Latest news with #Pap
The Star
7 days ago
- Health
- The Star
Most Malaysian women still unaware
PETALING JAYA: The biggest barrier to preventing cervical cancer and human papillomavirus (HPV) is the failure to recognise personal risk, says Prof Dr Murallitharan Munisamy. The National Cancer Society Malaysia (NCSM) managing director said many women wrongly believe they are not at risk because they feel healthy. 'The gap lies in the perception that I'm healthy, so I don't see the need for vaccination or screening. 'Another issue is ignorance – many assume HPV is only spread through sex, and since they have only one partner, they believe they're not at risk,' he said. He was responding to Health Minister Datuk Seri Dr Dzulkefly Ahmad's statement that more than 10,500 Malaysian women tested positive for HPV over the past five years through cervical cancer screening efforts. Dr Murallitharan also said many women are willing to spend on spas or beauty treatments but hesitate to invest in health screenings or vaccinations. He said following the success of the 'Leaving No One Behind' HPV vaccination programme last year, NCSM plans to partner with general practitioners to offer 70% subsidies for screenings. 'We are changing our approach. Instead of waiting for patients to come to us, we'll go to them,' he said. Echoing the concern, Malaysian Council for Child Welfare advisor Datuk Dr Raj Abdul Karim said many women do not take their health seriously enough. 'Many women don't realise that silent blood pressure or diabetes affects your health and even cancer can be invisible at times. 'As such, we need more advocacy and programmes for women on this, to emphasise that even if they feel well, they still need to get screening,' she added. She said the HPV vaccine can prevent high-risk strains linked to cervical cancer. 'So we need to accelerate the intake of the vaccine and have access to more screening among women, since cervical cancer is preventable,' she added. Dr Raj also recommended regular Pap smears for women aged 20 to 50, especially those who are sexually active. She said HPV DNA self-sampling could help eliminate cultural taboos and expand access for rural and vulnerable groups. Women's Aid Organisation executive director Nazreen Nizam said the conversation must shift from blaming women to addressing the systemic inequalities that limit access to healthcare. She said despite the introduction of the HPV vaccine in 2019, the lack of consistent and widespread public education has left many women unaware of its importance or how to access it. 'The government must invest in sustained, multilingual and culturally relevant public awareness campaigns, and ensure that screening services and vaccines are free or subsidised for all women, regardless of their citizenship or location. 'One possibility is to introduce age-based automatic subsidies for screenings, integrated into existing public healthcare systems and even GP clinics, so that it becomes part of routine care. 'But access alone isn't enough – the healthcare environment must also be safe, non-judgmental and respectful of women's autonomy and lived realities,' she said. HPV is the leading cause of cervical cancer, and any sexually active person can contract it. In Malaysia, cervical cancer is the second most common cancer among women aged 15 to 44.
Boston Globe
10-07-2025
- Health
- Boston Globe
‘That's a risk for me': Health system woes force a R.I. hospital to cancel routine women's care for hundreds of patients
Advertisement These cancellations are part of a wider problem within Rhode Island's health care system, where a primary care shortage is Get Rhode Island News Alerts Sign up to get breaking news and interesting stories from Rhode Island in your inbox each weekday. Enter Email Sign Up Spurgas is one of at least 300 women with annual OB-GYN appointments scheduled at the Newport Women's Health Services at Newport Hospital is owned and operated by the largest health care system in the state — Advertisement The exterior of Newport hospital where hundreds of women have had their OB/GYN appointments cancelled. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff Brown Health spokeswoman Jessica Wharton told the Globe that Newport Women's Health Services was down to just two practitioners, and a new gynecologist wasn't expected to begin working until October. 'We made the difficult decision to temporarily reschedule annual OB-GYN wellness visits originally scheduled for July through September to ensure that we can continue to provide timely and essential care to those with urgent, complex, or high-risk medical needs, including pregnant patients and those with active or serious gynecological concerns,' Wharton said in a statement. Related : Spurgas said she was told that she would be placed on a waitlist in October. But she may seek out care sooner, by finding a new provider in Massachusetts. 'I was in shock. They wouldn't explain at all what was going on,' said Spurgas. 