By Darius Tahir, KFF Health News

Central Oregon Pathology Consultants has been in business for nearly 60 years, providing molecular testing and other diagnostic services east of the Cascade Range.

Starting last winter, the corporate operated for months without pay, living on money, Pra

said Tice manager Julie Tracewell. The practice is reeling from the fallout from one of the significant digital attacks in American history: the February hack of payment manager Change Healthcare.

COPC recently learned that Change had begun processing some outstanding claims, which totaled about 20,000 as of July, but Tracewell didn't know which of them, she said. The patient payment portal stays closed, stopping customers from paying their bills.

“It will take months to calculate the total loss of this downtime,” she said.

Healthcare is essentially the most common goal of ransomware attacks: In 2023 says the FBIOf these, 249 were directed at healthcare facilities – essentially the most of any sector.

And health care leaders, advocates and people in Congress are concerned that the federal government's response is insufficient, underfunded and too focused on protecting hospitals — at the same time as changes have proven that vulnerabilities are widespread.

The Department of Health and Human Services' “current approach to healthcare cybersecurity – self-regulation and voluntary best practices – is woefully inadequate and has left the healthcare system vulnerable to criminals and foreign government hackers,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). , Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, wrote in a recent letter to the agency.

The money isn't there, said Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Center on Cyber ​​and Technology Innovation on the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “We’ve seen extremely incremental to almost no effort” to take a position more in security, he said.

The task is urgent – ​​2024 has been a yr of healthcare hacks. Hundreds of hospitals throughout the Southeast faced with disruptions their ability to receive blood for transfusions after nonprofit OneBlood, a donation service, fell victim to a ransomware attack.

Cyberattacks are making on a regular basis and complicated tasks equally difficult, said Nate Couture, chief information security officer on the University of Vermont Health Network, which was hit by a ransomware attack in 2020. “We can’t mix a chemo cocktail with the eye,” he said. referring to cancer treatments, at an event in June in Washington, DC

In December, HHS develop a cybersecurity strategy is meant to support the sector. Several proposals focused on hospitals, including a carrot-and-stick program to reward providers who adopted certain “essential” safety practices and penalize those that didn’t.

It could take years for even this narrow focus to materialize: Under the Departmental budget proposalFrom the 2027 budget yr, money would flow to hospitals with “strong need”.

The give attention to hospitals is “not appropriate,” Iliana Peters, a former law enforcement attorney on the HHS Office for Civil Rights, said in an interview. “The federal government needs to go further” by also investing within the organizations that offer and contract with providers, she said.

The department's interest in protecting patient health and safety “puts hospitals at the top of our list of priority partners,” Brian Mazanec, deputy director of the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response at HHS, said in an interview.

Responsibility for cybersecurity within the country's healthcare system is shared by three offices in two different agencies. The Department of Health and Human Services' civil rights office is a sort of police officer on duty, monitoring whether hospitals and other health groups have adequate patient privacy protections and potentially fining them in the event that they don't.

The Department of Health and Human Services' Preparedness Office and the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are helping construct defenses—for instance, requiring medical software developers to make use of auditing technology to confirm their security.

Both are required to attract up an inventory of “systemically important units” whose operations are crucial for the right functioning of the health system. These entities could possibly be given special attention, comparable to by including them in government threat briefings, Josh Corman, co-founder of cyber advocacy group I Am The Cavalry, said in an interview.

Federal officials had been working on the list when news of the Change hack broke — but Change Healthcare was not on the list, Jen Easterly, head of Homeland Security's cybersecurity agency, said at an event in March.

Nitin Natarajan, deputy director of the cybersecurity agency, told KFF Health News that the list is barely a draft. The agency previously estimated It would finalize the entity list – across industries – last September.

The Department of Health and Human Services' preparedness office is alleged to coordinate with the Department of Homeland Security's cybersecurity agency and all the Department of Health and Human Services, but congressional staffers said the office's efforts were inadequate. There are “silos of excellence” in HHS “in which the teams don’t talk to each other, [where it] It wasn’t clear who people should turn to,” Matt McMurray, chief of staff to Rep. Robin Kelly (D-Ill.), said at a conference in June.

