Free Republic

President Barack Obama said on Monday his administration was working on additional protocols for screening airplane passengers to identify people who might have Ebola and would step up efforts to make medical professionals aware of what to do if they encounter a case. Obama made the disclosure after meeting top administration officials involved in attempting to prevent an outbreak of Ebola in the United States. After a series of missteps involving the handling of a man who arrived in Dallas from Liberia with Ebola, Obama said "we have learned lessons in terms of what happened in Dallas."

On his blog on the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), director Dr. Tom Frieden wrote that sealing borders, restricting travel to and from countries with widespread cases of Ebola, and otherwise isolating communities infected with the deadly disease “increases people’s distrust of government, making them less likely to co-operate to help stop the spread of Ebola.” Frieden added: I have been asked whether we should stop travel to Liberia. The answer is no: to keep Americans and people in non-affected countries safe, we must continue to work to support efforts to stop the spread of...

Wal-Mart, the country's largest retailer, is eliminating health benefits for about 30,000 employees to control its rising healthcare costs. The cut applies to part-timers who work fewer than 30 hours a week, Wal-Mart said Tuesday. It impacts 2% of the company's U.S. workforce. More of Wal-Mart's employees signed up for health benefits this year than the company expected, which boosted the company's costs.. Obamacare requires everyone to have coverage, which has prompted people to compare plans available to them at work with plans offered on government exchanges. The cheapest and most popular Wal-Mart plan currently costs employees as little as...

(Reuters) - Sex could keep the Ebola epidemic alive even after the World Health Organization (WHO) declares an area free of the disease, one of the discoverers of the deadly virus said on Tuesday. The WHO is hoping to announce later this week that Nigeria and Senegal are free of Ebola after 42 days with no infections -- the standard period for declaring an outbreak over, twice the maximum 21-day incubation period of the virus. However, it appears the disease can last much longer in semen. "In a convalescent male, the virus can persist in semen for at least 70...

Welcome to Dallas, where we begin the week wondering whether our Ebola Patient Zero will die, and whether others among our neighbors will then follow due to various failures in systems that should keep us safe. Last week was an exercise in reverse psychological physics. The more officials at every level told us to shut up and calm down, the more we felt like yanking our kids out of school or packing up the family for a month in the mountains. This is not a complete collapse of faith in our institutions; it is a bad moment in history for...

When it snows, Albert Smith dreads having to put on a couple of coats and sit in his car in the parking lot of the West Mifflin Manor apartment complex to smoke a cigarette. But after the Allegheny County Housing Authority banned smoking inside his building this week, he fears that's what he'll have to do. “I'm not on board,” said Smith, 72, a smoker since he was 15 who sat outside the subsidized apartment complex with a pack of Pall Malls in his shirt pocket and a smoke-free sign tacked to the wall behind him. “I pay $400 a...

While most folks have had their eyes diverted by the Ebola scare, another illness is hitting hundreds of kids especially hard this year. Some have become paralyzed by the illness, and others have died. Calling it the "mystery illness," doctors say it is a strain of viruses called Enterovirus 68, and it has hit kids from California to the East Coast. First diagnosed in the U.S. in 1962, the virus has been rare here. But this year it has exploded for unknown reasons. As Breitbart News reported, since mid-September, more and more cases of this mysterious respiratory illness have broken...

*****BREAKING NEWS***** THE FOLLOWING SCHOOLS MAYBE AFFECTED BY ‪#‎EBOLA‬ Hotchkiss ES Dan D. Rogers ES Tasby MS Conrad HS Jack Lowe ES For the latest information follow us on Twitter @DanCofall

A division of the Agriculture Department is making $31.5 million in funding available to help people on food stamps obtain healthier foods. The department’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) is making the funding available to help those enrolled in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which offers nutrition assistance to millions of low-income Americans. "Too many struggling families do not have adequate access to nutritious food," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Monday as he announced the new funding. "Helping families purchase more fresh produce is clearly good for families' health, helps contribute to lower health costs for the country,...

Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas is carefully evaluating a patient who may have Ebola Virus Disease. Based on the patient’s symptoms and recent travel history, the patient has been admitted into “strict isolation,” said spokeswoman Candace White in a prepared statement. Preliminary test results are expected Tuesday. The hospital is following Centers for Disease Control and Texas Department of Heath recommendations to ensure the safety of patients, staff, volunteers, physicians and visitors, White said. In August, Dr. Kent Brantly, a Fort Worth doctor who contracted Ebola while working as an aid worker in Africa,

"Lack of condoms is a global problem, and Sir Richard's was founded by a team of socially conscious entrepreneurs and designers who are committed to combatting the spread of sexually transmitted infections. They’re vegan-certified, and the silicone-based lubricant doesn’t contain any spermicide, parabens, or glycerin."

