Plan B: 1 in 5 Pharmacists May Deny Eligible Teens Access to Emergency Contraception
Seventeen-year-olds can legally buy Plan B over the counter at the drugstore, but nearly 20% of pharmacists incorrectly deny them access.
Maria Szalavitz
TIME, 26 March 2012
About 1 in 5 pharmacies incorrectly denies teen girls access to emergency contraception (EC), or the “morning after pill,” according to a new study.
Posing as either 17-year-old girls or doctors seeking Plan B emergency contraception for their 17-year-old patients, researchers from Boston University called 943 drugstores — every pharmacy listed in five major U.S. cities. Eighty percent of the pharmacies said they stocked the drug.
By law, teenagers aged 17 and older can buy Plan B over the counter, but 19% of pharmacists told teenage callers they could not purchase it because of their age. Three percent of doctors were similarly told emergency contraception could not be given to 17-year-olds.
When asked whether they knew the legal age for Plan B access, only 57% of pharmacy employees answered correctly to teens; 61% answered correctly to doctors. Not surprisingly, teens were twice as likely as physicians to wait on hold, and four times less likely to be connected to a pharmacist to answer their questions.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a superb example of a) useful academic research; b) the importance of truth in the lives of so many; and c) the degree to which the pharmaceutical industry fails to meet professional standards in serving the most vulnerable.
About 300 of Rite-Aid’s 4700 drug stores are starting to direct customers to what they want – wellness without dependence upon problematic and over-priced prescription drugs. But that practice has obviously upset Big Pharma. These white-coated ambassadors are allegedly pretending they are pharmacists and directing patients to diet supplements – heaven’s to Betsy!
At least that is what two US Senators allege in their letter to Rite-Aid, which has GNC nutrition centers inside many of its stores. A letter from the senators to Rite-Aid says they are concerned these ambassadors “could be making false and misleading claims by marketing dietary supplements as treatments for health conditions.”
Wait a minute – I thought the Dietary Supplement Health & Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) gave the right to market dietary supplements as long as they strictly support health, not as cures, treatments or prevention for any disease. Drugs do not promote wellness, and few are an appropriate cure for anything.
A grave problem (the word grave being used in its true meaning) is that that DSHEA didn’t go far enough. Dietary supplements do in fact prevent, treat and cure diseases, many of them. The Food & Drug Administration mandates censorship of the truth. Doesn’t vitamin D prevent rickets, vitamin C prevent scurvy, vitamin B1 prevent beri beri, etc?
When you have ethicists offering an argument that transforms infanticide – murder – to abortion, which is supposedly not murder, then the next step is to argue for murder of kids and finally, murder of adults. The challenge for the elite’s philosophers will be to find or create terms to hide the fact it is murder. But if infanticide can be made innocuous, they will have achieved a huge step towards efforts at legitimating murder of other age groups, their ultimate goal. The typical anti-abortionists (usually right-of-center Catholics and conservatives) indeed are right about abortion expressing a culture of death, but their error is to blame the establishment of such a culture on abortion alone, as if merely prohibiting abortion will end the culture of death. Such an assumption is enormously naïve and false. There are many more components to that culture they seem to willfully ignore, such as the war machine, environmental exploitation and degradation, unbridled finance capitalism, and so much more. Limiting it to abortion gives too much credit to one facet of the whole, which has many other facets. Evil is one, but evil does not have one tentacle, it has multiple tentacles, to more efficiently grab its victims.
Dr Francesca Minerva, a former Oxford University ethicist, who co-wrote a controversial article that argued killing newborn babies should be as permissible as abortion, has said she has received death threats over the paper.
Stephen Adams, Medical Correspondent
The Telegraph, 2 March 2012
The article, which argued newborns and foetuses were only “potential persons” and not “actual persons”, has provoked a storm of protest.
Dr Minerva, a research associate at Oxford while being based at the University of Melbourne, said the recent days had been “the worst in my life” after the article attracted widespread attention.
“This is not a proposal for law,” she told an Australian news website. “This is pure academic discussion.
“I wish I could explain to people it is not a policy and I'm not suggesting that and I'm not encouraging that.”