“Is the Health Department’s on-call office ‘the right home for cybersecurity?’ I’m not sure,” he said.

Historically, the office focused on disasters within the physical world – earthquakes, hurricanes, anthrax attacks, pandemics. It inherited cybersecurity as Trump-era department leadership sought more cash and authority, said Chris Meekins, who worked for the preparedness office under Trump and is now an analyst at investment bank Raymond James.

But since then, Meekins said, the agency has shown it’s “not qualified to do this.” There is an absence of funding, an absence of commitment, an absence of specialist knowledge.”

The on-call office has only a “small handful” of employees focused on cybersecurity, said Annie Fixler, director of the FDD Center for Cyber ​​and Technology Innovation. Mazanec acknowledges the number just isn’t high, but hopes additional funding will allow for more hiring.

The office was slow to reply to outside feedback. When a cyber threat industry clearinghouse tried to coordinate together with her to develop an incident response process, “it probably took three years to find someone willing to support the effort,” said Jim Routh, the then CEO of the Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center group.

During the NotPetya attack in 2017 — a hack that caused widespread damage to hospitals and drugmaker Merck — Health-ISAC itself ultimately shared information with its members, including the perfect method to contain the attack, Routh said.

Advocates are taking a have a look at the change hack — said to be attributable to an absence of multifactor authentication, a technology quite common in American workplaces — and say HHS needs to make use of regulations and incentives to push the health care sector into higher defenses to introduce. The ministry's strategy, published in December, set out a comparatively limited list of targets for the health sector, most of that are voluntary at this stage. The agency is “exploring” creating “new enforceable” standards, Mazanec said.

Much of the HHS strategy is anticipated to be implemented in the approaching months. The department has already requested more funding. The Preparedness Office, for instance, is asking for a further $12 million for cybersecurity. The civil rights office, with a flat budget and shrinking enforcement staff, is anticipated to release an update to its privacy and security rules.

“The entire industry still faces major challenges,” said Routh. “I don’t see anything on the horizon that will necessarily change that.”

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©2024 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first used the term “AIDS“On September 24, 1982, greater than a yr after the primary cases appeared in medical records, the disease was first diagnosed. These early years of the crisis were marked by great confusion about what caused the disease, who it affected, and the way it spread.

But the name itself – acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, which we now know is attributable to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) – was a milestone. The way people talked about and named the AIDS crisis shaped perceptions of the disease and promoted or combatted a culture of stigma.

In the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, for instance, conservative Christian leaders reminiscent of Rev. Jerry Falwell described AIDS as “God's punishment” for sexual immorality. Many AIDS activistsOn the opposite hand, additionally they recognized the importance of giving a reputation to those affected. Rather than being known as “AIDS victims,” ​​they preferred terms reminiscent of “people with AIDS” and “people living with HIV” to emphasise their status as people and not only as patients or victims.

As a historian of faith, sexuality and public healthI used to be taken with how moral and spiritual rhetoric has shaped this global pandemic from the start. In my book “After the wrath of God“, I argue that the AIDS crisis can’t be separated from the broader cultural contexts wherein it occurred, including the history of LGBTQ+ people and the Christian right.

In other words, this medical epidemic was also an ethical epidemic from the start.

Before “AIDS”

The naming of AIDS in 1982 got here greater than a yr after the CDC first reported Cases of young, otherwise healthy men diagnosed with rare types of cancer, pneumonia and other infections that occur in individuals with weakened immune systems.

CDC researchers searched for a connection and located that these men “all lively homosexuals.” This confirmed what many gay and bisexual men in places like New York City and San Francisco already knew: There was a mysterious disease of their community.

The first news reports spoke of a brand new “gay cancer” or “gay pneumonia.” Some medical researchers called it GRID – homosexual immunodeficiency – or acquired immunodeficiency. When CDC leaders settled on AIDS as a substitute, they wanted to acknowledge the prevalence of cases in lots of other groups, including heterosexuals.

Despite these efforts, this early connection to homosexuality remained.

