Washington state provides case study on effects of heath-care reform. The state legislature, however, repealed that last provision two years later. With the guaranteed-access provisions still standing, the state saw premiums rise and enrollment drop, as residents purchased coverage only when they needed it. Health insurers fled the state and, by 1999, it was impossible to buy an individual plan in Washington — no company was selling. Washington is among a handful of states that have pursued universal access to health insurance. The challenges they have faced could give some clues about the federal overhaul’s fate should the individual mandate get struck down. “There are seven states that tried this in the mid-1990s and, in every case, it was a disaster,” said MIT health-care economist Jonathan Gruber, who worked on Massachusetts’ health-insurance law and the Affordable Care Act. That didn’t happen.
“The legislature was loath to repeal the insurance reforms because those were very popular,” says Katz, who advised the legislature on the issue. Chemical manufacturers rely on fear to push flame retardant furniture standards. Dr. David Heimbach knows how to tell a story. Before California lawmakers last year, the noted burn surgeon drew gasps from the crowd as he described a 7-week-old baby girl who was burned in a fire started by a candle while she lay on a pillow that lacked flame retardant chemicals.
"Now this is a tiny little person, no bigger than my Italian greyhound at home," said Heimbach, gesturing to approximate the baby's size. "Half of her body was severely burned. She ultimately died after about three weeks of pain and misery in the hospital. " Heimbach's passionate testimony about the baby's death made the long-term health concerns about flame retardants voiced by doctors, environmentalists and even firefighters sound abstract and petty.
But there was a problem with his testimony: It wasn't true. Records show there was no dangerous pillow or candle fire. Neither did the 9-week-old patient who Heimbach told California legislators died in a candle fire in 2009. "The fire just laughs at it," he said. Trace chemicals in everyday food packaging cause worry over cumulative threat. The government has long known that tiny amounts of chemicals used to make plastics can sometimes migrate into food.
The Food and Drug Administration regulates these migrants as “indirect food additives” and has approved more than 3,000 such chemicals for use in food-contact applications since 1958. It judges safety based on models that estimate how much of a given substance might end up on someone’s dinner plate. If the concentration is low enough (and when these substances occur in food, it is almost always in trace amounts), further safety testing isn’t required.
Meanwhile, however, scientists are beginning to piece together data about the ubiquity of chemicals in the food supply and the cumulative impact of chemicals at minute doses. What they’re finding has some health advocates worried. A complicated issue How common are these chemicals? The issue is complicated by questions about cumulative exposure, as Americans come into contact with multiple chemical-leaching products every day. What we should ask Romney about Mormonism. As a reporter who writes about political figures’ religion, I get asked this question a lot: How much of Mitt Romney’s Mormonism is fair game? I usually start with Article VI of the Constitution: “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” His Mormonism, or any candidate’s religion or non-religion, should not be a qualifier, or a disqualifier.
But the reality is that voters make judgments, some based on long-standing prejudices, some based on gut reactions, and some based on thinking a religious belief (planets, underwear, tribes of Israel roaming America) is “weird.” Or they listen to a Baptist minister who says Mormonism is a “cult.” Or not Christian. (Even if it’s not, should that matter?) There’s a difference, though, between probing a candidate’s religious beliefs, and probing a candidate’s involvement in promoting or even acquiescing to the activities of a powerful religious institution. FDA draws criticism after U-turn on antibiotics in animal feed | World news. Environmental and consumer groups have condemned the US Food and Drug Administration's move to renege on its long-held policy to regulate the use of human antibiotics in animal feed.
Last week, the agency quietly announced it was withdrawing its plan to limit the use of antibiotics fed to healthy livestock intended for human consumption. Critics say the U-turn, which comes amid the FDA's own stated concerns over food safety, is at odds with its obligations to protect the public. The groups also criticised the timing of the announcement, which was made during the holiday season and disclosed only in the federal register.
The use of low doses of antibiotics in agricultural animal feed contributes to drug-resistant superbugs, according to food and health experts. One leading food policy writer described the policy reversal as "pathetic" and "dismaying. " Pollan said there was "no question" that meat could be produced without human antibiotics, as the EU has already banned them. India Reports Completely Drug-Resistant TB | Wired Science Well, this is a bad way to start the year. Over the past 48 hours, news has broken in India of the existence of at least 12 patients infected with tuberculosis that has become resistant to all the drugs used against the disease. Physicians in Mumbai are calling the strain TDR, for Totally Drug-Resistant.
In other words, it is untreatable as far as they know. News of some of the cases was published Dec. 21 in an ahead-of-print letter to the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, which just about everyone missed, including me. (But not, thankfully, the hyper-alert global-health blogger Crawford Kilian, to whom I hat-tip.) That letter describes the discovery and treatment of four cases of TDR-TB since last October. Why this is bad news: TB is already one of the world’s worst killers, up there with malaria and HIV/AIDS, accounting for 9.4 million cases and 1.7 million deaths in 2009, according to the WHO.
That was before TDR-TB.