Liz Borkowski
lborkowski
Posts by this author
September 7, 2016
by Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA
Thirty years ago I worked with International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) studying the health consequences of nuclear weapons. Even if they were never used, these weapons–their manufacture and testing–harmed populations. All over the world…
September 7, 2016
Since Congress left for recess seven weeks ago without approving funding to address the Zika virus, the Obama administration has declared a public health emergency in Puerto Rico and the Florida Health Department has identified two areas in Miami-Dade County with local transmission of Zika. Now…
August 31, 2016
by Garrett Brown, MPH, CIH
If there is one thing that Christine Baker, Director of California’s Department of Industrial Relations (DIR), and Juliann Sum, Chief of the Division of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH or Cal/OSHA), cannot stand – it is criticism, no matter how constructive or gently…
August 29, 2016
Two decades ago, President Bill Clinton signed the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act” (PRWORA) and heralded the end of “welfare as we know it.” The law lived up to that promise, but the outcomes for families who depend on it have been problematic. "If the goal of…
August 22, 2016
A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Alicia Menendez at Fusion: Pregnant in the time of Zika: How Congress failed women like me
Vann R. Newkirk II in The Atlantic: Can free markets keep people healthy?
Brittney Martin in the Dallas Morning News: Texas' rate of pregnancy-related deaths nearly…
August 17, 2016
by Garrett Brown, MPH, CIH
A frequent official response to concerns that California workplace health and safety agency – Cal/OSHA or DOSH – does not have enough field enforcement compliance officers is that “California’s statistics are better that the national stats and other states.” This turns…
August 8, 2016
In MMWR, Brian Ward and Lindsey Black of the National Center for Health Statistics report that 25.7% of US adults have been diagnosed with multiple chronic conditions (MCC). In their analysis of data from the 2014 National Health Interview Survey, they examined rates of diagnoses of arthritis,…
August 1, 2016
Last year, researchers identified a gene that confers resistance to "last-resort" antibiotic colistin. They found it in several E. coli isolates in China, and it didn't take long for other researchers around the world to find the same gene, mcr-1, in stored samples once they started looking for it…
July 25, 2016
A few of the recent pieces I’ve liked:
Clint Smith at the New Yorker: Racism, Stress, and Black Death
Maryn McKenna at Germination: CDC Director: ‘This Is No Way to Fight an Epidemic’
Natasha Geiling at ThinkProgress: Cleveland Is Not The Place For Mocking Environmental Justice
Jennifer Adaeze…
July 18, 2016
In a Special Communication published in JAMA, President Obama assesses the Affordable Care Act's progress and recommends additional steps for elected officials to take to improve US healthcare. He notes that when he took office, more than 1 in 7 Americans lacked insurance coverage. Since the ACA's…
July 11, 2016
When a group of researchers supported by the HHS Office on Women's Health set about designing a weight-loss intervention for lesbian and bisexual (LB) women, they ran into a challenge: Many lesbian and bisexual women are averse to the idea of weight loss. Although LB women are more likely to be…
July 7, 2016
The 5-3 Supreme Court decision in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt last week was a welcome step for women's health, but resulted in the removal of only some of the barriers many US women still face in accessing abortion services. At issue in the case was Texas law HB 2, which required abortion…
July 5, 2016
[Updated below 7/5/16 (6:30 pm)]
by Andrea Hricko
Last week, three railroad workers were killed in Texas when two BNSF locomotives crashed head-on into each other; one other worker was hospitalized but released. Due to heavy smoke, the bodies of the three workers with fatal injuries were unable to…
June 20, 2016
Hospital-acquired infections are a persistent problem that has become even more worrisome as as antimicrobial resistance has increased. Researchers have been exporing the best ways to reduce hospital-acquired infections, and HHS's Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has provided tools…
June 13, 2016
A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
German Lopez at Vox: Obama is right. Inaction in the face of mass shootings is also a political act.
Helen Branswell at STAT: The world is alarmed by the Zika outbreak. No one is paying to deal with it.
