lborkowski | June 3, 2013I linked last week to Matthew Yglesias's Slate piece "The Best and Simplest Way to Fight Global Poverty," which reports on a study that gave unconditional cash grants to poor young adults in Uganda and found that four years later, recipients of the grants had more business capital and higher earnings than those in a control group. I thought about the study again over the weekend as I listened to a Planet Money podcast about a charitable school-building project in Haiti that exemplifies how hard -- and potentially less effective -- it can be to give poor communities assets like schools rather…
lborkowski | May 31, 2013by Kim Krisberg
In the United States, getting better often comes with an unfortunate and devastating side effect: financial bankruptcy. In fact, a 2009 study in five states found that between 2001 and 2007, medical-related bankruptcies rose by nearly 50 percent. And for those diagnosed with cancer, the risk is even worse.
As if a cancer diagnosis wasn't scary enough, a group of researchers recently calculated that cancer patients are more than two-and-a-half times more likely to go bankrupt than people without cancer. And younger cancer patients faced bankruptcy rates of two to five times…
lborkowski | May 31, 2013A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
The Latest in the NPR-WAMU series Poisoned Places: Elizabeth Shogren and Robert Bennicasa on "Baton Rouge's Corroded, Overpolluting Neighbor: ExxonMobil"and Richard Harris on "Breathing Easier: How Houston is Working to Clean up its Air."
Maryn McKenna at Superbug: To Prevent MRSA In Hospitals, Don’t Prevent Only MRSA
Matthew Yglesias at Slate: The Best and Simplest Way to Fight Global Poverty
Eric Jankiewicz and Sara Sugar of Brooklyn Bureau: Bushwick's Struggles With Asthma: What's Poverty's Role?
Tracy Weber, Charles Ornstein, and Jennifer LaFleur of…
lborkowski | May 30, 2013By Sara Gorman
In response to the realization that between 16% and 49% of people in the world have psychiatric and neurological disorders and that most of these individuals live in low- and middle-income countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) launched the Mental Health Gap Action Programme to provide services for priority mental health disorders in 2008. This focus on services is essential, but the WHO ran into a significant problem when confronting mental health disorders in the developing world: lack of research made it difficult to understand which mental health disorders should be…
cmonforton | May 29, 2013Nearly 40 percent of work-related injuries and illnesses seen in U.S. emergency rooms are not billed to workers’ compensation---the insurance program that’s designed to cover them. An increasing number of patients suffering from injuries or illnesses caused by exposures at work are using their private insurance, paying out of pocket or billing Medicaid or Medicare, instead of filing the appropriate claim to their employers’ workers’ compensation insurer. Those are the findings of a new study published in the journal Health Services Research by researchers with CDC’s National Institute for…
lborkowski | May 28, 2013Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved immigration legislation that would overhaul US immigration laws. Alan Gomez reports in USA Today:
The bill was produced by a bipartisan group of senators known as the Gang of Eight. With four of those members on the committee, the bill survived 212 amendments over five lengthy hearings.
Left intact was the core of the bill, which will allow the nation's 11 million unauthorized immigrants to apply for U.S. citizenship, add significant investments in border security and fundamentally alter the legal immigration system of the future.
The…
lborkowski | May 24, 2013by Kim Krisberg
When it comes to nonviolent drug offenses, systems that favor treatment over incarceration not only produce better health outcomes, they save money, too. It's yet another example of how investing in public health and prevention yields valuable returns on investment.
In a new study published in the June issue of the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH), researchers found that California's Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act, which diverts nonviolent drug offenders from the correctional system and into treatment, saved a little more than $2,300 per offender over a 30-…
cmonforton | May 23, 2013When they toured the devastation caused by the April 17 explosion at West Fertilizer, Texas' U.S. Senators pledged that investigators would get to the bottom of what happened. The disaster killed 15, injured hundreds of residents, and destroyed dozens of homes and buildings. Senator Ted Cruz said:
"We need to allow time for a careful investigation of what occurred. We all want to know what happened here."
Senator John Cornyn said:
"I'm confident there will be exactly the kind of review you're talking about on the local level, state level and the federal level. We have authorities from all…
egrossman | May 22, 2013By Elizabeth Grossman
What constitutes a disease? If the symptoms are sub-clinical and the cause is an environmental contaminant, what is the appropriate public health response? Once an environmental hazard is identified, who is responsible for removing that hazard to protect people from ongoing exposure and to what extent – or is society’s responsibility limited to treating those individuals already harmed?
These are questions central to Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and Fate of America’s Children, Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner’s provocative new book that tells the disheartening…
lborkowski | May 21, 2013At the Washington Post's Wonkblog, Ezra Klein has put up two posts about healthcare costs that are well worth reading. The first is about Oregon's Medicaid program, which has been the basis for some exciting recent research on how Medicaid coverage affects recipients' lives and is now trying to reduce the growth in healthcare costs by improving community health. The second is an interview with Bill Gates, whose Gates Foundation is trying to reduce global deaths of children under age five. Both pieces address one of today's key healthcare questions: How can we best use finite resources to…
cmonforton | May 20, 2013I've done it myself. Ask a teenager a healthy place to eat, she'll respond "Subway or Chipotle." What about a less healthy place? Response: "McDonald's or Burger King." But do fast food restaurants that are perceived "healthier" by teens actually translate into fewer calories consumed by them?
