Health & Science Story Archives - Page 295 of 299 - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Drug firms told to reveal W.Va. shipment records

A Boone County judge has ordered four pharmaceutical drug distributors to reveal their shipments to West Virginia pharmacies over the past five years.…

A Boone County judge has ordered four pharmaceutical drug distributors to reveal their shipments to West Virginia pharmacies over the past five years.

Circuit Judge William Thompson acted Thursday in a lawsuit filed last year by former state Attorney General Darrell McGraw. The suit accused the companies of helping to contribute to the state’s pain pill abuse epidemic.

The Charleston Gazette reports Cardinal Health, Anda Inc., AmerisourceBergen Drug Corp. and J.M Smith Corp. must disclose within 30 days every state pharmacy where they’ve delivered drugs.

West Virginia leads the nation in the rate of fatal drug overdoses. A report released this month by the Trust for America’s Health says that rate is now six times higher than it was about a decade ago.

Manchin proposes delay to ACA individual mandate

Senator Joe Manchin is proposing a delay in a key component to the federal Affordable Care Act, the individual mandate. Manchin defended his legislation…

Senator Joe Manchin is proposing a delay in a key component to the federal Affordable Care Act, the individual mandate. Manchin defended his legislation saying it allows the administration more time to fix glitches in the enrollment system, but a left-leaning policy group in Charleston maintains a delay will have significant negative impacts on West Virginians.

The individual mandate requires all Americans sign up for health insurance through the federal health care exchange by April 1, or face a penalty of $95 or 1 percent of their annual income, whichever is greater.

The penalty will be collected by the IRS and increases to more than $300 after the first year.

Manchin, however, said it’s too soon to punish Americans who are unable to sign up for health care because of problems with the federal enrollment website. He’s proposing that date be pushed back from April 1 to January 1, 2015.

“This should be a transition year,” he said in a conference call Thursday. “We’re seeing all the problems that they’re having rolling this thing out. It’s going to have some problems and they’re going to have to work through that, but people shouldn’t be facing a fine because they can’t log in.”

But Brandon Merritt, health policy analyst for the West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy, said the individual mandate is key and without it the Affordable Care Act will fall apart.

“The idea of the Affordable Care Act is to provide insurance to those who don’t have insurance and to help control the costs of insurance that has been creeping up for decades now,” Merritt said. “So, the individual mandate is what holds this together.”

Without that mandate, Merritt said healthy individuals won’t purchase plans, preventing more individuals from buying coverage and leaving insurance companies with a pool of sickly customers.

“Essentially what happens is that those who don’t seek as much treatment in any given year are helping cover the costs of those who do seek more treatment, and so under the Affordable Care Act, if the individual mandate is delayed likely what would happen is that only those who are sicker and going to require more care throughout the year are going to be the ones who purchase more health insurance,” Merritt said. “What that does is skews the risk pool so the health insurers essentially get set up with a sicker population that requires more treatment and is going to cost them more money.”

The more providers have to pay to cover their customers, the higher premium rates will climb thus preventing even more individuals from being able to access health care.

Manchin said that notion in Washington is being pushed by the insurance companies.

“I think everybody wants insurance if it’s affordable,” he said. “It’s part of who we are as Americans, but on the other hand, you have to have a marketable product. That’s where the insurance industry has to work with the administration and it has to be market forces that are driving it.”

Republicans have proposed similar delays in the hopes of preventing the ACA from taking root at all.

Manchin said his intention is not to get rid of the ACA in its entirety, but to put more pressure on the Obama administration and the industry to offer an affordable, quality product to consumers and to prevent Americans from being penalized before it is available.

“A lot of my colleagues keep saying delay, delay, delay. They want to delay it and never start it,” Manchin said. “Well, this is such a mammoth undertaking that you have to start down the road of (trying to work) within the marketplace, figure out where the problems are and if they can be fixed or not.”

Merritt doesn’t believe Manchin is trying to sabotage the bill’s implementation, but still, his analysis is blunt, saying straight out the senator’s plan won’t work. Merritt said now is not the time to tread lightly on a subject that affects thousands of West Virginians.

“While I understand Senator Manchin’s approach to say let’s try to find a common ground, I don’t think this is the compromise we really want to see because this is going to have negative impacts not just politically, but here in West Virginia with those who are unable to get insurance and those who do get insurance on the private market will see increased premiums,” he said.

