“we may prevent a tobacco user from growing up.”

says Kathleen Dachille, director of the Center for Tobacco Regulation at the University of Maryland School of Law.

okay, so she’s not threatening to kill kids. but it was a very unfortunate phrasing. and even as a former tobacco control advocate myself, i think the PG restrictions are asinine. they’re really going to attempt to charge people holding a single cigar with a drug paraphernalia offense? give me a break.

on monday, the research advisory committee on gulf war veterans’ illnesses issued a report concluding that Gulf War syndrome is a distinct physical condition.

apparently this contradicts earlier findings of the IOM, and it may have an impact on the position taken by the office of the special assistant for gulf war illnesses. then again, it might not. from the website, GulfLINK “was established in August 1995 to provide on-line access to medical, operational, and intelligence documents from the 1990-1991 Gulf War. Its purpose was and is to provide Service members, veterans, and any interested person with information on what happened during that war that might have affected the health of those who served.”

inneresting.

President-elect Barack Obama has offered the nomination of Secretary of Health and Human Services to his close ally Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the former Democratic Senate leader who was an early supporter of Mr. Obama’s run for the presidency.

this is an interesting choice - my preference would be for someone with a more practical health background (but when was the last time we had that, really?), but at least daschle’s been involved in the ongoing discussion about our nation’s health care system.

In response to judges who say they see too many people in their courtrooms because of undiagnosed mental disorders, D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty cut the ribbon to an urgent-care clinic at the D.C. Superior Court building yesterday.

mental health and legal issues often go hand in hand, as any forensic psychiatrist - or defense attorney - will tell you. there’s an american academy of psychiatry and the law, founded by psychiatrists, as well as a number of law and psychiatry programs in law schools around the country. but as far as i know, this is the first mental health clinic in a courthouse. according to the chief clinical officer at the dc department of mental health,

“there seems to be a lot of mentally ill people who were being arrested for quality-of-life crimes like open containers, aggressive panhandling and trespassing.

“They can either go to jail or go to treatment,” he said, adding that of the 146 people who have been treated, 110 were homeless, 60 people were given a community mental health provider and eight were referred to an emergency psychiatric facility.

30 years on, we’re still dealing with reagan’s legacy.

wired’s gallery of retired drugs reminds me why the (attempted creation of a) doctrine of FDA preemption of state law failure-to-warn cases is a bad thing, even if wyeth v. levine is lousy test case.

and if that doesn’t get your irish up, here’s some news that just walked across my transom that should:

United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Assistant Administrator for Global Health, Kent Hill¹, issued a new USAID instruction that requires its staff to force governments in several African countries to discontinue the provision of U.S.-funded contraceptive commodities to Marie Stopes International (MSI), one of the world’s leading family planning organizations.

Marie Stopes International is a london-based NGO that works on sexual and reproductive health, and operates its own clinics around the world, including in africa, bangladesh, and pakistan. more information on the ban is available on their website; according to their director,

the USAID instruction will “seriously disrupt” MSI’s family planning programmes in at least six African countries – Ghana, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe - including one where the organisation delivers 25% of all family planning services nationally. Women in these countries will be left with few options other than abortion, the majority of which will be unsafe and will likely result in their death or disability.

more abortions. and here i thought the neochristiancons were all about fewer abortions. silly me.

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¹ the USAID directory says hill’s work number is 202-712-0970. yahoo even has a home phone number for him, if you search in his town of residence. not that i’m saying anyone should call him and give him what-for. i’m just saying.

google’s philanthropic arm gets into the infectious disease business.

