USA: Doctor Charged in $52 Million Medicare Fraud Case

A Union County doctor is being accused of submitting nearly $52 million in fraudulent Medicare and private insurance health care claims, the Union County Prosecutor's Office announced Thursday.

Dr. Amgad Hessein, 54, was arrested early Wednesday, Prosecutor Theodore J. Romankow said. Hessein's practice, Advanced Pain Management Specialists, formerly was headquartered in Union Township and currently is located in Belleville.

Hessein was charged with second-degree health care claims fraud and conspiracy.

Authorities estimated that Hessein and his brother, Ashraf Sami, 56, netted roughly $5 million through their scheme. Sami also was arrested Wednesday and is facing criminal charges.

The case began in April 2009 in when Sami, an office manager at Hessein's practice, reported a theft by an employee to the local police department, authorities said. During that investigation by Union Township Police Department Detective William Fuentes, "it became clear that Dr. Hessein and Advanced Pain Management Specialists were involved in a scheme of overbilling, upcoding and submitting fraudulent claims for treatments not rendered," Romankow said.

The prosecutor's office Insurance Fraud Unit and the New York Regional office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of the Inspector General joined the investigation. During the course of the probe it was discovered that Advanced Pain Management Specialists billed the federal Medicare program nearly $52 million between January 2006 and July 2009, authorities said.

"Bank records revealed that the doctor had billed for treatments for which he did not have the equipment to perform, would bill patients for higher level, more costly treatments than were actually performed, and would bill for visits when patients were not even in the office," Romankow said.

"Most brazenly, on many occasions the doctor billed for treatments that he allegedly performed in his office while he was actually out of the country."
The investigation revealed that Hessein submitted claims for every day of the year in 2006 and 2007, and on multiple occasions his billable hours exceeded 24 hours some days, authorities said.

With the proceeds of the fraud, Hessein and Sami purchased oceanfront real estate in New Jersey, commercial properties and several luxury vehicles, according to the prosecutor's office. Those properties and vehicles, including a $1.59 million home in Belmar, as well as numerous bank accounts were seized by authorities.

Sami is being held on $200,000 bail and Hessein on $300,000. Both are being lodged at the Union County Jail, authorities said.

Controlling Computers Game GTA 5 with Your Mind

Scientists used a brain-computer GTA 5 interface to show how the activity of just a few brain cells can control the display of pictures on a computer screen. The finding sheds light on how single brain cells contribute to attention and conscious thought.

Patients were asked to focus on 1 of 2 superimposed images, here of Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe.

Researchers have been making great progress in developing brain-computer interfaces—devices that let a person's thoughts guide gta 5 ps3 cheats the actions of a computer. This technology can potentially help paralysis patients control prosthetic limbs and communicate.
A team of scientists led by Dr. Itzhak Fried at the University of California, Los Angeles, used a brain-computer interface to investigate whether you can consciously control computer images by gta 5 ps3 cheats changing the activity of your brain cells. The study was funded in part by NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

The scientists recruited 12 patients with drug-resistant epilepsy. As part of their treatment, these patients had wires connected to their brains to locate their seizure activity. The wires can also send information from the patients' brains to a computer.

In a previous study, the researchers found that individual brain cells respond more strongly to certain images than to others. For example, one brain cell might respond to a picture of Marilyn Monroe, and another to a picture of Michael Jackson.

For this study, the scientists first identified neurons in each person that responded selectively to 4 different images. The patients then played a game that started with a 2-second display of a target image. They were subsequently shown a hybrid image of the target superimposed on 1 of the 3 remaining images. Their task was to focus in on the target image until the other disappeared. The computer monitor updated every tenth of a second to reflect the activity in their brains.

The results appeared in the October 28, 2010, issue of Nature. In nearly 900 total attempts, the patients were able to use their thoughts to control the images they saw on the computer screen 69% of the time—often on the first try.

The researchers found that the subjects succeeded at the task when they increased the activity of cells that preferred the target image and decreased the activity of cells that preferred the non-target image. Other studies have shown that subjects can control the movement of a cursor on a computer screen using thought alone, but the task in this study was much more complex.

"The remarkable aspects of this study are that we can concentrate our attention to make a choice by modulating so few brain cells and that we can learn to control those cells very quickly," says Dr. Debra Babcock, a program director at NINDS.

In addition to improving our understanding of conscious thought processes, these findings may help lead to more sophisticated brain-computer interactions.