In fact, the history of homosexuality was crucial to the invention of AIDS. Scientists have now shown that HIV was in circulation long before 1981particularly amongst intravenous drug users, lots of whom were homeless. However, unusual illnesses and deaths inside this population group went largely unnoticed.

Meanwhile, the trendy LGBTQ+ rights movement had been gaining momentum since 1969, when a Police raid on the Stonewall Inna gay bar in New York City, sparked a series of riots that ignited a brand new wave of LGBTQ+ activism. In the Eighties, queer and trans people gained greater political and cultural influence.

This visibility and increasing cultural influence were crucial to the invention of this recent disease.

Arousing the “wrath of God”

The early link between AIDS and homosexuality also meant that this public health crisis sparked moral and spiritual debates.

As early because the Seventies, conservative Christian leaders warned most people about what they called Epidemic of homosexualityThey argued that social acceptance of LGBTQ+ people is a Signs of ethical decayand warned that if the United States did not eradicate this “moral disease,” the country would face the identical fate because the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, which were destroyed by God.

In other words, the Christian Right had already his own way of talking about homosexuality as an epidemic, as a threat to society itself. The AIDS crisis only looked as if it would confirm their belief within the wrath of God.

Medical and public health officials weren’t resistant to this rhetoric. In the Eighties, hospitals across New York readily invoked WOGS – the Wrath of God Syndrome. Doctor on the Medical College of Georgia wrote an editorial for the Southern Medical Journal, which questioned whether AIDS fulfilled a biblical statement about “due punishment” for sexual sins and beneficial conversion therapy for homosexuals.

In the White House, as Historian Jennifer Brier has shownPresident Ronald Reagan's conservative advisers Gary Bauer and William Bennett formulated a method to combat AIDS that emphasized the moral rightness of heterosexuality and abstinence outside of marriage.

They were frustrated by the resistance of Reagan-appointed Surgeon General C. Everett Koopa pediatric surgeon who was also a frontrunner of the evangelical pro-life movement. He insisted that national AIDS policy should concentrate on comprehensive sex education.

In 1988, Koop sent a mailing called Understanding AIDS in virtually every household in America. Conservatives balked at Koop's approach, although he nonetheless touted abstinence for single people as the most effective type of protection.

Bauer and Bennett complained that the flyer contained details about condoms and described the risks of infection through oral and anal sex. Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative Catholic crusader against feminism, abortion and gay rights, accused the Surgeon General of attempting to teach: “protected sodomy“ to 3rd graders.

Beyond the Christian Right

Not all conservative Christians understood AIDS as God's punishment for sexual sin. Many evangelical groups and Catholic leaders even opposed this concept – and yet spoke of it in religious and moral terms.

Cardinal John O'Connor, the Archbishop of New York, drew the ire of many AIDS activists when He spoke about AIDS within the Vatican in 1989. “Good morals,” he proclaimed, “are good medicine.”

Many Christians took more progressive positions. The Southern Baptist ethicist Earl Shelp and Chaplain Ronald Sunderland worked as research fellows on the Texas Medical Center, where they first encountered individuals with AIDS. Together they began certainly one of the primary AIDS programs focused on helping gay men with AIDS without prejudice.

And many queer and feminist Christian and Jewish leaders, including Jim Mitulski, Yvette Flounder And Joel Kahnformulated queer-affirming and justice-oriented responses to the stigma of AIDS. They challenged the notion that AIDS was a “gay disease,” but additionally focused on how AIDS harmed populations that were often marginalized, including people of color, women, and drug users.

What's in a reputation?

Today, once I teach the history of the HIV/AIDS crisis, my students are sometimes confused by this early reference to homosexuality. They associate AIDS with sub-Saharan Africa, which the epicenter of the pandemic within the Nineteen Nineties.

Yet my students have grown up in a world where AIDS is significantly better understood. Thanks to the work of Activists and scientistsMany more people now know that HIV could be blocked by condoms and sterile needles. Antiretroviral therapy has proven to be very effective in Treatment of individuals in a position to receive and tolerate the medication.

But irrespective of how scientific or objective people could also be, epidemics are shaped by culture. And studying this history helps us understand more about ourselves.

