Tag: health care

Hospitals ration IV fluids as shortage extends into 2025

The US healthcare system continues to grapple with a critical IV fluid shortage caused by Hurricane Helene, which brought catastrophic flooding to North Carolina and heavily damaged Baxter’s North Cove manufacturing facility. Responsible for 60% of the nation’s IV fluid supply, the facility has been steadily working to restore operations, but full recovery is anticipated during the first quarter of 2025.

Baxter has restarted 85% of its manufacturing capacity, according to a December 19 update. Eight of the facility’s 10 manufacturing lines are back online, with some operating near pre-hurricane levels. The company anticipates reaching full pre-hurricane production levels early this year, which would allow distribution channels to normalize shortly after.

Previously, in a December 5 update, Baxter announced the resumption of its 3-liter irrigation manufacturing lines and peritoneal dialysis solutions manufacturing lines. The company also detailed that its IV solutions manufacturing lines had restarted, producing much of the site’s pre-hurricane capacity of 1-liter IV solutions—the size most commonly used in hospitals and clinics.

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“I Thought He Was Helping Me”: Patient Endured 9 Years of Chemotherapy for Cancer He Never Had

Anthony Olson wanted a career, children, a partner with whom he could hike Montana’s trails. Despite the diabetes diagnosis at age 4, the anemia, the kidney transplant that failed at age 29, the dialysis, he clung to those dreams. He attended community college and later moved from his parents’ house in Helena to study accounting at Montana Tech in Butte. He thought he might live a nearly normal life.

All of that was taken away in early 2011 when an oncologist at St. Peter’s, Helena’s only hospital, diagnosed him with myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood disorder that’s often described as pre-leukemia. The life expectancy of MDS patients is short. “He told me that without treatment, I’d be dead before the end of the year,” Olson said. He was 33.

“That diagnosis changed the direction of my life,” Olson, now 47, told me.

Olson couldn’t have known that he was one of many patients who, according to court records, may have received inappropriate, harmful or unnecessary treatments from Dr. Thomas C. Weiner. As I reported earlier this month, administrators at St. Peter’s suspected Weiner, who directed the hospital’s cancer center, was hurting patients for years. Yet hospital administrators allowed him to keep treating people until late 2020, when they suspended and then fired him. Weiner has denied all the allegations.

“I trusted that he was doing what was best for me,” Olson said of Weiner. “I never really questioned that until someone else told me that there was reason to.”

I discovered Olson’s story in a cache of records related to an ongoing legal dispute between Weiner and St. Peter’s. I was struck by how similar his case was to that of another Weiner patient, Scot Warwick. Weiner had diagnosed Warwick with Stage 4 lung cancer and treated him with chemo and other therapies for 11 years, court records show; after Warwick died in 2020, his family learned, from both a biopsy and an autopsy, that he never had cancer. Weiner insisted that Warwick had cancer all those years and that other doctors “missed” the disease.

Olson’s diagnosis was similarly flimsy, and he had been treated over nearly the same period of time. But there was a key difference between the two men: Olson lived to tell his story.

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UN Expert Urges Medical World to Cut Ties With Israel Amid Attacks on Gaza Hospitals

As Israeli forces stand accused of war crimes during attacks on multiple Gaza hospitals in recent days, Francesca Albanese – the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories – on Monday implored the global medical community to respond by cutting ties with Israel.

“I urge medical professionals worldwide to pursue the severance of all ties with Israel as a concrete way to forcefully denounce Israel’s full destruction of the Palestinian healthcare system in Gaza, a critical tool of its ongoing genocide,” Albanese wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

Albanese amplified a post by Dr. Rupa Marya – one of the most vocal defenders of Palestinian human rights in the U.S. medical community – calling on Israeli forces to release Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia.

Abu Safiya, who documented Israel’s siege and attack on Kamal Adwan and who reported last week that nearly 50 people including five hospital staff members were killed by an Israel Defense Forces airstrike on a nearby apartment tower, was among dozens of other medical staffers abducted by IDF troops on Saturday.

After besieging and attacking the hospital for weeks, Israeli forces raided the facility and rounded up 240 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Israel claimed without evidence that Kamal Adwan was being used as a Hamas command center. With the facility shut down and badly damaged, critical patients and their caregivers were forced to evacuate to the nearby Indonesian Hospital.

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Euthanasia and the Failure of Canada’s Health Care System: A Human Tragedy

The rise of euthanasia in Canada, under the guise of progress, exposes an alarming truth: the abandonment of the fundamental values ​​that should guide any society.

Instead of investing in a health care system that cares for the most vulnerable, the country has opted for a quick and tragic solution: facilitating assisted dying as a response to the deficiencies of its health care system.

