Cancer

August 6, 2018

As Big Pharma rivals battled to hype opioids, watchdogs dozed. They slumber still.

When Big Pharma pursues rapacious profits and regulators snooze, patients suffer terrible consequences, as new revelations about the opioid crisis show.

Kaiser Health News Service , via the Washington Post, and The New York Times both have done excellent investigative digging into drug makers’ role in fueling the prescription painkiller mess that authorities estimate claims 116 lives a day due to overdoses.

Fred Schulte, writing for the independent, nonpartisan Kaiser service, reported that rival makers — seeing how much money Purdue Pharma was making with its powerful and addictive OxyContin drug and that it was encountering law enforcement and regulatory challenges — stepped in with “similarly dangerous painkillers, such as fentanyl, morphine and methadone.”

August 1, 2018

Colonoscopies carry higher infection risks than previously believed

by Patrick A. Malone

More than 15 million Americans each year undergo an invasive medical test, roughly once a decade and starting at age 50. If some medical experts had their way, more patients would get this cancer checkup, beginning at an even younger age. But as Emily Bazar, a senior editor and consumer columnist (Ask Emily) for the independent, nonprofit Kaiser Health News service, points out, physicians may want to heal themselves and their hygiene practices before pushing even more patients to get colonoscopies and endoscopies (procedures to examine the upper gastrointestinal tract).

That’s because a growing body of research shows that the switch by doctors, hospitals, and specialty centers to reusable scopes to peer into various parts of the body have resulted in rising infection rates among colonoscopy and endoscopy patients, among others.

Inspections show that the reused scopes don’t get cleaned properly and all the time. The more complex the medical device, the greater the risk, as clinicians and patients learned when complex and dirty duodenoscopes were tied to the deaths of 35 patients since 2013 and the sickening of dozens of others, leading to congressional investigations, lawsuits, and product recalls.

July 24, 2018

More bad booze news: Liver disease deaths are rising, especially among young

by Patrick A. Malone

Summer tipplers may want to steer away from that second glass of sangria, or rethink that next round of beers. That’s because there’s yet more bad news about Americans and booze abuse: Liver disease deaths are spiking, with fatalities tied to cirrhosis jumping by 65 percent between 1999 and 2016, while those connected with liver cancer doubled in the same time span.

Americans 25- to 34-years-old saw the steepest increases in alcohol-related liver disease, with the number of annual deaths in seven years, as studied by Michigan experts, nearly tripling.

“Alcohol misuse and its complications” is striking down a new generation of Americans, Elliot Tapper, a University of Michigan liver expert and lead author of a newly published study on liver cancer, told the Washington Post.

July 22, 2018

Baltimore bounces sugary sodas off restaurant children’s menus, favoring milk, water, juices

by Patrick A. Malone

Families dropping into Baltimore restaurants may be surprised by what is no longer on the children’s menu, thanks to an official mandate: sugary soft drinks.

At the behest of public health officials, Baltimore has become the largest US city and an East Coast pioneer in enforcing a new restaurant ordinance that makes water, milk, and 100 percent fruit juices the default drinks for youngsters.

Parents who really want their kids to have a sugar-laden soft drink can still get them, but the parent has to place the order. The idea is to get parents to pause and think, and nudge them toward healthier choices.

July 5, 2018

Will medical researchers turn away Big Tobacco’s billion-dollar Trojan horse?

by Patrick A. Malone

Big Tobacco seems to have a shiny new billion-dollar Trojan horse. The question now: Will medical scientists be savvy enough to avoid a credibility catastrophe by rejecting funding from Tobacco’s wealthy new foundation?

Rita Rubin, a seasoned health care writer, reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that Philip Morris, a global hawker of tobacco wares, has pledged in the next dozen years to pump $960 million into the Foundation for a Smoke Free World. That group, purportedly, aims to fund research “that advances the field of tobacco harm reduction and reduces the public health burden of smoking-related diseases,” Rubin reported.

But this gambit, often referred to in political parlance as “astroturfing,” has been slammed by respected medical and scientific organizations, including the World Health Organization. They have declared it unacceptable for groups that aim to advance the health and well-being of patients to take “profits from a product responsible for about 1 in every 5 US deaths to fund health research.”