DUBLIN – Eyewitnesses testified, revealing the motive for the fatal 2023 beating and strangulation attack on the Union City railroad tracks. The attack was allegedly carried out by a person who was attempting to evict the victim from a homeless encampment.

Brandon Kong, 49, is due in court next month to plead guilty to the charge of murdering Jason Deleon on March 11, 2023. At a preliminary hearing in April, a judge reviewed the prosecution's evidence and ordered Kong to go on trial despite the defense's attempt to cut back the charge from murder to manslaughter.

The principal witnesses were residents of the camp who described Kong as a friend and Deleon as an uninvited guest on the camp in Union City along the railroad tracks between 33375 Central Avenue and 33390 Transit Avenue. A lady there accused Deleon of stealing from her and told him to go away. When he refused, Kong stepped in to force him to make a choice, she testified.

But Kong went too far, the witnesses said, they usually urged him to finish the attack.

“I watched them and told them to stop because he's just not worth it, you know?” testified a person who lived on the camp. “They were on the ground and then Brandon put him in a chokehold so that Jason couldn't move.”

Witnesses and police say Kong hit Deleon with a frying pan after which choked him. The woman whose accusation sparked the conflict said she heard Deleon screaming for help and Kong dragging him down the tracks.

“He was screaming and begging for help because he was still alive, and then suddenly I heard it stop,” she said, adding that Kong got here back with blood on his pants and with the pocket knife the lady had stolen from Deleon.

Kong's attorney pleaded manslaughter, saying Kong likely unintentionally strangled Deleon while putting him in a chokehold, severing his carotid artery and never realizing he was inflicting fatal injuries. Alameda County Judge Amy Sekany rejected that argument and sentenced Kong to the murder charge.

Kong's arraignment has been postponed several times because the preliminary hearing and is now scheduled for September 19. In the meantime, he stays detained without bail.

politics

OMULUS, Mich. (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris described herself and her recent running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, as “joyful campaigners” against Donald Trump on Wednesday as they spent their first day of campaigning together within the Midwest. When they met with Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance on the Wisconsin tarmac, they got an unusual glimpse into the toughness of the campaign within the region.

Democrats visited Wisconsin and Michigan in hopes of bolstering support among the many younger, more diverse and pro-worker voters who played a key role in President Joe Biden's victory within the 2020 election.

Harris said at the primary rally of the day in Eau Claire, “As Tim Walz likes to point out, we are joyful warriors.” This sentiment was also fueled by the undeniable fact that Harris' campaign said it had raised $36 million in the primary 24 hours after announcing Walz as her running mate.

The vp said the couple were optimistic in regards to the future, unlike Trump, the previous president and Republican candidate for the White House. She accused him of being stuck prior to now and preferring a confrontational form of politics – at the same time as she criticized her opponent herself.

“Anyone who suggests we should repeal the Constitution of the United States should never again have the chance to sit behind the seal of the United States,” Harris said, raising his voice.

Dan Miller of Pelican Lake, Wisconsin, who was amongst greater than 12,000 individuals who attended the rally in Eau Claire, said Biden “has been an incredible president, but he's just not the same ambassador anymore.”

“And sometimes you need a better ambassador,” Miller said. “And that's Kamala.”

Later, at a night event in an airport hangar outside Detroit, which the campaign said was attended by 15,000 people, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who’s herself steadily mentioned as a future presidential candidate, said: “We need a strong woman in the White House and it is high time.”

“This election is going to be a fight,” Harris said at the identical event. “We like a good fight.”

This change in fact was particularly essential for Harris, as Biden's successful coalition of 4 years ago had shown signs of fragmentation over the summer – particularly in Michigan, which has change into a flashpoint for Democratic divisions over Biden's handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

With the president now out of the race, leaders of the Arab-American community and major labor unions say they’re encouraged by Harris's alternative as vp. Walz's inclusion on the list has eased some tensions and signals to some leaders that Harris has heard concerns about one other leading vice presidential contender, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, who they are saying has gone too far in his support for Israel.

