Latest KFF Health News Stories
Gingrich Think Tank’s Health Industry Clients Draw Scrutiny
The Washington Post and New York Times detail the lucrative business dealings between Gingrich’s think tank, the Center for Health Transformation, and health care companies.
Insurers Charging Companies More If Workers Have Unhealthy Lifestyles
A Towers Watson survey found that the percentage of employer-sponsored policies that impose these types of financial penalities have doubled in the last two years and will likely double again in the year ahead.
AHRQ: Primary Care Experiencing ‘Diminishing Economic Margins’
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality notes in an upcomping installment of its “Facts and Stats Series” that, despite primary care’s importance to the health care system, the discipline is facing a number of challenges.
Viewpoints: Waiting For the Super Committee; TV Coverage Of Supreme Court’s Health Law Session
A selection of editorials and opinions about health policy from around the country.
Research Roundup: Doctors’ Financial Incentives When Ordering Stress Tests
This week’s studies come from The Commonwealth Fund, The Kaiser Family Foundation, The New England Journal Of Medicine, The Journal Of The American Medical Association, The Urban Institute, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Annals Of Internal Medicine.
GAVI Alliance To Fund Roll-Out Of Vaccines Against Cervical Cancer, Rubella in Developing Countries
The GAVI Alliance “has agreed to fund the roll-out of vaccines against cervical cancer in developing countries, offering protection against a disease that kills one woman every two minutes,” Reuters reports (Hirschler, 11/17). The group is continuing negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to lower the price of the vaccine, NPR’s health blog “Shots” notes. “By 2015, GAVI expects that two million girls in nine countries will have received the HPV vaccine,” but the shot will not be given to boys unless the WHO recommends they also receive the immunization, according to the blog (Husted, 11/17).
First Edition: November 18, 2011
Today’s early morning highlights from the major news organizations, including reports indicating that the super committee continues to face difficulties and may not make its fast-approaching deadline.
Doctors, Aid Workers Warn Of Disease Threats To Displaced Persons In Somalia
Inter Press Service examines how doctors and aid workers in and around Mogadishu, Somalia, “are warning that famine victims in internally displaced camps have become vulnerable to contagious diseases like cholera and measles, as conditions here are ripe for an outbreak.” Sanitation and access to food and drinking water are the greatest concerns, IPS reports, adding that “[w]hile international aid continues to be delivered to Somalia, relief efforts at some camps have dwindled or stopped.” The news service writes, “The Somali government’s Mogadishu spokesman Mohamed Abdullahi Arig told IPS that the government needed help to prevent a possible cholera outbreak and to prevent other communicable diseases from spreading in the camps. ‘The government is more vigilant, but our capacity is too little. We need the international community’s assistance in this sector,’ Arig said” (Abokar, 11/17).
Efforts To End AIDS Could Also Reduce TB Burden With Proper Funding
In response to Michael Gerson’s November 11 column in which he said the end of AIDS is possible because of combination prevention and treatment innovations, David Bryden, the Stop TB advocacy officer at RESULTS, writes in a Washington Post letter to the editor, “Another benefit of [HIV] treatment is that it sharply reduces deaths from tuberculosis [TB], which is the primary killer of people living with HIV/AIDS.” He says that “to fully succeed in Africa, where TB and HIV/AIDS are often two sides of the same coin, we have to quickly identify people who have TB or who are vulnerable to it and get them the services they need,” which also means developing an accurate quick test for the disease.
Examining Funding In Light Of New Evidence On HIV Prevention, Treatment Strategies
In this Huffington Post opinion piece, Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development, reports on a World Bank- and USAID-sponsored debate she moderated last week as part of a series on HIV/AIDS issues, the topic of which was “Countries should spend a majority of what is likely to be a flat or even declining HIV prevention budget on ‘treatment as prevention.'” She notes several of her reactions to the debate and asks with regard to global health spending, “What about the pie? Even if it grows, there will be tradeoffs.”
Future Research Critical To Ending AIDS Epidemic
Mitchell Warren, executive director of AVAC: Global Advocacy for HIV Prevention and a founding member of the Global Health Technologies Coalition, writing in The Hill’s “Congress Blog,” welcomes Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s November 8 announcement of “an additional $60 million for implementation of a combination of prevention strategies in four sub-Saharan African countries and evaluation of their impact,” adding that “this funding can only be viewed as a down payment on the work that needs to be done.” He says the Obama administration and the governments of other countries “need to add specific commitments, milestones, and strategies to the vision,” as well as “commit to the long haul.”
Debt Panel Deliberations Involve Gloom, Doom And Blame
As indications suggest that the super committee stalemate continues, the panel members and other lawmakers are pointing fingers and assigning blame. Health programs — including Medicare — continue to be a sticking point. News outlets also examine how the threatened cuts that would kick in if the panel doesn’t find success would impact the health sector.
Medicaid Expansion Key Part Of Court’s Health Law Review
The high court’s announcement that it would review the law was not a surprise, but the specific issues it will examine have triggered some shockwaves. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court attention to the health law also has moved the issue of the overhaul back to the forefront of many campaigns.
HuffPost Green Examines Relationship Between Environment, Malaria
As part of its series on the relationships between human, animal and environmental health, titled “The Infection Loop,” HuffPost Green examines how changes in climate and landscape, human movement, agricultural practices, and microbe adaptation are affecting the spread of malaria. “Our disease-fighting weaponry has certainly improved in recent years, from the widespread distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets to hopeful progress towards a malaria vaccine,” but some “experts suggest that getting ahead of the disease, let alone maintaining a lead, is far easier said than done,” according to the article, which includes quotes from malaria researchers working in several academic disciplines (Peeples, 11/16).
Kenya Readies To Step Up Fight Against Trachoma
AllAfrica.com reports on trachoma — a chronic bacterial infection spread by direct contact with eye, nose and throat secretions from others who are infected — in Kenya, profiling Kajiado County where the disease has reached the blinding stage in 3.4 percent of patients, “making it a serious public health problem in that region and many other similarly remote areas with little access to health care and screening.” According to the news service, “Officials with the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) estimate that of every 100 people screened for trachoma in Kajiado alone, 17 will have active stage symptoms such as redness and irritation of the eyes.”
South African public health experts from Medecins San Frontieres (MSF) South Africa and the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) “are calling on governments to use legally available mechanisms to promote the production or import of generic drugs in their countries,” Inter Press Service reports. The article examines how countries can alter their patent acts under the Doha Declaration — a World Trade Organization declaration on the Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and Public Health that “exists to ensure that patents do not undermine the ability of countries to achieve the right to health” — “to access generic versions of otherwise patented medicines in cases where prices are prohibitively expensive, the organizations say.”
In advance of a U.N. climate change conference this month in Durban, South Africa, the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change, a high-level international panel, on Wednesday announced its recommendations (.pdf) for achieving food security while addressing the effects of climate change, VOA News reports. The panel, which includes scientists from 13 countries who are experts in agriculture, climate, economics, trade, nutrition and ecology, “spent the past year analyzing many climate studies — a year that included climbing food prices, humanitarian disasters and political unrest — all of which, it says, threaten food security,” VOA writes (DeCapua, 11/16). “The seven high-level recommendations include significantly raising the level of global investment in sustainable agriculture and food systems in the next decade; sustainably intensifying agricultural production on the existing land base while reducing greenhouse gas emissions; and reducing losses and waste in the food system,” a commission press release states (11/16).