'They just kept saying that it was because of Rhode Island's health care crisis. It was very vague.' Earlier this year, Brown Health's executives were considering closing down a dental center, halting major facility projects at Rhode Island Hospital, and discontinuing labor and delivery services at Newport Hospital in order to save money, according to an email sent by top Brown Health leaders to its managers in May that was obtained by the Globe. Related : The budget problems are not unique to Rhode Island's hospitals, and could become more critical in the coming months. Healthcare providers throughout New England will be affected by impending cuts to Medicaid through the ' Advertisement Many women who do not have an OB-GYN, or cannot afford one, seek reproductive care at Planned Parenthood clinics. But Related : 'Defunding is an attempt by lawmakers to make Planned Parenthood stop caring for patients and stop caring about reproductive freedom,' said Gretchen Raffa, chief policy and advocacy office of Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, during a virtual press conference on Monday. 'Make no mistake, this is a covert attack.' At Newport Women's Health Services, visits for new and existing prenatal patients, as well as those with high-risk pregnancies or other medical concerns, are unaffected. Experts say those whose routine checkups were postponed should not be worried about the delayed appointments, but should make sure to reschedule them. Advertisement 'Anyone who has an appointment for a Pap or HPV test that is cancelled should just be clear on what the follow-up plan might be, in terms of why it was taken off the books and if they should reschedule, either with their current provider or someone else,' said Fred Wyand, a senior advisor for the American Sexual Health Association/National Cervical Cancer Coalition. Cervical cancer tends to develop over a number of years, and not all women need to be screened annually, he said. 'If you have a Pap scheduled for Tuesday and for whatever reason you can't receive it, you won't develop cancer on Wednesday, but you don't want to fall out of the system.' 'That's what can happen, we lose the consistency and the regular screenings, and that's really when it can become risky,' he added. Alexa Gagosz can be reached at
Atlantic
01-07-2025
- Health
- Atlantic
The Biggest Anti-Abortion Victory Since ‘Dobbs'
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Amid all the news coverage of the GOP's spending-bill extravaganza—the late-night deficit debates, the strategy sessions, the hallway blanket-wearing —one piece of the package has received comparatively little attention: a provision that would block abortion clinics from receiving Medicaid funds for any of the non-abortion services they provide. During the past three years, abortion restrictions have mostly taken effect mostly in red and purple states—where legislatures have voted to enact them. But if this proposed provision passes, clinics all over the country will be affected. It would 'have a pretty devastating impact on a lot of providers,' Mary Ziegler, a legal scholar and an Atlantic contributor, told me. Some would probably close, and others would have to limit the number of patients they serve. It's 'a really big deal,' she said, with perhaps the most significant consequences for abortion access since the passage of the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funds for abortions in most cases. All of this is complicated—which helps explain the dearth of attention to the matter. But funding for independent abortion providers works like this: Clinics receive money from a variety of sources, including local donations, insurance payments, and Medicaid reimbursements. (Yes, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America receives millions in contributions every year, but most of those funds are earmarked for advocacy, Ziegler told me.) A big percentage of Planned Parenthood's patient pool relies on Medicaid. In keeping with the Hyde Amendment, providers are not reimbursed for abortions, but they do receive federal payments for other services, such as breast-cancer screenings, Pap smears, and STI testing. This new legislation would make Planned Parenthood and other clinics ineligible for any kind of Medicaid reimbursement, Ziegler said. If clinics are not paid for these services, then, in many cases, they won't be able to provide them. Maybe some clinics would be able to find funds from state legislatures or local donors to fill in the gaps, but many wouldn't. An initial version of the bill passed by the House would have blocked Medicaid funding for 10 years, but the current version, which passed the Senate earlier today, would prohibit that funding for just one year after the law's passage. (That's right—we'll all be back here again soon.) The cuts represent a pretty clear departure from President Donald Trump's 'leave it to the states' approach to abortion policy. They'd affect clinics everywhere, not just in places where Americans have grown accustomed to hearing about abortion restrictions. Most Planned Parenthood clinics at risk of closure under the bill are in states where abortion is legal, the organization says. That's partly because more blue states have recently expanded Medicaid. Up to one-third of patients at Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, for example, are on Medicaid, and reimbursement totals in the millions of dollars, PPNNE CEO Nicole Clegg told me. 