HEALTH AND SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS

September 20, 2017 (San Diego's East County) -- Our Health and Science Highlights provide cutting edge news that could impact your health and our future.

HEALTH 

• Chinese roulette: deadly illegal drugs sent by U.S. mail (KD Report)
• VA hospitals flooded with complaints about care (Boston Globe)
• Car-T treatment shows promise to be a real cancer cure (Healthline, by Jamie Reno)

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

• Facebook under fire over Russian ads in election (The Hill)
• Equifax screwed up its data breach from nearly every angle (SelectAll)

For excerpts and links to full stories, click “read more” and scroll down.

HEALTH 

Chinese roulette: deadly illegal drugs sent by U.S. mail (KD Report)

Let’s make this perfectly clear, the recent opiate crisis grappling Americans of all demographic backgrounds is not coming from CVS, Walgreens or Wal-Mart. US doctors are not prescribing massive doses of hydrocodone or oxytocin, nope, the real perpetrator of the opiate crisis is delivered to your mailbox from China in the form of synthetic opiate drugs, like fentanyl as well as a tide of mystery chemicals, concocted to enhance illegal drugs like heroin or meth.

Law enforcement agents across the country are stunned by the wave of chemically engineered opiates purchased via the Internet and mailed through the US mail or other international shippers.

VA hospitals flooded with complaints about care (Boston Globe)

Nursing home residents at the Bedford Veterans Affairs Medical Center can go many hours without food or languish in bed wearing only soiled sheets. The oldest buildings on the campus 25 miles north of Boston contain asbestos, exposing workers to potentially deadly fibers. At the William Jennings Bryan Dorn VA Medical Center in South Carolina, one doctor didn’t know how to give a spinal injection, and hospital leaders misled accreditors to win approval for their pain program….

Car-T treatment shows promise to be a real cancer cure (Healthline, by Jamie Reno)

As Novartis drug Kymriah makes its debut, other companies are pushing ahead with trials of this new type of immunology therapy to beat cancer.

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Facebook under fire over Russian ads in election (The Hill)

Facebook is under fire after revealing that a Russian group tied to the Kremlin bought political ads on its platform during the 2016 elections. Lawmakers are demanding answers, and liberal groups, who say the company failed to crack down on fake news, are seizing on the new disclosure.

Equifax screwed up its data breach from nearly every angle (SelectAll)

Credit-rating company Equifax’s data breach, which involves an estimated 143 million people, isn’t the largest in history. Yahoo, after all, lost billions of emails in various data breaches. But it’s gearing up to be the worst data breach. And Equifax isn’t helping matters out.