The case of Samia Saikali, a 67-year-old grandmother who chose euthanasia after a 10-week wait to be seen by an oncologist, calls into question the moral and ethical direction that Canada has decided to take.

Samia Saikali began experiencing health problems after a trip in December 2022. Finally, in March 2023, she was diagnosed with inoperable gastric cancer. According to her doctor, with chemotherapy she could have extended her life by at least a year, enough time to enjoy one last summer with her family.

However, the Canadian health system, renowned for its endless waiting times, failed miserably. Ten weeks after her diagnosis, Saikali finally got a consultation with an oncologist, but it was too late. Her health had deteriorated so much that treatment was no longer a viable option. Desperate and with no real alternatives, she opted for euthanasia.

This tragic outcome is not an isolated case. It represents the failure of a health system that prioritizes bureaucracy and inefficiency over human life.

According to the Fraser Institute, in 2022 Canadians waited an average of 25.6 weeks to access a specialist, the longest wait time ever recorded in the country.

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Concerns over the Security of Electronic Personal Health Information Intensifies

On Friday, an attorney for Ascension Health, a major U.S. hospital operator, wrote to Maine’s attorney general to tell him the electronic personal health information (e-PHI) of Ascension patients and employees were compromised during the ransomware attack that occurred in May that affected nearly 5.6 million people.

The attack significantly disrupted Ascension’s operations across its extensive network, encompassing 134,000 associates, 35,000 affiliated providers, and 140 hospitals in 19 states and the District of Columbia. Immediate consequences included the diversion of ambulances, closure of pharmacies, and a reversion to manual record-keeping methods as critical IT systems had to be taken offline.

Ascension attorney Sunil Shenoi said in his December 19 letter to the Maine Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Division that the company “will begin notifying applicable Maine residents of the security incident” through the U.S. Postal Service.

Despite the growing scale of cyber threats against the healthcare industry, a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report earlier this month emphasized that “there is no comprehensive digital data protection law in the United States.” Variable state data privacy and security laws compound this problem. Furthermore, while many data protection guidance documents are available, they are voluntary.

The attack on Ascension is the latest cyber-attack targeting the healthcare sector, which is particularly vulnerable due to the sensitive nature of patient data and the critical importance of uninterrupted medical services. Earlier this year there was a similar ransomware attack on Change Healthcare, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group that affected the personal health information of 100 million people, underscoring once again the escalating cybersecurity challenges healthcare providers face.

The February ransomware attack on Change Healthcare – attributed to the BlackCat cybercrime group – disrupted electronic payments and medical claims processing affecting healthcare providers and patients nationwide.

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San Francisco Health Department Hires Obese Woman to Promote Fatness — Report

The Health Department of San Francisco hired an obese woman named Virgie Tovar for the role of ‘weight stigma czar’ who’s job it will be to consult on ‘weight stigma and weight neutrality’, reports The Gateway Pundit.

Tovar, an influencer in the ‘fat positive’ movement is a self-described expert on ‘anti-weight-based discrimination’. She wrote the book ‘You Have the Right to Remain Fat’ which promotes obesity. She took to social media Tuesday to express her gratitude toward the new role.

“I’m UNBELIEVABLY proud to serve the city I’ve called home for almost 20 years in this way! This consultancy is an absolute dream come true, and it’s my biggest hope and belief that weight neutrality will be the future of public health,” Tovar said in a social media post Tuesday.

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NATO Head Says “Wartime Mindset” Needed; Redirect “Pensions, Health, Social Security” To Military Spending

Former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who was this year selected as the Secretary General of NATO, has stated that Europeans need to “shift to a wartime mindset” and that military spending must be increased, likely at the expense of things like health care.

Rutte made the remarks at, ironically, a meeting of The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Brussels, declaring that Russia is trying to “crush our freedom and way of life.”

“Hostile actions against Allied countries are real and accelerating… These attacks are not just isolated incidents. They are the result of a coordinated campaign to destabilise our societies and discourage us from supporting Ukraine,” he added.

Rutte further asserted that Russia is using unconventional “hybrid warfare” attacks against Europe, circumventing NATO’s traditional defence and bringing “the front line to our front doors. Even into our homes”.

“Ukrainians are fighting against Russian swarms of drones. That’s what we need to be prepared for”, Rutte told the conference.

“I know spending more on defence means spending less on other priorities. But it is only a little less,” he continued, adding that “On average, European countries easily spend up to a quarter of their national income on pensions, health and social security systems.”

“We need a small fraction of that money to make our defences much stronger, and to preserve our way of life,” he proclaimed, reasoning that “freedom does not come for free.”

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Hospitals Are Giving Pregnant Women Drugs, Then Reporting Them to CPS When They Test Positive

According to a new investigation from The Marshall Project, hospitals are giving women drugs during labor and then reporting them to child welfare services when they later test positive for those same drugs. These cases are one of the more maddening side effects of an out-of-control drug war combined with strict mandatory reporting laws. 

