Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. (Getty Images)

Potential donors to a nonprofit group committed to promoting the Affordable Care Act are supposedly second-guessing whether they want to associate their money with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ “scandalous” fundraising efforts.

“Would-be givers are ‘gun-shy’ after reports that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius called on private industry executives to contribute to Enroll America, a nonprofit that is encouraging Americans to sign up for health care markets tied to the Affordable Care Act,” the Washington Times reports.

It’s true: HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius earlier this month asked companies in an industry that she has an enormous amount of influence over to donate money to help implement Obamacare.

The Washington Post reports:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has gone, hat in hand, to health industry officials, asking them to make large financial donations to help with the effort to implement President Obama’s landmark health-care law, two people familiar with the outreach said.

Her unusual fundraising push comes after Congress repeatedly rejected the Obama administration’s requests for additional funds to set up the Affordable Care Act, leaving HHS to implement the president’s signature legislative accomplishment on what officials have described as a shoestring budget.

Over the past three months, Sebelius has made multiple phone calls to health industry executives, community organizations and church groups and asked that they contribute whatever they can to nonprofit groups that are working to enroll uninsured Americans and increase awareness of the law, according to an HHS official and an industry person familiar with the secretary’s activities. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk openly about private discussions.

Considering Sebelius’ power and sway over the health care industry, her fundraising efforts have raised a few eyebrows.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) told TheBlaze that the house energy and commerce committee will be looking into the allegations that HHS Secretary is raising funds from companies she also regulates.

“She should not be out asking for contributions from people they regulate and oversee and that she’s going to be regulating through this Obamacare process,” she said.

Blackburn said many people have made comparisons to the Iran-Contra affair, in which an end-run around Congress was made. “It sounds worse to me,” she said of the current allegations.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) also expressed concern that the HHS secretary might be raising funds from people she regulates and passing that on to a private entity in an end-run around Congress, similar to the Iran-Contra affair.

Enroll America “to do what Congress refused to do.” Alexander said he and several other senators have asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate the details and provide facts.

Sen. Alexander said it sounds like the secretary is “doing what Congress refused to do” by using private donations and a non-government entity, Enroll America.

“If Congress says no and you go ahead and do it anyway, then that’s illegal,” he added.

Meanwhile, a few bloggers have voiced their concerns in — less diplomatic terms.

“I’m sure people who decline her generous invitation to pay up won’t suffer and negative consequences,” the Ace of Spades HQ blog notes.

It’s not like the Obama administration “used the IRS to target conservatives. Oh, right. And naturally there won’t be a little something extra in the regulations for those that pony up,” the site adds.

Still, despite the backlash against Sebelius’ behavior, the department stands by her efforts, “noting aspects of the Public Health Service Act allow the secretary to engage with nonprofits to promote the president’s agenda,” the Times reports.

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Copeland, 24, who has been getting used to her new life since the zip-lining accident last summer, is getting a little help from a new pair of prosthetic hands, becoming the first woman in the world with both upper limbs amputated to use iLimb technology, according to WXIA-TV.

Aimee Copeland is fitted with iLimb, a new bionic hand. (Image: WXIA-TV)

The iLimb hands by Touch Bionics based in Ohio are now allowing Copeland, who lives in Georgia, to perform everyday tasks like wiping tables, hanging cloths and straightening her hair, the report adds.

(Image: WXIA-TV)

Watch Copeland test out the hands in this report from WXIA-TV:

Copeland said she is eager to use the new hands for cooking or perhaps even a little knitting.

Georgia Tech’s Robert Kistenberg is working with Copeland and her new prosthetics and said they cost $100,000 per hand. Touch Bionic though gave Copeland the hands free of charge when health insurance wouldn’t cover the cost.

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“As a first step in the process, Dr. Robertson stated that she should stop dwelling on the cheating. Next, he recommended that she remind herself of all the reasons she fell in love with him in the first place so that she might try to fall back in love with him all over again.”

“Lastly, his point was that everyone is human and there is much temptation outside of the home, so she should do whatever she can to strengthen their home and relationship. His intent was not to condone infidelity or to cast blame. We regret any misunderstanding,” the statement added.

The controversy began Wednesday when Robertson on his “700 Club” program was presented with this viewer question:

Credit: CBN.

“Here’s the secret,” Robertson responded, “Stop talking about the cheating. He cheated on you. Well, he’s a man, okay.”

He continued, offering the following suggestions [via TheBlaze’s Dave Urbanski]:

• “Recognize, also, like it or not, males have a tendency to wander a little bit, and what you want to do is make a home so wonderful that he doesn’t want to wander.”
• Focus on why you married him in the first place.
• Does he provide food, shelter, clothing? Is he nice to the children and does he do things with them?
• “Is he handsome?”
• Fall in love with him all over again.
• Touch his face, hold his hand, look into his eyes.
• Don’t focus on what makes you mad, just the good stuff.
• Give him honor.
• Keep in mind that there’s a lot of pornography out there, to which men are enticed every day.

You can watch Robertson’s comments here [relevant comments at the 49:20 marker]

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A preschool aide in Hawaii has received a last warning about eating her own lunch, prepared by her husband, in front of students. (Photo: KITV/YouTube screenshot)

A teacher’s assistant at KCAA Preschools of Hawaii could lose her job over the organic, homemade lunches packed for her by her husband.

KITV-TV reported, according to school policy, teachers either have to eat the food provided by the school with the children or wait to eat whatever they brought separately on their 10-minute break away from the kids.

Carissa Lee O’Connell began eating raw, organic food to try and stifle allergies and colds from which she was suffering — and it worked. Lee O’Connell can continue to bring her lunches as long as they’re not eaten in front of the children.

“Definitely upsetting because I really enjoy being with the kids, having fun and seeing them every day,” Lee O’Connell told KITV-TV. “They’re making me eat my lunch away from everybody else just because my director feels uncomfortable about the situation.”

Lee O’Connell argues a 10-minute break isn’t always enough time for her to eat privately, compared to the designated 30 minutes with the children.

“It’s definitely a possibility,” said Lee O’Connell, “but it’s not to say that it’s guaranteed that during my break time I’m not going to have a personal issue that comes up, and I have to take care of that first before I can be able to sit down to eat.”

At KCAA meals are a learning experience. The school’s website states:

Meal time provides rich learning opportunities for young children who are exploring new foods and developing food preferences. Recognized “best practices” in the area of nutrition and the young child, and in accordance with national accreditation standards and the USDA CACFP program, in which we participate, KCAA provides all enrolled children a USDA-approved breakfast, lunch and snack to help ensure they receive the nutrition their growing bodies need to thrive.

We serve meals family style; staff eat with the children and extend the learning through meal time conversations about food items being served, such as where they come from, their color and texture.

Exposing children to new foods, those that are different than foods normally provided at home, is part of the wonderful world of preschool. We provide menu alternatives for staff and children with a variety of food allergies as well as those who are vegetarian.

O’Connell’s husband, Rick, said this restriction surprises him given that the school operates lunches with subsidies through the USDA Child Nutrition Program.

“So in other words, her tax dollars can go into a program that (children) are being fed with, but she can be ostracized for eating a certain way to maintain her health,” he told KITV. “She’s got a choice to either keep her job, or keep her health. That’s just a horrible choice for anybody to have to make.”

Watch KITV-TV’s full report:

(H/T: Daily Mail)

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(Photo: Shutterstock.com)

According to a new study, there is some reason to fear a “Caddyshack”-like pool moment this summer — and it won’t be just a false alarm with a candy bar either.

A new report issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that E.Coli, bacteria associated with fecal matter, was present in 58 percent of the pools it tested.

Taking samples from pool filters, which the report states generally have higher densities of pool contaminants than the rest of the water, from pools in the metro-Atlanta region during the 2012 swimming season, the researchers found that more “vigilant pool cleaning, scrubbing and water quality maintenance” is needed to prevent the presence of such bacteria from impacting swimmer health.

“Swimming is an excellent way to get the physical activity needed to stay healthy,” Michele Hlavsa, chief of CDC’s Healthy Swimming Program, said in a statement. “However, pool users should be aware of how to prevent infections while swimming. Remember, chlorine and other disinfectants don’t kill germs instantly. That’s why it’s important for swimmers to protect themselves by not swallowing the water they swim in and to protect others by keeping feces and germs out of the pool by taking a pre-swim shower and not swimming when ill with diarrhea.”

The fecal matter enters the pool by washing off of swimmers bodies — or even as an “incident in the water.” Thankfully none of the samples taken included the strain of E.coli that produces toxins capable of leading to illnesses.

Although water parks and residential pools were not sampled, of those included in the study, the worst offenders for the presence of bacteria associated with fecal matter were municipal pools and those frequented by many children.

Suggestions to help protect swimmer’s health, in addition to proper pool maintenance, include having people shower before getting in the pool, requesting those with illnesses, like diarrhea, stay out of the pool, taking a bathroom break every hour and washing one’s hands after using the restroom or changing diapers.

If you aren’t familiar with the reference being made at the beginning of this post to the 1980 film “Caddyshack,” here’s the scene:

(H/T: Atlantic Wire)

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Featured image via Shutterstock.com.

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(Credit: CBN)

Robertson asked his co-host what she thought, to which she replied, “I think forgiveness can be one of the most difficult things in the whole wide world to do, and especially when it comes to a spouse, because that’s one of the ultimate betrayals.”

(Credit: CBN)

Robertson then interjected, saying, “Here’s the secret,” looked into the camera, and said (in a slightly exasperated tone), “Stop. Talking. About. The. Cheating. He cheated on you. Well, he’s a man, okay.”

(Credit: CBN)

Among the other tips and thoughts Robertson presented:

• “Recognize, also, like it or not, males have a tendency to wander a little bit, and what you want to do is make a home so wonderful that he doesn’t want to wander.”
• Focus on why you married him in the first place.
• Does he provide food, shelter, clothing? Is he nice to the children and does he do things with them?
• “Is he handsome?”
• Fall in love with him all over again.
• Touch his face, hold his hand, look into his eyes.
• Don’t focus on what makes you mad, just the good stuff.
• Give him honor.
• Keep in mind that there’s a lot of pornography out there, to which men are enticed every day.

Robertson ended his monologue by suggesting, “Thank God you have a marriage that is together, that you live in America, and that good things are happening. Okay, next question.”

This Q&A starts at the 49:20 mark in the below episode:

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Featured image CBN.

Read more stories from TheBlaze

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(Image: Shutterstock.com)

NEW YORK (TheBlaze/AP) — Scientists announced Wednesday recovering stem cells from cloned human embryos, a longstanding goal that could lead to new treatments for such illnesses as Parkinson’s disease and diabetes. But even with some of the potential health benefits, many are condemning the research as unethical, as it has been deemed by some in the past.

Stem cells can turn into any cell of the body, so scientists are interested in using them to create tissue for treating disease. Transplanting brain tissue might treat Parkinson’s disorder, for example, and pancreatic tissue might be used for diabetes.

But transplants run the risk of rejection, so more than a decade ago, researchers proposed a way around that: Create tissue from stem cells that bear the patient’s own DNA, obtained with a process called therapeutic cloning.

If DNA from a patient is put into a human egg, which is then grown into an early embryo, the stem cells from that embryo would provide a virtual genetic match. So in theory, tissues created from them would not be rejected by the patient.

That idea was met with some ethical objections because harvesting the stem cells involved destroying human embryos.

“It’s a grave concern that some scientists are still pursuing human cloning, a technology that will open the door to human engineering and a brave – but highly dangerous – new world. Human cloning by this technique requires the specific creation of a new individual, albeit cloned, at the embryo stage, using human eggs and human tissue cells,” Life News wrote. “Modern science has passed this by, especially in regards to stem cells. Creating and destroying cloned human embryos to extract their embryonic stem cells is unethical, and the entire faulty concept of using the cloning technique has been superseded by uncontroversial techniques.”

“Creating new human lives in the laboratory solely to destroy them is an abuse denounced even by many who do not share the Catholic Church’s convictions on human life,” Cardinal Seán O’Malley, OFM Cap., of Boston said in a statement. ”Also, this means of making embryos for research will be taken up by those who want to produce cloned children as ‘copies’ of other people. Whether used for one purpose or the other, human cloning treats human beings as products, manufactured to order to suit other people’s wishes. It is inconsistent with our moral responsibility to treat each member of the human family as a unique gift of God, as a person with his or her own inherent dignity. A technical advance in human cloning is not progress for humanity but its opposite.”

The Rev. Tad Pacholczyk, director of education for National Catholic Bioethics Center, an independent think tank in Philadelphia, reiterated his opposition to embryo cloning, calling the approach unethical.

“It involves the decision to utilize early human beings as repositories for obtaining desired cells,” he said. “You’re creating them only to destroy them.”

Scientists have tried to get stem cells from cloned human embryos for about a decade, but they’ve failed. Generally, that’s because the embryos stopped developing before producing the cells. In 2004, a South Korean scientist claimed to have gotten stem cells from cloned human embryos, but that turned out to be a fraud.

In Wednesday’s edition of the journal Cell, however, scientists in Oregon report harvesting stem cells from six embryos created from donated eggs. Two embryos had been given DNA from skin cells of a child with a genetic disorder, and the others had DNA from fetal skin cells.

Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon Health & Science University, who led the research, said the success came not from a single technical innovation, but from revising a series of steps in the process. He noted it had taken six years to reach the goal after doing it with monkey embryos.

Mitalipov also said that based on monkey work, he believes human embryos made with the technique could not develop into cloned babies, and he has no interest in trying to do that. Scientists have cloned more than a dozen kinds of mammals, starting with Dolly the sheep.

The new work was financed by the university and the Leducq Foundation in Paris.

Dr. George Daley, a stem cell expert at Children’s Hospital Boston who didn’t participate in the work, called the new results “one landmark step in a very long journey” toward creating DNA-matched transplant tissue.

Now, Daley said, scientists must compare the embryo-cloning approach with another technology that reprograms blood or skin cells directly into substitutes for embryonic stem cells. This reprogramming approach is technically simpler and doesn’t involve embryos or require the donation of human eggs, and it was widely acclaimed when it was reported in 2007. Its Japanese developer shared a Nobel Prize last year.

But these substitute cells show some molecular differences compared to embryonic ones, which has led to questions about whether they can safely be used for treating patients. So it’s essential to compare the cells from the two methods, Daley said.

The new results mean “we have another tool,” he said. “We have to learn more about this tool.”

Daley said he believed scientists will prefer using the reprogramming approach unless it can be proven “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that embryo cloning produces better cells for treating patients.

Mitalipov said he believed his technique would present a particular advantage for treating patients with a certain type of rare diseases. These are caused by mutations in genes of the mitochondria, the power plants of cells. He noted his technique, unlike the cell-reprogramming approach, would supply tissue with new mitochondrial genes that could replace defective ones. Those new genes would come from the egg.

Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society in Berkeley, Calif., said she was glad that Mitalipov doubted the embryos could be used to clone babies. She said the report still provides a good opportunity for the federal government to ban the use of cloning for reproduction.

Featured image via Oregon Health & Science University.

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“Harris County authorities and the Texas Department of State Health Services are investigating a local doctor accused Wednesday by an anti-abortion group of performing late-term abortions in 2011,” the Houston Chronicle reports.

The abortionist, Douglas Karpen, has been accused by three former staffers, Deborah Edge, Gigi Aguliar, and Krystal Rodriguez, of performing several illegal abortions. Their testimony, and alleged photographic evidence, was brought to light by Operation Rescue, a pro-life watchdog.

There’s a fourth informant working with Operation Rescue, filing an affidavit about her experiences, but she prefers to remain anonymous.

“We have several people looking into the allegations,” said Sara Marie Kinney, a spokeswoman for the Harris County District Attorney’s Office.

DSHS spokeswoman Carrie Williams said in an email that the agency, which monitors Texas abortion facilities, is “aware of the allegations, and we are investigating.”

“This is a very high priority for us,” she said.

DSHS became aware of the allegations after Operation Rescue released a report containing the staffers’ testimony and photos. The cellphone photos the staffers provided the pro-life group with seem to back up their gruesome claims.

“The photos show babies that are huge, with gashes in their necks, indicating that these babies were likely born alive, then killed, just as Kermit Gosnell did at his ‘House of Horrors’ clinic in Philadelphia,” said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman.

“In fact, there are numerous similarities between Karpen and the Gosnell case, including the disregarding of complaints by the authorities that allowed both men to continue their illegal operations,” he added.

The photos are extremely gruesome, entirely sickening, and graphic.  If you have the stomach for it, LifeSiteNews.com has copies of them here. But be warned.

Here’s a reported video of Karpen’s former staffers:

“In a week when serial murderer Kermit Gosnell was found guilty of killing babies, I read with disgust about the allegations of Houston-based abortionist Douglas Karpen performing illegal late-term abortions surrounded by appalling sanitary conditions in his clinic,” Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, mindful of Gosnell’s “house of horrors,” said in a statement.

“The Harris County authorities should perform a full-scale investigation and take action against those who broke state law,” the statement adds.

The possibility that Texas may have its own Gosnell has the Texas Medical Board on alert.

Leigh Hopper, a spokeswoman for the group, said the reports on Karpen’s three clinics “raises concerns, for certain.

However, she adds, Karpen’s license is “free and clear currently.”

“Hopper declined to say whether there have been complaints lodged against Karpen; such information is not available to the public,” the Houston Chronicle notes.

“But in its online post, Operation Rescue links to a February letter that appears to show the medical board dismissing an investigation into Karpen,” the report adds.

Hopper offered a possible explanation: It “doesn’t look fake to me, and it reads like the sort of letter TMB sends out routinely.”

–

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A Birmingham, U.K., family believes their 8-year-old daughter was murdered while on a trip abroad to India by physicians wishing to harvest her organs.

The Birmingham Mail reported that Gurkiren Kaur Loyal was brought to a clinic in Punjab to be treated for dehydration. Her mother, Amrit Kaur Loyal, said the girl was given an injection and “within a split-second Gurkiren’s head flipped back, her eyes rolled in her head, and the color completely drained from her.”

“I knew they had killed her on the spot,” Amrit said, according to the Mail. “I knew my innocent child had been murdered.”

The child was transported to a nearby hospital but the Mail reported that she could not be resuscitated.

The family was then told a post-mortem examination in India was required before the body could be brought back to the UK. The grieving mother insisted on a respectful autopsy, but said when she returned to the mortuary, the scene showed her daughter’s blood-stained clothes, ripped near an incinerator.

“It was medieval.”

Things got worse when they received the girl’s body back in the UK with plans to have it examined by a coroner, hoping to learn what really happened to their daughter.

“He said it was impossible to come to a conclusion for the cause of death,” Amrit told the Mail. “They had nothing to work from, she had no organs in her body for them to take samples.”

All that was left of her internal organs were her eyes, according to the report.

A family friend, Coun Kooner, said he believes the girl was killed so her organs could be harvested and sold.

In a separate article, the Birmingham Mail reported that local politicians have launched a campaign to figure out what happened to Gurkiren and prevent it from happening to travelers in the future.

This story has been updated to fix a typo. 

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Two girls pose for a picture with a cardboard cut-out of US President Barack Obama in a tent defending ‘Obamacare’ at a street fair in Charlotte, North Carolina, September 3, 2012. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

As the “IRS Inquisition” scandal unfolds, some are pointing out that the government agency is on the verge of not only having purview over your finances, but your health care as well.

Rush Limbaugh has theorized that this is one of the the reasons the administration and traditionally left-leaning members of the media have denounced the scandal so strongly.  The IRS must be seen to have made a mistake and been set right, so it can proceed at full strength for the implementation of “Obamacare.”

Stuart Varney appeared on Fox News this morning to discuss just how much the IRS will have control over with the complete implementation of the president’s health care overhaul.

“The IRS will be the policing agent for Obamacare,” Varney said.  “You’re going to have to, on your next tax return, you’re going to have to report to the IRS personal health care information…Do you trust the IRS with your personal health care information?”

Host Martha MacCullum continued: “It’s such a dangerous and slippery slope when [their] credibility is brought into question, because they of course know what you make…And now they are supposed to marry that information…with whether you are eligible for a healthcare subsidy.  And that raises questions, too, because you’ve got to keep them posted on every change that may lap in our employment picture.”

Varney interrupted to say that’s not even the full picture.

“Your doctor is going to put on file electronically your entire medical history,” he said.  “At the same time, on a parallel path, the IRS wants to know about your health insurance.  There is no wall between those two areas of information.  And bearing in mind what they have done politically there is no trust that they won’t jump that wall and go into your personal medical history….And that’s where the lack of trust comes in.”

MacCallum noted that, when the bill was being passed, we were repeatedly assured that privacy and having your records online wouldn’t be an issue.

“But people have been scanning documents for catch words, you wonder what they’re going to scan in terms of health care and health records. It’s a legitimate question given all of this,” she concluded.

Varney ended his remarks by saying the way things are heading now, the scandal may delay the implementation of Obamacare.

And those who have been targeted by the IRS are, understandably, among the most concerned.

Charles Smith, the founder and chairman of the Citizen’s Awareness Project, told TheBlaze: “It’s concerning to me that we will be handing more information to the government.”

The Citizen’s Awareness Project not only received “invasive” questionnaires regarding its application, but its information was illegally disclosed to the non-profit news organization ProPublica last year.

ThinkProgress reacted to the Fox News segment barely an hour it was posted, seemingly frantic that the reputation of the IRS may be tarnished.

“In reality, there is no evidence that the impropriety in the IRS office responsible for granting tax-exempt status to social welfare groups has bled over into other parts of the agency,” they wrote.

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• See Some of the Outrageous Requests the IRS Made to Tea Party Groups
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• Local News Reporter: IRS Started ‘Hammering’ Me After Tough Obama Interview

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(Photo: Shutterstock.com)

WASHINGTON (AP) — States should cut their threshold for drunken driving by nearly half-from .08 blood alcohol level to 0.05-matching a standard that has substantially reduced highway deaths in other countries, a U.S. safety board recommends. That’s about one drink for a woman weighing less than 120 lbs., two for a 160 lb. man.

More than 100 countries have adopted the .05 alcohol content standard or lower, according to a report by the board’s staff. In Europe, the share of traffic deaths attributable to drunken driving was reduced by more than half within 10 years after the standard was dropped, the report said.

NTSB officials said it wasn’t their intention to prevent drivers from having a glass of wine with dinner, but they acknowledged that under a threshold as low as .05 the safest thing for people who have only one or two drinks is not to drive at all.

Watch NTSB’s video with statistics about drunk driving:

A drink is defined as 12 ounces of beer, four ounces of wine, or one ounce of 80-proof alcohol.

Alcohol concentration levels as low as .01 have been associated with driving-related performance impairment, and levels as low as .05 have been associated with significantly increased risk of fatal crashes, the board said.

New approaches are needed to combat drunken driving, which claims the lives of about a third of the more than 30,000 people killed each year on U.S highways – a level of carnage that that has remained stubbornly consistent for the past decade and a half, the board said.

“Our goal is to get to zero deaths because each alcohol-impaired death is preventable,” NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman said. “Alcohol-impaired deaths are not accidents, they are crimes. They can and should be prevented. The tools exist. What is needed is the will.”

An alcohol concentration threshold of .05 is likely to meet strong resistance from states, said Jonathan Adkins, an official with the Governors Highway Safety Association, which represents state highway safety offices.

“It was very difficult to get .08 in most states so lowering it again won’t be popular,” Adkins said. “The focus in the states is on high (blood alcohol content) offenders as well as repeat offenders. We expect industry will also be very vocal about keeping the limit at .08.”

Even safety groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and AAA declined Tuesday to endorse NTSB’s call for a .05 threshold. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which sets national safety policy, stopped also short of endorsing the board’s recommendation.

“NHTSA is always interested in reviewing new approaches that could reduce the number of drunk drivers on the road, and will work with any state that chooses to implement a .05 BAC law to gather further information on that approach,” the safety administration said in a statement.

The board recommended NHTSA established “incentive grants” designed to encourage states to adopt the lower threshold.

A study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has estimated that 7,082 deaths would have been prevented in 2010 if all drivers on the road had blood alcohol content below .08 percent.

The lower threshold was one of nearly 20 recommendations made by the board, including that states adopt measures to ensure more widespread use of use of alcohol ignition interlock devices. Those require a driver to breathe into a tube, much like the breathalyzers police ask suspected drunken drivers to use.

The board has previously recommended states require all convicted drunken drivers install the interlock devices in their vehicles as a condition to resume driving. Currently, 17 states and two California counties require all convicted drivers use the devices.

However, only about a quarter of drivers ordered to use the devices actually end up doing so, the board said. Drivers use a variety of ways to evade using the devices, including claiming they won’t drive at all or don’t own a vehicle and therefore don’t need the devices, the board said.

The board recommended the safety administration develop a program to encourage states to ensure all convicted drivers actually use the devices. The board also recommended that all suspected drunken drivers whose licenses are confiscated by police be required to install interlocks as a condition of getting their licenses reinstated even though they haven’t yet been convicted of a crime.

Courts usually require drivers to pay for the devices, which cost about $50 to $100 to buy plus a $50 a month fee to operate, staff said.

The board has previously called on the safety administration and the auto industry to step up their research into technology for use in all vehicles that can detect whether a driver has elevated blood alcohol without the driver breathing into a tube or taking any other action. Drivers with elevated levels would be unable to start their cars.

But the technology is still years away.

Studies show more than 4 million people a year in the U.S. drive while intoxicated, but about half of the intoxicated drivers stopped by police escape detection, the NTSB report said. The board also recommended expanded use of passive alcohol devices by police. The devices are often contained in real flash lights or shaped to look like a cellphone that officers wear on their shirt pockets or belts. If an officer points the flashlight at a driver or the cellphone-like device comes in close proximity to an intoxicated driver, the devices will alert police who may not have any other reason to suspect drunken driving.

The use of the devices currently is very limited, the report said.

Dramatic progress was made in the 1980s through the mid-1990s after the minimum drinking age was raised to 21 and the legally-allowable maximum level of drivers’ blood alcohol content was lowered to .08, the report said. Today, drunken driving claims nearly 10,000 lives a year, down from 21,000 in 1982. At that time, alcohol-related fatalities accounted for 48 percent of highway deaths.

The board made its recommendations on the 25th anniversary of one of the nation’s deadliest drunken driving accidents in Carrollton, Ky. A drunk driver drove his pickup on the wrong side of a highway, collided with a bus and killed 27 people, 24 of them children. The children were part of a church youth group on their way home after spending the day at an amusement park.

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The reporter wondered if Reid supported Mike Lee’s proposed bill that would limit late-term abortions in the District of Columbia. (There are currently no limits on abortion in the nation’s capital.)

Image: YouTube

The Senator from Nevada did not give a direct answer to the question. Instead, he took the opportunity to place the blame for Gosnell’s atrocities squarely on those who, he says, are responsible for the house of horrors in Philadelphia: anti-abortion advocates.

“Do you support Senator Lee’s bill or do you oppose that?” the Weekly Standard reporter asked.

“Listen,” Sen. Reid responded, “and I know you’re all trying to… What led to the convictions of murder for this man is that people have been pushed back into these holes to do something that’s legal.”

Reid’s rambling (non) answer to the question continued:

I think all this picketing of these clinics, throwing chemicals into them so you can’t use them…you can’t get the chemicals out…all these restrictive laws…the law of the land now is what the Supreme Court has said. And I think to keep pushing these clinics back to situations where they wind up like this is wrong.

Reid, who has stated in the past to be “pro-life,” seemed to take a strong pro-abortion stance in his concluding remarks on the subject.

I think that no matter how you stand on the issue of abortion, people who make that decision, should do it and not be worried about infections and some butcher like this doing the bad things he did. It should be in a place that’s clean and sterile and have people that know what they’re doing and care about what they do.

Watch Reid respond to the question here:

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(H/T: The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack).

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Raymond Walters (Photo: University of Arkansas)

It’s graduation season and while most college grads in their early twenties grasp tightly onto their single major with perhaps a minor or two, an 18-year-old University of Arkansas student received his bachelor of science for triple majoring in mathematics, physics and economics.

But his impressive degrees and age aren’t all that makes Raymond Walter unique. Walter’s intense love of learning has helped him overcome some of the physical challenges that have been sent his way as he has a severe form of muscular dystrophy. Walter plans to go on to complete double doctoral degree in math and physics at UA as well.

“I really do just love learning,” Walter said, according to the university press release. “I like to learn as much as I can. I am willing to work and I want to work and learn. There’s an element of ability, for sure, but it wouldn’t mean much at all if I didn’t work as much as I do.”

Walter is intensely aware the severity of his condition. He said this is, in part, why he is trying to accomplish so much.

“I don’t anticipate living as long as usual,” Walter, who graduated high school at at 14, said. “In some respects, there is a lot of pressure to get as much done as I can. I don’t waste time.”

Symptoms of Duchenne muscular dystrophy include muscle degeneration, which can result in the loss of the ability to walk by age 12, and learning disabilities. Walter clearly doesn’t suffer from the latter of these but he does use a motorized wheelchair. As the disease progresses, the National Institute of Health states that trouble breathing and heart disease can begin as early as age 20.

Walter’s father, Hal, who is his primary caregiver and lived on the university campus with his son, said he works incessantly to achieve his goals.

“He goes to bed after midnight, every night,” Hal Walter said, according to the press release. “He doesn’t watch movies. He doesn’t play video games. He sits at his computer with two desks worth of books open for 12 to 14 hours a day. He works constantly.”

The Vice Provost for Student Affairs and Dean of Students Danny Pugh called Hal Walter his hero.