'We'll work with our state leaders' and increase local fundraising efforts, she said. But it will be difficult to make up the difference. The bill's passage is part of an abortion one-two punch: Last week, the Supreme Court made it easier for states to deny Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood. 'This is tremendous progress on achieving a decades-long goal that has proved elusive in the past,' Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told me in a statement about the SCOTUS decision and the GOP bill. 'This proves what we've said all along: Congress can cut Planned Parenthood's funding—and they just did,' Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America, wrote on X about the bill. 'The moral obligation is clear: If we can do it for 1 year, we must do it for good.' The events of this week also represent a slight strategy change. Reporters like me who have long covered the anti-abortion movement anticipated that, under the second Trump presidency, activists would shift their efforts in a different direction: attempting to outlaw abortion via the 1873 Comstock Act. Many who follow this debate agree that they probably still will. But so far, Trump 'hasn't really been doing a lot of what the anti-abortion movement has wanted,' Ziegler said. She wonders whether it was 'a self-conscious decision to go where they thought Republicans already were'—to work toward withholding funding, which is probably politically safer for the GOP than pursuing a relatively unpopular outright abortion ban. Next stop: the House of Representatives. Lawmakers there took up the bill today and want to make it law by Friday. But defenders of abortion access are keeping an eye out. As always, with a razor-thin Republican majority, anything could happen. A big, bad, very ugly bill Jonathan Chait: Congressional Republicans didn't have to do this. A classic childhood pastime is fading. Today's News President Donald Trump visited ' Alligator Alcatraz,' a makeshift migrant-detention center in the Florida Everglades, and said that he wants to see more detention centers in 'many states.' Trump wrote in a social-media post that the Department of Government Efficiency might need to reexamine government subsidies for Elon Musk's businesses. Zohran Mamdani officially won New York City's Democratic mayoral primary by 12 points. Evening Read The Birth-Rate Crisis Isn't as Bad as You've Heard—It's Worse By Marc Novicoff First, the bad news: Global fertility is falling fast. The aging populations of rich countries are relying on ever fewer workers to support their economy, dooming those younger generations to a future of higher taxes, higher debt, or later retirement—or all three … By about 2084, according to the gold-standard United Nations 'World Population Prospects,' the global population will officially begin its decline. Rich countries will all have become like Japan, stagnant and aging. And the rest of the world will have become old before it ever got the chance to become rich. Sorry, did I say 'bad news'? That was actually the good news, based on estimates that turned out to be far too rosy. More From The Atlantic Watch. F1 (out now in theaters) threads the nitty-gritty details of Formula One racing into a traditional underdog drama, David Sims writes. Read. Soft Core, by Brittany Newell, is a noirish novel set in the world of strip clubs and BDSM dungeons that ventures beyond titillation and into the daily grind, Lily Burana writes.
Boston Globe
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Alanna Rizzo couldn't be happier with her better-balanced life and opportunity with NESN
'On the primary broadcast, Dave O'Brien and Lou Merloni and Will Middlebrooks when he's there pay attention to the game and do what the baseball fan wants to see in a conventional broadcast, and they're great at that,' she said. Advertisement 'But there are a lot of other things that are fun to talk about too, and that's where Pap and Jared come in with all of their different stories of, 'I remember this in this situation,' or 'It takes me back this year when this guy did this,' and if I can just make sure that they don't drop a ton of f-bombs in there and go off the ledge and keep Pap out of jail, then I'm doing my job.' So far, so good for Rizzo, who has some experience working with unpredictable personalities. She's had two prominent stints at MLB Network, with the most recent one contributing to the Chris 'Mad Dog' Russo -hosted show 'High Heat' from 2021 until it was canceled in November. Advertisement She had easy chemistry with Russo — 'He's the best, and exactly the same off the air and on,' she said — and she's establishing it with Papelbon and Carrabis. 'I think there's been fun chemistry between the three of us and we've only done about three or four shows, so it will only get better as we get used to the rhythms of working together,' she said. During her career as a host and reporter, Rizzo has found herself situated on the other side of the Red Sox at memorable junctures. She was in her first year as a Colorado Rockies reporter — she started in September — when that team went on a late-season tear and 'It's interesting to look back on those World Series,' she said, 'because it's clear that both times the Red Sox were the better team. The Dodgers were really good in 2018, but that Red Sox team was so talented from top to bottom.' Rizzo has called New England home base for a few years. After the Dodgers won the World Series during the COVID-abbreviated 2020 season, Rizzo made the decision to leave the job and move to the Boston area to be with her then-fiance, former MLB catcher and Rhode Island native They married in November 2022. 