2 people shot outside Lee Zeldin's Long Island home: Report

 Two people were reportedly shot outside the home of Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin on Sunday afternoon.

According to the New York Post, Zeldin's teenage twin daughters were at home at the time of the shooting. 

"My 16-year-old daughters, Mikayla and Arianna, were at our house doing homework, while my wife, Diana, and I were in the car, having just departed the Bronx Columbus Day Parade in Morris Park," Zeldin said in a statement. "After my daughters heard the gunshots and the screaming, they ran upstairs, locked themselves in the bathroom and immediately called 911. They acted very swiftly and smartly every step of the way and Diana and I are extremely proud of them."

Zeldin added the two people who were shot were apparently laying down under his front porch and the bushes in front of his porch. 

Both victims were taken to area hospitals and have not yet been identified. 

"Like so many New Yorkers, crime has literally made its way to our front door. My family is grateful to all who have reached out and we will provide another update when we can," Zeldin said. 

"I'm relieved to hear the Zeldin family is safe and grateful for law enforcement's quick response," said New York Governor Kathy Hochul, in a tweet.

Zeldin is running for governor on a tough-on-crime platform and has excoriated Governor Kathy Hochul over New York's recent bail reform law changes.

He has served as a representative in New York's 1st Congressional District since 2015. 

https://www.fox5ny.com/news/two-people-shot-outside-lee-zeldins-long-island-home

Companies Lack Targets for Employee Mental Health: Study

 Only three companies out of 20 have published objectives for employee mental health management, a study from British charity investment manager CCLA revealed on Monday, despite "clear evidence" that such targets can save money.

CCLA's new investor benchmark, which assessed 100 of the world's largest listed firms, showed a disconnect between their recognition of workers' mental health as an important business issue and formalised public commitments and disclosure.

"There may be no shortage of mental health initiatives in the international workplace, but when it comes to integrating mental health into formal management systems and processes, most global companies have much further to go," Amy Browne, stewardship lead at CCLA, said in a statement.

"There is clear evidence to show that improving the mental health of an organisation saves money and that the financial ramifications of failing to improve corporate mental health are profound," she added.

According to David Atkin, head of the U.N.-supported Principles for Responsible Investment, the results of CCLA's benchmark show that mental health is "still a relatively immature business issue".

Deloitte, one of the "Big Four" accounting firms, reported in 2020 that mental ill-health in the workplace cost companies on average 1,652 pounds, or $1,900 based on mid-September exchange rate, per private sector employee each year, CCLA cited.

"If we consider that the 100 companies in the CCLA Corporate Mental Health Benchmark Global 100 employ almost 19 million people worldwide, between them, that translates to $36 billion lost, each year, to mental ill-health," Browne said.

CCLA noted, against a backdrop of surging inflation and an unfolding cost-of-living crisis across the world, that 82% of corporates had taken a clear stance on the relationship between good mental health and fair pay and financial wellbeing.

Less than a third of them, however, have shared a formal policy that expressly recognises this link.

https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2022-10-09/companies-lack-targets-for-employee-mental-health-study-shows

Athletes may have higher risk of concussion on artificial grass

 Athletes playing on synthetic grass surfaces may be at higher risk for concussion than those playing on natural grass.

Among high school athletes in the US, about 20 per cent of concussions result from the person hitting their head on the playing surface.

Artificial turf is becoming increasingly popular across the country: it is estimated that there are currently more than 16,000 synthetic grass fields in the US, and as many as 1500 new ones being built each year.

Several studies have shown that ankle and knee injuries are more common on harder synthetic playing fields compared to grass, both among professional athletes and amateur players. Yet Ian Chun at the University of Hawaii says there isn’t “very much information on different rates of concussions due to field hardness”.

Chun conducted a series of experiments in which he dropped a 20-kilogram mannequin onto 10 natural grass playing fields and 9 artificial turf surfaces. Chun placed accelerometers onto the right ear, top of the head and forehead of the mannequin, before fitting it with an American football helmet. He then dropped it off a table from a height of 170 centimetres – chosen to simulate the height of a teen athlete – with the mannequin landing either on its left side, front or back and measured the impact.

After 1710 total drops, Chun found that impact deceleration – a measure of how abruptly something in motion is brought to a halt – was significantly higher on synthetic playing fields in all three falling positions. Depending on drop position, deceleration measured in g-forces was as much as 23 g higher on artificial grass compared to natural surfaces. Previous research has shown that an impact of 40 g or higher increases the chance for concussion, but some people can sustain a concussion at lower forces.