Researchers in southern California explored that question in a new paper published in the Journal of Adolescent Health. They teamed up with the community-based group Youth, Family, School and Community Partnership in Action to recruit about 100 adolescents aged 12 to 21 years to participate in…
lborkowski | May 17, 2013It's Bike to Work Day! Here in DC 14,000 people signed up to participate, and volunteers staffed 72 pit stops to offer refreshments and prizes to cyclists. Between 2006 and 2011, the number of DC residents who commute by bike jumped from 5,667 to 9,669 (accounting for 2% of commuters in 2006 and 3.15% in 2011). Figures from other cities are available on this map from GOVERNING.
It's not surprising that more DC commuters are biking, because over the past few years the city has made substantial investments in bicycling infrastructure. Our Capital Bikeshare system keeps expanding, and our…
cmonforton | May 16, 2013The residents of Battlement Mesa didn't want their "Colorado Dream" ---the community's slogan----to turn into their nightmare. The unincorporated 3,200 acre, residential community offers its 5,000 residents high desert mountain views above the Colorado River, and boasts of opportunities for hiking, birding, golfing, fishing and hunting. But in 2009, Antero Resources identified the Battlement Mesa locale in Garfield County as a proposed site for 200 natural gas wells. That move raised concerns among the residents on how hydrofracking projects might change their way of life. They'd read…
cmonforton | May 15, 2013Spring 2013 looked like it would be a banner season for progress by the Obama Administration on new worker safety regulations. In the Labor Department's most recent regulatory agenda, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) indicated they'd be taking key steps in March through June 2013 on rules to better protect workers from health and safety hazards. I thought these optimistic projections meant President Obama's second term would be a more productive one than his first. With the Presidential election behind them, the…
lborkowski | May 14, 2013by Kim Krisberg
Earlier this month, Florida lawmakers wrapped up their latest legislative session. And nearly 500 miles south of Tallahassee in Miami-Dade County, workers' rights advocates breathed yet another sigh of relief.
Ever since Miami-Dade adopted the nation's first countywide wage theft ordinance in 2010, it's been under attack. For the first two years after its passage, state legislators tried to pass legislation to pre-empt local communities from passing their own wage theft laws; this last legislative session, they tried again but included a carve out for Miami-Dade and for…
lborkowski | May 13, 2013While the official death toll from the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building in Bangladesh was still rising (it has now passed 1,100), a fire at another garment factory in Dhaka killed eight people. (If you haven't yet seen Elizabeth Grossman's post from Friday, she explores the reaction from the Asian Network for the Rigths of Occupational and Environmental Victims (ANROEV).) In the Los Angeles Times, Mark Magnier notes that although this latest disaster has spurred additional calls for reform, change will be a challenge:
The Bangladesh garment industry, a national golden goose, is…
“Enough is enough” – Asian labor rights advocates call for change as death toll mounts in Bangladesh
egrossman | May 10, 2013By Elizabeth Grossman, reporting from Bangkok, Thailand
As bodies of workers continued to be pulled from the wreckage of the collapsed Rana Plaza factory complex outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, pushing the death toll past 900, and news was breaking of at least seven deaths in a garment factory fire in Bangladesh on May 9, labor rights advocates meeting in Bangkok called for changes in the system that has led to disasters that have killed more than 1300 workers in the past eight months. “Events of the last 8 months have clearly demonstrated a complete failure of the CSR [corporate social…
lborkowski | May 9, 2013Earlier this week, a UN official told AFP that a child in North Waziristan, Pakistan had contracted polio -- the first reported case since tribesman in North Waziristan stopped authorities from conducted a vaccination campaign in June last year. AFP explains:
The Taliban alleged that the campaign was a cover for espionage.
Efforts to tackle the highly infectious disease have been hampered over the years by local suspicion about vaccines being a plot to sterilise Muslims, particularly in Pakistan's conservative and poorly educated northwest.
"We are worried because this new case comes as an…
cmonforton | May 8, 2013The rate of work-related fatal injuries in some States is more than three times the national rate of 3.5 deaths per 100,000 workers. That's just one disturbing fact contained in the AFL-CIO's annual Death on the Job report which was released this week. In Wyoming, for example, the rate of fatal work-related injuries is 11.6 per 100,000, based on 32 deaths in the State in 2011 (the year for which the most recent data is available.) North Dakota's and Montana's rate is 11.2, based on 44 and 49 deaths, respectively. The rate in Alaska is 11.1, based on 39 deaths. In total, 4,693 workers…
cmonforton | May 7, 2013"Snazzy safety glasses," I said to the dental hygienist who was just about to ask me to open wide. Something about the pink rims caught my eye and led me to a remark that showed my age:
"I remember when dentists didn't wear gloves, or masks, or eye protection."
I not only recall the bare hands of my dentist circa 1970-1980, I also remember the hullabaloo from dentists when new federal regulations were proposed in 1989 requiring them to provide such protection for their hygienists. At the time, the term "AIDS' was less than 10 years old, and exposure to HIV in the U.S. was considered a…