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Medical Care Sought In Mexico By Nearly 1 Million Californians Annually
Driven by rising health care costs at home, nearly 1 million Californians cross the border each year to seek medical care in Mexico, according a new paper by UCLA researchers and colleagues published in the journal Medical Care.

Study Examines Cost, Benefits Of Extending Medicare Drug Use
"A new large-scale study of medical records found that the extra cost of extending prescription coverage to Medicare enrollees was substantially offset by lower spending on other medical care for people who previously had limited or no prescription-drug coverage," The Wall Street Journal reports.
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Soaring Summer Temperatures Spell Danger: What To Do To Protect Yourself
From the west to east coast, Americans are experiencing record-breaking temperatures. Some states are reporting triple-digit numbers and the heat has been the cause of several reported deaths. "Children and the elderly are considered the most vulnerable population. It is harder for their bodies to respond to these high temperatures," said Richard N. Bradley, M.D., associate professor of emergency medicine and chief of EMS and disaster medicine at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston.
Oncology

Experimental Drug Five Times More Effective Against MDR-TB Than Conventional Therapy

A Johnson & Johnson-run study found that its experimental drug TMC207 could make conventional tuberculosis treatment five times more effective against multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) because it cleared traces of the TB bacteria in the sputum of 48 percent of study volunteers after eight weeks, Reuters reports (Emery, Reuters, 6/3). The results were published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. TMC207 was tested in a Phase 2 trial of 47 South African patients with newly diagnosed MDR-TB, the Dow Jones Newswires/Wall Street Journal reports. "About half received TMC207 and the rest received a fake drug for about eight weeks; all patients took a standard regimen of five existing TB drugs. A higher proportion of patients who received TMC207 tested negative for TB in lung-fluid cultures at eight weeks than the placebo, 48 percent versus 9 percent," the Dow Jones Newswires/Wall Street Journal reports (Loftus, Dow Jones Newswires/Wall Street Journal, 6/3). According to Reuters, TMC207 is "being billed as the first new TB drug in 40 years." David McNeeley of Tibotec Inc., the subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson that developed the drug, said that TMC207 differs from other TB drugs because it "starves" the bacteria. "It"s like cutting off your food supply," he said (Reuters, 6/3). In a related NEJM editorial, Clifton Barry of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, writes that the development of TMC207 "represents an important advance in the chemotherapy of TB" and outlines three reasons why. According to Barry, "It is also a humbling case study that is worth some reflection," for those in the "tuberculosis field [who] turned up our noses at looking for compounds that killed anything less than the real human pathogen" (Barry, NEJM, 6/4). NEJM published a second study that "describes an international effort to detect" TB in immigrants and refugees that come to the U.S., HealthDay News/Forbes reports. "The TB rate in [foreign-born individuals] is 9.8 times higher than among U.S.-born individuals - 20.6 cases per 100,000 people versus 2.1 per 100,000 people for the native-born. Nearly 58 percent of the new TB cases in the United States in 2007 were diagnosed in the foreign-born group," according to HealthDay News/Forbes (HealthDay News/Forbes, 6/3). This information was reprinted from globalhealth.kff.org with kind permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Global Health Policy Report, search the archives and sign up for email delivery at globalhealth.kff.org. © Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.


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