Trump administration removes Obama surgeon general pick Vivek Murthy

The Trump administration has removed Dr Vivek Murthy as US surgeon general, leading one Democratic senator to accuse the president of “politicising the position”.

Murthy was appointed by Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate in December 2014 after a long delay. Murthy had incurred the wrath of the National Rifle Association by saying gun control was a “healthcare issue”.

During his tenure, he helped produce a White House report that said climate change had become a public health crisis, and launched Facing Addiction, the first surgeon general’s report on alcohol, drugs and health.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services said Murthy was asked to resign after “assisting in a smooth transition”. His deputy, rear admiral Sylvia Trent-Adams, will serve as acting surgeon general and leader the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, of which Murthy will remain a member.

Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator who has campaigned for new gun laws since the 2012 massacre of 20 children in Newtown, issued a statement on Saturday in which he praised Murthy’s handling of gun control, addiction and outbreaks of Ebola and Zika. The Connecticut senator called the doctor “another in a long list of political targets by the Trump administration”.

“Surgeons general are not supposed to be fired mid-term,” Murphy said. “They have served administrations of both political parties because keeping Americans safe and healthy isn’t a partisan issue.

“By firing Dr Murthy, President Trump is politicizing the position of surgeon general and risking the credibility of our nation’s top public health official.”

In a statement posted to Facebook, Murthy said: “Two years and four months ago, I was honored to be sworn in as the 19th surgeon general of the United States. For the grandson of a poor farmer from India to be asked by the president to look out for the health of an entire nation was a humbling and uniquely American story.”

He also summarised some of his achievements, which included educational initiatives on addiction, the opioid epidemic, vaccines and food insecurity.

Murthy added: “We worked with thousands of Commissioned Corps officers to protect our nation from Ebola and Zika and to respond to the Flint water crisis, major hurricanes, and frequent healthcare shortages in rural communities.

“I am exceedingly proud of what our team and our officers have done to bring help and hope to people all across America.”

The president has also dismissed several other high-profile appointees who he had either promised would stay on or left without replacements. In January he fired Sally Yates, then the acting attorney general, for her refusal to defend an order banning travel from seven Muslim majority nations, which was later halted in courts. Then in March he fired Preet Bharara, the powerful prosecutor in the southern district of Manhattan and the justice department dismissed dozens of US attorneys without new appointees. Scores of positions in the state department and other agencies also remain vacant.

Trump administration removes Obama surgeon general pick Vivek Murthy

The poor must not be left to pick up the tab for everyone’s social care | Letters

Theresa May’s decision to single out Ealing for attack on adult social care at prime minister’s questions is bizarre and unfair (Councils can get social care cash early, says PM, 15 December). Despite significant funding pressures, Ealing council has one of the best re-ablement services in the country, with 93% of older people who use this service still at home three months after hospital discharge, a record we are proud of. Ealing works closely with our local NHS to provide a seamless discharge service: our rate of delays to discharge due to social care issues is average, not the worst.

Since 2010, government cuts have led to a reduction in Ealing’s adult social care budget of nearly 20%. The council tax precepts the government has allowed us are sticking plasters by comparison. I’m proud that, rather than levying a precept on Ealing residents, as the prime minister seems to want us to do, our success in growing Ealing’s economy and building homes has provided us with the resources to provide extra social care funding that more than matches what a precept would raise. We’ve allocated £2.3m extra for social care this year, rising to £4m by 2019, along with a £5m transformation fund to redesign services so fewer people need intensive help in future.

Councils, like Ealing, that are innovating, redesigning and delivering high-quality social care in very difficult financial conditions, while not demanding extra money from just about managing local families, deserve Theresa May’s praise, not her censure.
Cllr Julian Bell
Labour leader of Ealing council

• My Labour-controlled local authority recently announced cuts to its budget of £82m up to 2020 and more than 400 job losses. These are on top of the cuts already implemented of £250m and 2,000 redundancies since 2010. In real terms, the council’s budget will have been cut by 50%. Any small increase to social care funding through higher council tax has to be set in this overall context (Council tax hike considered to cover social care costs, theguardian.com, 12 December).

All over the country, local authorities are facing a similar funding crisis, with accumulating evidence of how vital local services have been decimated and the serious consequences for local communities. No amount of Orwellian double-speak about efficiency savings, partnership working and smart delivery should be allowed to disguise the fact that the loss of skilled workers, the closure of facilities and cutbacks to services are leading to the biggest crisis of local provision ever seen in this country.

