Author: WorkCompAcademy

A new round of deceiving text messages are popping up on cell phones, sent by scammers claiming to be from the California EDD or Bank of America. According to a report by KTVU, several Californians say that in recent weeks, they have received phishing scam texts that attempt to get pin, debit card numbers, or account information related to unemployment benefits.

It’s not new. But California’s Employment Development Department warned the sophisticated schemes are still trying to trick people into clicking a link that takes them to a website that may look legitimate.

Since the start of the pandemic, $181 billion has been paid out in unemployment insurance payments. A chunk of that has gone to fraudsters, according to former EDD Director Michael Bernick. Bernick has been in close contact with officials at the EDD since the pandemic began, keeping an eye on claims, rampant fraud and department challenges.

“We’ve seen the enormous amount of money washing through the system,” he said. “I think that’s the new normal in government benefits.”

The EDD has put new identity safeguards in place over the last year, which has prevented some fraud. Bernick said unemployment insurance has long been the primary target of identity thieves, but he expects sophisticated scams to also hit disability insurance, food stamps, and welfare programs.

The EDD warned Californians to be on alert with several tips.

– – Never click a link in an unexpected text message
– – Messages asking to reactivate a debit card are scams
– – Verify if an EDD text message is legitimate by logging onto “UI Online”
– – Call Bank of America using the phone number on the back of the debit card to confirm bank-related messages
– – Do not respond to suspicious text messages
– – EDD only sends text messages from the number 510-74 or 918-06

Californians who receive suspicious cell phone or email phishing communications should report those scam attempts to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. Phishing emails can be forwarded to the FTC’s Anti-Phishing Working Group at reportphishing@apwg.org and phishing text messages can be forwarded to the FTC at 7726. You can also call the EDD Fraud Hotline at 1-800-229-6297.

An expert in pharmaceutical policy has said that the frequent interactions between pharmaceutical companies and health professionals can pose a conflict of interest for clinicians.

Prof. Barbara Mintzes told The Epoch Times that research has demonstrated that there was a corollary between health professionals receiving a low price meal while being promoted a drug and the rate of the professional then prescribing that medication compared to generic alternatives of similar quality.

Mintzes said a common example is pharmaceutical companies sponsoring events to provide food and drinks for health professionals.

“If you survey doctors, they will say, I can’t be bought for the price of a pizza or I can’t be bought for the price of a sandwich,” Mintzes said but she noted that research in the US found physicians that receive a meal promoting the drug of interest, averaging less than $20, had a significantly higher rate of prescribing that medication compared to generic alternatives of similar quality.

The study also found a dose-response where “the more meals provided; the more likely doctors are to prescribe the product.“

Mintzes noted that while the decision may not be conscious, “we’re all human and there is a tendency to reciprocity whether we’re conscious of it or not.”

“You would also expect that the companies are also looking at the returns on investment on their marketing activities and would not continue with marketing activities that were ineffective in terms of stimulating sales.”

Prior to 2015, Medicines Australia required its member companies to publicize each event they had sponsored, including information of the event such as the number of health professionals and who had attended, how much money was spent and what was spent on with spending on food and drinks by far the most common.

Additionally, from Medicines Australia’s data from 2011 to 2015, Mintzes’s team found that on average, corporate sponsored events for pharmaceuticals were being held at hospitals and universities over 600 times every week, averaging 30 attendees per event.

However, since October 2015, Medicines Australia changed its codes of conduct from requiring food and drink payments being reported to have companies only listing clinicians they provided funding for.

Whilst this enhanced transparency around the identification of individual health professionals, subsequent studies led by the University of Sydney also observed a 34.1 percent reduction in disclosed spending in 2016 and decreased expenditure reports in the year following.

Despite Medicines Australians change in 2015, Mintzes’s recent co-authored study on underreporting of conflicts of interests by health professionals has raised further questions about the limitations of a self-reported system.

The team examined Medicines Australia’s public data and found that nearly half of pharmaceutical trials with Australian authors had omitted or incomplete conflicts of interest declarations when the research team received commercial funding.

“It certainly seems that it’s not a situation where there are just like one or two bad apples, who are hiding their conflicts of interest, it seems more of a situation where it’s quite widespread,” she said.

