Word: tasked
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...members of the independent U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommended that most women delay routine mammograms until age 50 (instead of 40, as the panel advised in 2002). The task force cited enhanced analysis of the risks and benefits of screening as the reason for the new guidelines. But the recommendations went straight to the heart of the emotionally charged debate over the Democratic-sponsored health care reform legislation that is working its way through Congress. Republicans like Representative Marsha Blackburn charged that "this is how rationing begins. This is the little toe in the edge of the water...
Judging from the reaction to the new breast-cancer recommendations, that is proving to be a difficult reality for Americans to accept. But the task force's mammography advice probably marks the leading edge of similar recommendations to come. Already, new guidelines on Pap smear screening for cervical cancer have delayed the age at which young women should begin regular testing and reduced the frequency of testing in older women. Doctors are also questioning the usefulness of prostate-cancer screening among otherwise healthy middle-aged men, as studies begin to show that the test, which has many risks...
...body. At the time, screening all women made sense, especially since annual mammograms had reduced deaths from breast cancer 3% each year since 1990. But as Dr. Russell Harris, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a member of the task force, points out, breast cancer occurs less frequently in younger women, and not every cancer is the same. Some tumors are indolent and slow-growing; others are aggressively malignant and blanket a body within months. Mammography is best at spotting the slowest-growing tumors, which are most common and generally...
...impossible to say how frequently such "overdiagnosis" occurs, according to the task force, but the data did conclusively show that in order to save the life of one woman in her 40s from breast cancer, 1,904 women would have to be screened every year for up to 20 years. Because it judged that the risks of harm from annual screening outweighed the benefits, the panel issued its controversial recommendation that most women ages 40 to 49 need not get routine mammograms. "We felt that women would be better served if they understood the trade-off between the benefits, harms...
Feinstein also argues that Zuma is wildly inappropriate for the task he has set himself. Feinstein resigned from the ANC in 2001 in protest at his party's open hostility toward his investigation into a corrupt $5 billion arms deal. Through his financial adviser, who was jailed in 2005 for fraud, Zuma was one of the beneficiaries of kickbacks worth thousands of dollars. With Mbeki and Zuma slugging it out at the time, the courts and the state prosecutors became their arena, at considerable cost to the judiciary's independence. Prosecutors finally dropped the case in April, two weeks...