Cancer

August 15, 2019

Safety concerns more than skin deep with consumer products like sunscreens

It probably should not have come as such a shock. But consumers are learning the hard way — notably through lawsuits in the civil justice system — that substances they slather on their skin don’t just stay there. They can move deeper into the body, causing bad things to happen.

Judges and juries have accepted the argument that this occurs with baby powder, with asbestos-tainted talc contributing over long periods of frequent application to claimants’ genital cancers. Plaintiffs have won sizable judgments, asserting their cancers were tied to extensive, sustained exposure to the chemical used in the weed killing product Roundup.

August 5, 2019

Defense bill may offer active service personnel a way to win back key rights

by Patrick A. Malone

Although members of Congress have fled the nation’s capital for their annual August recess, there’s guarded optimism that lawmakers may be open to reversing a seven-decades-old U.S. Supreme Court ruling that bars active duty military personnel from their constitutional right to pursue in the civil justice system claims that they have suffered harms while seeking medical services.

Advocates of this change saw cause for optimism that President Trump met briefly in July in North Carolina and encouraged Army Sgt. 1st Class Richard Stayskal, a terminally ill Green Beret who has become the focus of efforts to fixing the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), Bloomberg news service reported. Jackie Speier, a California Democratic congresswoman, introduced a bill named after Stayskal and that would allow troops to file medical malpractice suits in federal court, because, as Bloomberg said:

“Stayskal went to Womack Army Medical Center at Fort Bragg in 2017 after feeling suffocated and coughing up blood, but the hospital misdiagnosed him with pneumonia during two visits, according to his congressional testimony before the House Armed Services Committee. By the time he saw a civilian doctor six months later, the lung tumor causing the problems had doubled in size. The tumor had showed up in X-rays done before he went to dive training, but nobody told Stayskal or diagnosed him.”

July 30, 2019

Voluntary recall of textured device raises more alarms about breast implants

by Patrick A. Malone

An Irish medical manufacturer voluntarily withdrew its textured breast implant and related tissue expanding devices from markets after the federal Food and Drug Administration tracked a spike in a rare cancer and deaths tied to the products and asked that they be recalled.

U.S. regulators, the New York Times reported, lagged their European counterparts by almost a year in acting to protect women seeking cosmetic and reconstructive procedures involving the Allergan implant:

“Worldwide, 573 cases and 33 deaths from the cancer have been reported, with 481 of the cases clearly attributed to Allergan Biocell implants, the F.D.A. said. Of the 33 deaths, the agency said its data showed that the type of implant was known in 13 cases, and in 12 of those cases the maker was Allergan.”

July 10, 2019

Critics fear a key watchdog’s decline as FDA eases up its regulatory actions

by Patrick A. Malone

Consumers may want to think long and hard about whether the federal Food and Drug Administration protects the interests of the vulnerable public or profit-raking Big Pharma and medical device makers.

As a scrutiny of data by Science magazine shows:

“From monitoring clinical trials and approving medicines and vaccines, to ensuring the safety of blood transfusions, medical devices, groceries, and more, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is one of the nation’s most vital watchdogs. By several measures, however, FDA’s compliance and enforcement actions have plummeted since President Donald Trump took office … The agency’s ‘warning letters’—a key tool for keeping dangerous or ineffective drugs and devices and tainted foods off the market—have fallen by one-third, for example. Such letters typically demand swift corrections to protect public health and safety. FDA records from Trump’s inauguration through 22 May show the agency issued 1,033 warning letters, compared with 1,532 for the most recent equivalent period under former President Barack Obama. Compared with the start of the Obama presidency, Trump-era letters dropped by nearly half. Warnings from the FDA Center for Devices and Radiological Health, which helps ensure the safety and quality of medical devices, and from some of the agency’s district offices—including Philadelphia, Florida, and New York—have dropped even more steeply, by more than two-thirds. Two district offices have not issued a warning in more than 2 years. The numbers don’t just reflect a new administration’s slow start. FDA sent significantly fewer warning letters in the second year of Trump’s presidency than in his first.

July 5, 2019

San Francisco, Beverly Hills blaze new regulatory path with e-cigarette bans

by Patrick A. Malone

Cities are daring to tread where federal regulators have not: They’re cracking down on vaping and its potential harm, particularly to the young, by banning e-cigarettes and tobacco products.

San Francisco supervisors’ e-cigarette ban, recently enacted, packs a symbolic punch because Juul, a “tech startup” whose product has become the market-dominating maker of vaping devices, is headquartered in the city.

Officials not only banned e-cigarette sales, they also decreed that their makers cannot manufacture the devices on municipal property. Juul is unaffected by this action because it is not retroactive, and the company says it does not make its product in its offices, space that is leased from the city on Pier 70.

