Health care worker possibly exposed to Ebola brought to Omaha
The Douglas County Health Department said the health care worker may have been exposed to the Ebola virus while caring for a patient in West Africa, but the individual has not shown symptoms...
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Health care worker possibly exposed to Ebola brought to Omaha - Video
CHRONIC ASTHMA LIVE AT KANDUNGAN BAYAN SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORK YUJ GUANG DOIN ASSN
YUJ GUANG DOIN GERONTOLOGIST ASSN MENTAL HEALTH CARE MEDICAL SCIENTIFIC MARTIAL ART ON HEALING..MISSIONARY PHIL #39;S.
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CHRONIC ASTHMA LIVE AT KANDUNGAN BAYAN SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORK YUJ GUANG DOIN ASSN - Video
WASHINGTON --The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said it will extend Sunday's registration deadline for anyone who recently started but did not complete registration on the federally-administered health care marketplace.
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"For those consumers who were unable to complete their enrollment because of longer than normal wait times at the call center in the last three days or because of a technical issue such as being unable to submit an application because their income could not be verified, we will provide them with a time-limited special enrollment period," HHS spokesman Aaron Albright said in an emailed statement.
The extended enrollment period - from Feb. 16-22 - will give consumers who encountered delays this weekend an extra week to complete registration on Healthcare.gov or over the phone. Health care coverage for those users would kick in Mar. 1.
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High call volume and a glitch in the software used to verify users' income were blamed for the slowdown, the Associated Press reported.
The extension does not apply to new applicants - only to those who were "in line" on February 13-15.
ACAsignups.net, which tracks Obamacare enrollment numbers, reported that in addition to the 37 states participating in the federal exchange, many states that run their own exchanges have extended their registration periods, including California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, and Washington, among others. Last week, HHS reported that 10.6 million people had either submitted a new application or renewed their 2014 plan. The Obama Administration hoped to see 9.1 million signed up for health care by the end of 2015. While it appears to have hit that number, there is some attrition expected.
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AUSTIN More than 200,000 retired educators and their dependents in Texas might have to pay higher premiums for health care.
Texas legislators are trying to shore up a nearly insolvent health care plan for the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, according to the Austin American-Statesman.
System officials told a Texas Senate panel last Wednesday that the plan for retired public education employees could become insolvent during fiscal 2016 and faces a $768 million shortfall by the end of fiscal 2017 if no new money is received.
Its not sustainable, Teacher Retirement System Executive Director Brian Guthrie told the panel.
Health care costs have outpaced growth in the payroll of active public educators, a sum on which plan contributions are based. Texas currently has to give an amount equal to 1 percent of payroll, or $495 million, in 2014 and 2015.
Initial budget proposals from the House and Senate include $562 million to cover the states statutory obligation.
The plan is funded primarily by contributions from the state, active teachers and school districts, plus retiree premiums.
Both two-year spending plans include contingency clauses for the Teacher Retirement System Board of Trustees to not increase retiree health insurance premiums. Retirement system officials want Texas to pay the shortfall, while either cutting benefits or upping contributions from the state, active public educators and school districts.
Retirees that served our schoolchildren for their careers need quality health care thats affordable for their fixed incomes, said Louis Malfaro, president of the Texas chapter of the American Federation of Teachers.
The budget board staff has recommended divvying up the projected shortfall, with the state paying 50 percent, retirees paying 25 percent, and active teachers and school districts splitting the rest.
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Thousands of retired Texas teachers could face higher health care costs
Sunday's deadline to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, passed as many states held last-minute sign-up campaigns and some even extended their deadlines after a technical glitch Saturday affected some people's ability to sign up. States and local areas reported holding call-a-thons and enrollment events to encourage people to buy health insurance, efforts that were thwarted in part by technical glitches on the federal website, HealthCare.gov, as well as some sites for state-run exchanges.
In the Northeast, a winter storm over the weekend also hindered sign-ups at the last minute. Rhode Island, which runs its own marketplace, extended its deadline, giving people until Feb. 23 to sign up for a plan. Last week, California's exchange, Covered California, said it would give those who started applications by the national deadline of Feb. 15 until Feb. 20 to complete them.
