Today's Headlines ? Sept. 27, 2012 - Kaiser Health News

Today?s early morning highlights from the major news organizations, including reports about how the health law and Medicare are buzz words in public opinion polls and on the campaign trail.

Los Angeles Times: Romney Cites His Healthcare Law As Proof Of His Compassion
Mitt Romney, while campaigning in Ohio on Wednesday, highlighted the healthcare law that he passed while governor of Massachusetts as proof of his empathy for people. ? The healthcare law is controversial among conservatives because it included a mandate that nearly every state resident purchase the insurance or be fined; it served as the model of the federal healthcare law that is Obama?s signature act as president, and that is an anathema to many Republicans (Mehta, 9/26).

Politico: Romney Hits ?Obamacare? In Ohio
Facing falling poll numbers in Ohio, Mitt Romney reconfigured his stump speech here, ratcheting up his attack on President Barack Obama?s health care law and returning to his once-abandoned talking points about the Founding Fathers and the debt clock. ? Instead of simply vowing to repeal the health care overhaul, Romney spoke more about the danger it poses to American freedoms (Gibson, 9/26).

For more headlines ?

The Washington Post: Romney Shows Political Flexibility On Health Care
Over the course of a half hour on Wednesday evening, Mitt Romney put on a vivid display of his political flexibility on the lightning-rod issue of health care. As his surrogates were warming up a crowd of 3,600 at the SeaGate Convention Centre in downtown Toledo, Romney sat backstage for an interview with NBC News, during which? he fully embraced the health care overhaul he signed into law as governor of Massachusetts. ? Then, just minutes later, Romney stepped out to rally his supporters here with a sharp critique of Obama?s national health-care overhaul, calling the federal law ?Exhibit No. 1? of Obama?s liberal view of government, even though it is very similar to Romney?s own Massachusetts law (Rucker, 9/26).

The New York Times: Romney Ad Reaches Out To Working Class
Mitt Romney stepped up his efforts to repair the damage from his ?47 percent? comments, releasing a new television ad on Wednesday. ? In an NBC News interview on Wednesday, Mr. Romney, explaining why he could relate to middle-class voters, talked about the health care law he championed as governor of Massachusetts but rarely mentions on the campaign trail. ?Don?t forget ? I got everybody in my state insured,? he said. ?One hundred percent of the kids in our state had health insurance. I don?t think there?s anything that shows more empathy and care about the people of this country than that kind of record? (Parker, 9/26).

Politico: Swing-States Polls: President Obama Tops Mitt Romney On Medicare
And that?s despite weeks of Republican attacks that the president is taking $716 billion from Medicare to pay for ?Obamacare.? In Florida, Obama is up by 15 percentage points on the question of who would do a better job on Medicare, 55 percent to 40 percent. The numbers are consistent in all three states. Obama leads 55 percent to 39 percent in Ohio, and 55 percent to 39 percent in Pennsylvania (Norman, 9/27).

The Wall Street Journal: Big Firms Overhaul Health Coverage
Two big employers are planning a radical change in the way they provide health benefits to their workers, giving employees a fixed sum of money and allowing them to choose their medical coverage and insurer from an online marketplace (Mathews, 9/26).

The Associated Press/Washington Post: How To Maximize Your Savings Through Smart Health Care Benefit Decisions
Employers will soon be offering workers their yearly opportunity to make changes to their health care benefits. All too often this open-enrollment period has required combing through pages and pages of confusing insurance terms. But this year workers will receive help translating that jargon thanks to a new requirement that insurers provide a user-friendly coverage summary of all health plans. Combined with innovative wellness plans that reward employees for staying health, experts say millions of workers should be able to make smarter benefit decision and save money in the process (9/26).

The Associated Press/Washington Post: Inspector General: Medicare Wrongly Paid For $25M In Refills On Painkillers, Other Drugs
Medicare routinely refilled pain pills and other restricted medications that are barred by federal law from renewal without a fresh prescription, government inspectors said in a report Thursday (9/27).