William Wong, director of utilities for Modesto, oversees water and sewage operations. Since early in the pandemic, he’s wanted to monitor the city’s sewage for SARS-CoV-2. It’s a natural extension of his work.

Kaiser Health News reports that across the country, academics, private companies, public health departments, and sewage plant operators have been working to hone a new public health tool, one with uses that could reach well beyond covid.

Wastewater surveillance is not a new concept, but the scale and scope of the current pandemic have vaulted the technique over the narrow walls of academic research to broader public use as a crucial tool for community-level tracking of covid surges and variants.

Sewage surveillance is proving so useful that many researchers and public health officials say it should become standard practice in tracking infectious diseases, as is already the case in many other countries. But whether that happens – and which communities get access – depends on the nation’s ability to vastly scale up the approach and make it viable in communities rich and poor.

Like many other public health tools, wastewater testing initially took off in big cities and university towns with access to research expertise, equipment, and money. The Modesto California project offers a glimpse of the challenges and opportunities involved in making this technology available in communities with more limited resources.

In Modesto, wastewater also revealed that the delta variant remained the dominant strain well into January, weeks after omicron had taken over elsewhere. That was important, said Dr. Julie Vaishampayan, the health officer for Stanislaus County, where Modesto is located. because some of the available treatments that don’t work for omicron are effective against delta. Her department told local doctors to keep using the full range of medicines, even after other areas had narrowed their treatment arsenal.

“You should be injecting more resources in places that are underserved since they have the disproportionate burden of disease,” said Colleen Naughton, an engineering professor at the University of California-Merced who is helping set up testing in Merced, Modesto, and surrounding Central Valley farm towns.

For covid surveillance, wastewater isn’t subject to the tricky inconsistencies that come with testing for the coronavirus in humans. Covid testing shortages have been a persistent problem throughout the pandemic, stemming both from supply-chain shortfalls and wide variation in local governments’ response. Long delays in test results can leave health officials weeks behind in detecting and monitoring infection trends.

More recently, at-home tests, whose results rarely find their way to public health departments, have proliferated. And for people living in lower-resource communities, there are incentives not to test at all, said Dr. Vaishampayan. A positive test can be a huge problem for people who can’t take time off work or keep their kids out of school.

By contrast, sewage surveillance is an effective and relatively low-budget enterprise, less reliant on human whim.

Dozens of research projects around the country have shown that the method can be used to accurately track covid trends over time. Upticks and drop-offs in neighborhood- and community-level infections can appear in sludge several days before they show up in tests.

Recent research has found that wastewater surveillance is a reliable method for monitoring flu and the common respiratory illness RSV. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told KHN it will soon launch pilot studies to see whether sewage can reveal trends in antibiotic-resistant infections, foodborne illnesses, and candida auris, a fungal infection.

There are places where sewage may not be a great way to keep tabs on covid. That includes communities without sewers; areas with industrial sewage, where treatment techniques can mask the virus; and communities with huge fluctuations in population, such as ski towns.

But where available, the data has already proven powerful. During the winter surge caused by omicron, California, Colorado, New York, and Texas first detected the variant via sewage. Central Valley health officials have said that sewage monitoring has assured them that declines in covid cases are real, and not a distorted reflection of declines in reported testing.

A new omicron subvariant of the virus that causes COVID-19, BA.2, is quickly becoming the predominant source of infections amid rising cases around the world. A new article in the Ventura County Star provided a closer look at what makes it different from previous variants, whether there will be another surge in the U.S. and how best to prepare.

BA.2 is the latest subvariant of omicron, the dominant strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. While the origin of BA.2 is still unclear, it has quickly become the dominant strain in many countries, including India, Denmark and South Africa. It is continuing to spread in Europe, Asia and many parts of the world.

The omicron variant has three main subvariants in its lineage: BA.1, BA.2 and BA.3. The earliest omicron subvariant to be detected, BA.1, was first reported in November 2021 in South Africa. While scientists believe that all the subvariants may have emerged around the same time, BA.1 was predominantly responsible for the winter surge of infections in the Northern Hemisphere in 2021.

