Category: Public health
November 17th, 2009
The Queen could better manage security of personal information than civil servants are
Her majesty’s servants seem to be lacking any sense of responsibility these days. Information in the health care sector, voter information are being either stolen or misplaced on a regular basis. Hundreds of incidents are occurring.
It’s one thing for a leak to be politically motivated, but quite another when it’s careless. In an article I wrote two weeks ago about an U.S. Ethics Committee staffer file sharing a sensitive file investigating members of Congress and winding up in the hands of the Washington Post ,many talk back readers suggested it was intentional. England on the other hand, seems to have poor training and staff that have little respect or understanding of what they are dealing with.
Last week, the BBC reported that in the U.K., health records are being ‘lost’ in unprecedented scale:
“Unacceptable amounts of data are being stolen, lost in transit or mislaid by staff. Far too much personal data is still being unnecessarily downloaded from secure servers on to unencrypted laptops, USB sticks, and other portable media.”
Companies and public bodies that recklessly or deliberately break the rules face fines of up to half a million pounds from 2010. The Ministry of Justice is considering allowing the ICO to impose fines in the most serious cases.
Fines? How about PRISON instead? Nobody seems to budget for training or make individuals aware of the consequences if data is ‘lost’.
Organized crime seeks out data and coordinates such thefts. In a recent FBI investigation, they nabbed a ring that stole over $9 million with individual and commercial banking information compiled over an extensive period of time and found vulnerability in the bank network. The plan was then executed in less than 12 hours. The three masterminds were caught and yes - they ARE going to prison.
But when civil servants have proper control of the information they are dealing with, patient records and other database formats of personnel records and are lax in the way they handle, manage and secure the data there seems to be a complete lack of discipline for their actions. The bottom line is that nobody seems to care. They have inquiries, investigations and commissions of what went wrong, but in recent history, NOBODY has been fined or prosecuted for what appears to be absolute contempt for security of individuals’ information.
In England it’s almost on the verge of bizarre. The Home Office Minister, MP Hanson wants every ISP to monitor and enable them track where a user has been and what they are downloading - but they can’t seem to even dismiss an employee for losing or locking down memory sticks or laptops with complete data records of individuals that is far more damaging in terms of potential financial ruin of an individual. The Right Honorable MP Hanson needs to check his backyard before worrying about what happens in public. The need to be heavy handed seems to be used on trivial things, like spying on a city council member that may or may not live within city limits - 21 times! Perhaps it’s time that Scotland Yard bring back Paul Temple and MI6 pull 007 out of retirement and wring somebody’s neck and throw them in jail, let alone be fired. This week, in yet another complete lack of security protocol, 4 laptops go ‘missing’ in a single event. One of the laptops has voter information — with sufficient data to ruin an individual’s identity with the information contained on the laptop.
Files contained names, addresses, dates of birth, signatures, postal vote forms and statements used to confirm the identity of 14,673 voters. Councillor Julian Daly, whose details were on the missing laptop, said the situation was “troubling”.
The data was protected by two levels of security, the council said, but admitted there was a “slight risk” it could be accessed.
Hackers have time - it’s not a slight risk, it’s a DEFINITE risk.
Everyone affected is to receive a letter to inform them of the situation.
Inform? What good is that going to do? Their identities have ALREADY been compromised.
Mr Daly, who is leader of the Conservative group at the Lib Dem controlled council, added: “That’s all the information you need to set up a bank account. It’s classic identity theft territory. “It is troubling that the data was on a portable machine and it was accessible for someone to walk off with it.”
Bureaucrat Understatement of the year:
Daniel Goodwin, the council’s chief executive, said: “I would like to apologise to residents and reassure them the council takes its responsibility to look after their personal data very seriously.”
Seriously - then Mr. Goodwin should take responsibility for complete lack of training of staff under his management and turn himself in and go to jail. It’s going to take that kind of punishment before somebody figures out that people have to follow some pretty basic COMMON SENSE rules and regulations or face the consequences. Either that or go to jail.
It would appear that the common trait among all these incidences in training or even having a security practice in place when such information is being used by employees, contractors and administrators. And clearly there is no sense of responsibility by any of the staff using the information. I sense HRM Corgi’s could manage security of the information better than some of the administrators in charge.