“He and his family have changed their entire life to support Ray’s academic pursuits, including his living and caring for Ray on our campus and returning to their farm every weekend to pack in five days of work in two.”

The family’s official homestead is three hours away from campus (one way) and the men traveled home each weekend for a visit.

In his graduate studies, Walter was honored with a Distinguished Doctoral Fellow award from the university, which amounts to at least $30,000 each year for up to four years, and won what the university calls a “highly competitive” $30,000 fellowship from the National Science Foundation.

(H/T: NeatORama)

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She calls it “My Medical Choice.”

Actress Angelina Jolie is now revealing her major decision to undergo a double mastectomy.

Jolie explained her decision in an op-ed for The New York Times:

MY MOTHER fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was.

We often speak of “Mommy’s mommy,” and I find myself trying to explain the illness that took her away from us. They have asked if the same could happen to me. I have always told them not to worry, but the truth is I carry a “faulty” gene, BRCA1, which sharply increases my risk of developing breast cancer and ovarian cancer.

Getty

The numbers for Jolie were pretty ominous. She explains that doctors put her risk of breast cancer at 87 percent.  Ovarian cancer – 50 percent:

Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy. I started with the breasts, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex.

On April 27, I finished the three months of medical procedures that the mastectomies involved. During that time I have been able to keep this private and to carry on with my work.

Getty

The rest of Jolie’s announcement is a balance of brave explanation of surgical detail and simple, unsentimental inspiration.  Read it here.

Update:

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Via The Washington Times:

Among their goals: Bans on assault-style weapons; mandatory background checks for all; required waiting periods for all gun buys; prohibitions on ammunition purchases and high-capacity magazines; and new laws for firearm storage, NBC said.

“We have to have a collectively louder voice,” said Danielle Laraque, the chairwoman of the pediatrics department at Maimonides Infants and Children’s Hospital in Brooklyn, NBC reported. “What we need is a call to action, to really look at how we can change public policy that is not affected by data.”

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Obamacare supporters react to the U.S. Supreme Court decision to uphold President Obama’s health care law, on June 28, 2012 in Washington, DC. (Photo: Getty Images)

Opponents of President Obama’s health care overhaul have long warned about the cost of the change, both on a national and personal level.  But now, even the Associated Press is acknowledging that some of the most ill in our society– whom many thought would now have “free” or dramatically cheaper coverage– may be hit the hardest.

“Cancer patients could face high costs for medications under President Barack Obama’s health care law, industry analysts and advocates warn,” begins an Associated Press article published Monday morning.

The article details some of the enormous potential costs:

To try to keep premiums low, some states are allowing insurers to charge patients a hefty share of the cost for expensive medications used to treat cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and other life-altering chronic diseases.

Such “specialty drugs” can cost thousands of dollars a month, and in California, patients would pay up to 30 percent of the cost. For one widely used cancer drug, Gleevec, the patient could pay more than $2,000 for a month’s supply, says the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

[...]

A spokesman for Covered California said state officials are trying to balance between two conflicting priorities: comprehensive coverage and affordable premiums.

“We are trying to keep the insurance affordable across the board,” said Dana Howard, the group’s spokesman. “This is just part of trying to manage the overall risk of the pool.”  [Emphasis added]

Dan Mendelson, the president of a data analysis firm catering to the health care industry and government called Avalere Health, has conducted research indicating that 1 in 4 cancer patients walk away from the pharmacy “empty handed” when faced with a bill of $500 or more — and presumably that number would only rise if the patient was faced with a bill of $2,000 a month.

The real-world result in this case, then, would mean more expensive coverage and dramatically less care.

But since heath care law gives states broad leeway to states to tailor benefits, costs will vary state-to-state.  And whatever combination the states choose — higher costs for the average person to help pay for the sick, or higher costs for the sick to keep the cost lower for the average household — it’s very possible the administration will blame the states for the shortcomings, regardless of the position it put them in.

A Senate aide delivers federal regulations dealing with the Affordable Care Act, printed out and bound in red tape, for a debate on the budget in the Senate at the Capitol in Washington, Friday, March 22, 2013.

Though the Associated Press acknowledges that insurers are forecasting double-digit premium increases for individual policies, it is also quick to note that the Obama administration “says the industry warnings are overblown.”

California Covered’s Dana Howard further argued that consumers will be protected because the law limits total out-of-pocket costs – the deductibles and copayments that policy holders are responsible for, apart from monthly premiums. In California, the annual out-of-pocket limit for an individual is $6,400, although it can be as low as $2,250 for low-income people.

But that’s still a lot of money, and if you are a smoker, for instance, insurers are allowed to charge you up to 50 percent higher premiums.  For a 55-year-old smoker, the penalty could reach nearly $4,250 a year, on top of the standard premium

“The intent of the Affordable Care Act is to make sure that all Americans have access to quality, affordable health care,” Brian Rosen, a senior vice president of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, said. He adds that there is a danger that the insurance marketplaces “will discriminate against the patients with the highest medical need. That would completely undermine the spirit of the ACA.”

Meanwhile, leukemia patient Lisa Lusk worries about what will happen to her. A nursing assistant who lives near Fresno, Lusk is hoping to return to work in the next few months. When that happens, she expects to lose emergency coverage she’s now getting through the state. And the medication Lusk takes to manage her chronic form of the disease costs more than $5,000 a month.

“I’m scared that when I get a job my copay may be more than $1,500 a month,” said Lusk. “I’ll just be working to pay for my medications.”

​The Associated Press contributed to this report.

–

Related:

• Mitch McConnell’s Office Sends Out Photo of 20,000 Pages of ‘Obamacare’ Regulations Printed and Stacked High
• President Obama: You’re Already Benefiting From Obamacare, ‘You Just May Not Know It’
• TheBlaze Blog: Tweet of the day: Democrats celebrate ‘free’ health care
• TheBlaze Blog: Obamacare: Making health care more expensive, less productive

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A TED Sydney video captured these faces after trying a variety of new foods and set the video on slow motion.

Anchovies.

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

Vegemite.

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

Orange.

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

Olive.

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

Yogurt.

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

Now watch all the reactions in slow motion:

(H/T: io9)

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A 105-year-old Texas woman has earned a place in almost all headlines by revealing the most unlikely secret to her long life.

Strangely, her key to longevity is bacon. Yes, you read it right; 105-year-old Pearl Cantrell loves to eat bacon and feasts on it almost every day. Her story, for sure, will be a subject of research for most health scientists.

Pearl Cantrell, who’s mostly referred to as the ’105-year-old bacon woman’, said in an interview with a local NBC station, “I love bacon and I eat it everyday. I don’t feel as old as I am, that’s all I can say.”

Resident of Central Texas, Cantrell, a mother of seven, has outlived three of her kids, as well as her husband. Her recent 105^th birthday bash was a three-day affair that included more than 200 guests.

WATCH:

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There might be benefits if parents “clean” baby’s pacifier with their own mouth instead of water, according to a new study. (Photo: Shutterstock.com)

For a parent, putting a pacifier into one’s own mouth before popping it into baby’s mouth next might not be the most appetizing thought, but this one action that a recent study says might help prevent allergies in the child. 

The study led by Swedish researchers published in the journal Pediatrics states that the oral microbes transferred from the parent to the child via pacifiers seem to protect against some allergy development. 

“Early establishment of a complex oral microflora might promote healthy maturation of the immune system, thereby counteracting allergy development,” University of Gothenburg professor Agnes Wold, who led the study, said in a statement.

Watch KSWB’s report on the study:

The study comes just as the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention released a report revealing that the prevalence of food and skin allergies among those under 18 years of age increased from 1997 to 2011. 

(Image: CDC/NCHS, Health Data Interactive, National Health Interview Survey)

Nearly 200 infants were examined for allergies and sensitivities at 18 months and 36 months in the study, with parents recording whether or not they used a pacifier and whether or not they cleaned it. One of these “cleaning” was methods the use of the parents own saliva. 

The allergies this practice was found to potentially help protect against were eczema and asthma. They also found white blood cells associated with allergies to be lower in infants whose parents sucked on their pacifiers.

The study couldn’t prove that sucking on the pacifier was the actual mode through which these children became more protected from allergies or not, and did note that children born naturally, as opposed to through a cesarean section, were less likely to see allergies as well. 

The study found that the prevalence of eczema in children born naturally and whose parents sucked pacifiers was 2.5 times lower than those who were delivered by c-section and whose parents did not practice pacifier sucking. 

The study includes that children delivered by c-section might stand the most to gain from parents practicing pacifier sucking as they had some of the benefits of microbe exposure from the birthing experience. 

Some parents might be concerned about passing a respiratory infection onto children, but the study authors found that there was no higher rate of infection in children of parents who sucked on their pacifiers. 

In fact, the study authors believe that transferring of more complex microbial life though the practice might actually serve to “build up resistance to colonization” of more pathogenic bacteria. 

Some of the study’s findings are completely contrary to what is suggested by others regarding child care. The New York Times noted a campaign by the New York City Health Department in February which advised parents not to share “utensils or bites of food with your baby,” and expressly said to “use water, not your mouth, to clean off a pacifier.”

But the Times reported Dr. Joel Berg, president of the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry, saying ultimately “saliva is your friend.”

“I think, like any new study, this is going to be challenged and questioned,” Berg told the Times. “But what it points out pretty clearly is that we are yet to fully discover the many and varied benefits of saliva.”

HealthDay News reported Dr. Ron Ferdman, a pediatric allergist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, cautioning that the study did have a relatively small sample size and that it focused only on Swedish babies. This is why the study authors too suggest the need for future studies to seek to establish whether this practice pacifier sucking is a safe and effective for protecting against some allergies, as their study seems to suggest. 

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Thanks to the Obama administration, these offices are now the driving force behind “culturally tailored” government care, including a new $40 million program to help prevent strokes among minority populations.

Judicial Watch reports:

In the last few years the administration has doled out north of $100 million to conquer the issue by funding initiatives that help lower chronic diseases—such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease—“disproportionately seen among poor and minority populations.” This includes a federal task force to “reduce racial and ethnic asthma disparities,” and an innovative state obesity map that reveals blacks, the poor and uneducated are disproportionately obese compared to affluent Caucasians.

Last summer the government spent tens of thousands of dollars to develop a special mobile device application “in different languages and in culturally appropriate contexts” to help “underserved and minority women fight and prevent cancer.” To assure that the app is topnotch, the government offered entrepreneurs money to create it by launching a contest called Reducing Cancer Among Women of Color App Challenge. The winner gets $85,000, second place gets $10,000 and third place $5,000.

This month’s race-based health initiative du jour aims to lower “stroke risk among racial and ethnic minorities in the United States,” according to an announcement that reveals $40 million has been allocated for the cause. Compared to non-Hispanic whites, racial and ethnic minorities such as African-Americans, Hispanics/Latinos, Asian-Americans, and American Indians and Alaska Natives are more likely to experience a stroke and its related disability, according to the announcement from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the nation’s medical research agency.

As Judicial Watch notes, all health issues pretty much disproportionately affect the poor and it doesn’t seem like a government program can really fix this. It does, however, seem likely that the Obama administration will continue pouring millions of dollars into funding said program.  

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Getty Images.

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — Gov. Chris Christie secretly underwent gastric band surgery in February to try to lose weight at the urging of his family, spokesman Michael Drewniak told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

The father of four agreed to the surgery, in which a tube was placed around his stomach to restrict the amount of food he can eat, after turning 50 in September. Christie told The New York Post, which first reported the surgery, that he said he wasn’t motivated by thoughts of running for president.

“I’ve struggled with this issue for 20 years,” he told the newspaper. “For me, this is about turning 50 and looking at my children and wanting to be there for them.”

Christie has never disclosed his weight. But he joked about his size during a February appearance on “The Late Show with David Letterman,” pulling out a doughnut and saying his girth was “fair game” for comedians, who had made fun of his size for years.

Christie was soon angered by comments from a former White House physician who said she worried about him dying in office. The governor said Dr. Connie Mariano should “shut up.”

Days later, on Feb. 16, Christie had the surgery. He said the operation lasted 40 minutes and he was home the same afternoon.

“A week or two ago, I went to a steakhouse and ordered a steak and ate about a third of it and I was full,” he told the Post.

Christie declined to say how much weight he has lost since the surgery.

The Republican governor is running for a second term in November, although his name is often mentioned as a possible presidential candidate.

“I know it sounds crazy to say that running for president is minor, but in the grand scheme of things, it was looking at Mary Pat and the kids and going, `I have to do this for them, even if I don’t give a crap about myself,’” he said.

Gastric band surgery is pitched as a minimally invasive procedure. One version of it is sold under the brand name Lap-Band. Its website says the surgery is appropriate for adults who have failed with more conservative alternatives, such as diet and exercise.

Christie has talked about working with a personal trainer since he first ran for governor four years ago.

The American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery says that about 200,000 people in the U.S. have weight loss surgery each year.

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“Ata” (Image: YouTube screenshot)

Featured in a crowd-funded documentary about extraterrestrials and the advanced energy technology they supposedly possess is a 6-inch humanoid skeleton with what many would describe as alien-like features. People were surprised when Garry Nolan with Stanford University said, after “Sirius” aired in April, that the skeleton was likely human based on its DNA.

Now, Science Magazine is featuring a more detailed analysis from the director of stem cell biology at Stanford University’s School of Medicine in California. The ultimate conclusion from Nolan is that the skeleton “is human, there’s no doubt about it.”

“Sirius,” the documentary led by Steven Greer, dubbed the skeleton Ata because it was found in Chile’s Atacama desert. Nolan heard about the skeleton and offered to filmmakers to give it his scientific look.

Here’s more from Science Magazine regarding the skeleton’s abnormalities and hypothesized age (emphasis added):

Among the apparent abnormalities, Ata sports 10 ribs instead of the usual 12 and a severely misshapen skull. “I asked our neonatal care unit how you would go about analyzing it. Had they seen this kind of syndrome before?” Nolan says. He was directed to pediatric radiologist Ralph Lachman, co-director of the International Skeletal Dysplasia Registry at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California. “He literally wrote the book on pediatric bone disorders,” Nolan says. Lachman was blown away, Nolan recalls: “He said, ‘Wow, this is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.’ “

To study the specimen, Nolan sought clues in Ata’s genome. He initially presumed the specimen was tens or hundreds of thousands of years old—the Atacama Desert may be the driest spot on the planet, so Ata could have been preserved for eons. He consulted experts who had extracted DNA from bones of the Denisovans, an Asian relative of European Stone Age Neandertals. It turned out that their protocols weren’t necessary. “The DNA was modern, abundant, and high quality,” he says, indicating that the specimen is probably a few decades old.

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

Looking at Ata’s mitochondrial DNA, scientists confirmed its heritage as likely being from Chile as its mother was from the west coast of South America.

So, if Ata is of human origin and is only a few decades old, what caused it to have such an alien-like appearance?

