Health/Sick Care
urgeons in Auckland, New Zealand, are expressing discomfort with a new policy that requires them to consider the ethnicity of their patients as a factor when scheduling surgeries.
Specifically, Maori and Pacific Islander patients are given priority consideration to compensate for historic inequality in access to health care.
Te Whatu Ora – Health New Zealand, a national public health agency established in July 2022 to consolidate numerous regional health boards, introduced an “Equity Adjustor Score” that sets five factors to be considered in surgery priority lists.
The five factors are clinical priority, time already spent on wait lists, if the patient lives in a geographically isolated area, economic deprivation, and ethnicity. The highest scores for ethnicity are given to Maori and Pacific Island (or “Pasifika”) peoples.
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Read MoreMore than 1 million people have been dropped from Medicaid in the past couple months as some states moved swiftly to halt health care coverage following the end of the coronavirus pandemic.
Most got dropped for not filling out paperwork.
Though the eligibility review is required by the federal government, President’s Joe Biden’s administration isn’t too pleased at how efficiently some other states are accomplishing the task.
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Read MoreHOUSTON (AP) — Milton Powell, a Houston rapper who performed under the name Big Pokey and is credited with elevating the city’s hip-hop scene, died after collapsing during a show in Texas, a local official said Monday.
Tom Gillam III, a justice of the peace in Jefferson County, where Powell was performing when he collapsed Sunday, said an autopsy to determine the cause of death was pending. He said Powell was 48.
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Read MoreDr Tess Lawrie is a medical doctor and research consultant based in the UK. She is the CEO of Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy and she sits on the steering committee of the World Council for Health.
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Read MoreA top Canadian politician has taken the unprecedented step of admitting that the government was “wrong” about vaccines while issuing an apology to the unvaccinated.
Since the Covid pandemic first emerged in 2020, Canada has enforced some of the strictest, most tyrannical measures of any nation in the Western world.
Mandates forced Canadians to wear masks and get vaccinated or risk losing their jobs.
Those who chose not to get vaccinated, however, were stripped of their freedom to travel or visit public places.
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Read MoreCorporate malfeasance has escalated to the point that some watchdogs argue we’ve entered a dystopian period of corporate fascism in which soft money campaign donations convince politicians to turn a blind eye to private sector immorality. Corporate America’s shift away from the pseudo-utilitarianism of the 20th century to unbridled self-interest at the cost of the collective is artfully portrayed in movies like Erin Brockovich and Dark Waters.
For example, Dupont, the corporation exposed in Dark Waters, and 3M are two of the most negligent corporations in the United States. Both companies have gone to great lengths to conceal evidence of the significant health risks posed by perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) chemicals. These human-created chemicals are used by corporations here at home and abroad.
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Read MoreA new preprint is out entitled: “Risk of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) among Those Up-to-Date and Not Up-to-Date on COVID-19 Vaccination”1 and it concludes from a multivariate analysis of 48,344 individuals (Employees of Cleveland Clinic) that ‘those not “up-to-date” on COVID-19 vaccination had a lower risk of COVID-19 than those “up-to-date”’.
I can already hear the hit piece vultures circling and chanting: it’s not peer-reviewed. No it’s not, but read it anyway and ask yourself if this study has merit. Decide for yourself. Maybe my summary can help.
What did they do?
They looked at the differences between ‘infection rates’ (cumulative incidence) with COVID-19 in individuals who’d received the bivalent shots treating injection with the COVID-19 bivalent product as a time-dependent covariate. What this means is that they accounted for the fact that injection status can change per individual at any time (injection time), and at each injection (event) time, that current status of the individual is compared with the current values of all others who were at risk of COVID-19 at that time.
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Read MoreNY Attorney Bobbie Anne Cox single-handedly overturned the New York State executive regulation that allowed the government to quarantine whomever it chooses. Now, the state of New York is using tax money to appeal that decision.
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Read MoreNatural Health Products shouldn’t cost more because Health Canada is broken.
Health Canada is strangling Natural Health Products (NHPs) in red tape, leading to increased costs and fewer products on store shelves for Canadians.
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Read MoreThis article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.
The makers of Roundup, the world’s top weedkiller, will pay $6.9 million for violating an agreement with the state of New York to stop making false claims about the safety of its best-selling herbicides.
Bayer and Monsanto, which was acquired by the German agrochemical giant for $63 billion in 2018, violated a 1996 agreement with the state of New York to “immediately cease and desist” from making false and misleading claims about glyphosate-based Roundup products, the New York attorney general’s office announced Thursday.
Studies have linked glyphosate, the active ingredient in many Roundup products, to a wide range of harmful effects on pollinators, lab animals and people. In March, a first-of-its-kind study linked Roundup to liver and metabolic disease in children.
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