, long a presence in many schools and the backbone of hospital care, are being cut back or stretched thin, according to several news organizations. Meanwhile, NPR reports on a poll that found three out of five patients feel their doctors rush through exams.
G8 Leaders Must Follow Through On Food Security Commitments
“I have just returned from a whirlwind visit to Washington, D.C., and Chicago, where I participated in a number of events around the G8 and NATO Summits focused on food and nutrition security,” Tom Arnold, CEO of Concern Worldwide, writes in the Huffington Post’s “Global Motherhood” blog, adding, “Among so many world leaders and high-level representatives from civil society and academia, I felt a sense of critical mass beginning to form in the fight to end global hunger.” He continues, “It’s a feeling I’ve had before — perhaps not this strong — only to be disappointed when promises went unfulfilled. We must keep calling our leaders to persevere, especially those in the G8, to ensure that does not happen this time.”
Hospital CEO Tied To Billing Collection Controversy Will Leave
Fairview Health Services of Minnesota opted not to renew the contract of CEO Mark Eustis after investigations into the role of bill collection company Accretive Health at the hospital.
Auditors Find Medicare Lax On Overpayments; New MedPAC Members
Federal auditors say Medicare failed to collect about 80 percent of the more than $400 million that were identified as overpayments, Modern Healthcare reports.
Muslim Women, Religious Leaders Being Enlisted In Global Campaign To Eradicate Polio
“The last three countries where polio is still paralyzing children — Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria — said on Thursday that they have enlisted Muslim women and religious leaders to allay fears of vaccination and wipe out the disease,” Reuters reports. According to Shahnaz Wazir Ali, a special assistant to Pakistan’s Prime Minister who is in charge of the polio eradication campaign, more than 20 leading Islamic scholars “have signed an endorsement of the polio eradication program, which is being used to persuade Pakistani parents” to allow their children to be vaccinated, the news agency writes. In Nigeria, the Federation of Muslim Women’s Associations is backing a polio immunization campaign there, Reuters notes. “It is not the first time that the world has come tantalizingly close to wiping out the crippling disease,” the news agency writes. “‘We’re so close, there is no time for complacency,’ Dr. Christopher Elias, head of global development at the [Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation], a major donor, told Reuters in Geneva,” Reuters adds (Nebehay, 5/24).
FDA Reauthorization Bill Sails Through Senate
Showing unusual bipartisan spirit, the Senate passed a massive FDA user-fee reauthorization bill Thursday designed to prevent drug shortages and speed federal approval of medicines, including lower-cost generic versions.
CDC Report Finds States Spend Only A Fraction Of Tobacco Funds To Fight Smoking
The study says states collected $244 billion from tobacco settlement payments between 1998 and 2010, and used about $8 billion of that for anti-smoking campaigns.
U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Valerie Amos on Thursday “called for strong leadership and a comprehensive response plan, as well as donor support, for the food crisis in West Africa’s drought-prone Sahel region, warning that hunger could lead to a humanitarian catastrophe,” the U.N. News Centre reports (5/24). Amos “met with President Macky Sall in Senegal and Blaise Compaore in Burkina Faso on a four-day trip to west Africa to examine the impact of the food crisis,” Agence France-Presse writes. “We can do more to avoid the crisis from becoming a catastrophe in the region but to save more lives we need strong leadership … and continued generosity from the regional and humanitarian community,” she said, the news agency notes (5/24). The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which Amos heads, said that in addition to food aid, “priorities for those in need of assistance include health care and water and sanitation services,” according to the U.N. News Centre (5/24).
Dueling Student Loan Bills Stall In Senate
Neither measure reached the 60-vote threshold needed to delay an interest rate increase for 7.4 million students with college loans. Republicans want to pay for it by abolishing a preventive health program in the health care law; Democrats proposed raising Medicare and Social Security payroll taxes on high-income owners of some privately held companies.
Capitol Hill Briefing Addresses Research Agenda To End AIDS Epidemic
In a guest blog post on the Center for Global Health Policy’s “Science Speaks,” Chris Collins, vice president and director of public policy at amfAR: The Foundation for AIDS Research, and Mitchell Warren, executive director of AVAC: Global Advocacy for HIV Prevention, summarize a Capitol Hill briefing “on the research agenda for beginning to end the AIDS epidemic” that took place Wednesday. “[R]esearchers, policymakers, and advocates joined our organizations and the Congressional HIV/AIDS Caucus” at the briefing to discuss “the research agenda needed to bring the epidemic to a close, with special focus on” combination interventions for treatment and prevention; “progress on vaccine and cure research”; and the importance of HIV testing, they write. Collins and Warren conclude, “We need to finance the response, make strategic choices about what to bring to scale (and what not to) and stop discriminating against high-risk populations. Whether you’re a researcher, policymaker or advocate, new scientific developments are how we end the epidemic” (5/24).