Loading ...November 13th, 2009
Life insurance may prove difficult to get if you contract H1N1
President Obama wants to ensure health insurance companies cannot deny you coverage if you have a pre-existing condition. This has key component of the President’s health care reform package going through the U.S. Congress. He may have another challenge lying ahead - life insurance. Already some insurance carriers in Canada, because of the pandemic H1N1 Virus, are asking on application forms if they have contracted it. In a Sun Media / Peterborough Examiner news article, this could lead to future profiling of consumers health and may eliminate the ability to get life insurance for some.
This may also force strict guidelines on health information privacy that a health insurance provider has in its database and ensuring that life insurance companies do not have access to it. It is legal to ask about a consumers current health and personal lifestyle habits such as smoking, but it does not bar you from getting coverage, only that it may have affect on what your monthly or yearly premiums will cost.
The debate this opens up is more than a few simple questions and no easy answers.
Loading ...November 6th, 2009
Human x-ray machines: Coming soon to an airport near you
In the movie Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger (Gov. of California) runs through a security check point corridor operating using X-Ray technology. That film was released in 1990. Today that technology is being installed around the world at airports, border check points, marine ports and high risk security environments such as court buildings. They are currently being assessed or used in Canada, the U.S., U.K., Russia, Japan, and Australia. Some countries, such as India, have outright rejected them based on privacy and considered too offensive to passengers. Significant concern is being raised as to the long term medical impacts to humans going through the devices.
In Canada, the Canadian Air Transport Security Agency (CATSA) organization has completed some field trials at smaller airports (Kelowna, B.C.) and is looking to purchase a half dozen of the machines to continue further assessment. There are approximately 18 airports in the U.S. using them. In the U.K. several airports now have them including Manchester. Testing in several countries has been going since 2004. In the U.S. the Transportation Security Administration began field trials in 2007. The technology offers security details to process passengers quickly and determine if weapons or other contraband is on a person without doing physical body search. Such technology would significantly improve the detection of hidden materials. Read the rest of this entry »
November 5th, 2009
Flu pandemic disproportionately infects, kills young people; are some getting preferred treatment?
The Vancouver Sun reported that a study analyzing the first 1000 H1N1 cases in the State of California, reveals younger people were dying at a higher rate. This Flu season is one of the worst on record.
“If you’re under the age of 50, this is a bad flu. This might be the worst flu experienced in 50 to 100 years,” said Dr. Bela Matyas, acting chief of the emergency preparedness and response branch of the California Department of Public Health
“If you are a teenager or younger, the chances of dying from this flu are much, much higher than any other flu we’ve seen maybe since the 1918 flu.”
The Center for Disease Control website indicates that 2,025,700 doses of vaccine have been sent to California so far with more being shipped daily. Governments across all boundaries have ramped up to ensure everyone gets vaccinated. Web portals dedicated to Health in each region are plastered with information putting the H1N1 Flu as the #1 topic and primary focus ensuring that information is readily available.
Source of Graphic: Center for Disease Control
October 18th, 2009
UK envisions zero waste: What about computers?
Recycling is part of our daily lives. We do it everyday with plastics, newspapers and other general household things. Cars are now recycled throughout North America and Europe at high efficiency rates.
Everything seems to be covered, right? Computers and batteries face recycling problems. We already know that a lot of high tech materials wind up in China and the Far East for disassembly and “recycling” with serious health consequences for the local populations. And then there’s the energy required to recycle. It’s more than most of us realize.
Computers are a nightmare. Yet governments around the world are now passing laws that will require the development of new techniques that are efficient, safe and capable of mass quantity capabilities. And it’s not just your household PC anymore that needs unique recycling capabilities. PDAs, smartphones and the wide range of batteries used are areas of concern that require unique technologies. The average cell phone is used for 18 months or less. That creates a huge landfill problem.
In a press release by the Minister of Environment for the U.K. Hilary Benn:
“We need to rethink how we view and treat waste in the UK. Why do we send valuable items like aluminium and food waste to landfill when we can turn them into new cans and renewable energy? Why use more resources than we need to in manufacturing? We must now work together to build a zero waste nation - where we reduce the resources we use, reuse and recycle all that we can and only landfill things that have absolutely no other use.