Google.org’s initial focus will be on emerging infectious diseases, which are on the rise worldwide. Climate change, urbanization, and rising international travel and trade all contribute to this threat. Moreover, humans and animals are coming into closer contact because of environmental degradation and increased demand for animal products. Nearly three out of four new diseases in the last three decades have spread from animals to humans. While everyone faces increasing risk from emerging infectious diseases, the world’s poor – who have minimal or no access to health care and may live with and depend on animals for their livelihood – are exceptionally vulnerable and stand to suffer the most.

via wired.

i don’t normally read The Nation (mostly because i subscribed to their e-updates a year or so ago and am now inundated with email from them… i should unsubscribe, but it’s easier to let everything go into the junk mail folder), and these days when i do glance at the articles i find them a bit lefty-histrionic for my tastes. however, this one was forwarded to me from a reliable (if 60s-liberal) source, i.e., my mother:

Now that 80 percent of clinical trials fail to recruit sufficient numbers of test subjects on deadline, drug companies increasingly export their trials to developing countries, where sick, undertreated patients abound. It’s faster, it’s cheaper and it’s easier to conduct the placebo-controlled trials that companies and the FDA prefer. There is precious little oversight of these trials. Unlike for domestic trials, the FDA does not require advance notice before drug companies take their trials outside US borders. And with 90 percent of trials failing to gain FDA approval, a massive number of trials are conducted, fail and then vanish with no agency review at all–and little public record, if any.

this is significant for a number of reasons, one being the brewing domestic storm over FDA preemption of state liability claims. (in case any of my readers - both of them - are suspicious of anything written about big pharma on a self-named “injury board” site, it’s worth noting that david kessler, re-fanger of the FDA in the 1990s, doesn’t support the concept of FDA preemption and indeed points out that it contradicts the FDA’s own position over the last several decades.)

if SCOTUS upholds FDA preemption for drug warnings, and unfavorable results of foreign drug trials are allowed to vanish into the bowels of drug company file cabinets, US consumers may be left without recourse against drug companies for injuries the drug companies - but not the FDA - were aware a given drug could cause. imo, this is a Very Bad Thing.

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on an unrelated note, i find it interesting that the word “sanction” has two mostly contradictory meanings. to ratify or confirm, and to penalize.

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and in what might be the most damning news coverage yet, sarah palin has been called “just another politician.” big surprise there. but it would be interesting to see palin facing a subpoena along with the general election.

i came across diary of a dying mom while reading an article on “difficult patients.” more commentary on (among many other things) the sorry state of american health care and the doctor-patient “relationship.”

the author is a former professor of public health at unc.

…health insurer rules often force New York State physicians to alter the way they treat patients — and not necessarily for the benefit of patients. Instead, the rules appear to have been developed to increase insurer profits at the expense of the best health practices and patients’ health.

it’s an ugly truth of managed care, and the only reasonable outcome when the provision of health care services becomes a business venture. as my friend holly can attest, the result of this can be truly horrific. but even for those who are not trying to make the transition from one insurer to another, profit-maximization imperatives can prevent them from getting the care they need.

the survey results indicate: Ninety percent (90%) of the physicians surveyed said that they have had to change the way they treat patients based on restrictions from an insurance company, and 92% said that insurance company incentives and disincentives regarding treatment protocols “may not be in the best interest of the patients.”

you can read about the survey as well as take a look at the instrument and response frequencies.

the “pro-life” position generally holds that abortion should be illegal in the u.s. (made so on a state-by-state basis, one would expect) because it is the murder of a human being. indeed, if their reasoning holds, abortion is the willful, deliberate, and premeditated murder of a human being.

in illinois, punishment for first-degree murder (which covers willful, deliberate and premeditated murder) includes the death penalty. as the perpetrator of murder for hire, a person who performs an abortion would be eligible for capital punishment. as the solicitor of murder for hire, the woman who has an abortion would face 20-40 years in prison.¹

seems pretty straightforward. and yet, these abortion protesters in libertyville² were hard pressed to come up with any appropriate penalty for a woman who had a hypothetical illegal abortion. most hadn’t even considered the question of what should be done to those women. (the young woman at 4:08 has the most reasoned response, however even she is visibly uncomfortable with suggesting an appropriate penalty.)

interesting. perhaps they believe abortion should be illegal, but decriminalized?

hat tip: justin
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¹ 720 ILCS 5/Art. 9 and 720 ILCS 5/Art. 8
² i’m assuming that’s libertyville, IL