Healthcare

[PizzaSnake]

Remind me again why I have the great fortune to live in this regressive, revanchist hole? Not all places are so retrograde.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/03/25/asia ... index.html

[a fan]

Remind me again why I have the great fortune to live in this regressive, revanchist hole? Not all places are so retrograde.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/03/25/asia ... index.html

Americans don't travel.

If they did? They'd realize what a complete and utter mess our health care system is for anyone pulling down less than $250K/yr.

The next generation gets it. And they're sick of being lied to by a bunch of millionaires in both parties.

[PizzaSnake]

Remind me again why I have the great fortune to live in this regressive, revanchist hole? Not all places are so retrograde.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/03/25/asia ... index.html

Americans don't travel.

If they did? They'd realize what a complete and utter mess our health care system is for anyone pulling down less than $250K/yr.

The next generation gets it. And they're sick of being lied to by a bunch of millionaires in both parties.

I think you’re being generous. Not sure some people have the sense to come in out of the rain...

[CU88]

Stop calling it “free college,” “free healthcare,” etc. They wouldn’t be “free”; they would be “taxpayer-funded” … like roads, police & fire departments, K-12, etc.

They would be part of what we as a society choose to do for the greater good of our country as a whole.

[cradleandshoot]

Stop calling it “free college,” “free healthcare,” etc. They wouldn’t be “free”; they would be “taxpayer-funded” … like roads, police & fire departments, K-12, etc.

They would be part of what we as a society choose to do for the greater good of our country as a whole.

What a load of FLP horsechit...

[Brooklyn]

560,000 Americans dead due to covid ~ this is what some right wing delusionals call "health care".

[Brooklyn]

Shinnecock tribe to break ground on marijuana cultivation facility, eyes rec sales this summer


https://www.newsday.com/business/shinne ... -news-only



The Shinnecock Indian Nation will break ground for a marijuana-cultivation facility on its Southampton reservation in the coming weeks, a leader said, as the tribe eyes the role of recreational marijuana sales for future economic development.

Newly reelected tribal chairman Bryan Polite said the tribe is working on a set of internal regulations for licensing recreational marijuana sales and that recreational sales could start this summer, but only after a vote by the entire tribe.

"We are working on regulations and hope to have something by the summer," he said. How, and if, the program is open for recreational sales by tribal smoke shops on Montauk Highway are "questions that have to be answered by tribal members" through a vote.

The federally recognized Shinnecock Nation is a sovereign government that sets its rules through a governing council of trustees and committees with full tribal votes on major initiatives.



more ....


Let's hope this will enable them to raise revenues and to create more jobs thereby improving the standard of living and quality of life in their rez.

[Farfromgeneva]

Wasn’t sure where to put this but as having some modest amount of knowledge on this topic I know how big of a deal it is so wanted to drop this story in here.

Fentanyl Has Spread West and Overdoses Are Surging
More than twice as many people died from drug overdoses as from Covid-19 in San Francisco last year

By Ian Lovett | Photographs by Nick Otto
April 15, 2021 7:00 am ET
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SAN FRANCISCO—Mike Enright overdosed three times in December. A longtime heroin user, he said he didn’t know his limit after switching to fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid.

“It just hits you so much harder,” Mr. Enright said, sitting on the sidewalk not far from the tent where he sleeps.

Long a scourge on the East Coast, fentanyl is now driving a rapid increase in overdose deaths in the Western U.S.


In the Seattle area, overdose deaths involving fentanyl were up 57% in 2020 over the previous year, according to data from the county medical examiner. Preliminary data show deaths from synthetic opioids like fentanyl rose 162% in the Las Vegas area last year. In Los Angeles County, a recent report blamed fentanyl for a 26% jump in overdose deaths among the homeless population during the first seven months of 2020.

The problem is particularly acute in San Francisco, where a record 708 people died of drug overdoses in 2020, a 61% increase from the previous year. By comparison, 254 people died of Covid-19 in the city last year.

So far, this year has been worse: 135 died by overdose in January and February, on pace for more than 800 deaths by the end of the year.


People in an alley in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco last year.
“We see the death and devastation getting worse right in front of us,” said Matt Haney, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who represents the Tenderloin neighborhood, the center of the city’s drug epidemic. “It’s an unprecedented spiraling, directly connected to the introduction of fentanyl in our city.”

Fentanyl can be 50 times more potent than heroin, making it possible to overdose on tiny amounts. As a result, when fentanyl hits the streets in force, more people tend to die. That is what has happened in New England and the Rust Belt, where beginning nearly a decade ago it was often mixed into heroin. In some places in the Eastern U.S. it has all but replaced heroin as a popular street opioid.


