http://www.ocregister.com/articles/-251773--.html

Medical board reinstated convicted felons

Sept. 2, 2010
Updated March 18, 2015 10:22 p.m.

By COURTNEY PERKES / THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

In the past 10 years, the California Medical Board has reinstated the licenses of doctors who were convicted of sexually assaulting patients, defrauding insurance companies of millions and hiring hit men to kill their wives.

Although some doctors spent as much time in prison as they did in medical school, they were most often able to show rehabilitation and given a second chance to treat patients.

"There are some things that people have done, and I don't care how remorseful you are, you shouldn't get your license back," said Julie D'Angelo Fellmeth, a San Diego attorney hired by the state in 2003 to report on the board's enforcement practices.

The Orange County Register examined records of 123 doctors who sought reinstatement in the past decade after they lost their licenses for misconduct or negligence. More than half were able to satisfy a judge and the medical board that they were fit to practice. Among the 66 who were reinstated, 16 got into trouble again.

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http://www.centerforhealthjournalism.org/blogs/qa-courtney-perkes-truth-checking-medical-board%E2%80%99s-claims-one-bad-apple-syndrome

Q&A with Courtney Perkes: How California Medical Board Reinstated Convicted Felon Doctors
By William Heisel
June 11, 2010

http://www.ocregister.com/taxdollars/medications-727645-children-foster.html

Our foster kids may be over-medicated, but under-supervised medically, report says

Sept. 1, 2016
Updated Sept. 3, 2016 1:56 p.m.

By TERI SFORZA / STAFF WRITER

Thousands of California's foster care kids may be over-drugged with psychotropic medications, often without medical follow-up or a legally required approval from a judge or parent, according to a stinging report by the California State Auditor.

“The state and counties have failed to adequately oversee the prescribing of these medications,” wrote auditor Elaine M. Howle.

The problems partly are a result of a division of labor when it comes to oversight. Two departments oversee foster kids and their medications, but neither could completely identify which foster children are prescribed psychotropic medications or even which medications they are taking.

“California’s oversight approach for its administration of foster care and monitoring of psychotropic medications appears to be piecemeal,” Howle said, adding that there isn’t strong “system-level oversight.”

Psychotropic medications include antidepressants, mood stabilizers and antipsychotics. Typically, such drugs can provide big benefits for people with psychiatric illnesses, but they often come with serious adverse side effects.

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BY THE NUMBERS

79,166
Children in foster care in California.

11.8%
Foster kids in California prescribed to take psychotropic drugs.

4%-10%
Estimated rate of psychotropic use among children not in foster care.

1 in 3
Foster children who take psychotropic drugs but weren't seen for follow-up care in a timely manner.

The full report is here: https://www.auditor.ca.gov/pdfs/reports/2015-131.pdf
Summaries and fact sheets are here: https://www.auditor.ca.gov/reports/recent

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-29/questions-linger-on-china-drug-safety-even-as-sales-rise-in-u-s

China Drug Sales to the U.S. Grow Despite Safety Concerns at Home

By Bloomberg News
August 29, 2016

Chinese drugs and pharmaceutical ingredients are found in medicine cabinets as far away as New York and Chicago, and the country's exports of pharmaceutical products and health supplements worldwide jumped 3 percent to $56 billion last year.

Yet even as China's drug industry has grown in global stature, so have questions about the safety of its products.

Consider: Last year, about 700 Chinese firms were told by regulators in China to review their pending applications to sell new drugs and voluntarily withdraw any that were false or incomplete. Within months, about 75 percent had been retracted by the manufacturers or rejected by Chinese officials.

Among those were some medicines that were separately approved for sale in the U.S. by the Food and Drug Administration. Some of the companies say their data in China were flawed because of faulty information by local research firms, and their applications for the U.S. usually include tests done by research firms in North America -- indicating those drugs should be safe. Chinese pharma exports to the U.S. rose 4 percent last year.

