Tag: CDC

Fake President now has censorship power over coronavirus data

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The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all Covid-19 patient information to a central database in Washington beginning on Wednesday. The move has alarmed health experts who fear the data will be politicized or withheld from the public.

The new instructions were posted recently in a little-noticed document on the Department of Health and Human Services website. From now on, the department — not the C.D.C. — will collect daily reports about the patients that each hospital is treating, the number of available beds and ventilators, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic.

The new instructions were posted recently in a little-noticed document on the Department of Health and Human Services website. From now on, the department — not the C.D.C. — will collect daily reports about the patients that each hospital is treating, the number of available beds and ventilators, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic.

Officials say the change will streamline data gathering and assist the White House to “blah, blah, blah“…

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
(George Orwell “1984”)

Is It The Meat Or Is It Us?

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❝ Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a multi-state outbreak that linked ground beef to food poisoning from salmonella. It’s not the first bad news of its kind this year. Following 2018’s record-breaking number of ground beef recalls, 2019 is closing in on similarly disturbing amounts of contaminated meat.

Last year, just over 13 million pounds of ground beef were recalled in 31 separate instances. More than 12 million pounds were due to salmonella contamination. So far in 2019, there have been 27 recalls, some of which are still active. Notable ones include nearly 57 tons in April (that’s over 113,000 pounds) and about 65,000 pounds in October.

❝ In comparison, just under 600,000 pounds of ground beef were recalled in all of 2016, and about 1 million in 2015.

❝ …Foodborne illness, in general, is a critical public health problem in the United States. Annually, roughly 200,000 people are hospitalized and almost 3,000 die from foodborne diseases, according to the latest estimates from the CDC. This doesn’t count the number of unreported cases every year.

Our family tries to be pretty selective about who we buy animal protein of any mind from. Try to stay on top of recalls. So far, I think the CDC does a decent job and – as noted – the retailers we frequent appear to be conscientious and quick to respond. When does that big word regulation return to improve the picture?

How many pain pills were sold in your county? How many deaths?

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Data compiled by CDC and DEA — Washington POST

❝ The Post obtained and analyzed a previously unreleased database maintained by the Drug Enforcement Administration that tracks the path of every pain pill sold in the United States – by manufacturers and distributors to pharmacies in every town and city. That data was compared with individual death records from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which were obtained and analyzed by The Post.

Phew!

Candida auris

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❝ Candida auris is an emerging fungus that presents a serious global health threat. CDC is concerned about C. auris for three main reasons:

❝ It is often multidrug-resistant, meaning that it is resistant to multiple antifungal drugs commonly used to treat Candida infections.

It is difficult to identify with standard laboratory methods, and it can be misidentified in labs without specific technology. Misidentification may lead to inappropriate management.

It has caused outbreaks in healthcare settings. For this reason, it is important to quickly identify C. auris in a hospitalized patient so that healthcare facilities can take special precautions to stop its spread.

Useful commentary follows this CDC notice. Check it out!

80,000 people died from the flu in the United States last winter

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❝ An estimated 80,000 Americans died of flu and its complications last winter — the disease’s highest death toll in at least four decades…

Flu experts knew it was a very bad season, but at least one found the size of the estimate surprising.

“That’s huge,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University vaccine expert. The tally was nearly twice as much as what health officials previously considered a bad year, he said…

❝ Last fall and winter, the U.S. went through one of the most severe flu seasons in recent memory. It was driven by a kind of flu that tends to put more people in the hospital and cause more deaths, particularly among young children and the elderly…

Making a bad year worse, the flu vaccine didn’t work very well. Experts nevertheless say vaccination is still worth it because it makes illnesses less severe and save lives.

❝ CDC officials called the 80,000 figure preliminary, and it may be slightly revised. But they said it is not expected to go down.

It eclipses the estimates for every flu season going back to the winter of 1976-1977…

There are no reasonable, educated, science or health-based excuses for NOT getting vaccinated. Allergic reactions? Yes. Anything else generally proves to be culturally spooky rationales.

I was a schoolboy when the first successful flu vaccines came along. Till then, we looked around among neighborhood friends and classmates after winter to see who had died. It was that stark.

California leads the fight to prevent women bleeding to death in childbirth

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Kristen Terlizzi

❝ In the US, childbirth has been growing more dangerous recently. Maternal mortality — defined as the death of a mother from pregnancy-related complications while she’s carrying or within 42 days after birth — in the US soared by 27 percent, from 19 per 100,000 to 24 per 100,000, between 2000 and 2014.

That’s more than three times the rate of the United Kingdom, and about eight times the rates of Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden, according to the OECD.

❝ It’s a stunning example of how poorly the American health care system stacks up against its developed peers. More women in labor or brand new mothers die here than in any other high-income country. And the CDC Foundation estimates that 60 percent of these deaths are preventable…

❝ But as the mortality rate has been edging up nationally, California has made remarkable progress in the opposite direction: Fewer and fewer women are dying in childbirth in the state.

