Libertarian activist to run for District 4 Alachua County seat

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Published: Monday, May 5, 2014 at 10:38 p.m. Last Modified: Monday, May 5, 2014 at 10:38 p.m.

Lucas Jewell, a 22-year-old libertarian activist and former U.S. Navy air traffic controller, has filed to run for the Alachua County Commission District 4 seat Commissioner Susan Baird will vacate after this November's election.

Jewell is relatively new to Gainesville, having moved here in January to be closer to his mother after her husband died in a car accident.

I mean, I'm going to live here for a while and you can either sit back and complain about things or you can say, 'Screw it, I'm going to throw my hat in the ring and see what happens,' he said.

Jewell grew up in North Florida and told The Sun he enlisted in the Navy in 2010 at 18 years old, serving as an air traffic controller before he was eventually honorably discharged in March 2013 after filing as a conscientious objector.

After leaving the military, he got involved as the business manager for Adam vs. The Man, a talk show helmed by libertarian activist Adam Kokesh that has existed in various formats (mostly online).

While he worked with Adam vs. The Man, Jewell said he participated in Smoke Down Prohibition rallies in Philadelphia during which people would smoke marijuana publicly as an act of civil disobedience meant to make the legalization issue more visible.

Jewell told The Sun he was arrested at a Smoke Down Prohibition event in June 2013, while Kokesh had already been arrested at a prior rally.

He said he had a hand-rolled tobacco cigarette and was trying to get the police to focus on him so others wouldn't be arrested. I don't know how regular people get arrested, but libertarians don't really comply, he said.

Jewell said he sat down and forced the authorities to carry him off.

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Libertarian activist to run for District 4 Alachua County seat

Libertarian candidates for Governor, AG blocked from Tuesday ballot

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The U.S. Supreme Court denied an appeal Monday from the Libertarian Party of Ohio, ending the partys efforts to field candidates for governor and attorney general on Tuesdays primary ballot.

Mark Brown, the Capital University law professor representing the Libertarians, said he will ask the entire 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati for a rehearing as part of an effort to gain spots on the November ballot of gubernatorial candidate Charlie Earl and attorney general candidate Steven Linnabary.

If we get it and win before November, (the Libertarians) can have candidates restored to the general election ballot, Brown said in an e-mail. He added that in 2008, the federal courts added Libertarian candidates to the November election even though they did not run in a primary.

A three-judge panel of the 6th circuit last week unanimously upheld a ruling by a federal judge that the candidacy petitions filed by Earl and Linnabary were faulty.

Secretary of State Jon Husted made the original decision to remove them from the statewide ballot

The Libertarians quickly responded by asking first Justice Elena Kagan and then Justice Clarence Thomas to delay enforcement of the appeals court ruling. After Kagan rejected the request, Thomas referred the entire appeal to the nine-member high court and the justices turned it down.

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Libertarian candidates for Governor, AG blocked from Tuesday ballot

Crossfire: Santorum doesn't think Rand Paul would win GOP nomination

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(CNN) Rick Santorum said Monday he doubts a Libertarian-leaning candidate, like Rand Paul, could be nominated to lead the Republican Party in a presidential election.

Asked by co-host Van Jones on CNN's "Crossfire" if he could support the Kentucky senator if he winds up running and is nominated in 2016, Santorum said he doesn't think hell have to consider that ultimately.

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"Well, first off, I don't think that will happen because a Republican Party is not a Libertarian Party. It is a conservative party and it will nominate a conservative, not a libertarian," Santorum said.

Paul has been open about the possibility of running.

Likewise, Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania and 2012 presidential candidate, is also eyeing another bid.

Santorum is an arch-conservative who gave Mitt Romney a run for his money in key conservative states last go-around.

Related: Santorum 'very open' to another presidential bid

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Crossfire: Santorum doesn't think Rand Paul would win GOP nomination

Whats holding undocumented immigrants back from seeking health care?

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Photo by Joe Raedle/ Getty Images

More than 8 million people have enrolled for health care under the Affordable Care Act, far exceeding original goals. But the countrys nearly 12 million undocumented immigrants are largely without health care and dont qualify to apply for it at HealthCare.gov. Their needs are caught between health care policy and immigration reform, two deeply partisan issues.

Some critics of the law argue that it further excludes undocumented immigrants one of the fastest growing populations in the country while others say opening access to this population would put an undue financial burden on public and government institutions, especially hospitals.

A new study published by the journal Health Affairs examines how often undocumented immigrants in California used health services to see if these conservative talking points held true.