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International Expansion

Another company, China Resources Saike Pharmaceutical Co., in December also pulled an application to sell an epilepsy medicine called levetiracetam in China, acknowledging that clinical trial data submitted with that application were flawed. Two weeks later, the same drug was approved for sale in the U.S.

Saike said the U.S. FDA waived a requirement to do human trials on the medicine and that other materials it submitted met the agency’s requirements for generic drug approvals. It didn’t respond to questions on where its tests were done.

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https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/Pages/American-Academy-of-Pediatrics-Publishes-New-Policies-to-Boost-Child-Immunization-Rates.aspx

American Academy of Pediatrics Publishes New Policies to Boost Child Immunization Rates

8/29/2016
​
AAP offers advice for pediatricians in counseling families to vaccinate their children; urges states to enact policies to support high immunization rates

Elk Grove Village, IL – Most parents who are hesitant about vaccines are not opposed to immunizing their children, but rather are unsure or have questions. And the best source of answers is their pediatrician.

To equip pediatricians for these conversations, the American Academy of Pediatrics is publishing a new clinical report, "Countering Vaccine Hesitancy" in the September 2016 Pediatrics (published online Aug. 29). The AAP advises pediatricians to have compassionate dialogues with parents to clear up misconceptions around vaccines, provide accurate information about the safety and importance of vaccines, and strive over time to help parents make the decision to vaccinate their child.

To protect all children in every community, the AAP also urges state governments to enact policies that will result in high immunization rates. In the policy statement, "Medical Versus Nonmedical Immunization Exemptions for Child Care and School Attendance​," published the same day, the AAP recommends only medical exemptions be allowed for vaccine requirements for child care and school attendance.

“Parents, pediatricians, and policy-makers all have a role here in protecting children from diseases like measles and whooping cough,” said AAP President Benard P. Dreyer, MD, FAAP. “As pediatricians, we care about every individual child in our practices, and we know that vaccines are an important way to protect them from disease. We also care about the broader communities where our patients live, play and learn, and high immunization rates are critical to keeping disease outbreaks at bay. No child should have to suffer through a disease that could have been prevented by a vaccine.”

According to the AAP, non-medical exemption laws have failed.

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http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2016/03/17/peds.2015-4230

Pediatrics
March 2016, VOLUME 137 / ISSUE 3
Childhood Vaccine Exemption Policy: The Case for a Less Restrictive Alternative
Douglas J. Opel, Matthew P. Kronman, Douglas S. Diekema, Edgar K. Marcuse, Jeffrey S. Duchin, Eric Kodish

Abbreviations: MV — measles vaccine, NME — nonmedical exemption, VPD — vaccine-preventable disease

Efforts to restrict parents’ ability to exempt children from receiving vaccinations required for school entry have recently reached a pinnacle. The American Medical Association voiced support for eliminating nonmedical exemptions (NMEs) from school vaccine requirements,1 and California enacted legislation doing so.2 Although laudable in their objective, policies eliminating NMEs from all vaccines are scientifically and ethically problematic. In the present article, we argue for an exemption policy that eliminates NMEs just for the measles vaccine (MV) and is pursued only after other less restrictive approaches have been implemented and deemed unsuccessful.

Published By American Academy of Pediatrics
Copyright © 2016 by the American Academy of Pediatrics

Author Information: Douglas J. Opel, MD, MPHa,b, Matthew P. Kronman, MD, MSCEb, Douglas S. Diekema, MD, MPHa,b,c, Edgar K. Marcuse, MD, MPHb, Jeffrey S. Duchin, MDd,e,f, and Eric Kodish, MDg

aTreuman Katz Center for Pediatric Bioethics, Seattle Children’s Research Institute, and
bDepartments of Pediatrics and
dMedicine, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, Washington;
cDepartments of Health Services and
eEpidemiology, University of Washington School of Public Health, Seattle, Washington;
fCommunicable Disease Epidemiology and Immunization Section, Public Health–Seattle and King County, Seattle, Washington; and
gDepartment of Bioethics, Center for Ethics, Humanities and Spiritual Care, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, Ohio