“To do this all of us - government, local authorities, businesses and consumers - must do our bit. And we must make this moment the turning point on our journey to eliminate wasteful waste.”
“Using new technologies will help us to re-use things, for example anaerobic digestion that creates energy from food and farm waste. And businesses can apply the technology at their fingertips to design innovative products that use less resources or contain recycled materials.
“In ten years time 75 per cent of household waste will either be recycled or used for energy, and over time this figure will increase even further. Aiming for zero waste is the way we have to think to get us to where we need to be.”
Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government John Denham added:
“If we continue to send recyclable or compostable waste to landfill we are missing a major opportunity to generate heat and energy and missing an opportunity to turn that waste into money. We can save planet whilst keeping money in resident’s pockets.
· England should more than halve the amount of waste going to landfill in the next 10 years – early next year we will consult on what recyclable and compostable items should be banned from landfill and how a ban will work.
· In ten years time 75 per cent of household waste will either be recycled or used for energy, and over time this figure will increase even further.
· New research out today shows it is possible to divert 500,000 tonnes of household waste per year through re-using it.
Nations around the world have such goals and laws becoming enforceable. Shredding has been a classic way to recycle some components. The problem is the heavy metals and toxins that are left behind.
Wikipedia lists most of the components such as:
dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), cadmium, chromium, radioactive isotopes, and mercury. A typical computer monitor may contain more than 6% lead by weight, much of which is in the lead glass of the cathode ray tube (CRT). A typical 15-inch computer monitor may contain 1.5 pounds of lead, but other monitors have been estimated as having up to 8 pounds of lead. Circuit boards contain considerable quantities of lead-tin solders and are even more likely to leach into groundwater or to create air pollution via incineration. Additionally, the processing required to reclaim the precious substances (including incineration and acid treatments) may release, generate, and synthesize further toxic byproducts.
CRT’s are becoming obsolete and the amount of lead being used in a computer is significantly less than it was five years ago.
Let’s hope that of the 25% of waste Mr. Benn says will still go to landfills, are not the gadgets we just mentioned, because today, it’s probably close to 90% that do.
January 30th, 2006
NIH cuts endanger biotech breakthroughs
NIH will receive $35 million less in 2006 than it did last year. Those cuts will be especially painful for biomedicine, Techology Review reports today. The budget effectively moves the agency back to 2003 funding levels, with the result that only one out of 10 grant proposals will be funded, versus three out of 10 in ‘03. While the agency is slated for a five percent increase in ‘07, no one really knows how much will be slated until the budget comes out later this week.
"There were great opportunities unleashed by the doubling of the budget [between 1998 and 2003]," says Bruce Bistrian, president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), a coalition of research societies based in Bethesda, MD. "When you dramatically withdraw support, it has a disproportionate effect on the young, who don’t have the wherewithal to weather the storm."
"We’re facing a serious crisis that may end up culling some of the very best people out of the biomedical research enterprise," says Jack Feldman, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. "There will be people who lose all funding or have gaps in funding so they can’t maintain the infrastructure they’ve built."
January 18th, 2006
CDC looks to cell phones for outbreak containment
It hasn’t happened yet, but what happens if and when avian flu starts to spread from person to person? Well, a lot of bad things, so the need for people in affected areas to take proactive measures is critical.
The Centers for Disease Control is experimenting with emerging technologies like "During an outbreak or emergency, getting good info to the public rapidly about what they need to do protect themselves is vital and can save lives," says CDC spokeswoman Jennifer Morcone.
At the Center for the Advancement of Distance Education (CADE) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, researchers are helping the CDC to develop an emergency alert system that would rely on the Global Positioning System (GPS) features built into many of today’s mobile handsets. In areas hit with an outbreak, people who carry GPS-enabled mobile phones and are subscribed to the alert service would receive an emergency alert text message with instructions about where to go or what to do during specific emergencies, such as an outbreak of anthrax or bird flu.
The problem is in knowing whom to contact. That’s where GPS comes in.
