WASHINGTON (AP) — Does your sweetheart have a milk allergy? You may want to hold off on a dark chocolate Valentine.
A new Food and Drug Administration study released Wednesday says there are traces of milk in some dark chocolate candies.
The agency found that 55 of 93 bars of dark chocolate “without any clear indication of the presence of milk” on their labels contained some level of milk. Two out of 17 dark chocolate bars that were labeled “dairy free or allergen free” also contained milk.
The FDA would not identify the brands that contain milk.
Milk is one of several allergens required to be labeled on food packages. The agency tested dark chocolate after hearing from consumers who said they had eaten it and experienced harmful reactions.
The Bishop Carroll Golden Eagles went on a 10-0 run in the final three minutes to defeat the Junction City Blue Jays 59-49 in the Tournament of Champions, Dodge City.
The loss drops JCHS into the 7th place consolation game at 1 p.m. Saturday afternoon against the loser of the Wichita North-Newton game.
The Blue Jays fall to 3-9 on the year while Bishop Carroll improved to 7-4. Junction City’s Ricardo Erans and Josh Bryan led the Blue Jays in scoring with 13 points each.
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A new report says more Kansas college students are receiving Pell Grants but the money isn’t covering the rising cost of attending a four-year college.
The report delivered Thursday to the Kansas Board of Regents says more than 37 percent of four-year students in Kansas received Pell Grants last year.
The Lawrence Journal-World reports more than 37 percent of students attending four-year universities in Kansas last year received Pell Grants. But the grants covered only 63 percent of tuition and fees, compared with 99 percent a decade ago.
The information was part of a report about the Regents’ long-range strategic plan, which includes the goal of increasing the higher education level in the state.
Due to dangerous wind chills forecast for Monday morning, the 2015 swearing-in ceremony for Kansas elected officials will be moved indoors to the House of Representatives.
The 2015 session of the Legislature begins Monday in Topeka.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The government is issuing the first permits to agriculture and real estate companies to use drones to monitor crops and photograph properties for sale.
The Federal Aviation Administration exemptions to the current ban on commercial drone flights were granted to Advanced Aviation Solutions in Spokane, Washington, for monitoring crops, and to Douglas Trudeau of Tierra Antigua Realty in Tucson, Arizona.
Previously, the FAA had granted 12 exemptions to 11 companies in the oil and gas, filmmaking and landfill industries.
The agency is under pressure from Congress, the drone industry and companies that want to use drones to provide broader access to U.S. skies. FAA officials had said they hoped to propose regulations to permit general commercial use of small drones by the end of 2014, but that deadline has slipped.
NEW YORK (AP) — To the surprise of even health officials, it turns out that most deaths from drinking too much involve middle-aged adults — not teens or college kids.
A report Tuesday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found six Americans die each day from alcohol poisoning. CDC officials said three-quarters of those deaths are adults ages 35 to 64, and most are men. CDC officials said they thought more would be younger.
The CDC searched death records from 2010 through 2012. Researchers focused on people who died after a single episode of binge drinking. Too much alcohol can shut down areas of the brain that control breathing, heart rate and temperature.
The report found an average of 2,221 alcohol poisoning deaths a year.
Saline County Commissioners Price, Duncan and Gile
SALINA, Kan. (AP) — A decision to eliminate four Saline County administrative positions is leading to angry words between a county commissioner and other county officials.
The Saline County Commission voted last week to eliminate the county administrator job, as well as directors of planning and zoning, road and bridge and the county health department.
The current chairman of the county planning and zoning commission alleged Wednesday that Commissioner John Price led the effort to eliminate the jobs because of a personal vendetta. Clayton Short says the department needs professional leadership and can’t be run by volunteers.
The Salina Journal reports Price denied the allegations. He says the county can run properly without the four administrators and called the planning and zoning director the least necessary administrator in the county.
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — A 16-year-old male has been charged in the Christmas Eve stabbing death of a Wichita man.
