Bloodthirsty Liberal

To our America readers: want to feel proud?

Medical device manufacturing is one of the nation’s most dynamic and vibrant industries. The United States is the global leader in medical technology innovation, and it is one of the few major industries with a net trade surplus. This industry is responsible for more than 400,000 American jobs—and is indirectly responsible for almost two million more that supply and support this highly skilled workforce. Most important, its products are essential elements of modern medical care. They include everything from CT scanners and pacemakers to blood pressure cuffs and robots used by surgeons.

As the old joke goes: coffee break’s over; everyone back on their heads.

Yet instead of protecting this paragon of American ingenuity and innovation, the Obama administration and Congress have viewed the industry as a cash cow from which they could milk profits to help pay for the president’s health law. So they added to the Affordable Care Act a 2.3% excise tax on medical devices that will take effect at the beginning of 2013.

This tax is especially pernicious because it is assessed on sales, not profits. To put this in perspective, imagine that you’ve manufactured medical devices and had sales of $1 million, after all your costs and expenses—everything from materials and labor to research and development—your profit was $100,000. The excise tax would be $23,000, wiping out almost 25% of your profits.

Many medical device companies have to ramp up sales before they become profitable. Due to the long, draconian and sometimes unpredictable regulatory process that must be negotiated before a product can be sold, it can take from $70 million to $100 million in total sales before these businesses make their first cent of profits. Nevertheless, they would have to pay the excise tax on their revenue.

The nation’s medical device industry is vulnerable. It is not comprised of behemoths: 80% of its companies have 50 or fewer employees, the very businesses we are relying on to turn the U.S. economy around. The new excise tax comes when regulatory delays and uncertainty are increasing, and as many device firms are shutting down or moving abroad to take advantage of the more favorable tax and regulatory climate in Europe. The tax will force companies to lay off employees, cut back on research and development, or diminish capital investment.

Another symbolic news story (see below): government can encourage private industry (often best by leaving it the hell alone), or it can prey on it. I’ll give you one guess.

I’m reminded of an episode of The Sopranos.

At the brokerage, Christopher is apologizing for the Monkey Boys’ behavior. Then he calls them into the office for a stern dressing-down…. They explain the concept of “pump-and-dump,” and how they’re pawning all the stock off on old ladies. It’s up to eighty, though, and they want to sell. Christopher teaches a little Racketeering 101, laying down the primary rule: “When you’re bleeding a guy, you don’t bleed him dry right away. You wait, so you can bleed him next week, and the week after.”… Christopher goes on to tell them, “If any more Porsches disappear, make it two towns over, and I want a taste.”

And we all know what happens when Christopher doesn’t get his “taste”.

Your government at work.

Good, I’d like to add a few categories to the list myself:

A majority of [British] doctors support measures to deny treatment to smokers and the obese, according to a survey that has sparked a row over the NHS’s growing use of “lifestyle rationing”.

Some 54% of doctors who took part said the NHS should have the right to withhold non-emergency treatment from patients who do not lose weight or stop smoking. Some medics believe unhealthy behaviour can make procedures less likely to work, and that the service is not obliged to devote scarce resources to them.

However, senior doctors and patient groups have voiced alarm at what they call “blackmailing” of the sick, and denial of their human rights.

Ever the voice of reason, may I offer a compromise? Instead of allowing no denial of service, or only a limited, narrowly selected group, why not broaden it? If enough people are deemed to be a waste of resources, then the burden of premature death is spread fairly and evenly. Call it the “individual death-date”.

I’ve already selected my category: fanatic exercisers, whose obsession with heart rate and lung capacity leads to expensive knee and hip replacements and a host of other physical complaints. Tell them to take it easy, or they can just hobble home from the ER, discharged without being seen. It’s not just your ailments I can’t stand; it’s your sanctimony. Good bye!