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

Looking at the development of the skeleton, Lachman believes Ata’s age was between 6 to 8 years old. This gives them two options about Ata’s bizarre deformities, Nolan said. Either Ata had a severe form of dwarfism or it was really a 22-week-old fetus that had a disease causing it to age rapidly, like progeria, and died before reaching a full-term birth. Looking into both of these possibilities, Nolan didn’t find the genes for either condition.

Science Magazine reported Nolan saying he is researching other genetic mutations and toxins that could have led to such a skeleton.

Getting another opinion, Science reported William Jungers, a paleoanthropologist and anatomist at Stony Brook University Medical Center, saying he thinks Ata was a mummified human fetus or premature stillbirth. Nolan said this explanation wouldn’t account for the unusual rib number and other features.

Still think Ata might be a hoax? Nolan too said that based on his analysis “you just couldn’t fake it … unless you were an alien.”

If you haven’t seen the trailer for the “Sirius” documentary that spurred the story of Ata to go viral, check it out:

(H/T: NeatORama)

–

Related:

• The DNA Test Results of That 6-Inch ‘Humanoid of Unknown Classification’ Are In
• Documentary Trailer Claims to Show ‘Humanoid of Unknown Classification’ That’s Just a Few Inches Tall

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For years, there have been tales of people in the first permanent English settlement in America eating dogs, cats, rats, mice, snakes and shoe leather to stave off starvation. There were also written accounts of settlers eating their own dead, but archaeologists had been skeptical of those stories.

But now, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and archaeologists from Jamestown are announcing the discovery of the bones of a 14-year-old girl that show clear signs that she was cannibalized. Evidence indicates clumsy chops to the body and head of the girl, who appears to have already been dead at the time.

Watch this report from CBS regarding the discovery:

Smithsonian forensic anthropologist Douglas Owsley said the human remains date back to a deadly winter known as the “starving time” in Jamestown from 1609 to 1610. Hundreds died during the period. Scientists have said the settlers likely arrived during the worst drought in 800 years, bringing severe food shortages for the 6,000 people who lived at Jamestown between 1607 and 1625.

The historical record is chilling. Early Jamestown colony leader George Percy wrote of a “world of miseries,” that included digging up corpses from their graves to eat when there was nothing else. “Nothing was spared to maintain life,” he wrote.

TheBlaze’s Meredith Jessup on TheBlaze Blog delves into other reasons that might have contributed to conditions that led some to resort to cannibalism.

Here are pictures showing what the archaeologists believe to be evidence of cannibalism:

In one case, a man killed, “salted,” and began eating his pregnant wife. Both Percy and Capt. John Smith, the colony’s most famous leader, documented the account in their writings. The man was later executed.

“One amongst the rest did kill his wife, powdered her, and had eaten part of her before it was known, for which he was executed, as he well deserved,” Smith wrote. “Now whether she was better roasted, boiled or carbonado’d (barbecued), I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of.”

Archaeologists at Jamestown and Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia were somewhat skeptical of the stories of cannibalism in the past because there was no solid proof, until now.

“Historians have questioned, well did it happen or not happen?” Owsley said. “And this is very convincing evidence that it did.”

Owsley has been working with William Kelso, the chief archaeologist at Jamestown, since their first burial discovery in 1996.

The remains of the 14-year-old girl, named “Jane” by researchers, were discovered in the summer of 2012 and mark the fourth set of human remains uncovered at Jamestown outside of graves. Her remains were found in a cellar at the site that had been filled with trash, including bones of horses and other animals consumed in desperation, according to archaeologists.

The discovery detracts from the happier mythology of John Smith and Pocahontas that many associate with Jamestown. The vice president of research at nearby Colonial Williamsburg, which oversees excavations of the original Jamestown site, said visitors will have a fuller view of a terrible time in early American history.

“I think we are better served by understanding history, warts and all, because I think it gives us a better understanding of who we are as a people,” James Horn said.

Owsley, who has also done forensic analysis for police investigations, examined the girl’s remains and how the body had been dismembered, including chops to the front and back of the head. The girl was likely already dead at the time. There was a cultural stigma against killing someone for food.

But it was clear to Owsley immediately that there were signs of cannibalism.

“This does represent a clear case of dismemberment of the body and removing of tissues for consumption,” he said.

It was the work of someone not skilled at butchering, Owsley said, indicating a sense of desperation.

The bones show a bizarre attempt to open the skull, he said. Animal brains and facial tissue were desirable meat in the 17th century.

The archaeologists are publishing their findings in a new book but decided against waiting to announce the discovery.

The human skull will be placed on display at Jamestown, and a sign will warn visitors of the room’s content. At the Smithsonian, curators will display a computer-generated reconstruction of the girl’s face in an exhibit about life at Jamestown.

Owsley said archaeology is helping to fill in details from a time when few records were kept – details that won’t likely be found in history books.

Kelso, whose archaeology team discovered the bones, said the girl’s bones will be displayed to help tell a story, not to be a spectacle. Through the remains, scientists traced her likely origin to the coast of Southern England.

“We found her in a trash dump, unceremoniously trashed and cannibalized, and now her story can be told,” Kelso said. “People will be able to empathize with the time and history and think to themselves, as I do: What would I do to stay alive?”

Watch Kelso describe the discovery in Historic Jamestowne’s official video:

At Jamestown, officials removed a large tarp covering the site where the remains were found for visitors to see. Tourists were told Wednesday of the discovery.

“Oh, wow,” said Kim Reyes, who was on a field trip escorting fourth grade students from Alexandria, Va. “We all know the harsh conditions they were here in, but I didn’t think it was that bad.”

Pam Nagle’s mouth dropped when she heard the announcement. The Charlottesville, Va., resident was visiting Jamestown with her children, ages 7 and 10, and her in-laws. Nagle said she had never heard any mention of cannibalism at Jamestown before.

“I was really curious whether it was pre- or post-mortem. I was really glad he said post-mortem,” she said. “There was a level of desperation, but maybe perhaps it wasn’t as severe as it could’ve been.”

—

Associated Press Writer Brock Vergakis in Jamestown, Va., contributed to this report.

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Carmen Blandin Tarleton of Thetford had face transplant surgery at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital in February and spoke publicly for the first time at a news conference at the hospital Wednesday.

“I’m now in a better place, mentally and emotionally, than I ever could have imagined six years ago,” Tarleton said. “I want to share my experience with others, so they may find that strength inside themselves to escape their own pain.”

In 2007, the 44-year-old mother of two was attacked by her now ex-husband Herbert Rodgers, who believed she was seeing another man. Police say he went to the house looking for that man, then went into a fury directed toward Tarleton, striking her with a bat and pouring lye from a squeeze bottle onto her face.

When police arrived, Tarleton was trying to crawl to a shower to wash away the chemical. It had already distorted her face.

In 2009, Rodgers pleaded guilty to maiming Tarleton in exchange for a prison sentence of at least 30 years.

The hospital said that during the face transplant surgery, more than 30 surgeons, anesthesiologists and nurses worked for more than 15 hours to replace her skin, muscles, tendons and nerves.

The face donor was a Williamstown, Mass., woman, Cheryl Denelli Righter, who died of a sudden stroke, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Righter’s daughter, Marinda, told Tarleton on Wednesday that she looked beautiful, adding she was certain her mother had somehow picked Tarleton. “They are both mothers, they are both survivors, they are both beacons of light,” she said.

Righter said that after meeting Tarleton for the first time Tuesday, she felt overjoyed for the first time in a long time.

“I get to feel my mother’s skin again, I get to see my mother’s freckles, and through you, I get to see my mother live on,” she said. “This is truly a blessing.”

Tarleton is legally blind and read her remarks from a tablet. She thanked Righter’s family for what she called “a tremendous gift” that’s greatly alleviated the physical pain she’d felt daily.

Tarleton referred to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing and said the city is “facing the challenges of pain and forgiveness.”

“There is a lot to learn and take from horrific events that happen,” Tarleton said. “I want others to know that they need not give up on feeling (like) themselves when tragedy strikes, but instead they can make a choice to find the good and allow that to help them heal.”

Watch the doctor, daughter of the face donor’s mother and Tarleton speak in a press conference about the transplant:

—

Associated Press writer Jay Lindsay contributed to this report.

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Hannah Warren has been unable to breathe, eat, drink or swallow on her own since she was born in South Korea in 2010. Until the operation at a central Illinois hospital, she had spent her entire life in a hospital in Seoul. Doctors there told her parents there was no hope and they expected her to die.

The stem cells came from Hannah’s bone marrow, extracted with a special needle inserted into her hip bone. They were seeded in a lab onto a plastic scaffold, where it took less than a week for them to multiply and create a new windpipe.

About the size of a 3-inch tube of penne pasta, it was implanted April 9 in a nine-hour procedure.

Early signs indicate the windpipe is working, Hannah’s doctors announced Tuesday, although she is still on a ventilator. They believe she will eventually be able to live at home and lead a normal life.

Here is a look at pictures of Hannah throughout the procedure:

“We feel like she’s reborn,” said Hannah’s father, Darryl Warren.

“They hope that she can do everything that a normal child can do but it’s going to take time. This is a brand new road that all of us are on,” he said in a telephone interview. “This is her only chance but she’s got a fantastic one and an unbelievable one.”

She breathes with help from a ventilator but no longer has a tube in her mouth that she’d lived with since shortly after birth, Dr. Mark Holterman said. She’s not yet able to eat normally, but doctors let her have her first taste ever of food – a few licks on a lollipop. Her father said she already has discriminating taste and prefers chocolate Korean lollipops to the American kind.

“I asked her, ‘Is it good?’” he said, “and she immediately nodded her head.”

Warren choked up and his wife, Lee Young-mi, was teary-eyed at a hospital news conference Tuesday. Hannah did not attend because she is still recovering from the surgery. She developed an infection after the operation but now is acting like a healthy 2-year-old, her doctors said.

Warren said he hopes the family can bring Hannah home for the first time in a month or so. Hannah turns 3 in August.

“It’s going to be amazing for us to finally be together as a family of four,” he said. The couple has an older daughter.

Only about one in 50,000 children worldwide are born with the windpipe defect. The stem-cell technique has been used to make other body parts besides windpipes and holds promise for treating other birth defects and childhood diseases, her doctors said.

The operation brought together an Italian surgeon based in Sweden who pioneered the technique, a pediatric surgeon at Children’s Hospital of Illinois in Peoria who met Hannah’s family while on a business trip to South Korea, and Hannah – born to a Newfoundland man and Korean woman who married after he moved to that country to teach English.

Hannah’s parents had read about Dr. Paolo Macchiarini’s success using stem-cell based tracheas but couldn’t afford to pay for the operation at his center, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. So Holterman helped the family arrange to have the procedure at his Peoria hospital, bringing in Macchiarini to lead the operation. Children’s Hospital waived the cost, likely hundreds of thousands of dollars, Holterman said.

Part of OSF Saint Francis Medical Center, the Roman Catholic hospital considers the operation part of their mission to provide charity care, but also views it as a way to champion a type of stem-cell therapy that doesn’t involve human embryos, the surgeons said. The Catholic church opposes using stem cells derived from human embryos in research or treatment.

Macchiarini has been involved in 14 previous windpipe operations using patients’ own stem cells – five using man-made scaffolds like Hannah’s but in adults; and nine using scaffolds made from cadaver windpipes, including one in a 10-year-old British boy.

He said only one patient died, a 30-year-old man from Abingdon, Md., who had the operation in November 2011 to treat late-stage cancer of the windpipe. He died about four months later of uncertain causes, Macchiarini said.

Similar methods have been used to grow bladders, urethras and last year a girl in Sweden got a lab-made vein using her own stem cells and a cadaver vein.

Scientists hope to eventually use the method to create solid organs, including kidneys and livers, said Dr. Anthony Atala, director of Wake Forest University’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine. He said the operation on Hannah Warren “is really showing that the technique is workable.”

Watch this video from CBS in 2011 about a similar technique to grow body parts:

Hannah had breathing difficulties at birth and Korean doctors soon discovered the missing windpipe. They reconfigured her esophagus so that a breathing tube could go down it from her mouth to her lungs. The esophagus normally runs behind the windpipe and carries food to the stomach.

Korean doctors said she couldn’t live long with the tube and told her parents there was nothing more they could do.

Hannah outlived their expectations and has thrived despite the grim prognosis and other abnormalities including an undeveloped voice box that prevented her from speaking. Now that she has a windpipe and can breathe more normally, doctors expect the larynx to grow and function normally. She will work with speech therapists to help her learn to talk.

Holterman said Hannah will likely need a new windpipe in about five years, as she grows.

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Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on how you look at it — this was not the case for the canned veggie of choice in the Chubb household.

“We eat a lot of green beans. We do. We did,” Gloria Chubb of St. Joseph County, Indiana, said, according to WBND. “Nobody wants any more now.”

That’s because they found a toad in their grocery-store brand side dish set to accompany a traditional meal of meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

(Photo: WBND)

“My son put some on his plate and said, ‘What is that?’ I thought maybe it was a piece of moldy bacon or something. Because they have bacon in them sometimes. I had it in my hand because I was trying to figure out what it was. And I took it out of there and it wasn’t moldy bacon. It was a toad with parts of his little legs all in the green beans, other than that he was fully intact,” Chubb said, according to WBND.

Afterward, Chubb said she was “sick, nauseated for two days” and noted that she doesn’t think “I’ll have green beans anytime soon.”

Watch this report on the incident from WZZM:

The frog (or toad, it’s unclear which amphibian it was) and the can in question were taken to the St. Joseph County Health Department for inspection, which will then transfer it to the Indiana State Department of Health.

What likely happened, according to St. Joseph County Health Department’s Rita Hooten is that the green beans were picked from the field, along with the toad, which ended up making its way through all the processing at a Wisconsin plant.

In a fast-moving processing plant, the amphibian was missed during inspections.

“I think they should come up with a better way of inspecting and canning vegetables,” Chubb said. “I mean anything can happen you know but a whole frog?”

The grocery store Meijer, where the green beans were purchased, said in a statement they “sincerely regret this customer’s experience, and we are in the process of investigating the incident.”

(H/T: Gawker, WTSP)

Featured image via Shutterstock.com. 

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–

UPDATE TO THIS STORY: Calif. Parents Whose Baby Was Seized by Police Are One Step Closer to Regaining Full Custody After Court Ruling

–

Anna and Alex Nikolayev with their baby, Sammy. (Photo: Facebook/Bring Sammy Home)

A California couple had their five-month-old baby “snatched” by police after they took the infant to get a second opinion on a medical procedure, they claim.

Anna and Alex Nikolayev are described as loving parents who took their baby, who has a heart murmur, to Sutter Memorial Hospital in Sacramento when he started exhibiting flu-like symptoms.  The family has undergone plenty of doctor visits in the last five months for the their son’s heart, and were unsettled by the treatment he was receiving.

