It’s a decision no parent wants to make: Delay taking your sick child to the doctor because you can’t afford the bill. Stewart is relying on hope, homeopathic remedies and some borrowed antibiotics to cure her 7-year-old’s earache. And she’s waiting until July to take her 4-year-old to the dentist for a dead tooth. That’s when the state will have enough money to enroll 12,000 more kids in the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which now pays for insurance for 28,706 youth. Enrollment starts July 2. Stewart is counting down the days. ‘It’s a ticking time bomb,’ she said of the wait. ‘If you were to take them in for everything you need to take them for, you’d be done. There’s no way to afford it. The main consequence is kids are lacking care that they need.’ Choking up, Stewart laments the position she’s in. ‘It’s horrible. It should never be a question whether you take them or not.’ But it’s one that parents of the 89,500 Utah children who don’t have health insurance must make – and their health and the community suffer for it, say doctors and advocates […]
WASHINGTON — Abortions and miscarriages do not raise the risk of breast cancer, despite claims by some groups and some studies that suggest they do, researchers said on Monday. A study of more than 100,000 U.S. nurses found that those who had an abortion or miscarriage were no more likely to have breast cancer than any other woman in the study. The findings fit with a 2003 report from an international expert panel put together by the U.S. National Cancer Institute. ‘If you look at the high-quality evidence, it does not support an association between induced abortions and breast cancer,’ said Karin Michels of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. But her team set out to create the most reliable type of research that is possible — a prospective study, starting with women before they ever had cancer, and following them for years. Her team’s study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, began with 105,000 women aged 29 to 46 years in 1993. All were cancer-free to start with and filled out a detailed, anonymous questionnaire that included questions about abortions and miscarriages. Previous studies have started with women […]
A Merced company has recalled year-old hamburger meat distributed in California and elsewhere after at least three Napa County children became ill with a virulent strain of E. coli, health officials said Friday. The meat was produced by Richwood Meat Co. on April 28, 2006, dated either ‘4-28-06’ or ‘118-6,’ for the 118th day of the year, said Mike Wood, the company’s president. Although the product was manufactured a year ago, the patties still may be present in freezers at home or in stores, officials said. The products were distributed to institutional food services, food distributors, discount grocers and retail outlets such as WinCo and Vons, officials said. The recalled meat also was shipped to Arizona, Idaho, Oregon and Washington. The tainted hamburger patties were served at a concessionaire stand at a Little League field in St. Helena, Calif., about 65 miles north of San Francisco. Health officials found the E. coli strain in remaining frozen hamburger stored by the stand and by the store that sold it the meat, Salami Lady’s Cash & Carry. Health officials urged the public to throw away any of the recalled meat or return it to the store where it […]
BAGHDAD — Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said Sunday that he was ordering a halt to construction of a wall that would blockade a Sunni Arab neighborhood in Baghdad from other areas, saying it reminded people of ‘other walls.’ The announcement, which he made in Cairo while on a state visit, appeared intended to allay mounting criticism from both Sunni Arab and Shiite parties about the project. ‘I oppose the building of the wall and its construction will stop,’ Mr. Maliki told reporters during a joint news conference with the secretary general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa. ‘There are other methods to protect neighborhoods,’ he said. A spokesman for the American military, Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, said the military would remain ‘in a dialogue’ with the Iraqi government about how best to protect citizens. The military did not say whether the wall’s construction would be halted. Mr. Maliki did not specify in his remarks what other walls he referred to, but the separation barrier in the West Bank being erected by Israel, which protects Israel but greatly inconveniences Palestinians, is a particularly sensitive issue among Arabs. In Baghdad, the wall would surround the Adamiya […]
As the first wave of baby boomers edges toward retirement, a growing body of evidence suggests that they may be the first generation to enter their golden years in worse health than their parents. While not definitive, the data sketch a startlingly different picture than the popular image of health-obsessed workout fanatics who know their antioxidants from their trans fats and look 10 years younger than their age. Boomers are healthier in some important ways — they are much less likely to smoke, for example — but large surveys are consistently finding that they tend to describe themselves as less hale and hearty than their forebears did at the same age. They are more likely to report difficulty climbing stairs, getting up from a chair and doing other routine activities, as well as more chronic problems such as high cholesterol, blood pressure and diabetes. ‘We’re seeing some very powerful evidence all pointing to parallel findings,’ said Mark D. Hayward, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin. ‘The trend seems to be that people are not as healthy as they approach retirement as they were in older generations. It’s very disturbing.’ While cautioning that the data […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
