Daily Rounds: Nursing Homes Hiring Criminals; Old Food At Schools; Pricey J&J Drug Lags; Ending The Testing Addiction

Nursing Home Workers’ Criminal Pasts Found - NYTimes.com "More than 90 percent of nursing homes employ one or more people who have been convicted of at least one crime, federal investigators said Wednesday in a new report. In addition, they said, 5 percent of all nursing home employees have at least one criminal conviction." (nytimes.com)

Outdated food may be on the cafeteria menu - The Boston Globe "Cafeterias in the Boston public schools keep taco meat, cheese, and other food in freezers well past the expiration and best-by dates printed on packages. That practice was made public yesterday by Councilor at Large John R. Connolly, who inspected four school kitchens after hearing that frozen food in some schools dated to 2009." (boston.com)

J&J’s Risperdal Consta No Better Than Cheaper Drugs in Study - Bloomberg "Patients on Risperdal Consta, a twice-monthly injection, ended up in the hospital 39 percent of the time during the three-year analysis, about the same as those who took other drugs as a daily [cheaper] pill, a study released yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine said. People on the J&J treatment also reported more headaches and muscle tremors among their side effects, scientists found. Risperdal Consta generated $1.5 billion in sales last year for New Brunswick, New Jersey-based J&J."  (bloomberg.com)

Doc Calls For End To High-Cost-Test Addiction | WBUR "DR. SEAN PALFREY: The effects are two- or three-fold. On the one hand, most tests cause pain. Second, they may give us information either we don’t want or that is confusing, And, third, because they do cost millions and millions of dollars, I think they’re part of the reason why we are unable to cover all of the children and all of the adults in this country with health care." (WBUR | 90.9 FM)