But I’m sure my wacko environmentalist friends would add global warming skeptics to the queue. We’ve already been likened to Holocaust deniers; why waste even a penny on us? I would also add so the SOL-roster the cast of Jersey Shore, Lindsay Lohan, King Shabazz Shamir, and anyone who says “I” when they mean “me”. It’s an eclectic list, but you can make your own.

Who am I kidding? If the Supreme Court doesn’t shut this racket down, we’ll all be on someone’s list. I’ll flip you for the red pills, Aggie. Loser takes blue.

You say “myth”, I say “lie”:

A persistent health-care myth is that the U.S. system is uniquely wasteful versus the European countries that spend far less per patient as a result of tight government control. Only the establishment experts who spread this myth will be surprised, but new research shows American patients are often getting more value—better outcomes and longer lives—in return for those extra dollars.

More remarkable still, the news arrives via the policy journal Health Affairs, in a symposium on the cost and quality of U.S. cancer care. This is like the Vatican saying go ahead, worship the graven images and false idols.

…

The U.S. system is relatively more expensive because diagnosis and treatment are much more intensive, and doctors tend to leverage the latest therapies and drugs against one of the world’s leading killers. While U.S. health care could obviously be far more efficient, most of its dysfunctions are the result of government’s perverse incentives.

The sophisticates who pine for the allegedly more enlightened forms of European rationing and price controls—for more perverse incentives—would do well to peruse the Health Affairs symposium. Mr. Philipson’s paper suggests those are good ways to stop anticancer progress in its tracks, or reverse it altogether.

The entire purpose of ObamaCare is to lessen the best care so that everyone may have mediocre care. It’s one thing to spread the wealth, but can you seriously spread the health?

File under: What Jews do when not writing or implementing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion:

Retired university professors typically rest on their laurels after many years of teaching and research and take it easy. Not so for Hebrew University Faculty of Medicine emeritus professor Nathan Citri. Two decades after his retirement, the veteran microbiology expert has developed a novel kit enabling speedy detection of multidrugand extremely antibiotics-resistant “superbugs” and providing instant guidelines for patients’ appropriate treatment in hospitals.

His invention will improve patient care, save lives, shorten hospital stays and significantly reduce healthcare costs around the world, according to Yissum, HU’s research and development company, which recently signed a licensing agreement for commercializing the kits with BioConnections, a microbiology company in the UK.

The Polish-born Citri, who marks his 91st birthday this month, was in March one of 27 HU researchers to be honored in a permanent photo exhibition on the Mount Scopus campus’s Innovators’ Way.

“I hardly dealt with bacteria until the last two or three years,” Citri told The Jerusalem Post in an interview in his apartment in Jerusalem’s retirement residence Nofim.

“Twenty years after I went on pension, I became a microbe hunter,” he said with some irony.

If you did the math as I did, you will note that he was a young man at the time of the German invasion of Poland. He had already emigrated to Palestine (as was); not so the rest of his family. You can read that story here (pdf file).

But back to his invention—and its significance:

“When the first antibiotics were introduced in the 1940s, they were hailed as ‘wonder drugs,’ the miracles of modern medicine,” said WHO director-general Dr. Margaret Chan. “With hospitals now the hotbeds for highly resistant pathogens, the world is on the brink of losing these miracle cures. The speed with which these drugs are being lost far outpaces the development of replacement drugs.

“In the US alone, antibiotic-resistant infections are responsible for eight million additional hospital stays annually and for the consequent bed-to-bed spread of resistance, taking a toll of $20 billion per year in excess healthcare costs and $35 billion a year in societal costs.”

“But until my kits become widely available,” commented Citri, “there is no way to implement this recommendation fast enough because the physician doesn’t know whether using the antibiotic is justified or not. Humanity is facing the end of the antibiotic era – and it’s our own fault!” The unique identification kits are based on a chemical reaction that directly tests for the presence of the antibiotic-destroying enzymes called beta-lactamases, which are found in all multidrug-resistant bacteria. The kits enable direct and precise recognition of bacterial resistance to all members of the beta-lactam family, which include penicillins, cephalosporins and carbapenems.