“Our study suggests that synthetic fields are a harder playing surface. This translates to a theoretical increased risk of concussion due to contact with playing surfaces,” says Chun, who is presenting this work on 8 October at the American Academy of Pediatrics Conference and Exhibition in California.

Sudden deceleration of the brain within the skull is known to be a cause of concussion. “I think future research in observing actual rates of concussions in different playing fields and environments would be an interesting follow-up study and solidify the link between harder playing surfaces and concussion risks,” says Chun.

Kristen Dams-O’Connor at at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York says that these findings point to a possible way that we could reduce injury risk. “We’re at this very interesting crossroads now where evidence has accumulated that even in the absence of a concussion, there is risk to brain health in contact sports,” she says.

Dams-O’Connor says she’d like to see additional work confirming the results and conducting similar tests of other playing surfaces.  “We should be considering every possible avenue to make sports safer,” she says.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2341481-athletes-may-have-higher-risk-of-concussion-on-artificial-grass/

Racial equity in marijuana pardons requires states’ action

 By pardoning Americans with federal convictions for marijuana possession, President Joe Biden said he aimed to partially redress decades of anti-drug laws that disproportionately harmed Black and Latino communities.

While Biden’s executive action will benefit thousands of people by making it easier for them to find housing, get a job or apply to college, it does nothing to help the hundreds of thousands of mostly Black and Hispanic Americans still burdened by state convictions for marijuana-related offenses, not to mention the millions more with other drug offenses on their records.

Advocates for overhauling the nation’s drug laws are hopeful that Biden’s pardons lead state lawmakers to pardon and expunge minor drug offenses from people’s records. After all, they say, dozens of states have already decriminalized cannabis and legalized it for a multibillion-dollar recreational and medicinal use industry that is predominantly white-owned.

“We know that this is really the tip of the iceberg when it comes to people who are suffering the effects of (past) marijuana prohibition,” said Maritza Perez, director of federal affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit organization pushing for decriminalization and safe drug use policies.

The decades-long “war on drugs,” a sweeping federal legislative agenda that Biden championed as a U.S. senator and that was mirrored by state lawmakers, brought about mass-criminalization and an explosion of the prison population. An estimated tens of millions of people have had a marijuana-related arrest on their record since 1965, the vast majority of them stemming from enforcement by local police and state prosecutors.

But as many law enforcement officials like to point out, the majority of people who serve long sentences for marijuana-related offenses were convicted of more serious charges than possession, such as a weapons count or the intent to sell or traffic the drug on a larger scale. Such factors are typically how a case moves into federal territory versus state prosecution.

Still, reform advocates counter that many of them aren’t violent drug kingpins.

A 2021 Associated Press review of federal and state incarceration data showed that between 1975 and 2019, the U.S. prison population jumped from 240,593 to 1.43 million people. Of them, about 1 in 5 were incarcerated with a drug offense listed as their most serious crime.

The passage of stiffer penalties for crack cocaine, marijuana and other drugs in the 1990s helped to triple the Black and Hispanic incarceration rates by the year 2000. The white incarceration rate only doubled.

And despite state legalization or decriminalization of possession up to certain amounts, local law enforcement agencies continue to make more arrests for drug possession, including marijuana, than any other criminal offense, according to FBI crime data.

The president’s pardon of more than 6,500 Americans with federal marijuana possession convictions, as well as thousands more with convictions in the majority-Black city of Washington, captures only a sliver of those with records nationwide. That’s likely why he has called on state governors to take similar steps for people with state marijuana possession convictions.

“While white and Black and brown people use marijuana at similar rates, Black and brown people have been arrested, prosecuted and convicted at disproportionate rates,” Biden said Thursday. “Just as no one should be in a federal prison solely due to the possession of marijuana, no one should be in a local jail or state prison for that reason, either.”

With the president’s unambiguous acknowledgement of racial inequity in marijuana enforcement, drug law reform advocates and those with convictions now see an opening to push for far more remedies to the harms of the war on drugs.

Weldon Angelos, whose 2003 federal case for selling $300 worth of marijuana to a confidential informant in Utah got him sentenced to 55 years in prison, said he knows many people who will benefit from the president’s pardon. But there are also many more who will not, he said.

“I feel like this is a first step of (Biden) doing something bigger,” said Angelos who, after serving 13 years in prison, received presidential clemency and a pardon during the Obama and Trump administrations. He is now a drug law reform activist.

