Glaxo to Pay $3 Billion to Settle U.S. Cases on Sales, Marketing

By Phil Serafino and Makiko Kitamura

Bloomberg News

GlaxoSmithKline Plc (GSK) agreed to pay $3 billion to resolve U.S. criminal and civil investigations into whether the U.K. company marketed drugs for unapproved uses and other matters, its biggest legal settlement.

Negotiations over the terms will be completed next year, the London-based company said in a statement today. The cost is covered by existing legal provisions and will be paid from the company’s cash resources, Glaxo said.

The potential settlement brings Glaxo closer to putting years of legal probes behind it. The company set aside 2.2 billion pounds ($3.5 billion) in the fourth quarter last year in anticipation of reaching an agreement on the cases. Glaxo said it will have about 1 billion pounds of its 2.9 billion pounds in total legal provisions remaining after today’s settlement is completed, and it hasn’t decided what to do with the money.

“This news essentially draws a line under a 10-year legal saga,” Gbola Amusa, an analyst at UBS AG in London who recommends buying Glaxo shares, said in an e-mail. “This removes significant uncertainty on ongoing legal issues.”

There rest of the story can be found here.

Culture of Denial and Child Sex Abuse

Voices In The Family - WHYY Radio
Originally posted 11/14/11

Alleged incidents of child sexual abuse brought to light at Penn State are disturbing. University stakeholders have been ousted. The campus remains a live wire of anger and confusion. As our hearts go out to children and families who have come forward with their stories, we find ourselves wondering, why did so many people fail to report what they saw or heard about?

Dan Gottlieb, PhD

Dan Gottlieb Ph.D, host of Voices in the Family, is a family therapist in private practice. He is a nationally recognized lecturer in the field of mental health, and a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Dan Gottlieb asks: why the cultural hesitation and denial in sexual abuse cases, in general, when the well-being of children is at stake? We'll take a look at the psychology of institutional betrayal as well as prevention of abuse with Jennifer J. Freyd, Michael Stinson, Ken Singer, and Kelly Moore.

The entire podcast can be found here.

Child abuse: We’re making the problem worse

By Tracy Clark

Salon.com

Originally published 11/13/2011

The alleged Penn State sex abuse scandal may provide a powerful lesson about institutional corruption — but it’s also a good time for some self-examination. The general consensus among experts who treat sex offenders is that America has taken the wrong approach to dealing with child molesters. In fact, some say that we’re only making the problem worse.

Just last week, the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abuse conference in Canada surveyed the latest research in the field. The narrative that emerged from the meeting is that we should place a stronger emphasis on something proved to actually reduce the recidivism rate: treatment. The potential for bias here is apparent — it’s like incarceration experts highlighting the importance of incarceration — but studies show that treatment, particularly group approaches, can be highly effective. (Although, as a 2009 report put it, “Despite these advances we, as a field, continue to fall well short of the community’s expectation of ‘no more victims.’”)

The entire story can be found here.

Two additional stories on the Penn State sexual abuse case can be found on the same page.

Pedophiles infiltrate respected institutions to find victims

By Greg Toppo

USA Today

Originally published November 14, 2011

The Penn State allegations may seem unthinkable: revered assistant coach and prominent community activist Jerry Sandusky preying on eight children. But such abuses of trust play out in the USA over and over again.

Respected people who set up charitable or social groups for children, only to be implicated in some form of child sexual abuse, are a frightening reality.

"I call them 'institutions of trust,' " says Portland, Ore., attorney Kelly Clark, who has represented more than 300 sex abuse victims. Some predators are so tacitly trusted "that when something like this happens, the instinctive reaction is, 'That can't happen here. We can't allow the mission to be compromised,' " he says.

Abuse experts say the common denominators in many such crimes are parents willing to allow noted people to have unrestricted access to their kids. Among recent cases:

•A Utah judge this month sentenced a 70-year-old orphanage co-founder to three consecutive terms of five years to life in prison after he pleaded guilty to three counts of abuse. Lon Kennard originally faced 43 counts dating to 1995, but most charges were dropped as part of a plea deal. Kennard's victims were among six children adopted from Ethiopia, where he and his wife helped establish an orphanage.

•A Miami jury on Thursday returned a $100 million verdict against a retired Roman Catholic priest accused of sexually abusing dozens of boys since the 1980s in the city's Little Haiti neighborhood. More than 20 people say Neil Doherty, 68, trolled for victims wearing his priest's collar.

The rest of the story can be found here.

Psychologist Suicide

By Tori DeAngelis
November 2011, Vol 42, No. 10
Print version: page 19

A colleague's death is hard to contemplate. But the suicides of two psychologists in 2008 — as well as those of noted psychologists Michael J. Mahoney, PhD, in 2006, and Lawrence Kohlberg, PhD, in 1987 — prompted an ad hoc APA committee to look closely at what is known about this hazard and what the profession can do about it.

