Dr. Larry Corey

Dr. Larry Corey, M.D., president and director of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Academy is one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies and independent policy-research centers.

The current membership includes more than 250 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.

Dr. Corey has led the Hutchinson Center since January 2011 and has held other leadership positions there since 1996, first as head of infectious disease sciences in the Clinical Research Division and later as senior vice president and co-director of the Center’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division.

Dr. Corey is an expert in virology, immunology and vaccine development. His research has focused on herpes viruses, HIV and other viral infections, particularly those associated with cancer.

He also is principal investigator of the Hutchinson Center-based HIV Vaccine Trials Network, an international collaboration of scientists and institutions that combines clinical trials and laboratory-based studies to accelerate the development of HIV vaccines.

Dr. Corey is a professor of laboratory medicine and medicine, adjunct professor of pediatrics and microbiology, and holder of the Lawrence Corey Endowed Chair in Medical Virology at the University of Washington. He is also an infectious disease physician at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.

Dr. Corey is the Hutchinson Center’s second president to be elected to the Academy. Yeast geneticist Lee Hartwell, Ph.D., a 2001 Nobel laureate, was elected in 1998. He led the Center from 1997 until 2010.

Corey is among 220 leaders in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts, business and public affairs who have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2012 class of fellows.

Since its founding in 1780, the Academy fellows have included: George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth.

The new class will be inducted at a ceremony Oct. 6 at the Academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

Davis

Seattle’s global health organization PATH announced today that Steve Davis has been appointed president and CEO.

In his new position Davis will oversee PATH’s annual budget of $305 million, a staff of nearly 1,200, and a portfolio of projects based in PATH offices in 22 countries.

PATH projects include the development of an affordable meningitis vaccine, improved screening and treatment for HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, and low-cost filters for safe drinking water.

Davis comes to PATH  from McKinsey & Company, where he was global director of social innovation.

In that position, Davis led a global team that consults for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), governments, and the private sector, with a focus on global health and development, research and development, and Asia and Africa.

Previously, Davis was a long-term CEO of Corbis, a global digital media leader, and served as interim CEO of the Infectious Disease Research Institute, a nonprofit biotech working on vaccines, diagnostics, and drug discovery for infectious diseases of poverty.

His previous experiences also include serving as interim director of PATH’s India program, practicing law with K&L Gates, and working on refugee and human rights issues.

Mr. Davis earned his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, his master’s degree from the University of Washington, and his juris doctor from Columbia University.

Davis will join PATH on June 11 and be based at PATH’s Seattle headquarters.

He succeeds former president and CEO Dr. Christopher J. Elias, who led PATH through significant growth for ten years.

Dr. Elias left PATH in January to become president of the Global Development Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Mother Jones: Santorum In ’93: More Government Needed in Health Care

Rick Santorum (Photo: Gage Skidmore)

If elected president, Santorum vows, he will end the “tyranny” of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Yet as an up-and-coming congressman in the early 1990s, Santorum took a much different line. Then—like now—health care was one of the nation’s most divisive issues. In 1993, Republicans were up in arms about a health care reform bill spearheaded by Hillary Clinton and pushed by President Bill Clinton. … During that fiery debate, Santorum said it would be a mistake to allow the delivery of health care services to be determined only by the market. He asserted that Republicans were “wrong” to let the marketplace decide how health care works. He instead argued that government should play a “proactive” role in shaping the health care marketplace “to make it work better” (Andy Kroll and Tim Murphy, 3/5).

The Atlantic: Making The Best Of What Is Often The Very Worst Time Of Our Lives (Book Excerpt)

As difficult as things are now, these may turn out to be the good old days. How we die is already a public health crisis, and care for people through the end of life is poised to become a generation-long social catastrophe. … Very soon, for the first time in human history, older people will outnumber younger people on our planet. In the United States, one in five adults is 65 or older. … Those of us who are concerned about long-term care have good reasons to worry. The nursing homes of the future — our future! — may make today’s nursing homes look like luxury hotels. It doesn’t have to turn out that way (Ira Byock, 3/7).

American Medical News: Legal Risks Of Going Paperless

System breaches. Modification allegations. E-discovery demands. These issues are becoming common courtroom themes as physicians transition from paper to EMRs, legal experts say. Not only are EMRs becoming part of medical negligence lawsuits, they are creating additional liability. … Studies are mixed about how EMRs will impact liability for physicians. … Whatever the future holds for EMRs, it’s important that doctors reduce their liability risks during system implementation, legal experts say. Being aware of potential legal pitfalls prevents doctors from falling victim to technology intended to do good — not cause hardship (Alicia Gallegos, 3/5).

The Daily Beast: Talking About Sex Is the Only Way To Stop HIV

[The United States has] been stuck at about 50,000 new infections each year for more than a decade. Compared with the challenges facing places like sub-Saharan Africa, our failure is particularly galling: we have plenty of drugs that work, the money and systems to administer them, and effective, if not particularly popular, ways to interrupt the spread (condoms, clean needles, abstinence). So why aren’t we doing better? The answer is blindingly simple: sex. Almost all HIV in the U.S. is spread by sexual intercourse, yet when faced with this fact, we act like a bumbling junior-high-school kid hearing about the birds and the bees for the first time. As a result, we have before us an unabated 30-year epidemic of a sexually transmitted disease (Kent Sepkowitz, 3/5).