Dr Opel conceptualized and designed the study and drafted the initial manuscript; and Drs Kronman, Diekema, Marcuse, Duchin, and Kodish reviewed and revised the manuscript. All authors approved the final manuscript as submitted and agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work.

http://www.acog.org/Resources-And-Publications/Committee-Opinions/Committee-on-Ethics/Refusal-of-Medically-Recommended-Treatment-During-Pregnancy

OB/GYN Group Says Pregnant Women Have Right to Informed Consent and Refusal of Doctor Recommendations

1. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Refusal of Medically Recommended Treatment During Pregnancy.
ACOG.org No. 664, June 2016.

2. McClain L. New ACOG Statement Says Forcing Treatment on Pregnant Women is Unethical.
Mothering June 10, 2016.

http://file.scirp.org/html/22932.html

Open Journal of Pediatrics, 2012, 2, 228-235

OJPed http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojped.2012.23036
Published Online September 2012 http://www.SciRP.org/journal/ojped/

Vaccination practices among physicians and their children

Michael Martin1, Vahe Badalyan2
1Department of Pediatrics, Inova Fairfax Hospital for Children, Falls Church, USA
2Department of Gastroenterology, Children’s National Medical Center, Washington DC, USA

Received 1 May 2012; revised 3 July 2012; accepted 30 July 2012

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to identify vaccination patterns of both general pediatricians and subspecialists with regards to their own children and projected progeny. A 14 question survey was sent randomly to 1000 members of the Academy of Pediatrics in 2009. Two categories of questions included 1) how physicians with children vaccinated them in the past, and 2) how all respondents would vaccinate a child in 2009. A comparison was made between the answers of general and specialty pediatricians. 582 valid questionnaires were received (58.2% response rate) of which 431 were general pediatricians and 151 sub-specialists. No statistical difference was found between general and specialty pediatricians on how they vaccinated their children up until 2009 (95% vs 93%). When asked about vaccinating a future child, a significant proportion of respondents would deviate from CDC guidelines, specialists more than general pediatricians (21% vs 9%). Generalists were more likely to give a future child Hepatitis A (OR: 3.6; 95% CI 1.3 - 10.4), Rotavirus (OR: 2.2; 95% CI 1.1 - 4.4), Meningococcal (OR: 9.9; 95% CI 3.3 - 29.9), and influenza (OR: 5.4; 95% CI 1.1 - 26.7) vaccines. Specialists were more likely to postpone MMR vaccination (OR: 4.4 95% CI 2.3 - 8.6). Safety was listed by both groups as the most common reason for altering the recommended immunization schedule. Until 2009, general pediatricians and pediatric specialists have largely adhered to ACIP recommendations, but due to vaccine safety and other concerns, both groups, albeit a higher percentage of specialists, reported greater numbers willing to diverge from these recommendations.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/29/our-infant-mortality-rate-is-a-national-embarrassment/

Our infant mortality rate is a national embarrassment

By Christopher Ingraham
September 29, 2014



The United States has a higher infant mortality rate than any of the other 27 wealthy countries, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control. A baby born in the U.S. is nearly three times as likely to die during her first year of life as one born in Finland or Japan. That same American baby is about twice as likely to die in her first year as a Spanish or Korean one.

Despite healthcare spending levels that are significantly higher than any other country in the world, a baby born in the U.S. is less likely to see his first birthday than one born in Hungary, Poland or Slovakia. Or in Belarus. Or in Cuba, for that matter.

The U.S. rate of 6.1 infant deaths per 1,000 live births masks considerable state-level variation. If Alabama were a country, its rate of 8.7 infant deaths per 1,000 would place it slightly behind Lebanon in the world rankings. Mississippi, with its 9.6 deaths, would be somewhere between Botswana and Bahrain.

We're the wealthiest nation in the world. How did we end up like this?

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More at link.