Local and federal government officials encouraged people to sign up for health insurancelast week, reminding them that if they didn't sign up by Sunday's deadline, they would notlikely be able to do so again until October. But technical glitchesfrustratedsome who tried to sign up on Saturday. HealthCare.gov had problems with the income verification portion of the sign-up process, and officials spent about six hours working on the issue before it was fixed. Some state exchanges reported similar issues. Katie Hill, the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) press secretary, explained the problem as being due to "intermittent issues with external verification sources."
New York state gave New Yorkers who signed up but did not complete the application for health insurance by Feb. 15 two extra weeks to finish enrolling in a plan. By February 4, in New York, more than 2 million had signed up for insurance during the 2015 open enrollment period, which began November 15, 2014, and ended on Sunday. Of those, 1.4 million had enrolled in Medicaid.
On Monday, the HealthCare.gov blogsuggested that extensions may still be possible after the end of the open enrollment period for those who either tried to enroll before Sunday but could not due to website glitches or call-center delays, or for those who had sent paper applications by mail by the Feb. 15 deadline but had not completed the enrollment process. "We know many of you worked hard to enroll in a plan through the Health Insurance Marketplace," the site said. "Despite your best efforts, you may not have been able to complete your application and select a plan."
According to acasignups.net, a site that tracks Affordable Care Act enrollment numbers, nearly 10.5 million were confirmed to have enrolled in a health care plan as of Saturday, and 11.3 million were estimated to have signed up. In the last few days before the Feb. 15 deadline, sign-up numbers drastically increased. The DHHS expected 9.1 million to sign up during the 2015 open enrollment period.
DHHS said it had 80,000 concurrent visitors to the HealthCare.gov website at 8:30 p.m. Sunday, the highest number since Dec. 15. It also reported that the HealthCare.gov call center, which can be used to start applications forhealth care coverage as well as compare plans or ask questions, fielded over 250,000 calls on Sunday. The deadline for signing up via the federal marketplace was 2:59 a.m. Eastern Time Monday, although some state-run exchanges posted different deadlines.
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Health Care Enrollment: Obamacare Website Glitches Prompt Some States To Extend Deadlines
Health care professionals nationwide are tangled in a discussion regarding the ethics and regulations of the growing field of precision medicine.
Also known as personalized medicine, the field aims to analyze patients genes so doctors can home in on treatments specific to each person.
As the talks have intensified in recent years, concerns over privacy and insurance discrimination are colliding with benefits like predicting disease contraction and better, more-personalized treatment.
The debate hit the University of Minnesota campus on Thursday with the start of a lecture series focusing on the standardization and policies of precision medicine.
Heidi Rehm, a Harvard University pathology professor, gave the first in a three-part lecture in the Universitys Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment and Life Sciences series.
Her lecture comes soon after President Barack Obamas announcement of a plan late last month that calls for a major biomedical research initiative that would create a biobank, or a collection of genetic data, on one million Americans.
If Congress approves Obamas proposal, it would put individualized medicine more easily within doctors reach.
Rehm, who studies precision medicine, said how the technology is used and the way results are interpreted should become more standardized than they currently are.
University law professor and consortium chair Susan Wolf said the difference in technology and interpretation of genomes needs standardization.
Right now its kind of a tower of Babel, Wolf said. And thats really tough on patients that may get different answers from different labs.
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The National Institutes of Health is slated to receive $215 million with the hope of individualizing medical treatments by using patients genetic information.
In his State of the Union address on Jan. 20, President Barack Obama announced the Precision Medical Initiative, a program with the goal of enabling doctors to better understand diseases through genetic sequencing of patients and ultimately choose better treatments. In cancer treatment, for example, a patients tumor might be sequenced to uncover the specific mutations causing the disease, and physicians will use that information to select the right drug or predict which will be most effective. The approach has gained traction in the treatment of cancer and rare genetic diseases, but is not available for all patients and is yet to be widely applied to other diseases.
