Stephan: Here is another report on the effects of climate change that gives a further idea of the world that is emerging. We are not taking this seriously enough. We need national policies that foster wellbeing on a national level, the bills Biden and Pelosi are proposing move us in that direction. . But we are running out of time to wake up to this and really embrace it.
Rachel Wald of North Dakota State University tested levels of sulfates and total dissolved solids concentration in a watering hole on John Marshall’s ranch.
TOWNER, NORTH DAKOTA — Darrell Rice stood in a field of corn he’d planted in early June, to be harvested in the fall and chopped up to feed the hundreds of cows and calves he raises in central North Dakota.
“It should be six, seven, eight foot tall,” he said, looking down at the stunted plants at his feet, their normally floppy leaves rolled tight against their stalks to conserve water in the summer heat.
Like ranchers across the state, Mr. Rice is suffering through an epic drought as bad or worse than anywhere else in this season of extreme weather in the Western half of the country.
A lack of snow last winter and almost no spring rain have created the driest conditions in generations. Ranchers are being forced to sell off portions of herds they have built up for years, often at fire-sale prices, to stay in business.
Some won’t make it.
“It’s a really bad situation,” said Randy Weigel, […]
Robin Respaut and Chad Terhune, Reporters - Thomson Reuters Foundation
Stephan: This is alarming health news, and evidence that the American diet is, well, unhealthful, and this has long-term consequences for those individuals and their life expectancy. If you know a young person help them understand the importance of a good diet.
Credit: Diabetes Voice
The number of young people with the most prevalent form of diabetes nearly doubled in the United States from 2001 to 2017, according to a study published on Tuesday.
The findings showed that the rate of young people ages 10 to 19 with type 2 diabetes increased by 95% over the 16-year period. The estimated rate of youth under age 20 with type 1 diabetes grew by 45%.
“Rising rates of diabetes, particularly type 2 diabetes, which is preventable, has the potential to create a cascade of poor health outcomes,” said Dr Giuseppina Imperatore, who oversees disease surveillance and other areas at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Diabetes Translation.
This month, Reuters published a special report https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-diabetes-covid on the worsening outcomes for people with diabetes in the United States.
The new findings come from the SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth study, which was funded by the CDC and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
One in 10 Americans, or 34 million people, have diabetes in the United States. About 1.6 million people have type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease […]
Stephan: I got an email this morning from a reader who wrote to tell me how angry she was with Fox because her father who would only listen to Fox and NewsMax, and who would not get vaccinated, was in the hospital and may not make it. I think the anti-vaxxer, anti-masker crowd, and the media who spew out disinformation about covid, are dangerous to the good health of others. The good news is that more and more people are beginning to realize this, and are getting vaccinated.
Anti-vaxxer ranting
For a few brief weeks in the spring, it seemed as if the United States was poised to announce a small victory in the fight against the pandemic. A vaccine had arrived in record time. It was proven effective against serious illness and hospitalization, as an average of 2 million adults were getting inoculated each day and there seemed to be plenty of the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson doses to go around. The media scrambled to write pieces about how to stay safe while still breaking free of isolation, and there were seemingly millions of rhapsodic tweets about our Hot Vax Summer.
But then, predictably, the anti-vaxxers and their BFFs the anti-maskers had other plans.
Yes, COVID-19 is surging again, this time fueled by the highly infectious and deadly Delta variant, which is ravaging the country—especially in places with low vaccination rates such as Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. As of August, about half of the country remains unvaccinated. But as this unvaccinated group has asserted its importance and become a public health menace, it seems dangerous to dismiss them as an undifferentiated […]
Stephan: I am gobsmacked by the number of Americans who basically have joined a death cult instead of following medical science. It is Jim Jones and the Jonestown Peoples Temple writ large. It tells one a lot about how easy it is to manipulate Americans when you speak to their fears, hates, and resentments.
Horses in stable Credit: Shutterstock
As the Delta variant of COVID ravages the southeastern region of the United States, officials in a state with one of the lowest vaccination rates are pleading with residents to refrain from using a livestock drug to treat COVID-19.
Approximately 70% of recent calls to the Mississippi Poison Control Center are in reference to Ivermectin ingestion, according to notice released by the Mississippi Department of Health. Many individuals who called the center have mild COVID symptoms. The center is warning that the livestock drug, which is concentrated for larger animals, “can be highly toxic to humans.”
On Monday, Satruday, August 21, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released brief statement via Twitter addressing the issue. The short tweet read, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”
Stephan: Here is the fact-based proof. The more people vaccinated the fewer deaths and people having to be hospitalized for covid. It is becoming increasingly obvious now that covid has become a Republican anti-vaxxer pandemic.
Californians being vaccinated
The Food and Drug Administration granted full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine on Monday, paving the way for more employers, schools and other organizations to mandate the shots.
“If you are not vaccinated, let this be the milestone that gets you there,” California’s public health officer, Dr. Tomás Aragón, said after the announcement.
Experts say that the highly contagious Delta variant not only presents an unprecedented threat to those who are not vaccinated, but has also provided ample evidence of the effectiveness of the vaccines.
In California, unvaccinated people are more than six times as likely to contract the coronavirus than those who have their shots, according to state data released on Monday.
And in Los Angeles County, the state’s most populous, an unvaccinated person is as much as 25 times more likely to be hospitalized with the disease.
“That, in a sense, is our proof that vaccines work,” said Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, an infectious-disease expert at the University of California, Los Angeles’s Fielding School of Public Health.
Similar to how states with low vaccination rates have been hard hit by the latest […]
