The Health News USA August 24 2017

Overview

• Fast food giant McDonald’s has announced that it would begin curbing the use of the high value human antibiotics in its global chicken supply in 2018, it joins a broad effort to battle dangerous superbugs.
• A program meant to address the shortage of OB-GYNs in rural America could help many families who are faced with an hours-long and often dangerous journey to the nearest qualified hospital.
  
• Researchers have discovered that many Medicaid patients continue to receive prescriptions for the same type of drugs that nearly killed them. A few overdose patients are even prescribed anti-addiction medications after hospital discharge.

News on Health Professional Radio. Today is the 24th of August 2017. Read by Tabetha Moreto. Health News

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/23/mcdonalds-to-start-cutting-global-antibiotic-use-in-chickens.html

McDonald’s on Wednesday said that it would begin curbing the use of the high value human antibiotics in its global chicken supply in two thousand eighteen, as the fast-food giant joins a broad effort to battle dangerous superbugs. McDonald’s, in a policy statement, said it is working on antibiotic plans for other meats, dairy cows and laying hens. McDonald’s is requiring suppliers of chicken meat to begin phasing out the use of antibiotics defined by the World Health Organization as “highest priority critically important antimicrobials” or HPCIA to human medicine.

Public health and consumer groups applauded the move, which is not as strict as the company’s policy for the United States, where already for a year suppliers have provided the chain with chickens raised without antibiotics deemed important to human health. In January two thousand eighteen, HPCIAs will be gone from McDonald’s chickens in Brazil, Canada, Japan, South Korea, the United States and Europe….

More than seventy percent of medically important antibiotics in the United States are sold for livestock use. Scientists have warned routine use of antibiotics to promote growth and prevent
illness in healthy farms animals contributes to the rise of dangerous antibiotic-resistant superbug infections, which kill at least twenty three thousand Americans each year and pose a significant threat to global health.

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2017/08/21/program-aims-to-boost-prenatal-care-in-rural-us.html

A program meant to address the shortage of OB-GYNs in rural America could help many families who are faced with an hours-long and often dangerous journey to the nearest qualified hospital. Doctor Ellen Hartenbach, of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, launched the first rural obstetrics and gynecology residency in two thousand sixteen, aiming to train doctors in the rural communities that they will eventually practice in.

Since the program’s launch, Hartenbach said other medical schools in the country have shown interest in beginning similar initiatives across the U.S. According to the school’s post, nearly half of U.S. counties do not have an OB-GYN, and the country may be facing a shortage of possibly twenty two thousand by two thousand fifty.

Hartenbach believes her program will help the staff at hospitals without maternity wards, especially when dealing with complications.

http://health.usnews.com/health-care/articles/2017-08-22/many-prescribed-opioids-even-after-overdose

After treatment for an opioid overdose, many Medicaid patients continue to receive prescriptions for the same type of drugs that nearly killed them, researchers say. Moreover, few overdose patients are prescribed anti-addiction medications after hospital discharge, the University of Pittsburgh investigators found. The researchers studied more than six thousand people who survived an overdose from an opioid — a class of drugs including painkillers like morphine and OxyContin or oxycodone, synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, and heroin.

According to lead researcher Julie Donohue, forty percent of those with a heroin overdose and sixty percent of those with a prescription opioid overdose filled a prescription in the six months after overdose for the very kind of medication that contributed to the overdose in the first place.
The U.S. health care system isn’t organized to respond to these life-threatening events, which disproportionately affect young people, she said. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than thirty three thousand Americans died from opioid overdose, including prescription painkillers and heroin, in two thousand fifteen.

The researchers focused on prescription painkiller use, duration, and rates of medication-assisted treatment with the drugs buprenorphine, methadone or naltrexone six months before and after an overdose. One-third of the six thousand patients had survived a heroin overdose. Their rate of narcotic prescription painkillers dropped from about eleven percent to nine  percent, the researchers found. Of the four thousand who had overdosed on prescription opioids, prescriptions decreased from about thirty three percent before the overdose to slightly more than twenty eight percent after.