National Briefing

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/us/national-briefing.html

Version 0 of 1.

The American Counseling Association announced Tuesday that it was canceling plans to hold a conference in Nashville next March to protest a new Tennessee law that allows therapists to decline to see patients based on religious values and personal principles. The group has condemned the law as a “hate bill” that discriminates against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, and as an unprecedented attack on its profession. No other state has passed such a law, the group said, vowing to work to get it repealed and to keep similar measures from passing around the country. The conference would have brought 3,500 to 4,000 to Nashville, said the counseling association’s chief executive, Richard Yep, and generated what Nashville’s Convention and Visitors Corporation estimated as $2.5 million in direct spending and $444,609 in tax revenue for the city and state. Nashville’s mayor and tourist officials feared the city could face a backlash because of a law that it did not create or support. This is the second group to cancel a convention in Nashville because of the law, Bonna Johnson, a spokeswoman for the convention and visitors group, said in an email. She would not identify the other group. State Senator Jack Johnson, a Republican who sponsored the bill, has said counselors must refer patients they decline to treat to another therapist and must treat those seen as an immediate danger to themselves or others. (AP)

An Arkansas District Court judge has resigned after a state commission accused him of ordering male defendants to be spanked, engage in sex acts and bend over for thousands of photographs to fulfill their “community service,” the commission’s executive director said Tuesday. The Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission began an inquiry into Judge O. Joseph Boeckmann Jr. of Cross County in 2014 over a possible conflict of interest in an unrelated case on elder care, its executive director, David J. Sachar, said. But that case took a surprising turn when men who had appeared before Judge Boeckmann in court said they had been asked to bring him bags of canned goods, ostensibly for charity. Then, they said, the judge told them to bend over and pick up the cans as he photographed them from behind for what he called evidence of community service, according to a filing on the commission’s website. No criminal charges have been filed, but Mr. Sachar said they were possible. The judge’s lawyer, Jeff Rosenzweig, had no comment on the photographs but said Judge Boeckmann had done nothing wrong. He said the judge was near the end of his second elected four-year term when he resigned. CHRISTINE HAUSER

Urine tests for the Zika virus are more accurate than blood tests and should be the preferred diagnostic method in the two weeks after a suspected infection, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday. Tests done by the Florida Department of Health on urine, blood and saliva samples from 913 Florida residents with Zika symptoms detected the virus almost twice as often in urine as in blood early in the infection. Virus also stayed in urine for up to 20 days after the onset of symptoms, while it usually disappeared from blood after five days. Saliva testing was almost as accurate as urine testing, the report said, but no cases were detected using saliva alone. French scientists investigating simultaneous outbreaks of Zika virus in French Polynesia and New Caledonia in 2013 had discovered that testing urine was superior to testing blood. DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

The National Institutes of Health is replacing the leaders of its research hospital in Bethesda, Md., as part of an effort to improve patient safety there. The actions follow the recommendations of an expert group that the N.I.H. director, Dr. Francis S. Collins, appointed last year after the hospital, known as the N.I.H. Clinical Center, had to suspend operations at a unit that produced drugs for clinical studies. Two vials of a substance used in studies were contaminated with fungus. The expert group raised concern last month about a culture at the Clinical Center “in which patient safety gradually, and unintentionally, became subservient to research demands.” The center’s patients come from around the world to receive free experimental treatments for illnesses studied there. In a statement on Tuesday, the N.I.H. said it was changing the leadership structure of the center “to model those of world-class hospitals,” and seeking a chief executive “with proven experience in management of a complex inpatient and outpatient facility.” It is also recruiting a new chief operating officer and chief medical officer. Dr. John Gallin, the center’s director since 1994, is a clinician and researcher. ABBY GOODNOUGH