Headlines: June 2, 2010
by Meg Larkin
In health reform news, the new law offers a temporary tax credit for small business owners providing insurance for their employees. The size of the tax credit is based on the size of the business, with the smallest businesses getting the most help. For businesses that have 10 or fewer full time employees, the tax break could amount to 35% of the employer’s premium contributions. To be eligible for the tax credit small businesses must pay at least 50% of their employees’ health care premiums. The system, which is expected to cover 1.8 to 4 million businesses will remain in place until the State insurance exchanges begin to operate in 2014.
In regulatory news, doctors in Boston are sounding the alarm about the continuing availability of a Chinese diet pill that was the subject of an FDA recall last year. Pai you guo is touted as an herbal weight loss panacea, but it actually contains prescription weight loss medicine and a chemical that is suspected of causing cancer. This latest revelation has helped focus attention on the FDA’s lack of control over the herbal supplement industry. The supplement industry has about $24 billion in annual sales, and about 150 American consumers, and it is widely unregulated. Pai you guo’s manufacturer and others who lace their supplements with pharmaceuticals are facing pressure to stop from industry trade groups, who fear that if the industry does not begin to self-regulate more thoroughly, the F.D.A. will be forced to step in.
In research news, the risks from obesity are higher for people over 40. A new study has found that while obese people of all ages take slightly more medications than normal weight people, obese people over 40, 60 percent of obese men were on medication as opposed to 39.3 percent of average weight men. The study’s lead author pointed out that one lesson to take away from the research is that body mass index is a largely imperfect measure for health risk factors or current health status.
In other health news, multiracial patients have much more difficulty finding bone marrow donors. In 2000, nearly 7 million Americans identified themselves as multiracial, an increase of 25 percent, but most people who have registered as potential bone marrow donors are white. Only about 3 percent of donors in the National Marrow Donor Program’s registry identify themselves as multiracial. Because bone marrow transplants are matched based on inherited tissue markers, donors and patients of the same race are more likely to be a match. While some widely publicized cases have caused more people to register to be marrow donors, it is still extremely difficult for mixed race patients to find a match, and many are counseled to undergo less than optimal treatment because their odds of finding a match are so low.
Finally, new research may help reduce the amount of arsenic in the drinking water of some developing countries. The groundwater in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Cambodia comes from the flood plains draining from the Himalayas. The eroding coal seams and rocks containing sulfides can cause arsenic to leech into the water that many communities use for drinking, but a team of geologists has identified steps that could reduce the risks of arsenic poisoning. Water found near orange sand has less chance of being contaminated with significant amounts of arsenic than water from near gray sands. Because many villages have both types of sand, the study’s authors suggest that, “wells for drinking water should be drilled in deep orange sands and connected to low-pressure hand pumps, while wells connected to high-pressure pumps for crop irrigation should be kept out of those deep aquifers so they do not empty them of safe water, which would cause arsenic-laden water to migrate downward into them.”
Meg Larkin is a law student at Boston University. Please feel free to email her with any questions, comments, suggestions, or concerns.
