According to a 2008 CDC study, 82.8 percent of male prisoners in Minnesota reported having had one or more brain injury over the course of their lifetime. Marlena M. Wald and her colleagues found the causes ranged from assaults (37%), auto crashes (25%), sports-related (11%) to falls (11%). Another study showed that 87 percent of a county jail population had a history of brain injury (Slaughter, Facc & Ehde, 2003). This study also showed that many of these prisoners experience mental health problems such as severe depression and anxiety. Other studies have shown co-occurring problems such as alcohol and substance abuse, suicidal thoughts and attempts as well as significant anger management issues for this population.
In 1986, Dr. Dorothy Lewis and Dr. Jonathan Pincus published a study of 15 death row inmates and found every one of them had suffered severe brain injuries in childhood, about half were caused by assaults and six were chronically psychotic. Another study of 14 juveniles sentenced to death found all of them had suffered from a brain injury, most in auto crashes but assaults as well. Twelve had been brutally physically abused and five were sodomized by relatives.
We know where this tipping point begins. Over 765,000 American youth suffer a new brain injury every year, over 80,000 are hospitalized and over 11,000 die annually. Every 40 seconds another American family enters an Emergency Room with a new brain injury. And these are the ones who are actually identified, when two to three times are not identified. These numbers do not include the tens of thousands of non-traumatic acquired brain injuries such as meningitis which President Obama’s daughter had as an infant to strokes, brain tumors and seizure-disorders.
Not surprisingly, The Neptune Nudniks let Pallone spin the stroy
By Art Gallagher
The Asbury Park Press has finally reported Congressman Frank Pallone’s interference with the Food and Drug Administration on behalf of a campaign donor.
After receiving campaign contributions from ReGen Biologics, a Hackensack based medical device manufacturer, and its executives in 2008, Pallone, Congressman Steven Rothman and Senators Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menedez , the four legislators pressured the FDA into approving ReGen’s Menaflex knee patch. Menaflex had previously been rejected twice. This week the FDA reversed the decision and announced it was rescinding the approval.
Pallone told the Asbury Park Press that what he did was routine, what he would do for any constituent.
ReGen is in Hackensack which is not in the 6th congressional district. ReGen CEO Gerald Bisbee, who along with his wife Linda contributed $32,000 of the over $50,000 contributed to the legislators and the Democratic party, lives in Connecticut. John Dichiara, the company’s government affairs director, wrote checks for $20,800. He lives in New York.
Pallone told the APP that he has three staffers who help residents who are having trouble with government red tape.
Patrick Donohue hasn’t given any money to Pallone either. Maybe that is why Frank won’t release H. Con Res. 198, a resolution recognizing Pediatric Acquired Brain Injury as the leading cause of death and disability in the United States for children and young adults from birth until 25 years of age and endorsing the National Pediatric Acquired Brain Injury Plan, from the committee he chairs.
Pallone told the APP that the FDA has mismanaged the project from the beginning. He said that the product is approved in Europe and that, “This is a product that could have helped people. It could have saved people a lot of pain.”
That’s not what Pallone was saying in May of 2009. He, Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak signed a 16 page letter to the FDA raising questions about the ReGen Menaflex approval and asking them to review it. That hardly seems routine. I guess the APP fact checkers missed that.
During his Red Bank town hall meeting in August of 2009, Pallone said “Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman are the two finest people I know in Washington.”
Let’s summarize what we know of Pallone’s involvement with ReGen and the FDA so far.
1) In 2008 Pallone received campaign contributions from ReGen executives and then he joined his NJ colleagues Rothman, Lautenberg and Menedez in applying pressue to the FDA to approve the ReGen product.
2) In 2009, Pallone reversed course. He joined Waxman, “one of the finest people he knows in Washington” in raising questions about the ReGen product’s approval and asking the FDA to review it. He did so in a 16 page letter with a signature larger than John Hancock’s.
3) In 2010, while in the midst of the tightest election he has ever faced in his career, Pallone flips again. He tells the Asbury Park Press that what he did was routine, like what he would do for anybody. He said the FDA mismanaged the process from the beginning and that the product could help a lot of people.
Congressional candidate Anna Little (R, NJ-6) held a press conference this morning to shed light on Pediatric Acquired Brain Injury and the plan for the treatment of brain injuries created by the Sarah Jane Donohue Foundation that has the bi-partison support of 110 members of the House of Representatives.
Little’s opponent, Congressman Frank Pallone, is preventing congress from holding an up for down vote on the the Pediatric Acquired Brain Injury Plain by refusing to allow H. Con Res. 198 from being released from the committee he chairs.
Frank Pallone is preventing H. Con Res. 198, a resolution recognizing Pediatric Acquired Brain Injury as the leading cause of death and disability in the United States for children and young adults from birth until 25 years of age and endorsing the National Pediatric Acquired Brain Injury Plan to develop a seamless, standardized, evidence-based system of care universally accessible for all of these children, young adults, and their families, regardless of where they live in the country from being referred from the committee he chairs and getting an up or down vote from Congress, according to Patrick Donohue, father of Sarah Jane Donohue and founder of The Sarah Jane Brain Foundation.
110 members of congress from both parties have co-sponsored the resolution.
Donohue’s organization has developed a comprehensive plan for the prevention of and treatment for brain injuries among children and young adults up to the age of 25. The program would cost approximately $930 million and would be funded through several federal departments under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the $787 billion dollar “stimulus” package passed last year.
Pallone refused to discuss the resolution or his reasoning for preventing a congressional vote on it, according to Donohue. Maybe Pallone doesn’t like it because ACORN is not involved or because labor unions will not be putting members to work with “prevailing wage” compensation. Or maybe it is because Donohue is a New York Republican fundraiser with close ties to former NY Governor George Pataki.
It can’t be because Pallone is suddenly a fiscal conservative. After all he wants to spend $400 million to count fish.
UPDATE: Yesterday on his facebook page Pallone had an announcement that his committee had moved a bill for veterinary care. Imagine that, pet care before pediatric brain care!