'I wasn't certain after leaving the Dodgers what my approach was going to be, but I didn't want to be done with the industry,' she said, 'but I needed to make a decision to come to the East Coast for sure because me being in LA and Chris being here made things a little more difficult.' Related : Advertisement So she reconnected with MLB Network and Russo, and she also maintains a couple of other baseball media gigs, including for Ken Rosenthal — and as a contributor to Sportsnet's Toronto Blue Jays coverage. It made all the sense for her to become part of NESN's coverage. The wheels were put in motion when Tom Caron mentioned to management that someone ought to give her a call and gauge her interest. 'I'm so happy it worked out this way,' said Rizzo, who beyond 'Unobstructed Views' also fills in for Caron in the studio and Jahmai Webster as the in-game reporter. 'I've gone from doing 200 games a year for the Dodgers for seven seasons, including spring training and postseason, to doing this, and it's been really fun. At this point I want that work-life balance, and NESN has provided that.' Draft choice was welcome ESPN and ABC featured two broadcasts of the first round of the NBA Draft: One with Stephen A. Smith , and one without. Smith makes me laugh on occasion, but I've been burned out on his NBA takes since before the playoffs began, so you can guess which one I chose. The Stephen A.-free ESPN version, which included host Malika Andrews and analysts Jay Bilas , Andraya Carter , and Kendrick Perkins . Good choice by me, though Perk was Perk and Andrews made a couple of uncharacteristic mistakes. She referred to Blazers draft pick Cedric Coward as ' Colin Cowherd ,' the FS1 host who was high on no one's draft board. More egregiously, she mispronounced the name of Nokomis High School in Newport, Maine, where Advertisement Mainers will eventually forgive her. Chad Finn can be reached at
Sunday World
12-06-2025
- Sunday World
Man accused of murdering his mother and producing an axe set to stand trial
Nebojsa Pap previously appeared in court last month where it was revealed the DPP had sanctioned an additional charge to the original count of murder Nebojsa Pap is charged with the murder of his mother Mirjana Pap. A Croatian man has been sent forward to stand trial accused of producing an axe during the course of murdering his mother in her midlands home five months ago. Thirty-two-year-old Nebojsa Pap, of Beechville in Athlone, Westmeath, was brought before a sitting of Athlone District Court this afternoon where he was served with a book of evidence in connection to the murder of Mirjana Pap at the same address as her son on December 28 last year. Pap who sported a grey jumper and black tracksuit bottoms, was flanked by three prison officers when he was led into court where details surrounding the servicing of the book of evidence was relayed before Judge Bernadette Owens. Nebojsa Pap is charged with the murder of his mother Mirjana Pap. Pap took to his feet and stood with his hands clasped as he greeted Judge Owens at the opening of proceedings by saying in a muffled voice: 'Afternoon Judge'. Garda Olivia Connolly gave sworn evidence of having served the book and its related counts of murder and the production of an axe on Pap at shortly before 2pm. Pap had previously appeared in court last month where it was revealed the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) had sanctioned the additional charge to the original count of murder. The details of that charge allege that on December 28 at 1 Beechville, Athlone, Westmeath, while committing murder, in the course of a dispute, Mr Pap produced an article in the form of an axe which was 'capable of inflicting serious injury'. Nebojsa Pap outside Athlone Courthouse. Today's News in 90 Seconds - June 12th Sgt Paul McNally, for the State, said the DPP had consented for Pap to be sent forward to stand trial at the next sittings of the Central Criminal Court. Pap's defence solicitor Ciara Macklin said her client was consenting to be remanded in continuing custody and would not be seeking bail given that any consequent application in terms of a murder charge can only be made before the High Court. Judge Owens, meanwhile, gave Pap what's known as the alibi warning, advising him of his obligations to notify the State within 14 days should he wish to rely on any alibi evidence during the course of his trial. Nebojsa Pap. Ms Macklin, meanwhile, also applied for legal aid in an application which was acceded to by Judge Owens to include both a junior and senior counsel to represent Pap. The late Ms Pap, who was a widow and mother of three, had resided in Athlone for several years and previously worked at the Athlone accommodation centre. The Croatian national's body was found on lands close to Clonark in Co Roscommon, around 10km from Athlone, on 30 December 2024 after she had been reported missing two days earlier.
