Baptisms fell to their lowest number in 60 years among Southern Baptists, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
The new numbers are a sign that the denomination is in trouble, Baptist leaders say.
‘This is not a blip,
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 […]
NEW YORK — The number of drug shortages is at a record high, and the Food and Drug Administration is warning that they are getting even worse.
Fueling the problem are shortages of raw materials. Also, drugmakers are discontinuing older, and off-patent drugs in favor of newer and more profitable ones, and issuing large recalls of drugs due to quality problems, the agency said.
In 2010, 178 drug shortages were reported to the FDA. These include cancer drugs, anesthetics used in surgery, a large number of ‘sterile injectables’ — medicines that are given intravenously — and ‘crash cart’ drugs used in emergency treatments.
Valerie Jensen, FDA’s expert on drug shortages, said regulators are seeing a large number of new drug shortages in 2011 as well.
FDA: Another tainted drug crisis seems inevitable
Jensen said the agency is especially concerned about the danger to consumers from shortages of injectable drugs, which represented more than half of the shortages reported last year to the FDA.
These are oncology drugs, drugs used during surgery and emergency treatments.
‘Companies have told us that these injectable drugs are older drugs and not as profitable,’ she said. ‘They’ve told us it’s a business decision to discontinue production.’
Over the last six years, the […]
It must be election season. Like other prominent Democrats, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson has been making the rounds. Two weeks ago she popped up on Jon Stewart’s ‘Daily Show’ and explained that regulating toxins like mercury from coal burners across the country would prevent thousands of deaths and create jobs. She even rallied people to action.
‘Environmentalism is not a spectator sport,’ Jackson told Stewart, as if she was encouraging viewers to turn off their televisions and get busy. ‘You actually have to stand up and demand that we be vigilant in protecting our air and water.’
It was certainly a boisterous display of support for stronger environmental statues, something Jackson happens to know a little bit about. However, just one week after Jackson’s Comedy Central performance the EPA indefinitely delayed essential health protections designed to reduce public exposure to airborne toxins such as mercury, arsenic, lead, and acid gases by thousands of tons per year.
It was back in 1990 when President H.W. Bush signed Clean Air Act Amendments into law, requiring the EPA to establish emission standards limiting toxins like mercury from the largest pollution sources. One of these laws, called Boiler MACT, covers emissions from boilers that produce […]
MONTEVIDEO — Figures released earlier this year showed that Latinos are the largest minority group in the US, accounting for 16.3% of the population in 2010 – 50.5m people – up from 12.5% in 2000. The overall population of the United States is 308.7 million, according to the 2010 US Census. This includes 196.8m whites (64%), 38.9m blacks (13%) and 14.7m Asians (5%).
Now, further analysis from the Census Bureau shows that while California, Texas and Florida still account for more than half of all US Hispanics, many other states are seeing far more rapid increases in their Latino population.
The Hispanic population more than doubled in nine states during the first decade of the 21st century and increased by at least a fifth in every state bar New York.
‘This shows that the Hispanic population is now in every corner of the country,