The authors, whose piece was published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, suggested that “what we call after-birth abortion (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled”.
Some very strong and strange signals coming out of sources that have a track-record of being accurate.
1) Banks have created an economic doomsday scenario. Greece is going to default on 20 March, and will eventually get to renounce 80% if not more of the debt that its government very unwisely took on (never mind Goldman Sachs high crimes, governments are supposed to have a modicum of intelligence and integrity).
2) This is going to lead to two consequences, not one:
First, the banks have huge amounts of “insurance” obligations, an entire underworld of banking in which these obligations to cover one another's bad debts are not counted as liabilities — when these all come due, banks crash and no amount of government bail-outs with printed or digital counterfeit money is going to save them.
Second, the combination of riots and economic collapse among hundreds of millions of previously “rich” Europeans with the collapse of the banks is going to present some governments with “internal control” issues. In the USA, the plan under Bush-Cheney was the Civilian Inmate Labor Facilities (CILF), incarcerating the unemployed on agriculturally-productive land. That plan has now been abandoned as unscaleable and unenforceable — the number of pissed off citizens with guns may have something to do with the realization.
And now for the scary part: how do you handle a population of what Henry Kissinger likes to call “useless eaters” who are also armed? Enter the Forced Population Reduction Program (FPRP). Originally to be implemented with neutron weapons (allegedly killing people without destroying infrastructure), the new new thing is VX gas that is heavier than air and make an entire city die with even less environmental damage. How the deaths are “sold” is no doubt being worked on. Testing this in South Africa or the Congo first (they are a party to the program), then simulating a “black plague meets SARS” transfer to Detroit or a couple of southern states, can be anticipated.
Below are a few links. On the edge, no question about it.
Last item is a scholarly paper (it just came out) which argues for making “permissible” the killing of babies after birth. Abstract: Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call “after-birth abortion” (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.
There's an animal virus that's spreading in the UK. They may never know where it came from or why it's suddenly a threat. But I wonder if it has to do with genetic engineering, either with livestock or food products.
It's possible that such genetic engineering introduces a weakness in the animal or plant that makes it vulnerable to a common virus or bacteria or other pest that it was never vulnerable to before. The potential for epidemics scares me.
A new animal disease which causes birth defects and miscarriages in livestock has now been found on 74 farms in England.
The Schmallenberg virus first emerged in the Netherlands and Germany last year, causing mild to moderate symptoms in adult cattle, including reduced milk yield and diarrhoea, and late abortions and birth deformities in newborn sheep, goats and cattle.
It is thought the virus is spread by midges, and has crossed the Channel from the Continent. Adult animals that contract the virus usually recover, but the young born with birth defects have to be destroyed.
Phi Beta Iota: In our view bio-chemical “experiments” are proliferating and out of control. The cucumber attack is suspected by some to have been a bio-war experiment. The mounting evidence that we create many of our own problems, and that viruses may often be constructed in ways that are against the public interest (e.g. built-in sterilization as a form of eugenics), is troubling.
IT WAS unthinkable 20 years ago that the Charles River would ever be clean enough to win the world’s leading environmental prize for river restoration. Back then, human feces lapped at the Museum of Science. It was a river with “belly-up fish and algal blooms making dogs sick,’’ recalled Arleen O’Donnell, former state department of environmental protection acting commissioner.
For recreational kayaker Roger Frymire, a paddle between the Museum of Science and the BU bridge 14 years ago was disgusting. “I passed under the Longfellow bridge and I started smelling something awful. I kept following the smell upriver until I went under the Mass. Ave. bridge. I traced the smell to a spot near the MIT crew house. There was a grate underwater that was bobbing up and down with turds.
Click on Image to Enlarge
Today, the Charles is one of the nation’s cleanest urban rivers, and recently claimed the International River Foundation’s top award for river management, beating out more than 20 other countries. The award went to the Charles River Watershed Association, which was formed in 1965 to protect the river.
“The Charles in many ways is a wild river again,’’ said Bob Zimmerman, executive director of the CRWA. “If you had asked me in 1991 if that was possible, I would have said you were crazy.’’