PSI Interviews Gates Foundation Official About Child Health
In this post in PSI’s “Healthy Lives” blog, “PSI’s Nutrition Research Adviser Dr. Abel Irena talks with Saul Morris, senior program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, about progress that has been made in child health.” Morris addresses treatment for pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria among children, delivery and access to integrated health systems, the Gates Foundation’s focus on newborn health, and the most effective steps to take to reach the fourth Millennium Development Goal to reduce child mortality by 2015 (5/24).
Today’s early morning highlights from major news organizations, including articles about Senate passage of a key FDA bill.
FDA Reauthorization Bill Clears Senate By 96-1 Vote
The Senate voted overwhelmingly Thursday afternoon to pass a bill to reauthorize the Food and Drug Administration’s user fee programs. KHN tracked the coverage of the vote.
WHO Can Survive With Reform, Flexibility
“As the nations of the world attend the World Health Assembly in Geneva this week, the World Health Organization is in a budget crisis and continuing to struggle for relevancy among better-funded, more agile philanthropic foundations and disease-specific initiatives,” Thomas Bollyky, senior fellow for global health, economics, and development at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), writes in this CFR expert brief. “Survival for the institution is possible, but only if WHO reinvents itself as a twenty-first century international institution that can adapt to changing global health needs and thrive in austere times,” he writes (5/23).
5 Questions About The New Alliance For Food Security and Nutrition
In this article on the Feed the Future initiative’s webpage, Tjada McKenna, deputy coordinator for development for Feed the Future, and Jonathan Shrier, acting special representative for global food security and deputy coordinator for diplomacy for Feed the Future, ask and answer five questions about the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, launched last week by the Obama Administration. The authors discuss the participants in the initiative, the specific commitments of these participants, as well as the costs of the initiative (5/23).
Global Polio Eradication Initiative Launches ‘Emergency Action Plan’
“A global initiative to rid the world of polio launched an emergency action plan on Thursday because gaps in funding and vaccination coverage threaten to derail a final push towards stamping out the paralyzing disease,” AlertNet reports (Rowling, 5/24). “Despite the dramatic drop in polio cases in the last year, the threat of continued transmission due to funding and immunization gaps has driven the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) to launch an Emergency Action Plan,” a GPEI press release states. “‘Polio eradication is at a tipping point between success and failure,’ said Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization,” the press release states. “We are in emergency mode to tip it towards success — working faster and better, focusing on the areas where children are most vulnerable,” she added, according to the release (5/24).
Blogs Report On Controversy Surrounding Lancet Study Examining Millennium Development Project
Following controversy surrounding a study published in the Lancet earlier this month that examined the impact of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) on child mortality, “both the authors of the paper and the journal itself have finally responded,” blogger Matt Collin writes in the Aid Thoughts blog and provides a link to the post in the World Bank’s “Development Impact” blog that began the debate. The blog notes that study author Paul Pronyk of the Earth Institute, in a letter (.pdf) to the Lancet, retracts the child mortality data in the study and accepts that mathematical errors highlighted in the “Development Impact” post were made (5/18). In the Roving Bandit blog, blogger Lee Crawfurd discusses the Lancet editors’ response (.pdf) and writes, “There are definitely lessons to be learned across [the medical and economic] disciplines both ways. It’s just an incredibly sad state of affairs that one of the lessons that journals of medicine, the discipline that gave us randomized controlled trials, needs to learn from economics, is a more careful attention to statistics and causality” (5/21). In a post in the Christian Science Monitor’s “Africa Monitor” blog, blogger Tom Murphy summarizes the controversy and writes, “The discussion is important, say the critics, because of the popularity and cost of the MVP” (5/23).
Doctors Disagree On New Prostate Cancer Screening Guidelines
One doctor suggests the problem is the rush to treatment, not the screening; another suggests that a failure to screen men could be more costly in the long run.
British Prime Minister Cameron To Hold Food Security Summit During Olympic Games In London
“The U.K. will hold an international food security summit during the Olympic games in London this summer, British Prime Minister David Cameron has announced in a statement to the House of Commons,” AlertNet reports (Caspani, 5/23). “The move follows last week’s G8 summit in the U.S., where eight of the world’s wealthiest nations pledged to speed up progress on combating hunger and malnutrition,” the Guardian writes, noting that President Barack Obama last week launched the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition.