May 17, 2019

For cancer patients in online support groups, another grief: illness fakers

by Patrick A. Malone

For all the benefits that the cyber world has bestowed on billions of users, it also has brought out trolls and bullies aplenty. It also potentially has created a new category of sick people. They use online forums to fake illnesses and gain sympathy and even money. There’s even a new term for it: Munchausen by internet.

To be sure, this is not yet a formal and widely accepted medical or psychiatric diagnosis but a description of a phenomenon that appears to be rising and has gotten media attention when exposed through the experiences of patients with serious and chronic illnesses who band together in online chat groups, writer Roisin Lanigan reported in the Atlantic magazine.

Lanigan says that patients with cancer, for example, find the cyber forums invaluable. They not only allow those with the disease to discuss their fears, emotions, and experiences, they can allow individuals to share tips and ideas on how to cope with situations that patients have never encountered and may be overwhelmed by.

May 7, 2019

Did FDA just let Big Tobacco put another burn on Americans’ health?

by Patrick A. Malone

Federal regulators appear to be getting caught flat-footed yet again as Big Tobacco’s harms metastasize before their very eyes. The federal Food and Drug Administration has given a qualified go-ahead to Philip Morris International to sell a device that heats but does not burn tobacco, a process that appears to expose users to fewer harmful toxins.

Still, the iQOS gadget packs the same wallop of highly addictive nicotine as does a standard, tobacco-burning cigarette. And the FDA decided it would be regulated just as cigarettes are, thereby restricting its sales and marketing to young people.

Big Tobacco executives talked up iQOS (eye-kos) as yet another way for smokers of their proven and deadly burned tobacco cigarettes to get unhooked from them and to lessen their health harms.

May 3, 2019

Climate change is worsening air quality, allergies, and Americans’ health

by Patrick A. Malone

If residents of the nation’s capital aren’t already sneezing, hacking, and swiping at red and rheumy eyes, just wait — the spring allergy season is upon us. And it may be longer and worse than ever. Then, Washingtonians also may be gasping soon for another reason: worsening air pollution, specifically problematic ozone levels in summer heat.

Though science deniers may be resisting environmental realities, human-caused climate change already is affecting our health and well-being.

Air pollution, for example, is a rising worry, the American Lung Association reported in its 20^th annual report on clean air. The health group advised that:

April 7, 2019

Politicians disconnect from good sense, even as U.S. health care worries soar

by Patrick A. Malone

When it comes to something as crucial as health care, let’s keep it simple: Americans deserve better than this …

Can President Trump keep up his barrage of counter-factual assertions and political reverses on federal help for those needing health insurance, a key part of the Affordable Care Act? After resurrecting in federal courts the decade-long debacle of Republican efforts to kill Obamacare—including its protections for preexisting conditions—Trump flipped yet again. He heard an earful from party leaders that they have no way to cover tens of millions who would lose their health insurance if the ACA gets tossed out by courts, and he apparently awoke to the reality that the GOP can’t eliminate the law when Democrats control the House. So, the president then insisted that the GOP, after failing to do so for years, would present a better alternative and enact it, repealing Obamacare, too—at some time after the 2020 elections. If Republicans win back the House, keep control of the Senate, and he is reelected.
Even as the president asserted the GOP’s superiority in health care policy, the Los Angeles Times and the Philadelphia Inquire reported that a key element of Trumpcare is bringing back consumer nightmares. Patients initially might like the short-term health insurance plans the administration has pushed as an ACA alternative. Officials have relaxed rules on them so they can last longer than the few months permitted under Obamacare. The plans may carry lower monthly premiums. But they come with skimpy benefits. Which consumers are rediscovering. They’re getting sick and hoping to rely on short-term policies, only to find they owe doctors and hospitals thousands of dollars—but their insurance won’t help them with a penny.

April 4, 2019

As GOP keeps slashing at health coverage, big strains of caregiving ignored

by Patrick A. Malone

Americans have real reason to fear a health care catastrophe: If loved ones suffer major injury or illness, who will feed, bathe, and care for them 24/7 after they get out of the hospital and recuperate at home? Who will take time off from work to set up and take them to unending and long medical appointments? Who will wait for and get all the pills and devices they need?

The nation has been locked in a decade-long battle over health insurance that helps cover medical costs, but caregiving, a crucial part of the social safety net, gets short shrift, writes Aaron E. Carroll, a professor of pediatrics and health research and policy expert at Indiana University School of Medicine. As Carroll noted in a timely and personal column for the New York Times “Upshot” feature:

Americans spend so much time debating so many aspects of health care, including insurance and access. Almost none of that covers the actual impossibility and hardship faced by the many millions of friends and family members who are caregivers. It’s hugely disrupting and expensive. There’s no system for it. It’s a gaping hole.