At one point, Anna says, a nurse came in and started giving the baby, named Sammy, medicine.  When she asked what it was the nurse allegedly replied, “I don’t know.”

“I’m like, you’re working as a nurse, and you don’t even know what to give to my baby…?” Anna said in an interview with ABC’s local affiliate, News10/KXTV.

They later found out that medicine was antibiotics, which Anna claims the doctor told her Sammy shouldn’t have received.

After doctors started discussing heart surgery, the Nikolayevs decided they wanted a second opinion.  They weren’t categorically opposed to the procedure, but they wanted a different doctor.

“If we got the one mistake after another, I don’t want to have my baby have surgery in the hospital where I don’t feel safe,” Anna explained.

Anna Nikolayev and her son Sammy. (Photo via News10/KXTV)

(Photo via News10/KXTV)

The doctors at Sutter Memorial allegedly argued against consulting other health experts, pressuring her to stay put. Anna remained firm.  She took her baby from the hospital without a proper discharge, and went straight to Kaiser Permanente Hospital.

Doctors there said the baby was safe to go home with his parents, one writing in the paperwork: “I do not have concern for the safety of the child at home with his parents.”

But while they were at the hospital, police showed up.

“They told us that Sutter was telling them so much bad stuff that they thought that this baby is dying on our arms,” Anna recalled.  But when police saw the doctor’s evaluation, Anna says they said, “Okay guys, you have a good day,” and left.

But the family wasn’t at peace for long.

The next day police showed up at the Nikolayev’s home with representatives from Child Protective Services (CPS).  Alex went outside to meet them, where he says he was “pushed against the building.”  When he asked if he was being placed under arrest, he said they “smacked me down onto the ground [and] yelled out, ‘I think I got the keys to the house.’”

Seeing the scene outside, Anna set up a camera in front of her door.

Video shows police letting themselves in without a warrant, and taking the baby.

“I’m going to grab your baby, and don’t resist, and don’t fight me okay?” one officer can be heard telling the mother in the video.

Anna described it with tears in her eyes: “He’s like, ‘okay let your son go,’ so I had to let him go, and he grabbed my arm, so I couldn’t take Sammy.  And they took Sammy, and they just walked away.”

Anna Nikolayev set up a camera before police came in. (Photo via News10/KXTV)

News10 has video of the incident in its report (there’s also an interview with the family):

A number of news agencies have reached out to police, the hospital, and child protective services, but none has spoken out on the issue.  News10, which has worked on the story at length, says police and the hospital both referred questions to Child Protective Services, which said it can’t comment on specific cases because of privacy laws.

Anna says she was told by a CPS worker that her baby was taken because of “severe neglect.”

The couple can’t believe the rationale, saying: “We did everything…We went from one hospital to another. We just wanted to be safe, that he is in good hands.”

“It seems like parents have no rights whatsoever,” Alex said.  Originally from Russia, he said the situation reminds him of a “communist regime.”

The couple’s attorney, Joe Weinberger, remarked: “It’s absolutely amazing to me how a government can reach out and snatch a child after a doctor said there’s not an issue…As we’ve seen, there is no emergency situation in this case…I can’t imagine having my baby ripped from my arms.”

He acknowledges that the couple erred in taking their baby from Sutter Memorial without a proper discharge, but it has now been roughly two weeks since the situation began.  Anna says she was able to visit her baby for an hour last Thursday.

A court date has been scheduled for today, Monday April 29.  TheBlaze will keep you posted as the story develops.

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(Photo: Shutterstock.com)

At the bottom of nearly every $20 glass of champagne at a woman’s club event in Florida was a cubic zirconia, diamond-shaped rock. But one glass held the real deal — a 1.03 carat diamond.

Instead of the lucky woman attending the Fashionollia event hosted by the Tampa Woman’s Club for its 65th year excitedly announcing she found the stone valued at $5,000, the Tampa Bay Times reported the room was silent.

“We knew the winner had to be at one of two tables,” one of the event organizers and jeweler Joy Pierson told the Times.

An 80-year-old woman later admitted she decided she didn’t want to stick her finger in the glass to retrieve the object, but thought she would drink down to the stone. When she swallowed it, she didn’t think she would have to tell anyone, thinking someone else would likely have the real diamond.

“We were laughing and talking when I realized I swallowed it. What a dumb thing,” Miriam Tucker said.

In a stroke of good luck though — if you would call it that — the Times reported that Tucker was scheduled for a colonoscopy a few days later. Sure enough, Tucker’s doctor found the stone.

The diamond was cleaned, polished and taken home.

“All’s well that ends well,” Tucker said, recounting the popular saying her son often uses.

Watch this report about the incident:

But this isn’t the only diamond that has been swallowed of late. In a criminal case, a man entered a jewelry store in New Hampshire, inquiring about an engagement ring. When presented with an option, he took off but the store’s door was locked. That’s when he swallowed it instead. The man was taken to the hospital where the ring was passed and the jeweler later put it up for a charity auction.

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The new strain H7N9 is being called one of the “most lethal” flu viruses so far, worrying health officials because it can jump more easily from birds to humans than the one that started killing people a decade ago, World Health Organization officials said.

Scientists are watching the virus closely to see if it could spark a global pandemic but say there is little evidence so far that it can spread easily from human to human.

WHO’s top influenza expert, Dr. Keiji Fukuda, told reporters at a briefing in Beijing that people seem to catch the H7N9 virus from birds more easily than the H5N1 strain that began ravaging poultry across Asia in 2003. The H5N1 strain has since killed 360 people worldwide, mostly after contact with infected fowl.

Here are pictures showing that residents are taking the spread of the virus seriously:

Health experts are concerned about H7N9′s ability to jump to humans, and about the strain’s capacity to infect birds without causing noticeable symptoms, which makes it difficult to monitor its spread.

“This is definitely one of the most lethal influenza viruses we have seen so far,” Fukuda said. But he added that experts are still trying to understand the virus, and that there might be a large number of mild infections that are going undetected.

Watch WHO’s report:

The H7N9 bird flu virus has infected more than 100 people in China, seriously sickening most of them and killing more than 20, mostly near the eastern coast around Shanghai. Taiwan on Wednesday confirmed its first case, a 53-year-old man who became sick after returning from a visit to the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu.

Will the virus make its why to the U.S.? According to a health expert in an ABC report, yes:

“Given the extent of global travel, I expect that we will see cases in the United States,” ABC News chief health and medical editor Dr. Richard Besser said. “It’s so important that people who become ill tell their doctors if they have been traveling.”

[...]

U.S. health officials are also bracing for bird flu by preparing a vaccine, a process expected to take six months. In the meantime, they, too, are urging travelers to China to steer clear of birds, practice good hygiene and report any and all flu-like symptoms to a doctor upon return.

“The CDC has developed a diagnostic test for H7N9 flu so that travelers who develop symptoms can be tested,” Dr. Besser said.

In comparison, the earlier bird flu strain, H5N1, is known to kill up to 60 of every 100 people it infects.

Wednesday’s briefing came at the end of a weeklong joint investigation by WHO and Chinese authorities in Beijing and Shanghai.

Experts said they still aren’t sure how people are getting infected but said evidence points to infections at live poultry markets, particularly through ducks and chickens. They said it was encouraging that reported infections appeared to slow down after the closure of live poultry markets in affected areas.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

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Bone marrow stem cell turned into a brain precursor cell. (Image: Lerner lab, The Scripps Research Institute)

The current method for transforming marrow cells, for use in treating things like spinal cord injuries or strokes, is described as not only cumbersome but also risky. But this latest find, which was uncovered by scientists researching antibodies that activate a growth-stimulating receptor on the marrow cells, pointed to one type of antibody that causes the marrow stem cells to become a nearly mature form of brain cell.

“These results highlight the potential of antibodies as versatile manipulators of cellular functions,” Richard Lerner, the Lita Annenberg Hazen Professor of Immunochemistry at the institute and principal investigator for the new study said in a statement. “This is a far cry from the way antibodies used to be thought of—as molecules that were selected simply for binding and not function.”

In the research of one isolated antibody that activated the marrow stem cells growth receptors, researcher Jia Xie in Lerner’s laboratory said the cells started “becoming long and thin and attaching to the bottom of the dish.” Lerner speculated, and later confirmed through tests, that they were becoming neural progenitor cells.

This process of changing a one cell into a completely different type is called transdifferentiation. Lerner said in a statement that he doesn’t know of any other laboratories that have been able to use a single protein to accomplish this, as their research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has. Current techniques for transdifferentiation involve deprogramming cells to a state that is like that of embryonic stem cells and reprogramming them, the press release explained.

Here’s how this new method of cell transdifferentiation could be used:

In principle, according to Lerner, an antibody such as the one they have discovered could be injected directly into the bloodstream of a sick patient. From the bloodstream it would find its way to the marrow, and, for example, convert some marrow stem cells into neural progenitor cells. “Those neural progenitors would infiltrate the brain, find areas of damage and help repair them,” he said.

U.S. World News and Report stated that the team will conduct animal tests using the technique and hope to collaborate with researchers working on regenerating eye nerves.

Featured image via Shutterstock.com.

(H/T: Blaze reader Bill A.)

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DES MOINES, Iowa (TheBlaze/AP) — Days after they were badly hurt in a car accident, Jacinto Cruz and Jose Rodriguez-Saldana lay unconscious in an Iowa hospital while the American health care system weighed what to do with the two immigrants from Mexico.

In this Thursday March 7, 2013 photo, Jacinto Rodriguez Cruz, 49, sits on a sofa inside his home in the city of Veracruz, Mexico. Cruz and another friend suffered serious injuries during a car accident last May 2008 in northwestern Iowa. After their employers insurance coverage ran out, Cruz, who was not a legal citizen, was placed on a private airplane and flown to Mexico still comatose and unable to discuss his care or voice his protest. Hospitals confronted with absorbing the cost of caring for uninsured seriously injured immigrants are quietly deporting them, often unconscious and unable to protest, back to their home countries. (Photo: AP/Felix Marquez)

The men had health insurance from jobs at one of the nation’s largest pork producers. But neither had legal permission to live in the U.S., nor was it clear whether their insurance would pay for the long-term rehabilitation they needed.

So Iowa Methodist Medical Center in Des Moines took matters into its own hands: After consulting with the patients’ families, it quietly loaded the two comatose men onto a private jet that flew them back to Mexico, effectively deporting them without consulting any court or federal agency.

When the men awoke, they were more than 1,800 miles away in a hospital in Veracruz, on the Mexican Gulf Coast.

Hundreds of immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally have taken similar journeys through a little-known removal system run not by the federal government trying to enforce laws but by hospitals seeking to curb high costs. A recent report compiled by immigrant advocacy groups made a rare attempt to determine how many people are sent home, concluding that at least 600 immigrants were removed over a five-year period, though there were likely many more.

In interviews with immigrants, their families, attorneys and advocates, The Associated Press reviewed the obscure process known formally as “medical repatriation,” which allows hospitals to put patients on chartered international flights, often while they are still unconscious.

Watch the Associated Press’ report:

Hospitals typically pay for the flights.

“The problem is it’s all taking place in this unregulated sort of a black hole … and there is no tracking,” said law professor Lori Nessel, director of the Center for Social Justice at Seton Hall Law School, which offers free legal representation to immigrants.

Now advocates for immigrants are concerned that hospitals could soon begin expanding the practice after full implementation of federal health care reform, which will make deep cuts to the payments hospitals receive for taking care of the uninsured.

Health care executives say they are caught between a requirement to accept all patients and a political battle over immigration.

“It really is a Catch-22 for us,” said Dr. Mark Purtle, vice president of Medical Affairs for Iowa Health System, which includes Iowa Methodist Medical Center. “This is the area that the federal government, the state, everybody says we’re not paying for the undocumented.”

Hospitals are legally mandated to care for all patients who need emergency treatment, regardless of citizenship status or ability to pay. But once a patient is stabilized, that funding ceases, along with the requirement to provide care. Many immigrant workers without citizenship are ineligible for Medicaid, the government’s insurance program for the poor and elderly.

That’s why hospitals often try to send those patients to rehabilitation centers and nursing homes back in their home countries.

Civil rights groups say the practice violates U.S. and international laws and unfairly targets one of the nation’s most defenseless populations.

“They don’t have advocates, and they don’t have people who will speak on their behalf,” said Miami attorney John De Leon, who has been arguing such cases for a decade.

Estimating the number of cases is difficult since no government agency or organization keeps track.

The Center for Social Justice and New York Lawyers for the Public Interest have documented at least 600 immigrants who were involuntarily removed in the past five years for medical reasons. The figure is based on data from hospitals, humanitarian organizations, news reports and immigrant advocates who cited specific cases. But the actual number is believed to be significantly higher because many more cases almost certainly go unreported.

Some patients who were sent home subsequently died in hospitals that weren’t equipped to meet their needs. Others suffered lingering medical problems because they never received adequate rehabilitation, the report said.

Gail Montenegro, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the agency “plays no role in a health care provider’s private transfer of a patient to his or her country of origin.”

Such transfers “are not the result of federal authority or action,” she said in an email, nor are they considered “removals, deportations or voluntary departures” as defined by the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The two Mexican workers in Iowa came to the U.S. in search of better jobs and found work at Iowa Select Farms, which provided them with medical insurance even though they had no visas or other immigration documents.

Cruz had been here for about six months, Rodriguez-Saldana for a little over a year. The men were returning home from a fishing trip in May 2008 when their car was struck by a semitrailer truck. Both were thrown from the vehicle and suffered serious head injuries.

Insurance paid more than $100,000 for the two men’s emergency treatment. But it was unclear whether the policies would pay for long-term rehabilitation. Two rehabilitation centers refused to take them.

Eleven days after the car crash, the two men were still comatose as they were carried aboard a jet bound for Veracruz, where a hospital had agreed to take them.

Rodriguez-Saldana, now 39, said the Des Moines hospital told his family that he was unlikely to survive and should be sent home.

The hospital “doesn’t really want Mexicans,” he said in a telephone interview with the AP. “They wanted to disconnect me so I could die. They said I couldn’t survive, that I wouldn’t live.”

Hospital officials said they could not discuss the case because of litigation. The men and their families filed a lawsuit in 2010 claiming they received minimal rehabilitative care in Veracruz.

A judge dismissed the lawsuit last year ruling that Iowa Methodist was not to blame for the inadequate care in Veracruz. The courts also found that even though the families of the men may not have consented to their transport to Mexico, they also failed to object to it. An appeals court upheld the dismissal.

Patients are frequently told family members want them to come home. In cases where the patient is unconscious or can’t communicate, relatives are told their loved one wants to return, De Leon said.

Sometimes they’re told the situation is dire, and the patient may die, prompting many grief-stricken relatives to agree to a transfer, he said.

Some hospitals “emotionally extort family members in their home country,” De Leon said. “They make family members back home feel guilty so they can simply put them on a plane and drop them off at the airport.”