We looked at emergency rooms, because some say that emergency rooms are over or misused by some groups versus others, said the studys primary author, Nadereh Pourat, director of research at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

PBS NewsHour spoke with Pourat last week about her research.

NEWSHOUR: How do undocumented immigrants in California use health care?

Photo by Rick Brian/UCLA Health

And we found that uninsured undocumented (populations) use fewer services than other uninsured populations. Even undocumented immigrants who were in insured surprisingly dont use services more or as much as insured documented groups. Youre looking at a systematic lower level of use. And when you see theyre using lower levels of care, you have to ask yourself, Why is that? Why would that be? We speculate that lower levels of utilization have to do with other unmeasured barriers. There are other issues going on that keep undocumented immigrants from using health care.

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Whats holding undocumented immigrants back from seeking health care?

Rising treatment costs drive up health care spending

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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

5-May-2014

Contact: Rebecca Basu basu@american.edu 202-885-5978 American University

It's a well-known fact that spending on health care has consistently grown faster than the rest of the U.S. economy. What's behind this trend is less certain. Economists point to two causes: the prevalence of diseases and conditions afflicting the U.S. population, or the rising costs of treating diseases. New research from American University Associate Professor Martha Starr and Virginia Tech Research Professor Ana Aizcorbe shows it is the latter, with higher prices for treatment accounting for 70 percent of growth in health care spending.

"Rising costs of treatment have had a much greater impact on driving up average spending than increased disease prevalence," Starr said. "To tackle the problem of health care spending from a policy perspective, solutions need to focus on slowing growth of spending on procedures, treatments, and drugs used to treat given diseases and conditions. Of course, slowing or reversing the rise of chronic conditions would be beneficial for the health and well-being of the U.S. population, but by itself it won't put much of a dent in health care spending growth."

The research findings appear in the May issue of Health Affairs. The researchers examined data from four nationally representative surveys from 1980 to 2006. They analyzed how shares of the U.S. population afflicted with different diseases and conditions and the costs and services used to treat them contributed to growth in average spending on health care, adjusting for inflation.

"In contrast to earlier studies on health care spending, we analyzed data that covered a longer time period and the full range of health care cases," Aizcorbe said.

Over the whole period, rising disease prevalence boosted spending by 0.5 percentage point per year compared to a contribution of 2.5 percentage points from rising cost per case, the researchers found. Costs of treatment have increased due to both rising prices of health care services and more intensive use of services to treat diseases. Robust growth in cost per case occurred for musculoskeletal conditions and circulatory and respiratory disorders. Particularly hefty growth was associated with rising average costs of routine care, which more than doubled over the period to $602 per person per year in 2006. Increased cases of chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart conditions, high cholesterol, and mental disorders boosted health care spending as well, but in a much more modest way.

When examining rising health care spending, economists look at population aging and shifts in insurance coverage. Starr and Aizcorbe found these played minor roles over the 26-year period. And even though rising disease prevalence from 1997 to 2006 stood out, it still accounted for only one-third of average spending growth. The researchers also noted that had there not been a steady shift away from the use of hospital services, the rate of spending growth would have been well above 3.5 percent per year.

Finally, the researchers warn that even while shifts from hospital-based care to office-based care and prescription medicines for diseases and conditions may lower health care costs, intensified use of these services and the use of more expensive items, such as brand-name instead of generic medications, risk driving up costs.

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Rising treatment costs drive up health care spending

Gene and Cell Therapy for Thrombosis, AIDS and Inherited Disorders

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Washington, DC (PRWEB) May 05, 2014

There will be a Media Event in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, May 21, 2014, from 10:45 am 12:15 pm in Wilson A of the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, which is sponsored by the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy (ASGCT).

The event will profile exciting clinical trial results in patients suffering from serious and often fatal diseases such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), Inherited Immunodeficiencies, Hemophilia B, and complications from Thrombosis. All registered media will have the opportunity for personal, one-on-one questions with academic and industry leaders in the field, including:

Dr. Bruce L. Levine of the University of Pennsylvania is developing a gene and cell therapy strategy to achieve a functional cure for HIV infection by genome editing of cells, and results from the first-in-human trial of this novel treatment strategy will be presented.

Professor Adrian Thrasher of the University College of Londons Institute of Child Health will discuss the impressive results of recent advances in gene therapy technology to treat inherited immunodeficiencies in patients, many of whom are children.

Researchers at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have successfully treated Hemophilia patients with gene therapy that led to their disease-free living for several years. Dr. Andrew Davidoff will provide the latest update on these exciting clinical results.

