Monthly Archives: March 2015

Health Care REIT Stocks Find Investors' Favor

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H ealth care stocks are on the move with many making new highs. And the Federal Reserve last week signaled that interest rate increases are at least a few months off. That combination has been good news for health care REITs. Being in the right sector helps a REIT, and so does the prospect of continued low interest rates.

Two REITs,Medical Properties Trust ( MPW ) andSabra Healthcare ( SBRA ) have formed double-bottom formations. Sabra already has broken out from a 33.74 buy point and is in new high ground. Medical Properties is trading just below a 15.58 buy point.

Medical Properties buys hospitals, rehab centers and other specialty hospitals and leases them back to their established operators. It also finances construction of new or expansion of existing medical facilities. It's been expanding in Europe.

The REIT pays a regular quarterly dividend of 22 cents a share, which works out to a 5.8% annual dividend.

Wall Street expects an 18% increase in funds from operation, the REIT equivalent of earnings, in 2015 and an 8% increase in 2016.

Sabra has a portfolio of 160 real estate medical properties that are leased to operators, including senior housing facilities.

Sabra pays a 39-cent quarterly dividend, which works out to a 4.6% annualized yield. Analysts expect 9% growth this year and 6% next year. FFO rose 8% in the most recent quarter with revenue up 48% from a year ago.

BioMed Realty Trust ( BMR ) owns offices and laboratories that it leases to businesses in the life sciences. Earlier this year, it signed a 15-year lease withIllumina ( ILMN ) for a new 360,000-square-foot campus at Foster City, Calif. BioMed expects to turn the facility over to Illumina in 2017.

The stock corrected 19% in recent weeks, but it recovered much of that decline and is now trading 8% off a high.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc.

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MU Health Care designated for high-level stroke care

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Monday, March 23, 2015 | 4:13 p.m. CDT

COLUMBIA MU Health Care has been designated one of the state's first Level 1 stroke centers, the highest rating a hospital can receive for its stroke program.

MU Health care joined nine other hospitals in Missouri designated as a "time-critical diagnosis stroke center." Boone Hospital Center shares the status.

According to a news release from MU Health Care, the stroke team treated approximately 61 percent of eligible stroke patients with a clot-busting drug within 45 minutes after they arrived compared to 24 percent in other hospitals across the country.

The process of being designated at any level stroke center is voluntary, Derek Thompson, a spokesman for MU Health Care, said. The hospital must contact the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services to apply; the agency then conducts a review that includes auditing, observations and interviews.

MU Health Care is also certified by the Joint Commission as an advanced primary stroke center. MU's stroke team includes experts in neurology, neurosurgery, physical therapy, cardiology and emergency services.

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MU Health Care designated for high-level stroke care

Obama marks health care reform's fifth anniversary

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President Obama on Monday commemorated the fifth anniversary of his signing of his landmark health care reform law by touting the act's successes in the face of heavy political opposition.

Since its enactment on March 23, 2010, Mr. Obama said the reform law has provided access to health insurance for millions of Americans who previously could not afford it, as well as drastically reduced the growth rate of health care costs and contributed to improved care quality.

The Affordable Care Act has been the subject of more scrutiny, more rumor, more attempts to dismantle and undermine it than just about any law in recent history, Mr. Obama said in a statement released on Monday. But five years later, it is succeeding in fact, it's working better than even many of its supporters expected.

Last year, the percent of adults in the U.S. without health insurance dropped to 11.3% as of June 30, down from an average of 14.4% in 2013 and approximately 16% in 2010, according to reports by the federal Council of Economic Advisors. The report said the drop was due primarily to the expanded availability of affordable coverage through the public health insurance exchanges established under the health care reform law.

The Obama Administration said the reform law has also helped hold down the rising costs of health care and health insurance. The average premium cost for employer-sponsored health care coverage grew by 3% in 2014, representing the lowest year-over-year increase in nearly 15 years.

Annual increases in the cost of medical goods and services have been held in check as well, rising just 1.7% since the act's signing.

The health care reforms also were a major contributor to a 17% reduction in the rate of patients harmed by hospital care through the first three years of the law's implementation, translating to an estimated 50,000 fewer care-related deaths and approximately $12 billion in cost savings.

Despite its successes, the law has not been without its challenges or challengers since its enactment in 2010.