Felony cannabis cases like his also deserve consideration, Weldon said. Biden’s pardon does not cover convictions for possessing marijuana with an intent to distribute, which could further widen the scope of people receiving relief by tens of thousands.

Enacting a law that clears a person’s federal drug record, similar to what has been offered in nearly two dozen states where marijuana has been decriminalized or legalized recreationally, would make the conviction invisible to companies and landlords doing criminal background checks, he said. Even with the federal pardon, Weldon’s record is still visible, he said.

“There’s a lot more that needs to be done here, if we really want to unwind the effects, and the racist effects, of the war on cannabis,” Weldon said.

Some advocates believe the country should consider clearing more than just marijuana records. In the 1990s, Marlon Chamberlain was a college student in Iowa when he learned that his then-girlfriend was pregnant with his eldest son. He began using cannabis to cope with the anxiety of becoming a young father and, soon after, started selling the drug.

“My thought was that I would try to make enough money and have the means to take care of my son,” said Chamberlain, a 46-year-old Chicago native. “But I got addicted to the lifestyle and I graduated from selling weed to selling cocaine.”

Chamberlain said he had a slew of state charges for marijuana possession between the ages of 19 and 25. But it was a federal case for crack cocaine, in which authorities used his prior marijuana arrests to enhance the seriousness of their case, that upended his life. Chamberlain was sentenced to 20 years in prison before the punishment was reduced to 14 years under the Fair Sentencing Act that narrowed the sentencing disparity between crack and powder forms of cocaine. He was freed after 10 years.

Even though he will not benefit from Biden’s marijuana pardon, Chamberlain sees it as an opportunity to advocate for the elimination of what he calls the “permanent punishments,” such as the difficulties in finding a job or housing that come with having a past drug offense.

“What Biden is initiating is a process of righting the wrongs” of the drug war, he said.

Colorado and Washington were the first states to legalize the recreational use of cannabis in 2012, although medical use had already been legal in several states. According to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, 37 states, the District of Columbia and four U.S. territories now permit the medical use of cannabis. Nineteen states, D.C. and two territories have legalized its recreational use.

And during next month’s midterm elections, voters in Arkansas, Maryland, Missouri, North Dakota and South Dakota will decide whether to permit recreational adult use of cannabis. That is reason enough for every state to look into mass-pardons and expungements, civil rights leaders say.

“How fair is it that you will legalize marijuana now, tax it to use those state taxes to fund government, but forget all the people who are sitting in jails or were incarcerated when it was illegal?” NAACP President Derrick Johnson told the AP. “All those individuals who have been charged with marijuana crimes need to be pardoned, particularly those in states that have legalized marijuana.”

Richard Wallace, executive director of Equity and Transformation, a social and economic justice advocacy group in Chicago, said state pardons must also come with some form of restitution to those who suffered economically under the racially discriminatory drug war.

“We need to be thinking about building out durable reparations campaigns centered around cannabis legalization,” he said. “I think oftentimes we end up just fighting for the pardons and the expungements, and we leave out the economic component.”

https://apnews.com/article/biden-politics-health-government-and-marijuana-f3ac590ab38962747683b4b2c071084d

Vanderbilt to review gender-affirming surgeries for minors

 Officials at Vanderbilt University Medical Center announced Friday that they are pausing gender-affirming surgeries for minors in order to review their practices.

The news, delivered in a letter sent to a lawmaker who has demanded an end to the surgeries, was publicly released Friday afternoon. It comes amid mounting political pressure from Tennessee’s Republican leaders — many of whom are running for reelection — who called for an investigation into the private nonprofit hospital after videos surfaced on social media last month of a doctor touting that gender-affirming procedures are “huge money makers.” Another video showed a staffer saying anyone with a religious objection should quit.

None of the politicians could point to a specific law that the hospital had violated, and no agency to date has committed to an investigation. Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s office said they had passed their concerns to the Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, but his office has not commented on whether he is looking into the Nashville-based hospital.

“We are pausing gender affirmation surgeries on patients under age 18 while we complete this review, which may take several months,” wrote C. Wright Pinson, VUMC’s deputy CEO and chief health system officer.

The GOP-dominated Legislature is scheduled to reconvene in January, and many lawmakers have vowed to introduce legislation further limit gender-affirming treatments. If successful, it’s unclear if VUMC would be allowed to resume gender-affirming surgeries for minors, regardless of their internal review.

