Time: Gingrich Wants Scrutiny Of IVF Clinics: Why That’s Not The Worst Idea

Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich hit upon a reproductive minefield on Sunday when he called for deeper scrutiny of in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics, where women go for high-tech help to conceive. Gingrich, who believes life begins at conception, wants a commission to dissect the ethical issues attendant with assisted reproductive technology. Ostensibly, it’s not the babies born from IVF he’s got a problem with; it’s the potential babies — and there are lots and lots of them — who aren’t. … The creation of excess embryos is central to the IVF process. … For most women, no more than two embryos are recommended for transfer. Considering that hyperstimulation can yield more than a dozen embryos — hello, Octomom — the question of what to do with the leftovers is one that can’t be ignored (Bonnie Rochman, 1/30).

Columbia Journalism Review: Medicare Versus Obamacare

In the last few days, three mainstream news outlets elevated “Medicare: The Political Story” into the headlines. It was good to see that The New York Times, PBS’s Need To Know, and Reuters, all of which reach large audiences, have realized Medicare may be the most important health story of the campaign. (Yes, perhaps more important than the Supreme Court’s ruling on the individual mandate.) During the 2008 campaign, as Campaign Desk pointed out at the time, the candidates ignored Medicare. … Now that large outlets have anointed Medicare politics as legitimate news, we’ll probably see a lot more similar stories. That’s fine, but a diet of nothing but political stories shortchanges the public, since those stories omit crucial information about what Medicare is and what opponents want it to become (Trudy Lieberman, 1/30).

National Review: Free Birth Control Vs. Freedom Of Religion

When Pliny the Younger was a provincial governor in the Roman Empire, he wrote a letter to Emperor Trajan asking whether he should execute Christians who refused to burn incense in worship of the emperor. I thought of Pliny when I read that the Obama administration, in creating specific rules to implement Obamacare, will require all employers (with a very narrow exemption discussed below) to offer their employees health insurance that provides FDA-approved contraception, female sterilization, and other “reproductive” services free of charge — even if the employer is a religious organization and doing so violates its doctrine. … The birth-control rule is the latest and most egregious example of government forcing religious organizations to conform their operations to reigning secular moral values. In this sense, faith organizations are being compelled to participate in a metaphorical Caesar worship (Wesley J. Smith, 1/30).

Photo courtesy of Rasiel Suarez/Creative Commons license

Governing: School-Based Health Centers Reap Benefits

In more than 2,000 schools throughout the country, students can get free comprehensive medical, mental health and sometimes dental care without ever leaving school property. School-based health centers (SBHCs) are fully staffed clinics located in or on school property. Each one is different, but most offer a full range of services, including primary care, mental health and social services. Most are in schools that serve the neediest students and are funded by state governments, the feds and private foundations. … Having a full-service health clinic in schools has many benefits. … Luckily, virtually every entity that applied for the new federal SBHC grants received at least a portion of the funds. Unlike the rest of the federal health law, advocates argue, school-based health centers are a nonpartisan solution to a pervasive problem (Caroline Cournoyer, February 2012).

This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

“Of the 22 major occupational groups, employment in health-care support occupations is expected to grow most rapidly (34.5 percent), followed by personal care and services occupations (26.8 percent), and healthcare practitioners and technical occupations (25.9 percent),” the agency said Friday.

Overall, employment is projected to grow by 14.3 percent over this decade, resulting in 20.5 million new jobs.

Of these, health care and social assistance sector is projected to gain the most jobs (5.6 million).

Professional and business service employment will see smaller gains (3.8 million new jobs) as will construction (1.8 million).

The increase in health and personal care services will generate jobs for an estimated 712,000 registered nurses, 706,000 home health aides, and 607,00 personal care aides.

To learn more:

• Go to the summary (which has links to the full report).

In an interview with LocalHealthGuide, the school’s dean, Dr. Howard Frumkin, said a new strategic plan was needed to enable the school to meet the “very big, cross-cutting challenges facing public health,” ranging from the rise of new technologies, such as genomics, to looming global problems, such as climate change.