It’s time for councillors to reject the logic of imposed austerity. There should be a coordinated campaign by all Labour-led authorities not to set another round of cuts budgets. To the predictable response that the government will threaten to suspend councillors and impose administrators – so what? Nothing could be worse than meekly accepting what is, effectively, the destruction of local government in any recognisable form. They should be leading a campaign to restore real local democracy and funding to provide decent local services. Get up off your knees and fight for the working-class communities you are supposed to represent.
Steven Schofield
Bradford

• Changes to council tax and the social care precept will seem to many nothing more than a temporary fix. There is real concern about the postcode lottery nature of these tax-raising powers intended to fund our ailing social care system.

While the changes to the social care council tax precept from 2% to 3% over the next two years are welcome, they do not provide additional funding. The government has missed the opportunity to bring forward some of the £1.5bn additional funding for social care through the Better Care Fund already announced for 2019/20.

The most deprived areas in the UK derive the lowest proportion of their income from council tax. The government’s intention in allowing councils to increase council tax is to spread the financial burden of the nation’s rising social care bill. But council tax payers in deprived areas may be less likely to be able to afford the increase, and many of these who are on low incomes will already be paying reduced rates.

The UK has a long tradition of providing care to those who need it most. If that is to continue, the government must invest in a robust social care system that can cater for all based on needs and not on geography. From a taxpayer’s perspective this is a zero-sum game. For every £1 not invested in social care, the cost to the NHS is considerably more.
Paul Dossett
Head of Public Sector, Grant Thornton UK LLP

• Gaby Hinsliff is right (Do-it-yourself social care only works for the very rich, 16 December). Grown children’s ability to step in where the state fails to care for their elderly parents becomes increasingly decisive. But with the proposed increase in council tax the state is forcing the unemployed to step in. Since April 2013 the unemployment benefits of grown children have been taxed by 259 councils out of 326 in England. Taxation of the weekly £73.10 jobseeker’s allowance/income support/employment and support allowance of single mothers and vulnerable citizens deemed fit for work by the Department for Work and Pensions will now be increased to require the least able to step in to pay for the care of anyone’s elderly parents.

Tenants are also forced to step in by paying not only the increase in council tax but also increases in rent out of their unemployment benefits since April 2013; that is due to the cuts in housing benefit called “local housing allowance”, “single room supplement” or “benefit cap”. Some of them are struggling to pay off rent, council tax, utility and fines arrears that accumulate during the three-month absence of income caused by a benefits sanction.

The supreme court has noted the injustice of taxing benefits in Mosley v Haringey. “Their income was already at a basic level and the effect of Haringey’s proposed scheme would be to reduce it even below that level and thus in all likelihood to cause real hardship, while sparing its more prosperous residents from making any contribution to the shortfall in government funding.”
Rev Paul Nicolson
Taxpayers Against Poverty

• I have cancer (non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma) and I was recently taken by ambulance to Plymouth’s Derriford hospital with a pulmonary embolism (a blood clot on the lung). I was admitted to A&E around 1am but spent more than 12 hours on a trolley until a bed could be found for me on the medical assessment unit (MAU). I was one of many patients – most were elderly and frail – waiting on trolleys where there was very little spare room for any more. Nursing staff told me that the delay was because the MAU could not find beds on other wards for patients ready for transfer. I was also told this problem was caused by these wards struggling to discharge medically fit older people because these patients needed social care that is not available.  

My experience is just one example of the crisis facing hospital services around the country. Patient care is suffering as a direct result of the economically misguided and unjust consequences of this government’s austerity programme. This policy should be reversed by central government providing immediate funds directly to local government to enable an equitable and adequate provision of social care services to free up beds in NHS hospitals and relieve the pressures on A&E services.
Nigel Charles
South Brent, Devon

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The poor must not be left to pick up the tab for everyone’s social care | Letters

The police can’t continue to pick up the pieces of Britain’s mental health cuts | Ian Blair

In my time as the deputy and then commissioner of the Metropolitan police, my primary concerns were with terrorism and issues around diversity. But a constant problem for my officers was dealing with people exhibiting psychotic behaviour in public, which seemed to be getting worse. A main driver of this was the inadequacy and local unpredictability of mental health services.

Since I left office in 2008 the situation has deteriorated more dramatically than I could have imagined, with the latest report suggesting that police across England and Wales are now using powers under section 136 of the 1983 Mental Health Act 50% more than they did a decade ago – nearly 30,000 times in 2014-15. These numbers are a symptom of a crisis in mental health provision.

Section 136 is the power given to police officers to remove individuals who appear to be exhibiting signs of acute mental distress from public places to what is described as “a place of safety”. This should be a hospital but, in an emergency, can be a police station.