In 2013, the Obama administration's rollout of the federally-run public health insurance exchange was plagued by technical issues, requiring costly and time-consuming repairs and significantly damaging public confidence in the government's ability to effectively administer the law.

The government was also forced to delay or relax implementation of several key provisions of the reform law, including coverage and information reporting requirements for employers.

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Extreme cryptography paves way to personalized medicine

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David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty

Cloud processing of DNA sequence data promises to speed up discovery of disease-linked gene variants.

The dream for tomorrows medicine is to understand the links between DNA and disease and to tailor therapies accordingly. But scientists working to realize such personalized or precision medicine have a problem: how to keep genetic data and medical records secure while still enabling the massive, cloud-based analyses needed to make meaningful associations. Now, tests of an emerging form of data encryption suggest that the dilemma can be solved.

At a workshop on 16 March hosted by the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), cryptographers analysed test genetic data. Working with small data sets, and using a method known as homomorphic encryption, they could find disease-associated gene variants in about ten minutes. Despite the fact that computers were still kept bogged down for hours by more-realistic tasks such as finding a disease-linked variant in a stretch of DNA a few hundred-thousandths the size of the whole genome experts in cryptography were encouraged.

This is a promising result, says Xiaoqian Jiang, a computer scientist at UCSD who helped to set up the workshop. But challenges still exist in scaling it up.

Physicians and researchers think that understanding how genes influence disease will require genetic and health data to be collected from millions of people. They have already started planning projects, such as US President Barack Obamas Precision Medicine Initiative and Britains 100,000 Genomes Project. Such a massive task will probably require harnessing the processing power of networked cloud computers, but online security breaches in the past few years illustrate the dangers of entrusting huge, sensitive data sets to the cloud. Administrators at the US National Institutes of Healths database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP), a catalogue of genetic and medical data, are so concerned about security that they forbid users of the data from storing it on computers that are directly connected to the Internet.

Homomorphic encryption could address those fears by allowing researchers to deposit only a mathematically scrambled, or encrypted, form of data in the cloud. It involves encrypting data on a local computer, then uploading that scrambled data to the cloud. Computations on the encrypted data are performed in the cloud and an encrypted result is then sent back to a local computer, which decrypts the answer. If would-be thieves were to intercept the encrypted data at any point along the way, the underlying data would remain safe.

If we can show that these techniques work, then it will give increased reassurance that this high-volume data will be computed on and stored in a way that protects individual privacy, says Lucila Ohno-Machado, a computer scientist at UCSD and a workshop organizer.

Homomorphic data encryption, first proposed in 1978, differs from other types of encryption in that it would allow the cloud to manipulate scrambled data in essence, the cloud would never actually see the numbers it was working with. And, unlike other encryption schemes, it would give the same result as calculations on unencrypted data.

But it remained largely a theoretical concept until 2009, when cryptographer Craig Gentry at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, proved that it was possible to carry out almost any type of computation on homomorphically encrypted data. This was done by transforming each data point into a piece of encrypted information, or ciphertext, that was larger and more complex than the original bit of data. A single bit of unencrypted data would become encrypted into a ciphertext of a few megabytes the size of a digital photograph. It was a breakthrough, but calculations could take 14 orders of magnitude as long as working on unencrypted data. Gentry had rendered the approach possible, but it remained impractical.

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Extreme cryptography paves way to personalized medicine

'Ban DNA Editing Of Sperm And Eggs'

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Designer babies are on their way, said experts in genetic engineering as they called for a global ban on the practice.

It is thought that studies involving the use of genome-editing tools to modify the DNA of human embryos will be published shortly, said the authors of a paper in Nature.

The articles lead author, Professor Jennifer Doudna of the University of California at Berkeley, led the team that developed the gene-editing technique that she now wants restricted.

She and her colleagues have now warned of the ethical and safety implications of research that could lead to the birth of what laymen might term super humans.

In our view, genome editing in human embryos using current technologies could have unpredictable effects on future generations, they said. This makes it dangerous and ethically unacceptable. Such research could be exploited for non-therapeutic modifications.

DNA can be edited far more precisely than ever before using Crispr-Cas9 (Credit: Mehmet Pinarci/Sendercorp)

It is possible, for example, for the technology to make unintended changes to DNA, The New York Times reported.

But they are also worried that a public backlash could halt work on disease fighting techniques in somatic (non-reproductive) cells.

Genome-editing technologies may offer a powerful approach to treat many human diseases, including HIV/Aids, haemophilia, sickle-cell anaemia and several forms of cancer, they said.