Precision medicine, using genomic information in a way that affects their clinical decisions about care, is already here and now, said Eric Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, which carried out the Human Genome Project and is now working to apply that research to solve medical problems. This is not science fiction, but we are just starting to ascend this mountain. This will be a very long climb, but once we get to the top, you will see genomics being used all over the place.
Green said genetic sequencing in cancer and rare genetic disease treatment saves valuable time and money.
According to professor of medical oncology and Associate Director of the Yale Cancer Center Roy Herbst 84, Yale is already using genome sequencing to personalize treatments and predict the effectiveness of drugs for patients at the cancer center, allowing physicians to find the right drug, for the right patient, at the right time.
But the hope is for the practice to reach a larger population of cancer patients than it does now and ultimately to apply genome sequencing to other diseases.
According to Green, the latter will be more complicated. With diseases like diabetes, arthritis and hypertension, there is a complex interplay between environmental and genetic factors. But the complexity of figuring out how to use genetics in those more complex diseases makes for an even stronger argument to create the Precision Medical Initiative, he added.
Dean of the Yale School of Medicine Robert Alpern said that although the possibility to improve treatment for cancer and other diseases is there, more funding is still needed.
Were at this somewhat frustrating point where the science has never been in a better position to create ways for us to cure diseases that, frankly, when I went to medical school I thought could never be cured, and now theres not enough money, he said. The NIH budget just doesnt keep up with inflation. Were at a point where we can do so much and the money has never been so limited.
Alpern added that Yale is a leader in the use of genomics in personalized medicine the University even has a genome center on West Campus and is primed to turn additional funding into breakthroughs.
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A promising personalized medicine initiative, but little funding
Genetic engineering part3
Lol.
By: Gayatri JC
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10 hours ago by Amanda Siegfried Dr. Leonidas Bleris (left), assistant professor of bioengineering at UT Dallas,and Richard Taplin Moore MS11 helped create a new delivery system that may change gene therapy.
Bioengineers at The University of Texas at Dallas have created a novel gene-delivery system that shuttles a gene into a cell, but only for a temporary stay, providing a potential new gene-therapy strategy for treating disease.
The approach offers distinct advantages over other types of gene therapies under investigation, said Richard Taplin Moore MS'11, a doctoral student in bioengineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. He is lead author of a study describing the new technique in the Jan. 30 issue of the journal Nucleic Acids Research.
"In other gene therapy approaches, the therapeutic genetic messages being delivered can persist for a long time in the patient, potentially lasting for the patient's entire lifetime," Moore said. "This irreversibility is one reason gene therapies are so difficult to get approved."
The UT Dallas study describes proof-of-concept experiments in which a gene carrying instructions for making a particular protein is ordered to self-destruct once the cell has "read" the instructions and made a certain quantity of the protein. In its experiments with isolated human kidney cells, the research team successfully deliveredand then destroyeda test gene that makes a red fluorescent protein.
More research is needed to determine whether and how well the system might work in living organisms. But Moore said the ultimate goal is to refine the method to deliver genes that produce therapeutic proteins or drugs. The nature of the gene delivery system offers more control over how much protein the gene produces in cells or tissues. Because it does not alter the cell permanently, the method also sidesteps potential health problems that can occur if a gene is delivered to the wrong place in a cell's genome.
"Our goal was to create a delivery system for therapeutic genes that would self-destruct, giving us more control over the delivered DNA by limiting the time it resides in cells," Moore said.
Located in the nucleus of each human cell, genes are made of DNA and contain instructions for making proteins. Machinery inside each cell "reads" the instructions and builds those proteins, which then carry out various functions needed to sustain life. Defective or mutated genes can result in malfunctioning or missing proteins, leading to disease.
Gene therapy aims to replace defective genes with healthy versions. Typically the good genes are packaged with a delivery mechanism called a vector, which transports the genetic material inside cells. With traditional approaches, once in the cell, the gene permanently integrates itself into the cell's DNA.