June 28, 2018

No surgery is free of risks or complications, as breast reconstruction study reminds

by Patrick A. Malone

Cancer and surgery — it’s little wonder that even the most resilient patients can buckle a bit when their doctors talk to them about these two issues together and urgently. That’s why new research may be valuable to women with breast cancer, providing them with better evidence-based insight about challenges in their reconstructive options.

The information, which experts said surprised them and may change their views on frequently performed procedures, yet again underscores that surgery can carry significant risks and complications.

In fact, 1 in 3 women who undergo cancer-related breast reconstructive surgery develops a postoperative complication over the next two years, 1 in 5 requires more surgery, and in 1 in 20 of cases, reconstruction fails, the New York Times reported of the published findings of medical researchers, most from the University of Michigan.

June 17, 2018

NIH ripped for Big Alcohol funding and advising on $100-million drinking study

by Patrick A. Malone

The National Institutes of Health, perhaps the world’s leading medical research institution, has moved fast to try to fix self-inflicted damage to its reputation caused by a controversial $100-million study on alcohol and its harms.

NIH Director Francis Collins halted the study, and an advisory group backed his action, lambasting researchers for soliciting funding and counsel from the alcohol industry for a work that purported to answer key and fundamental questions about booze but from its outset leaned toward seeing benefit in moderate drinking.

The New York Times deserves credit for digging into the dubious actions by researchers supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, an arm of NIH.

June 15, 2018

San Francisco voters send strong message cracking down on kids’ vaping

by Patrick A. Malone

San Francisco voters, upholding their elected leaders’ enlightened lawmaking, bashed Big Tobacco and its interests, providing a potent primary election message to public health officials nationwide to curb the growing menace to young people posed by e-cigarettes and vaping.

By a 2-to-1 margin, Bay Area residents supported their Board of Supervisors’ tough ban — which may be the most stringent in the nation — on sales of flavored tobacco products, including vaping liquids packaged as candies and juice boxes, and menthol cigarettes.

Specialized liquids, peddled in flavors like bubble gum, chicken and waffles, and unicorn milk, are key to the youth craze for vaping, in which teens use small devices about the size of a computer flash drive to get a nicotine-fueled boost. They can, with standard hits from liquids in devices like the trendy Juul, regularly consume as much nicotine as is found in a pack of cigarettes.

June 13, 2018

For early-stage breast cancer patients, dreaded chemo may be unneeded

by Patrick A. Malone

Breast cancer patients may get a welcome respite from one of the disease’s dreaded aspects — its aggressive and costly treatments. New research suggests that thousands of women with early-stage breast cancer who now are told to get chemotherapy don’t need it, while a larger, significant number of patients can benefit by halving the time they’re told to take an expensive drug with harsh side-effects, especially for the heart.

Although this information should be taken in a positive light, patients should consult with their doctors about appropriate treatment for their individual case.

The prospective shifts in breast cancer treatment, based on new findings, may add to rumblings and criticisms about over-treatment and whether doctors have taken too lightly the toll — physically, mentally, and financially — that this and other forms of cancer inflict on patients.

June 6, 2018

Be skeptical of cancer society’s call for earlier colorectal screenings

by Patrick A. Malone

If you’ve got a shaker of salt, you may want to empty it on recent news coverage of the American Cancer Society’s announcement about its new guidelines on the age to start colorectal screening. That’s because the organization’s advisory and more than a few health journalists show a shaky grasp of basic disease statistical math.

Cancer specialists, correctly, are concerned because they say they are seeing the disease in younger people, with more colon and rectum cancers detected in patients in their 20s and even in their teens. They’re unsure what’s causing this. But just how many diagnosed cases have there been — and do the numbers mean there’s enough hard science to support a new recommendation that patients get colorectal screening five years earlier than they do now, at age 45 instead of 50?

As Kevin Lomangino, managing editor of Healthnewsreview.org, a health news watchdog site, points out, too many reporters became too accepting of experts’ fuzzy math when describing a screening change that could result in patient harms. The society, and specialists contacted by many reporters, spoke often of “doubled risks,” or impressive seeming percentage increases in colorectal cancer diagnoses — but without providing actual numbers of cases.