Eideard

Photo taken when Kruger was surrendering to the FBI
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

State Senator Carl Kruger, who for months had insisted on his innocence, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to federal corruption charges, admitting that he conspired to accept nearly $500,000 in bribes, which prosecutors have said supported a lavish lifestyle.

Mr. Kruger, an influential Democrat and 16-year legislator, stood before Judge Jed S. Rakoff in United States District Court in Manhattan and pleaded guilty to four of the five counts in the indictment against him. He sobbed and mumbled unintelligibly as he admitted his crimes. The charges included two counts of fraud conspiracy, for which he could face up to 20 years in prison each, and two counts of bribery conspiracy, which carry a maximum term of five years each…

The broad corruption investigation, which also resulted in the arrests of Assemblyman William F. Boyland Jr., two hospital executives, a lobbyist and a developer, indicated that Mr. Kruger used the money to live beyond his means; a prime example of that, prosecutors said, was his mansion in Mill Basin, Brooklyn, where he lived with two gynecologist brothers and their mother…

And the schemes were lucrative, according to the charges. Mr. Kruger collected at least $1 million in bribes, the authorities initially said, in return for all manner of political favors, like helping hospitals seeking to merge, getting state money for real estate developers and even expanding the business hours of liquor stores. The bribes, according to prosecutors, financed a four-door Bentley Arnage and the Mill Basin home, which was originally built for a boss of the Luchese crime family…

Mr. Boyland, a Democrat, who was tried separately before Judge Rakoff last month, was acquitted of conspiring to take $175,000 in bribes in return for using his influence on behalf of a health care organization that operates hospitals in Queens and Brooklyn…

In September, another defendant, David P. Rosen, the former chief executive of the health care organization, MediSys, was convicted of conspiring to bribe Mr. Boyland — as well as Mr. Kruger and a third legislator, Anthony S. Seminerio, a Democratic assemblyman from Queens — in return for favorable treatment for MediSys.

Poisonally, I would throw away the key. This man crapped on the voters who elected him. He conspired to break the law to benefit medical corporations feeding off the healthcare of Brooklyn taxpayers.

My only regret is that the scumbags who lobbied the healthcare changes to drug regulations through Congress for George W. Bush – before officially going to work for the Pharmaceutical industry – aren’t going to be sharing a cell with Kruger.

A new study of hand hygiene in hospitals found that wearing latex gloves makes health care workers less likely to clean their hands before and after treating patients. The finding is concerning, researchers say, because germs can travel through latex gloves, and because they’re often worn when doctors work with bodily fluids and the sickest, most infectious patients. Taking off latex gloves can also cause a “back spray” effect, in which fluids and germs are snapped back onto the wearer’s hands.

As a result, doctors and nurses who don’t wash up after using latex gloves can spread infections through contaminated hands, said Dr. Sheldon Stone, lead author of the study…

“If you’re a patient, you assume that if someone is wearing gloves they’re being careful and protecting you from infection,” he said. “But in fact, their hands could be very dirty…”

The researchers found that the overall hand-washing rate — regardless of whether gloves were worn — was just 47.7 percent, similar to compliance rates for hand hygiene in American hospitals, which average about 40 percent. But when gloves were used, the latest study found, hand washing in the 15 hospitals that were part of the research went down even further, to about 41 percent…

The study found that health care workers wore gloves in roughly a quarter of all contacts with patients, and in 60 percent of those cases did not clean their hands either before or after treating the patient…

It was unclear why doctors, nurses and other hospital workers were less likely to wash or disinfect their hands before and after donning gloves. But Dr. Stone and his colleagues speculated that they might be influenced by a widespread misconception that gloves are impermeable to pathogens. While gloves do lower the rate of hand contamination, germs can still get through. Dr. Stone said he and his colleagues wanted to dispel the myth and get across to hospital workers the idea of “The Dirty Hand in the Latex Glove.”