The kits are modular, disposable arrays of spots impregnated with several types of antibiotics. The exact combination can be easily varied according to need. Unprocessed samples of any specimen to be tested (such as blood or urine) are placed directly on the array spots, which are then covered by a lid containing a dark indicator dye. If the sample contains bacteria that can destroy the antibiotic impregnated in a particular spot, the dark indicator dye facing that spot becomes lighter, exposing the antibiotic resistance within minutes.

The modular kits will thus alert doctors to the presence of multi-drug-resistant (MDR) or extremely drug-resistant (XDR) bacteria, warn which antibiotics will be futile and indeed wrong to use and inform which, if any, still constitute a treatment option. Thus, for the first time, evidence-based guidance for appropriate treatment can be made available without delay.

Allow me to state the obvious: a Polish Jew who would have perished with the rest of his family had he not emigrated, lived to become a distinguished researcher—and then lived some more to develop a tool to save countless lives and money.

Zionism saves lives.

PS: Do read his bio, linked above. The miracles and tragedies of his family’s story are a microcosm of the Holocaust.

I told Aggie this was how I intended to title all of my UN posts, and I took her hysterical cackle for agreement.

Give Bill Clinton credit for saying so: when you step in the [bleep], sometimes you have to wear it:

Former President Bill Clinton, the United Nations special envoy for Haiti, has acknowledged the role U.N. peacekeepers played in a deadly cholera outbreak that has killed thousands in Haiti, according to ABC News. The U.N. has repeatedly denied its role in the outbreak despite the ever-mounting scientific evidence that its troops were the culprits.

“I don’t know that the person who introduced cholera in Haiti, the U.N. peacekeeper, or [U.N.] soldier from South Asia, was aware that he was carrying the virus,” Clinton said, adding that “it was the proximate cause of cholera. That is, he was carrying the cholera strain. It came from his waste stream into the waterways of Haiti, into the bodies of Haitians.”

Clinton also said that Haiti’s dismal sanitation conditions were the real culprit, not the U.N., “Unless we know that he knew or that they knew, the people that sent him, that he was carrying that virus and therefore that he could cause the amount of death and misery and sickness, I think it’s better to focus on fixing it,” he said.

Leading researchers from Harvard Medical School told ABC News they felt confident that the cholera strain came from Nepal and was carried to Haiti by Nepalese soldiers who served as U.N. peacekeepers in January 2010. Allegedly, the peacekeepers failed to keep sanitary conditions on their base.

Allegedly? [Bleep] allegedly!

The UN’s own study was clear: “The source of the Haiti cholera outbreak was due to contamination of the Meye Tributary of the Artibonite River with a pathogenic strain of current South Asian type Vibrio cholerae as a result of human activity.” In other words, somebody dumped human fecal matter containing a deadly cholera bacteria from South Asia into one of the country’s main sources of water for drinking and irrigation. Who might that be?

…

When Associated Press journalists visited Wednesday, they found open and cracked pipes behind the base, with U.N. military investigators taking samples. There was an overpowering smell of human waste, and a pipe leading toward a septic tank was leaking foul-smelling black fluid toward the river.

The waste is dumped across the street in open pits that residents, who live a few yards away, said often overflow into the Artibonite tributary running below.

A UN official told the BBC that “everyone knew the sanitary situation in the Nepali base was deplorable”.

And this ain’t your grandma’s cholera:

According to John Mekalanos, chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology at Harvard Medical School, cholera strains from South Asia are far more virulent, and more capable of causing lethal epidemics. “These strains are nasty. So far there has been no secondary outbreak. But Haiti now represents a foothold for a particularly dangerous variety of this deadly disease,” he said.

…

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been over 470,000 reported cases of cholera and over 6,631 deaths during the Haitian epidemic, making it the worst cholera outbreak in recent history.

