Salon.com > public health

A salon on Mayor Bloomberg’s big drink ban

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 18:34:00 +0000

Earlier this week a judge nixed New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed ban on sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces. Bloomberg is arguably the most influential advocate for public health in the country. His 2003 ban on smoking in bars has been widely copied. More recently, his staunch advocacy for gun control and his bottomless pockets suggest he could take on the NRA. His soda ban, however, has even some supporters scratching their heads. Will it help to fight obesity? Why 16 ounces? Is it just too intrusive?

Sorry, Bloomberg, NYC continues to supersize

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:44:00 +0000

Keep drinking, New York. On Monday, just one day before Mayor Bloomberg's controversial ban on supersize sugary drinks was to go into effect, a state Supreme Court judge struck it down.

You can imagine El Bloombito's disappointment. Mike Bloomberg has had stunning previous successes with his health-focused initiatives — a 2008 ban on trans fats in restaurants paved the way for significant changes in food preparation across the country, and led to a large reduction in the amount of a heart-disease-promoting ingredient in our foods. Two years ago, he restricted smoking in the city's parks, beaches and public spaces – and other cities have either followed suit or are now considering similar measures.

Illness is big business

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 20:29:00 +0000

WHEN I WAS in my early twenties I lived in New Zealand for several years, working on a television series. Our series was stunt based and one day I almost broke my ankle. New Zealand has a national healthcare system. Even though I was not a New Zealand citizen, I still was taken to a doctor who x-rayed my ankle. Once he deemed the foot not broken he prescribed me a regimen of physical therapy. A trained therapist came to my house and rubbed my swollen and quite purple foot twice a day. None of this cost me anything– of course the production company was taking care of that– but that original doctor was a public one, in a public emergency room. When he finished up his exam and knew that my foot-bones were still intact, that simple extra step he took prescribing me physical therapy was his way of treating his patient’s whole care, not just the condition.

Everything you never wanted to know about the European horse meat scandal

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:46:00 +0000

It started when Ireland's food safety authority discovered that horse meat accounted for nearly 30 to 100 percent of the meat content of hamburgers being sold by major supermarket chains, but in less than a month, the scandal spread as horse meat -- and, in some cases, a powerful equine drug -- was found in beef products in Britain, Spain, Italy and Germany.

Today, there are nearly a dozen countries pulling products believed to be adulterated with horse DNA from their shelves, sparking a flurry of attention to a continent-wide crisis over international supply chains and a lack of transparency in food manufacturing standards.

Where did the horse meat even come from?

Good question, but it's a hard one to answer. Food supply chains are incredibly complex, so European authorities are scrambling to trace multiple sources. The number seems to grow by the day.

Teen birthrate hits a record low

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 17:59:00 +0000

The teenage birthrate in the United States fell to a record low in 2011, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers documented an 8 percent drop in teen births between 2010 and 2011, with just over 3 percent of 15- to 19-year-olds having babies during that period.

This is bad news for Teen Mom producers, but probably good news for everyone else.

Women in their 20s were also less likely to have babies than in previous years, and the birthrate among women in their their late 30s and early 40s actually increased, according to the report.

Researchers say that women in their 20s delaying motherhood, and the parallel trend of more women having kids in their 30s and 40s could be the result of a long-struggling economy. "The economy has declined, and that certainly is a factor that goes into people's decisions about having a child," CDC statistician Brady Hamilton, lead author of the new report, told Reuters Health.

Poll: Obesity’s a crisis, but we want our junk food

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 17:42:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (AP) -- We know obesity is a health crisis, or every new year wouldn't start with resolutions to eat better and get off the couch. But don't try taking away our junk food.

Americans blame too much screen time and cheap fast food for fueling the nation's fat epidemic, a poll finds, but they're split on how much the government should do to help.

Most draw the line at policies that would try to force healthier eating by limiting food choices, according to the poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

A third of people say the government should be deeply involved in finding ways to curb obesity, while a similar proportion want it to play little or no role. The rest are somewhere in the middle.

Require more physical activity in school, or provide nutritional guidelines to help people make better choices? Sure, 8 in 10 support those steps. Make restaurants post calorie counts on their menus, as the Food and Drug Administration is poised to do? Some 70 percent think it's a good idea.

"That's a start," said Khadijah Al-Amin, 52, of Coatesville, Pa. "The fat content should be put up there in red letters, not just put up there. The same way they mark something that's poisonous, so when you see it, you absolutely know."

No soda for food stamps?

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 17:25:00 +0000

Should the government dictate what the poor can drink?

New York Times columnist Mark Bittman argues that the almost 50 million people who receive SNAP benefits (formerly known as food stamps) should not be allowed to spend the funds on soda and other junk food. The idea has “been gaining momentum in the last few years” Bittman writes, since “no one without a share in the profits can argue that [a sugary drink] plays a constructive role in any diet.”

Bittman’s column highlights a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association:

“It’s shocking,” says [Dr. David] Ludwig, [director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center and one of the article’s authors] “how little we consider food quality in the management of chronic diseases. And in the case of SNAP that failure costs taxpayers twice: We pay once when low-income families buy junk foods and sugary beverages with SNAP benefits, and we pay a second time when poor diet quality inevitably increases the costs of health care in general, and Medicaid and Medicare in particular.”