“So, it’s really going to hit us here at home if we delay this aspect of the Affordable Care Act. I think it’s really important that we put it bluntly to say that this is a bad idea.”

When asked if the bill would receive a signature if it made it to the President’s desk, Manchin said he was unsure, but he hopes the bipartisan support will force the President to consider it.

The problem with chicken poop and rain

Environmental groups are reacting to a ruling from a federal judge which says the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has no legal right to force a West Virginia chicken farmer to obtain pollution permits for runoff from her Hardy County farm.

U.S. District Judge John Preston Bailey ruled that the runoff entering the Chesapeake Bay watershed from Lois Alt’s poultry farm is stormwater and therefore not subject to regulation under the Clean Water Act.

Alt admitted that pollutants from the poultry houses are being discharged into the South Branch of the Potomac River, but objects to a requirement to operate under a permit. The farm bureaus called EPA’s attempt to require a permit an illegal overreach of authority.

Several organizations supported the EPA’s efforts including Potomac Riverkeeper, West Virginia Rivers Coalition, Waterkeeper Alliance, Center for Food Safety, Food and Water Watch and Earthjustice. The groups said ina press release that the court’s decision could have devastating impacts on the health of the watershed. The groups say they’re exploring legal options.

State legislators concerned with head injuries

There’s been a lot of attention on how head injuries are affecting football players, and athletes, on all levels—including when they are very young. Stakeholders concerned about this issue hope new protocols will sufficiently prevent serious injuries.

Last year, the state legislature passed a measure that provides protocols for head injury protections for student athletes in West Virginia. These guidelines require coaches to have course training on head injuries and concussions, as well as being mandated to remove players from competition who are suspected of having concussions. It’s something that State Senator Ron Stollings said there’s a specific mission with these new rules.

“I think this bill is a good bill, we will see it being implemented as we speak. Me, being a volunteer physician on Friday nights, I have to take that educational piece myself. It’s a good thing,” said Stollings.

Also under the guidelines, a concussion and head injury sheet must be signed and returned by the athlete and the athlete’s parents before practice or competition begins, to make officials aware of previous injuries. If a player has been removed from a game due to a head injury, that person may not return to action until he or she has written clearance from a licensed health care professional.

Gary Ray with the West Virginia Secondary Schools Activities Commission said these new guidelines give “teeth” to his organizations, and other interested parties, in protecting students. But he says parents must also play a role.

“I was guilty when I played sports, you didn’t want to tell mom or dad because you might not get to play the next day. You’ve got to let people know, you’ve got to communicate. Mom and Dad work with their child, they need to make sure they are in constant communication with the school if they feel this is an issue,” said Stollings.

Senator Stollings said he wants to make sure that all medical professionals like him, who administer to athletes during games, are protected from excess liability issues.

“I think just basically saying that volunteer physicians while at a volunteer event, Friday night football, that you would have coverage by the Board of Risk and Insurance Management,” said Stollings. “I’d like it to be spelled out in statute, that we’re covered, a volunteer physician.”

One final requirement of the new guidelines is that when students do suffer a concussion or head injury in a practice or game, a report must be sent from the school to the WVSSAC within 30 days of the injury. The report must state whether an evaluation, done by a medical professional, verifies that a concussion has occurred. This report must also state how many days it’s been between the injury and athlete’s return to competition.

Audit says state should focus on safety of Child Protective Service workers

An audit of the Bureau for Children and Families says the Department of Health and Human Resources needs to focus on the safety of Child Protective Service workers making home visits throughout the state.

Legislative auditors presented their review of the bureau to lawmakers with six recommendations on how to improve safety for workers monitoring cases and conducting investigations outside of their county offices.

Those include:

1. Increase focus on worker safety and create a culture that emphasizes worker safety through creating a central and uniform focus on safety.

2. Avoid any further delays in providing personal safety devices for all CPS workers and develop a statewide, uniform practice for their use.

3. Identify areas of weak/nonexistent mobile phone coverage and explore the use of other communication technology.

4. Provide agency mobile phones to all field workers and require their use for state business conducted from remote locations.

