TOKYO — Japan’s Fukushima city said on Tuesday it would hand radiation dosimeters to 34,000 children to gauge their exposure from the crippled nuclear power plant about 60 kilometres (40 miles) away.

The city will hand the measuring devices to all children aged between four and 15 for three months from September so that they can wear them around the clock, an official at the city’s education board told AFP.

The city is outside the government’s 20-kilometre (12-mile) evacuation and no-go zone around the tsunami-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, but many residents are concerned about radiation, he said.

‘There have been fixed-spot radiation measurements but parents and citizens are concerned about individual exposure,’ said the official.

‘We also believe the distribution of dosimeters will help ease parents’ worries if they confirm their children’s exposure does not pose health risks.’

He added that radiation in the city had been below the official threshold for health risks, and said the children’s dosimeters would be read out once a month to assess cumulative radiation exposure.

Japan has struggled to bring the plant under control since it was hit by a tsunami that knocked out its cooling systems, leading to three reactor meltdowns, explosions and radiation leaks into the air, […]

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Rerouting ambulances away from overcrowded emergency departments is linked to a 3 percent higher risk of death in heart attack patients, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). ‘Now we actually have empirical evidence to show crowding affects patients in a very real way,’ said lead study author, Dr. Renee Hsia, an emergency physician at the University of California, San Francisco in a Reuters article.

Researchers surveyed nearly 14,000 Medicare patients with acute myocardial infarction and 149 emergency departments in California between 2000 and 2005 and found that patients who were diverted for at least 12 hours by the nearest ED were associated with increased mortality (30-day, 90-day, 9-month, and 1-year).

Ambulance diversion is a practice in which hospitals temporarily close off services to new patients typically because their emergency department is already filled to capacity and/or limited staffing reasons. In 2009, Massachusetts was the first state to issue a ban on ambulance diversion. Early reports showed that the ban has not negatively affected patient waiting times, according to the study.

Researchers concluded that ambulance diversion does not only affect the diverted patients but also patients receiving care while the ED is on diversion status […]

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Slavery has dogged every year of our history, and its grip on us has had to be pried off, one finger at a time. Ohio did not ratify the 14th Amendment until September 17, 2003, and ‘Black Codes

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U.S. babies are dying at an increased rate. While the United States spends billions on medical care, as of 2006, the US ranked 28th in the world in infant mortality, more than twice that of the lowest ranked countries. (DHHS, CDC, National Center for Health Statistics. Health United States 2010, Table 20, p. 131, February 2011.)

The recent CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report indicates that eight cities in the northwest U.S. (Boise ID, Seattle WA, Portland OR, plus the northern California cities of Santa Cruz, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and Berkeley) reported the following data on deaths among those younger than one year of age:

4 weeks ending March 19, 2011 – 37 deaths (avg. 9.25 per week)
10 weeks ending May 28, 2011 – 125 deaths (avg.12.50 per week)

This amounts to an increase of 35% (the total for the entire U.S. rose about 2.3%), and is statistically significant. Of further significance is that those dates include the four weeks before and the ten weeks after the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster. In 2001 the infant mortality was 6.834 per 1000 live births, increasing to 6.845 […]

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WASHINGTON – The government issued warnings on Friday about two materials used daily by millions of Americans, saying that one causes cancer and the other might.

Government scientists listed formaldehyde as a carcinogen, and said it is found in worrisome quantities in plywood, particle board, mortuaries and hair salons. They also said that styrene, which is used in boats, bathtubs and in disposable foam plastic cups and plates, may cause cancer but is generally found in such low levels in consumer products that risks are low.

Frequent and intense exposures in manufacturing plants are far more worrisome than the intermittent contact that most consumers have, but government scientists said that consumers should still avoid contact with formaldehyde and styrene along with six other chemicals that were added Friday to the government’s official Report on Carcinogens. Its release was delayed for years because of intense lobbying from the chemical industry, which disputed its findings.

John Bucher, associate director of the National Toxicology Program, which produced the report, said evidence of formaldehyde’s carcinogenicity was far stronger than for styrene and that consumers were more likely to be exposed to potentially dangerous quantities of formaldehyde.

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration warned in April that a […]

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