Rachel Maddow provides a detailed description of the pathology of Ebola, from the nitty-gritty of its symptoms to its development in a person over time, as a means to understanding the protocols for its handling and the likelihood of its spreading.
A California school district has agreed to temporarily shelve a ninth grade sex education textbook after parents complained it included material that’s inappropriate for teenagers, including information about masturbation, orgasms, and erotic touch. The parents asking for the removal of Your Health Today have compared the book to porn.
The rise of corporate Democrats has gone from a quiet but steady pace since 2010, to a very visible and in-your-face spectacle of late. The face of the party has changed, with some of the old guard gone, but many Democrats who were always at the right-most edge of the party playing more central roles in our parliamentary politics.
In Congress, especially over the past year, we’ve seen deals quietly made by certain Senate Democrats with the GOP, on the backs of the poor and unemployed. The economic agenda of the Democratic party, as a whole, has vanished, as has its vocal support for its blue collar constituencies. While there are still a few progressives who stump for jobs, the unemployed, our safety net, education, and infrastructure, that talk isn’t backed by any particular legislative effort on the part of the leadership to, at the very least, give the appearance that it is trying to bring these issues back to the fore. Continue reading The faces of neo-liberalism, Part I: Robert Gibbs, Andrew Cuomo, and Rahm Emanuel→
A CHINESE millionaire tried to give $300 (and lunch) to homeless men and women in New York last week. This didn’t sit well with the nonprofit New York City Rescue Mission. The Rescue Mission offered to help with lunch, but wouldn’t cooperate in handing out cash. So midway through a meal of sesame-crusted tuna and filet of beef, some 200 homeless people discovered that they would not be getting money. Instead, the Rescue Mission would accept $90,000 on their behalf. You can imagine the anger and humiliation. Continue reading CHRISTOPHER BLATTMAN: Let Them Eat Cash – NYTimes→
Various pundits, by now, have weighed in on today’s Supreme Court decision striking down Massachusetts’ buffer zone law for abortion clinics. To be sure, I don’t disagree that this decision will make it much harder for already vulnerable women to get the care they seek. To be sure, this is a blow to women. There is no doubt, were we talking about a buffer zone at clinics where men receive erectile dysfunction treatment, not only would buffer zones be just dandy, but walls would be mandated, for extra protection and privacy.
This unanimous decision implies that when there is a choice between women’s right to privacy or the right of a stranger to tell you about their beliefs, whether you are interested in hearing them or not, you have no right to choose to avoid it. Continue reading My Takeaway from SCOTUS’ Buffer Zones Decision→
Young children who dig into a bowl of fortified breakfast cereal may be getting too much of a good thing when it comes to certain vitamins and minerals, a new report says.
A new report says that “millions of children are ingesting potentially unhealthy amounts” of vitamin A, zinc and niacin, with fortified breakfast cereals the leading source of the excessive intake because all three nutrients are added in amounts calculated for adults.
Outdated nutritional labeling rules and misleading marketing by food manufacturers who use high fortification levels to make their products appear more nutritious fuel this potential risk, according to the report by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a Washington, D.C.-based health research and advocacy organization.
Although the Food and Drug Administration is currently updating nutrition facts labels that appear on most food packages, none of its proposed changes address the issue of over-consumption of fortified micronutrients, or that the recommended percent daily values for nutrition content that appear on the labels are based on adults,, says Renée Sharp, EWG’s director of research. Continue reading WUSA: Report: Over-fortified cereals may pose risks to kids→
Life with food allergies is fraught with mysteries, a few of which, I suspect, are never elucidated. My daughter has many allergies and, as a result, her food is prepared at home, from single ingredients that are carefully-vetted to exclude soy, corn, palm, gluten, and dairy, just to name the main culprits. We’ve had too many accidents that resulted in a trip to the emergency room to stray too far from our regimen. While a great number of those accidents were traceable to a food she ingested, or the possibility of cross-contamination, there were still a great many instances where there was an illness and no obvious culprit.
Olive oil is a staple in our kitchen. Up until recently, while I would strive to buy our olive oil mostly from either Costco or Whole Foods, I would buy it at my local grocery chain when in a pinch. Recently, I ran out of olive oil as I was getting ready to make a limited run to the local grocery. I bought a liter bottle there. Within hours, my daughter was sick. While she was not sick enough to need the emergency room, she was noticeably ill and we didn’t know why. After all, nothing new was added to her diet. Right? Continue reading #OliveOil: buyer beware!→
You can buy food from farmers — directly, through markets, any way you can find — and I hope you do. But unless you’re radically different from most of us, much of what you eat comes from corporations that process, market, deliver and sell “food,” a majority of which is processed beyond recognition.
The problem is that real food isn’t real profitable. “It’s hard to market fruit and vegetables without adding value,” says Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. “If you turn a potato into a potato chip you not only make more money — you create a product with a long shelf life.” Potatoes into chips and frozen fries; wheat into soft, “enriched” bread; soybeans into oil and meat; corn into meat and a staggering variety of junk.
You can possibly blame them for stupidity: Even a mindless parasite knows that if it kills its host the party’s over, and by pushing products that promote “illth” — the opposite of health — big food is unwittingly destroying its own market. Diet-related Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease disable and kill people, and undoubtedly we’ll be hearing more about nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH, an increasingly prevalent fatty liver disease that’s brought on by diet and may lead to liver failure. Continue reading Mark Bittman: The Food Industry’s Solution to Obesity – NYTimes→
King’s College London – King’s spin-out will put tooth decay in a ‘time warp’
Dentists could soon be giving your teeth a mild ‘time warp’ to encourage them to self-repair, thanks to a new device being developed by dental researchers. Reminova Ltd, a new spin-out company from King’s College London, aims to take the pain out of tooth decay treatment by electrically reversing the process to help teeth ‘remineralise’. Continue reading New Painless Treatment For Cavities→
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