In that way, people in areas hit with an outbreak could receive directions to the nearest medical clinic and be told what routes to take in an evacuation.
"Using mobile devices could be an ideal way to communicate with people directly affected, because more than 200 million people in the U.S. subscribe to a mobile service," says Ken Hyers, principal mobile analyst at ABI, a technology research firm based in Oyster Bay, NY.
But naturally there are problems: privacy, funding, logistics and network vulnerability.
Infrastructure such as cell towers and the T1 Internet lines that the cellular network depends on proved to be more reliable during Katrina than many expected. In fact, many people text-messaged each other reliably during the hurricane, according to Hyers. He says that, in some cases, Verizon and BellSouth arrived at disaster sites in New Orleans and before FEMA. Often they were able to replace backup power on cell tower generators and get T1s back up and running.
Infrastructure and privacy issues haven’t discouraged researchers in Japan, where mobile carrier KDDI, IBM Japan, and Kyoto University are collaborating on a real-time evacuation alert service for mobile phones. The service displays small readable maps and evacuation routes in the event of an earthquake or other natural disaster. A trial of the system is underway in Kyoto.
Well, Verizon looks pretty good compared to FEMA, but … this program is another reason that decentralizing networks is a good idea.
January 12th, 2006
Your own genetic map is within reach
A new project at Harvard Medical School called the Personal Genome Project (PGP) is getting underway, possibly driving the cost of acquiring one’s own personal genetic map down to $1,000 by 2014, reports the Mercury News.
An offshooot of the Humune Genome Project, the massive government effort to sequence all 3 billion bits of human DNA, the PGP is the privately financed enterprise of George Church, 50, a leading genome expert at Harvard Medical School.
"The goal is to reduce costs to the point at which the genomes of individual humans could be sequenced as part of routine health care,” Church wrote in the journal Nature Reviews Genetics.
At this point, Church is the only volunteer for the program, but he predicts the project with gain a lot of momentum very quickly once people recognize that the benefits of the project outweigh the costs. "Eventually PGP may require millions of volunteers,” he said.
Church envisons a public government database where scientists and anyone else can see them. He acknowledged that such extraordinary openness carries risks as well as benefits. To encourage volunteers and allay fears, the project gives volunteers the option of keeping their data private.
"The prospect of this new type of personal information suddenly becoming widely available prompts worries about how it might be misused — by insurers, employers, friends, neighbors, commercial interests or criminals,” he acknowledged in the current issue of Scientific American.
January 10th, 2006
Pharma cos. not big fans of India's traditional knowledge database
India recently funded a $2 million digital database that eventually will contain more than 100,000 traditional medicinal remedies — "the collective wisdom of the ancient healing arts known as ayurveda , unani and siddha, the latter based on the teachings of the Hindu god Shiva," reports the Washington Post.
The project was fueled by worries that theft by multinational drug companies, a practice known here as bio-piracy, and an effort to preserve and copyright India’s unique cultural heritage. It is hoped that the data-collection effort will help foster a joint collaboration between western pharmaceutical companies and traditional medicine.
Mark Grayson, a spokesman for Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America, the drug-industry lobbying group, described the Indian project as "a solution in search of a problem." He said "there is no evidence of bio-piracy," noting that most modern drugs are developed from chemicals with the aid of computers, rather than from natural substances."
Fearing intellectual property lock-ups, the project definately has some detractors.
"At the same time, he said, the Indian effort could "inhibit drug development" by discouraging companies from developing new cures from plants whose medicinal uses India now claims as protected intellectual property. The drug industry is opposing India’s efforts to amend World Trade Organization rules to protect such ancient remedies."
October 19th, 2005
IBM puts workers' health records online
In one big step towards electronic medical records, IBM announced it would let employees volunteer to have their health records available online.
The company’s roughly 133,000 workers in the United States will have the option to enroll in the online-information system, IBM said in a memo scheduled to be sent to employees early on Wednesday. They can also sign up their dependents.
. . . "The long-term goal for electronic health records is to make patient data securely available to health care providers such as hospitals and emergency personnel, when and where the information is needed," IBM said in the memo.
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