The Wall Street Journal: Making The ?Pharmacy Crawl?
The clampdown by Florida and at least seven other states has left some pain-sufferers struggling to get their medicine. That has put drug-enforcement and public-health officials at odds with some doctors and patients legitimately prescribed the pills. Several states now make doctors criminally liable and revoke their licenses for writing prescriptions for painkillers that lead to overdoses, prompting many to stop prescribing them at all. Other states have tightened regulation of pain clinics, forcing so-called pill mills to close but leaving people in need of pain medications with fewer doctors (Martin, 9/26).

The Associated Press/Washington Post: Md. Health Reform Panel To Vote On State?s Benchmark Health Benefit Plan
A Maryland panel working on implementing federal health care reform is planning to take a vote on the state?s benchmark health benefit plan. The Maryland Health Care Reform Coordinating Council is scheduled to meet Thursday in Annapolis (9/27).

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2012 at 8:08 am.

Source: http://capsules.kaiserhealthnews.org/index.php/2012/09/todays-headlines-sept-27-2012/

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U.S. and Russian experts turn up volume on cybersecurity alarms

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Uncontrolled security threats on the Internet could return much of the planet to an era without electricity or automated transportation, top U.S. and Russian experts said on Thursday.

Former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden warned that the United States had yet to resolve basic questions about how to police the Internet, let alone how to defend critical infrastructure such as electric generation plants.

And if recently discovered and government-sponsored intrusion software proliferates in the same way that viruses have in the past, "somewhere in 2020, maybe 2040, we'll get back to a romantic time - no power, no cars, no trains," said Eugene Kaspersky, chief executive officer of Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, the largest privately held security vendor.

The back-to-back presentations at a Washington conference painted the starkest picture to date about the severity of the cybersecurity problem.

The past two years have seen an escalation of such warnings, especially about what U.S. officials have termed an unprecedented theft of trade secrets and. more lately, mounting threats to infrastructure.

At the same time, Congress failed last month to pass legislation aimed at protecting vital facilities, which Hayden bemoaned, and Kaspersky earlier this year detected extremely sophisticated surveillance programs that infiltrated personal computers and energy facilities in the Middle East.

If previous viruses were like bicycles, Kaspersky said, then the Stuxnet worm that damaged uranium enrichment centrifuges at the Natanz plant in Iran two years ago would be a plane, and the latest programs, dubbed Flame and Gauss, would be "space shuttles."

Researchers are still dissecting those heavily encrypted viruses. Kaspersky and others say they are related to Stuxnet, which officials have privately admitted was designed by U.S. and Israel intelligence forces.

But Kaspersky said Stuxnet, Flame and Gauss would become templates.

Although Stuxnet infected thousands of machines in friendly nations, it was written by cautious "professionals" who minimized collateral damage, Kaspersky said at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit at the National Press Club. The knock-off versions by others will be much less discriminating, he added.

To show how quickly computer attacks can proliferate, Kaspersky said an electronic assault that disabled thousands of computers at Saudi Arabia's Aramco in mid-August had followed a separate infection reported by an Iranian oil company a few months ago.

Mounting a defense against nation-sponsored attacks will be extraordinarily difficult, Kaspersky said, as it requires new operating systems designed to manage equipment at crucial facilities. He said stopping criminals and terrorists who will adopt the same techniques would take strong international cooperation and deeper monitoring of the Internet, which many oppose on privacy grounds.

"We need to upgrade our understanding that the world is different," Kaspersky said. "We need to pay more attention to the critical information technology security issues."

Yet Kaspersky and Hayden said international treaties or even nonbinding agreements were nowhere in sight.

What is more, Hayden said, both the divided U.S. Congress and even different agencies within the executive branch have failed to reach a consensus on fundamental concepts, in part because the issues are still so new.

