A Rose Medical Center operating room technician who was fired after failing a drug test for a powerful pain medication may have exposed thousands of patients to hepatitis C.

The technician, infected with hepatitis C, is charged with swapping her used dirty syringes, refilled with saline solution, for ones containing the painkiller fentanyl.

Hospital officials said they knew the technician had the virus when she was hired. She began work Oct. 21, 2008. She was fired April 13.

Rose is offering free testing to all people who had surgery in the main hospital or the Wolf Building between those dates. Letters will be sent to more than 4,700 former patients. Maternity and emergency room patients are not affected.

Rose officials said the state health department had found nine former Rose patients who tested positive for hepatitis C.

Hospital officials stressed at a Thursday night news conference that the employee is not confirmed to be the source of the infection and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment is continuing its investigation.

Justice Department paperwork obtained by The Gazette newspaper in Colorado Springs identified the technician as Kristen Diane Parker, 26, of Colorado Springs. She is in federal custody.

Charges against Parker were filed by the U.S. attorney’s office in Denver on Thursday. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office did not return telephone calls Thursday night.

In a videotaped interview Monday with police, according to the Gazette, Parker told a detective she used heroin from July to September last year.

She allegedly told the investigator she thought she caught the virus from injecting herself with dirty needles.

Parker also might have exposed 1,000 patients at Audubon Ambulatory Surgery Center in Colorado Springs, where she worked after being fired from Rose, according to the charges against her. Hospital officials say she worked there from May 4 until Monday.

UPDATE: Alaskan blogger says investigations by the state legislature drove her out.

Via Suzie over at Echidne of the Snakes, where there’s an interesting discussion about this song and the dynamics of domestic abuse.

Well, maybe not. At least I’ll have strong bones while I’m going crazy!

After watching “Real Housewives of New Jersey” last week, I thought I’d seen the ultimate in dysfunction. But last night, I saw something even crazier: the annual show where “Clean House” finds the messiest house in the country.

If you’re familiar with Clean House, you know the drill. Niecy Nash and friends go into a house, twist the pack-rat owners’ arms into giving up their clutter, sell all the crap at a yard sale to raise the money for a makeover, and send them off to a hotel while the Clean House crew works its magic.

This episode was deeply disturbing. (You can watch highlights here.) The homeowner, a Cincinnati police detective, lives with her grown daughter. The daughter’s room was filled with toys and stuffed animals “because my mother won’t let me get rid of it.”

The mom is a compulsive shopper and hoarder who kept insisting (despite all the crap with the price tags still on it) that she “never” buys anything and this is all just the normal accumulation of 30 years. (Trust me on this - it wasn’t.)

The ordinarily-indefatigable Niecy started crying when she saw the basement. It had so much stuff in it, you couldn’t even see the walls. Everything was piled high - as was the garage, and the large storage unit they also rented.

This is mental illness, without a doubt. Textbook OCPD.

Anyway, the procedure was slightly different because they won the “Messiest House” contest. Instead of having to raise money for the makeover, they got to donate it to charity. And here’s the interesting part: These people had so much crap, Clean House had to rent an empty department store for the yard sale - 7,000 square feet! (The owner was still insisting it was just “normal clutter.”)

When was the last time you made $15,000 at a yard sale? That’s how much crap these people had. Five thousand people showed up to shop, and there was still stuff left over.

You could see that the daughter (who nominated the house) was also a pack rat, although not on the same scale as her mother. She freaked out when she saw all the stuff that was gone.

Anyway, you could see very clearly at the end that these people would only see their empty house as an invitation to fill it up with more crap.

When I was a cleaning lady, I saw people who were well on their way to this state of affairs, and I’ve personally known two people like this: One was a relative by marriage, and the other was an employee. The employee broke her foot and her husband was away on business, so I offered to come over and help.

Holy shit, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

Now, I have a lot of crap - more than most of my friends, anyway. But most of the friends with clean, organized houses don’t have many indoor activities, and the ones who do have messy homes, too. I have guitars, books and art supplies - all of which I use. I get rid of most books as soon as I’m done reading them. However, a lot of them are astrology reference books - I’d say about 200 - and I use them. The real problem area for me is around my computer desk, where I pile things I’m not sure what to do with. (Come to think of it, I really do need to have a yard sale.)

While I do have some clutter, I hate dirt. (Allergies - especially to mice!!!) I’m always wiping and sweeping. (I even clean my toaster oven. My range top is cleaned every day.) So on the scale of the Creative Clutter continuum, I’d put myself at a 4.

I was speechless. There was a car engine in the middle of the living room floor. The dining room table and chairs were unusable, piled high with stacks of assorted mail and papers. There were giant tumbleweeds of dog and cat hair on the hardwood floors, and dried cat turds everywhere.

