Liz Borkowski
lborkowski
Posts by this author
A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Tara C. Smith at Slate: Measles is Horrible
Jason Cherkis in the Huffington Post: Dying to Be Free ("There’s A Treatment For Heroin Addiction That Actually Works. Why Aren’t We Using It?")
Sara Ainsworth at RH Reality Check: Lawyers for Fetuses? Yes, It’s…
by Amy Liebman, MPA, MA
Pesticide drift from a pear orchard sickened 20 farmworkers laboring in a neighboring cherry orchard in April 2014, in Washington State, according to a new Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Interestingly, and…
Evidence has been accumulating about the toll of prolonged sitting, and a new systematic review and meta-analysis published in the Archives of Internal Medicine shows just how harmful sedentary habits can be. University of Toronto researcher Aviroop Biswas and colleagues performed a quantitative…
by Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA
The final closing of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power plant in Vernon got few headlines outside Vermont, but for me it brought back a flood of memories and an important lesson. I am convinced that public involvement with nuclear power in Vermont was a factor…
In the week before his 2015 State of the Union address, President Obama took modest but important steps toward expanding US workers’ access to paid sick and family leave. Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor to President Obama and Chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls, broke the news with…
In The Atlantic, Alana Semuels writes about poor families living in the Atlanta suburbs – one of the many suburban US areas where a growing proportion of residents are struggling to get by. And because poverty has historically been concentrated in cities, that’s where the infrastructure and…
by Anthony Robbins, MD, MPH
When my colleagues here at The Pump Handle asked me if I would like to comment on the recent demise of "Single Payer" health insurance in Vermont, I hesitated because my Vermont hands-on experience is so dated. I moved on from being Vermont State Health Commissioner…
The latest issue of the journal Health Affairs focuses on children's health, and one of the major topics is health insurance for children. A look at the Kaiser Family Foundation's coverage statistics shows that in 2013, 49% of children ages 0 - 18 had employer-sponsored coverage, 39% were covered…
Last week, the US Food and Drug Administration published a final rule that updates requirements for what prescription-drug information must disclose about potential effects for pregnant and breastfeeding women and their babies. Under the old labeling rules, drugs were placed in one of five…
A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic: Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid
Danielle Paquette in The Washington Post: An Obamacare program helped poor kids and saved money. It was also doomed to fail.
Richard Florida at CityLab: This Holiday…
On Saturday, Healthcare.gov opened for enrollment in 2015 health insurance plans, and so far it’s proceeding without the horrific technical problems that greeted would-be enrollees last year. This year, as will be the case in future years, the enrollment window is just three months long. People can…
Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014, edited by Pulitzer-winning writer and professor Deborah Blum, features two pieces that remind us how public-health interventions can become less effective if we as a society don't use them appropriately -- and, based on the spelling of the authors'…
A new Data Note about Kaiser Family Foundation survey findings highlights how this country’s lack of nationwide paid sick leave places a disproportionate burden on women with children – and is particularly hard on low-income mothers. In Balancing on Shaky Ground: Women, Work and Family Health, Usha…
A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Nancy Shute at NPR's Shots blog: Nurses Want to Know How Safe is Safe Enough with Ebola
Maryn McKenna at Superbug: What Would Keep Ebola from Spreading in the US? Investing in Simple Research Years Ago. (Check out the last paragraph for links to other great…
Last week, the American Academy of Pediatrics published a "Contraceptives for Adolescents" policy statement that advises pediatricians to consider long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) methods as first-line contraceptive choices for adolescents. LARC methods include contraceptive implants…
Last month, when California Governor Jerry Brown signed the Health Workplaces, Healthy Families Act of 2014 into law, he made his state the second in the nation with a law mandating paid sick days. In 2011, Connecticut became the first state to require that employers let workers earn and use paid…
By Kim Gilhuly
Reforming California’s sentences for low-level crimes would alleviate prison and jail overcrowding, make communities safer, strengthen families, and shift resources from imprisoning people to treating them for the addictions and mental health problems at the root of many crimes,…
by Michael Lax, MD, MPH
The news that almost one third of NFL football players can expect to suffer the effects of brain trauma made headlines in major media. While it is not surprising that large men, often leading with their heads, bashing each other week after week suffer some consequences,…
Last week, an Institute of Medicine panel released a report that critiques US handling of end-of-life healthcare and suggests improvements. Dying in America: Improving Quality and Honoring Individual Preferences Near the End of Life recommends improved communication between patients and providers…
New findings from CDC's National Health Interview Survey show the uninsured rate at its lowest level since the agency started tracking this statistic 17 years ago. In the first quarter of 2014, an estimated 13.1% of the US population did not have health insurance at the time of interview. That…
As we've written before, the routine use of antibiotics in livestock operations contributes to the global problem of bacteria resistant to antibiotics. So I was delighted to visit Maryn McKenna's Superbug blog and read that Perdue Farms, the US's third-largest chicken producer, has announced…
As Celeste Monforton and I were putting together 2014 edition of The Year in U.S. Occupational Health and Safety (which she introduced yesterday), we noticed that a lot of the good news about workers winning better conditions was coming from cities and states. Victories include:
Cities and states…
The San Jose Mercury News has begun publishing a multi-part series on the alarming use of psychotropic medications among youth in California's foster-care system. Karen de Sá writes:
With alarming frequency, foster and health care providers are turning to a risky but convenient remedy to control…
On NPR's Morning Edition earlier today, Laura Starecheski reported on efforts to use peer groups to prevent young men from becoming rapists. She set the stage by talking with psychologist David Lisack about a study he (and colleague Paul M. Miller of Brown University School of Medicine) conducted…
A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Everything Tara C. Smith at Aetiology is writing about Ebola, especially her re-post of What's it like to work an Ebola outbreak?
Chris Young at the Center for Public Integrity: Critic of artificial sweeteners pilloried by industry-backed scientists
Dena E.…
Ebola virus disease (EVD), formerly known as Ebola hemorrhagic fever, has been reported in humans since 1976, but the current epidemic of the disease – affecting Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone – is unprecedented. There is no vaccine or cure for Ebola, and in past outbreaks up to 90% of people…
With much of the country still suffering the effects of the last recession, many hourly workers are trying to scrape by with part-time jobs that don’t give them as many hours as they’d like. Worse, their schedules are often unpredictable, with little advance notice -- and workers may scramble to…
by Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA
I first heard the name Thomas Piketty on a trip to France. Now his immense book, Le capital au XXIe siècle (Capital in the Twenty-First Century) sits on my bedside table (in both the original French and the English translation). It is a best seller in the US…
By Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA
So screams a headline in the New York Times business section on July 12, 2014. Two of the three tobacco companies in the $100 billion US market plan to merge.
Fifty years after the Surgeon General’s first report on Tobacco and Health, the US tobacco industry is…
A few of the recent pieces I’ve found worth bookmarking about the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision:
Dahlia Lithwick and Sonja West at Slate: Quick Change Justice: While you were sleeping, Hobby Lobby just got so much worse
“To prove that the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate was not…