McConnell says Senate may again target Obamacare

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Food-service employee at UK hospital diagnosed with hepatitis A; if you ate at Pavilion A cafeteria Oct.11-30, get vaccinated

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A food service employee at the Albert B. Chandler Hospital at the University of Kentucky has been diagnosed with hepatitis A, a highly contagious liver disease, the hospital announced. The employee prepared food at the Pavilion A cafeteria, but was not involved in any food preparation for hospital patients. The hospital advises anyone who ate at the cafeteria between Oct. 11 and 30 to get a hepatitis A vaccination, which requires two shots, six months apart. All food-service workers at UK HealthCare will now be required to get the vaccine, and the hospital will set up "vaccination stations" for that. The Lexington-Fayette County Health Department and UK HealthCare have recommended that all Lexington residents get vaccinated as the number of cases continues to climb. Kentucky schoolchildren were required to have the vaccination at the beginning of the school year. In the current outbreak, there have been no confirmed cases of hepatitis A being transmitted by food-service wo...
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Cigarette smoking rates among U.S. adults are at a historic low, 14%, but one in five still use some type of tobacco-based product

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By Melissa Patrick Kentucky Health News Cigarette smoking rates have hit their lowest level ever, but 47 million Americans still use some type of tobacco-based product, prompting government officials to say there's more work to do. Smoking rates among adults dropped to about 14 percent in 2017 from 15.5 percent in 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , the Food and Drug Administration and the National Cancer Institute . That's a drop of two-thirds from 42 percent in 1965, the first year national smoking rates were recorded. The current rate for young adults 18 to 24 dropped even more than the overall rate, to 10 percent in 2017 from 13 percent in 2016. However, use of electronic cigarettes among young people is burgeoning , and one in five Americans, still use some type of tobacco-based product, and 34 million of the 47 million users still smoke. Kentucky's latest reported adult smoking rate is 24.5 percent. The national figures were published ...
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Electronic health records, touted as tool for efficiency and better care, are coming between doctors and patients, surgeon writes

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Illustration by Ben Wiseman for The New Yorker Electronic health records were supposed to "make medical care easier and more efficient," says The New Yorker . "But are screens coming between doctors and patients?" Yes, surgeon Atul Gawande writes in the magazine's latest issue, starting with a description of his 2015 training session on the Epic Systems Corp. system, which now has information on more than half of Americans. "The new system would give us one platform for doing almost everything health professionals needed�recording and communicating our medical observations, sending prescriptions to a patient�s pharmacy, ordering tests and scans, viewing results, scheduling surgery, sending insurance bills. With Epic, paper lab-order slips, vital-signs charts, and hospital-ward records would disappear. We�d be greener, faster, better. But three years later I�ve come to feel that a system that promised to increase my mastery over my work has, instead, increa...
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