The document, University of Washington School of Public Health: Strategic Plan 2012-2020, is the result of a nearly year-long process that involved discussions involving the school’s faculty, staff, students and other stakeholders.

“We began with a focus on big, bold, new ideas that would orient us to next few decades of public health challenges,” Dr. Frumkin said, “But what emerged over time was a concern that by focusing on those big, emerging challenges we would neglect the enormous strengths that we already have.”

A major concern, Dr. Frumkin said, was that at a time when state funding for higher education is being slashed and federal funding is leveling off the school’s core programs could be undermined if ambitious new programs began to draw on diminishing resources.

To address those concerns, Dr. Frumkin said, the plan takes a two-pronged approach that aims to strengthen the school’s “core” teaching, research and service programs while also moving to address the new challenges of the coming decades.

In the end, “we came to a very robust consensus on a balance between our existing assets and the new directions in which we want to move,” Dr. Frumkin said.

Seven goals to strengthen the school’s core programs

• Strengthen Teaching

• Strengthen Research

• Strengthen Collaborations with Community Partners

• Globalize the School

• Improve Diversity

• Enhance School Community

• Promote the School

Although the school’s core teaching program is already very strong, Dr. Frumkin said, more needs to be done to incorporate new science into the curriculum and develop the cross-disciplinary approaches that will be needed to address the “upstream” issues that affect health, Dr. Frumkin said.

“Improving health means you have to have a broad, collaborative, interdisciplinary approach where public health expertise might, for example, be blended with social work expertise, urban design expertise, educational approaches, and so on,” Dr. Frumkin said. All new courses will in include curricula that include a broader, big picture approach, he said.

UWSPH Fast Facts:

• Founded in 1970

• 1,014 students (76% women, 7% international, 30% minority)

• 208 undergraduates, 806 graduate students

• Faculty: 251 full, 147 adjunct, 476 affiliate & clinical – 874 total

• Departments: Biostatistics, Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences, Epidemiology, Global Health, Health Services

• $130.8 million (69% Federal Grants & Contracts, 15% State & Local Funds, 1% Gifts & Endowments, 14% Foundations, Industry, etc.)

• Ranked sixth in the nation in the 2011 US News and World Report survey of graduate schools of public health, and third among publicly funded schools of public health.

Hitting the ground

Students will also receive more training in practical policy implementation, said Dr. Frumkin. “The employers are telling us that our students are very good at analytics and that they are very good at working with data, but they don’t necessarily have the practical skills, ranging from creating and managing budgets to going to the county commission and making the case for a public health program,” Dr. Frumkin said. “When you hit the ground and begin practicing public health, you have to have a whole set of skills that aren’t really captured by a more academic approach.”

As part of an effort to develop such skills, the school will broaden its collaborations with local agencies and community organizations, especially through the school’s student practicum programs, Dr. Frumkin said.

Such programs and other initiatives will increase the school’s involvement in communities around the state and region, he said.

Bio: Dr. Howard Frumkin

Dr. Frumkin has a special interest in environmental health, climate change and healthy community design.

Before he was appointed dean of the UW School of Public Health in 2010, he served at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from 2005-2010, where he was the first director of the National Center for Environmental Health and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, and later served as Special Assistant to the CDC Director for Climate Change and Health.

From 1990-2005, Dr. Frumkin was Professor and Chair of Environmental and Occupational Health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and Professor of Medicine at Emory Medical School.

His research interests include: the public health aspects of the built environment, climate change, energy policy, and nature contact; the toxic effects of chemicals; and environmental health policy.

He has co-edited or co-authored a number of books, including:

• Urban Sprawl and Public Health
• Emerging Illness and Society
• Environmental Health: From Global to Local
• Making Healthy Places

Diversity

Although the school already has a significant number of minority and international students, more can be done to make the school more diverse in culture and outlook, Dr. Frumkin said.

As part of the effort to promote diversity, the school plans to expand its outreach to local high schools, community colleges and other institutions by offering courses and other programs designed to encourage minority students to pursue careers in public health.

“Through such conduits or pipelines, I think we can build pathways through which students from under-represented groups can get into public health and serve their communities,” Frumkin said.