“We want health care workers to avoid it,” he said. “It’s gross. And it’s not just a British phenomenon. I’m sure if you went all over you would find it.”

Eeoough!

The privacy curtains that separate care spaces in hospitals and clinics are frequently contaminated with potentially dangerous bacteria, researchers said in Chicago this week.

To avoid spreading those bugs, health care providers should make sure to wash their hands after routine contact with the curtains and before interacting with patients, Dr. Michael Ohl…said at the 51st Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

“There is growing recognition that the hospital environment plays an important role in the transmission of infections in the health care setting and it’s clear that these (privacy curtains) are potentially important sites of contamination because they are frequently touched by patients and providers,” Dr. Ohl told Reuters Health.

Health care providers often touch these curtains after they have washed their hands and then proceed to touch the patient. Further, these curtains often hang for a long time and are difficult to disinfect…

Tests detected Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, including the especially dangerous methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA), as well as various species of Enterococci — gut bacteria — some resistant to the newer antibiotic vancomycin.

The researchers used additional tests to identify specific vancomycin and methicillin-resistant strains to see whether the same strains were circulating and contaminating the curtains over and over.

The study found significant contamination that occurred very rapidly after new curtains were placed…

“The vast majority of curtains showed contamination with potentially significant bacteria within a week of first being hung, and many were hanging for longer than three or four weeks,” Dr. Ohl noted.

“We need to think about strategies to reduce the potential transfer of bacteria from curtains to patients,” he added. “The most intuitive, common sense strategy is (for health care workers) to wash hands after pulling the curtain and before seeing the patient. There are other strategies, such as more frequent disinfecting, but this would involve more use of disinfectant chemicals, and then there is the possibility of using microbial resistant fabrics. But handwashing is by far the most practical, and the cheapest intervention.”

How about reinstating the traditional hospital laundry? That’s gone by the boards in many hospitals. Outsourcing to save money and keep the beancounters on the board of directors happy.

Hospitals are supposed to be about healthcare, right?

Republican Congressional Troika

With Republicans in complete control of Maine’s state government for the first time since 1962, State Senator Lois A. Snowe-Mello offered a bill in February to limit doctors’ liability that she was sure the powerful doctors’ lobby would cheer. Instead, it asked her to shelve the measure.

“It was like a slap in the face,” said Ms. Snowe-Mello, who describes herself as a conservative Republican. “The doctors in this state are increasingly going left.”

Doctors were once overwhelmingly male and usually owned their own practices. They generally favored lower taxes and regularly fought lawyers to restrict patient lawsuits. Ronald Reagan came to national political prominence in part by railing against “socialized medicine” on doctors’ behalf.

But doctors are changing. They are abandoning their own practices and taking salaried jobs in hospitals, particularly in the North, but increasingly in the South as well. Half of all younger doctors are women, and that share is likely to grow.

There are no national surveys that track doctors’ political leanings, but as more doctors move from business owner to shift worker, their historic alliance with the Republican Party is weakening from Maine as well as South Dakota, Arizona and Oregon, according to doctors’ advocates in those and other states.

That change could have a profound effect on the nation’s health care debate. Indeed, after opposing almost every major health overhaul proposal for nearly a century, the American Medical Association supported President Obama’s legislation last year because the new law would provide health insurance to the vast majority of the nation’s uninsured, improve competition and choice in insurance, and promote prevention and wellness, the group said.

No surprise to me. RTFA for details – for, more often than not, enlightened self-interest is re-entering American politics.

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Administering methadone to a 4-week-old infant

As prescription drug abuse ravages communities across the country, doctors are confronting an emerging challenge: newborns dependent on painkillers…Infants…have to stay in the hospital for weeks while they are weaned off the drugs, taxing neonatal units and driving the cost of their medical care into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Like the cocaine-exposed babies of the 1980s, those born dependent on prescription opiates — narcotics that contain opium or its derivatives — are entering a world in which little is known about the long-term effects on their development. Few doctors are even willing to treat pregnant opiate addicts, and there is no universally accepted standard of care for their babies, partly because of the difficulty of conducting research on pregnant women and newborns.

