Las Vegas health crisis

The Review-Journal is running a story that details the conflict of interest policy that our state's Board of Medical Examiners will discuss this week.

"This was a subject addressed to us during (legislative committee) meetings. The nursing board has one. Our board does not,'' said Tony Clark, executive director. "I plan to ask the board if it wants to adopt such a policy.''

The Southern Nevada Health District is reporting 77 potential new clinic-associated hepatitis C infections in the investigation into the outbreak associated with the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada.

In a unanimous vote of the Las Vegas City Council, the Endoscopy center will surrender their license and pay a $500,000 fine.

This is just the beginning.

Senator Harry Reid is teaming up with CDCP Director Julie Gerberding on a public service announcement to address the public health scare in southern Nevada.

The PSA released today urges people to take an active role in their health care, but to also follow their doctors' advice. 

Governor Jim Gibbons today named temporary appointments to the medical board to hear the Endoscopy Center case.  Drs. Ronald Kline, Beverly Neylan and Robert Wiencek will fill the three positions vacant because of board members recusing themselves because of conflicts of interest in this case.

Gibbons also named Dr. Edwin "Flip" Homansky to the state board of health. 

My esteemed colleague Anjeanette Damon received a bit of a chewing from conservative lobbyist Paul Enos in his defense of the Governor.

Read all about it on her blog: 

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The latest news from the Governor is that he still wants those three doctors on the medical board to resign, even though there is no evidence that they did anything wrong. And now it’s really really really important to him to make sure that everyone knows that they had no wrongdoing in the case. But he still wants them to resign.  read more »

Nev. Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto hosts a "Kitchen Table" meeting in Pahrump Wednesday.PAHRUMP—Three days into a four-day trip through rural Nevada, Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto was in Pahrump Wednesday, taking questions and educating people about the services her office provides.

“I love getting out in the rural communities,” said Masto.  “It helps me get an understanding of the areas that I should be focusing on if I’m not.  I think a big component of what my office should be doing is outreach and education to prevent things from happening in the community.”

After an afternoon stop at the Pahrump Senior Citizens Center, Masto and a number of key deputies attended a “Kitchen Table Meeting” at the Bob Ruud Community Center on Highway 160, where they discussed topics as diverse as mortgage, insurance, workers’ compensation and e-mail fraud, identity theft and domestic abuse prevention, the dangers of methamphetamine abuse and the health crisis caused by unsafe medical practices at a number of Southern Nevada clinics. 

Hippocrates would be furious.

Most of us either don’t know anything about the Hippocratic oath, or at most we know that it is something with ancient roots that doctors say when they graduate from medical school.

And I thought political commercials were annoying.

If any of you own a television, odds are you’ve seen the tsunami of trial attorney commercials soliciting potential victims of the health crisis.  This is to be expected, annoying as it is.  But the disturbing news is the report that people are being told not to cooperate with investigators by their attorneys.  read more »