The Health News USA November 8 2017

• CVS Health plans to begin offering next-day delivery of prescriptions and retail merchandise from its nationwide network of more than 9, 700 stores, marking a potentially preemptive strike at Amazon as the online giant weighs entry into the pharmacy business. It also comes as CVS grapples with declining in-store sales as many of the retail products the company sells are contracting.
• According to President Donald Trump, the tragic Texas church shooting that left 26 people dead was “a mental health problem at the highest level.” Various studies over the past two decades show that the vast majority of people with severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or severe depression, are no more likely to be violent than anyone else. Rather, people with severe mental illnesses are more than 10 times more likely to be victims of violent crime than the general population, and only about 3%-5%of violent acts can be attributed to individuals living with a serious mental illness.
• According to a major study, almost every country in the world now has serious nutrition problems, either due to overeating leading to obesity or a lack of food leading to undernutrition.  Researchers behind the Global Nutrition Report, which looked at 140 countries, said the problems were “putting the brakes on human development as a whole” and called for a critical change in the response to this global health threat.

News on Health Professional Radio. Today is the 8th of November 2017. Read by Tabetha Moreto.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/11/06/cvs-health-pharmacy-network-offsets-decline-retail-store-sales/835090001/

CVS Health plans to begin offering next-day delivery of prescriptions and retail merchandise from its nationwide network of more than nine thousand seven hundred stores, marking a potentially defensive strike at Amazon as the online giant weighs entry into the pharmacy business. CVS CEO Larry Merlo said Monday that the company would begin offering the service in two thousand eighteen. Stores in Miami, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco will offer same-day delivery, he said. The move comes as Amazon is said to be considering selling prescription drugs, which would require navigating a complex thicket of regulatory approvals but would represent a significant threat to CVS.

It also comes as CVS grapples with declining in-store sales as many of the retail products the company sells are contracting. The company will also offer free, same-day from all of its locations in Manhattan starting December four. CVS spokeswoman Erin Pensa declined to say how the company would handle the logistics of packaging and shipping, but said it would be handled by “a national partner.” Products will be shipped from local pharmacies, not from a warehouse. She said in an email that pricing will be announced later but will be “affordable.”
Merlo said CVS has an advantage because seventy percent of Americans live within three miles of a CVS store.

CVS recorded third-quarter revenue of forty six point eighteen billion dollars, up three point five percent. That narrowly edged S&P Global Market Intelligence expectations of forty six point seventeen billion dollars. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria took a fifty five million dollar bite out of the company’s earnings, mostly in the form of payments in insurance deductibles, Merlo said on a conference call. Some nine hundred twenty five CVS locations were closed at some point in the quarter because of the storms.

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/06/health/guns-mental-health-texas-trump/index.html

According to President Donald Trump, the tragic Texas church shooting that left twenty six people dead was “a mental health problem at the highest level.” If you ask mental health researchers, such mass shootings are much more complicated than that. On Sunday, twenty six-year-old Devin Kelley sprayed bullets across the sanctuary of First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, about thirty miles east of San Antonio. The youngest killed at the church was seventeen months old; the oldest was seventy seven years old. In two thousand fifteen, Trump said that he was opposed to tightening gun laws in the United States but was in favor of addressing mental health to prevent shootings. Yet various epidemiologic studies over the past two decades show that the vast majority of people with severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or severe depression, are no more likely to be violent than anyone else. Rather, people with severe mental illnesses are more than ten times more likely to be victims of violent crime than the general population, and only about three percent to five percent of violent acts can be attributed to individuals living with a serious mental illness, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Gun violence and mental illness are public health problems “that intersect at the edges” but have very little overlap, Jeffrey Swanson, a professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University who specializes in gun violence and mental illness, told CNN last year.
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Instead of policies that restrict gun access based solely on mental illness diagnoses or because a person has made contact with the judicial system or health care agencies due to mental illness, the American Psychological Association, the National Alliance on Mental Illness and other advocacy groups have called for gun access criteria based on more subtle indicators of potentially dangerous behavior. Swanson supports intervention at the point of purchase through  comprehensive background checks — but to make background checks work, criteria for inclusion on the database should be based on other indicators of risk besides mental health history, such as those indicators of aggressive, impulsive or risky behavior.

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2017/11/06/millions-either-malnourished-or-obese-in-global-nutrition-crisis.html

According to a major study, almost every country in the world now has serious nutrition problems, either due to overeating leading to obesity or a lack of food leading to undernutrition.
Researchers behind the Global Nutrition Report, which looked at one hundred forty countries, said the problems were “putting the brakes on human development as a whole” and called for a critical change in the response to this global health threat. The report found that while malnutrition rates are falling globally, their rate of decrease is not fast enough to meet the internationally agreed Sustainable Development Goal to end all forms of malnutrition by two thousand thirty.

The report said more than one hundred fifty five million children aged under five are stunted due to lack of nutrition, and fifty two million are defined as “wasted” – meaning they do not weigh enough for their height.  At the other end of the spectrum, over-eating is taking a heavy toll on people of all ages worldwide: the report found that two billion of the world’s seven billion people are now overweight or obese. In North America, a third of all men and women are obese.
Worldwide, at least forty one million children under five are overweight, and in Africa alone, some ten million children are now classified as overweight.
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The Global Nutrition Report is an independently produced annual analysis of the state of the world’s nutrition. It tracks progress on targets for maternal, infant and young child nutrition and on diet-related chronic diseases adopted by World Health Organization member states.