In the kitchen, the cabinet drawers were so full of stuff, you couldn’t close them. (Expired coupons, mostly.) In the bathroom, used maxipads and toilet paper rolls thrown on the floor because there was no wastebasket. In the bedrooms, piles of clothes everywhere - she couldn’t even tell which were clean.

I spent three days cleaning, scrubbing and throwing out. I came back a week later, and she’d brought all the trash bags back into the house. And yes, she put the expired coupons back in the drawers.

Sisyphus shrugged, and left the building.

Fortunately for me, I got my heritage plants at the local CSA and not the Home Depot. How about you?

Meg McGrath, professor of plant pathology at Cornell University, calls late blight “worse than the Bubonic Plague for plants.”

“People need to realize this is probably one of the worst diseases we have in the vegetable world,” she said. “It’s certain death for a tomato plant.”

Tomato plants have been removed from Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Lowe’s and Kmart stores in all six New England states, plus New York. Late blight also has been identified in all other East Coast states except Georgia, as well as Alabama, West Virginia and Ohio, McGrath said.

Global warming seems to be shrinking sheep.

On average, wild Soay sheep on Scotland’s island Hirta are 5 percent smaller today than they were in 1985, according to a team of researchers led by Tim Coulson of Imperial College London.

“The decrease in body size was due to a reduction in growth rates caused, in part, by the changing climate,” Coulson said in an interview via e-mail.

Evolution favors the development of large sheep, which can more easily survive harsh winters, Coulson explained. So the researchers became curious about the overall decline in size of the animals on Hirta.

They discovered that as the climate has grown milder, small lambs that would not have survived previous winters were now living to grow up and reproduce.

Since size is inherited, the survival and reproduction of these smaller animals lowered the average size of the herd.

Why would you trade a non-recourse loan from which you can walk away for a recourse loan that guarantees you’ll end up as bad as some poor slob at Tappahannock? It doesn’t seem like an incredibly appealing choice, does it?

But, of course, this is a classic case of asymmetric information because you don’t know that you are getting a poor trade, but your bank and the government do. In fact, the bank makes more money this way because of incentives it receives for refinancing these loans – incentives, I might add that come straight from the taxpayer to the bank via the Federal Government (see my post “How refinancing helps the likes of Bank of America and Wells Fargo”).

So, to recap, you get shackled to a house with a recourse loan because you don’t know what the bank and government do. Meanwhile, your bank gets to forgo a writedown (remember, your loan was for the same amount as before). And the bank gets a refinance fee which is goosed by government incentives.

Is this predatory lending? Sure sounds like it to me.

I’m also partial to whoever lives in L’Epiphanie, Quebec. Nice!

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Two popular anti-smoking drugs will now carry warnings about the risk of severe mental health problems, the Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday.

The FDA said Chantix and Zyban will carry the warnings to alert consumers to the risks of depression and suicidal thoughts when using the drugs.

The drugs also have been reported to cause changes in behavior, hostility and agitation in users, whether users had a history of psychiatric illness or not. In many cases, side effects started shortly after use began and ended when the medication was stopped. The FDA does not know what is causing the changes and said people taking these products should be monitored by their doctor.

“The risk of serious adverse events while taking these products must be weighed against the significant health benefits of quitting smoking,” said Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. “Smoking is the leading cause of preventable disease, disability and death in the United States, and we know these products are effective aids in helping people quit.”

The agency also is requiring Pfizer Inc., which makes Chantix, and GlaxoSmithKline, maker of Zyban, to conduct a study looking at how often these serious symptoms occur.

Pfizer says it updated its label in 2007 to include information of neuropsychiatric symptoms and has revised the label again to reflect Wednesday’s warning.

This is something I would so totally not do.

‘ [An] April 2001 report, “Strategic Policy Challenges for the 21st Century,” was prepared by the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy and the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations at the request of then-Vice President Dick Cheney. In retrospect, it appears that the report helped focus administration thinking on why it made geopolitical sense to oust Hussein, whose country sat on the world’s second largest oil reserves.

“Iraq remains a de-stabilizing influence to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East,” the report said.

“Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export program to manipulate oil markets . . . The advisory committee that helped prepare the report included Luis Giusti, a Shell Corp. non-executive director; John Manzoni, regional president of British Petroleum; and David O’Reilly, chief executive of ChevronTexaco. . . [the notorious crook] Ken Lay, then chairman of the energy-trading Enron Corp., also made recommendations that were included in the Baker report.’

