Pizza Lovers — Watch Out!

March 6, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Paul Krugman opens the eyes of the hungry today. Who would have known that there is an enormous Pizza Lobby, and it gives enormously to Republicans?

 

A recent Bloomberg report noted that major pizza companies have become intensely, aggressively partisan. Pizza Hut gives a remarkable 99 percent of its money to Republicans. Other industry players serve Democrats a somewhat larger slice of the pie (sorry, couldn’t help myself), but, over all, the politics of pizza these days resemble those of, say, coal or tobacco. And pizza partisanship tells you a lot about what is happening to American politics as a whole.

… some parts of the food industry have responded to pressure from government agencies and food activists by trying to offer healthier options, but the pizza sector has chosen instead to take a stand for the right to add extra cheese.

The rhetoric of this fight is familiar. The pizza lobby portrays itself as the defender of personal choice and personal responsibility. It’s up to the consumer, so the argument goes, to decide what he or she wants to eat, and we don’t need a nanny state telling us what to do.

… At one level, there is a clear correlation between lifestyles and partisan orientation: heavier states tend to vote Republican, and the G.O.P. lean is especially pronounced in what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention call the “diabetes belt” of counties, mostly in the South, that suffer most from that particular health problem. Not coincidentally, officials from that region have led the pushback against efforts to make school lunches healthier.

Filed under Health, Politics Tagged with ,

Marin County Makes the Daily Show!

February 5, 2015 by Leave a Comment

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Medicare Spending Gap Falls Again

August 28, 2014 by Leave a Comment

For quite some time now, the Deficit Hawks in the greater American punditocracy have waved their fear flags about Medicare and how it was going to send the nation down the slippery slope of Greekification.  Better to let each oldster and handicapped person work it out on their own, or depend on relatives or churches, or the side-walks, like the good old days!

Well the latest data shows the worry has been overwhelming their prognostication.  Not that they will stop shrieking of course.  But anyway, here it is:

You’re looking at the biggest story involving the federal budget and a crucial one for the future of the American economy. Every year for the last six years in a row, the Congressional Budget Office has reduced its estimate for how much the federal government will need to spend on Medicare in coming years. The latest reduction came in a report from the budget office on Wednesday morning.

The changes are big. The difference between the current estimate for Medicare’s 2019 budget and the estimate for the 2019 budget four years ago is about $95 billion.

…

Some of the recent reductions in Medicare spending are because of differences in estimates about the economy and demographics that affect the program.

And some are because of cuts in health care spending passed by Congress. The Affordable Care Act, in particular, made significant reductions to Medicare’s spending on hospitals and private Medicare plans, to help subsidize insurance coverage for low- and middle-income Americans. The Budget Control Act, which Congress passed in 2011, also made some across-the-board cuts to Medicare spending.

Filed under Economy, Health Tagged with ,

Enter Depression, Exit…

August 13, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Count me as one of those who has to turn off the radio or television when news and commentary and sorrow about Robin Williams’ suicide begins.  Way too close an encounter for me, like the shadow of a shark to a snorkling diver.  I use the time to review the rules: don’t swim in certain waters, only go in with friends, and only when I’m rested, feeling buoyant.  When a shadow appears, talk to myself: talk to others.  Swim away as away from a rip-tide, across the current not straight back in. Panic doesn’t help; irony sometimes does — there you are again, swimming from shadows! Solid land is back there somewhere; I know, I’m mostly on it.  There are more.  Here’s a good article in the Guardian’s Science section.

Depression, the clinical condition, could really use a different name. At present, the word “depressed” can be applied to both people who are a bit miserable and those with a genuine debilitating mood disorder. Ergo, it seems people are often very quick to dismiss depression as a minor, trivial concern. After all, everyone gets depressed now and again, don’t they? Don’t know why these people are complaining so much.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; dismissing the concerns of a genuine depression sufferer on the grounds that you’ve been miserable and got over it is like dismissing the issues faced by someone who’s had to have their arm amputated because you once had a paper cut and it didn’t bother you. Depression is a genuine debilitating condition, and being in “a bit of a funk” isn’t. The fact that mental illness doesn’t receive the same sympathy/acknowledgement as physical illness is often referenced, and it’s a valid point. If you haven’t had it, you don’t have the right to dismiss those who have/do. You may disagree, and that’s your prerogative, but there are decades’ worth of evidence saying you’re wrong.