Those who do treat pregnant addicts face a jarring ethical quandary: they must weigh whether the harm inflicted by exposing a fetus to powerful drugs, albeit under medical supervision, is justifiable.

“I’ve had pharmacies that have just called back and said: ‘This lady’s pregnant. Why do you want me to fill this scrip? I can’t do that,’ ” said Dr. Craig Smith, a family practitioner in Bridgton, Me. “But when you stop and think about what actually happens during withdrawal and how violent it can be, that would certainly be not in the baby’s best interest…”

There are no national figures that document the extent of the problem, but interviews with doctors, researchers, social workers and women who abused painkillers while pregnant suggest that it has grown rapidly, especially in rural regions, where officials say such abuse is most common…

RTFA. Please. This is an addictive disaster that is not slowing down in the least.

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Ila with her parents – in November

A nine-year-old East Timorese girl, Ila Amaral, has died because no Australian hospital would give her a life-saving operation.

For more than 12 months Dan Murphy, a doctor who runs a clinic for the poor in Dili, tried to convince Australian hospitals to accept her for surgery to correct her defective mitral heart valve.

“I blame myself first – I was unable to find the words to make things move for her,” Dr Murphy told the Herald by telephone from the Bairo Pite Clinic, where Ila died last week.

A Victorian cardiologist, Noel Bayley, examined Ila in Dili in November. He said she needed open heart surgery. A cardiac team from Sydney had offered to travel to East Timor to perform the operation but permission to use local facilities was refused by Timorese authorities.

Dr Murphy appealed to the US Navy to be allowed to use one of the 12 operating rooms on the hospital ship USN Mercy when it was in Dili late last year but that was also refused.

“The navy people didn’t want to allow the operation … because of the negative publicity if it didn’t go well and she died,” he said.

After failing to get a hospital in Australia to accept Ila, Dr Murphy appealed to others in the US and then a small cardiac hospital that is opening in Vietnam.

“All in all. a massive effort for something ridiculously simple as correcting a small girl’s problem failed,” he said…

Thousands of Australians donated to a fund to pay for the surgery; but, no hospital in Oz could – or would – shortcut the red tape standing in the way of her operation. The government was no help. Hospital administrators were no help.

Ila Amarai has died.

Efforts to make hospitals safer for patients are falling short, researchers report in the first large study in a decade to analyze harm from medical care and to track it over time.

The study, conducted from 2002 to 2007 in 10 North Carolina hospitals, found that harm to patients was common and that the number of incidents did not decrease over time. The most common problems were complications from procedures or drugs and hospital-acquired infections.

“It is unlikely that other regions of the country have fared better,” said Dr. Christopher P. Landrigan, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. The study is being published on Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

It is one of the most rigorous efforts to collect data about patient safety since a landmark report in 1999 found that medical mistakes caused as many as 98,000 deaths and more than one million injuries a year in the United States. That report, by the Institute of Medicine, an independent group that advises the government on health matters, led to a national movement to reduce errors and make hospital stays less hazardous to patients’ health…

Dr. Landrigan’s team focused on North Carolina because its hospitals, compared with those in most states, have been more involved in programs to improve patient safety.

But instead of improvements, the researchers found a high rate of problems. About 18 percent of patients were harmed by medical care, some more than once, and 63.1 percent of the injuries were judged to be preventable. Most of the problems were temporary and treatable, but some were serious, and a few — 2.4 percent — caused or contributed to a patient’s death…

RTFA. Disappointing? Yes. Surprising? No. Liable to support further improvements in healthcare beyond the tentative steps taken by the Obama administration? Don’t hold your breath.

The ignoranuses who just voted in a flock of less-than-useless Republicans may yet have a chance to join folks who voted out the least competent Blue Dog papier-mache Democrats – in 2012.

Georgia’s mental health system is in trouble again with federal authorities, who say seven state psychiatric centers, including Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, remain unsafe and the state must do more to move the mentally ill into outpatient care.

