.

I have been a community and hospital pharmacist for over thirty years … trained in clinical pharmacy at one of the largest healthcare centers in the South. I am a consultant pharmacist for Medication Therapy Management (MTM) for the State of North Carolina.

I search the Internet and other sources for information that I think you should be aware of; that should be interesting and important for you to know. When I see something that meets these criteria, I will let you know about it in my next article.

If you don’t see some information that you need and it is within my areas of education and expertise, I will try to post an article or an answer as soon as possible! You can put your request in the “Contact Us” area located above the upper left column on this page.

.

.

Bob Diamond R.Ph Pharmacist

Tweet

Technorati Tags: Cancer, colon cancer, Diabetes, health care, Healthcare, pharmacist, pharmacy

ATLANTA — With “baby boomers” believed to account for 75% of the hepatitis C infected population in the U.S. — the CDC is recommending that everyone ages 47 to 67 be tested for infection.

The CDC estimates that some two million Americans born from 1945 to 1965 are infected with HCV — that’s about 3% of the boomer generation. But because many years usually elapse before noticeable symptoms develop, most don’t know they are infected.

The CDC said one-time HCV testing of all “baby boomers” “could identify more than 800,000 additional people with hepatitis C, prevent the costly consequences of liver cancer and other chronic liver diseases, and save more than 120,000 lives.”

“CDC believes this approach will address the largely preventable consequences of this disease, especially in light of newly available therapies that can cure up to 75% of infections,” the agency said in a statement issued Friday.

Most boomers do not have the risk factors that, until now, the CDC had used as the basis for testing recommendations. Those risk factors include use of illegal injected drugs, receiving blood products or organ transplants before HCV testing became routine, known exposures to HCV, presence of hepatitis symptoms, and all patients with HIV.

Vietnam era veterans — all baby boomers — are a well-know risk group due to blood exposure in military field hospitals as well as drug use.

Infection with HCV often leads to liver cancer. However, the recent introduction of HCV protease inhibitors, including telaprevir (Incivek) and boceprevir (Victrelis), has made the disease more manageable, possibly even curable.

The recommendation will be open for public comment from May 22 to June 8, after which the CDC will release a final version.

The CDC also set Saturday, May 19, as “National Hepatitis Testing Day,” and announced that it would make a total of $6.5 million in grants to make testing available to specific populations including Asian-American Pacific Islander communities (which have high rates of hepatitis B infection) and injection drug users, as well as members of the “boomer” generation.

John Gever

Senior Editor

John Gever, Senior Editor, has covered biomedicine and medical technology for 30 years. He holds a B.S. from the University of Michigan and an M.S. from Boston University.

Technorati Tags: Baby Boomers, Boomers, Hepatitis C

Indoor tanning is associated with an increased risk for skin cancer, the most common form of cancer in the United States (1,2).

The World Health Organization considers ultraviolet (UV) tanning devices to be a cause of cancer in humans (3).

Exposure to UV radiation, either from sunlight or indoor tanning devices, is the most important, avoidable known risk factor for skin cancer (4,5).

Annually, skin cancer costs an estimated $1.7 billion to treat and results in $3.8 billion in lost productivity (6).

Reducing the proportions of adolescents and adults who report using artificial sources of UV light for tanning are Healthy People 2020 objectives (7).

Current state-level policies to restrict indoor tanning are directed at youths aged <18 years. To examine the proportion of the adult U.S. population reporting indoor tanning in the past 12 months, CDC and the National Cancer Institute analyzed data from the 2010 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). Overall, the age-adjusted proportion of adults reporting indoor tanning in the past 12 months was 5.6%, with higher rates among whites, women, and adults aged 18–25 years. Nationwide, the highest rates of indoor tanning were among white women aged 18–21 years (31.8%) and 22–25 years (29.6%). Among white adults who reported indoor tanning, 57.7% of women and 40.0% of men reported indoor tanning ≥10 times in the past 12 months. Continued public health efforts are needed to identify and implement effective strategies for reducing indoor tanning among adults in the United States, particularly among whites, women, and adults aged 18–25 years.

Click here to read the entire article with research citations >>> http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6118a2.htm?s_cid=mm6118a2_e

Technorati Tags: indoor tanning, Skin Cancer

In the first published study of its kind, researchers from the Catholic University/Policlinico Gemelli in Rome, Italy, and NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center found that bariatric surgery dramatically outperforms standard medical treatment of severe type 2 diabetes.

These findings were published March 27 in an advanced online edition of the New England Journal Medicine (NEJM).

The study’s authors report that most bariatric surgery patients were able to discontinue all diabetes medications and maintain disease remission for the two-year study period, while none of those randomly assigned to receive standard medical treatment did.

