Your children’s health, your health, everyone’s health is at risk. Each year, we gratefully celebrate International Nurses Week around May 12, the birthday of Florence Nightingale. But now the world needs more than a few days of flowers, cake and ice cream. We must accomplish something far larger and more sustaining to ensure and improve public health – everywhere, every day. Nursing shortages are now critical in the U.S. and other developed nations and epidemic worldwide. The shortage is adversely affecting health and well-being across the globe. A recent issue of Health and Medicine warned: ‘In communities across the country, the nursing shortage has become so severe that it threatens patient care and safety, health care costs and patient outcomes.’ The 59th World Health Report called attention to the crisis for the first time, noting that greater commitment to strengthen nursing and midwifery – 80 percent of the world’s health care workforce – is a global necessity. ‘Overcoming this crisis will require exceptional advocacy and leadership. … Addressing the magnitude of issues is not something any one organization can do alone,’ said Alan Gibbs, chairman of the Burdett Trust for Nursing, and Dr. Hiroko Minami, […]
The worst consequences of climate change can still be avoided — if humanity acts quickly. The IPCC has determined that doing so would cost just 0.1 percent of world GDP. But the rise in CO2 emissions would have to stop by 2015. The costs are not the problem — time is. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is calling for a strict timetable to prevent the worst consequences of global warming. The IPCC issued its report ‘Mitigation of Climate Change’ on Friday in Bangkok. The goal set by the climate experts is as follows: CO2 emissions need to be reduced by between 50 and 85 percent by 2050. That would require global CO2 emissions to begin sinking in 2015. If that’s achieved, the extent of global warming can probably be limited to an average temperature increase of between one and two degrees Celsius (1.8 and 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. The costs would amount to 0.12 percent of the world’s total GDP — a small percentage but an enormous sum. But IPCC argues that investing in mitigation will pays off. The first two parts of the IPCC’s report show that the human contribution to global […]
WASHINGTON — A Food and Drug Administration plan to close seven of 13 field laboratories has angered some lawmakers, government workers and safety advocates, who fear the move will chase away skilled veteran employees and hurt the FDA’s ability to respond to public health emergencies. The FDA’s field labs inspect and analyze food, drugs, animal medications and feeds, medical devices and other health products. The labs check for compliance with federal guidelines, protect consumers from unsafe, ineffective and mislabeled products, and help investigate public health threats such as product tampering, bio-terrorism, food-borne illnesses and contaminated blood supplies. Several of the facilities helped investigate the recent pet food scare and E. coli and salmonella outbreaks in spinach and peanut butter. On the heels of these crises, the proposed lab closings have been met with strong suspicion. ‘In the middle of all these outbreaks and contamination issues, the timing of the proposal is extraordinarily bad,’ said Chris Waldrop, director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America. Over the next several years, the FDA wants to close labs in Philadelphia; Denver; Detroit; Alameda, Calif.; Lenexa, Kan.; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Winchester, Mass. Those […]
Neanderthals disappeared from Earth more than 20,000 years ago, but figuring out why continues to challenge anthropologists. One team of scientists, however, now says they have evidence to back climate change as the main culprit. The Iberian Peninsula, better known as present-day Spain and Portugal, was one of the last Neanderthal refuges. Many scientists have thought that out-hunting by Homo sapiens and interbreeding with them brought Neanderthals to their demise, but climate change has also been proposed. Francisco Jiménez-Espejo, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Granada in Spain, says a lack of evidence has left climate change weakly supported-until now. ‘We put data behind the theory,’ he said, filling in a large gap in European climate records when Neanderthals faded out of existence. The scientists’ study is detailed in a recent issue of Quaternary Science Reviews. Cold spell To figure out the temperature, water supply, and windiness of Iberia from 20,000 to 40,000 years ago, the scientists looked at sediments on the ocean floor off Spain and Portugal. Because wind or water erode rocky minerals differently, the pebbles and fragments wash into the sea in different ratios, creating a steady track record of land conditions […]
Chinese archaeologists say they have uncovered strong evidence that Stone Age people in southern East Asia were at least as technologically advanced as their European cousins — challenging the long-standing theory of ‘two cultures’. Excavations at the Dahe Stone Age site, in southwest China’s Yunnan Province, had revealed elaborate stone tools and instruments that rivaled those of the Mousterian culture that existed at that time in Europe, said Ji Xueping, chief archaeologist at the site. Dated as 36,000 to 44,000 years old, the Dahe site has since 1998 yielded cores — stones or flints from which flakes had been removed — including Levalloisian tortoiseshell-shaped and cylindrical blade cores,semicircular scrapers,end scrapers, denticulations (evenly spaced rectangular blocks set in a row), Mousterian-type points and beak-shaped stones. Technologically they were very similar to European Mousterian cultures, which were characterized by flint flake tools dating from 70,000 to 32,000 BC and named after archaeological finds in the cave of Le Moustier, Dordogne, France. The Levalloisian technique describes the flaking method and is named after the French town of Levallois-Perret where it was identified. ‘This may suggest that the theory of two cultures is not as accurate and complete as previously […]
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Remote Viewing the Year 2060