I would be more receptive to Clinton’s message of forgiveness if the UN took responsibility. Without that, who’s to say Nepalese peace-keepers won’t be crapping in other water tables the world over?

Oh yeah, as we also reported over two months ago, substitute Haitians for Nepalese:

More than 500,000 Haitians have been infected, and Mekalanos said a handful of victims who contracted cholera in Haiti have now turned up in Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and in BOSTON, Miami and New York, but only in isolated cases.

Oh, okay, only isolated cases. I want to drink a bottle of hand sanitizer just writing this.

Israel could use a friend in the Muslim world—but Turkey isn’t going to be it:

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan took advantage on Tuesday of the escalation in southern Israel to once again attack Israel, as he has done on a regular basis in recent months.

Speaking at the headquarters of his Justice and Development Party, Erdogan accused Israel of committing a “massacre” in Gaza and called Israel’s citizens to speak out against the government.

“A slow but methodical massacre has been taking place in Palestine since the early 20th century,” said Erdogan, according to a report on Channel 10 News. “I reiterate the call for Israel to stop the inhumane attack on Gaza and the Palestinian territories.”

The Turkish prime minister also directly turned to the citizens of Israel and, referring to the Holocaust, said, “I call on the citizens of Israel, themselves victims of genocide, to oppose any attempt of genocide against the Palestinians and to ask their country to stop the terror.”

Erdogan said Turkey will continue to stand firmly against the “injustice” and alongside the people of Gaza.

He left out the fact that terrorists in Gaza have been constantly attacking Israel with rockets. More than 200 rockets were fired at southern Israel in four days of hostilities. Despite a ceasefire which began Monday night, terrorists continued to fire rockets and missiles into Israel throughout the day.

He also left this out:

A 15-year-old boy was taken to hospital in Israel on Tuesday, after he was injured on Monday morning in the Jabalya area of Gaza, according to a statement by the Coordinator of Government Activities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

The boy was taken to the Kaplan Medical Center in Rehovot, according to the statement.

The evacuation took place after contacts between the Coordination and Liaison Administration at Erez Crossing and representatives of the Health Ministry.

The statement noted that the boy’s injury is related to the death of another 15-year-old boy, who initially claimed that he was wounded by IDF forces. However, this claim was denied by the IDF Spokesperson, who said that the IDF was not operating in the area.

The evacuation took place despite constant rocket attacks on southern Israel by Gaza terrorists. During four days of hostilities terror groups fired more than 200 rockets at Israeli civilians, while the IAF responded by targeting the cells firing the rockets.

Stick that in your hookah and smoke it.

Oh, the inhumanity!

A delegation of Israeli doctors and volunteers from the Eye from Zion organization traveled to Ethiopia recently to perform 160 cataract surgeries in a portable operation room donated by Chaim Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer. During their visit, they met Kavda Imsak, a 10-year-old girl who suffered from a large tumor in her eye.

Since Ethiopian hospitals are not equipped for such operations, Imsak had to live with the large growth until the Israeli delegation arrived.

At first the team, headed by Dr. Nachum Rosen, preformed a preliminary surgery to discern whether the tumor was cancerous or benign. Later on, they decided to bring her to Israel to remove it.

“The chances of recovery are very slim,” said Eye from Zion founder Nati Marcus, who insisted on bringing the girl to Israel. “As soon as I saw her I decided to take a chance,” he explained.

Once it was decided to bring her to Israel for surgery, arrangements were coordinated with MASHAV, Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation, the Foreign Ministry, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the surgeons who agreed to operate pro bono.

According to Marcus, many offered to help, including the best doctors in the country who asked to take part in the complex operation, and hospitals that offered to donate surgery and recovery rooms.

Show-offs.

And this really toasts my crumpets:

This is not the first pro bono operation for Ben-Simon. Together with friends and colleagues he volunteers in various places with Eye from Zion and independently. The delegations consist of volunteers who fund their own travel.

Eye from Zion operates in various places including Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Micronesia, Myanmar and Ethiopia, sending advanced equipment, specialists, operating room nurses and experts to remote locales.

