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On January 16, The Washington Post (WaPo) reported that guns may serve a defensive purpose—that defensive gun uses may be slightly higher than 3 million each year—but we will not know until the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) begin their research into guns as a public health issue. WaPo quoted a New American Magazine article which said, “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year.”

The CDC released early estimates of the influenza vaccine effectiveness (VE) today. Many of us saw the report circulating that the VE was 23% overall. But if you happen to be 18-49 years old, it’s only 12%.

Miami (AFP) - This US winter season's flu vaccine has been just 23 percent effective at preventing doctor visits for people of all ages, according to health authorities' early estimates out Thursday....The flu vaccine is generally most effective in young, healthy people under 65.This season, vaccine effectiveness has been highest -- 26 percent -- in those aged six months through 17 years.Vaccine effectiveness wa s just 12 percent for ages 18 to 49 years and 14 percent for people age 50 years and older, the CDC said.

At least nine people – including two unvaccinated Riverside County siblings – contracted measles after visiting Disneyland Resort in mid-December, state health officials said Wednesday. Public health officials are also investigating three additional cases of suspected measles, which is highly contagious, and a spokesman with the department said it would not be surprising to see more cases. All 12 reported visiting Disneyland or Disney California Adventure between Dec. 15 and Dec. 20. {snip} Of the nine confirmed cases linked to Disneyland, only one was vaccinated, according to the state Department of Public Health.

2014 Ebola Outbreak in West Africa - Cumulative Reported Cases Graphs "Graph 1: Cumulative reported cases of Ebola virus disease in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, March 25, 2014 – January 7, 2015, by date of WHO Situation Report, n=20712 "Graph 1 shows the cumulative reported cases in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone provided in WHO situation reports beginning on March 25, 2014 through the most recent situation report on January 7, 2015. Cumulative reported cases in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone[CSV - 1 page] Graph 2: Cumulative reported cases and deaths of Ebola virus disease in Guinea, March 25,...

The CDC used to have a report called the Morbidity and Mortality Report which reported the previous week's deaths and reasons. I used to have it mailed to me years ago. I remember a while back on HUSSIAN's watch during a flu season, the CDC stopped reporting where deaths were occurring. I have not been able to find the report recently. Has that information been taken from us totally? I went to the CDC

New York City preschoolers will be heading back to class next week with memories of new holiday toys, vacation adventures, and, health officials hope, a flu shot.In fact, because of a new city requirement, young children can, for the first time in the city’s history, be excluded from class if they have not received a flu vaccination.The new rule, which applies to some 150,000 children in city-licensed day care centers and preschools, was quietly adopted by the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in the waning days of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration. 

he U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention plans to hire a chief of laboratory safety, a new post that has taken on more urgency after a CDC scientist was possibly exposed to Ebola in a laboratory last week. Creating a new high-level safety position was a key recommendation of a months-long internal investigation into the mishandling of anthrax and bird flu in CDC labs this past summer, according to an internal CDC memo obtained by Reuters. Those incidents called into question safety practices at more than 1,000 laboratory and support facilities across the CDC's sprawling network of scientists.

As many as a dozen scientists may have been exposed to the Ebola virus at a lab of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, agency officials said Wednesday. The potential exposure took place Monday when scientists conducting research on the virus at a high-security lab mistakenly put a sample containing the potentially infectious virus in a place where it was transferred for processing to another CDC lab, also in Atlanta on the CDC campus.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) took to Twitter on Tuesday to criticize the FDA’s proposed new policy on blood donations from gay men, saying that while the recommendation is a “step forward” it is still “discriminatory.” The liberal legislator and potential 2016 presidential candidate tweeted that the FDA must “have courage to set policies based on science” in order to “commit to building a bigger, safer blood supply through risk-based screenings.” The policy, introduced Tuesday by FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, would replace a 30-year-old ban on blood donations from gay and bisexual men with a new rule permitting donations from men...

