Health Care Tuesday

• Obama on health reform, and the next Surgeon General, Regina Benjamin.

• Kaiser.org:

  As House leaders prepare to release a sweeping health overhaul plan, they're clinging to their goal to provide a liberal counterpoint to any legislation now likely to emerge from the Senate.

  On a broad array of contentious issues – from government’s role in providing insurance to the size of subsidies for lower-income Americans – the liberals who largely control the agenda in the House are holding fast to their principles.  The legislation expected to be formally unveiled, perhaps as soon as today, will reflect their vision of how to insure nearly all Americans and how to pay for it – including a proposal to tax the wealthy that was announced Friday.

• If you missed it, an excellent summary of the last Thursday influenza summit held at NIH is here in a blog written by John Solomon, a free-lance author who writes about emergency preparedness. john attended the conference and interviewed a few key players as part of the blog post. This is Paul Jarris, Executive Director of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO, your state DPH folks - the local DPH might belong to NACCHO, the National Association of County And City Health Officials).

• Reuters summarizes the plans:

  * Vaccine to be offered in fall if needed

  * States need plan to close schools in worst case scenario

  * Hospitals need surge capacity

• HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced today that the department will commit $884 million to purchase additional supplies of two key ingredients for potential H1N1 vaccine to further prepare the nation for a potential resurgence of the 2009 H1N1 virus.

• ScienceInsider on pandemic vaccine and how things are coming along: a snag because egg-based vaccine is showing decreased yields with this novel H1N1 pandemic viirus.

  Total vaccine supply will depend on several other unknowns, including whether 15 micrograms of antigen is enough—as is the case with seasonal vaccine—and whether one or two shots are needed. A key factor is how many companies will use so-called adjuvants, which boost the immune response and thus lower the amount of antigen needed per shot. A recent survey among 36 vaccine producers, also presented by Kieny, showed that only 12 of the 33 proposed vaccine formulations will contain an adjuvant. Many companies have never used adjuvants and adding them now would raise additional safety issues, Kieny said. "It's very difficult to mix antigen from one company with adjuvant from another company when they have never been tested together."

• Because hospital surge capacity is limited, the strategy to protect the hospitals will be to advise those who are not that ill with influenza to stay home and care for yourself (and even if you go to the hospital anyway, you might not get seen unless you are very ill.) I linked an excellent new home care eBook last week, and yesterday, I interviewed one of the authors, Sandra L. Schwanberg, PhD, RN, who has over 35 years of experience in community and public health nursing and nursing education, on why she wrote the book and what she expects in the fall.

  More free home care guidance can be found here.

• From the Beeb:

  H1N1 swine flu attacks the respiratory system in a more sustained way than the standard seasonal virus, research in animals shows.

  Tests showed swine flu multiplies in greater numbers across the respiratory system, and causes more damage.

  And instead of staying in the head like seasonal flu, it penetrates deeper into the respiratory tissues - making it more likely to cause pneumonia.

  The University of Wisconsin study appears in the journal Nature.

• eCare Diary is a new web site for those dealing with long term care issues with loved ones.
• Want to know how that new cigarette tax is playing out? For every 10% rise in taxes price, there's a 3% drop in consumption. But it's not even - mid-range products might lose to high end or low end brands. In any case, the industry survives.
• This looks promising:

  New tests assessing brain changes and body chemistry are showing promise at diagnosing Alzheimer's disease in its earliest stages, aiding the search for new drugs, researchers said on Tuesday.