WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Millions of unemployed U.S. workers face sharply higher health insurance premiums and loss of coverage as temporary federal subsidies expire, a healthcare advocacy group said on Tuesday.

With the U.S. unemployment rate topping 10 percent, FamiliesUSA is urging Congress to extend a measure that helps laid-off workers maintain employer-sponsored health coverage with a 65 percent subsidy on their insurance premiums.

A report released by the group on Tuesday said without the subsidy, insurance premiums would consume a significant portion of monthly unemployment benefits and in nine states exceed the average jobless benefit.

The subsidies began in March as part of the $787 billion economic stimulus and the nine months of benefits for the first group of recipients expired on Monday. The program runs through December and anyone laid-off before the end of the month remains eligible for nine months of subsidies.

Some Democrats are considering extending the program as part of new legislation they hope to pass before the end of the year to address unemployment. The issue will also likely be discussed at the White House’s jobs summit on Thursday.

But Republicans worried about record federal budget deficits are expected to oppose extending the program.

If Congress fails to act, anyone losing a job in January and subsequently would receive no federal subsidies to maintain employer-sponsored health coverage through what has become known as the COBRA program.

Under that long-standing law, workers who lose their jobs can keep their employer-sponsored health plans for up to 18 months although they must pay the full premium. For many laid-off workers, the $1,111 average family monthly health insurance premium is too much, the group said.

“When workers lose their jobs, they often lose their health coverage as well,” said director Ron Pollack. “For millions of laid-off workers and their families, the federal COBRA subsidies have been a health-coverage lifeline.”

The report said that average monthly family COBRA premiums vary range from $979 in Idaho and $989 in Iowa to $1,246 in Massachusetts and $1,232 in Minnesota.

By Kate Kelland

LONDON (Reuters) – People who smoke “skunk” — a potent form of cannabis — are almost seven times more likely to develop psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia than those who smoke “hash” or cannabis resin, according to research.

Scientists from King’s College London’s institute of psychiatry said their study was the first to look specifically at skunk, rather than normal cannabis, and suggested high levels of tretrahydrocannabinol, or THC, were to blame for the drug’s effect on mental health.

“The risk of psychosis is much greater among people who are frequent cannabis users, especially among those using skunk, rather than among occasional users of traditional hash,” said Marta di Forti, the psychiatrist who led the study.

Di Forti and colleagues, whose work was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry Tuesday, studied 280 patients who had experienced a first psychotic episode and 174 healthy people from the area of London where the research was conducted.

They found that those who had been diagnosed with psychosis serious enough to last a week and warrant admission to hospital were twice as likely to have used cannabis for longer than five years and more than six times more likely to use it every day.

And among all those who had used cannabis — from both the healthy group and the psychotic group — those with psychosis were almost seven times more likely to use skunk, a finding the researchers described as “striking.”

The potential dangers of cannabis sparked a row between British politicians and scientists last month after the government sacked its chief drugs adviser for arguing that cannabis was no more harmful than alcohol..

Previous studies have suggested smoking cannabis can double the risk of developing psychosis, Di Forti said, but hers is the first to look at skunk — a drug she said was now taking over from cannabis resin in the illegal drug trade in many countries.

The two main constituents of cannabis are THC — the psychoactive ingredient which can produce psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions and paranoia — and cannabidiol.

The researchers said cannabidiol appeared to have anti-psychotics properties and could be counteracting the THC.

Skunk traded illegally in southeast London, where the study was carried out, has around 12 to 18 percent THC and 1.5 percent cannabidiol, while regular cannabis resin has an average THC of around 3.4 percent and an equal amount of cannabidiol.

“It seems that with hash the equal amounts of THC and cannabidiol may be reducing the effect, but with skunk that balance is not there,” Di Forti told Reuters after a briefing.

“Unfortunately skunk is displacing traditional cannabis preparations in many countries,” she said, adding that while skunk had been more expensive than hash in the past, it was now selling for a similar price — under 5 pounds ($8.24) a gram.

(Editing by Alison Williams)

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) – More than half of patients receiving abdominal CT scans, an advanced type of X-ray, got them for tests they did not need, exposing them to excess radiation that could raise the long-term risk of cancer, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

The study, presented on Monday at the Radiological Society of North America meeting in Chicago, adds to mounting evidence that Americans are exposed to an increasing amount of radiation from diagnostic imaging exams.