“Although bariatric surgery was initially conceived as a treatment for weight loss, it is now clear that surgery is an excellent approach for the treatment of diabetes and metabolic disease,” says senior author Dr. Francesco Rubino, chief of Gastrointestinal Metabolic Surgery and director of the Metabolic and Diabetes Surgery Center at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell and associate professor of surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College.

It is particularly challenging to treat obese patients who have type 2 diabetes, because insulin therapy and other hypoglycemic medications often cause additional weight gain. In this study, most surgery patients experienced improvements in blood sugar levels, decreased total cholesterol and triglycerides, and improved HDL-cholesterol concentrations. This suggests that bariatric surgery for the treatment of diabetes may reduce a patient’s cardiovascular risk.

“The unique ability of surgery to improve blood sugar levels and cholesterol levels as well as reduce weight makes it an ideal approach for obese patients with type 2 diabetes,” says lead author Dr. Geltrude Mingrone, chief of the Division of Obesity and Metabolic Diseases and professor of medicine at Catholic University in Rome.

Click here to read in ‘Science Daily’ how the study was conducted

Technorati Tags: Bariatric Surgery, Diabetes, Type 2 Diabetes

.

Prescriptions for narcotic painkillers soared so much over the last decade that by 2010 enough were being dispensed to medicate every adult in the U.S. around-the-clock for a month.

Fueling that surge was a network of pain organizations, doctors and researchers that pushed for expanded use of the drugs while taking in millions of dollars from the very companies that made them, a Journal Sentinel/MedPage Today investigation found.

Last year, the Journal Sentinel/MedPage Today found that a University of Wisconsin-Madison based organization had been a national force in helping liberalize the way opioids are prescribed and viewed. During a decade-long campaign that promoted expanded use of opioids — an agenda that critics say was not supported by rigorous science — the UW Pain & Policy Studies Group received $2.5 million from makers of opioid analgesics.

After that article was published last April, the UW Pain group said it had decided to stop taking money from the drug industry.

But the UW Pain group is just one link in a network of national organizations and researchers with financial connections to the makers of narcotic painkillers.

Beginning 15 years ago, that network helped create a body of “information” that today is found in prescribing guidelines, patient literature, position statements, books and doctor education courses, all which favored drugs known as opioid analgesics.

Without rigorous scientific evidence to prove that their benefits out weigh potential harm, drugs like OxyContin and Vicodin increasingly have been used to treat a wide array of chronic pain syndromes including low back pain and fibromyalgia.

Current practices reflect a gradual shift from the use of these drugs to treat short-term acute pain such as post-surgical pain, as well as severe pain associated with metastatic cancer or end-of-life pain — uses that were based on solid evidence that such use was safe and effective.

But the benefit seen for those conditions was extended to treatment of chronic pain syndromes, an extrapolation that had no evidence to back it up.

Caught in the middle are millions of Americans with real pain that can last for years and thousands of doctors who want to help them.

It’s a situation that was ripe for the influence of the pharmaceutical industry, said Mark Sullivan, MD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington.

By 2010, those firms were selling four times as many prescription painkillers to pharmacies, doctors’ offices and hospitals as in 1999.

Led by OxyContin, sales of prescriptions of opioid drugs totaled $8.4 billion in 2011, up from $5.8 billion in 2006, according to data supplied by IMS Health, a drug market research firm.

“We’ve never really exposed so many people to so much drug for so long,” Sullivan said. “We don’t really know what the long-term results are.”

Click here to read the entire article > Chronic Pain Fuels Boom in Opioids

.

What kind of pills are these?

Worried about those capsules you found in your teenager’s room? Not sure about some of those leftover pills still in the bathroom cabinet? There’s a good chance that our Pill Identification Wizard (Pill Finder) can help you match size, shape, colour… then lead you to find the detailed description in our drugs database.

NOTE: As a general rule, we should all periodically check our medicine cabinets for any expired, re-bottled, or unidentified pills. The safest bet is to keep all medications in their original bottles or packets, with pertinent labeling and instructions attached, to avoid confusion and mistakes.

Most pills can usually be identified by color, size, shape and a combination of letters and numbers.

Click here for a Pill Identification Wizard

Technorati Tags: Medicine, Pill Identification

The Basics

Food poisoning (foodborne illness) is when you get sick from eating or drinking something that has harmful germs (like bacteria, viruses, or parasites) in it. Two common causes of food poisoning are E. coli and Salmonella.