What are they trying to prove?

Somebody inform the International Red Cross:

Today (Thursday), 16.2.12, at 09:00, Magen David Adom (MDA) Jerusalem received a call reporting that there had been an accident between a truck and bus carrying schoolchildren from Anata in northern Jerusalem. As a result of the accident, the bus had overturned into a roadside ditch and had caught fire.

MDA immediately declared a mass-casualty event. Large forces of intensive care ambulances, ambulances, medics, doctors and paramedics were summoned. In addition, senior MDA officers, including MDA Director-General Eli Binn, arrived on the scene.

…

During the rescue operation, MDA Director-General Binn met – at the scene – with the President of the Palestinian Red Crescent and offered, in the framework of the efficient cooperation between the two organizations, to place at the Red Crescent’s disposal considerable MDA forces to assist in transferring the injured who had been evacuated to hospitals in Ramallah to hospitals within the Green Line so that the injured could receive the best care possible. To this end, MDA Dir.-Gen. Binn allocated considerable MDA forces within a very short time. He also offered as many units of blood as were necessary.

In order to facilitate the transfer of the injured to hospitals in Jerusalem and the center of the country, MDA ambulances and intensive care ambulances were at the DCO adjacent to Beit El.

…

MDA Director-General Binn said, “There is no doubt that the cooperation between all of the forces that worked together at the scene enabled, and is still enabling, the saving of lives and the giving of the best possible medical care to those who were injured in the accident. In such cases, there is no significance to the ethnicity or origin of the victims and we all work to one end – saving lives.”

It was a terrible accident that took the lives of several Palestinian children (the truck driver was an Israeli Arab). There is no good news here, none. But thank God for the cooperation between the two medical services, which certainly saved lives.

PS: If you are deaf to the sarcasm of my first line, for decades the ICRC refused to allow the Magen David Adom to participate in international operations for fear of offending Moslem sensibilities. (The MDA insisted on flying the Red Star of David, as Christian countries fly the Red Cross and Moslem countries fly the Red Crescent.) That’s a classic example of the soft bigotry of low expectations. As we have seen above, Moslems can be quite grateful to see MDA ambulances arriving on an accident scene. They’ll even take their blood.

All of Israel’s adversaries who have provided similar services (or even can provide similar services) please raise your hands? Anyone…? Bueller…? Bueller…?

A gifted 12-year-old boy from Kazakhstan whose cerebral palsy (CP) prevented him from walking independently has had a successful operation and is undergoing extensive rehabilitation at Assaf Harofeh Medical Center in Tzrifin – at the hospital’s and the Foreign Ministry’s expense.

Pavel (Pasha) Sadyshev and his mother have been staying free at the state hospital’s minihotel since early January so he could undergo the surgery and the physical therapy for his severe orthopedic problem.

…

As the parents of the only child are unemployed, they could not afford the surgery, rehabilitation, accommodations and travel expenses. Since Pavel’s case was unusual, the government and hospital director-general Dr. Benny Davidson agreed to foot the medical bills.

The family, who live in a small town near Astana, were blessed by the fact that last September, Dr. Simona Bar Haim, Assaf Harofeh’s veteran physiotherapist and neurophysiology researcher, had been invited to Kazakhstan for the second time to lecture on her experience in the field.

During her visit to Astana’s Republican Children’s Rehabilitation Center, Bar Haim met a number of children, including Pavel, who desperately needed help. Israel’s ambassador to Kazakhstan Israel Mei-Ami, and his wife Ayala, asked the senior physiotherapist to examine him. After doing so, she predicted that with surgery and treatment in Assaf Harofeh, the boy would be able to walk like Israeli children born with CP that developed just before or during delivery.

…

Many Kazakh citizens with CP go untreated because of the country’s lack of knowhow in the field.

As Kazakhstan is landlocked, Bar Haim took the boy to the sea for the first time in his life.