A Senate bill backed by President Barack Obama would have set voluntary cybersecurity standards for critical plants and allowed for greater information-sharing between intelligence agencies and private companies. But the bill encountered opposition from both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which objected to additional regulation, and the American Civil Liberties Union, which was worried about privacy issues.

The White House is now developing an executive order that would not go so far, but it still wants more powerful laws.

Even inside the administration, Hayden said, the Defense Department has defined cyberspace as a warfare domain that it must "dominate," while the Department of Homeland Security has publicly disagreed.

A core problem is that the same communications networks are used both for military operations and civilian transactions, which are protected from unreasonable searches.

While most Americans would welcome a local police officer shining a light at a shrub in their yard after seeing something suspicious, almost no one would feel the same way about questionable Internet activity.

The National Security Agency has the most advanced capabilities for cyberattacks and defense in the world, Hayden said.

"It is awesome," he said. "But nobody there has the authorization to defend you," because the NSA is generally barred from domestic eavesdropping.

As governments and companies recognize that they have all been hacked and focus more on limiting the damage from breaches, Hayden called for more extensive debate from civilians on how the United States should treat the Internet.

"You and I have not yet given our government guidance about what we want it to do," he said.

(Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/u-russian-experts-turn-volume-cybersecurity-alarms-170934473.html

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Times Higher Education - Head suspended after theology school ...

27 September 2012

The head of a theology school at a Catholic university college has been suspended after he criticised plans to close his department.

Anthony Towey, head of the School of Theology, Philosophy and History at St Mary's University College, Twickenham, was suspended last week "pending investigations into a very serious disciplinary matter", the college has confirmed.

The action follows protests over plans to merge Dr Towey's department with the School of Communication, Culture and Creative Arts.

Academics at St Mary's, which hopes to become Britain's first Catholic university by 2013, fear the lack of a dedicated theology department may harm teaching and research as well as undermine the college's commitment to its Catholic mission.

Students told Times Higher Education that Dr Towey was interrupted while giving a Christology lecture on 17 September and escorted off the premises of the institution by a member of security.

His suspension comes after he sent an email to staff and students informing them about the proposed merger, saying he was "completely in the dark" about how it might affect students.

The email, seen by THE, criticises the "sudden decision" to merge the schools which he says "runs contrary to St Mary's procedures".

Dr Towey also mentions the "overwhelming and reasoned opposition to the proposal across some 60 academic and administrative staff" members and suggests students could complain to their union or the college's chair of governors.

"It is a tremendous sadness that this sense of community is being dismantled," he adds.

Dr Towey has distributed a document making detailed criticisms of the merger plans, which were put forward by the college's principal Philip Esler, a Bible scholar and former chief executive of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Lance Pettitt, head of the School of Communication, Culture and Creative Arts, has also said "the proposal to merge is ill-conceived, poorly researched and presents no coherent business case" in a draft response to the proposals.

However, St Mary's believes the merger will not only save money but will improve interdisciplinary research in religious studies.

A spokesman added that Dr Towey had been suspended following "a grave breach of his professional duties" and that his teaching programmes would be fully covered.

jack.grove@tsleducation.com.

Source: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=421270&c=1

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Steve Galloway ? Blog Archive ? Stop smoking in October campaign

Stoptober?s challenge for York

A national campaign is calling for all smokers in York to join a 28-day quitting challenge.

During October, smokers in York are being encouraged to take part in the first ever mass quit attempt launched by the Department of Health ? Stoptober.

We know that if you can stop smoking for 28 days you are five times more likely to stay smokefree, and Stoptober leads smokers through a detailed step-by-step programme to help them achieve this goal.

Many famous faces, organisations, employers, City of York Council and North Yorkshire NHS Stop Smoking Service are supporting the brand new stop smoking campaign in a bid to get people to quit.

The new campaign includes a preparation pack, 28-day Quit Calendar and Health & Wealth wheel. Smokers will also receive support and encouragement through a daily messaging service, inspiration from celebrity mentors, and expert advice via:

? Stoptober app (available via Smartphone)
? Motivational text messages
? Facebook page.