“Condom ambulance” coming to a campus near you

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 18:44:00 +0000

There's not much need to leave the house these days. Seamless brings you sushi during a superstorm, Amazon delivers books to your doorstep and Netflix ensures that you never read them. For those curious about the next big thing in our increasingly stationary consumer culture, look no further than the Condom Ambulance, a condom delivery service for your latest sex emergency.

Launched by College of New Jersey sophomore and interactive multimedia major Kyle McCabe, the Condom Ambulance will get you good and prophylactic-ed within minutes of placing your order by phone, text or Web. After a customer fills out the order form, provides an on-campus location and signs a waiver, McCabe hurries over with your order -- $3 for one condom, and up to 10 for $15 -- and discreetly slips it under your door. The website promises: you've gone from "kissing, to condoms, to sexy-time in mere seconds."

McCabe's motivation for starting the Condom Ambulance isn't purely financial, as he told his campus newspaper, the Signal.

“Fever Season”: Revelations of a plague year

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 11:00:00 +0000

"The panic is fearful today," wrote an Episcopal nun from Memphis, Tenn., in the summer of 1878. "Eighty deaths reported and half the doctors refuse to report at all. We found one of our nurses lying on the floor in her patient's room down with the fever, another is sickening. I really believe that Dr. Harris and I and the two negro nurses are the only well persons anywhere near here."

With more than half the city's population fled and most of those remaining stricken by the virus known as Yellow Jack, Bronze John and "the Stranger's Disease" — yellow fever — Memphis resembled a post-apocalyptic landscape to rival that in any zombie film. At the peak of the epidemic, corpses lay in the streets as overburdened work crews struggled to convey them to mass graves. Looters rampaged through the posher homes in the only major urban center between St. Louis and New Orleans, guzzling their victims' liquor and collapsing with the fever at the scene of their crimes. At one point, a single man remained of the staff at the Western Union telegraph office, which was the sole, fragile information conduit between the quarantined city and an outside world looking on in horror and pity.

“The Waiting Room”: Welcome to Romneycare 2.0

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 22:34:00 +0000

Dr. Douglas White has a problem. Behind him is an overcrowded emergency room at Highland Hospital in Oakland, Calif., and in front of him is a middle-aged homeless man he knows well – a “frequent flier,” in hospital parlance – who literally has nowhere to go. Carl is medically stable, having shown up in the E.R. to recuperate from a long, rough night of drinking alcohol, smoking crack and using methamphetamine. But the local pastor who runs his halfway house is understandably sick of the way he cycles in and out of substance abuse, so White has two choices: Cut Carl loose to fend for himself on the streets of Oakland, or find some pretext to admit him to the hospital.

NYC big-soda crackdown plan goes to vote Thursday

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 06:47:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) — One of New York City's most ambitious efforts to prod residents to live healthier appears poised to pass as a health panel takes up a plan to cut down sales of big-sized sodas and other sugary drinks.

Thursday's Board of Health meeting could bring the final vote on the proposal. But it may not be the final word.

The plan would bar sales of sugar-heavy drinks in more than 16-ounce cups or containers in restaurants, movie theaters and some other settings.

Advocates include Mayor Michael Bloomberg and a roster of doctors. They say the proposal strikes at a leading cause of obesity.

Soda makers and sellers say the plan unfairly singles out soft drinks as fat culprits. A beverage industry-led group says it's considering suing if the proposal passes.

Update: The New York City Board of Health has approved the ban, which will go into effect in six months.

Rick Scott’s true TB blunder

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 17:26:00 +0000

Jacksonville, Fla., is currently experiencing a large tuberculosis outbreak that has been linked to 13 deaths and 99 illnesses. At the same time as the outbreak, the state, citing a budget pinch, has opted to close AG Holley Hospital, one of the few remaining TB hospitals in the U.S. Much of the current media coverage has focused on the inconvenient coincidence of the two events, suggesting some sort of causal link between the two. The plausibility of a link is particularly tempting because there’s a certifiable bad guy, Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who signed the bill to close the hospital. But for once, Scott’s action, though ill-timed and tone-deaf, isn’t at the heart of the problem – or, for that matter, his biggest misstep.

Cambodia’s mystery disease

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 18:55:00 +0000

A mysterious disease is killing scores of Cambodian children - and both local and international disease experts are unsure what's causing the respiratory and neurological symptom-causing affliction.

Sixty-four of 66 children brought into Cambodian hospitals since April 2012 have died from the unknown disease, which, according to a report on the World Health Organization website "causes high fever, followed by respiratory and/or neurologic symptoms with rapid deterioration of respiratory functions." Devastating lung malfunction appears to kill the young sufferers disturbingly quickly, often within 24 hours.

Thus far only affecting youngsters under the age of 7, World Health Organization officials are scrambling to discover what the causes of the ailment are, and how it might be prevented from killing more children in this impoverished Southeast Asian nation. Bird flu, not unknown in Cambodia, has already been ruled out as a possible cause, while well-known tropical diseases dengue fever and Chikungunya are "unlikely" according to the WHO's Dr Nima Asgari.