Fentanyl in the U.S. is often made by Mexican cartels using precursor chemicals from China, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. It took off in the East faster, in part because of the region’s longstanding problem with opioids. The West has historically been a bigger methamphetamine market, but the cartels are now aggressively pushing fentanyl there, too, often in the form of fake pain pills, said Wade Shannon, special agent in charge of the DEA’s San Francisco office.

Though fentanyl began to show up in San Francisco around 2015, only since 2018 has it become widely available, according to local officials, nonprofit workers and drug users. Overdose deaths in San Francisco increased 173% between 2018 and 2020.

The pandemic has compounded the overdose crisis, according to public health officials. Isolation, stress and job loss drove many people to drugs; with homeless shelters and other congregant living spaces closed, addicts often used drugs alone. If they overdosed, no one was there to help them.

A projected 88,295 people in the U.S. died from overdoses in the 12-month period that ran through last August, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In all of 2019, there were 70,630 drug deaths, a record that was likely broken last year.

Opioids including fentanyl were involved in about 70% of overdose deaths in 2019, according to the CDC.


A naloxone package handed out last year in the Tenderloin.
“The best practice to reduce the risk of Covid is isolation,” said Kristen Marshall, manager of the DOPE Project, a program of the National Harm Reduction Coalition that is funded by the city and oversees San Francisco’s overdose prevention efforts. “Isolation is also the thing that puts people at the absolute highest risk of overdose death.”

On a recent Thursday afternoon in the Tenderloin, dozens of people using or selling drugs lined the sidewalks. One man was sitting on a plastic crate, smoking from a piece of aluminum foil; the person beside him was passed out. Young men and women approached anyone who walked by, asking, “What you need?”

Workers from a local nonprofit called Glide offered needles, body wipes, and other supplies. People crowded around them, asking for specific sizes of needles, face masks and, above all, pipes and aluminum foil. Many users smoke fentanyl, rather than injecting it, because they think it lowers the risk of overdose.

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Addiction experts are in wide agreement on the most effective way to help opioid addicts: Medication-assisted treatment. But most inpatient rehab facilities in the U.S. don’t offer this option. WSJ’s Jason Bellini reports on why the medication option is controversial, and in many places, hard to come by. Image: Ryno Eksteen and Thomas Williams (Video from 11/16/17)
“We’re seeing a dramatic change in the demand for needles going down and the increase in demand for foil,” said John Negrete, a harm-reduction program manager at Glide. “Normally, we couldn’t get people to smoke heroin, because it wastes the drug. But fentanyl’s just so powerful.”

One woman asked for Narcan, a branded version of the overdose medication naloxone, saying she had given out 16 doses the previous week. According to the DOPE Project, naloxone was administered more than 4,300 times in San Francisco last year, up from 2,610 in 2019.


Ansar El Mohammed, a heroin user, said he began carrying naloxone as the deaths rose, so he can help if someone is overdosing. He also gets test strips from local clinics to make sure what he’s using has no fentanyl in it. A number of overdoses happen because people don’t know the drugs they are using contain fentanyl, officials said.

City officials are at odds about how to address the problem. Mr. Haney said he would like to see the police do more in the Tenderloin.


A street in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, which police say is the center of the city’s drug epidemic.
San Francisco police seized 5.5 kilos of fentanyl in the Tenderloin last year, up from 1.2 kilos in 2019. Seizures have picked up further this year, with 2.8 kilos seized in the first 12 weeks of 2021. Still, in the Tenderloin, people openly used drugs on sidewalks a few blocks from the local police station. Squad cars drove by but rarely stopped.

San Francisco Police Chief William Scott said fentanyl dealers are causing deaths and shouldn’t be left alone to do it, but his department can’t arrest them all while handling other priorities, like 911 calls.

“Would we like to put our resources into stamping that out as much as we can?” the chief said. “Yes. But we can’t.”

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

How has drug use changed in your area during the pandemic? Join the conversation below.

Chesa Boudin, the district attorney elected in 2019 on a criminal justice reform platform, has questioned the value of arresting street-level dealers, saying that before the police report from one arrest is written, someone else is already selling on the same corner. He said the city’s drug epidemic needs to be treated as a public-health problem, with a focus on treatment.

“As long as we have people who are addicted to drugs, who are willing to destroy their own bodies and their own lives, no amount of investment on the law enforcement is going to solve this problem,” he said.


—Jon Kamp contributed to this article.

Write to Ian Lovett at [email protected]

[Brooklyn]

Supreme Court refuses to hear case about another attempt to destroy American lives:



https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-wa ... WXEIGY.jpg




Patriotic Americans rejoice, right wingers cry.