“We should not allow permanent, life-altering decisions that hurt children,” Lee tweeted late Friday. “With the partnership of the General Assembly, this practice should end in Tennessee.”

According to Pinson, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health recently changed its recommendations for transgender treatment, which helped prompt the need for a review.

On average, VUMC has provided five gender affirming surgeries to minors every year since its transgender clinic opened in 2018. All were over the age of 16 and had parental consent, and none received genital procedures.

“The revenues from this limited number of surgeries represent an immaterial percentage of VUMC’s net operating revenue,” Pinson wrote.

Emails provided to The Associated Press through a public records request show hundreds of Tennesseans reached out to the governor’s office in support of shutting down VUMC’s transgender youth health clinic, with some asking him to call a special legislative session to address the issue. Others asked if he could suspend the licenses of the doctors who work at the clinic.

A few criticized Lee for not taking harsher steps earlier when he signed legislation banning doctors from providing gender-confirming hormone treatment to prepubescent minors.

Only a handful defended the clinic’s services, with some saying the transgender health care they received had been life-saving.

https://apnews.com/article/health-business-tennessee-nashville-vanderbilt-university-6deb93f7dea92f1b2082c39f72b59766

Info seen emerging slowly in big hospital chain cyberattack

 Details of an apparent cyberattack on one of the largest health systems in the U.S. were slow to emerge as security experts on Friday warned that it often takes time to assess the full impact on patients and hospitals.

Earlier this week, CommonSpirit Health confirmed it experienced an “IT security issue” but it has yet to answer detailed questions about the incident, including how many of its 1,000 care sites that serve 20 million Americans may have been affected. The health system giant, which is the second largest nonprofit health system in America, has 140 hospitals in 21 states.

“It actually takes a while to fully know the scope because you’re in the middle of trying to restore all your systems,” said Allan Liska, an analyst with the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. “You’re trying to get patient care up and running. You’re trying to get your nurses and your doctors back to the systems they need.”

Healthcare organizations are an appealing target for cyber attackers — particularly those who use malware to lock up a victim organization’s files and leverage the information for a payment. Ransomware has remained a persistent threat for the industry, which is among the 16 sectors the U.S. government classifies as critical infrastructure.

“Ransomware actors know that’s going to cause a lot of disruption,” Liska said.

Health care systems in 2021 saw an unusually high amount of attacks, with 285 publicly reported worldwide, Liska added. So far, Liska’s firm has tracked 155 this year with an average of 20 attacks happening a month. However, he estimated that only about 10% of ransomware attacks are publicized.

Cybersecurity experts said years of work have built health care leaders’ trust in the FBI and other federal agencies focused on cyber crime.

An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on whether they were investigating the CommonSpirit Health cyberattack.

John Riggi, the American Hospital Association’s national advisor for cybersecurity and risk, said he could not discuss CommonSpirit specifically. In general, though, he said it can take days, weeks or more to discover how an attacker gained access, determine what damage has been done and prevent further harm.

Riggi, who spent nearly 30 years with the FBI, called any significant cyber attack on a hospital “a potential risk to patient safety” and said the U.S. government takes that seriously. Their goal, he said, is to identify the attacker and make their identity and methodology public.

“They don’t want to show their hand, what they know about the bad guys,” he said. “You’re really processing a crime scene in real time.”

But there are risks to victims of cyber attacks who fail to communicate their response plan and strategies for recovery, said Mike Hamilton, the chief information security officer with Critical Insights Cybersecurity in Washington state.

The reaction of patients, staff and affiliated health care operations to the chain’s handling of the incident all could affect the company’s future survival, he said.

“Here’s how close we are to resolution, here’s where we’re diverting, here are the other hospitals we’re partnering with,” Hamilton said. “They need to be sure they’re communicating ... because so many people are being impacted by this.”

https://apnews.com/article/technology-health-business-8e43ed9b8f1d132c2f17a094c1fce410

Telemedicine was made easy during COVID-19. Not any more

 Telemedicine exploded in popularity after COVID-19 hit, but limits are returning for care delivered across state lines.

That complicates follow-up treatments for some cancer patients. It also can affect other types of care, including mental health therapy and routine doctor check-ins.

Over the past year, nearly 40 states and Washington, D.C., have ended emergency declarations that made it easier for doctors to use video visits to see patients in another state, according to the Alliance for Connected Care, which advocates for telemedicine use.