This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

by Lena Groeger

The fine is just the latest of more than a dozen the Red Cross has racked up in the last decade.

In 2003, a federal court, frustrated by repeated blood safety violations by the Red Cross, gave the FDA the power to fine the organization.

Forty-six million dollars in penalties later, many of the same violations — understaffing, ineffective screening of donors, failure to recall infected blood — are outlined in the recent letter the FDA sent to the executive vice president of Biomedical Services for the Red Cross.

The 32-page letter describes hundreds of violations over several months in 2010 at 16 Red Cross facilities across the country, and details how the Red Cross repeatedly failed to properly track and record information about donors and blood units.

(To see a history of Red Cross fines and many of the documents cited in this article go to ProPublica’s timeline of Red Cross fines.)

For example, the agency failed to notify health departments when donors had infectious diseases such as HIV and syphilis, failed to add new donors with infected blood to a national list of people who aren’t allowed to donate, and failed to review records of donors who had bad reactions, such as a 16-year-old who lost consciousness and fell to the floor after giving a unit of blood.

It also failed to follow written procedures, such as the case of a phlebotomist in Arizona who stuck herself with a needle before sticking a donor with the same needle to draw blood. The case went unreported for a month, because a staff member “was not aware of the need to immediately notify a Medical Director,” according to the inspection letter.

In a recent statement, the Red Cross said it was disappointed that the FDA issued the fine for “an inspection conducted so long ago” and noted that it has “already taken corrective steps to address those matters and that improvements in operations have been made.”

In an email to ProPublica, a Red Cross spokeswoman also said there is no evidence that these violations endangered any patients, adding that the blood supply is safer than it has ever been.

The spokeswoman said the agency has made significant improvements, including reducing the number of problems system-wide by at least 65 percent, and is investing in technology upgrades.

For example, the agency recently upgraded software and computer equipment at blood drives to better collect and track donor information.

The FDA’s letter laying out the fines says the Red Cross “has known of these continuing problems and has failed to take adequate steps to correct them.”

The FDA also noted that “many of the violations recounted in this letter are virtually identical to violations charged in previous [letters].” In June 2010 the FDA imposed a $16 million penalty on the Red Cross for the same type of violations.

The chronic problems raise the question of whether penalties are working at all.

The Red Cross has been making promises and failing to keep them for over a decade, according to Sidney Wolfe, who heads the health research group at the consumer watchdog organization Public Citizen.

Wolfe said he wrote to head of the FDA in 2000, urging it to hold the Red Cross in contempt of court. A federal court first put the Red Cross under government supervision in 1993 after finding blood safety lapses. A decade later, in 2003, the court empowered the FDA to impose fines.

“But fast-forward nine years ahead, and we have the same violations,” Wolfe said.

If the Red Cross disagrees with an assessment, it can ask the FDA to reevaluate the penalty, but in most cases the fine only changes by a few thousand dollars.

Most of the recent problems inspectors cited have to do with managing records and tracking blood donors. The Red Cross says it is unaware of any infections or deaths that stemmed from problems noted in the report, and that “serious problems” account for only three percent of the total problems found.

The FDA doesn’t think that’s good enough.

“FDA cannot definitively say there was never any danger to the blood supply since the violations can create conditions that could lead to potential safety consequences,” said FDA spokeswoman Patricia El-Hinnawy.

The government requires that the Red Cross (like any blood services operation) have multiple safeguards for its blood services.

That includes asking a donor questions to identify any risks, checking his or her name against a national list of people who aren’t allowed to give blood, testing for infectious diseases, keeping track of blood units so infected blood isn’t released, and investigating any deviations from standards.

Because blood transfusions always carry a degree of risk, the FDA considers every step in that process critical to minimizing problems.

“Failure of an individual safeguard does not automatically translate into the release of unsafe products,” an FDA spokeswoman told ProPublica in an email, “however, it may increase the potential for risk.”

In 2008, the Red Cross consolidated its blood work to two facilities: one in Charlotte, N.C., and the other in Philadelphia. The offices are in charge of managing, tracking and, if need be, recalling blood.

But according to the inspection letter, both offices have been chronically understaffed, and simply haven’t been able to carry out their required functions in a timely or effective manner. As of 2010, the offices had a backlog of about 18,000 donor management cases.

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Supporters of the initiatives say these new services allow students to get good information about sex anonymously. But there are also those who oppose these initiatives, writes Hoffman.

…proponents of abstinence-based sexual education argue that these digital services presume that sexual activity among teenagers is the norm, and do not spend enough time on alternatives.

“They are only focusing on the risk-reduction model,” said Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association, which hopes to kick off its online service for teenagers next year.

Those who run digital programs say they simply want teens to have accurate information, to help them make good decisions. Even though popular culture is saturated with sex, facts and advice can be hard to find.

To learn more:

• Read Hoffman’s article Sex Education Gets Directly to Youths, via Text.

Some of the services discussed:

• ICYC – In Case You’re Curious

• Chicago’s The Sex-Ed Loop

• California’s The Hookup.

• SexEtc: www.sexetc.org

• National Abstinence Education Association: www.abstinenceassociation.org