The group – led by Phillip M. Kleespies, PhD, of the VA Boston Healthcare System and made up of members of APA's Advisory Committee on Colleague Assistance, the APA Practice Directorate and the APA Div. 12 (Clinical) Section on Clinical Emergencies and Crises — examined research in four critical areas: suicide rates, risk factors, impact on others and how colleagues support psychologists in distress. They also examined the current state of prevention and intervention, and suggested ways to enhance training in this vital area.

(cut to the final portion)

"Suicide by psychologists, individuals with special expertise in human behavior, seems to be particularly fraught with challenges and raises concerns specific to psychology such as doubt in the value of therapy," they write. "Identifying risks, reducing the stigma associated with acknowledging hopelessness or despair, and overcoming other barriers to intervention are critical to reducing the incidence of suicide."

The entire story can be read here.

Chantix's Suicide Risk Makes It Unsuitable As First Line Smoking Cessation Drug

By Catharine Paddock, PhD
Medical News Today

A new study finds that the smoking-cessation drug varenicline (Pfizer's Chantix) has too poor a safety profile to make it suitable for first-line use. Researchers from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, and other research centers in the US, found the drug, known as Champix outside the US, was 8 times more likely to result in reports of suicidal behavior or depression than nicotine replacement products. They report their findings in the 2 November issue of PLoS One, an online journal of the Public Library of Science.

The findings contradict those of a recent review by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that found varenicline, which already carries an FDA "black box warning", did not increase the risk of being hospitalized for psychiatric problems such as depression.

The entire story can be found here.

12 Are Charged in Medicare Fraud Schemes Said to Cost $95 Million

By Kirk Semple
The New York Times
City Room
Originally published November 2, 2011

Federal agents swarmed several medical clinics and homes in New York City on Wednesday, arresting 10 people on charges of running Medicare fraud schemes that bilked the government out of $95 million, federal officials said.

Another defendant charged in one of the schemes surrendered later to the authorities and a 12th defendant was still at large on Wednesday afternoon, the officials said.

The defendants included three medical doctors, a doctor of osteopathy and a chiropractor, the United States Department of Justice said in a news release.

The cases are part of an aggressive campaign by the Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Services to combat the escalating problem of health care fraud. In 2007, a special team was formed to combat fraud in Medicare, the federal program that helps provide health care for older people.

The entire story can be read here.

Privacy and Security for EHR: US and EU Compared

PRIVACY AND SECURITY IN THE IMPLEMENTATION OF

HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (ELECTRONIC

HEALTH RECORDS): U.S. AND EU COMPARED

By Janine Hiller, Matthew McMullen, Wade Chumey, and David Baumer

Abstract

The importance of the adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and the associated cost savings cannot be ignored as an element in the changing delivery of health care. However, the potential cost savings predicted in the use of EHR are accompanied by potential risks, either technical or legal, to privacy and security. The U.S. legal framework for healthcare privacy is a combination of constitutional, statutory, and regulatory law at the federal and state levels. In contrast, it is generally believed that EU protection of privacy, including personally identifiable medical information, is more comprehensive than that of U.S. privacy laws. Direct comparisons of U.S. and EU medical privacy laws can be made with reference to the five Fair Information Practices Principles (FIPs) adopted by the Federal Trade Commission and other international bodies. The analysis reveals that while the federal response to the privacy of health records in the U.S. seems to be a gain over conflicting state law, in contrast to EU law, U.S. patients currently have little choice in the electronic recording of sensitive medical information if they want to be treated, and minimal control over the sharing of that information. A combination of technical and legal improvements in EHRs could make the loss of privacy associated with EHRs de minimis. The EU has come closer to this position, encouraging the adoption of EHRs and confirming the application of privacy protections at the same time. It can be argued that the EU is proactive in its approach; whereas because of a different viewpoint toward an individual’s right to privacy, the U.S. system lacks a strong framework for healthcare privacy, which will affect the  implementation of EHRs. If the U.S. is going to implement EHRs effectively, technical and policy aspects of privacy must be central to the discussion.

The entire .pdf can be found here.

Thanks to Ken Pope for this lead.

Children’s hospital loses personal info of 500,000 patients

wftv.com

In a potential security breach at Nemours Children’s Health System, officials say they have lost the personal information of thousands of Florida patients.

Company officials say the patient information was being stored in a filing cabinet at a facility in Delaware. Officials said inside the cabinet were nonpassword protected computer backup tapes containing the personal and financial information of 500,000 Florida patients.

The whole story and video can be found here.