[youthathletics]

Incredible story. Baby born at 21 weeks, just had his first birthday. https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/19/us/world ... index.html

[Brooklyn]

Stop calling it “free college,” “free healthcare,” etc. They wouldn’t be “free”; they would be “taxpayer-funded” … like roads, police & fire departments, K-12, etc.

They would be part of what we as a society choose to do for the greater good of our country as a whole.

Funny how so many delusionals of the radical far right hate to pay taxes that finance things like domestic health care, roads, public services, etc but happily pay for those same things in Israel. That includes abortion which they hate to pay for here but happily pay for there.

[Brooklyn]

Repuke health care plan for dealing with covid:



https://image.politicalcartoons.com/253 ... munity.png




https://image.politicalcartoons.com/253 ... target.png




More dead Americans. Thank you Repukies.

[jhu72]

50 year old diuretic found likely to be effective against Alzheimer’s disease.

[youthathletics]

50 year old diuretic found likely to be effective against Alzheimer’s disease.

Crazy...all these heart medications finding new uses. Last time I believe it was the little blue pill.

[Farfromgeneva]

This bit reminds me of an old Vonnegut short story called Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_ ... ort_story)

What’s next for the business of longevity?
By Lauren Hirsch

Reporter, DealBook

Investors including Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel have spent billions on the business of living longer. The appeal is clear: more time to spend with loved ones, achieve goals and enjoy new experiences.

But the prospect of extending life also brings up a host of thorny societal, economic and philosophical issues. And though there’s general acceptance of certain fundamentals, like the importance of exercise and not smoking, there is still debate over how much life spans can be extended and exactly how to go about extending them.

David Sinclair, a Harvard biologist, has been studying aging and how to slow it for more than a decade. He is also a founder of at least 12 biotech start-ups and sits on the boards of several others.

DealBook spoke with Dr. Sinclair in an event last week about the business and science of extending life, with help from insightful questions offered by our readers. Here are some of the key takeaways from the talk. You can listen to the full discussion here.

Longevity research would work differently if aging were classified as a disease by the Food and Drug Administration. Since aging is not considered a disease — as it is natural and affects all humans — the F.D.A. does not have a regulatory process to approve a drug for it. It also means there is less regulation around various supplements and treatments that claim to combat aging. “I would like the F.D.A. to declare it a disease, and let’s start treating it, and when we do that, we will have much greater gains on health span,” Dr. Sinclair said.

In the absence of a clear regulatory pathway, drug developers have focused efforts on treating diseases linked to aging, like glaucoma. For example, Unity Biotechnology, a publicly traded biotech company focused on such diseases, last week reported positive data from a safety study on a new drug for treating advanced vascular eye disease. The same company faced a major setback last year when its drug for osteoarthritis of the knee failed in a trial to show improvements over a placebo.

Living longer could have broad economic benefits, but there may be other costs. Dr. Sinclair was the co-author of a report earlier this year arguing that increasing the average life span in the United States by a decade could create about $360 trillion in economic value, accounting for both money saved in categories such as sick-care and additional spending by people who are living healthier longer. (The average life span last year was about 77 years, a nearly two-decade low mainly because of Covid 19-related deaths.)

Living longer and healthier could arguably put money into the economy. But there are other costs. “If there were more humans on the planet, there’s always going to be more stress you place on the environment,” Dr. Sinclair said, though he believes that a decline in fertility could offset some life-span increase. He pointed to innovations in areas like clean energy as possible countermeasures to the climate burden of a higher population.

And what about the personal costs to longevity — with so many Americans already having difficulty saving for retirement? Retirement wealth has accumulated almost exclusively among higher-income households, while middle- and lower-income households have held steady or lost ground. Dr. Sinclair argued the money “that’s currently wasted on medical care” can be put toward “a whole bunch of things,” citing vocational retraining, Social Security, among other programs.

But living longer would still probably mean working longer. “The one thing that I don’t think is going to happen is that we will be able to retire at the same age,” Dr. Sinclair said.

We are on the “first flight stage” of the research into longevity, according to Dr. Sinclair. Critics of longevity research argue the billions investors have put toward longevity are focused on enriching only the wealthy, and that the money would be better spent on more immediate issues. Dr. Sinclair, though, compared research into longevity to initial work in industries like air travel, which was originally funded by and offered primarily to the wealthy. “The people who invest in that are the rich — they have to be,” Dr. Sinclair said of longevity research. “This is the way capitalism works and it’s worked well.”

His goal, he says, is to “democratize” longevity drugs, education and knowledge. As for an academic’s role in the business of longevity, he said, “it is now at Harvard Medical School unusual for a scientist not to be involved in industry somehow and there are plenty of entrepreneurs around me.”