President Obama warned world leaders at the United Nations Thursday that the international response to the Ebola crisis is "not enough," urging them to step up their efforts. "We know from experience that the response to an outbreak of this magnitude needs to be both fast and sustained — like a marathon, but run at the pace of a sprint," Obama said. "That’s only possible if every nation and every organization does its part. And everyone has to do more." Last week, the president announced the U.S. was sending 3,000 military personnel to West Africa to respond to the crisis,...

ob Schneider has learned the hard way that there's no way to inoculate yourself against an Internet backlash. State Farm Insurance has dropped an ad campaign featuring the "Deuce Bigalow" star in a reprisal of his "Richmeister" character -- a.k.a. the "making copies" guy -- from "Saturday Night Live." The decision stems not from an objection to rehashed humor from the mid-'90s, but to Schneider's outspoken stance against childhood vaccines. Along with former "View" co-host Jenny McCarthy, Schneider, who has lately been busy trying to revive his career with a spec sitcom, has been one of the most vocal celebrity...

MARIETTA — Federal food regulations going into effect this school year are affecting certain teachers’ lesson plans as well as the lunchroom menu. Limits on the calorie counts of foods that may be sold to students have interfered with the special education and culinary arts programs at Marietta High School, said Principal Leigh Colburn. The special education students sold coffee and food such as muffins to teachers and students every morning last year, but Colburn said the calorie counts of those items fall outside the new regulations because they’re more than 200 calories, which is the limit for a snack...

Normally, no one would care that in a recent Atlantic essay -- "Why I hope to die at 75"-- 57-year-old Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel argued that living to be 75 years old was long enough for anyone. After 75, Emanuel suggests, "We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic. But Emanuel is no garden-variety crackpot. Nor is he a wannabe science-fiction writer dreaming of a centrally planned planet of robust youthful humanoids. Unfortunately, he was one of the chief architects of the troubled Affordable Care Act and a key medical advisor to the Obama...

Michigan’s medical community is split over legislation that would give nurses with advanced training the authority to prescribe some medications. Essentially, physician groups are working to prevent nurses from gaining responsibilities that are currently reserved only for doctors. Senate Bill 2 would allow Advanced Practice Registered Nurses (APRNs) in Michigan to write prescriptions for patients without physician approval. This new authority would be limited to the particular nurse's scope of practice. Michigan is one of 21 states that do not recognize APRNs. In 16 states and Washington, D.C., these nurses are allowed to practice autonomously with regard to providing diagnosis...

A real-life horror story is playing out in Africa as Ebola spreads, and President Obama’s decision to send 3,000 troops to Liberia to combat the virus could very well put Americans at risk of contracting the deadly illness at home, some health experts say. According to the World Health Organization, at least 4,985 people have contracted Ebola and at least 2,461 have died. Several doctors have fallen ill with Ebola, and two of them have died. New reports indicate a Doctors Without Borders staff member has contracted the virus in Liberia and will be evacuated to France for treatment. “You...

Forty-six percent of doctors give President Obama's healthcare law a "D" or an "F,"... The findings come from a survey that was emailed to "virtually every physician in the United States with an email address on record with the American Medical Association" this March through June as the law's major provisions were taking effect, and received more than 20,000 responses from doctors. In their comments that were included (but kept anonymous) in the report, a number of doctors complained about the vast amount of bureaucracy that has been added to the medical profession. "Get government OUT of healthcare," one doctor...

CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo. – New federal school food regulations promoted by First Lady Michelle Obama are becoming a massive headache for many schools that participate in the National School Lunch Program. And many, like Missouri’s Notre Dame Regional and Saxony Lutheran high schools, are taking matters into their own hands. Those schools and numerous others across the country are ditching the federal regulations and the funding that comes with them to save their cafeteria programs, which have experienced a nose-dive in sales and skyrocketing waste since the new rules were implemented in 2012. At Notre Dame, school officials turned to...

Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Friday dropped another financial bombshell on Chicago’s 25,000 retired city workers and their dependents: their monthly health insurance premiums will be going up by a whopping 40 percent — in spite of a pending lawsuit and a precedent-setting Illinois Supreme Court ruling. Last year, Emanuel announced plans to save $108.7 million a year by phasing out the city’s 55 percent subsidy for retiree health care and forcing retirees to make the switch to Obamacare. For the city, the Year One savings was $25 million. For retirees, that translated into an increase in monthly health insurance premiums...