Scientists at the Hubrecht Institute in the Netherlands reported in Cell Stem Cell two years ago that the technique could repair the cystic fibrosis mutation.

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'Ban DNA Editing Of Sperm And Eggs'

Scientists call for caution in using DNA-editing technology

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14 hours ago by Robert Sanders The bacterial enzyme Cas9 is the engine of RNA-programmed genome engineering in human cells. Credit: Jennifer Doudna/UC Berkeley

A group of 18 scientists and ethicists today warned that a revolutionary new tool to cut and splice DNA should be used cautiously when attempting to fix human genetic disease, and strongly discouraged any attempts at making changes to the human genome that could be passed on to offspring.

Among the authors of this warning is Jennifer Doudna, the co-inventor of the technology, called CRISPR-Cas9, which is driving a new interest in gene therapy, or "genome engineering." She and colleagues co-authored a perspective piece that appears in the March 20 issue of Science, based on discussions at a meeting that took place in Napa on Jan. 24. The same issue of Science features a collection of recent research papers, commentary and news articles on CRISPR and its implications.

"Given the speed with which the genome engineering field is evolving, our group concluded that there is an urgent need for open discussion of the merits and risks of human genome modification by a broad cohort of scientists, clinicians, social scientists, the general public and relevant public entities and interest groups," the authors wrote.

Doudna, director of UC Berkeley's Innovative Genomics Initiative, was joined by five current and two former UC Berkeley scientists, plus David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate and president emeritus of the California Institute of Technology, Stanford Nobelist Paul Berg and eminent scientists from UC San Francisco, Stanford, Harvard and the universities of Wisconsin and Utah. Several of these scientists are currently involved in gene therapy to cure inherited diseases.

Latest of many warnings

Such warnings have been issued numerous times since the dawn of genetic engineering in 1975, but until now the technology to actually fix genetic defects was hard to use.

"However, this limitation has been upended recently by the rapid development and widespread adoption of a simple, inexpensive and remarkably effective genome engineering method known as CRISPR-Cas9," the scientists wrote. "The simplicity of the CRISPR-Cas9 system enables any researcher with knowledge of molecular biology to modify genomes, making feasible many experiments that were previously difficult or impossible to conduct."

Correcting genetic defects

Scientists today are changing DNA sequences to correct genetic defects in animals as well as cultured tissues generated from stem cells, strategies that could eventually be used to treat human disease. The technology can also be used to engineer animals with genetic diseases mimicking human disease, which could lead to new insights into previously enigmatic disorders.

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Scientists call for caution in using DNA-editing technology

What’s New Now: Microsoft and Apple Strike a Blow Against Freedom – Video

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What #39;s New Now: Microsoft and Apple Strike a Blow Against Freedom
Microsoft and Apple are both moving to restrict the OSes that users can run on their newest machines, citing security concerns. What #39;s New Now is PCMag #39;s daily report where we cover the most...

By: PCMag

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Teqq – Freedom New Best Music for You Electro & House No Copyright Music BMfY – Video

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Teqq - Freedom New Best Music for You Electro House No Copyright Music BMfY
Teqq - Freedom NO copyright music for you! It #39;s 100% free! __ We upload music for your better day! It #39;s way to live! Enjoy and subscribe! New music every week! __.

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Teqq - Freedom New Best Music for You Electro & House No Copyright Music BMfY - Video

Freedom Industries pleads guilty to pollution charges in West Virginia chemical spill case

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CHARLESTON, W.Va. A now-bankrupt chemical company pleaded guilty Monday to three pollution charges related to last year's spill that contaminated a West Virginia river.

Mark Welch, chief restructuring officer of Freedom Industries, entered the plea on behalf of the company in federal court to negligent discharge of a pollutant and unlawful discharge of refuse matter, both misdemeanors, and violating a permit condition under the Clean Water Act, a felony.

Thousands of gallons of a coal-cleaning agent from Freedom Industries in Charleston spilled into the Elk River and went into West Virginia American Water's intake 2 miles downstream on Jan. 9, 2014. It prompted a tap water ban for 300,000 residents in nine counties for up to 10 days while the water company's system was flushed out.

Freedom Industries, which filed for bankruptcy eight days after the spill, faces a maximum $900,000 fine. Sentencing was set for June 29.

