cmonforton | October 29, 2012"Never say where you're calling from" is one lesson learned by journalist Andrew Marantz during his summer working at a Delhi, India call center. Before getting the job, Marantz and the estimated million job seekers in India's business process outsourcing (BPO) industry complete weeks of training. The classroom sessions include pronunciation drills to shed their "mother tongue influence" and culture training.
Trainers aim to impart something they call "international culture"—which is, of course, no culture at all, but a garbled hybrid of Indian and Western signifiers designed to be…
lborkowski | October 26, 2012by Kim Krisberg
Earlier this year, federal officials put their foot down: New Hampshire could no longer use federal preparedness money to supports its poison control efforts. The directive sent state lawmakers scrambling to find extra funds so New Hampshire residents would still have access to the life-saving service. Without new money, New Hampshire callers to the Northern New England Poison Center would get a recording telling them to call 911 or go to the emergency room.
Fortunately, New Hampshire officials found enough funds to keep the service up and running for state residents this year…
lborkowski | October 25, 2012A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Jason Beaubien (here, too), Jackie Northam (here, too), Julie McCarthy, and Michaeleen Doucleff in NPR's terrific polio series.
Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Atlantic blog: Pregnancy as Labor
Jenni Bergal at the Washington Post: Moving people out of nursing homes proves to be difficult, despite federal funding
Bora Zivkovic at A Blog Around the Clock: Stumped by bed nets, mosquitoes turn midnight snack into breakfast
Jane Brody at the New York Times' Well Blog: In Fight Against Obesity, Drink Sizes Matter
And this would technically be in the "worth watching"…
lborkowski | October 24, 2012Last month, workers from warehouses run by Walmart contractors NFI and Warestaff walked off the job and marched from Ontario, CA to Los Angeles to draw attention to unsafe working conditions. Now, employees of Walmart itself have walked off the job in several cities. On October 4, Josh Eidelson reported in Salon:
Today, for the first time in Wal-Mart’s 50-year history, workers at multiple stores are out on strike. Minutes ago, dozens of workers at Southern California stores launched a one-day work stoppage in protest of alleged retaliation against their attempts to organize. In a few hours,…
cmonforton | October 23, 2012The pediatrician suspected that something wasn't quite right with the youngster. He'd met the teen as part of his North Philadelphia community health center's psychiatry outreach program. "He was a very nice kid...[but] he had trouble with words, with propositions and ideas," the pediatrician remembered. It made him wonder, "how many of these kids who are coming to the clinic are in fact missed cases of lead poisoning?"
That's the story recalled by Herbert Needleman, MD and shared in 2005 with historians David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz about the pediatrician's initial inquiries into the…
lborkowski | October 22, 2012In just eight years, the incidence of congenital birth defects in Iraq's Al Basrah Maternity Hospital increased 17-fold, a new study reports. An earlier study found the incidence of birth defects at that hospital to be 1.37 per 1,000 live births between October 1994 and 1995 (out of more than 10,000 births total); in 2003, the rate had jumped to 23 per 1,000 live births. The authors also report that, in an analysis of hair samples from 44 Fallujah children with birth defects -- the most common being congenital heart, neural tube, and facial clefting defects -- and 10 Fallujah children without…
lborkowski | October 19, 2012by Kim Krisberg
At Palm Beach Groves in Lantana, Fla., a small, seasonal business that ships fresh citrus nationwide, employees have regularly voted between getting a raise or keeping their employer-based health insurance. Health coverage always wins, as many employees' ages and pre-existing conditions would have made it nearly impossible to get coverage on their own.
In her 12 years with Palm Beach Groves, general manager Louisa McQueeney has seen insurance premiums go up anywhere from 12 percent to 32 percent a year. Coverage for her family alone — herself, her husband and daughter — was $1…
lborkowski | October 18, 2012The US workers' compensation system isn't so much a system as it is a collection of state programs with varying rules and requirements. The basic idea is that employers purchase workers-compensation insurance, and when a worker is injured or made ill on the job, the insurer will cover medical costs and, if the worker misses more than a few days on the job, pay wage-replacement benefits. It's intended to avoid high-stakes litigation in which employers and workers fight over who's at fault; instead, it's supposed to compensate anyone with a work-related illness or injury.
In practice, many…
lborkowski | October 18, 2012Forty years ago today, the Clean Water Act was enacted. Since then, US waterways have gotten cleaner – but some people seem to be forgetting why we need regulation like this in the first place. The Act aimed "to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation's waters" by establishing a system to regulate municipal, industrial, and other discharges into waterways. EPA explains:
The CWA set a new national goal “to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters”, with interim goals that all waters be fishable and…
lborkowski | October 17, 2012This post is part of The Pump Handle’s new “Public Health Classics” series exploring some of the classic studies and reports that have shaped the field of public health. Links to past posts in the series are available here. If you have a favorite Public Health Classic to recommend, let us know in the comments. And if you’re interested in contributing a post to the series, email us at thepumphandle@gmail.com (send us a link to the report or study along with a sentence or two about what you find most interesting or important about it).
