African-American women are diagnosed with breast cancer at a younger age and have larger tumors and more lymph node involvement than white women, report Yale School of Medicine researchers. The results were based on 2,164 Caucasian women and 207 African American women followed over a 30-year period — the largest most comprehensive study of its kind to date. “The incidence of breast cancer is actually lower in African American women compared to Caucasian women, yet their mortality rates are higher,” Yale’s Meena Moran said. “We were surprised. Previous reports did not show higher relapse rates in African American women after surgery to conserve breast tissue. This might be because we had so many African American patients and a longer follow-up period.”

Moran proposed several possible biological risk factors that need to be explored more fully;

• African American women have a lower level of estrogen/progesterone receptors, which means existing anti-estrogen therapies are not effective on these tumors.
• African American women have a higher rate of “triple negative tumors,” which have been associated with a worse outcome in early stage breast cancer.
• They also have a higher rate of mutation in the p53 gene, which normally acts to suppress tumors.

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President Bush told Republican lawmakers on Tuesday he will not agree to legislation expanding children’s health insurance if it includes a tobacco tax increase, a decision that virtually ensures a renewed veto struggle with the Democratic-controlled Congress.The president also suggested he would not be willing to sign other types of tax increases that Democrats have attached to major legislation, including an energy bill, according to numerous officials who attended a closed-door meeting at the White House.

Bush’s remarks represented a hardening of the administration’s public position in a running veto showdown over Democratic-led attempts to enact legislation that provides coverage for 6 million children who now lack it. The officials who disclosed his comments did so on condition of anonymity, saying they were made in a closed-door meeting.

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President Bush and other critics of a $35 billion spending increase for children’s health insurance say they’ll support expanding coverage to families of four making as much as $62,000 a year, but they want to limit states’ ability to go beyond that level.About three dozen states ignore certain income when determining who can get government-subsidized health coverage. For example, many states exclude child support payments. Others deduct expenses for child care when determining who qualifies for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Congress is considering the renewal of SCHIP for an additional five years, but differences remain over who the program should cover and how much money should be spent. The flexibility that states have in defining income is one of the differences that will probably need to be resolved for Democrats to override a promised veto from Bush.

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First, please recommend!  PLEASE!

Republican’s who vote against SCHIP and George Bush say it’s too expensive and that we can’t afford it while they enjoy the benefits of government funded health care.

Please join me in telling our elected officials that We strongly urge them to give the SCHIP renewal and expansion their support, knowing that we the people who elected them do not consider $13.30 per year to be an unreasonable burden.

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Experts say good, old-fashioned personal hygiene is the best defense against the increase of antibiotic-resistant staph infections — along with plenty of other bugs.

Dr. John Jernigan, an expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on MRSA — or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus — said that clusters of antibiotic-resistant staph infections in the community “go away when those involved implement simple hygiene measures.”
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A recent report from a national business panel underscores the need to overhaul health care.

Many if not most Assembly Republicans probably figured – with no small amount of relief – that a wooden stake had been driven through the heart of the Healthy Wisconsin plan after one of the Senate’s Democrats, Jim Sullivan of Wauwatosa, publicly pronounced it dead.

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And errors are made in up to 4 percent of the 4.5 million new prescriptions written annually, according to the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, an industry trade group.The nation’s $2 trillion health care industry hasn’t been keeping up with the times, but a number of companies are going all out to create a safer universal electronic medical system that President Bush says should be in place by 2014.

One of the major players in the burgeoning $40 billion health information technology industry is Alpharetta-based McKesson Technology Solutions, which manufactures and sells robots such as Fillmore.

McKesson, which has 2,500 employees here, has robots in more than 325 hospitals, including 12 in Georgia and seven in the Atlanta area.

Company President Pamela Pure says health information technology is one of the fastest-growing divisions for San Francisco-based McKesson Corp., a Fortune 18 company. McKesson Technology Solutions accounted for $730 million of McKesson Corp.’s revenues of $24.5 billion in its first fiscal quarter of 2008, which ended June 30, and 23 percent of its operating profits. Its competitors include Siemens, GE Healthcare, Cerner Corp. and Epic Systems.

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In the quest to contain escalating health-care costs, we’ve tried cost controls, set payments for hospitals and physicians, used managed care and pay for performance. But U.S. health-care costs are still the highest in the world, while we sit near the bottom on key health indicators.But health-care reform bumps into three formidable quality barriers: overuse, misuse and underuse, according to Dr. Mark R. Chassin, chairman of the Department of Health Policy at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, who in January will lead The Joint Commission, which monitors health-facility quality.

Overuse is the barrier that could make the biggest difference, but it’s also the one that has received the least effort to overcome it, he said during Intermountain Healthcare’s Healthy Dialogues discussion Wednesday morning in Salt Lake City. Chassin believes overuse drives up costs more than the other two, but would be the least costly to fix.

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Heart disease kills 43 percent of women each year — almost half. During the month of February, the American Heart Association, will tell women how we need to take responsibility for our health by exercising, eating right and de-stressing. They are right, but in the meantime some woman somewhere, probably next door to you if not you ,will die because her doctor thinks she has indigestion or anxiety.

What needs to be done? The health protocol for women’s health physicals needs to change. It should be a standard part of the woman’s physical that she receive the cardiac enzyme test. It should be standard that she receive an EKG, even though EKG’s are less revealing when we are talking about women’s hearts. Finally, baseline echocardiograms should be given as a part of the physical exam for women starting at 40, most definitely at 50 and 60. It probably would not hurt if we started at 30 years of age. My sister had her physical on Tuesday, Aug. 14. On Wednesday, Aug. 15, she was dead. Any of these measures might have saved her life. It is too late for her, but not to late for you or your sister.

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When asked to name the two issues that they want to hear the presidential candidates talk about, people overall are most likely to name Iraq (44 percent), followed by health care (38 percent), the economy (18 percent) and immigration (12 percent).  Among Republicans, 30 percent name health care as one of the top two issues – the highest share recorded for that group since the tracking poll began in March 2007. 

The poll also examines the specific aspects of health care that the public wants candidates to address, as well as their perceptions of the presidential candidates on health issues.

This latest Kaiser Health Tracking Poll: Election 2008, the fourth in a series, was designed and analyzed by public opinion researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation. A nationally representative random sample of 1,204 adults was interviewed by telephone between October 1 and October 10, 2007. The margin of sampling error for the survey is plus or minus 3 percentage points; for results based on subgroups, the sampling error is higher.

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