As well as the financial benefits of stopping smoking, those undertaking the 28-day programme will experience physical improvements including a better sense of smell and taste and more energy.

Longer term, those who stop smoking reduce their risk of heart disease and lung cancer as well as protecting others from their secondhand smoke.

Smoking is one of the biggest cause of premature death in York and each year it accounts for over 100,000 deaths in the UK and one in two long-term smokers will die prematurely from a smoking-related disease.

Dr Paul Edmondson-Jones, City of York Council?s director for Public Health said: ?Smoking is one of the biggest causes of premature death in York and each year, one in two long-term smokers will die prematurely from a smoking disease. I urge smokers to join Stoptober and reap the benefits as soon as possible.?

Stoptober 2012 kicks off on Monday 1 October and runs for 28 days. For more
information and to join the biggest stop smoking challenge of its kind, visit www.smokefree.nhs.uk/Stoptober

September 27th, 2012 in News |

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Source: http://stevegalloway.mycouncillor.org.uk/2012/09/27/stop-smoking-in-october-campaign/

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Romney: ?My heart aches? for struggling Americans

(Alex Wong/Getty Images)WESTERVILLE, Ohio?Mitt Romney kicked off a day of campaigning in this battleground state by insisting his "heart aches" for struggling Americans and that he is better prepared than President Barack Obama to help those who are "hurting" under the tough economy.

Speaking at a rally located in a swing district just outside Columbus, Romney kept repeating his empathy for people out of work and trying to pay their bills?insisting that he will do his "very best to help" those in need "when I am president."

"I've been across this country, and my heart aches for the people I've seen," Romney told a crowd of several hundred people here. "There are so many in our country that are hurting right now. I want to help them."

Relating the story of an unemployed woman he met at a rally on Tuesday, Romney insisted over and over that he has "what it take to get the economy going again."

"I care about the people in America," he said. "And the difference between me and President Obama is I know what to do, and I will do what it takes to get this economy going."

Romney's remarks came as yet another public poll found him losing significant ground to Obama in Ohio, which has been considered a must-win state for his campaign. A New York Times/CBS News/Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday found Obama leading Romney by 10 points, 53 percent to 43 percent. It came on the heels of a Washington Post poll released Tuesday that found Obama leading Romney by 8 points in Ohio.

Top Romney aides have downplayed the public polling?suggesting their internal numbers remain close. But Romney's message on the stump Wednesday seemed to be informed by findings in the latest round of surveys, including stats from the NYT/CBS/Quinnipiac poll showing that he still holds an advantage over Obama when it comes to who would be best equipped to handle the growing federal deficit.

Campaigning in a high school gym here, Romney spoke against the backdrop of a constantly updating national debt clock?a prop that hasn't been employed at his rallies for awhile. He spoke at length about why the growing deficit is a major crisis for the country?one, he claimed, that Obama is ignoring.

Highlighting the nation's $16 trillion in debt, Romney said of Obama, "If he were reelected, I can assure you, it would be almost $20 trillion debt."

Looking to offer context, Romney added, "What is a trillion? It's a thousand billions."

Romney also called for efforts to "reform our tax system"?but at the same time, he seemed to downplay the idea of instituting major tax relief should he be elected president.

"Small businesses most typically pay taxes at the individual tax rate. And so our individual income taxes are the ones I want to reform. Make them simpler. I want to bring the rates down," Romney said.

But, he added, "Don't be expecting a huge cut in taxes because I'm also going to lower deductions and exemptions. But by bringing rates down we will be able to let small businesses keep more of their money so they can hire more people."

Amid criticism from members of his own party that he hasn't had any "fire in the belly" on the trail, Romney seemed more passionate on the stump than he's been in weeks.