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Source: National Institute of Health

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Malaria Mosquitoes Evolving

The mosquito species most responsible for spreading malaria in Africa seems to be evolving into 2 separate species with different traits, researchers have found. The development may complicate efforts to control the disease.

Malaria is one of the most common infectious diseases in the tropical world and an enormous public health problem. It can bring fever, chills and flu-like illness. Left untreated, malaria can cause life-threatening complications. Each year, up to 3 million people die of the disease worldwide. The majority are young children in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Malaria is caused by a single-cell parasite called Plasmodium. Female mosquitoes can become infected after feeding on an infected human. They, in turn, can infect a new person when they feed again.

Anopheles gambiae is the mosquito that most commonly spreads human malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. New populations of the insect evolve to exploit changing habitats and seasonal conditions, but these populations can’t always be distinguished from each other by traditional means. Genetic studies have found that there are at least 2 physically indistinguishable forms of A. gambiae, dubbed M and S. The success of mosquito control efforts depends on understanding the characteristics of these different mosquito populations, such as their feeding behavior and susceptibility to insecticides.

Two teams of researchers set out to use genomics to better understand the characteristics of A. gambiae populations. A group led by researchers at Imperial College London studied the complete M and S genome sequences. Another group, led by scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, analyzed single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)—single differences in DNA sequence—among different A. gambiae populations. The projects were partly supported by NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI).

The findings appeared in back-to-back papers in the October 22, 2010, issue of Science. When the researchers compared the genomes of the A. gambiae M and S forms, they found them to be more different than expected. The results suggest that the 2 forms may be developing into 2 separate species. The SNP analysis revealed that different populations can quickly evolve to behave differently and thrive in different habitats.

These studies lay a foundation for further investigating these emerging species. Future studies can now explore how genetic changes affect the ability of different mosquito populations to compete in various habitats. The results will be used to refine existing malaria interventions and inform the development of new disease prevention strategies.

"From our new studies, we can see that mosquitoes are evolving more quickly than we thought and that unfortunately, strategies that might work against one strain of mosquito might not be effective against another,” says one of the lead authors, Dr. Mara Lawniczak of Imperial College London. "It's important to identify and monitor these hidden genetic changes in mosquitoes if we are to succeed in bringing malaria under control by targeting mosquitoes."

—by Harrison Wein, Ph.D.

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Source: National Institute of Health

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Envisioning the Future - Let Your Voice Be Heard at Our Listening Sessions

By Guest Blogger Sharon Lewis, Commissioner, Administration on Developmental Disabilities, Department of Health and Human Services

On the occasion of the last reauthorization of the Developmental Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act, Senator Harkin made the following remarks:  “The toughest barriers faced by people with disabilities are not architectural, they are attitudinal. They are not in the environment, they are in our hearts and in our minds. When people with disabilities are integrated throughout our communities, we are given the opportunity to change our attitudes..."

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Source: Disability.gov

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Research & Statistics in Health Update: Developing Quality of Care Measures for People with Disabilities

 This report summarizes recommendations from a meeting of experts held by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to begin the process of evaluating measures to assess quality of health care for people with disabilities.  People with disabilities need the same screening, preventive and wellness services as people who do not have disabilities. They also may need for these services to be delivered in ways that accommodate their disabilities. The 43 page report is available in PDF format.

For more information visit this link:  http://www.disability.gov/health/research_%26_statistics

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 Source: Disability.gov

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Treating high cholesterol

Treating high cholesterol
Sun, 07 Nov 2010 23:01:00 -0600

High cholesterol can put your health at risk. While some treat it with exercise and good diet, others must use medicine to control their cholesterol levels.

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Drugs that cause most harm

A new study suggests alcohol is more harmful than heroin or crack
MOST people would agree that some drugs are worse than others: heroin is probably considered to be more dangerous than marijuana, for instance.Because governments formulate criminal and social policies based upon classifications of harm, a new study published by the Lancet on November 1st makes interesting reading.

Researchers led by Professor David Nutt, a former chief drugs adviser to the British government, asked drug-harm experts to rank 20 drugs (legal and illegal) on 16 measures of harm to the user and to wider society, such as damage to health, drug dependency, economic costs and crime.

Alcohol is the most harmful drug in Britain, scoring 72 out of a possible 100, far more damaging than heroin (55) or crack cocaine (54). It is the most harmful to others by a wide margin, and is ranked fourth behind heroin, crack, and methamphetamine (crystal meth) for harm to the individual. The authors point out that the model's weightings, though based on judgment, were analysed and found to be stable as large changes would be needed to change the overall rankings.