Things are looking up!

Just a cute one from Trixie

Outsourcing Health and Welfare (mental anyway)

This will keep one awake at night:

In 2004, when Bush administration officials unveiled a project to provide every American with an electronic health record by 2014, they pledged to put privacy and security first. But the discovery in April of stolen health records containing sensitive medical information about U.S. patients on a computer server in Malaysia controlled by cyber criminals indicates such records so far do not pass the privacy and security test.

Medical records are a “platinum card” for organized crime, which can rake in millions of dollars from false billings,  NextGov – Cyber criminals overseas steal U.S. electronic health records

Millions of dollars yeah – but how about altering prescriptions on VIPs, blackmail, and just generalized fear?

Sorry to be isolationist but this is another of those areas I don’t think needs to pass the shore.

Net of Note

Government Executive tries to cover some of the factions in the Scott Bloch saga with Six Degrees of Scott Bloch: A Scandal Scorecard

Summertime Blues

 Because it damn sure ain’t red:

American Red Cross: Blood donations dip in summer
Blood donations tend to drop in the summer, and the American Red Cross already is not meeting its daily collection goals. "Last summer was pretty bad because of the oppressive heat that we had, but this summer we’re feeling the need even earlier," said an American Red Cross official.  Daily Reflector (Greenville, N.C.), The (5/22)

Fake Blood and the Government

They’ve tried this stuff but it really doesn’t work very well:

Blood substitute testing should be limited, experts say
Investigational blood substitutes should be tested on a limited basis, such as only on patients at high risk of death, physicians and researchers said at an FDA meeting held Wednesday. They argued that past studies on the product were too broad. The FDA should make artificial blood available for compassionate use and for patients such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, who deem blood transfusions unacceptable, one trauma surgeon suggested.  Boston Globe, The/Bloomberg (5/1)

Regardless, the Pentagon will keep the program going:

Defense Department funds development of Hemopure
The Defense Department has given the Naval Medical Research Center $3.4 million to develop Biopure Corp.’s blood-replacement product for trauma patients, called Hemopure, which is derived from cow blood cells.  Mass High Tech (5/8)

Now, if they’d just give me a fraction of that for a mobile blood unit and some command emphasis.  Still, not a bad plan and good to keep DoD’s hand in while this stuff is developed.  It may not be ready for prime time yet, but someday it will.

Saturday Dog Blogging

Napping (need that energy to bark at 0500)

Blood in Iraq

Here’s an email from a Soldiers’ mom that just arrived in Iraq last month:

Had an email from Chip .  He is fine, has pretty good food, AC, 106 yesterday, has to carry or wear 50 lbs. of gear to work and back, working 6 days, 12 hour shifts, and is going to donate blood.  That is something he started doing in high school.  He said at the newcomer briefing, they were told that the hospital there is dependent on the military stationed there for blood and they are critically low on AB positive blood and that is his blood type.  I think his blood type is neat.  Ray is B positive and I’m A negative and I’m terribly happy Chip got the positive factor with his AB, rather than the negative.

Later,  P

It is frustrating that the same leadership that will drain their troops while deployed will then be reticent about doing it here to prevent them doing it there.  I have got to find a way to communicate that to them in a better way. 

High School Recruiting for Now – How about Later?

This is actually from an ad for incentives by DonorGifts.com but it still has merit and is more than worth considering.  The shortsightedness of blood banks and bankers is something else.  At least it’s just not me!

Class of 2008 Hits Population Peak—Is Your Blood Center

Ready for the Drop in Class Size That Follows?

by Kendal Summers

A record number of students will graduate from US high schools this year.  And then?  Census figures show the teenage population declining as much as 11% by 2016. 

What impact will the shrinking student population have on school blood drives?  What impact will it have in communities where 1 in 5 donations come from student donors?

Many blood centers have lobbied for a legislative solution, to allow 16 year olds to donate blood with parental consent.  Still others realize any solution must include a plan that keeps student donors active after graduation. 

In our work with over 200 blood centers, we found just one with a written strategy to retain high school donors for life.  In a 14 blood center study that followed 3,000 high school student donors from the class of 2005, we found that just 1 in 20 returned to give again in the year following graduation.

Bull Terrier Blogging

Memorial Day honors troops of all types, from the Revolutionary militia to the Special Forces crawling over the Afghan mountains.  Less famous are another sort of trooper – the K-9s or War Dogs that accompany, protect, and defend their two-legged comrades.  Dogs have served alongside our forces since World War I.  According to the U.S. War Dogs page:

There is a confirmed list of 3,747 dogs that were used in Vietnam identified by Dr. Howard Hayes, Veterinarian (RET) of the National Institute of Health as of March 1994, by “brand number” (a tattoo usually placed in the left ear of the dog). However, it is estimated that approximately 4,900 dogs where used during the course of the war between 1964 and 1975.  Records of the dogs in Vietnam where not maintained by the military prior to 1968, thus the discrepancy.

Patton was famously accompanied by his faithful English Bull Terrier Willie:

This photo was taken in Bad Nauheim, Germany in January 1946, right after the death of General George S. Patton Jr. on 21 December 1945 at the Army hospital in Heidelberg, Germany, the result of a tragic automobile accident. The photo shows Patton’s papers that have been packed in trunks to be sent to his aide, Colonel Charles R. Codman, his briefcase, and above all his faithful friend Willie, Patton’s pet bull terrier.  GEN. PATTON’S BULL TERRIER ‘WILLIE’ MOURNS HIS MASTER, JANUARY 1946

You can contribute to U.S. War Dogs’ efforts to build a War Dog Memorial here.  Meanwhile, here is a picture of our own Conqueror – Trixie.

Worker Charged in Chinook Vandalism

Now, imagine that the assembly of this helicopter had been outsourced to China, or another country without access to investigators or the union workers that helped identify this guy…

PHILADELPHIA – A federal judge on May 20 ordered a $19-an-hour Boeing Co. assembly-line worker to undergo psychiatric testing after authorities arrested him and accused him of vandalizing a $30 million Chinook helicopter being built for the Army.

Would they have discovered his vandalism before a pilot’s life was in danger?

U.S. Attorney Patrick Meehan said Montgomery, a Boeing employee for 18 months, admitted to Defense Criminal Investigative Service agents May 19 that he was the one who hacked into a fire-hose-thick bundle of wires on one of two CH-47F copters on the eight-chopper assembly line.

Montgomery, 32, severed the wiring during an overtime shift May 10, authorities said. It was to have been his final day on the Chinook line before being transferred to a V-22 Osprey line. Boeing discovered the damage two days later.

I think we need to think seriously before we allow every last bit of our weapons technology to be moved out of our country and we need to consider the standards involved in maintaining the kind of quality required for a flying machine.

“We received a lot of cooperation from Boeing . . . management, the union workers, and information from various individuals in the public, and that assisted us in our investigation,” said Edward Bradley, special agent in charge of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service team.

Worker Charged in Chinook Vandalism