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New Study Highlights Monstrous Cost Of Smoking To UK, Says Heart Charity
In response to a study, funded by the British Heart Foundation and published online by Tobacco Control Journal , Betty McBride, Policy & Communications Director, at the British Heart Foundation, said:

Sen. Baucus Says Health Care Overhaul Will Cover About 95% Of Citizens, Will Not Cover Undocumented Immigrants
Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus (D-Mont.) on Thursday said that Congress" health care overhaul plan would cover 94% to 96% of the population but not undocumented immigrants, the AP/Las Vegas Sun reports (Alonso-Zaldivar, AP/Las Vegas Sun, 5/21). In remarks at a briefing sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Families USA and the National Federation of Independent Business, Baucus said, "There are always going to be some people ... you just can"t find" to enroll, adding that "we"re going to try to get as close as we can (to 100% coverage) and we"re working hard to accomplish that." He added, "[W]e"re not going to cover undocumented workers. That"s too politically explosive" (Reichard, CQ HealthBeat, 5/21). According to an analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies and the U.S. Census Bureau, undocumented immigrants make up between 15% and 22% of the estimated 47 million U.S. residents without health coverage. Baucus said, "I don"t have a good answer yet to undocumented workers, illegal aliens," adding, "There will still be charity care " (Landers, Dallas Morning News, 5/22). Baucus said that the bill his committee is working on and that he expects to mark up in mid-June will include "incentives" and possibly requirements for employers to pay for employee health insurance. Baucus mentioned the possibility of including an individual mandate and establishing a health insurance exchange (AP/Las Vegas Sun, 5/21). Baucus also noted that the plan most likely will include a public health insurance option in some form (Tumulty, "Swampland," Time Magazine, 5/21). "Everything"s on the table," Baucus said, warning that "because this is so big, so complex, there are going to be a lot of trade-offs. ... This is just so large" (CQ HealthBeat, 5/21). He said that he is very optimistic about the prospects of bipartisan support for the legislation, placing the odds at between 75% and 80% ("Swampland," Time Magazine, 5/21).
News of the day
JCR And The Joint Commission To Host Pediatric Safety Conference
Children are especially vulnerable in the hospital and they are the population at highest risk of a medication error, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Meeting their needs in this environment can be especially challenging. The Joint Commission and Joint Commission Res (JCR) "Pediatric Conference: Safe Care, Quality Care, We Care" will help health care organizations review current pediatric emergency and perioperative services as benchmarks to improve their organizational approaches. JCR is a not-for-profit affiliate of The Joint Commission.
Public Health

Sugar Tags On Nuclear Proteins Have An Important Developmental Function

Proteins are the executive agents that carry out all processes in a cell. Their activity is controlled and modified with the help of small chemical tags that can be dynamically added to and removed from the protein. 25 years after its first discovery, researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg have now gained insight into the role of one of these tags, a small sugar residue, that is found on many different proteins across species. In the current online issue of Science they report that the addition of this sugar tag to proteins in the nucleus of a cell is vital for normal development in fruit flies. Over 25 years ago scientists discovered that many proteins in the nucleus and cytoplasm have a small sugar molecule, called GlcNAc, attached to them. The enzyme that adds this sugar is called Ogt but since its discovery it has remained elusive why attaching GlcNAc to proteins is important. Researchers in the group of JÃørg MÃøller at EMBL have now discovered that flies lacking Ogt show dramatic developmental defects. In the absence of Ogt cells do not develop into the appropriate cell types and body segments do not differentiate according to plan. "Expressing the right genes at the right time is critical for a developing organism," says JÃørg MÃøller. "It is the appropriate combination of genes that tells a cell to turn into muscle, nerve or skin. This is why a tight control system regulates gene expression throughout development." One important component of this control system is a group of regulatory proteins, called Polycomb proteins. They switch off developmental genes when and where their activity is not needed and thereby prevent the formation of specialised tissues and organs in the wrong places. The scientists found that in the absence of Ogt, Polycomb proteins are no longer able to inactivate developmental genes. They showed that one specific Polycomb protein, called Polyhomeotic, is modified with the sugar tag by Ogt and might be the link between Ogt and development. Further investigations are necessary to find out how the sugar tag affects the function of Polyhomeotic. "Our findings were very surprising. GlcNAc has been found on so many different proteins in mammalian cells that we expected many processes to go wrong in a fly lacking Ogt. Instead we see a very specific effect on development in fruit flies that is likely brought about by a single nuclear protein that needs the sugar tag to function properly," says Maria Cristina Gambetta, who carried out the research in MÃøller"s lab. Anna-Lynn Wegener European Molecular Biology Laboratory


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