In court documents, Iowa hospital officials said they had received permission from Saldana’s parents and Cruz’s long-term partner for the flight to Mexico. Family members deny they gave consent.

n this Thursday March 7, 2013 photo, Jacinto Rodriguez Cruz, 49, leaves his home on a wheelchair with the help of his wife, Belen Hernandez in the city of Veracruz, Mexico. Cruz and another friend suffered serious injuries during a car accident last May 2008 in northwestern Iowa. After their employers insurance coverage ran out, Cruz, who was not a legal citizen, was placed on a private airplane and flown to Mexico still comatose and unable to discuss his care or voice his protest. Hospitals confronted with absorbing the cost of caring for uninsured seriously injured immigrants are quietly deporting them, often unconscious and unable to protest, back to their home countries. (Photo: AP/Felix Marquez)

There’s no way to know for sure whether the two men would have recovered faster or better in the United States. But the accident left both of them with life-altering disabilities.

Nearly five years later, the 49-year-old Cruz is paralyzed on his left side, the result of damage to his hip and spine. He has difficulty speaking and can’t work.

“I can’t even walk,” he said in a telephone interview, breaking into tears several times. His long-term partner, Belem, said he’s more emotional since the accident.

“He feels bad because he went over there and came back like this,” she said. “Now he can’t work at all. … He cries a lot.”

She works selling food and cleaning houses. Their oldest son, 22, sometimes contributes to the family income.

Rodriguez-Saldana said he has to pay for intensive therapy for his swollen feet and bad circulation. He also said he walks poorly and has difficulty working. He sells home supplies such as kitchen and bath towels and dishes, a business that requires a lot of walking and visiting houses. He often forgets where he lives, but people recognize him on the street and take him home because he’s confused.

The American Hospital Association said it does not have a specific policy governing immigrant removals, and it does not track how many hospitals encounter the issue.

Nessel expects medical removals to increase with implementation of health care reform, which makes many more patients eligible for Medicaid. As a result, the government plans to cut payments to hospitals that care for the uninsured.

Some hospitals call immigration authorities when they receive patients without immigration documentation, but the government rarely responds, Nessel said. Taking custody of the patient would also require the government to assume financial responsibility for care.

Jan Stipe runs the Iowa Methodist department that finds hospitals in patients’ native countries that are willing to take them. The hospital’s goal, she said, is to “get patients back to where their support systems are, their loved ones who will provide the care and the concern that each patient needs.”

The American Medical Association’s Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs issued a strongly worded directive to doctors in 2009, urging them not to “allow hospital administrators to use their significant power and the current lack of regulations” to send patients to other countries.

Doctors cannot expect hospitals to provide costly uncompensated care to patients indefinitely, the statement said. “But neither should physicians allow hospitals to arbitrarily determine the fate of an uninsured noncitizen immigrant patient.”

Arturo Morales, a Monterrey, Mexico, lawyer who helps Cruz and Rodriguez-Saldana with legal issues, is convinced the men would have been better off staying in Iowa.

“I have no doubt,” he said. “You have a patient who doesn’t have money to pay you. You can’t let them die.”

—

Associated Press Writer Barbara Rodriguez in Des Moines contributed to this report. Featured image via Shutterstock.com. 

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(Photo via CBSNewYork)

MILLER PLACE, N.Y. (TheBlaze/AP) — Those who took one look at Brittany Ozarowski had no doubt she was battling cancer. Her face was drawn and gaunt. She weighed a mere 80 pounds, hobbled gingerly on a cane, and complained of the toll chemotherapy and radiation treatments were taking on her fragile body.

Neighbors and friends wanted to help so much they gladly put donation jars on store counters, pulled cash out of their own pockets and organized fundraisers – including a dinner dance and a dog-washing event – that together raised tens of thousands of dollars. Ozarowski also had a website showing her in a wheelchair next to the plea: “Help Save My Life.”

But then people began to wonder: Why didn’t she lose her hair after chemotherapy? Why didn’t she show up for a free exam at a neurologist? Why did she hang up when a man who ran a cancer charity offered $10,000 in treatments paid directly to a hospital?

The explanation from prosecutors hit this middle-class Long Island suburban community like a punch in the gut: The 21-year-old Ozarowski wasn’t battling cancer at all, they say, but was scamming people out of their money to feed a growing addiction to heroin.

“There was no cancer, no chemotherapy or radiation,” Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota declared. “All there was was heroin and more heroin.”

Prosecutors say there is no way of knowing how much money Ozarowski pocketed in the alleged scam, because so many of the donations were in cash.  But a local CBS report estimates it was in the tens of thousands.

(Photo via CBSNewYork)

There was $317 in the collection jar when Ozarowski was arrested soliciting donations outside a supermarket on Easter, and investigators say there were at least two dozen jars in restaurants, pizzerias and stores across Long Island that Ozarowski collected from regularly over the past year.

More than 60 potential victims have called prosecutors since the arrest, along with dozens of cancer patients who have called just to vent their outrage.

“It wasn’t just about the money,” said Elizabeth Patricola, owner of “Paws N Claws” pet grooming, and a breast cancer survivor who befriended the young woman after she and her grandmother came to her shop in March 2012. “It was about the principle and the caring, the faith that we have in people. Everyone came together as a community to help. It broke my heart.”

Ozarowski told various versions of having either ovarian cancer, stomach cancer, bone cancer and brain cancer, prosecutors said. Patricola, who has been cancer free for four years, became suspicious when the young woman explained not losing her hair after chemotherapy because of “special vitamins.”

Elizabeth Patricola, a cancer survivor, was one of many to donate to the girl. (Photo via CBSNewYork)

“I’m so mad and I’m so sad at the same time,” said Denise Bambola, a next-door neighbor in the Selden community where Ozarowski grew up. “I held her. I let her call me mama. I took care of her. She hurt me deeply.”

Tom O’Grady, owner of the Tuscany Gourmet Market, took a special interest after learning Ozarowski graduated from the same high school as his children. He said the woman’s grandmother first came into his butcher shop in March 2012. In the ensuing months, he got to know Ozarowski and figures he gave her $5,000 in increments of about $300 over several months.

“She played on the heartstrings of the public,” he said. “All of this money could have went to a family that really needed it. We took it away from another child that needed help. It just sucks, in plain English.”

O’Grady said his wife took Ozarowski shopping for a new dress, hair and makeup for a fundraiser at the local Moose lodge that netted $7,200. Weeks later, she asked for more money for a neurologist. He arranged through a friend to get her free treatments from a neurologist at Stony Brook Medical Center, but she never showed, he said.

Thomas O’Grady was one of many to donate to the girl. (Photo: CBSNewYork)

Ozarowski, a petite, doe-eyed woman who looks younger than her 21 years, worked for a time as a receptionist. She is being held on $75,000 bail after pleading not guilty to grand larceny, forgery and other charges in a 24-count indictment. If convicted, she could get up to seven years in prison.

Prosecutors say Ozarowski has a history of drug arrests dating to 2010. The forgery charges in the indictment are linked to doctor’s notes she allegedly wrote seeking postponement of court dates from four prior arrests.

Her attorney, George Duncan, said if the allegations of a drug problem are true, his client’s actions reflect a person who “obviously went to great lengths to support that habit and she is in need of some sort of help or rehabilitation.” Duncan declined a request from The Associated Press to interview her in jail.

Suspicious donors went to authorities late last year, and an investigation continues into whether Ozarowski had any assistance. The young woman’s grandmother, identified as Judith Ozarowski, sold her Selden home and left town. Prosecutors said the woman told them she gave her granddaughter $100,000 in proceeds from the sale of the house, but they were still investigating that claim.

(Photo via CBSNewYork)

It’s hardly the first such scam. An Alabama woman was sentenced this month to 20 years in prison for collecting donations after lying about her son having cancer. In Arizona, a woman faces sentencing next month after admitting lying about needing a bone marrow transplant. Last year, an upstate New York woman admitted facing cancer so donors would pay for her “dream wedding” and Caribbean honeymoon. She spent about two months in jail and was forced to pay back $13,000.

But area addiction specialists say the Ozarwoski case could be another symptom of a growing heroin problem in the area. Jeffrey Reynolds, the executive director of the Long Island Council on Alcohol and Drug Dependence, said that in the last four years, the number of people seeking assistance from opiate addiction has soared from 100 to 700 a month.

“I worry that she will become the poster child for heroin addiction,” Reynolds said. “She makes it harder for people to seek treatment, and I think she makes it harder for charities, because people will be less likely to donate.”

CBSNewYork has more on the story:

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Kelly McGrevey last Monday purchased a tanning package at Aloha Tanning in Norton, Ohio, but when she returned on Tuesday, she was told couldn’t use it, WPTV reported.

“He said, ‘Sorry, but I’m not going to let you tan today because we’ve just implemented a new policy where anyone over 230 pounds can’t go in one of our beds,’” McGrevey told the NBC affiliate. “I was just so shocked and embarrassed and humiliated.”

McGrevey outside of the tanning bed she feels wronged her. (Image: WKYC screenshot)

McGrevey was first informed that she was too heavy for certain beds after she tried to use one of the “laydown beds” after the vertical booth broke down. Her next move was to ask for a refund on the $70 package she had just purchased. However, a store employee told her they don’t offer refunds, according to WKYC.

The Ohio woman said she considered this “discrimination.”

“I said, ‘You’re not going to give me a refund, I paid for a service that I’m not getting,’ and he said ‘no, you can’t have a refund.’”

Both McGrevey and the WKYC asked the store to see the policy regarding the weight limit. A store employee identified as Nicole told WKYC that it isn’t written down but discussed verbally with the clients. Why? Because they also have a policy banning posted signs.

“We do have a lot of bigger people that came in here and they know that they can’t go into the laydown beds because they are so, you know, they are bigger,” the station reported Nicole saying.

The store manager, identified as Gus by Nicole, was contacted by WKYC and said he suggested McGrevey cancel the charge on her credit card as they would not issue a refund. McGrevey filed a police report against the store owner.

McGrevey said she just wants her money back and wants to alert other heavier customers about the salon’s policy.

WKYC contacted other tanning salons in the area, most of which did not have restrictions for heavier customers.

Watch the report:

Featured image via Shutterstock.com.

(H/T: Gawker)

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New York City is proposing upping the age for tobacco purchases to 21. (Image: NIH)

NEW YORK (TheBlaze/AP) — First there was the proposal by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg that tobacco products be hidden from plain view in stores. Now there’s a new proposal that would bar anyone under the age of 21 from purchasing cigarettes in the city.

New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn discussed details of a proposed law that would raise the minimum age for tobacco purchases from 18 to 21. City Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley, some of Quinn’s fellow City Council members and health advocates were to join her.

Under federal law, no one under 18 can buy tobacco anywhere in the country, but some states and localities have raised it to 19. Texas lawmakers recently tried to increase the minimum age to 21, but the plan stalled.

Public health advocates say a higher minimum age discourages, or at least delays, young people from starting smoking and thereby limits their health risks. But opponents of such measures have said 18-year-olds, legally considered adults, should be able to make their own decisions about whether or not to smoke.

Some communities, including Needham, Mass., have raised the minimum age to 21, but New York would be the biggest city to do so.

“With this legislation, we’ll be targeting the age group at which the overwhelming majority of smokers start,” Quinn said.

Officials say 80 percent of NYC smokers started before age 21, and an estimated 20,000 New York City public high school students now smoke. While it’s already illegal for many of them to buy cigarettes, officials say this measure would play a key role by making it illegal for them to turn to slightly older friends to buy smokes for them. The vast majority of people who get asked to do that favor are between 18 and 21 themselves, city officials say.

“We know that enforcement is never going to be perfect,” but this measure should make it “much harder” for teens to get cigarettes, Farley said.

The Richmond, Va.-based Altria Group Inc., parent company of Philip Morris USA, which makes the top-selling Marlboro brand, had no immediate comment, said spokesman David Sutton. He previously noted that the company supported federal legislation that in 2009 gave the Food and Drug Administration the power to regulate tobacco products, which includes various retail restrictions.

Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the health commissioners he has appointed, including Farley, New York has rolled out a slate of anti-smoking initiatives.

Bloomberg, a billionaire who has given $600 million of his own money to anti-smoking efforts around the world, began taking on tobacco use in the city shortly after he became mayor in 2002.

Over his years in office, the city – at times with the council’s involvement – helped impose the highest cigarette taxes in the country, barred smoking at parks and on beaches and conducted sometimes graphic advertising campaigns about the hazards of smoking.

Last month, the Bloomberg administration unveiled a proposal to keep cigarettes out of sight in stores until an adult customer asks for a pack, as well as stopping shops from taking cigarette coupons and honoring discounts.

Bloomberg’s administration and public health advocates praise the initiatives as bold moves to help people live better. Adult smoking rates in the city have fallen from 21.5 percent in 2002 to 14.8 percent in 2011, Farley has said.

But the measures also have drawn complaints, at least initially, that they are nannyish and bad for business.

Several of New York City’s smoking regulations have survived court challenges. But a federal appeals court said last year that the city couldn’t force tobacco retailers to display gruesome images of diseased lungs and decaying teeth.

Quinn, a leading Democratic candidate to succeed Bloomberg next year, has often been perceived as an ally of his.

Bloomberg also has pushed a number of other pioneering public-health measures, such as compelling chain restaurants to post calorie counts on their menus, banning artificial trans fats in restaurants, and attempting to limit the size of sugary drinks. A court struck down the big-beverage rule last month, but the city is appealing and Bloomberg has urged voluntary compliance in the meantime.

While Bloomberg has led the way on many anti-smoking initiatives, this one arose from the City Council, Farley said. City Councilman James Gennaro, who lost his mother to lung cancer after she smoked for decades, has been a particularly strong advocate.

–

Related:

• NYC Mayor Bloomberg at It Again: Now He Wants to Hide Tobacco Products in Stores 
• Is NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg the Most Dangerous Man in America?

–

Associated Press writer Michael Felberbaum contributed to this report from Richmond, Va.

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This includes several people who arrived with legs attached by just a little skin, a 3-year-old boy with a head wound and bleeding on the brain, and a little girl riddled with nails. Even a transit system police officer whose heart had stopped and was close to bleeding to death after a shootout with the suspects now appears headed for recovery.

In this April 15, 2013 file photo, Sydney Corcoran, of Lowell, Mass. is tended to at the finish line of the Boston Marathon after two bombs exploded, in Boston. As people lay badly bleeding in the smoke of the Boston Marathon bombings, rescuers immediately turned to a millennia-old medical device to save their lives _ the tourniquet. Using belts, shirts and other materials, they tied off bleeding limbs in fast-acting bids to prevent major blood loss, shock and death. Such fast work no doubt saved many lives, doctors at Boston area hospitals said. (Photo: AP/John Tlumacki)

“All I feel is joy,” said Dr. George Velmahos, chief of trauma surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, referring to his hospital’s 31 blast patients. “Whoever came in alive, stayed alive.”