Ahead of his arrival on stage, aides played for the crowd a powerful biographical video of Romney that first aired during the Republican National Convention, featuring interviews with Romney's wife, Ann, and their five sons. Those in the gym seems captivated by the clip. The video has been the subject of questions among Republicans lately about why the Romney campaign isn't doing more to broadcast it throughout swing states, where polls show voters are still skeptical about Romney personally.

Romney's move to emphasize his compassion with voters here came as his campaign continues to do damage control over the candidate's suggestion in a secretly taped video at a May fundraiser that Obama supporters?which he calculated to be "47 percent" of the country?see themselves as victims and are too dependent on the government.

Ahead of his rally, the Romney campaign released an ad featuring the candidate speaking directly to the camera about "compassion" and his desire to help the middle class.

Joining Romney on stage was golf legend Jack Nicklaus, who is from the area. He offered up a full-throated endorsement of the GOP candidate, arguing that people "want us to be like America to be like we were."

Romney would "ignite a real recovery" if elected, Nicklaus said.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/romney-ohio-heart-aches-struggling-americans-153739193--election.html

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Lab encodes collagen: Program defines stable sequences for synthesis, could help fight disease, design drugs

ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2012) ? The human body is proficient at making collagen. And human laboratories are getting better at it all the time.

In a development that could lead to better drug design and new treatments for disease, Rice University researchers have made a major step toward synthesizing custom collagen. Rice scientists who have learned how to make collagen -- the fibrous protein that binds cells together into organs and tissues -- are now digging into its molecular structure to see how it forms and interacts with biological systems.

Jeffrey Hartgerink, an associate professor of chemistry and of bioengineering, and his former graduate student Jorge Fallas, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, wrote a new computer program that predicts the most stable structures of nanometer-sized collagen. In nature, these small structures link into chains that serve as connective tissue in the body. Hartgerink and Fallas followed up the computer research by making and testing the collagen detailed in their calculations.

Their success, reported September 25 in the online journal Nature Communications, will be of interest to physicians and scientists who work in reconstructive surgery, cosmetics and tissue engineering as well as to researchers investigating collagen protein interactions that could lead to new treatments for cancer and other diseases.

"Collagen is an odd protein. On one hand, it's the most abundant protein in the human body," said Hartgerink, who in a previous work unveiled a new way to synthesize self-assembling collagen. "It basically is the connective fiber that holds cells together; without it you'd turn into a big puddle.

"By mass, collagen is the most common protein there is. But it's different from almost any other you might look at," he said.

Hartgerink likened collagen to DNA with a structural twist, as it has not two but three intertwining peptide strands. "Watson and Crick, when they were first trying to understand DNA, figured out the underlying code for how all the base pairs fit together," he said. "Collagen is similar, except there are three strands. In this paper, we've started to crack the code of which amino acids go with what others to stabilize the structure."

While scientists have made a great deal of progress defining the structures of other proteins, "only a small group of us have been interested in collagen. And because of that, our understanding of it has lagged behind," he said.

In their new work, Hartgerink and Fallas analyzed charged interactions between amino acids that attract one strand to another (and in this case, yet another) to form the triple helix. "We look at positively charged and negatively charged amino acids and where they need to be aligned to result in stabilization," Hartgerink said.

In the same way three-color images must be properly aligned for a viewer to see a complete picture, the three strands of a collagen protein must be in register for the protein to carry out its function.

"Collagen does more than hold cells together," he said. "It also binds other proteins that have interesting functions. Those proteins will attach to collagen, and then cells come along and bind to those proteins. Based on that interaction, a cell will then 'decide' how to behave or differentiate into a different type of cell."

Hartgerink said that property makes collagen especially valuable for biological scaffolds, materials that are under intense study as a way to grow new body parts -- even entire organs -- to replace damaged ones.

Hartgerink said strand alignment also determines a collagen helix's stability. The computer program designed by Fallas and Hartgerink calculates the stability of each possible alignment of a given set of peptide strands -- 27 in all -- to find the best matches of positively and negatively charged amino acids. It then assigns each set a score, based on the net positive or negative charge of the entire helix.