Some scientists have called BA.2 a “stealth” variant because, unlike the BA.1 variant, it lacks a particular genetic signature that distinguishes it from the delta variant. While standard PCR tests are still able to detect the BA.2 variant, they might not be able to tell it apart from the delta variant.

BA.2 is considered to be more transmissible but not more virulant than BA.1. This means that while BA.2 can spread faster than BA.1, it might not make people sicker.

A recent preliminary study that has not yet been peer reviewed of over 1 million individuals in Qatar suggests that two doses of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines protect against symptomatic infection from BA.1 and BA.2 for several months before waning to around 10%. A booster shot, however, was able to elevate protection again close to original levels.

Importantly, both vaccines were 70% to 80% effective at preventing hospitalization or death, and this effectiveness increased to over 90% after a booster dose.

CDC data suggests that BA.2 cases are rising steadily, making up 23% of all cases in the U.S. as of early March. Scientists are still debating whether BA.2 will cause another surge in the U.S.

Though there may be an uptick of BA.2 infections in the coming months, protective immunity from vaccination or previous infection provides defense against severe disease. This may make it less likely that BA.2 will cause a significant increase in hospitalization and deaths.

The U.S., however, lags behind other countries when it comes to vaccination, and falls even further behind on boosters.

Whether there will be another devastating surge depends on how many people are vaccinated or have been previously infected with BA.1. It’s safer to generate immunity from a vaccine, however, than from getting an infection.

In January 2016, Gilbert Ellinger injured his back while working, and he immediately informed his supervisor.

The following month, Ellinger reported to his employer’s human resources manager that he had sustained a work-related injury and had told his supervisor about it. The human resources manager created a “time line memorandum” summarizing the conversations she had with Ellinger about the injury. She placed the memorandum in Ellinger’s personnel file.

Ellinger filed a workers’ compensation claim based on the injury. Zurich was the workers’ compensation insurance carrier for Ellinger’s employer, and ESIS was Zurich’s claims administrator. Stephanie Ann Magill worked as a senior claims examiner for ESIS and was the adjuster assigned to investigate Ellinger’s claim.

ESIS denied Ellinger’s claim. Magill later testified that she denied the claim because of an April 2016 written statement from Ellinger’s supervisor in which the supervisor claimed that Ellinger had not reported the injury to him.

When the human resources manager was deposed in November 2016, she produced the time line memorandum, which Ellinger’s counsel in the workers’ compensation action did not know about until then. Nearly eight months after that disclosure, in July 2017, ESIS reversed its denial of the claim and stipulated that Ellinger was injured while working, as he had alleged.

When Magill was deposed in September 2018 she testified that she was unaware of the time line memorandum. Contrary to Magill’s testimony, her email messages show that the human resources manager had emailed Magill the time line memorandum in March and April 2016, and Magill thanked the manager for sending it.

Ellinger brought suit on behalf of the People of the State of California against Zurich American Insurance Company, ESIS, Inc., and Magill under Insurance Code section 1871.7, a provision of the Insurance Frauds Prevention Act (IFPA). Ellinger alleged that Magill’s concealment of or failure to disclose the time line memorandum violated Penal Code section 550, subdivision (b)(1) to (3).

Defendants filed demurrers. They argued that insurers and their agents, such as a claims administration company and a claims adjuster, could not be held liable in a qui tam action under section 1871.7. The trial court sustained defendants’ demurrers without leave to amend. The Court of Appeal affirmed in the unpublished case of People ex. rel. Ellinger v Magill (March 2022) E076378.

The trial court found persuasive State of California ex rel. Nee v. Unumprovident Corp. (2006) 140 Cal.App.4th 442 and State of California ex rel. Metz v. Farmers Group, Inc. (2007) 156 Cal.App.4th 1063, and concluded that insurance carriers are not subject to liability under the IFPA for claims handling practices.

In this case the opinion rejected arguments against these prior decisions and concluded that “excluding insurers and their agents from liability under section 1871.7 does not “tacitly approve of insurance company fraud” or otherwise entail that insurers and their agents can commit fraud with impunity. It means only that insurers and their agents cannot be sued under the IFPA. That holding is not surprising, because the IFPA expressly targets only deceptive conduct directed at insurers, not improper conduct by insurers.”