AP released a story by Mike Stobbe this afternoon Average ER waiting time nears 1 hour, CDC says:

The amount of time a patient waited before seeing a physician in an ER has been rising steadily,
              from 38 minutes in 1997,
              to 47 minutes in 2004,
              to 56 minutes in 2006.

Try not to break an arm people, and DEFINITELY don't have a heart attack or a stroke, ok?

Mediocre journalism and journalists love to do "trends" pieces, which amount to what "what my friends' friend and the taxi driver said."

Teenage Sex and Drug behavior is always a favorite topic.
Happily for the reality based community many actual surveys exist.

One that is important in my profession is the  Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBS) that the CDC does in collaboration with State health departments.

They have just released a new report: Trends in HIV- and STD-Related Risk Behaviors Among High School Students --- United States, 1991--2007 which since it is not a restricted report, I am going to quite in full (sans tables & references) below. For those interested in the full range of youth risky behavior, beyond just sex & drugs, there is also this report and the full website.

And yes, there is a similar survey done for Adult's risk behavior.

First off, if you'd like the report can be found here

This diary is to report on Correlates of weapon carrying among high school students in the United States by Muula, Rudatsikira and Siziya and to provide my analysis of the findings.

<more after the break>

crossposted from unbossed

Lest you think that NIOSH is not on board with faith-based initiatives and the role faith can play in health, O! Ye of Little Faith!, think again.

From the pages of today's (Sunday's)Philadelphia Inquirer

The Secret CDC Testimony Email.

Measles was all be eliminated in the US just a few years ago, but it's making a comeback, sickening 127 people in 15 states, most of whom were not vaccinated against the virus, federal officials announced Wednesday.

As many of my fellow Bay Area Kossacks know, we are undergoing a heatwave.  The temps in the inland areas are going to be in the triple digits.  The last I heard, San Francisco was supposed to hit 90 today.  We won't have any relief until the weekend.

In addition to the heatwave the air quality has been very bad as a result of the No. CA fires that are still raging.  This will make life worse for those, like me, with asthma.

Oh you didn't know?  Well neither did I, until early today when I took my sons to our local travel clinic.  

I thought my lack of knowledge may have been due to being on vacation visiting my parents in Denver at the end of June. When does one really stay as attuned to all the news that affects them when they are visitng family?

So I came home from the tavel clinic today and checked on Dailykos.  The result, searching with the keyword either "rabies" or "Rabies" was zero.  Nothing, nada, goose egg.

So I went to google news and searched using the words "Rabies Vaccine Shortage."  There are, as of this writing, 38 stories written on this subect for the past month.

This house has been solar heated for nearly 28 years now, the glazed black box on the south wall pumps heat into the living room whenever the sun shines, consistently and reliably.  It was built in the Riverside neighborhood of Cambridge, MA in 1980.

This solar collector is an air heater that takes air from the kitchen,

moves it past the black absorber plate with a fan,

and then exhausts the solar heated air back into the living room.  

Sometimes on sunny winter days, the people who live there have to flip the damper and dump the collector's air outside to prevent overheating.  

It has worked unfailingly all these years without any major maintenance, even for the fan and the thermostat that turns it on and off.

This is cross posted to my blog, where I've also posted a photo of Dr. Wolitski and links to related source materials.

Tomorrow, Federal health officials are convening leading experts to conduct a workshop on "triggers for neurological deterioration," including the relationship between autism and  mitochrondrial disease, an issue which first gained recognition when the parents of Hannah Poling went public as the US government conceded that Hannah's "autistic encephalopathy" was triggered by vaccines.

.
AND WHY DOESN'T ANYBODY KNOW?

SHIT HAPPENS. DID IT HAPPEN ON OUR TOMATOES?

The Real Question Is, How Can FOUR U.S. Gov't. Agcy's STILL Not Know, After Almost A Week? The Politics Of Food Safety:

CDC
Division of Foodborne, Bacterial and Mycotic Diseases
Salmonellosis
"Salmonella live in the intestinal tracts of humans and other animals, including birds. Salmonella are usually transmitted to humans by eating foods contaminated with animal feces. "

We all know that big business and their lackeys in the Republican Administration don't give a shit about public health. These are the people who mass-marketed you tobacco, alcohol, sugar-water, fast food, polyunsaturated fats, and even baby food with no food in it at all, just chemicals. And babies were their business, their only business.

[more after the jump]
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It is the Heat... and the Humidity.

Many parts of the country are beginning to suffer a "heat wave." This being summer, wherever you are there are going to be dangerously hot days.

Heat waves cause many excess deaths and suffering, most of them unreported as such. Heat waves in the U.S. cause more deaths than hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes combined!

From 1999–2003, the U.S officially had a total of 3,442 reported heat-related deaths, for an annual mean of 688. In 2003, Europe suffered 34,000 excess deaths do to a heat wave.

Yet they are a silent killer with relatively less public attentiond paid. They cause relatively little damage to infrastructure and offer no dramatic pictures for TV news. Many deaths go unreported or unattributed. And yet everyone of these deaths is preventable!

This diary offers both personal and community advice as to how to protect yourself, and some political context (yup. everything has a political context).

What does it feel like to wake up in the morning, get out of bed, have a little breakfast, and then head off to work knowing that this day, like all the days before, what you do will unobtrusively and effectively send more and more African Americans to a slow but certain death?

In her book on Adolph Eichmann, Hannah Arendt coined the off-repeated phrase, "the banality of evil," in her attempt to describe how apparently normal, seemingly non-insane people could so easily participate in the monstrousness of the Final Solution.  

Banality is where you find it.

Tonight's SCUM-O (Sycophant/Crony/Underling/Minion Obfuscator) claims the honor really through no action of his own initiation.  All he had to do was accept a position as Chair of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning PreventionAdvisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention.  That's not so bad, but as a pediatrician who had most recently been, as Seth Shulman points out in his book Undermining Science(p. 36):

...retained by the Lead Industries Association as an expert witness in an ongoing legal case between the state of Rhode Island and lead-paint manufacturers.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce Dr. William Banner, Jr.

The contentious debate about whether some aspect of the current recommended child vaccination schedule may trigger autism in some susceptible individuals or groups has just gone nuclear.  The detonator was a beautiful young 9 year old girl named Hannah Poling.

This diary attempts to look at recent events in the Poling case from the perspective of public policy rather than the scientific debate.

As we close in on PA, what we have to do is keep making our message as relevant as possible to as many people as possible. The problem with politics at the national level is that people frequently do not see it as relevant to their daily lives. But if we can break that barrier and make it relevant, that will turn into a lot more turnout and a lot more votes.

With that in mind, I will start including commentary on Oprah in every OENR. Her endorsement of Obama gives us a unique opportunity to take our progressive political message and relate it to peoples' lives. People who might never phone bank, might never contribute to a political campaign, or who might never have an account at Daily Kos or write a blog might still watch Oprah. Her show gives us a bridge to reach out to people who might not otherwise connect with our campaign.

Today, a top government health official announced that climate change will have a "significant impact" on health, particularly the elderly and children, in the "next few decades."

Howard Frumkin, a senior official of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gave a detailed summary on the likely health impacts of global warming at a congressional hearing. But he refrained from giving an opinion on whether carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas, should be regulated as a danger to public health.

Frumkin presented some details about the type of public health impacts from climate change. This was important testimony of our government admitting that global warming is not a myth, that the impacts will include much more than warmer temperatures, and that the time frame of impacts happening is the "next few decades."  However, this information would have been released a year ago if the WH had not censored the testimony that was presented at that time.