The government is not telling the public about all the possible cases of Ebola it is monitoring in the United States, says investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson. There is an effort to control the message, Attkisson said Sunday on Fox News Channel's "Media Buzz." "A lot of the media coverage has gone from overtime to almost nothing since they appointed the 'Ebola czar,'" Attkisson said. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Tom Frieden was all over the airwaves after the first case of Ebola was diagnosed in the United States in September and when two nurses who treated Ebola victims...

Sunday on Fox News Channel’s “Media Buzz,” investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson said the CDC is not putting out the current information on how many potential cases of Ebola they are currently tracking in the Untied States. Attkisson said, “I called CDC not long ago and I said how many cases are being monitored in the United States and they said 1,400. I said, ‘Where are these updates on your website? ‘ They said they’re not putting it on the web.

The leftwing New York Daily News blasted President Obama on its cover Thursday morning. Referring to the federal government's appallingly incompetent response to the American Ebola outbreak, the front page headline next to the president's photo read, "For God's Sake, Get a Grip." After three weeks of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) happy talking its Ebola preparedness and wrist-flicking the potential threat, 3 people in America have been infected with Ebola, two nurses and the man they cared for -- who died last week.

In the span of four months, at least 94 children in 33 U.S. states have developed a devastating form of paralysis with symptoms similar to polio. Some require a ventilator to breathe. And some of the greatest government health minds in the country say they have no idea what’s causing it. At the same time, during the past four months, at least 12 children have died after falling ill with a respiratory virus called Enterovirus D-68 (EV-D68). Again, federal health officials are at a loss to explain the origin of the epidemic. Are the mysterious outbreaks linked? The Centers for...

“It seems to me that in the gay community the people who should be running interference for NAM/BLA are the parents and friends of gays. Because if the parents and friends of gays are truly friends of gays, they would know from their gay kids that the relationship with an older man is precisely what 13-, 14-, and 15-year-old kids need more than anything else in the world.” – Harry Hay, founder of the modern “gay rights” movement None of it matters: Neither common sense, nor an abundance of victim testimony, peer-reviewed studies, nor their own loathsome admissions and actions....

In the first week of public comments on a federal proposal to encourage male circumcision in the U.S., most people are telling Uncle Sam to leave the foreskins alone. “His body, his choice” and “Foreskin is not a birth defect” are among the hundreds of negative comments in the Federal Register against a proposed policy by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to advise that males of all ages be circumcised for health reasons. The strongest objections were for infant circumcision, since it is a “human rights” violation for a male to permanently lose a piece of his body...

The height of the Ebola outbreak in Africa, Europe, and the United States also coincided with a period in which the Obama administration came under the heaviest scrutiny over its response to that health crisis. Amid criticism, President Barack Obama rejected calls from lawmakers to impose some travel restrictions on the areas affected by Ebola, but he did say his administration was open to appointing one figure to oversee his government’s response to the crisis. Days later, Obama appointed Ron Klain, a long-time Democratic political operative and veteran of both Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s presidential campaigns, to serve as...

Hoping to tamp down fears about Ebola, the Obama administration said Monday the virus wreaking havoc in West Africa is unlikely to mutate and spread by air. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a fact sheet that says samples from the current outbreak, which has killed about 5,000 abroad and elicited fear in the U.S., are nearly identical — 97 percent the same — as the strains studied when Ebola was discovered in 1976. Scientists monitoring the virus have not seen any evidence that Ebola may be mutating in a way that would make it spread more easily,...

The governmentÂ’s latest report confirms the good news reported by Guttmacher earlier this year. That not only the number of abortions in the U.S. have dropped to lows not seen since the earliest days of legal abortion in America, so, too, have abortion rates and abortion ratios. The 730,322 abortions reported to the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in 2011 do not include any from California, Maryland, or New Hampshire, which did not make them available. Guttmacher reported 1,058,470 for the same year. (As we explain fully below, GuttmacherÂ’s numbers will always be higher because it directly surveys abortion...

Health officials have designated 35 hospitals across the country as Ebola treatment centers. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released the list of hospitals on Tuesday. Most are clustered in metropolitan areas like New York City, San Francisco, Minneapolis and Washington D.C.