[...] ‘The New Yorker ’s Jane Mayer later made another discovery: a secret NSC document dated Feb. 3, 2001 - only two weeks after Bush took office - instructing NSC officials to cooperate with Cheney’s task force, which was “melding” two previously unrelated areas of policy: “the review of operational policies towards rogue states” and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.” [The New Yorker, Feb. 16, 2004]

By March 2001, Cheney’s task force had prepared a set of documents with a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and a list titled “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts,” according to information released in July 2003 under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the conservative watchdog group, Judicial Watch.

Some of us remember these stories, but it’s good to be reminded of the larger context. And it’s here that I get to say (again) the thing that makes conservatives crazy: Michael Moore was right. It was all about the oil.

From Coalition of the Obvious, via Avedon, this useful “compare and contrast” on national health care systems. It especially means something to me because a few years back, after my unemployment ran out and I was working an hourly job, I developed pneumonia and couldn’t afford to pay for a chest x-ray. (I don’t remember ever feeling so damned sick in my life.) I’m glad I’m still alive to tell the tale:

During my time in Venezuela, I developed a cough that went on for three weeks and progressively worsened. Finally, after I had become incredibly congested and developed a fever, I decided to attend a Barrio Adentro clinic. The closest one available was a Barrio Adentro II Centro de Diagonostico Integral (CDI) and I headed in without my medical records or calling to make an appointment. Immediately, I was ushered into a small room where Carmen, a friendly Cuban doctor, began questioning me about my symptoms. She listened to my lungs and walked me over to another examination room where, again without waiting, I had x-rays taken.

Afterwards, the technician walked me to a chair and apologized profusely that I had to wait for the x-rays to be developed, promising that it would take no more than five minutes. Sure enough, five minutes later he returned with both x-rays developed. Carmen studied the x-rays and informed me that I had pneumonia, showing me the telltale shadows. She sent me away with my x-rays, three medications to treat my pneumonia, congestion, and fever, and made me promise to come back if my conditioned failed to improve or worsened within three days.

I walked out of the clinic with a diagnosis and treatment within twenty-five minutes of entering, without paying a dime. There was no wait, no paperwork, and no questions about my ability to pay, my nationality, or whether, as a foreigner, I was entitled to free comprehensive health care. There was no monetary value connected with my physical well-being; the care I received was not contingent upon my ability to pay. I was treated with dignity, respect, and compassion, my illness was cured and I was able to continue with my journey in Venezuela.

This past year, a family friend was not so lucky. At the age of 56, she was going back to school and was uninsured. She came down with what she thought was a severe case of the flu, and as her condition worsened she decided not to see a doctor because of the cost. She died at home in bed, losing her life to a system that did not respect her basic human right to survive.

Via Gawker, this astonishing clip:

Last night Glenn Beck’s guest was ex-CIA person Michael Scheuer, who stated that the only hope for the country was for Osama Bin Laden to “deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States.” Seriously.

Why would any good, patriotic American say such a thing in a discussion about border protection? Because all of our politicians crave is the approval of Europeans and to hold on to their cushy jobs and it’s going to take an attack from Bin Laden to wake America up to the fact that our leaders need to use “as much violence as necessary” to firmly establish our place in the world. Meanwhile, Beck just sat there nodding his approval.

Yeah.

The neoconservatives aren’t even trying to hide their pulling for such things anymore. And these are the same people who revel in cloaking their deranged beliefs in patriotism, mind you.

These people are just crazy.

Michael Scheuer, as you may know, is a former CIA analyst who served as Chief of the Bin Laden Issue Station, from 1996 to 1999, the Osama bin Laden tracking unit at the agency’s Counterterrorist Center.

It’s not just that you’re going to give the Senate Democrats that theoretical filibuster-proof majority (knowing the Democrats, they’ll figure out a way to screw it up anyway). And it’s not even that you’re a real, honest-to-God progressive (lately I’ve seen that label used more often as a marketing ploy to raise money than an actual political ideology), but that you’re such an unabashed admirer of a decent, compassionate politician like the late Paul Wellstone.

That says good things about what we can expect from Senator Al Franken.

You turned your career in comedy into one targeted against the forces of the right wing with titles like “Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot” and “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them“. (And don’t think we don’t appreciate it!) Heck, you even served as a Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and helped get Air America off the ground.

I can’t wait to see what you do in the Senate. I want to warn you, Al - I expect big things from you. In fact, I’m feeling something I haven’t felt for a while this morning: Hope.

And it’s all because of you, Al Franken. Congratulations, Senator!

He said (and I’m paraphrasing here) it was not surprising that so many Republican politicians have sex with other men. “I mean, if you look at their contemptuous attitude toward women in general, they don’t think very highly of them,” he said. “So they have sex with men and it’s like, ‘See? You can’t even do this any better.’”

He might be on to something.

But about that “filibuster-proof” majority? It’s only a dream.