Some, like Virginia, have created exceptions for people who have an existing relationship with a physician. A few, like Arizona and Florida, have made it easier for out-of-state doctors to practice telemedicine.

Doctors say the resulting patchwork of regulations creates confusion and has led some practices to shut down out-of-state telemedicine entirely. That leaves follow-up visits, consultations or other care only to patients who have the means to travel for in-person meetings.

Susie Rinehart is planning two upcoming trips to her cancer doctor in Boston. She needs regular scans and doctor visits to monitor a rare bone cancer that has spread from her skull to her spine.

Rinehart doesn’t have a specialist near her home outside Denver who can treat her. These visits were done virtually during the pandemic.

She will travel without her husband to save money, but that presents another problem: If she gets bad news, she’ll handle it alone.

“It’s stressful enough to have a rare cancer, and this just adds to the stress,” the 51-year-old said.

Rinehart’s oncologist, Dr. Shannon MacDonald, said telemedicine regulation enforcement seems to be more aggressive now than it was before the pandemic, when video visits were still emerging.

“It just seems so dated,” said MacDonald, who recently co-wrote a piece about the issue in The New England Journal of Medicine.

To state medical boards, the patient’s location during a telemedicine visit is where the appointment takes place. One of MacDonald’s hospitals, Massachusetts General, requires doctors to be licensed in the patient’s state for virtual visits.

It also wants those visits restricted to New England and Florida, where many patients spend the winter, said Dr. Lee Schwamm, a vice president for the Mass General Brigham health system.

That doesn’t help doctors like MacDonald who see patients from around the country.

Cleveland Clinic also draws a lot of patients from out of state. Neurosurgeon Dr. Peter Rasmussen worries about how some will handle upcoming travel, especially because winter can bring icy weather.

A fall “literally could be life ending” for someone with a condition like Parkinson’s disease who has trouble walking, he said.

Psychiatrists have a different concern: Finding doctors for patients who move out of state. This is especially difficult for college students who temporarily leave home.

Most U.S. counties have no child and adolescent psychiatrists, noted Dr. Shabana Khan, chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s telepsychiatry committee.

“If we do try to transition patients, often there is no one there,” Khan said.

Helen Khuri’s mother found a specialist to help her when the 19-year-old’s post-traumatic stress disorder flared up last spring. But the Emory University student had to temporarily move from Atlanta to Boston for treatment, even though she never set foot inside the hospital offering it.

She rented an apartment with her father so she could be in the same state for telemedicine visits, a situation she deemed “ridiculous.”

“It didn’t necessarily make sense to … kind of uproot my life, just to receive this three-week treatment program,” Khuri said.

Even people seeing doctors close to home can be affected.

Dr. Ed Sepe’s Washington, D.C., pediatric practice has patients in Maryland who have started driving a few miles across the border into the city to connect by video. That saves them a 45-minute trip downtown for an in-person visit.

“It’s silly,” he said. “If you are under a doctor’s care, and you are in the U.S., it doesn’t make any sense to have geographic restrictions for telemedicine.”

Sepe noted that low-income families tend to be in jobs that don’t allow time off for in-person visits. Some also have a hard time getting transportation. Video visits were helping with these obstacles.

“It’s bigger than just telemedicine,” he said. “There’s a missed opportunity there to level the playing field.”

States can play an important role in telemedicine’s growth by guarding against fraud and protecting patient safety, according to Lisa Robin, an executive with the Federation of State Medical Boards.

But the federation also recommends that states loosen some telemedicine restrictions.

That includes permitting virtual follow-ups for someone who has traveled out of state to seek care or for people who temporarily move but want to stay with a doctor.

States could also form regional compacts with their neighbors to ease cross-border care, noted Dr. Ateev Mehrotra, a Harvard health policy professor who studies telemedicine.

“There’s so many ways that these issues can be addressed,” he said

In the meantime, patients who need care now are trying to figure out how to manage it.

Lucas Rounds isn’t sure how many visits he will make to see MacDonald in Boston to monitor his rare bone cancer. The 35-year-old Logan, Utah, resident already spent months away from home earlier this year, undergoing radiation and surgery.

Plus he has a wife and three young girls and expenses like a mortgage to consider.

Rounds says he has to think about taking care of his family “if the worst happens.”

“If I die from cancer, then all these expenses we’ve accrued … those are dollars that my family wouldn’t have,” he said.

https://apnews.com/article/science-health-business-covid-cancer-56deaf3a9ff108775dc36e3bd767175e