So how did California manage to buck the trend? I was curious, particularly as American women’s health is under assault, with the GOP push to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act…

RTFA. Long and detailed, Julia Belluz went to California to meet Dr. David Lagrew, an OB-GYN at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange County. A founding member of the CMQCC, the California Maternal Care Quality Collective. Dr. Lagrew leads the fight for sensible hemorrhage protocols that save lives – and the fight to end unnecessary C-sections which set the stage for so many deaths-by-hemorrhage in the United States.

Over a million kids in the US have lead poisoning — We’re only treating half of them

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❝ We’ve long known that despite all our efforts to clean up lead, we have a serious problem with lead poisoning in American children — it’s an egregious and preventable public health issue that just won’t go away.

And it seems the problem is even worse than we thought. Researchers at the Public Health Institute reported…in the journal Pediatrics that the overall number of children with elevated blood lead levels as of 1999-2000 in the US was 1.2 million, or double what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had reported. (The number is likely even higher now, since testing rates have…declined since 2000.) These kids who are never tested or reported to the CDC also aren’t receiving treatment.

❝ Some states are doing much worse than others, according to the researchers. In the 11 states in dark blue on the map below, including Arizona and Florida, more than 80 percent of children with lead poisoning were not tested by their pediatricians or local health departments. For the other 28 states with data (in medium and light blue), anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of lead-poisoned children weren’t tested.

As for the 12 states in gray, researchers were unable to determine how many cases of lead poisoning were missed, because these states don’t share any data with the CDC…

Perish the thought these turd-brains Americans persist in electing and re-electing actually do something modern about healthcare legislation. Like make it uniform and nationwide. Require states to participate and provide information.

❝ What researchers have learned in recent years is that no level of lead is safe for children. Studies have even shown lead concentration in the blood as low as 2 micrograms per deciliter of blood (μg/dL) can lower IQ in children. And once children have blood lead levels of 5 μg/dL and above (what’s now considered lead poisoning), they can suffer severe neurological damage in the form of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders.

❝ How did the counting of lead-poisoned children get so bad? For one, testing for lead is not legally required in most of the US…And…public health departments aren’t asking if there’s missing data when they turn things over to the CDC…

❝ Civil engineers have estimated that overhauling America’s drinking water system and bringing it up to code will cost at least $1 trillion over the next 25 years, but if these investments aren’t made, we risk continuing to poison children with dangerous levels of lead.

Not that this is a priority for Congressional politicians whose single most pressing task — Republican or Democrat – is raising sufficient funds for re-election.

The risk of a single 5-day opioid prescription

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❝ Now that it’s clear opioid painkillers have helped cause the worst drug epidemic in history, health experts are scrambling to figure out when dependency on these powerful prescription drugs starts — and how to prevent it.

❝ A new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looked at the relationship between the number of days of someone’s first opioid prescription and their long-term use. It found that that number has a huge impact: Patients face an increased risk of opioid dependency in as few as four days of taking the drugs.

As you can see in the chart…opioid prescriptions longer than five days in length significantly increased the likelihood of continued opioid use both one and three years later…

❝ “There’s nothing magical about five days versus six days, but with each day your risk of dependency increases fairly dramatically,” said Bradley Martin of the CDC, one of the study authors.

❝ The study, which analyzed 1.3 million non-cancer patients, also found that only 6 percent of patients prescribed a one-day supply of opioids were still taking the drugs a year later, but that number doubled to 12 percent if patients were prescribed a six-day supply and quadrupled to 24 percent if patients were given a 12-day supply.

Pretty solid warning, I’d say.

The world always counted on the US to help fight a global health crisis — Not anymore, man!

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Panic, bad judgment and a disregard for science

❝ China is facing the biggest and deadliest outbreak of H7N9 bird flu in human history…The virus causes pneumonia and death in most of its victims, which is why it tops the list of global flu pandemic threats.

…460 human cases of the virus have been confirmed in China since last October — the most of any flu season since H7N9 was first reported in humans in 2013…Forty percent of those confirmed to have the virus have died — including at least 87 people this year alone. That high mortality rate is part of the reason the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers H7N9 the “most concerning” of the flu viruses it tracks…

❝ For now, the risk of H7N9 reaching the US is low. Still, the chances of the US being hit with some kind of pandemic in the next four years is high…Based on what we’ve seen from President Donald Trump so far, the US seems poised to botch an outbreak response:

1) Trump hasn’t named a CDC director and could cut 12 percent of its budget

2) “America first” doesn’t work during pandemics

3) Trump has advocated for closing borders to countries dealing with outbreaks. That’s dangerous.

4) The fallout from Trump’s travel ban could hamper research collaboration that could save lives

❝ We’ll eventually learn whether Trump will put public health above politics — and hopefully the White House’s pandemic test doesn’t roll around too soon. Trump’s Ebola tweets and perpetuation of myths about vaccines certainly aren’t very encouraging. But perhaps the gravity of the Oval Office will change the stakes.

Anyone expecting Trump to acquire an interest in science or sensible governance may as well be smoking something mellow. His forte is loudness, blather designed to impress someone with the civic understanding of a sixth-grade social pass. Ignorance is his bliss – and our biggest danger.

Want more details? Click the link above and see what he’s done, so far. Or, rather, what he hasn’t done.