"Extreme fines would be very difficult for the estate," Welch told U.S. District Judge Thomas Johnston. "I have limited resources."

In ordering a presentencing report, Johnston said, "We'll find out how much money Freedom Industries has."

An FBI affidavit says Freedom knew about critical flaws at its Charleston plant but never dealt with them. Federal investigators have said holes in a corroded tank's floor and roof likely helped cause the spill.

Prosecutors have said the tank conditions "put an entire population needlessly at risk."

In September a federal bankruptcy judge approved a $2.9 million settlement between the company and businesses and residents under which a panel would choose public interest projects that would benefit those whose tap water was contaminated. The settlement would rely on insurance proceeds from Freedom Industries.

Former Freedom owners William Tis and Charles Herzing and two lower-level employees pleaded guilty to a pollution charge last week and will be sentenced in June.

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Indiana House passes controversial religious freedom bill

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A controversial religious freedom billthat wouldprotect business owners who want to decline to provide services for same-sex couples was passed by Indianas State Housetoday, the latest in a larger battle over same-sex marriage and rights.

The bill reflects a national debate over the dividing line between religious liberty and anti-gay discrimination.The question ofwhether the religious rights of business owners also extend to their for-profit companies has been a flashpoint as part of a larger debate over same-sex marriage.For instance, the bill would protect awedding photographer who objects to shooting a same-sex wedding.

TheIndiana House voted63to31to approve a hot-button bill that will likely become law, andRepublican Gov. Mike Pence said he plans to sign the legislation when it lands onhis desk. The state Senates version of the bill would prevent the government from substantially burdening a persons exercise of religion unless the government can prove it has a compelling interest and is doing so in the least restrictive means.

Supporters say the measure supports religious freedom while opponents fear discrimination against LGBT people. The push towards this kind of legislation comes as same-sex marriage becomes legal across the country. In September, a federal court rulingstruck down bans onsame-sex marriage in Indiana and other states.

Jason Collins, an athlete who publicly came out as gay after the 2013 NBA season, will be in Indianapolis as a Yahoo Sports analyst covering the NCAA Final Four and publicly questioned the bill.

Indianas religious freedom bill is modeled on a 22-year-old federal law calledthe Religious Freedom and Restoration Act, which played a key role in the Supreme Courts Hobby Lobby decision in 2014. The court ruled that closely held corporations with religious objectionsdonot have to comply withhealth-carerequirements that they cover contraceptives like Plan B.

A growing list of cities are passing gay anti-discrimination ordinances, which has raised the ire of more conservative state houses.Severalstates have adopted laws related to religious freedom. Utah recently passed a bill aimingto protect people who are LGBTfrom employment and housing decisions based on their gender identity or sexual orientation, while still protectingreligious institutions that oppose homosexuality. The billdidnot deal with whether a business can deny services because of religious convictions.

In debating the measure Monday, lawmakers on both sides of the issue cited the Bible to defend their positions, the Indianapolis Starreports.

Republican Rep. Bruce Borders spoke about an anesthesiologist who declined toanesthetize a woman in preparation for an abortion. According to the Star, Borders said he believes the Bibles command to do all things as unto the Lord means religious believers need to be protected not just in church but in their workplaces as well.

Democratic Rep. Ed DeLaney argued that Jesus served all people.

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Indiana House passes controversial religious freedom bill

Freedom pleads guilty to criminal pollution

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CHARLESTON, W.Va. Freedom Industries on Monday pleaded guilty to three water pollution crimes that prosecutors said caused the January 2014 chemical leak that contaminated the drinking water supply for hundreds of thousands of residents in the Kanawha Valley and surrounding communities.

The company already facing millions of dollars in bankruptcy claims and major civil lawsuits could be ordered to pay $900,000 or more in fines when it faces sentencing on June 29.

During an afternoon hearing in Charleston, Mark Welch, who joined Freedom as its chief restructuring officer after the leak and the companys bankruptcy filing, appeared before U.S. District Judge Thomas Johnston to enter pleas on Freedoms behalf.

Guilty, Welch said in response to questions about the two misdemeanors and one felony contained in a 13-page charging document that was made public more than three months ago. Freedom said in December that it had reached agreement to plead guilty to the three criminal charges.

Freedom pleaded guilty to a negligent discharge of pollution into the Elk River and a negligent discharge of refuse material into the river, both misdemeanor counts. The company also pleaded guilty to a knowing violation of its state Department of Environmental Protection-issued Clean Water Act permit, which is a felony.