Good habits like these can help protect your family from food poisoning:

• Buy food from stores that look and smell clean.
• Don’t buy food past “sell by,” “use by,” or other expiration dates.
• Wash your hands often with warm water and soap – especially before and after touching food.
• Make sure food is cooked to a safe temperature.
• Keep raw meat and seafood away from cooked and ready-to-eat food.
• Keep cold foods cold. Keep hot foods hot.

Technorati Tags: food handling, food poison, food poisoning

Technorati Tags: Breast Cancer, Cancer, Healthcare

nist.gov image

by Rosemary Gibson

.

The October 19 Health Affairs briefing entitled “Saving Medicare Dollars and Improving Care,” sponsored by the ABIM Foundation and other funders, was a watershed moment in which ideas that would require less spending on health care that would actually improve care for patients were discussed on K Street. This is a great message for patients and, it so happens, for the super committee deliberations a few miles away.

Dr. Nancy Morioka-Douglas, Clinical Professor of Medicine/Family and Community Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine highlighted seven often unnecessary things done in primary care, such as EKGs in patients without symptoms, that were identified by the Good Stewardship groupconvened by the National Physicians Alliance.

Later, Dr. Steve Weinberger, Executive Vice President and CEO of the American College of Physicians identified sensible principles to guide the integration of a “less is more” theme in public policy, such as:

• Avoid interventions that don’t help and may harm
• Give incentives to physicians and patients to avoid low value care
• Use payment approaches that are politically feasible, medically appropriate and minimally burdensome
• Recognize that there will always be exceptions.

The discussion addressed the tip of the iceberg. The next step is to move to the big-ticket items where the literature is quite clear that patients are harmed by back surgeries for which there is no evidence of efficacy, cardiac bypass surgeries that are unwarranted, and duplicative and unnecessary diagnostic imaging that exposes patients to cancer-causing radiation, among many other tests and procedures performed that may cause more harm than good.

We can’t put all of the health care reform burden on patients, even with shared decision-making. Physician leadership is essential. That’s why this meeting will hopefully be the first of many conversations on K Street and on Capitol Hill.

In the end, this is all about good care of the patient. That’s the primary motivation. It’s also true that as a society, we don’t have money to waste. As I wrote in The Treatment Trap, the best way to preserve Medicare is to pay for things that improve health and well-being, and to stop paying for things that don’t. If we don’t get it right, and get it right soon, even the good things will be cut. Let’s act on the wisdom we have that knows the difference.

Rosemary Gibson led national quality and safety initiatives at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.  She is author of The Treatment Trap and Wall of Silence: The Untold Story of the Medical Mistakes that Kill and Injure Millions of Americans. This article originally appeared on The Medical Professionalism Blog.

Technorati Tags: Healthcare, Medical Tests, Medicare

(Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

.

(CBS/AP) The Listeria outbreak from cantaloupes is now the deadliest foodborne illness outbreak in the U.S. in more than 25 years.

Pictures: 10 dangerous but common food safety mistakes

The CDC announced Wednesday that 23 people have died from listeriosis, while another 116 have been sickened. Not since 1985, when Listeria from Mexican-style soft cheeses killed 52 people, has a foodborne illness outbreak been this deadly in America. The current death toll also surpassed a 1998 Listeria outbreak linked to processed meats that killed 21 people.

Officials say the tainted cantaloupes from Jensen Farms in Holly, Colo., should be off store shelves by now, as they were recalled mid-September and their shelf life is about two weeks. But the number of deaths may continue to grow. Symptoms of listeriosis can take up to two months to appear.

The CDC on Wednesday confirmed two more deaths in Louisiana. Other deaths have been reported in Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Texas and Wyoming.

Listeria illnesses have been reported in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

FDA investigators said that Colorado health officials found Listeria in cantaloupes taken from grocery stores and from a victim’s home that were grown at Jensen Farms. Matching disease strains were found on equipment and cantaloupe samples at Jensen Farms’ packing facility in Granada, Colo. FDA officials have said they were looking at the farm’s water supply and possible animal intrusions among other things to figure out the source of the problem. Listeria grows in moist and muddy conditions, and the bacteria are often are carried by animals.

Jensen shipped the cantaloupes to about half the states, but added that it wasn’t sure where the cantaloupes went because they have been sold and resold. Some companies may be unaware that they bought or distributed the tainted fruit.

Listeria is more deadly than other well-known pathogens such as salmonella and E. coli. While most healthy adults can consume Listeria with no ill effects, it can kill the elderly, those with compromised immune systems, and unborn children of pregnant women. The CDC said the median age of those sickened is 78, and most people who are ill are over 60. The CDC said it is also aware of one miscarriage linked to the outbreak.

Colorado has the most illnesses with 34, while Texas has reported 17.

Technorati Tags: Listeria