In addition, he was provided with a laptop computer so he could communicate with his father and other relatives via Skype.

Not bad for a filthy microbe, a cancer, eh Borat?

I don’t burden you with my sports obsessions, much, but my Patriots are playing the Denver Broncos tonight in a playoff game. I will be rooting for Brady and the Pats, as I always do, but there will be one person on the other team I will not be rooting against.

This is about a local kid, whose story is here. (More here.)

And Tebow does this stuff all the time. When most other athletes are about booze, drugs, chicks, and money, he’s about God. (To be fair, a lot of athletes are religious, if not so overtly.)

Sure, he praises his “Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ” in every breath, but so what? We should all have such faith. I think most of the hatred, all of it irrational, comes from the discomfort his unapologetic faith induces in others.

That, and this:

Say, is that supposed to be anti-abortion, or something?

PS: His team’s still going down tonight. Bet the ranch.

What the hey, I just dealt with a grisly abortion (see below), who’s up for euthanasia?

Tens of thousands of patients with terminal illnesses are being placed on a “death pathway”, almost double the number just two years ago, a study published today shows.

Health service guidance states that doctors should discuss with relations whether or not their loved one is placed on the scheme which allows medical staff to withdraw fluid and drugs in a patient’s final days. In many cases this is not happening, an audit has found. As many as 2,500 families were not told that their loved ones had been put on the so-called Liverpool Care Pathway, the study disclosed.

In one hospital trust, doctors had conversations with fewer than half of families about the care of their loved one. In a quarter of hospital trusts, discussions were not held with one in three families.

Overall, doctors discussed plans with relations in 94 per cent of cases, which is an improvement since the last audit but still means thousands of families were not informed. Under the guidance, patients who are close to death can be placed on the Liverpool Care Pathway, so called because it was developed at the Royal Liverpool Hospital in the 1990s. It aims to ensure they die without being subjected to unnecessary interference by staff.

In addition to the withdrawal of fluid and medication, patients can be placed on sedation until they pass away. This can mean they are not fed and provided with water and has led to accusations that it hastens death.

I don’t have a problem with the so-called pathway, I really don’t. There are people who are going to die, though it is very sad, and they should be made comfortable. (I went through this not so long ago with a member of my family.)

But there is no excuse, none, ever, to keep the family in the dark. Even advocates of socialized medicine—of which I am most assuredly not—have to acknowledge that respect for life supersedes all.

I admit 94% exceeds my low expectations and esteem for national health care, but as the article makes clear, even 99.99% is unacceptable. People die only once, and their loved ones lose them only once.

There is no excuse, none, ever, for messing that up.

Waste not, want not!

After 52 years of marriage, Pat Shoop thought she’d shared every intimacy possible with her husband, Bob.

But that was before she became so ill with a Clostridium difficile infection last year that doctors suggested that a spousal stool transplant — yes, a dose of Bob’s feces — might be the only way to save her life.

“I’d heard of intercourse, but I’d never heard of ‘pooper-course,’” Shoop, 75, of Minnetonka, Minn., jokes now.

…

A new review of more than two dozen scientific reports involving 317 patients, some dating back 50 years, finds that fecal bacteriotherapy, commonly known as fecal transplant, cured the problem in 92 percent of the cases. Nearly all got better after just one treatment. That’s a better record than other treatments, including probiotics, toxin-binding molecules and an experimental vaccine.

The review offers the most comprehensive evidence so far in favor of the repugnant-sounding practice in which stool from a healthy donor is emulsified, usually mixed with water or saline, and transferred via a nasal tube or enema to the gut of a seriously ill C. diff patient.

Hey, that sounds like the mess tent at Zuccotti Park. Who will notice the difference? At last these people have a chance to give back to society after take, take, taking. Let’s hope they don’t poop the bed. (Or that they do!)

PS: I can hear the PSAs now: “Anyone can be a donor, and it’s quick, easy, and painless. Won’t you please give the gift of [bleep]?”