Facebook / Nguyen Vu Binh
A Vietnamese blogger held in a mental hospital while awaiting trial for criticizing Vietnam’s one-party communist state was refused a visit from supporters on Wednesday, with authorities saying he is being kept in isolation as a “political case.”
Le Anh Hung, a member of the online Brotherhood of Democracy advocacy group who blogged for Voice of America, was arrested on July 5, 2018 on a charge of “abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the state” under Article 331 of Vietnam’s criminal code.
He was later transferred in April 2019 from jail to Hanoi’s Central Mental Hospital No. 1 for “observation and treatment.” If convicted at trial, he could serve up to seven years in prison.
Study highlights promising opportunities that may reduce wasteful health care spending
Spending on low-value health care among fee-for-service Medicare recipients dropped only marginally from 2014 to 2018, despite both a national campaign to better educate clinicians and increasing use of payment revisions that discourage wasteful care, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
Three items accounted for two-thirds of the low-value care. Among these, prescribing opioids for acute back pain increased despite a growing national awareness of the harms caused by the drugs and the role of such prescribing in fueling the nation s opioid crisis.
The study found that the proportion of study participants receiving any of 32 low-value services decreased from 36.3% in 2014 to 33.6% in 2018. Annual spending per 1,000 individuals on low-value care also decreased, from $52,766 to $46,922 from 2014 to 2018. The findings are published online by the journal
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OCALA, Fla., Feb. 16, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) AIM ImmunoTech Inc. (NYSE American: AIM) today announced that it has received approval from the required Ethics Committee in the Netherlands to commence its Phase 1 clinical study on the safety of AIM s drug Ampligen as an intranasal therapy, a critical step in the company s ongoing efforts to develop Ampligen as a potential prophylaxis or treatment for COVID-19 and other respiratory viral diseases.
Earlier this year, the company announcedthat it had entered into a sponsorship agreement with the Centre for Human Drug Research (CHDR) for the proposed AMP-COV-100 (CHDR2049) trial. Last week, approval was received from the Dutch local Ethics Committee, clearing the road for execution of the trial.
Findings from a new Geisel-led study, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, reveal that there is substantial variation across different regions of the country in the intensity of fracture-associated drug (FAD) use among long-term care facility residents, and that areas with greater use of these prescription drugs experience higher hip fracture rates.