Emerging Challenges

• Global Environmental Change and Human Health

• Genomics and Public Health

• Obesity, Food, Physical Activity, and Health

• Health Policy and Health Systems

• Public Health Implementation Science

• Social Determinants of Health

Emerging Challenges:

The health effects of global environmental change are a particular interest of Dr. Frumkin and he believes the school already is well positioned to become a world leader in the field.

The UW’s Department of Global Health, for example, has already launched a “Climate Change and Global Health” initiative, which is focusing on threats to food and water security due to climate changes, he noted.

The school will also be able to harness the existing expertise of such programs as UW’s Colleges and Schools of Environment, Built Environments and Engineering.

Genomics and public health

The school is also well-placed to become a leader in the application of genetics and genomic science to public health, Dr. Frumkin said, with its Institute for Public Health Genetics and  Center for Genomics & Public Health and the opportunity to collaborate with the researchers at other UW programs, such as the Department of Genome Sciences and the School of Medicine’s Northwest Institute of Genetic Medicine and the Northwest Genomics Center.

Socioeconomic determinants of health

Although listed last, an effort to address the socioeconomic determinants of health will be a important part of the school’s plan to tackle “upstream” problems that directly affect health, such as education, living conditions and access to community services,  Dr. Frumkin said.

“If you’re committed to improving health, you can’t avoid people’s circumstances,” he said. ”We know the poverty is the most accurate predictor of bad health.”

The foundation, which focuses on raising money for breast cancer research and prevention, said it was pulling about $700,000 in breast cancer screening and service grants from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America under a new policy that forbid support for organizations under investigation.

Planned Parenthood is the under investigation that was launched last fall by House Energy and Commerce Investigative Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns, R-Fla.

But Planned Parenthood’s supporters argued the investigation is politically motivated and based on allegations proved to be unsubstantiated.

Komen, they charged, was simply knuckling under to pressure from anti-abortion groups and using the new policy as cover.

Reaction was swift and fierce with abortion-rights supporters denouncing Komen from the floor of Congress to Facebook pages.

In a statement, released today the Komen board for directors said:

We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives. The events of this week have been deeply unsettling for our supporters, partners and friends and all of us at Susan G. Komen. We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.

Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.

In a statement released in response to the Komen decision Planned Parenthood said:

In recent weeks, the treasured relationship between the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation and Planned Parenthood has been challenged, and we are now heartened that we can continue to work in partnership toward our shared commitment to breast health for the most underserved women. We are enormously grateful that the Komen Foundation has clarified its grantmaking criteria, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Komen partners, leaders and volunteers.

Full text of both statements are below:

Full text of today’s statement from Komen:

We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives. The events of this week have been deeply unsettling for our supporters, partners and friends and all of us at Susan G. Komen. We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.

Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.

Our only goal for our granting process is to support women and families in the fight against breast cancer. Amending our criteria will ensure that politics has no place in our grant process. We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.

It is our hope and we believe it is time for everyone involved to pause, slow down and reflect on how grants can most effectively and directly be administered without controversies that hurt the cause of women. We urge everyone who has participated in this conversation across the country over the last few days to help us move past this issue. We do not want our mission marred or affected by politics – anyone’s politics.

Starting this afternoon, we will have calls with our network and key supporters to refocus our attention on our mission and get back to doing our work. We ask for the public’s understanding and patience as we gather our Komen affiliates from around the country to determine how to move forward in the best interests of the women and people we serve.

We extend our deepest thanks for the outpouring of support we have received from so many in the past few days and we sincerely hope that these changes will be welcomed by those who have expressed their concern.

Statement released by Planned Parenthood:

“The outpouring of support for women in need of lifesaving breast cancer screening this week has been astonishing and is a testament to our nation’s compassion and sincerity.

“During the last week, millions spontaneously joined a national conversation about lifesaving breast cancer prevention care and reinforced shared values about access to health care for all. This compassionate outcry in support of those most in need rose above political, ideological, and cultural divides, and will surely be recognized as one of our nation’s better moments during a contentious political time. Planned Parenthood thanks each and every person who has contributed to elevating the importance of breast cancer prevention for so many women in need.