Norm Ornstein in The Atlantic: How to Fix a Broken…
June 1, 2016
Back in November, researchers from China reported finding a gene that confers resistance to the last-resort antibiotic colistin in several E. coli isolates, and warned that pan-drug resistant Enterobacteriaceae -- a family of bacteria that includes common foodborne illness culprits E. coli and…
May 26, 2016
Last week, the World Health Organization stopped short of declaring a yellow fever outbreak centered in Angola to be a public health emergency of international concern, but its emergency advisory committee “emphasized the serious national and international risks posed by urban yellow fever…
May 18, 2016
Maryland Governor Larry Hogan has signed into law the Contraceptive Equity Act, which puts the state at the forefront of efforts to reduce insurance-plan barriers to accessing multiple forms of contraception. When the law takes effect in 2018, insurance plans regulated by Maryland that provide…
May 9, 2016
A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Melissa Harris-Perry in Elle and before the Congressional Caucus for Black Women and Girls: How Our Country Fails Black Women and Girls
N.R. Kleinfeld in The New York Times: Fraying at the Edges (“A withered person with a scrambled mind, memories sealed away:…
May 2, 2016
A study in CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report last week reported that the birth rate for US teens aged 15-19 declined by 41% nationwide from 2006 to 2014. Disparities in teen birth rates also narrowed, with the birth ratio for Hispanic teens to white teens dropping from 2.9 to 2.2, and for…
April 26, 2016
Reading over the list of 2016 Pulitzer Prize winners makes clear just how essential journalism's watchdog role is to public health. In 2015, news organizations devoted considerable resources to researching, reporting, and commenting on slave labor in international seafood supply chains; funding…
April 18, 2016
Rena Steinzor in the New York Times Opinion Pages: Judgment Day for Reckless Executives
Angus Deaton in JAMA: On Death and Money: History, Facts, and Explanations (This is an editorial about the study by Raj Chetty and colleagues on income and life expectancy, and you can also read about their…
April 11, 2016
As summer approaches, mosquito bites will become common, and the Zika virus could start spreading in parts of the continental US. Although federal, state, and local public health officials are working hard to address this threat, the response from many lawmakers has been disappointing and, in some…
April 7, 2016
New York State's new budget deal includes a paid-leave program that will offer the most paid leave in the nation once it's fully implemented in 2021. California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island have already established programs that partially replace workers' salaries when they take time off work to…
March 22, 2016
A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Charles Ornstein, Ryann Grochowski Jones and Mike Tigas at ProPublica: Now There’s Proof: Docs Who Get Company Cash Tend to Prescribe More Brand-Name Meds
Anna North in the New York Times: What Planned Parenthood Really Does
Alison Young and Mark Nichols in…
March 14, 2016
Although the US still has a long way to go in preventing unintended pregnancies, an article published earlier this month in the New England Journal of Medicine had some good news: The proportion of US pregnancies that were unintended dropped from 51% in 2008 to 45% in 2011. Lawrence B. Finer and…
March 7, 2016
As I noted when I first wrote about Zika virus in January, researchers haven't definititively established the link between the virus and microcephaly -- abornormally small brains now seen in thousands of infants whose mothers had (confirmed or suspected) Zika infections during pregnancy. Over the…
February 29, 2016
I've written before about the Colorado Family Planning Initiative, which in 2009 started providing free IUDs and contraceptive implants (the two forms of long-acting reversible contraception, or LARC) to low-income women at family planning clinics in 37 Colorado counties. Between 2008 and 2014, the…
February 18, 2016
A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Jay Hancock of Kaiser Health News at NPR: In Freddie Gray's Baltimore, The Best Medical Care Is Nearby But Elusive
Jessica Mason Pieklo at RH Reality Check: With No Scalia, What’s Next for the Supreme Court?
David Heath at the Center for Public Integrity: Meet…
February 17, 2016
Cross-posted from CPRBlog
by James Goodwin
In case you didn’t get the memo: President Obama is entering the last year of his final term in office, so now we’re all supposed to be panicking over a dreaded phenomenon known as “midnight regulations.” According to legend, midnight rulemaking takes…