Sedgwick County District Attorney spokesman Dan Dillon said the boy is charged in juvenile court with intentional second-degree murder in the death of 32-year-old Steven Manuel.
The boy appeared in court Tuesday and is scheduled for an initial appearance on Jan. 22. He is being held in the Juvenile Detention Facility.
Manuel died early Christmas Day after he was stabbed several times during a fight at his home.
NEW YORK (AP) — Rocker Jon Bon Jovi donned a New York Police Department T-shirt on stage. Well-wishers delivered cookies to police in Cincinnati. In Mooresville, North Carolina, officers were treated by residents to a chili dinner.
At a time when many in the nation’s police community feel embattled, Americans across the country are making an effort to express their support.
The immediate catalyst for the surge of support was the execution-style killings of two New York City police officers on Saturday. For many of those making appreciative gestures, there also was a desire to counter the widespread protests — steeped with criticism of police — that followed grand jury decisions not to charge white officers for their roles in the deaths of black men in Ferguson, Missouri, and in New York
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In its toughest crackdown yet on medical errors, the federal government is cutting payments to 721 hospitals for having high rates of infections and other patient injuries, records released Thursday show.
Medicare assessed these new penalties against some of the most renowned hospitals in the nation, including the Cleveland Clinic, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa. Eleven Kansas hospitals are among those being penalized.
One out of every seven hospitals in the nation will have their Medicare payments lowered by 1 percent over the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 and continues through September 2015. The health law mandates the reductions for the quarter of hospitals that Medicare assessed as having the highest rates of “hospital-acquired conditions,” or HACs. These conditions include infections from catheters, blood clots, bed sores and other complications that are considered avoidable.
The penalties are falling particularly hard on academic medical centers: Roughly half of them will be punished, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis.
Dr. Eric Schneider, a Boston health researcher who has interviewed patient safety experts for his studies, said research has demonstrated that medical errors can be reduced through a number of techniques. But “there’s a pretty strong sense among the experts we talked to that they are not widely implemented,” he said. Those methods include entering physician orders into computers rather than scrawling them on paper, better hand hygiene and checklists on procedures to follow during surgeries. “Too many clinicians fail to use those techniques consistently,” he said.
The penalties come as the hospital industry is showing some success in reducing avoidable errors. A recent federal report found the frequency of mistakes dropped by 17 percent between 2010 and 2013, an improvement U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell called “a big deal, but it’s only a start.” Even with the reduction, one in eight hospital admissions in 2013 included a patient injury, according to the report from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, or AHRQ.
he new penalties are harsher than any prior government effort to reduce patient harm. Since 2008, Medicare has refused to pay hospitals for the cost of treating patients who suffer avoidable complications. Legally, Medicare can expel a hospital with high rates of errors from its program, but that punishment is almost never done, as it is a financial death sentence for most hospitals. Some states issue their own penalties — California, for instance, levies fines as high as $100,000 per incident on hospitals that are repeat offenders.
The government has also been giving money to some hospitals and quality groups to help improve patient safety efforts.
The HAC program has “put attention to the issue of complications and that attention wasn’t everywhere,” said Dr. John Bulger, Geisinger’s chief quality officer. However, he said hospitals such as his now must spend more time reviewing their Medicare billing records as the government uses those to evaluate patient safety. The penalty program, he said, “has the potential to take the time that could be spent on improvement and making sure the coding is accurate.”
Hospitals complain that the new penalties are arbitrary, since there may be almost no difference between hospitals that are penalized and those that narrowly escape falling into the worst quarter.
“Hospitals may be penalized on things they are getting safer on, and that sends a fairly mixed message,” said Nancy Foster, a quality expert at the American Hospital Association.