“In recent weeks, the treasured relationship between the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation and Planned Parenthood has been challenged, and we are now heartened that we can continue to work in partnership toward our shared commitment to breast health for the most underserved women. We are enormously grateful that the Komen Foundation has clarified its grantmaking criteria, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Komen partners, leaders and volunteers. What these past few days have demonstrated is the deep resolve all Americans share in the fight against cancer, and we honor those who are at the helm of this battle.

“Planned Parenthood has been a trusted partner with the Komen Foundation in early cancer detection and prevention services. In particular, Planned Parenthood helps the Komen Foundation reach vulnerable populations — low-income women, African-American women, and Latinas — especially in rural areas and underserved communities where Planned Parenthood health centers are their only source of health care. With Komen Foundation grants, over the past five years, Planned Parenthood health centers provided nearly 170,000 clinical breast exams and more than 6,400 mammogram referrals. With the outpouring of support over the past week, even more women in need will receive lifesaving breast cancer care.”

“Bugs,” the two year old boy said as he pointed to an irritated patch of skin on his face. Mary Leitao looked closer, and although she found no visible insects, she was startled to find colored fibers sprouting from her son’s skin. It was a summer evening in 2001 that would change the lives of the Leitao family for years to come.

A medical researcher turned stay-at home mom, Leitao had never seen anything like it and neither had her husband, Edward, an internist at South Allegheny Internal Medicine.  Mary Leitao took her son to be examined by numerous doctors, but none provided a satisfactory explanation. Many suggested that it was a form of psychosis called “delusional infestation” or the conviction of being infected with parasites.

Images from the CDC study in PLoS One

Believing instead that she had discovered a new disease, Leitao named the condition Morgellons and in 2004 established a non-profit organization called the Morgellons Research Foundation (MRF).

Through the efforts of the MRF, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) conducted a three-year government study to research Morgellons.

The results, released last week, indicated that there was no diseased organisms or parasites present in the 115 case-patients.

The protruding fibers were found to be mostly skin fragments or clothing fibers stuck to the skin.

According to the report, the physical ailments were manifestations of “delusional infestation.”

From a recent article in WebMD, individuals with delusional infestation tend to be hyper-aware of normal body sensations and interpret them as medical illness.  The article notes, “This stress has real physical effects on the body and leads to a spiral of worsening physical symptoms…”

The suggestion that thoughts and stress can be manifested as physical maladies may be counterintuitive to anatomy-based medicine, but research increasingly supports the idea. For instance, The Washington Post reported, ”Nocebos[inert pills provided with a negative expectation] often cause a physical effect, but it’s not a physically produced effect,” said Irving Kirsch, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs who studies the ways that expectations influence what people experience.

The CDC study, published by the open-access journal PLoS One, is available online.

The CDC also has an information page about Morgellons Disease.

The idea that the condition may be more mental than physical has always been unpopular among those who identify themselves with the disease. It has impelled them to fight on two fronts – working to gain credibility and help from the medical community and fighting the unfortunate stigma of mental illness.  With the significant setback of the CDC report, how many may be wondering, what next?  

I have compassion for those suffering from Morgellons.  No one should have to live with the painful symptoms or the mental anguish of feeling isolated, abandoned and uncared for. Yet, perhaps it’s time to consider the mental nature of the condition. Yet, perhaps it’s time to consider the mental nature of the condition. But I’m not proposing psychotherapy – but a spiritual approach.”

For instance, in the recent Jan. 29 issue of the Concord Monitor, a woman describes her recovery from disease as she changed her thought to a more prayerful perspective.  Shifting thought away from the body to seeking a greater understanding of her spiritual nature worked for her.

As the mental factors of many diseases become more widely understood, spiritual treatments, such as Christian Science, that focus on thought can be a valuable resource. The MRF website reports that fear and hopelessness are common among those who suffer from Morgellons. Working spiritually to lessen and eliminate these unhealthy mental states may be the best next step.

This article first appeared on Blogcritics.

A retired architect, Bill Scott writes about spirituality and health for Blogcritics.org and also serves as the Christian Science Committee on Publication for Washington State.