Three people did die in the blasts, but at the scene, before hospitals even had a chance to try to save them. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer who police say was fatally shot Thursday by the suspects was pronounced dead when he arrived at Massachusetts General.

Firefighters salute as pallbearers carry the casket of Krystle Campbell, a victim of the Boston Marathon bombing, from St. Joseph Catholic Church after a funeral service on April 22, 2013 in Medford, Massachusetts. A manhunt ended for Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing after he was apprehended on a boat parked on a residential property in Watertown, Massachusetts. His brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, the other suspect, was shot and killed after a car chase and shootout with police. The bombing, on April 15 at the finish line of the marathon, killed three people and wounded at least 170. (Photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

The only person to reach a hospital alive and then die was one of the suspected bombers – 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

But the remarkable, universal survival one week later of all others injured in the blasts is a testimonial to fast care at the scene, on the way to hospitals, then in emergency and operating rooms. Everyone played a part, from doctors, nurses and paramedics to strangers who took off belts to use as tourniquets and staunched bleeding with their bare hands.

As of Monday, 51 people remained hospitalized, three of them in critical condition and five listed as serious. At least 14 people lost all or part of a limb; three of them lost more than one.

People wait inside the main lobby of Brigham and Women’s Hospital April 15, 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts. Many who were wounded when two explosions struck near the finish line of the Boston Marathon earlier were brought to Brigham and Women’s. (Photo: STAN HONDA/AFP/Getty Images)

Two children with leg injuries remain hospitalized at Boston Children’s Hospital. A 7-year-old girl is in critical condition and 11-year-old Aaron Hern is in fair condition.

The surviving bombing suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, is in serious condition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center with a neck wound.

“Our training, our practicing, went a long way” to minimizing chaos so that hospitals and emergency responders worked effectively to treat the many wounded, said Dr. William Mackey, surgery chief at Tufts Medical Center.

“Trauma care is optimism translated into action,” said Dr. Russell Nauta, chairman of surgery at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Mass., where the wounded transit police officer, Richard Donohue, remains in stable but critical condition. Doctors and emergency responders approach each patient as someone who can be saved regardless of how severe the injuries appear.

And some were very bad.

“The legs came hanging on muscles and skin,” said Velmahos, who did three of the four initial amputations on patients in the early hours after the bombs at Massachusetts General. A fifth patient at that hospital had to have an amputation Thursday. Doctors had judged that there was a 5 percent chance the woman’s leg could be saved, so they didn’t amputate right away.

“We restored the blood supply to the leg, but all the muscles and nerves were destroyed,” so the leg had to be removed later, he explained.

(Photo: AP/Kenshin Okubo)

Medical workers aid an injured man at the 2013 Boston Marathon following an explosion in Boston, Monday, April 15, 2013. Two bombs exploded near the finish of the Boston Marathon on Monday, killing at least two people, injuring at least 22 others and sending authorities rushing to aid wounded spectators. (Photo: AP/The Boston Globe, David L. Ryan)

Of the remaining five patients at the hospital with severe leg injuries, “I’m very confident that they will all keep their legs, and even more, that they will have functional legs,” he said.

Although doctors are optimistic, some patients still have life-threatening wounds. Complications can range from blood clots to infections. A few still have injuries that could require amputation, said Dr. Michael Yaffe, a trauma surgeon at Beth Israel.

“We have to see how these are going to heal” over the next few weeks, he said. “Blood supply is key. … The two biggest enemies we will face in the next two weeks are maintaining a good blood supply and preventing infection.”

So far, the progress has been in the right direction.

“Every day they’re a little better,” Yaffe said. “A lot of them have a long road of recovery ahead.”

Watch this report from doctors Monday out of Boston medical center:

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Hummus might not make the cut based on its sodium content for the health department’s cafe. (Photo: mamagyro)

New York City’s Health Department for two years has been trying to find a restaurant or caterer to service its headquarter’s cafe, but the New York Post reported not a single applicant responded to its request for proposals.

Why? Here’s what the Post wrote of the “nanny-state” that might have dissuaded an establishment from applying:

The department’s picky food specs mandated that all entrees and sandwiches be less than 700 calories with at least 50 percent under 500, and that no more than 20 snack and dessert items be available at any time, with all less than 200 calories and containing less than 200 milligrams of sodium.

Also, only juices 8 ounces and under and only 1 percent or no-fat milk would be permitted.

This doesn’t mean workers at the health department won’t have an on-site food option in the end though. The Post reported that the department reached out to the Greek restaurant mamagyro, which is now finalizing details to meet the dietary requirements.

Co-owner of the eatery, Vicki Likitsakos, told the Post the requirements, which have even been scaled back at this point by the department, were “surprising” but she feels doable.

“It’s not like we can offer a sandwich with a lot of cheese, turkey and ham and they’ll be OK with that,” Likitsakos said. “It’s definitely intimidating — but we’re not afraid.”

These requirements though, according to Likitsakos, are what have delayed the cafe’s opening. The cafe also won’t take on the official name of the eatery because it won’t be serving gyros. It instead is called mamabites and will open in May with some traditional Greek food among more mainstream options, like turkey sandwiches.

Hummus, the chick-pea blended dip, is also still under review to make the dietary cut because of its sodium content.

According to the Post, not going through the RFP process results in the city losing money.

Read more details in the New York Post here.

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Only now are these nurses beginning to come to grips with what they endured – and are still enduring as they continue to care for survivors. They are angry, sad and tired. A few confess they would have trouble caring for the surviving suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, if he were at their hospital and they were assigned his room.

And they are thankful. They tick off the list of their hospital colleagues for praise: from the security officers who guarded the doors to the ER crews who mopped up trails of blood. The doctors and – especially – the other nurses.

Nurses from Massachusetts General Hospital, which treated 22 of the 187 victims the first day, candidly recounted their experiences in interviews with The Associated Press. Here are their memories:

“They were screaming”

Megann Prevatt, ER nurse: “These patients were terrified. They were screaming. They were crying … We had to fight back our own fears, hold their hands as we were wrapping their legs, hold their hands while we were putting IVs in and starting blood on them, just try to reassure them: ‘We don’t know what happened, but you’re here. You’re safe with us.’ … I didn’t know if there were going to be more bombs exploding. I didn’t know how many patients we’d be getting. All these thoughts are racing through your mind.”

Shrapnel, nails

In this frame grab from Saturday, April 20, 2013, video, Massachusetts General Hospital nurse Adam Barrett talks about the horrific early hours as bloody patients poured in after the explosions at the Boston Marathon. (Photo: AP/Carla K. Johnson)

Adam Barrett, ICU nurse, shared the patient bedside with investigators searching for clues that might break the case. “It was kind of hard to hear somebody say, ‘Don’t wash that wound. You might wash evidence away.’” Barrett cleaned shrapnel and nails from the wounds of some victims, side by side with law enforcement investigators who wanted to examine wounds for blast patterns. The investigator’s request took him aback at first. “I wasn’t stopping to think, ‘What could be in this wound that could give him a lead?’”

Their faces, their smiles

Massachusetts General Hospital nurse Jean Acquadra talks about the horrific early hours as bloody patients poured in after the explosions at the Boston Marathon. (Photo: AP/Carla K. Johnson)

Jean Acquadra, ICU nurse, keeps herself going by thinking of her patients’ progress. “The strength is seeing their faces, their smiles, knowing they’re getting better. They may have lost a limb, but they’re ready to go on with their lives. They want to live. I don’t know how they have the strength, but that’s my reward: Knowing they’re getting better.”

She is angry and doesn’t think she could take care of Tsarnaev, who is a patient at another hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center: “I don’t have any words for him.”

The need for justice

Christie Majocha, ICU nurse: “Even going home, I didn’t get away from it,” Majocha said. She is a resident of Watertown, the community paralyzed Friday by the search for the surviving suspect. She helped save the lives of maimed bombing victims on Monday. By week’s end, she saw the terror come to her own neighborhood. The manhunt, she felt, was a search for justice, and was being carried out directly for the good of her patients.

“I knew these faces (of the victims). I knew what their families looked like. I saw their tears,” she said. “I know those families who are so desperate to see this end.”

On Friday night, she joined the throngs cheering the police officers and FBI agents, celebrating late into the night even though she had to return to the hospital at 7 a.m. the next day.

–

Related:

• Israeli Doctors Are Treating Boston Bombing Suspect: New Details on His Condition
• Reports: Boston Bombing Suspect Awake and Responding ‘Sporadically’ to Questions
• Police Release Incredible Thermal Images of Boston Bombing Suspect in His Last Hiding Place

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Officials from Regions Hospital in St. Paul said the body was found by a laundry service employee a day earlier. The remains had been wrapped in linens in its morgue and somehow were mistaken for laundry that was supposed to be sent out for cleaning.

“This was a terrible mistake, and we are deeply sorry,” Chris Boese, the hospital’s chief nursing officer, said in a statement. “We have processes in place that should have prevented this but did not. We are working to identify the gap in our system, and to make sure this does not happen again.”

The hospital said the baby boy was stillborn on April 4, at 22 weeks of development.

During a news conference, Boese said hospital officials were still trying to reach the child’s family – and trying to determine what went wrong.

Regions Hospital, one of the largest hospitals in the Twin Cities, handles about 2,500 births every year, and about 20 to 25 of those infants are stillborn, Boese said. Families of those infants are given the choice of making their own arrangements or the hospital will work with community groups that take care of the burial or cremation. Boese said patient privacy laws prevented her from saying if this baby’s family had expressed a preference.

“We are really sorry and saddened that this event happened,” she said. “This has never happened before that I am aware of, this unfortunate event.”

The baby’s body was found when it tumbled out of a bed sheet at Crothall Laundry in Red Wing, about 45 miles southeast of St. Paul, according to Red Wing Police Chief Roger Pohlman. Laundry employees called Regions Hospital, which immediately sent workers who collected the remains before police arrived.

Pohlman said there was no indication of foul play. The Ramsey County medical examiner’s office was expected to examine the remains.

Bose said it was too early to know if any employees would be disciplined, and that the hospital needed “to do our due diligence.”

Boese said the hospital has offered support and counseling to employees of the laundry service, as well as to the hospital workers involved. She said it had been an emotional event for everybody involved, noting that she herself had barely slept the night before.

“That’s our No. 1 concern, our patients, our families. We’re deeply troubled,” she said.

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University of Buffalo professor Laura Curry was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after she “launched into a profanity-laced tirade directed towards a group of pro-life students,” according to Fox News’ Todd Starnes.

Her complaint? She was upset that the pro-life rally on campus had on display an image of a man being hanged. (Pro-life rallies regularly feature images drawing comparisons between abortion and infamous mass slaughters [i.e. Wounded Knee, the Holocaust, etc.]).

In a video that was recorded moments before her arrest, and later posted to Creative Minority Report, Curry can be heard saying that the image is “swearing to her.” So she responded by swearing about the image. Loudly.

“Where does it say I can’t use the f**k word in public?” the professor shouted at students. “I can swear because that’s part of my vocabulary. That’s part of my First Amendment rights!”

“I can swear in public because that is profane,” she continued. “That image is swearing to me. That is profane to me.”

Curry is an adjunct instructor of media study, according to the Fox report [strong language!]:

“That image is profane but f**k isn’t,” she went on.

Police officers eventually responded to her tirade, allegedly offered her a warning, and then hauled her off when she refused to calm down.

A university spokesman confirmed Curry’s arrest but declined to provide further information regarding her employment status, Fox notes.

“The University of Buffalo strives to create an environment in which diverse opinions can be expressed and heard,” the university said in a statement. “As a public university, it is a fundamental value of UB that all members of the campus community and their invited guests have a right to peacefully express their views and opinions, regardless of whether others may disagree with those expressions.”

The statement added that protesters have a right to “oppose the views or opinions of others, but not in such a way as to limit or prevent the speaker’s freedom of expression or interfere with university operations.”

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Featured image screen grab.

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The Washington Examiner‘s Paul Bedard explains:

The one new group already using Obamacare — older children up to age 26 added to their parents’ insurance — are fueling a surge in coverage for pregnancy, substance abuse and depression far greater than young adults who were already covered by mom and dad, according to a new study.

The survey of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s popular provision that requires employers to extend coverage to children found at one huge employer that the three treatments account for 60 percent of hospital claims for the young adults who signed up in 2011 under Obamacare.

The Employee Benefit Research Institute said that is nearly double the number of claims by young adults who were already enrolled in their parents’ plan before the provision went into effect in 2011. The study said that substance abuse, pregnancy and mental illness accounted for about a third of the claims for that group.

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The South often has the reputation of being home to the most obese people in the country. But a new study suggests they might just be more honest about their weight compared to other regions — and are not the fattest after all.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s data collected for 2011 found the South having the highest prevalence of obesity, compared to the rest of the country. Conversely, the study by researchers at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, published in the journal Obesity, found the West North Central and East North Central Census divisions had a higher prevalence of obesity.

The difference according to the study is between self-reported data and directly measured height and weight.

Map of U.S. split by Census division. (Image: Census.gov)

“It is hard to know exactly what is going on, but my speculation is that people in the South are telling the truth more,” George Howard, a UAB biostatistics professor said, according to Al.com. “Perhaps there is not as much stigma connected to obesity as say someone in California, or in this case, Minnesota.”

Women, Howard said, were more likely to lie about their weight, but men weren’t off the hook either. Men were more likely to lie about height, which impacts body mass index calculations.

Comparing height and weight data collected in the REGARDS (Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke) study to the CDC’s self-reported Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, the researchers found that obesity went up everywhere around the country, but the South saw less of a bump.

The study stated that the issue of following self-reported data should be considered as it might have implications on current policy proposals.

Featured image via Shutterstock.com.

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Evie Branan of Flint Township said Thursday, according to the Flint Journal, that it was “the happiest I’ve been in a long time.” Branan was surprised at the concert at The Palace of Auburn Hills with VIP treatment, getting to meet Seger in person — not just rock out to his music.

Here are pictures of Branan and the concert she was so excited to attend:

Six years ago, Branan, after a major stroke, couldn’t speak or move. In 2011, she came out of the coma and has since regained speech. She is slowly also regaining memory and thanks to physical therapy takes 150 steps a day.

When Branan awoke, Michelle Cross, an administrator at Willowbrook Manor care center that takes care of Branan, told the Flint Journal earlier this week, she wasn’t depressed about her condition but a ”cool, hip chick.”

Watch MLive’s video profile of Branan:

Thursday’s Seger concert was Branan’s fifth. When talking about it earlier in the week, Branan said she was so excited she could “hardly breathe.” She intended to hug Seger, if she saw him, and “[give] him a big smooch.”

And she did.

“I had my arm around him and I gave him a smooch on each side,” Branan recounted to the Flint Journal. Seger even dedicated a song to her during the concert.

Read more of Branan’s touching concert experience meeting Seger here.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

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But a new study is finding that even if such a ban were to be instituted, it might actually have the reverse effect on soda consumption.