5. Provide methamphetamine safety training and establish stringent methamphetamine safety guidelines for social workers.

6. Require annual safety training.

As auditors explained their recommendations to members of the Joint Committee on Government Organization, they explained the bureau has been aware of communication issues during home visits since a CPS worker was killed on the job five years ago, but have yet to make any changes to the devices workers are carrying with them.

Bureau Commissioner Nancy Exline said over the next few months, they will be testing a variety of communication devices including satellite phones, life alert type badges and cell phone boosters to determine which technologies will be useful in different areas of the state.

“We’re currently doing a complete inventory of all of our cell phones, the technology they have, where they work, where they don’t work, where we need booster,” she said. “It is my hope that in December we can begin to make decisions about what devices we need to have where and which ones are the best to use for all of our field staff.”

Legislators asked Exline to return with a report in December detailing the devices that will be used by CPS workers and how additional safety procedures have been implemented as suggested by the audit.

WVU students exploring the world through others’ perspectives—Literally.

Google Glass. It’s a new computer right out of a James Bond film or a science fiction novel. You wear it like you would wear glasses, but you peer at the world with technologically reinforced eyes.

Like Iron Man.

…Without the suit.

Maybe the suit will come next, but, in the meantime Google Glass is being tested by thousands of people including students at West Virginia University. Professor Mary Kay McFarland got wind that Google was looking for ‘Glass Explorers’ and now she’s incorporated the technology into her class.

What Iron Man Sees

McFarland explains that basically, you’re wirelessly tethered to your smartphone. So instead of burying your head in your lap, you can walk around—head held high, taking pictures, rolling video, text messaging, calling someone, sharing what you see-live, getting directions-and following them, and of course, you look up whatever you want online—and all with voice commands or with a flick, tap, or nod.

“So it’s really responsive to questions like, ‘Do I need a sweater today?’ It’ll give you the weather. They’ve sort of thought about making mental leaps. You might say, ‘Ok, Glass, I’m hungry.’ And it’ll just list all the restaurants in the area.”

McFarland also points out that the design is fairly intelligent—the screen that you look through which projects whatever you’re looking at on the world in front of you, hovers just above your eyebrow so as not to actually obstruct your vision.

Testing, testing 1, 2, 3, 4… 8,000

McFarland is one of about 8,000 so-called ‘Glass Explorers’ who responded to a call for tweeted proposals to test the device.

Mary Kay McFarland made this proposal: It's not WHAT you said, it's HOW you said it. – Couples get counseling to understand the other's perspective. What if you could see it? I would use Glass to make documentary video about the misunderstandings in relationships resulting from unconscious body language, choice of phrase and tone of voice.

She explains that once chosen, testers had to go to NY, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, to one of the Google offices, to pick the devices up and get an explanation of how to use them. So off she went to New York.

“It was very simple ass I was just playing with them, to take pictures of the people who were sleeping across the airplane aisle or in the waiting area. And I thought, you know, if you had a camera out here it would be very obvious what you were doing, people would shy away or say, ‘I don’t want my picture taken.’ But it just looks like I’m fiddling with my glasses.”

Enter Elephant in the Room

“It just changes the complexion of life on the street if you can be being filmed all the time, without your knowledge, and have pictures taken of you without your knowledge. So I think most people are excited about the Glass, because they think, ‘Oh, it would be like wearing a computer around; I can just ask it questions and get answers.’ And that is absolutely true, but what they haven’t considered all the implications of privacy and that something that records and then uploads directly to Google who has the capacity to do facial recognition… ”

These are ideas that McFarland is introducing along with the device in her journalism classes at West Virginia University.

“This is not a new issue, however the technology makes the invasion of privacy possible on levels that it probably wasn’t before.”

Classy

But McFarland is embracing the technology nonetheless and students are eager to do the same. She’s asking students to come up with journalism and documentary projects where, instead of recording their subjects, they record their subject’s point of view.

“One student in my multimedia reporting class is in the WVU marching band—the Pride of WV—he actually used them to tell the story of Game Day from the band’s perspective as they go out on the field and what they see from the field, how the formations look.”

McFarland also points to examples like a student who wants to explore the effects of sequestration on Head Start, and a student who is interested in the implications of possible marijuana legislation in the state.

“In those stories they’ll have to find the people for whom those issues matter. And then we can talk about the implications of actually seeing life through the eyes of the people who are living through those issues.”