Guardian: Burnett

Filed under Health, Passings Tagged with , ,

Death by Pollution Soaring

March 26, 2014 by Leave a Comment

This ain't dusk folks, it's pollution in Guangdong Province, China (Credit Alex Lee/Reuters )

This ain’t dusk folks, it’s pollution in Guangdong Province, China (Credit Alex Lee/Reuters )

“From taxi tailpipes in Paris to dung-fired stoves in New Delhi, air pollution claimed seven million lives around the world in 2012, according to figures released Tuesday by the World Health Organization. More than one-third of those deaths, the organization said, occurred in fast-developing nations of Asia, where rates of cardiovascular and pulmonary disease have been soaring.

Around the world, one out of every eight deaths was tied to dirty air, the agency determined — twice as many as previously estimated. Its report identified air pollution as the world’s single biggest environmental health risk.

… The report found that those who are most vulnerable live in a wide arc of Asia stretching from Japan and China in the northeast to India in the south.

Exposure to smoke from cooking fires means that poor women are especially at risk, the agency said

Indoor air pollutants loomed as the largest threat, involved in 4.3 million deaths in 2012, while toxic air outdoors figured in 3.7 million deaths, the agency said. Many deaths were attributed to both.

See New York Times: Jacobs and Johnson

Filed under Environment, Health Tagged with , ,

Doctors Without Borders Partially Back in Burma

March 4, 2014 by Leave a Comment

The news coming from Burma has not been good for months.  While foreign investment has picked up and a certain liberalization of life inside the country has taken place, terrible xenophobic violence, led by s few Buddhist monks,  has brought the deaths of many, homelessness and fear to tens of thousands.  A few days ago, the President, inexplicably, forced Médecins Sans Frontières out of the country.  Yesterday, the decision was reversed, partially.  They can’t go where they are most needed.

 BURMA is to allow Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to resume work – just days after announcing that the group was to be thrown out the country.

But the Nobel Peace Prize-winning group will not be allowed to resume work in Rakhine, a state plagued by bloody bouts of sectarian violence. MSF has expressed grave concern at the weekend about the fate of tens of thousands of vulnerable people in that state.

The group has been providing care there to both ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims, a mostly stateless minority who live in apartheid-like conditions and who otherwise have little access to health care.

The Scotsman and The Burma Times

A Rohingya family have a meager meal in a camp for displaced Muslim families near Sittwe in May 2013. (Photo: Jpaing / The Irrawaddy)

A Rohingya family have a meager meal in a camp for displaced Muslim families near Sittwe in May 2013. (Photo: Jpaing / The Irrawaddy)

Filed under Asia, Civil Rights Tagged with , ,

Health Insurance Sign Ups Increasing

February 13, 2014 by Leave a Comment

“For the first time since the federal and state health-insurance marketplaces opened early last fall, the number of people who signed up for coverage exceeded the government’s expectations for the month in January, bringing the overall total to about 3.3 million.

Across the country, nearly 1.2 million people enrolled in health plans last month through the new insurance exchanges — more than federal officials had envisioned when they compiled monthly targets late last summer, weeks before the sign-ups began.

Washington Post

Two things occur to me: if you don’t get health insurance who is going to pay the costs should the good-health fairy-dust not fall on you? If the GOP wins enough seats in 2016 and follows up with their zeal to roll back the Federally enabled insurance markets, will there be blood in the streets as people are stripped of coverage?

Filed under Health Tagged with ,

Post War Trauma — and Love

February 10, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Terry Gross interviewed a quite incredible couple today on her Fresh Air show.

Kayla Williams and Brian McGough met in Iraq in 2003, when they were serving in the 101st Airborne Division. She was an Arabic linguist; he was a staff sergeant who had earned a bronze star. In October of that year, at a time when they were becoming close but not yet seeing each other, McGough was on a bus in a military convoy when an IED went off, blowing out the front door and window.

“Essentially a piece of shrapnel went through the back of my head, burrowed the skull from the back of my head past my ear, out through where my eye is and while doing this it also ripped some brain matter out,” McGough tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross.

Williams has written a memoir about their life together, titled Plenty of Time When We Get Home: Love and Recovery in the Aftermath of War,  surviving their sometimes reinforcing mutual PTSD, and now raising two kids.  It’s pretty amazing to hear them talk about what they have been through, and by talking perhaps giving others in similar situations the vocabulary and conceptual tools to advance further in their own struggles.