Among other things, Freedom admitted to allegations that the company did not conduct proper inspections of a chemical tank containing Crude MCHM and consequently failed to repair and/or replace the tank prior to the Jan. 9, 2014, leak.

Also, the company admitted to not ensuring that the tank had a spill-containment area that would control any material that leaked from the tank and keep it out of the river.

Freedom faces potential fines of between $7,500 and $100,000 per day of violation, or a maximum fine of $900,000, or twice the financial loss or gain resulting from the companys conduct.

The companys plea comes after four guilty pleas that U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin secured with former Freedom officials and as two other former Freedom officials also face criminal charges.

Two former Freedom owners, William Tis and Charles Herzing; plant manager Michael Burdette; and environmental manager Robert Reynolds have already pleaded guilty in agreements with Goodwin. Sentencing hearings for those four officials are set for June.

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Freedom pleads guilty to criminal pollution

Freedom Takes Another Blow From Apple, Microsoft

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Both are reducing OS choices for PC owners, pushing PCs further towards becoming disposable appliances.

Call it another blow against OS freedom, part of the slow creep towards turning PCs into consumer appliances. Call it the choice of security over liberty, one our society has made so many times since 2001. Call it annoying. But in the wake of both Apple and Microsoft cracking down on what OSes can be installed on their PCs, I'd like to call it unnecessary.

This weekend, two irritating stories came out about OS vendors potentially locking popular alternatives out of their platforms. Apple, which happens to make gorgeous Windows-compatible laptops, said its new round of PCs won't support Windows 7. And Microsoft is giving PC manufacturers the option to lock down their hardware and prevent Linux installationsor for that matter any experimental OS.

Security clearly has something to do with these arguments. As ExtremeTech explains, Microsoft's move is designed to protect PCs from particularly sneaky malware. And Apple is just following Microsoft's guidelines on Windows 7, as Microsoft signalled in January that it would like to start dialing back support for Windows 7 in general.

But still, I don't like the precedent. If you build your own desktop PC, none of this will affect you, as motherboard manufacturers will almost certainly leave the security switch that lets you install alternative OSes intact. But more and more people are turning to laptops as their primary machines, and it's very difficult to build your own (adequate) laptop. Having the potential freedom to install other OSes doesn't make a computer more difficult to use in its default mode, and having a security switch which can be disabled by knowledgable users doesn't make a PC, by default, less secure.

Operating system freedom has always been a big difference between desktop and mobile platforms, too. Mobile OS vendors typically forbid end-users from installing any other OS on their hardware. Without built-in restrictions, it's completely possible to do this. Microsoft last year showed off how the same hardware can run Android and Windows Phone, and we've seen both HTC and Alcatel devices offered with different OS options on the same hardware. The CEO of ZTE USA has told me twice how he'd love to sell multi-OS devices. But if there's one thing Google, Apple, and Microsoft agree upon, it's that end-users shouldn't have the freedom to try out alternatives.

And if you have a problem with my wanting to run both Mac OS and the superior Windows 7 versions of both Microsoft Excel and utilities like FastStone Image Viewer, then you need to check your fanboy/girlism.

It's About Planned Obsolescence Locking out competing OSes and "old" OSes is all part of the decade-long shift towards making computing devices less upgradeable, to advance planned obsolescence and force you to buy new machines more often. One of the things about Linux is that it runs really well on older, lower-power machines which might otherwise be sent to the recycle bin. I'm considering installing Linux on a dying old laptop I have around, to use it as a Web terminal.

Yes, you'll be able to run Windows 7 in a virtual machine such as Parallels on a Mac. But Apple's decision to withdraw Boot Camp support just highlights the total consumer failure of Windows 8. (I just checked, and thank goodness, I was never on the Windows 8 bandwagon.) Windows 7 was awesome. I'm still running it on two machines. We all want to pretend Windows 8 never happened. Would it have hurt Apple so much to support the version of Windows that people actually like, until Windows 10 comes out?

The answer for the truly geeky among us is, of course, to build your own desktop. But that's becoming a smaller and smaller group of people, and it leaves out the growing crowd who want mobile, portable or handheld computing experiences. For themfor us, because I'm of course one of those peoplewe're seeing our freedoms sadly, and slowly, erode.

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Freedom Takes Another Blow From Apple, Microsoft