14 The Daily Collegian Tuesday, Aug. 5, 1997 Many children lack Some child advocates are worried that new welfare-to-work progrdms will cause the number of uninsured children to increase. By ALIAH D. WRIGHT Associated Press Writer HARRISBURG One-year-old Izjada Watson cooed from her mother's lap yesterday as legisla tors and doctors at a Harrisburg health clinic discussed ways to help pay for the health care of some of her peers. Today, President Clinton is scheduled to sign the newly passed Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which includes $24 billion to supply health insurance coverage nation wide for the uninsured children of the working poor. LaShanna Grant, Izjada's moth er, said her job provides health insurance, but she told U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa, state Sen. Jef frey Piccola, R-Dauphin, and U.S. Rep. George Gekas, R-Pa., that she canceled it because it was expen sive. Instead, Grant said her mother, who works at a local hospital, will place Izjada under her health plan. Health insurance for children has garnered national attention, and some child advocates fear that new welfare-to-work programs will cause the number of uninsured children to increase. Even among working parents covered by employers, many can not afford the additional cost of a family plan to cover their children. To help, the federal government last week decided as part of the Government says no more accidents By ERIK BROOKS Associated Press Writer MILWAUKEE Good news! The government says you'll never get into an auto accident It has stopped using the word "accident" in favor of the no nonsense "crash." Crash, shmash, says Tom Rehbeck, an AAA district man ager. "An accident is an accident," Rehbeck says. "Whatever they call it, a car's not working, and we have to come and tow it." American Family Insurance agent Scott Wolfe agrees: "It's a waste of time. They should not even be fooling around with this. They have bigger fish to fry." The U.S. Transportation Department decided to stop . I I arifoliV ~. al ---": 7 ...\ ..... - t• - -4 - -\ ., -; , .' . - - 1 1:"::-4 , TTIL - ~,.., p. , ,, Xikl."..' ~\• \\.' 7 ; :,-;',- .... - f.-..•\• \ ' \\ .;,... N ""a7-7.. , s - , -- , : ,--_,-, • 7 1 FPO '\\ '-- .. 4 ‘'.-. ‘,," \ _ - _ - 4 . , ‘, , im . 444%' s s :' . 0 ::` 1 ~1:".•, .- -- 7 '- i - ; :?..-f, r __ $....r4 i, ..„). t ,-, ..:.,.., 2nd meal free when ,-- - F,-- ordering am/thing on the menu of ~, equal value or less (excludes - '-'--- •-----:'-'; _ beverages & dessert). Use ony __ from 3prn to Bpm. :: -- .1f, -,- ,. - -----• '-= - r:„_____.-sis - m r : -- t - ortgeAve. J musiefOts! 300 d! Enjoy the BEST of the Oub Scene • Alcohol Bee insurance budget package to spend $24 billion over the next five years to expand health coverage to about half of the nation's 10 million uninsured chil dren. A small amount can be funneled directly to hospitals and other health care providers, but most of the money must pay for insurance. States can expand Medicaid, but most are expected to expand sepa rate programs already in place, or to create new ones. "I believe $24 billion for chil dren's health is enormous," said Specter, who talked with Grant during a visit to Harrisburg's Hamilton Health Center on Mon day. "Now we have to figure out exactly tow to carry it out." The federal money $8 billion of which will come from raising taxes on tobacco will go to the states in grants and could offer sig nificant help in Pennsylvania, although the lawmakers could not say how much. A survey released in May by the Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children estimated that 331,000 Pennsylvania children are unin sured. Nearly 30 percent of the patients who seek treatment at Hamilton have no health insurance, nearly 60 percent are on Medicaid, and offi cials there said more money needs to be funneled into types of care other than that provided by prima ry physicians, such as specialists, medicine or critical diagnostic test ing. At Hamilton, primary care is provided to anyone, regardless of whether they can pay, thanks to various federally funded pro grams. "But we can't give them the adjunctive care," said Dr. Gwen dolyn Poles, a staff physician. describing these convergences of chrome as accidents to hold people more accountable for their actions. "If you call something an accident, you are saying it's fate, it's an act of God, it's something you can't foresee," says Tim Hurd, media director for the department's National Highway Traffic Safety Admin istration. "It's not accidental that one person survives a crash wear ing a seat belt and one person goes through a window and dies." The change has been in the works for years but may have finally hit home a few weeks ago with the release of the report formerly known as the Fatal Accident Reporting Sys tem, listing all deadly accidents in the United States. The waiting game Seven-year-old Kevin Hemelaer of Belgium waits with his family's mother waited in a long line to buy tickets. Trains were were halted baggage inside Penn Station in New York yesterday while his while police investigated a suspicious duffel bag for explosives. Antibiotics By PAUL RECER AP Science Writer WASHINGTON Researchers have found a way to turn off the genes that make bacteria resistant to antibiotic drugs a discovery that could help head off a major medical crisis in the treatment of infections. Bacteria have been growing increasingly resistant to antibiotics. Many infections including meningitis no longer respond well to drugs that once worked well against them. "This method could restore the full useful ness of today's front-line antibiotics, thus bypassing the tremendous expense of develop ing new antibiotics," said Nobel Prize laureate Sidney Altman, who led the Yale University team that made the discovery. The team found a way to insert artificial genes into bacteria, thus making the germs highly sensitive to two widely used antibiotics, chloramphenicol and ampicillin. Altman cautioned, however, that the tech nique has been demonstrated only in laboratory cultures and could take five more years of research before it is ready for testing in human patients. "There is a big, big gap between doing some thing in the laboratory and making an effective therapeutic tool," said Altman. A report on the study is to be published today puzzle may be solved "It's exciting they're able to essentially switch the resistance (to antibiotics) off —that's the first time that's happened." Dr. Stephen Heyse student of bacterial resistance in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "It's exciting they're able to essentially switch the resistance off —that's the first time that's happened," said Dr. Stephen Heyse, who studies bacterial resistance at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. But no one yet knows how to deliver the arti ficial genes into specific cells, meaning moving the discovery out of the test tube will be diffi cult at best, Heyse cautioned. Even if the method could work in people, it's not likely to end the problem of drug resistance, added Dr. Mitchell Cohen, bacteria resistance chief at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Anytime you do something that kills bacte ria, you put selective pressure on those bacteria to change to get around it," Cohen said. "This would be another approach to deal with resistance," but not a cure-all. Antibiotic resis tance has become a growing medical concern in recent years. For instance, the bacteria that causes menin gitis once was routinely controlled with ampi cillin, a commonly prescribed antibiotic. But now, about 20 percent of such infections are resistant to ampicillin. In addition, hospital-acquired infections also are showing an increased resistance to antibi otics. In the experiment, the Yale researchers made synthetic genes that shut down the bacte ria's ability to resist antibiotics. The genes were introduced into the bacteria using small packets of DNA called plasmids. The synthetic genes inside the bacteria started a process that leads to the formation of an enzyme that destroys a specific gene. Blocking the action of the targeted gene low ered the bacteria's defenses against antibiotics, enabling the drugs to kill the infection. The experiment used E. coli bacteria, a common source of infection, but Altman said the tech nique could work against any bacteria and, per haps, even against some viruses. "This is a very general method that you can use to stop the expression of any gene that you want to choose," said Altman. The biggest problem with the research is finding a way to deliver synthetic genes to spe cific cells, Altman said.
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