Free Republic

A majority of Florida voters oppose the national health care law and half want it repealed, a new Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times/Bay News 9 poll shows two weeks after President Barack Obama’s signature achievement was largely upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Only 43 percent of voters statewide support the Affordable Care Act and 52 percent oppose it, with 5 percent undecided. With the exception of southeast Florida, more voters think the law will make the health care system worse. More voters also favor the state opting out of provisions of the law, something Gov. Rick Scott has already said...

CNSNews.com) – Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) sent a letter signed by 62 other Democrats to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, supporting her agency's review of the policy that bans homosexual and bisexual men from donating blood. The Democrats say the ban is “outdated,” and they called the HHS pilot study an important step in "assessing the feasibility of allowing healthy gay and bisexual men to donate blood while maintaining the safety of our blood supply."

Mayor Bloomberg's proposed soda ban is about himself, not about public health. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed ban on big sodas in the Big Apple is generating accusations that he is a Nanny Statist. But that’s not quite accurate. A nanny forces others to do things for their own good. Bloomberg is a moral narcissist forcing New Yorkers to do things that make him feel good. Under his soda ban, street vendors and restaurants would be barred from selling pop in anything over 16-ounce containers on the theory that limiting access to sugary drinks will help combat the...

LA County Finds Health Code Violations in Skid Row LOS ANGELES (AP) — The city of Los Angeles is violating the county health code for hazardous conditions on Skid Row, including nearly 90 rats' nests, a dozen hypodermic needles and piles of human excrement and trash on sidewalks, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health has found. The notice of violation stems from an extensive Health Department inspection last month of the 10-block area of downtown Los Angeles that houses the nation's densest population of homeless people, most of them mentally ill and substance abusers. Health officials ordered the...

Washington state’s worst outbreak of whooping cough in decades has prompted health officials to declare an epidemic, seek help from federal experts and urge residents to get vaccinated amid worry that cases of the highly contagious disease could spike much higher. It’s the first state to declare a whooping cough, or pertussis, epidemic since 2010, when California had more than 9,000 cases, including 10 deaths. Washington has had 10 times the cases reported in 2011, and so has Wisconsin with nearly 2,000 cases this year, though that state has not declared an epidemic. California responded to its crisis two years...

Enlarge Image An advisory committee that met yesterday to consider the design of the struggling National Children's Study (NCS) came down firmly in favor of one option: The study should recruit children from a geographic sample that represents the entire U.S. population. But whether the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will go with that plan isn't yet clear. Proposed by Congress 12 years ago, NCS aims to enroll 100,000 pregnant women and follow their babies' health from before birth to age 21. In February, NIH announced that because the original plan to recruit women from certain addresses in 105...

Black women in six major U.S. cities have rates of infection with the AIDS virus that are five times higher than anyone thought, researchers reported on Thursday. The findings stunned even the researchers doing the work – who already knew that the HIV epidemic in the United States is worse among blacks, and that young black women have a special risk. “The fact that the rate for infections in these women is something like the rate in Congo is something that ought to get peoples’ attention,” Dr. Charles Flexner, a clinical pharmacologist and infectious-disease expert at Johns Hopkins University in...

Parents who do not have their children fully immunised will be stripped of family tax benefits under a scheme announced by the Federal Government. The Government says 11 per cent of five-year-olds are not immunised and has announced a shake-up of the system which will take effect from July 1 next year. Under the changes, families who refuse vaccinations face losing up to $2,100 per child in benefits. Families will need to have their children fully immunised to receive the Family Tax Benefit (FTB) Part A end-of-year supplement. A new immunisation check will be introduced for one-year-olds to supplement the...

A Maryland health advocate who fought successfully this year for an increase in the state’s alcohol sales tax is pushing for a tax increase on cigarettes. Vincent DeMarco, president of the Maryland Citizens’ Health Initiative, says the group will start a campaign next week asking the General Assembly to increase the state’s $2-a-pack tax on cigarettes to $3 and raise taxes on other tobacco products, including cigars and smokeless tobacco. Mr. DeMarco — a health lobbyist who has long championed so-called “sin taxes” on tobacco and alcohol — hopes to build on momentum from this year’s assembly, in which legislators...

After hearing from more than 30 speakers during hours of debate, the Virginia Board of Health on Thursday approved sweeping changes to abortion-clinic regulations that abortion-rights groups say will close many of the state's 22 clinics. Acting under a mandate from the Legislature, the board passed the new rules on a 12-1 vote. The emergency regulations, favored by pro-life advocates, give the state more control over facilities that provide five or more first-trimester abortions per month and requires those facilities to abide by regulations normally reserved for hospitals. By the start of 2012, clinics would be required to renovate their...