It’s worth the 40 minutes to hear them. Highly recommended.

Books -- Plenty of Time

For a related look at post-war trauma see Hidden Battles, a look at people affected by war in several times and countries — from the Nicaragua civil war to Palestine and Israel.  Victoria Mills has brought 5 veterans to the screen, some visiting the scenes of their old battles, and let them talk about what it has been like in the years after.  A very accessible way to widen the conversation about war injuries — they happen everywhere, not only to American soldiers in distant places.  Killing has consequences and not only for the dead.

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Poisoning the Children

January 30, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Not only does the Mafia shoot, strangle or dump into river those who cross them, they sow the land with worse than Roman salt in Carthage, millions and millions of tons of toxic waste, reaping dumping fees and sowing death by cancer for their own children and those of their neighbors.

It’s not that it hasn’t been known, but knowing is finally finding its feet.

A group of 13 women who claim their children died of cancer after being poisoned by tons of toxic waste dumped in their region by the local mafia met with Italy’s president Wednesday.

They traveled to Rome from their towns around Naples as representatives of some 150,000 mothers who sent Italian President Giorgio Napolitano postcards with photos of their dead or cancer-stricken children in the hope that he might put an end to the environmental crimes that have been perpetrated in their region for decades.

“We are want truth and justice,” said one of the mothers, Pina Leana, at the presidential palace Wednesday. “We want facts, not empty words.

WorldNews

mafia-dump-waste

In 1997 a hearing was held about the dumping, taking testimony from a one-time member of the Casalesi clan near Naples. It was so detailed and implicated so many in the government it has been sealed until October of 2013.

“We are talking about millions of tons,” Schiavone, formerly head of administration for the Mafia organization, told the parliamentarians. “I also know that trucks came from Germany carrying nuclear waste.” The operations took place under the protection of darkness and were guarded by Mafiosi in military police uniforms, he said. He showed Italian justice officials the location of many of the dumpsites because, as he put it in 1997, the people in those areas are at risk of “dying of cancer within 20 years.”

numerous officials at all levels must have known about Schiavone’s warnings since the mid-1990s — and ignored them.

The pressure is particularly great on the following players:

  • Giorgio Napolitano was Italy’s interior minister at the time and thus ultimately in charge of the investigation. Today, he is the country’s president.
  • Gennaro Capoluongo was, according to Schiavone, in a helicopter that went on a tour of some of the toxic waste dumps. Today, he is Italy’s Interpol head.
  • Alessandro Pansa was head of mobile units for the Italian police force at the time. Now he is head of the Italian State Police.
  • Nicola Cavaliere was with the criminal police at the time and was involved in the case, according to Schiavone. Today is the deputy head of Italy’s domestic intelligence service.

Der Spiegel

and more at the NY Times

Filed under Corruption, Environment Tagged with , , ,

Antibacterials = Antihealth?

December 17, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Ever since the little plastic bottles with jelly-like stuff promising to keep us ultra clean and healthy began appearing I have been skeptical.  Really?  Ordinary soap and water isn’t good enough?  Really?  Paper dust on my fingers is going to make me sick?  Really?  We’ve begun to hear some doubts about these claims in the past few years, but it seems to have finally gotten some lead time…

After years of mounting concerns that the antibacterial chemicals that go into everyday items like soap and toothpaste are doing more harm than good, the Food and Drug Administration said on Monday that it was requiring soap manufacturers to demonstrate that the substances were safe or to take them out of the products altogether.

The proposal was applauded by public health experts, who for years have urged the agency to regulate antimicrobial chemicals, warning that they risk scrambling hormones in children and promoting drug-resistant infections, among other things. Producers argue that the substances have long been proved to be safe.

“It’s a big deal that they are taking this on,” said Rolf Halden, the director of the Center for Environmental Security at Arizona State University, who has been tracking the issue for years. “These antimicrobials have taken on a life all of their own,”

NY Times: Sabrina Tavernise

And that’s not all.  Not only do soaps and toothpastes promise health through bacteria bombing there are other issues with the stuff:

Tiny plastic beads used in hundreds of toiletries like facial scrubs and toothpastes are slipping through water treatment plants and turning up by the tens of millions in the Great Lakes. There, fish and other aquatic life eat them along with the pollutants they carry — which scientists fear could be working their way back up the food chain to humans.

Yes, there is such a thing as being too clean…

Filed under Corporations, Environment, Health Tagged with , ,

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