Thrombosis, or the formation of blood clots inside a blood vessel, remains the major cause of death and disability in the western world. Dr. Bruce Sullenger of Duke University Medical Center will describe the recent development of gene and cell therapy strategies to control thrombosis that is currently in a Phase 3 clinical trial.

The media event will take place in Wilson A in the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel.

Members of the media are welcome to conduct individual interviews with each speaker following the presentation, and will receive complimentary full-access registration to the ASGCT 17th Annual Meeting. Representatives who wish to attend may contact ASGCT directly at 414.278.1341 or mdean(at)asgct(dot)org.

The American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy (ASGCT) is a professional nonprofit medical and scientific organization dedicated to the understanding, development and application of genetic and cellular therapies and the promotion of professional and public education in the field. For more information on ASGCT, visit its website, http://www.asgct.org.

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Gene and Cell Therapy for Thrombosis, AIDS and Inherited Disorders

Bioinformatics approach helps researchers find new use for old drug

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Developing and testing a new anti-cancer drug can cost billions of dollars and take many years of research. Finding an effective anti-cancer medication from the pool of drugs already approved for the treatment of other medical conditions could cut a considerable amount of time and money from the process.

Now, using a novel bioinformatics approach, a team led by investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) has found that the approved antimicrobial drug pentamidine may help in the treatment of patients with advanced kidney cancer. Described online in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, the discovery reveals how linking cancer gene expression patterns with drug activity might help advance cancer care.

"The strategy of repurposing drugs that are currently being used for other indications is of significant interest to the medical community as well as the pharmaceutical and biotech industries," says senior author Towia Libermann, PhD, Director of the Genomics, Proteomics, Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Center at BIDMC and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. "Our results demonstrate that bioinformatics approaches involving the analysis and matching of cancer and drug gene signatures can indeed help us identify new candidate cancer therapeutics."

Renal cell cancer consists of multiple subtypes that are likely caused by different genetic mutations. Over the years, Libermann has been working to identify new disease markers and therapeutic targets through gene expression signatures of renal cell cancer that distinguish these different cancer subtypes from each other, as well as from healthy individuals. In this new paper, he and his colleagues were looking for drugs that might be effective against clear cell renal cancer, the most common and highly malignant subtype of kidney cancer. Although patients with early stage disease can often be successfully treated through surgery, up to 30 percent of patients with renal cell cancer present with advanced stages of disease at the time of their diagnosis.

To pursue this search, they made use of the Connectivity Map (C-MAP) database (http://www.broadinstitute.org/cmap), a collection of gene expression data from human cancer cells treated with hundreds of small molecule drugs.

"C-MAP uses pattern-matching algorithms to enable investigators to make connections between drugs, genes and diseases through common, but inverse, changes in gene expression," says Libermann. "It provided us with an exciting opportunity to use our renal cell cancer gene signatures and a new bioinformatics strategy to match kidney cancer gene expression profiles from individual patients with gene expression changes inducted by various commonly used drugs."

After identifying drugs that may reverse the gene expression changes associated with renal cell cancer, the investigators used assays to measure the effect of the selected drugs on cells. This led to the identification of a small number of FDA-approved drugs that induced cell death in multiple kidney cancer cell lines. The investigators then tested three of these drugs in an animal model of renal cell cancer and demonstrated that the antimicrobial agent pentamidine (primarily used for the treatment of pneumonia) reduced tumor growth and enhanced survival. Gene expression experiments using microarrays also identified the genes in renal cell cancer that were counteracted by pentamidine.

"One of the main challenges in treating cancer is the identification of the right drug for the right individual," explains first author Luiz Fernando Zerbini, PhD, of the International Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Cape Town, South Africa, adding that this bioinformatics approach could be a particularly valuable lower-cost model in developing countries.

The authors say their next step will be to evaluate the potential of pentamidine in combination with the current standard-of-care therapies to treat kidney cancer. "Since the drugs we are evaluating are already FDA-approved, successful studies in preclinical animal models may enable us to rapidly move these drugs into clinical trials," adds Libermann.

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Bioinformatics approach helps researchers find new use for old drug

May 2014 – Futurist Michio Kaku at DePauw University for Ubben Lecture – Video

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May 2014 - Futurist Michio Kaku at DePauw University for Ubben Lecture
"What is the most complex object in the known universe?," asked futurist, physicist and bestselling author Michio Kaku at DePauw University on May 5, 2014. "Believe it or not, it sits on your...

By: DePauw University Video - Ken Owen

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May 2014 - Futurist Michio Kaku at DePauw University for Ubben Lecture - Video