There is a similarity here with the much more widely understood crisis in social care for the elderly, with too many simply frail people staying in hospital when they should be being looked after at home. The closure of many psychiatric hospitals in the 1980s under the policy of “care in the community” has put pressure on mental health provision, while the increased geographical mobility of many families makes care by relatives much more challenging

But the real issue, both in social care and mental health, is that money is being spent on crisis-handling rather than on prevention.

The police and hospital A&E units have, in the past decade, become the only 24-hour public services for people in crisis. The police have had severe funding cuts but are still there at the end of a telephone. Anyone working in the NHS will admit that the government’s vaunted “parity of esteem” between physical and mental health has not been honoured, particularly for young people. Meanwhile local authority budgets, which part-fund child and adolescent mental health service and community health teams, have not been protected at all.

In my early service in the 1970s it was a rare sight to see a cell door open with an officer sitting outside, watching

This means funds for services that would have previously been available are being rationed on the basis of seriousness of need. Adult care provision is being refused by cash-strapped local authorities to hundreds of thousands of people who would have previously received it; now they will only get it when their incapacities worsen to the point where they end up in A&E, then in a ward from which they cannot be released because there is no adult social care service to support their recovery at home.

I have lost count of the number of officers dealing with distressed young people – and of friends and acquaintances whose children are so ill as to be taken by police to local psychiatric institutions only to be assessed as not ill enough to be given a bed. All of these are therefore released into the care of community mental health services, whose budgets have also not been protected. Over 200 people took their own life last year while under the care of such services, which lack sufficient resources to prevent difficulties becoming disasters.

Last year the government announced that police cells should never be used for the housing of mentally ill people. Fine, but announcing that something is forbidden is not the same as providing an alternative, as was highlighted during prime minister’s questions last week.

In my early service in the 1970s it was a rare sight in a police station to see a cell door open with an officer sitting outside, watching over a vulnerable person with mental health problems because there was nowhere more suitable to take him or her. Later, it became less rare. Contrary to the government’s intention, that sight will probably remain commonplace for some time, as will cases on the street where officers end up dealing with psychotic individuals without sufficient backup from mental health professionals. It is interesting that the chief constable of Devon and Cornwall is reported to be threatening to sue his local NHS trusts over a lack of mental health beds.

The social care crisis will affect most of us in the coming years, whether as patients or as relatives. Such experiences can be deeply distressing and long-lasting, but unless more money is put into mental health provision, both in residential care and in the community, significant numbers of people will suffer; and families will face the acute and agonising dilemma of how to look after someone at home whose psychotic state is unpredictable, occasionally violent and sometimes self-harming.

Meanwhile the police will continue working to provide a service for which they were not and are not designed. When Robert Peel, who founded the Metropolitan Police in the 1820s, said the police are “only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare”, I don’t think he envisaged them as community mental health workers.

The Home Office judges the success or failure of individual police services by reductions in crime – not on dealing with mental health crises – but unless NHS and council-run mental health services are adequately funded, too much police time will continue to be taken up with a task they are ill-equipped to perform, and which risks jeopardising their role as protectors of the community from crime and terror.

The police can’t continue to pick up the pieces of Britain’s mental health cuts | Ian Blair

Amount of females travelling to America to pick sex of kid rises twenty%

Dr Potter who runs the HRC clinic in Newport Beach in California, said 80 per cent of couples from Britain are choosing to have a girl.

It had been feared that allowing sex selection would lead to an imbalance between the genders with fewer girls born for cultural reasons.

However Dr Potter said the women he sees are desperate for a girl having grown up playing with dolls and always imagined they would have daughter.

He told the Telegraph: “Some have only one child but most have two or three of the same gender. The process is driven by the mother who has identified with little girls since her own childhood and has always had a place for a daughter. When they do not have one, it is like a death and they grieve for their little girl.”

Dr Potter’s patients often do not need fertility treatment in order to conceive but go through the process so that the resulting embryos can be screened and the chosen sex transferred to the womb.

The whole process costs around US$ 15,000 and requires a 12 day stay near the clinic.

Dr Potter said: “I think that pregnancy termination as a method of gender selection is not acceptable but I also believe that is it not for me to impose my values on other people.

“I believe women should have reproductive freedom and that should include selecting the gender of their child if they wish. But in countries like the UK where the government pays for some IVF, taxpayers’ money should not be used to people can have a boy or a girl because that is what they want. That is inappropriate.

“I have had patients come to me from the other side of the world who have never been on a plane before and have saved up for a long time, it is really very important to them.”

He said the arguments against sex selection using IVF were mostly ‘absurd’ and focus on it ‘interfering with God’s will’ or somehow sexually discriminating against the embryo.

One in ten of Dr Potter’s patients are now seen for gender selection with the largest numbers of couples from outside America coming from Australia, the UK and Canada. In these countries, most couples want a girl, he said.