Although promising, this type of gene therapy also has risks. If a therapeutic gene is inserted in the wrong place in the cell's DNA, such as too close to a cancer-related gene, the process could activate additional disease-causing genes, resulting in lifelong health problems for the patient. While many gene therapy clinical trials are underway worldwide, the Food and Drug Administration has not approved for sale any human gene therapy product in the U.S.
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Flow chart of one method of engineering T cells to fight cancer.
Tough blood cancers are responding to treatment with the patient's own genetically engineered immune cells, according to a cancer specialist who is helping test the bold -- and risky -- approach.
The treatment has produced complete remissions in large percentages of patients treated, up to 90 percent in one group of 30 patients. Moreover, these are all extremely sick patients, whose cancer has resisted other therapies, leaving them with virtually no options. The longest survivor has been in complete remission for more than 4 years, said Dr. David Porter of the University of Pennsylvania.
Porter spoke Sunday at the 35th Annual Conference on Clinical Hematology & Oncology, held in La Jolla by Scripps Health. Speakers like Porter came from around the country to discuss advances in their field, part of a continuing medical education program to keep doctors up to date with the latest medical advances. The conference continues through Tuesday.
Dr. David Porter / University of Pennsylvania
Porter works with Dr. Carl June and other colleagues to hone the effectiveness of using T cells genetically programmed to attack malignant B cells. B cell malignancies cause such cancers as chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL; acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL, and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
The genetically altered T cells are given an artificially created gene to produce a chimeric antigen receptor. This receptor recognizes the protein CD19, produced almost exclusively on B cells. The T cells hone in on this protein and kill the B cells. When the cancer is knocked down, some of the T cells remain behind, ready to pounce on any recurrence.
The trials are now expanding to include myloma, Porter said. For more information on the university's T cell-based clinical trials, go to http://www.penncancer.org/tcelltherapy.
June's team began testing the therapy in 2010 in CLL patients and then in those with ALL. These were all patients with relapsed cancers that had become resistant to other therapies. The therapy has been progressively refined, Porter said. Other centers have developed their own versions of this therapy.
In October, 2014, the University of Pennsylvania and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia announced that 27 out of 30 patients with relapsed ALL achieved a complete remission within one month of treatment, and 23 were still alive 6 months after treatment. As of October, 19 of the patients remained in remission. Most treated, 25 out of 30, were children. The response rate with CLL is about 47 percent, Porter said.
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Introduction to Thinking Like A Futurist Video Series
A 15 part practical video series with insights on how to think like a futurist, presenting by Graeme Codrington of TomorrowToday Global.
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Introduction to Thinking Like A Futurist Video Series - Video
Tracking Sleep With Wearables Literally Changed My Life - The Medical Futurist
I use wearable gadgets to measure the quality of my sleep and as some of the subscribers asked me how I do that in details step by step, I thought I would sh...
By: The Medical Futurist
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Tracking Sleep With Wearables Literally Changed My Life - The Medical Futurist - Video
Portland Woman Disrespects My Freedom Based Lifestyle - MGTOW
I was asking a young woman about how she felt about selling hugs and a conversation started for about 15 minutes and went OK but when I talked about operating outside the system - then things...
By: Alex Ansary
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Portland Woman Disrespects My Freedom Based Lifestyle - MGTOW - Video
Edwud Freedom Original Mix
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No More Room For Freedom!
No More Room In Hell Great mod, random pubs. Richie Havens - Freedom (Live from Woodstock)
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Freedom (Like a Bullet Train)
Music by - Stephen Swartz Bullet Train Ft. Joni Fatora. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkime9M4z34 This is why I love riding... Having the freedom and a simple life...
By: Edgar Hibbert
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Freedom - A Battlefield 4 montage
Mi raccomando: like e iscrivetevi 😉 Smash the like button and subscribe mate 😉
By: Milwrol Gamer
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Latin Hustle - Freedom Latino 13.02.2015
Si sente la musica salsa in sottofondo...Purtroppo i mezzi audio a disposizione non ci hanno permesso di fare di meglio! I ragazzi come sempre BRAVISSIMI!!!!
By: SALSA IN BLACK A.S.D.
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