In August, a team at Emory University in Atlanta reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that as many as 4 million Americans a year are exposed to high doses of radiation.

A report in March from the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement found Americans were exposed to seven times more radiation from diagnostic scans than in 1980.

Radiation is measured in millisieverts. The average American can expect to receive about 3 millisieverts a year from ground radon or flying in an airplane. That level is not considered a risk to health.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison team led by Dr. Kristie Guite studied 978 CT scans of the abdomen and pelvis done on 500 patients that were sent to the university to be interpreted. They used American College of Radiology guidelines to determine whether they were appropriate.

They found that 52.2 percent of the patients were found to have had CT scans that were unnecessary. The average excess radiation dose per patient was 11.3 millisieverts, about the equivalent of 113 chest X-rays.

RAISING CANCER RISK

Some patients got a lot more radiation than others. In one in five patients, the dose was 50 millisieverts, enough to raise some concerns about health problems, Guite said. Seven of the 500 got 100 millisieverts of radiation, a level known to raise the risk of cancer.

“At the dose seen in our study, one in 1,000 patients could get a radiation-induced cancer,” Guite told the meeting.

“This could lead to up to 23,000 radiation-induced cancers per year,” she said.

Many of the scans they looked at involved the use of a contrast agent — a fluid injected into a patient’s veins that makes the images more clear.

In that type of study, radiologists can look for different characteristics of the same organ at different times, depending on when the solution is present in the organ, and they often take multiple images of the same organ in the series. Each pass of the scanner exposes patients to radiation.

Dr. Louis Hinshaw of the University of Wisconsin who worked on the study said many institutions may be doing the extra studies for good measure, or because their machines are automatically set to do them.

But he said it was possible some centers were doing the extra scans because they may get paid more for them.  Continued…

By Andrew Quinn

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States is ready to shift the focus of its global AIDS programs from emergency medical support to building sustainable health systems, U.S. officials said on Monday as they announced that Washington would host the world AIDS conference in 2012.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the Obama administration was strengthening its commitment to fighting AIDS and would take a first step early next year by ending a longtime ban on HIV-positive foreign visitors.

“We have to make sure that our programs foster conditions that improve people’s lives and in turn promote stability, prosperity and security,” Clinton told a meeting to announce the decision to bring the 2012 world AIDS conference to Washington, the first time it will be held on U.S. soil since 1990.

“The return of the conference to the United States is the result of years of dedicated advocacy to end a misguided policy based on fear, rather than science,” International AIDS Society President-elect Elly Katabira said in a statement.

Clinton and other officials said the broader change would center on PEPFAR, the $18.8 billion program begun by former President George W. Bush, which has become the largest international health initiative dedicated to a single disease.

Eric Goosby, President Barack Obama’s global AIDS coordinator, said he would announce later this week a five-year strategy for PEPFAR that would see the emphasis shift from emergency interventions such as providing drugs to longer-term efforts to improve basic healthcare services.

DETAILS TO COME

Goosby said his review would include details of how PEPFAR will work with international partners and recipient governments to improve healthcare delivery and address stigma and discrimination in a “global response to a global responsibility.”

The AIDS virus infects 33 million people globally and about a million in the United States, but more people are living longer thanks to HIV drugs, according to a recent U.N. report.

But more than half the people who need lifesaving drugs are not getting them, the World Health Organization and Joint U.N. Program on HIV/AIDS say.

Cocktails of drugs can control HIV but there is no cure and no vaccine.

PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, has been credited with helping to cut AIDS deaths by 10 percent in targeted African nations and saving more than a million lives, in large part by supplying HIV drugs.

The program has been less successful in reducing the number of people infected with the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, the researchers found.

Some activists voiced fears that Obama — beset by problems ranging from the U.S. economy to the war in Afghanistan — would be unable to follow through with the same level of commitment on AIDS.

“There are worrisome signs the U.S. government is considering a significant slowing in the scale-up of global AIDS prevention and treatment,” Chris Collins, vice president of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, said in a statement.  Continued…