Some patients travel from China wanting to have a boy but many also want twins, with one of each sex.

One British patient who asked to be known only as Hayley said: “I’d always wanted a little girl but logistically, we didn’t want lots of children, we only wanted three, so we though we’d go down this route.

“My husband said “you can have one more baby” at which point I said, if I’m having one more I’ll make sure it’s a girl.

“I just think I’ve always wanted a mother daughter relationship. Not to take away from what I have with my sons which is lovely.”

Hayley and her husband Greg already had two boys, Bobby, six and Christopher, four. After searching the Internet, Hayley found lots of couples were looking for the same, and had coined the phrase, ‘gender dreaming’.

She said: “It took a lot of soul searching to go to the US to be honest – it took us a long time and we had to do lots of talking before we decided.

“Dr Potter was fantastic right from the care you receive in the UK. He was reassuring, really professional and everything you could want.”

“Of the eggs we created, we had 6 healthy embryos, 3 girls, 3 boys.”

Hayley chose to have one female implanted, which led to a successful pregnancy.

“I still can’t quite believe it, I’ll believe it when she’s here.

“The remaining embryos are frozen, they’ll probably remain frozen for a while. At some point we’ll make a decision, and I’m not sure what they decision will be.”

“We spent £22,000 on treatment but we never think about the cost, it was worth every penny.”

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority which regulates fertility treatment in Britain carried out a review of sex selection in 1993 and again in 2002. Sex selection for social or family balancing reasons is illegal under the amended HFE Act which came into force in 2009.

Amount of females travelling to America to pick sex of kid rises twenty%

Pick Your Chocolate Wisely

Over the last ten years there has been significantly investigation carried out exploring the rewards of chocolate. It turns out that tiny quantities of dark chocolate or cocoa day-to-day truly does have a place in a healthy diet regime! Much of that investigation has been on the cardiovascular method. The compounds responsible for these positive aspects are the polyphenols, in these plants that give us colours and plant safety towards pests, infection and UV harm.

Chocolate is from the beans of the Cacao tree, the seeds within the cocoa pods that increase in Africa, South America and Indonesia. The beans are fermented to create the chocolate taste and dried into solids to promote as chocolate.

When we consume meals that contain polyphenols, they act as anti-oxidants, guarding your proteins, fats and DNA from oxidative harm. Oxidative tension plays a role in aging and studies show it increases degenerative illnesses. Several research present that chocolate consumption increases HDL cholesterol, the “good” kind. Also the polyphenols shield the endothelial lining, the layer of cells that line the blood vessels, from totally free radical harm and aids control inflammation.

Researchers from Harvard Healthcare School had been the 1st to observe that large blood pressure is unheard of in the Kuna Indians from Panama. There, cacao trees grow wild and they use the fruit as a staple in their diet program day-to-day. They eat so much cocoa they have the highest consumption of the compound, flavanols, in the world. How? The normal Kuna  drinks 5 cups of cocoa beverage a day and that does not count the cocoa they include to their meals!

Cocoa has been identified to aid with blood pressure with the compound, epicatechin, which improves nitric oxide. Nitric oxide aids market relaxation of the blood vessels which keeps the blood flowing. Some of these cocao compounds aid modulate irritation, the start off of all illness! It might even enhance the skin contrary to the old feel that it causes acne! A advantage, unsuspected prior to, is the new probability it could improve memory and protect brain neurons from damage.

The negative information is that a lot of chocolate merchandise on the industry are loaded with sugar, milk and body fat. Even worse are the artificial flavors, trans unwanted fat oils and other additives to extend shelf live. Soon after you add all of these items to the chocolate you are left with minor real percentage of cocoa so your positive aspects are diminished!

To really reap the rewards you need to pick dark chocolate or at least a bar with a larger percentage of cocoa which means significantly less sugar and body fat. Studies show you can eat up to 41 grams of dark chocolate a day and not achieve weight. Try out seeking for 60-70% cacao on the labels of your chocolate bars!

Or if that does not appeal place a tiny powdered cocao or raw cacao in your smoothie or include to oatmeal or yogurt. Try out this recipe under.

Chocolate Vinaigrette

This dressing is good on salads or with roasted beets and winter squash.

3 tbs. balsamic vinegar, four tbs. olive oil, 1tsp Dijon mustard, 1-3tsps. raw cocao powder and pinch of sea salt. Whisk collectively and area in jar, it will not last prolonged!

References:

Alfrescofoodandlifestyle.blogspot.com by Judith Fertig

www.naturalgrocers.com

Healing Spices by Bharat B. Aggarwal

Pick Your Chocolate Wisely