By Sara Gorman
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, acute…
cmonforton | October 16, 2012For some reason the news story stuck in my memory. The headline read:
"Oil rig explosion near Marshall in north central Oklahoma was caused by blowout, company attorney said."
Maybe it was because I'd been reading so many stories about the natural gas boom, that a news story about an oil rig caught my attention. It happened January 20, 2012 at the Logan Rig #7, operated by El Dorado Drilling, an affiliate of Kirkpatrick Oil. Maybe it was the news headline's word "blowout" which stirred memories of the Deepwater Horizon Maconda rig's infamous "blowout preventers." Maybe it was the lead…
lborkowski | October 15, 2012October 15th is Global Handwashing Day. CDC explains why handwashing deserves the recognition:
This observance increases awareness and understanding of handwashing with soap as an effective and affordable method of preventing disease around the world.
Handwashing with soap has an important role to play in child survival and health. About 2.2 million children aged <5 years die each year from diarrheal diseases or pneumonia, the top two killers of young children worldwide. Handwashing is not only simple and inexpensive, but handwashing with soap can reduce the incidence of diarrhea by 30%…
lborkowski | October 12, 2012by Kim Krisberg
Researchers studying workers’ compensation claims have found that almost one in 12 injured workers who begin using opioids were still using the prescription drugs three to six months later. It's a trend that, not surprisingly, can lead to addiction, increased disability and more work loss – but few doctors are acting to prevent it, explains a new report from the Massachusetts-based Workers Compensation Research Institute (WCRI).
Report researchers looked at longer-term opioid use in 21 states and how often doctors followed recommended treatment guidelines for monitoring…
lborkowski | October 11, 2012A new Health Wonk Review compiled by David E. Williams is now up at the Health Business Blog. It's got links and descriptions for a great collection of post about healthcare issues in the first presidential debate, efforts to contain US healthcare spending, and other topics (including my recent post on hospital readmissions).
One of the featured posts that gets a big "hear, hear!" from me is a suggestion from Louise at Colorado Health Insurance Insider that political debates include non-partisan fact checkers sitting off to the side and holding up "pants on fire" signs when appropriate. She…
cmonforton | October 10, 2012Planning a conference is a pain in the neck. There are loads of details to attend to and the only time you get a little relief is when you can cross tasks off that long, long to-do list. Now imagine learning that clergy, women's groups, labor organizations, immigrants' rights networks and others are urging individuals to boycott the venue where your conference is scheduled. You signed that hotel contract ages ago, paid that hefty deposit and crossed that item off your list. What a dilemma. It's the exact one faced in the last few weeks by the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO…
lborkowski | October 9, 2012This post is part of The Pump Handle’s new “Public Health Classics” series exploring some of the classic studies and reports that have shaped the field of public health. Links to past posts in the series are available here. If you have a favorite Public Health Classic to recommend, let us know in the comments. And if you’re interested in contributing a post to the series, email us at thepumphandle@gmail.com (send us a link to the report or study along with a sentence or two about what you find most interesting or important about it).
By Dick Clapp
Between 1940 and 1971, a synthetic form of…
lborkowski | October 8, 2012With the help of a University of Missouri School of Journalism fellowship and Investigative Reporters and Editors, The Oregonian's Anthony Schick spent the summer investigating child labor in Oregon, where agriculture plays a major role in the economy. After visiting fields and interviewing farmworkers, he reports that child labor is "far more widespread than statistics show." He describes Diana and Elvin Mendoza Sanchez, ages 12 and 9, whose typical summer days involve picking fruit from 6 or 7am until 5pm, and submitting their buckets under their father's name. Schick writes:
Nearly…
lborkowski | October 5, 2012by Kim Krisberg
In the west Texas city of San Angelo, Planned Parenthood has been serving local women since 1938. It was one of the very first places in Texas to have a family planning clinic.
"We have grandmas bringing their granddaughters in," Carla Holeva, interim CEO of Planned Parenthood of West Texas, told me. "We're very much part of the community."
Today, the San Angelo clinic is preparing for some big, and unfortunate, changes. Last year, Texas lawmakers voted to exclude Planned Parenthood and other organizations affiliated with abortion providers from the state's Women's Health…
lborkowski | October 4, 2012Monday was the start date for an Affordable Care Act provision aimed at reducing high rates of hospital readmission among Medicare patients. This year, hospitals determined to have excess readmissions for patients with acute myocardial infarctions, heart failure, and pneumonia can lose up to one percent of their Medicare reimbursements for the year -- and in future years, the list of applicable conditions will get longer and the percentage of payments at risk will rise to three percent. But to what extent are readmissions under hospitals' control?
First, a bit of background: Readmissions are…
lborkowski | October 3, 2012This post is part of The Pump Handle's new “Public Health Classics” series exploring some of the classic studies and reports that have shaped the field of public health. View the first post of the series here, and check back at the "Public Health Classics" category for more in the future.
By Sara Gorman
The current state of public health research is increasingly aware of the effects of various kinds of inequality on health. Especially in the U.S. and other developed countries, the burden of chronic, non-communicable diseases is especially high among low-income individuals. Public health…