For the second time in three years, a University of Kansas Hospital cancer patient has received tainted platelets from the Community Blood Center. In the first case, the patient died within 48 hours after receiving a transfusion laced with E. coli bacteria. In the second instance, which occurred Oct. 13, the patient spent days on a respirator and nearly died. The FDA's regional office visited KU's blood bank last week and has reviewed the Community Blood Center's policies. KU's transfusion committee also will review the hospital’s platelet safety procedures. The hospital will bring in national experts to review its blood safety policies.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, and her Republican challenger, John Kennedy, each advocate a major reshaping of an American healthcare system. Kennedy, the state treasurer making his second run for the Senate, favors shifting more responsibility for obtaining health coverage onto individuals through changes to the federal tax code and by erasing federal barriers that prevent people from buying insurance across state lines. Landrieu, running for a third term, supports the bipartisan Healthy Americans Act, that would dismantle the current system of employer-based health coverage in favor of requiring people to buy health coverage from a pool of state-regulated private plans.
Health services and other benefits available to illegal immigrants can vary by the state. Welfare, prenatal care, or in-state college tuition might be available in one place and inaccessible across a state line. The disparities reflect the nation's conflicting attitudes toward its estimated 12 million illegal immigrants. With limited federal guidance, states often are left to make their own decisions, frequently shaped by political winds.
Service Employees International Union members struck today at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, CA, where temporary workers had been hired in anticipation of the one-day action. Patient care at the nonprofit hospital was unaffected, said a hospital spokeswoman.
Strikers included respiratory therapists, nursing assistants and licensed vocational nurses, as well as housekeepers, food workers, and registration clerks. Neither the union nor the hospital had complete figures on how many people went on strike.
Hospitalized patients who received blood that had been stored for more than four weeks were nearly three times as likely to develop infections as those who received fresher blood, researchers said.
The blood itself was not infected, but the release of chemical agents called cytokines by the stored blood may have affected the recipient's immune systems, rendering them more susceptible to infections, said Raquel Nahra, MD, of the Sparks Regional Medical Center in Ft. Smith, AK. The patients typically suffered an increase in urinary tract infections, pneumonia, and infections associated with intravenous lines, she told a Philadelphia meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians.
Children's Hospital Boston said it has launched Generation Cures, which it describes as a Web-based philanthropic community designed for tweens and their parents to raise financial support for pediatric medical research. The site uses game play and digital entertainment to inspire children to care about others and understand the concept of giving, said representatives from Children's Hospital Boston.
Arizona's Proposition 101 would block the state from enacting a universal health-insurance plan. If it passes, it would amend the state's constitution to say that no law "shall impose any penalty or fine, of any type, for choosing to obtain or decline healthcare coverage or for participation in any particular healthcare system or plan." As a result, the state wouldn't be able to launch a plan requiring everyone in the state to buy insurance or pay a fine. The bill would also block the universal health-insurance plan sponsored by Phil Lopes, a Democrat who is the minority leader of Arizona's House of Representatives.
Somewhere along the line too many doctors stopped being healers and became prescribers and technicians, says Benjamin Brewer, MD, in this opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal. "We became business people and started thinking in terms of relative value units—the coin of the medical finance realm—as much as how to make patients better," Brewer says. "We took seminars in medical coding, so we could talk the same lingo as the government and the insurance companies. The changes in medicine are at odds with many of the values that defined the profession I joined."
A premier Manhattan hospital is turning a cancer-treatment floor over to a world-famous fashion designer in the hope that serendipity, science and intuition will help in the healing process. A foundation run by Donna Karan, founder of the DKNY line of clothing, has donated $850,000 for a yearlong experiment combining Eastern and Western healing methods at Beth Israel Medical Center. The Karan-Beth Israel project will have a celebrated donor turn a hospital into a testing ground for a medically controversial notion: that yoga, meditation, and aromatherapy can enhance regimens of chemotherapy and radiation.
New evidence has emerged of a widespread gap in the cost of health insurance, as women pay much more than men of the same age for individual insurance policies providing identical coverage, according to new data from insurance companies and online brokers. Some insurance executives expressed surprise at the size and prevalence of the disparities, which can make a woman's insurance cost hundreds of dollars a year more than a man's. Women's advocacy groups have raised concerns about the differences, and members of Congress have begun to question the justification for them.
