Daily Rounds: Fish Fraud; EMR Cash Arrives; Commuting As Marriage-Killer; Bad News On Niacin

New Technology Reveals Widespread Mislabeling of Fish - NYTimes.com "Scientists aiming their gene sequencers at commercial seafood are discovering rampant labeling fraud in supermarket coolers and restaurant tables: cheap fish is often substituted for expensive fillets, and overfished species are passed off as fish whose numbers are plentiful.Yellowtail stands in for mahi-mahi. Nile perch is labeled as shark, and tilapia may be the Meryl Streep of seafood, capable of playing almost any role." (nytimes.com)

BIDMC receives Medicare award for electronic health records - White Coat Notes - Boston.com (boston.com) "The federal government today awarded its first payments from a Medicare program designed to push hospitals and individual health care providers to adopt electronic health records. Three Massachusetts physicians received payments starting at $18,000. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, long a leader in electronic records, received $2.57 million."

Long commutes cause obesity, neck pain, loneliness, divorce, stress, and insomnia. - By Annie Lowrey - Slate Magazine "Couples in which one partner commutes for longer than 45 minutes are 40 percent likelier to divorce. The Swedes could not say why. Perhaps long-distance commuters tend to be poorer or less educated, both conditions that make divorce more common. Perhaps long transit times exacerbate corrosive marital inequalities, with one partner overburdened by child care and the other overburdened by work. But perhaps the Swedes are just telling us something we all already know, which is that commuting is bad for you. Awful, in fact. Commuting is a migraine-inducing life-suck—a mundane task about as pleasurable as assembling flat-pack furniture or getting your license renewed, and you have to do it every day." (Slate)

Niacin Drugs Don’t Reduce Heart Attack Risk, Study Says - NYTimes.com  "The results are part of a string of studies that suggest that what doctors thought they knew about cholesterol may be wrong. Studies that track patients over time have for decades shown that patients with higher levels of high-density lipoproteins (H.D.L., or good cholesterol) tend to live longer and have fewer heart problems than those with lower levels of this cholesterol.
Not surprisingly, doctors thought that if they could raise H.D.L. levels, their patients would benefit. So far, that assumption is not panning out. Nobody knows why." (nytimes.com)

Memo To GOP: Cutting Medicaid Is Unpopular, Too : Shots - Health Blog : NPR "This month's health tracking poll from the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation finds that only 13 percent of those polled support major reductions in Medicaid spending as part of congressional efforts to reduce the deficit. At the same time, 60 percent want to keep Medicaid as it is. That means having the federal government guarantee coverage and set minimum standards for benefits and eligibility for every state." (npr.org)