In reaching to remain relevant, the environmental movement has had to change tactics.  Back in the seventies, when America looked like China does today, environmental issues needed attention. But then we cleaned up the air and water. The skies and rivers went from brown to blue. As Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore explains, in order to stay relevant, environmentalists had to find new issues.For most of the last decade global warming has been their cause, and carbon—or burning fossil fuels—was vilified as the cause. This gave way to a whole new industry: green. Green energy would replace fossil fuels. Wind and...

A Florida man was arrested for popping zits on his back at a McDonald's restaurant, according to a report. Owen Lemire Kato of Port Charlotte stood in front of one of the entrances and repulsed customers by squeezing the pimples for more than 10 minutes, the police report cited by news-press.com said. Kato, 23, gave a fake name to an off-duty officer who tried to intervene, then gave his real name before bolting out of the restaurant, news-press.com reported. Another officer in the area heard the call go out, spotted Kato and tackled him after a brief chase on foot,...

(English-language translation) A septuagenarian missionary became the first person to import the dangerous cholera bacterium to Puerto Rico in over a century. Confirmation was done by the Department of Health, following protocol which requires that confirmed cholera cases be reported within 24 hours. The man, whom the Department of Health only identified as a missionary who lives in the northern part of the island, traveled to the Dominican Republic two weeks ago to do work in an area where hygienic conditions were not the best. "He is a person who travels to the Dominican Republic frequently," State Epidemiologist Carmen Deseda...

Gemeinnutzgeht vor Eigennutz. (The common good supersedes the private good.) ~ Nazi slogan Prologue Fanatical environmentalism, vegetarianism, animal rights and public health are four progressive policy initiatives that most people would not readily associate with Hitler and the Nazis. "Unlike Marxism, which declared much of culture and humanity irrelevant to the revolution, National Socialism was holistic," wrote Jonah Goldberg. Indeed, "organic" and "holistic" were the Nazi terms of art for totalitarianism. The Mussolinian vision of everything inside the state, nothing outside the state, was organic-ized by the Nazis. In this sense, the Bavarian cabinet minister Hans Schemm was deadly serious...

A new campaign seeks to eliminate disclosure laws which require HIV positive individuals to inform their sex partners of their potentially deadly infection. The campaign is led by the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and UNAIDS, an umbrella group of UN agencies. Notably absent from this campaign is any recognition of the danger posed for the possible victims of a willful refusal to disclose HIV status. As part of the campaign, IPPF released a collection of interviews entitled “Behind Bars”, which implies that such criminal laws fuel stigma against HIV persons. Proponents of criminal laws assert, however, they are designed...

Obesity affects many aspects of our society, and the military is no exception. But the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has a solution to slimming down potential recruits: promote vegetarianism. The committee recently wrote a letter to Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offering free copies of its "Vegetarian Starter Kit." The group supports "compassionate and effective medical practice, research and health promotion," according to its website, and is against animal research and testing. A news release included part of the letter from the group's nutrition education director Susan Levin: "It is not too late for...

California is in the midst of its worst outbreak of whooping cough in a half-century. More than 2,700 cases have been reported so far this year — eight times last year's number at this point. Seven of the victims, all infants, have died. And here's what really worries pediatricians like UCLA's Harvey Karp: Doctors thought they wiped out whooping cough when they developed vaccines decades ago. The disease hits young children hardest, especially ones who are not vaccinated or who have not yet built up full immunity. The prescribed vaccination regimen begins with a shot at two months and continues...

Every five years, the federal Department of Agriculture and Department of Health and Human Services revise their Dietary Guidelines for Americans, a publication that sets the direction for federal nutrition-education programs. In an age when aggressive government agencies in places like New York City seek a greater hand in shaping Americans’ diets, the next set of guidelines, published later this year, could prove more controversial than usual because increasing scientific evidence suggests that some current federal recommendations have simply been wrong. Will a public-health establishment that has been slow to admit its mistakes over the years acknowledge the new research...

Los Angeles County public health and U.S. Forest Service officials have closed the Los Alamos Campground in the Angeles National Forest after a California ground squirrel captured two weeks ago tested positive for plague. The camp, between Gorman and Pyramid Lake, was closed Saturday afternoon and will remain closed for at least 10 days, said Jonathan Fielding, the county's public health director. Squirrel burrows in the area will be dusted for fleas, and further testing will be conducted before the campground is reopened. "We're fortunate to have caught this," Fielding said. "This case now is about prevention." Plague is a...

Even before the doors opened on the $1.02-billion Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center many observers warned that the new hospital was too small. Now, more than a year and a half of experience appears to confirm it. The overcrowding has become so intense that health officials asked county Supervisor Gloria Molina eight months ago what she would think if the hospital began placing patients in the hallways, the supervisor recalled in an interview. "I said, 'Absolutely not. We will not have patients in the hallway,' " Molina said. Instead, County- USC officials have increased patient transfers to other hospitals. Despite...