“The party recognizes that it needs to rebuild a coalition,” said Abdullah Hammoud, mayor of the heavily Arab-American community of Dearborn, Michigan. “The election of Walz is another sign of goodwill.”

Still, lingering dissent was evident during Harris' speech in Michigan, when she was interrupted by demonstrators protesting Israel's fight against Hamas. Harris first told those that tried to interrupt her, “I'm here because I believe in democracy and every vote counts.”

It was the same response to that of Biden, who often said at his rallies when interrupted that protesters have to be given a likelihood to talk before being removed by security. Harris then quickly took a harder line, nonetheless, continuing, “But I'm speaking now,” which drew cheers from a lot of the audience.

“If you want Donald Trump to win, say so,” the vp continued over the protesters. “Otherwise, I'll do the talking.”

The protesters were eventually led away, but not before a heated confrontation occurred between Harris supporters and protesters who shouted at one another.

Trump, then again, has emphasized his desire to appeal to Midwestern voters by selecting Ohio Senator Vance as his running mate. Vance accomplished the Harris-Walz ticket together with his own campaign appearances in Michigan and Wisconsin on Wednesday.

It overlapped enough that while Harris was still greeting a bunch of Girl Scouts who had come to see her arrive at Chippewa Valley Regional Airport in Wisconsin, Vance's campaign plane landed nearby and taxied in the space. Harris posed for a bunch photo with the women in regards to the same time Vance got off the plane and made his strategy to Air Force Two, followed by his security detail.

The vp eventually got into her convoy and it drove off before they may speak, but that the 2 got so close was still unusual given their fastidiously planned campaign schedules.

“I just wanted to test out my future airplane,” Vance later told reporters, meaning he would fly on Air Force Two if he and Trump were elected in November. He also criticized Harris for not holding any press conferences since running for president.

“If these people want to call me weird, I call it a badge of honor,” Vance said, responding to a nickname Walz had used for him that had made the Minnesota governor famous online in the times before Harris nominated him as her vice presidential candidate.

Walz had some critical words for Vance in Wisconsin and Michigan, but his harshest words were aimed toward Trump. He said the previous president “is making a mockery of our laws, he is sowing chaos and discord among the people, and that doesn't even mention his work as president.”

Walz also stressed that he and Harris would promote neighborhood and community spirit, even hinting that his state's football fans were completely happy for Detroit's long-underperforming NFL team the last time it almost made it to the Super Bowl: “Vikings fans are proud of the Lions.”

In Detroit, where nearly 80 percent of the population is black, this trend could possibly be crucial. Politicians there have been warning the federal government for months that voter fatigue could prove costly in a city that is generally a stronghold of their party.

Rev. Wendell Anthony, president of the Detroit NAACP branch, said the joy in the town right away is “mind-blowing,” comparing it to Barack Obama's first presidential run in 2008, when voters lined up long lines to elect the country's first black president.

But some Democratic politicians in Michigan fear that selecting the mistaken vp could slow that momentum and split a coalition that has only recently begun to form.

Arab-American politicians, who’ve great influence in Michigan because of their strong presence within the Detroit metropolitan area, had been vocal of their opposition to Shapiro due to his past comments on the Israel-Hamas conflict.

These politicians pointed specifically to a comment he made earlier this 12 months about protests on college campuses, which they felt he unfairly compared the actions of student protesters to those of white supremacists. Shapiro, who’s of Jewish descent, has criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but remained a staunch supporter of Israel.

Osama Siblani, publisher of Dearborn-based Arab American News and a distinguished leader of Michigan's large Muslim community, was amongst those that met with White House adviser Tom Perez in Michigan last week. Perez has maintained contact with some Dearborn leaders since he and other senior officials traveled there with Biden to enhance relations with the community.

Siblani said he met with Perez for over an hour on July 29 and told him that if Harris selected Shapiro, it could “end” future talks.

“Not selecting Shapiro is a very good move. It opens the door a little wider for us,” Siblani said.

The 4 works described below, all written by black women from Philadelphia, appear in my latest anthology “A Black Philadelphia Reader: African American Writings on the City of Brotherly Love.” I’m a professor of English at Long Island University and have several anthologies of African-American and Afro-Caribbean authors and a group of writings about Coney Island. My latest book accommodates fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by Philadelphia writers from town's founding to the current day.

