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
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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.