Dr. Sinclair’s personal regimen is a “combination of eating right, living right, exercising,” as well as some supplements and the drug metformin. Metformin is a diabetes drug that some people without the disease have begun to take in hopes of staying healthier longer. Some studies, though, have suggested it may also blunt the health benefits of exercise.

He is also a fan of intermittent fasting, which he said has helped improve the life span of mice. “I’ve been skipping breakfast my whole life and lately, over the last two years, I’ve been skipping lunch,” he said.

Limiting food intake to certain hours of the day has gained popularity over the past few years. Advocates of the dietary regimen argue that it forces the body to break down fat for energy, once glucose has been depleted. When that happens, the body can go into a state of ketosis that can be similarly achieved by low-carbohydrate diets, whose proponents say have benefits ranging from burning more calories to managing diabetes. (Ketosis also has risks, like liver damage.) Research into intermittent fasting is still evolving. A rigorous three-month study published in September found that people experimenting with the diet lost little weight, and much of that may have been from muscle.

[youthathletics]

Interesting article....but really seemed to take a step forward, then immediately backward.

Intermittent fasting, for me, was more about resetting indulgence vs actual 'need' for proper replenishment, rather than looking for some weight loss benefit. And frankly....its really easy to do. After dinner just do not eat until lunch the next. And when you do this...plan for that meal. I did a few trials. One time I ate a sleeve of Blue Diamond smoked almonds and a diet fountain soda.....best damned meal I ever had at the time; it tied me over until dinner again. Next week, I ate some turkey deli meat, cheese, pickle spear, and some trailmix....with water and mio; again tied me over until dinner. Next time I did a sandwich with potato bread, a little bag of Doritos, and a diet coke; the craving went through the roof and I succumbed to those craving with another bag of chips and a couple more handfuls of trail mix.

In short, we really do not need much food...so long as we chose wisely. And to be frank, that damned food pyramid from the FDA, especially the original one, is pretty damned useless. Couple that with portion size...and we are effed. I really think WalMart screwed our country over....when it comes to our health.

[Farfromgeneva]

Interesting article....but really seemed to take a step forward, then immediately backward.

Intermittent fasting, for me, was more about resetting indulgence vs actual 'need' for proper replenishment, rather than looking for some weight loss benefit. And frankly....its really easy to do. After dinner just do not eat until lunch the next. And when you do this...plan for that meal. I did a few trials. One time I ate a sleeve of Blue Diamond smoked almonds and a diet fountain soda.....best damned meal I ever had at the time; it tied me over until dinner again. Next week, I ate some turkey deli meat, cheese, pickle spear, and some trailmix....with water and mio; again tied me over until dinner. Next time I did a sandwich with potato bread, a little bag of Doritos, and a diet coke; the craving went through the roof and I succumbed to those craving with another bag of chips and a couple more handfuls of trail mix.

In short, we really do not need much food...so long as we chose wisely. And to be frank, that damned food pyramid from the FDA, especially the original one, is pretty damned useless. Couple that with portion size...and we are effed. I really think WalMart screwed our country over....when it comes to our health.

Almonds and diet coke is a staple for me. Pickles need to be legit kosher ones.

[cradleandshoot]

Interesting article....but really seemed to take a step forward, then immediately backward.

Intermittent fasting, for me, was more about resetting indulgence vs actual 'need' for proper replenishment, rather than looking for some weight loss benefit. And frankly....its really easy to do. After dinner just do not eat until lunch the next. And when you do this...plan for that meal. I did a few trials. One time I ate a sleeve of Blue Diamond smoked almonds and a diet fountain soda.....best damned meal I ever had at the time; it tied me over until dinner again. Next week, I ate some turkey deli meat, cheese, pickle spear, and some trailmix....with water and mio; again tied me over until dinner. Next time I did a sandwich with potato bread, a little bag of Doritos, and a diet coke; the craving went through the roof and I succumbed to those craving with another bag of chips and a couple more handfuls of trail mix.

In short, we really do not need much food...so long as we chose wisely. And to be frank, that damned food pyramid from the FDA, especially the original one, is pretty damned useless. Couple that with portion size...and we are effed. I really think WalMart screwed our country over....when it comes to our health.

Very simple rule of thumb when it comes to ALL food... All things in moderation.

[Farfromgeneva]

Public Service Announcement:

Google Chief Health Office Karen DeSalvo might be a smokeshow...getting a little long in the tooth but Google's own images section portrays some nice history

Thanks,

Mgt

[NattyBohChamps04]

More good news on the vaccine front. "Slut Shot" for the win.

HPV vaccine cutting cervical cancer by nearly 90%

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-59148620