“Hospital drug testing of pregnant women, which began in the 1980s and spread rapidly during the opioid epidemic, was intended in part to help identify babies who might experience withdrawal symptoms and need extra medical care,” writes The Marshall Project reporter Shoshana Walter. “Federal law requires hospitals to alert child welfare agencies anytime such babies are born.” 

The problem is that these pee-in-a-cup tests are frequently inaccurate and vulnerable to false positives. One 2022 study cited by Walter found that 91 percent of women given fentanyl in their epidurals tested positive for it later. Making matters worse, in several cases reviewed by Walter, a simple lack of due diligence played a major role. In these cases, “doctors and social workers did not review patient medications to find the cause of a positive test. In others, providers suspected a medication they prescribed could be the culprit, but reported patients to authorities anyway,” Walter writes. 

One woman Walter spoke to was reported to child welfare services soon after she gave birth to a stillborn daughter. She had tested positive for benzodiazepine—the same drug she was given before her emergency C-section. Another woman was given morphine to ease her pain during childbirth and was reported to child welfare services after her baby’s first bowel movement tested positive for opiates—even though the morphine was noted in her medical records and a drug test she took shortly before she went into labor showed no drugs in her system. After another woman tested positive for meth, her four children—including a newborn—were taken from her and kept in first care for 11 days. They weren’t returned until another drug test showed that the positive test was triggered by a heartburn medication she had been given at the hospital. 

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‘This Is Stupidity’: Why We Need to Oppose WHO’s Plan to Centralize and Control Global Health

Durk Pearson died recently. He was one of the pioneers of natural medicine — but really so much more than that, being a polymath.

Amongst Durk’s many endeavors; as a physicist, he developed guidance systems for cruise missiles; as a creative, he wrote screenplays for Clint Eastwood, such as “The Dead Pool”; as a longevity researcher, he kicked off the wellness revolution with his New York Times bestseller, “Life Extension: A Practical Scientific Approach,” and; as a freedom advocate, his case against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), won an appeal in the Supreme Court and brought by my colleague, now ANH-USA General Counsel, “FDA Dragon Slayer,” attorney Jonathan Emord, burst the doors open to a liberalized market for natural health products in which truthful structure/function claims could be made to inform consumer choice.

We ignore polymaths at our expense, and certainly the expense of future generations. Imagine if we’d ignored Aristotle, da Vinci or Turing? Or, in the East, if the Han Dynasty had ignored Zhang Heng?

Well, it’s now time to take heed of what Durk had been saying about medical freedom for over half a century. Durk said in an interview with Life Extension magazine back in 1998, “The price of liberty is vigilance.”

While often attributed to Thomas Jefferson, it seems this is more likely an abbreviation of a segment from a speech made by Irish orator and politician, John Curran, delivered in Dublin in July 1790, where he said, “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.”

Let me stray no further and move our attention to the issue we face today with efforts to centralize control over human health.

I can’t say it any other way: but this is stupidity. If I tried to be kinder, it would come out something like this: it is ignorant of the available facts, it is misguided, simple-minded, or lacking in judgment.

But, in my view, the adjective “stupid” does the job just fine — it’s short and to the point.

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The FDA’s War Against America’s Health

In 1906, the first FDA (Food and Drug Administration) was created in response to massive public protests against adulterated food and drugs (e.g., rotting food partially preserved with food additives or counterfeit consumer products). To stop it, food industry lobbyists attempted every tactic imaginable, eventually taking over the Department of Agriculture and in time forcing the dedicated public servant leading it (Harvey Wiley) to quit. Because of this, many toxic food additives Wiley fought against gained “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) status and remain in use today.

•The handicapping of the FDA came to a head in 1962, when thalidomide was just barely prevented from devastating America’s children, prompting Congress to give the FDA much broader powers to police the safety and efficacy of drugs.

•Unfortunately, this law backfired, as the FDA created an impossible to reach standard of efficacy that it selectively enforced to protect the pharmaceutical industry and simultaneously began utilizing increasingly brazen (and illegal) police tactics against anyone promoting effective natural therapies.

•Because of this, many life-changing medical therapies (discussed throughout this article) were blacklisted by the FDA and faded into obscurity. This, along with the FDA’s tendency to push unsafe and ineffective therapies (e.g., vaccines or antidepressants) onto the market regardless of how much data argued against doing so, led to the FDA becoming the most protested agency in the federal government.

•Nonetheless, every attempt to fix the FDA failed. In this article, I will review the structural issues that have perpetually caused the FDA to succumb to incompetence and corruption. I propose potential solutions that can utilize the unprecedented window created by the Make America Healthy Again movement to end the FDA’s war against America’s health.

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