Despite the tremendous challenges that black Philadelphians have faced throughout history – including racial prejudice and gender inequality in Housing, public transportation, Training, Healthcare And Criminal justice – these 4 authors convey an unwavering belief in family and community and the hope that Philadelphia will fulfill its guarantees of equality to its black residents.

Although the stories here deal with black Philadelphians, I consider their messages and lessons are universal.

“Sweet Summer: Growing Up with and Without a Father” (1989)

In this bittersweet memory Bebe Moore Campbella bestselling novelist who died in 2006, tells a poignant coming-of-age story about growing up within the Sixties in a family separated by each divorce and geographical distance.

During the varsity yr, young Bebe lives in North Philadelphia and tries to live as much as the high expectations of her mother, grandmother, aunts and teachers. Although she knows that they love her very much, she longs for the more relaxed summers in North Carolina together with her father, who doesn’t let his wheelchair confinement limit his dreams.

In these two worlds, Bebe realizes that there may be multiple method to show love and that families can take many various forms. Although she longs for a united home, the young girl grows up with a robust sense of family and self, learning that no distance can truly separate people in the event that they love one another.

“The Price of a Child” (1995)

Lorene Cary is a renowned novelist, playwright, and memoirist. This historical novel tells the stirring story of an enslaved woman, Ginnie Pryor – later often called Mercer Gray – who wins freedom for herself and her two children with the assistance of abolitionists in Philadelphia in 1855.

Because Philadelphia was the next big city above the Mason-Dixon linewhich separates the north from the south, it was often the place where enslaved people experienced freedom for the primary timeHowever, Mercer realizes that her freedom is in danger because after the Escaped Slave Law In 1850 she was captured and brought back to the South.

She also feels a responsibility to assist others still trapped in slavery and to help the white abolitionist who was imprisoned in consequence of her escape. Most importantly, she must face the terrible price of her freedom: leaving her youngest child behind in Virginia, where he remains to be enslaved.

Mercer can never shake off the haunting memory of her missing child until she finally receives a present of cash that is sufficient to buy his freedom. Largely based on the true story of Jane Johnsonrecorded in William Stills “The Records of the Underground Railroad”, this novel was chosen as the primary selection for the city-wide reading program, One book, one Philadelphia, in 2003and it remains to be value reading today.

“Tumbling” (1996)

Native of West Philadelphia Diane McKinney Whetstone has written several acclaimed novels. Her debut “tumbling“” is about within the Nineteen Forties and Fifties within the South Street and South Philadelphia areas.

The foremost characters – Noon, a God-fearing woman, and Herbie, her nightclub-loving husband – appear to be an unlikely pair. Despite their differences, nevertheless, they love one another. That love is strengthened when, on two separate occasions, with the support of their tight-knit community, they soak up abandoned little girls left on their doorsteps.

While the 2 girls develop a real sisterly bond as they grow up, the community is soon threatened by one other challenge: a municipal proposal to construct a highway through the center of the neighborhood. It's as much as Noon to prepare her neighbors to withstand this bureaucratic nightmare and keep the community together.

“The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” (2012)

This novel by Native of Germantown Ayana Mathis was a variety for Oprah's Book Club 2.0It begins within the Nineteen Twenties and tells the story of young Hattie Shepherd, one in all many black Americans who left the South throughout the Great MigrationShe settled within the Germantown area of ​​Philadelphia and fulfilled the dream of many immigrants to construct a greater life for themselves and their families. Her optimism is reflected within the names of her first two children: Philadelphia and Jubilee.

But Hattie learns the hard way that the North isn’t any paradise. Her children die of disease and he or she becomes disillusioned. Hattie must adapt to her latest life: the bitter cold winters, racial segregation and grinding poverty. She misses the sense of community she had back home in Georgia. But her courage and determination enable her to beat these challenges while raising nine more children and a grandchild – and using the 2 dead children to found her 12 tribes. It is her descendants and Hattie who tell the stories, and so the novel stretches as much as 1980.