The U.S. Department of Justice has slapped Georgia with a federal discrimination lawsuit accusing the state of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by improperly segregating hundreds of Georgians with mental illness and developmental disabilities in institutions. The department’s civil rights division also filed a motion seeking the appointment of a federal monitor to protect patients “from harm to their lives, health and safety.”

Federal prosecutors listed several violent incidents — a killing, a rape and several suicides — at state mental hospitals in 2009 and 2010. They said patients confined in Georgia’s mental hospitals are still exposed to “egregious harm.”

The state’s new mental health chief disputed that, arguing the state has made huge strides in improving care at its psychiatric facilities…

The state said it would stop offering care for adult mental health patients at Central State Hospital, where some of the worst cases of abuse had been reported. In November, federal officials found so many shortcomings at Central State, with patients attacking one another and receiving poor treatment, that state officials announced the facility would no longer accept new patients.

RTFA to identify the hospitals in question. I hope you haven’t any friends or kin under treatment in one of these snake pits.

Sounds about right for a state run by a “compassionate conservative”.

For patients with prostate cancer, it is a common surgical procedure: a doctor implants dozens of radioactive seeds to attack the disease. But when Dr. Gary D. Kao treated one patient at the veterans’ hospital in Philadelphia, his aim was more than a little off.

Most of the seeds, 40 in all, landed in the patient’s healthy bladder, not the prostate. It was a serious mistake, and under federal rules, regulators investigated.

But Dr. Kao, with their consent, made his mistake all but disappear. He simply rewrote his surgical plan to match the number of seeds in the prostate, investigators said.

The revision may have made Dr. Kao look better, but it did nothing for the patient, who had to undergo a second implant. It failed, too, resulting in an unintended dose to the rectum. Regulators knew nothing of this second mistake because no one reported it.

Two years later, in 2005, Dr. Kao rewrote another surgical plan after putting half the seeds in the wrong organ. Once again, regulators did not object.

Had the government responded more aggressively, it might have uncovered a rogue cancer unit at the hospital, one that operated with virtually no outside scrutiny and botched 92 of 116 cancer treatments over a span of more than six years — and then kept quiet about it, according to interviews with investigators, government officials and public records.

The team continued implants for a year even though the equipment that measured whether patients received the proper radiation dose was broken. The radiation safety committee at the Veterans Affairs hospital knew of this problem but took no action, records show.

There was a time when VA hospitals were among the best in the nation. I had friends and family who only survived their wartime injuries because of the dedicated care and concern of VA hospitals and staff.

Crap treatment for our vets – regardless of history’s judgement of the politics of American wars in the last half-century – is unforgivable. Please, someone nudge the chickenhawks in Congress into getting off their rusty dusties and doing something about preventing this meanness.

An Ohio peanut butter distributor has issued a voluntary recall for two brands of peanut butter after health officials in Minnesota said they had found salmonella bacteria in a tub of peanut butter that is distributed to schools and hospitals. The recall, and the Minnesota report, could be the breakthrough in the search for the source of a salmonella outbreak that has struck in 42 states so far.

Officials from the Minnesota Department of Health and the Minnesota Department of Agriculture issued a product warning Friday after preliminary laboratory testing indicated the presence of salmonella in a container of creamy peanut butter from King Nut, according to published reports.

Late Saturday, King Nut Companies of Solon, Ohio, announced it had issued a recall of all peanut butter distributed under its label and manufactured by Peanut Corporation of America, of Lynchburg, Va. The company also recalled its distribution of Parnell’s Pride peanut butter, which is also made by Peanut Corporation…

King Nut distributes peanut butter through food service accounts and does not sell it directly to consumers.

Most reported cases of salmonella occur in children. In the current outbreak, victims have ranged in age from less than 1 year to 103.

Man cannot live on bread alone. He must have peanut butter.

UPDATE: Hiding out in bankruptcy.