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Fremont Patients, Public Health Endangered By Kaiser Cutbacks In Urgent Services
TUESDAY: Dozens of Registered Nurses to March on Kaiser Permanente-Fremont to Protest Effort to Slash Urgent Care
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Parasites Ready To Jump
Transposons are mobile genetic elements found in the hereditary material of humans and other organisms. They can replicate and the new copies can insert at novel sites in the genome. Because this threatens the whole organism, molecular mechanisms have evolved which can repress transposon activity. Professor Klaus Förstemann of the Gene Center of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich and a team of researchers working with the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster have now uncovered a new type of cellular defence that acts against DNA sequences present in high copy numbers inside the cell, even if they have not integrated into the genome. Small molecules of RNA (a class of nucleic acid closely related to the genetic material DNA) play the central role. "Transposons are genomic parasites, so to speak", says Förstemann. "If they are allowed to proliferate, the genome can become unstable or cancers can develop. We now want to find out whether mammalian cells possess this newly discovered defence mechanism and to elucidate precisely how it works." (EMBO Journal online, 30 July 2009.)
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Editorials, Opinion Pieces Respond To Recent Action On Health Reform
The following summarizes recent editorials and opinion pieces responding to health reform action over the last week.
Health Insurance

AP: Children's Hospital A Model For Benefits, Struggles Of Health IT

An Associated Press examination of the "new all-digital Children"s Hospital of Pittsburgh" reveals the benefits of electronic health records in action, and the steep climb the hospital took to achieve those improvements. Doctors save time and money in the emergency room by using the records - available through "computers on wheels," or COWs - to avoid repeating tests or working without enough information while treating an infant in respiratory distress. Outpatient specialists and doctors who treat patients during hospital stays are more efficient because they are linked by the same record. Administrators are able to identify wasteful spending, like too-frequent orders for "specially filtered blood transfusions, at $30 extra a bag, when medical guidelines say few patients truly need them." But, "only 1.5 percent of the nation"s roughly 6,000 hospitals use a comprehensive electronic record," the AP reports. "[T]hat statistic belies how hard it will be for health care to jettison its 19th-century filing system by 2014, the federal government"s goal - despite the $19 billion that the economic stimulus package is providing to help doctors start." Doctors and hospitals resist moving to the records because they require large investments during the transitions from paper and have a steep learning curve as physicians adjust their workflow. "It took Children"s seven hard years and more than $10 million to evolve a system that lets its doctors check on patients with a few mouse clicks from anywhere and use speedily up-to-date records in directing their care" (Neergaard, 7/7). This information was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with kind permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives and sign up for email delivery at kaiserhealthnews.org. © Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.


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