"If we have a positive charge in a peptide sequence, it will destabilize the triple helix, and we score that as a minus 1," he said. "If we have a negative charge, that also destabilizes the helix and we also score that as a minus 1. But if those charges line up in what we call the axial geometry, it negates the destabilization. This triple helix would have a score of 0, which is good.

"We create huge, theoretical populations of collagen sequences and score all of them," he said. "We find out which are closest to this magical score of 0 and throw out all the other ones." That tells the researchers which sequences are likely to self-assemble into the most stable helixes. "The math looks complicated, but a personal computer can generate one of these sequences in one or two minutes of processing time. It's not super sophisticated." He said the code will be available on his group's home page for other researchers to try.

Hartgerink's lab, based at Rice's BioScience Research Collaborative, has the unusual capacity to carry out both theoretical and experimental sides of the work. While the program generates test sequences in minutes on a desktop computer, synthesis and analysis of actual collagen takes much more effort.

"Once you have a sequence, you want to test it to see if it actually works," he said. "The math is useless if it's not predicting reality. Our proof-of-principle showed the computer code can be used to design a triple helix that folds properly. Now that we know how to do this, we can think about making collagen biomaterials for things like scaffolding, or to test protein/collagen receptor interactions, which people have been trying to demonstrate for a long time."

>He said the new work could help researchers decipher collagen's role in the metastasis of cancer. "Cancer cells need to be able to degrade collagen in order to move from organ to organ. We need to understand the structure of collagen to learn how they do that," Hargerink said. "Blood clots happen because specific proteins recognize a collagen sequence. If we don't understand the structure, we can't assist clotting to heal a wound or help people who have overclotting problems.

"All these targets are critical but they're very difficult to approach when we don't fundamentally understand collagen structure," he said. "We're not solving all those problems here, but this is a good first step."

The work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Robert A. Welch Foundation and the Norman Hackerman Advanced Research Program of Texas.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Rice University. The original article was written by Mike Williams.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Jorge A. Fallas, Jeffrey D. Hartgerink. Computational design of self-assembling register-specific collagen heterotrimers. Nature Communications, 2012; 3: 1087 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2084

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/ydq0DxokZo4/120925143755.htm

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Winklevoss twins invest in social network company: report

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Winklevoss twins, best known for their legal battle against Mark Zuckerberg over the founding of Facebook Inc, have invested in SumZero, a social network company aimed at professional investors, The Wall Street Journal said on Sunday.

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss have put $1 million into SumZero, which was founded by fellow Harvard University alumni Divya Narendra and Aalap Mahadevia in 2008, the article said. Narendra was an ally to the Winklevoss twins during their lawsuit against Facebook, which won the brothers a cash and stock settlement valued at $65 million at a time when the company was valued at $15 billion.

Facebook's market cap is currently valued at $47 billion.

In June 2011, the twins decided not to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court a ruling upholding their $65 million settlement.

The 2008 accord was intended to resolve a feud over whether Zuckerberg stole the idea for what became the world's most popular social networking website from the Winklevosses, who like him, had attended Harvard. Their battle was dramatized in the 2010 film "The Social Network."

After agreeing to the cash-and-stock accord, the Winklevosses sought to undo it, saying it was fraudulent because Facebook hid information from them and that they deserved more money.

In February, the brothers formed Winklevoss Capital as a vehicle to invest their personal wealth. Their first investment in June was SumZero, which brings together investors to share trading ideas and research, the WSJ reported.

SumZero.com has 7,500 members and has parallels with the first versions of Facebook, including exclusivity.

The site also allows investors to become members only if they work on the "buy side." SumZero defines that group as investment professionals at hedge funds, mutual funds and private-equity firms. Analysts from the "sell side" such as Wall Street banks are not allowed, the report said.

(Reporting by Nadia Damouni, editing by Gary Crosse)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/winklevoss-twins-invest-social-network-company-report-231526282--sector.html

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