A study by researchers at the University of California-San Diego found soda consumers are likely to buy more of the sugary drink if it is sold in packs of single-serving sizes than if it were just one large size soda.

(Photo: Shutterstock.com)

The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE by Brent Wilson, gave participants three drink choices. One option included a choice of a 16, 24 or 32 ounce individual drink. The second menu option was a single 16 ounce drink, two 12 ounce drinks or two 16 ounce drinks. The third was only a 16 ounce drink.

The study found that the 100 participants were most likely to choose the option that involved bundling of two drinks, compared to options with only individual drinks. Business earnings were also found to be higher with this option for packs of drinks as well, suggesting restaurants and stores would favor them over individual drink options if a ban on large sizes was put in place.

“Our research shows the New York City ban on large-sized drinks may have unintended consequences that policy makers need to consider. Sugary drinks are a major source of business revenue, and businesses will adjust their menus in order to maximize profits,” Wilson said in a statement.

The study did not measure actual consumption of soda but noted participants were told to make purchases as if it were only for themselves. People still could have chosen pack options with the intention of sharing.

The study also noted some “inconveniences” of packaging drinks into bundles, like the having to carry two, that could deter people.

–

Related:

• MSNBC Host Flips Out Over Soda Ban Being Overturned — Accuses Soft Drink Makers of ‘Poisoning Children’
• Judge Overturns NYC Soda Ban
• Daily News, NY Post React to Overturn of Bloomberg’s Soda Ban

(H/T: Eurekalert)

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(Photo: Shutterstock.com)

The Erie Insurance Group in Pennsylvania found that of the 65,000 people killed in car crashes from 2010 and 2011, one in 10 were distracted driving cases.

“Distracted driving is any activity that takes your eyes off the road, your hands off the wheel, or your mind off your primary task of driving safely,” Doug Smith, senior vice president of personal lines at Erie Insurance, said in a statement. “We looked at what law enforcement officers across the country reported when they filled out reports on fatal crashes and the results were disturbing. We hope the data will encourage people to avoid these high-risk behaviors that needlessly increase their risk of being involved in a fatal crash.”

The number one reason for fatal crashes from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System data caused by distracted driving was being “lost in thought” or daydreaming, comprising 62 percent of the accidents. Texting and other phone-related distractions were responsible for only 12 percent of the crashes.

Other distractions on the top 10 list below these two in rank included rubbernecking, fiddling with a device like a GPS gadget, eating and other people in the car.

Watch KTPV’s report about the findings:

The insurance group recommends safety precautions like letting calls go to voicemail and pulling over and parking to text, if necessary.

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As pointed out by BioEdge, Walter Glannon, a Canada Research Chair in Medical Bioethics and Ethical Theory and professor at the University of Calgary, is among the many ethicists that have begun questioning whether it’s necessary to wait until death before harvesting organs, especially in light of recent shortages.

This graph highlights the gap between the number of donors, recipients and those on an organ waiting list. Info for the graph was from optn.transplant.hrsa.gov and OPTN/SRTR Annual Report. (Image: OrganTransplant.gov)

Glannon’s abstract states (the full article is available for purchase) “it is not the timing or declaration of death that matters morally in this type of organ donation” — this type being one based on patient autonomy (or lack there of) and nonmaleficence.

“This position rejects the conviction that whether donors are harmed depends upon when death is declared and that procuring organs before this declaration always harms them,” Glannon wrote.

Glannon continued that time of death can be “one of the most vexed questions” as it pertains to organ donation, because in some cases the organ will not remain viable after the official declaration of death is made. Glannon also argues that following the dead donor rule (DDR) doesn’t always protect the patient from harm in that it might “defeat their interest of donating viable organs.”

BioEdge expounded upon Glannon’s thoughts regarding how a patient could be harmed if their organs were not taken in time:

Harm, he says, is thwarting a person’s interests. If a patient wanted to donate his organs, he would harmed if they were not donated, or if they were unsuitable for donation because doctors waited for them to die first. “We should reject the view that organ donors are beyond harm only after they have been declared dead and that they are harmed if organ procurement occurs before this time.”

If this is true, though, why can’t people donate organs when they are well – perhaps as a way of committing suicide? Highly unlikely, [Glannon] responds. Such people would be irrational and hence not capable of the fundamental criterion, acting autonomously. “It is usually the experience of an irreversible, hopeless condition that makes a person conclude that life is no longer worth living.”

“Violating the DDR by carrying out earlier organ procurement from consenting donors can benefit them by realizing their intention to donate and can benefit transplant recipients by ensuring good graft survival,” Glannon wrote.

In his piece, Glannon discusses the controversy regarding time of death and explains how it is not “morally significant” when it comes to the “question of harm in organ donation.”

In his arguments, Glannon cites a patient who has a neurological condition rendering them permanently unconscious and “more controversially,” he acknowledges, cases of conditions where the patient might not remain permanently unconscious or is sure to die where it still might be permissible to harvest the organs.

–

Related:

• Shock Article: Bioethicists Suggest Killing Someone With ‘No Autonomy Left’ Is Not Morally Wrong
• ‘Brain Dead’ Student Awakens Just Hours After Doctors Suggest Pulling the Plug
• Oregon Man Begs for Kidney Donor…on the Side of the Road
• NYC to Dispatch New ‘Organ Preservation Units’ With 911 Responders

Featured image via Shutterstock.com.

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Breath could someday be used to diagnose diseases in a similar method to how a breathalyzer test evaluates blood-alcohol level. (Photo: Shutterstock.com)

It might not sound pleasant — someone checking your “breathprint” — but it is actually a technique that could potentially make disease or illness diagnosis far less intrusive than taking blood samples or other methods.

Researchers at ETH Zurich and at the University Hospital Zurich are striving to identify chemical compounds in a person’s breath that might someday allow them to gauge health, a similar but more precise concept to dogs being able to smell the difference of patients with cancer.

Using mass spectrometry in a small study of 11 participants, the hospital researchers were able to identify individual “breathprints.”

The breathprint remained stable for an 11 day period, showing that it could adequately be used to notice variations in the future.

Researchers are continuing to identify specific compounds that are normal in breathprint but will also be working to identify patterns that would indicate diseases.

“If we find a consistent pattern in patients with a given lung disease, we can develop a diagnostic tool”, Pablo Martinez-Lozano Sinues, a senior scientist in research led by Renato Zenobi, said in a statement. They will be focusing on lung disease identification first.

Compared to more mainstream diagnostic techniques, like taking a blood or a urine sample, the ETH researchers believe this method would be faster and non-invasive. It could also be done regularly to monitor health at a lower cost.

“Our goal is to develop breath analysis to the point where it becomes competitive with the established analysis of blood and urine”, says Malcolm Kohler, professor at the University Hospital Zurich, said in a statement.

For the idea to be successful, research would also have to develop more sensitive detection capabilities for small, portable mass spectrometers. At the moment, machines sensitive enough to detect the appropriate compounds are large.

Featured image via Shutterstock.com.

(H/T: Popular Science, Science Daily)

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This undated image made available by Teva Women’s Health shows the packaging for their Plan B One-Step (levonorgestrel) tablet, one of the brands known as the “morning-after pill.” (AP)

A New York federal judge ruled Friday that the government must make emergency contraception available over the counter for women and girls of all ages within 30 days, instead of requiring a prescription for girls 16 and younger.

The ruling overturns a decision by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who said in 2011 that the morning-after pill could not be sold to girls younger than 17 without a prescription. Sebelius had overruled a recommendation by the Food and Drug Administration to make the pill available over the counter to all ages.

Judge Edward Korman in Brooklyn called the government’s restrictions on access to the pill “arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable,” the New York Times reported, and gave the FDA one month to lift age and sale restrictions on Plan B One-Step and its generic versions.

The White House did not immediately comment on the judge’s decision. The FDA said it couldn’t comment on the ruling, citing the ongoing legal matter, according to CNN.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said last year that oral contraceptives should sold over the counter in order to reduce unintended pregnancies in the United States, CNN noted. Those who oppose prescription requirements say prescriptions can delay access to the drug, increasing the chances of pregnancy.

According to the drug’s manufacturer, Plan B can prevent pregnancy if taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex. It is different from RU-486, commonly known as the abortion pill.

–

​Related:

• FDA Overruled on Selling Morning-After Pill Without a Prescription
• Will the FDA Make Room for the Morning-After Pill on Drug Store Shelves?

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According to reports, the market for bleaching products to produce a lighter skin color among Nigerian women is booming. But the beauty trend involving harsh chemicals comes with health consequences.

According to a report from the World Health Organization released last year, women in Nigeria topped the list of countries using skin lightening products with 77 percent of the female population applying them regularly.

The Economist reported in September that in the country’s capital of Abuja a store’s cosmetics’ section had two aisles devoted to skin-bleaching products exclusively and that they are expected to be a $10 billion industry worldwide by 2015.

Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Adow has a more recent video report including interviews with women talking about why they want lighter skin. Reasons include looking more beautiful and having the perception of being more successful:

One shop owner in Al Jazeera’s report explained that skin lightening is a gradual process.

“It’s not something you wake up one day and decide ‘I want to be fair, I want to be like Michael Jackson,’ and you go Michael Jackson all of a sudden,” the shop owner said.

It’s so popular in Nigeria, the Economist reported, that there’s even local lingo for people who only use products on their face, while the rest of their body stays darker. They’re called “Fanta face, coca cola legs.” Al Jazeera’s report stated that the very nature of calling it bleaching has been rebranded as “toning” now as well.

The WHO report though noted the active ingredient in these products — mercury salts to inhibit melanin formation — can cause kidney damage and reduce the body’s natural ability to fight of bacterial and fungal infections. What’s more, mercury in such heavily used products eventually ends up in water supplies as well, making its way into fish, which if eaten by pregnant women can cause birth defects.

BBC earlier this year covered the story of a female entrepreneur who was “alarmed” by the skin bleaching she saw going on in Africa. Grace Amey-Obeng of Ghana started a beauty clinic and product line to combat the problem with only $100 in seed funding and it is now worth millions.

“The women in the market had destroyed their skin with all this kind of beauty products, bleaching products, and so I saw the need for assisting them to reverse the process because otherwise it would become a social problem,” she said, according to BBC.

Here’s more on Amey-Obeng’s story:

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This picture taken on April 3, 2013 shows a Chinese health worker looking at viles as workers prepare an H7N9 virus detection kit at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Beijing. (Photo: STR/AFP/Getty Images)

(TheBlaze/AP) — A bird flu virus never before found in humans has grabbed world attention this week after it infected and killed people in China. Scientists have been scrambling to understand how it happened and, more importantly, whether it poses a risk to public health or could potentially spark a global pandemic.

The good news is that so far there’s no sign that the H7N9 virus is spreading from person to person, but experts say it has mutated in a way that has left them a bit worried.

This picture taken on April 3, 2013 shows Chinese health workers inoculating chickens at a farm in Shangsi, in southwest China’s Guangxi province. (Photo: STR/AFP/Getty Images)

Here’s a crash course in Bird Flu 101 to help explain what’s known about the strain and why it matters:

Q: What is the H7N9 virus and what do we know about it?

A: The H7N9 strain – named for the combination of proteins on its surface – has infected at least 11 people in China since February, killing four of them. The latest cases were confirmed Thursday, four days after the initial announcement. Symptoms include fever and respiratory problems, including severe pneumonia. Much still remains unknown about the virus, including how people are getting infected, but scientists say it contains genetic markers that could help it infect humans. It is circulating in poultry stocks, but is considered a “low pathogenic” virus that is not sickening birds. This can allow it to spread in flocks unnoticed, making it much harder to track and also possibly creating more contamination since the birds are surviving and spending more time on farms, in markets and elsewhere.

Watch a microbiologist talk about the virus in this AFP report:

Q: How concerned should the public be about the H7N9 virus?

A: At this point, experts say there is no cause for alarm, but they are watching it closely. No evidence exists that the virus is spreading from person to person, and no cases have been reported outside China. Samples are being collected from patients, and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention is sharing genetic sequences with outside scientists. This allows the world’s top flu experts to study the virus and look for mutations that could make it more dangerous. Poultry and its products are safe to eat as long as they are properly cooked.

Chickens are sold at a market on Thursday, April 4, 2013, in Shanghai, China. In a worrisome sign, a bird flu in China appears to have mutated so that it can spread to other animals, raising the potential for a bigger threat to people, scientists said Wednesday. (Photo: AP)

Q: Is there a vaccine?

A: No vaccine exists, but the World Health Organization and its partners are already working to isolate and identify possible candidate viruses that could be used to make a future vaccine if necessary. However, it would likely take months to produce the first doses.

A passenger (R) has her temperature checked by a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) staff member at the entrance of Sungshan Airport in Taipei on April 4. (Photo: SAM YEH/AFP/Getty Images)

Q: What changes are scientists seeing in the virus and why is this important?

A: Although it is not yet clear, the virus appears to have mutated in a way that would make it easier for it to adapt and grow at normal body temperature in mammals. Scientists are working to figure out which species could now be playing host to the virus, and one possibility is pigs.

Swine are important because they share some basic biological similarities with humans, and they can serve as “mixing vessels” if infected with different flu strains at the same time.

Other possibilities are that the mutations could be occurring in poultry or they are being generated after people are infected by birds.

“To me, the most important question to find out is: What is the actual host of this virus?” said Richard Webby, director of a WHO flu center at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. “It really looks like there’s been some mammalian host involved.”

A man who died was one of two H7N9 avian influenza infections reported in Zhejiang in eastern China on April 3, the official state news agency said, citing local authorities, bringing the country’s total number of cases to nine. Chinese authorities are trying to determine how exactly the new variety of bird flu infected people, but say there is no evidence yet of human-to-human transmission. (Photo: STR/AFP/Getty Images)

Here is WHO’s announcement regarding the virus and concerns earlier this week:

Q: How is this bird flu different from the H5N1 strain everyone has been so concerned about in the past?

A: Unlike the H7N9 strain, the H5N1 virus is highly lethal in birds, making it easier to identify and eliminate poultry outbreaks. H5N1 remains an avian influenza and has not taken root in another species, such as pigs. Most human infections have been linked to contact with infected birds. Scientists have been closely watching the virus since it first appeared in Hong Kong in 1997. It resurfaced in 2003 and decimated poultry stocks across Asia and has since killed at least 371 people. About 60 percent of those infected die, and experts have long feared the H5N1 virus could mutate into a form that spreads easily from person to person, possibly igniting a pandemic.

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Related:

• Scary Bird Flu Virus Not Previously Known to Infect Humans Kills 2 in China, Health Officials Baffled
• Scientists Granted Rights to Publish Bird Flu Study With Possible Pandemic Implications
• Pandemic Possible? Scientist Genetically Modifies Bird Flu With Scary Results
• Health Officials Warn: Super Bugs Are a ‘Ticking Time Bomb’ for the World

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