Hospital officials also point out those that do the best job identifying infections in patients may end up looking worse than others. “How hard you look for something influences your results,” said Dr. Darrell Campbell Jr., chief medical officer at the University of Michigan Health System. “We have a huge infection control group, one of the largest in the country. I tell them to go out and find it.” Campbell’s hospital had a high rate of urinary tract infections but was not penalized because it had fewer serious complications than most hospitals, records show.
The penalties come on top of other financial incentives Medicare has been placing on hospitals. This year, Medicare has already fined 2,610 hospitals for having too many patients return within a month of discharge. This is the third year those readmission penalties have been assessed. This is also the third year Medicare gave bonuses and penalties based on a variety of quality measures, including death rates and patient appraisals of their care. With the HAC penalties now in place, the worst-performing hospitals this year risk losing more than 5 percent of their regular Medicare reimbursements.
In determining the HAC penalties, Medicare judged hospitals on three measures: the frequency of central-line bloodstream infections caused by tubes used to pump fluids or medicine into veins, infections from tubes placed in bladders to remove urine, and rates of eight kinds of serious complications that occurred in hospitals, including collapsed lungs, surgical cuts, tears and reopened wounds and broken hips. Medicare tallied that and gave each hospital a score on a 10-point scale. Those in the top quarter — with a total score above 7 — were penalized.
About 1,400 hospitals are exempt from penalties because they provide specialized treatments such as psychiatry and rehabilitation or because they cater to a particular type of patient such as children and veterans. Small “critical access hospitals” that are mostly located in rural areas are also exempt, as are hospitals in Maryland, which have a special payment arrangement with the federal government.
The AHRQ study found that the biggest decreases in errors among those it studied occurred in the two categories of infections Medicare used in setting the penalties. Central-line associated bloodstream infections decreased by 49 percent and catheter-associated urinary tract infections dropped by 28 percent between 2010 and 2013. By contrast, pneumonia cases picked up by patients on ventilators that help them breathe – a condition not covered by the new penalties — decreased by only 3 percent during the same period.
Some of the errors on which the Medicare HAC penalties are based are rare compared to other mistakes the government tracks. For instance, AHRQ estimated that in 2013 there were 760,000 bad drug reactions to medicine that controls blood sugar in diabetics, but only 9,200 central-line infections. Infections from tubes inserted into urinary tracts are more common — AHRQ estimated there were 290,000 in 2013 — but those infections tend to be easier to treat and less likely to be lethal.
On the other measures, the study estimated there were 240,000 falls and more than 1 million bedsores.
In evaluating hospitals for the HAC penalties, the government adjusted infection rates by the type of hospital. When judging complications, it took into account the differing levels of sickness of each hospital’s patients, their ages and other factors that might make the patients more fragile. Still, academic medical centers have been complaining those adjustments are insufficient given the especially complicated cases they handle, such as organ transplants.
Medicare penalized 143 of 292 major teaching hospitals, the KHN analysis found. Penalized teaching hospitals included Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and Keck Medicine of USC in Los Angeles; Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta; Northwestern Memorial Hospital and University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago; George Washington University Hospital and Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C.
“We know some of the procedures we do — heart transplants or resecting cancerous portions of the esophagus — are going to be just more prone to having some of these adverse events,” said Dr. Atul Grover, the chief public policy officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges. “To lump in all of those things that are very complex procedures with simple things like pneumonia or hip replacements may not be giving an accurate result.”
Medicare levied penalties against a third or more of the hospitals it assessed in Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Utah, Washington and the District of Columbia, the KHN analysis found.
The penalties are reassessed each year and Medicare plans to add in more kinds of injuries. Starting next October, Medicare will assess rates of surgical site infections to its analysis. The following year, Medicare will examine the frequency of two antibiotic-resistant germs: Clostridium difficile, known as C. diff, and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, known as MRSA.
Jordan Rau is a reporter for Heartland Health Monitor, a news collaboration focusing on health issues and their impact in Missouri and Kansas.
MARY CLARE JALONICK, Associated Press
