lborkowski

Last week’s White House Summit on Working Families – hosted by the White House Council on Women and Girls, the Department of Labor, and the Center for American Progress – served both as a pitch to employers to adopt more family-friendly policies, and as a push for policies that require all…

by Phyllis Freeman and Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA One of our public health heroes, Ciro de Quadros, a public health physician from Brazil died on May 28, 2014. We need his attitude, skills, and persistence more than ever today. Ciro was a master of innovation, particularly in his efforts to prevent…

A few of the recent pieces I've liked: Sommer Mathis at CityLab: What If the Best Way to End Drunk Driving Is to End Driving? Dylan Matthews at Vox: More evidence that giving poor people money is a great cure for poverty Tressie McMillan Cottom in the Washington Post: No, college isn’t the answer.…

One of the things policy wonks are keeping an eye on as the Affordable Care Act is fully implemented is the proportion of employers who stop offering employees insurance and instead give their workers money they can use to pay premiums of plans sold on health insurance exchanges (or marketplaces).…

by Rajiv Bhatia, M.D. Over the past three decades, real wages for low-income workers in the United States have either stagnated or declined. The federal minimum wage is intended to maintain a decent standard of living, but has fallen woefully behind. The current federal minimum of $7.25 an hour is…

by V. Tinney, J. Paulson, and E. Webb In recent months, spikes in birth defects, and stillborn and neonatal deaths in drilling-dense regions of Colorado and Utah has raised the attention of local communities, researchers, and public health officials. There is still much to be studied to be able to…

The National Complete Streets Coalition, a program of Smart Growth America, has released Dangerous by Design 2014, a new report that ranks major metropolitan areas according to the Pedestrian Danger Index and presents recommendations for reducing pedestrian injuries and fatalities. The report…

by Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA As an editor of the Journal of Public Health Policy, I have been following developments where public health intersects with the activities and policies of espionage agencies. New happenings appear regularly. First there was the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA)…

Last week was National Women’s Health Week, and the Kaiser Family Foundation used the occasion to release the report Women and Health Care in the Early Years of the ACA: Key Findings from the 2013 Kaiser Women’s Health Survey, by Alina Salganicoff, Usha Ranji, Adara Beamesderfer, and Nisha Kurani.…

Most of us probably expressed some appreciation yesterday for our mothers. Despite the brunches, flower sales, and media attention lavished on moms each Mother's Day, though, US policy doesn't express as much appreciation for mothers (or fathers) as it should. Jennifer Senior shared this graphic on…

Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) is a viral respiratory illness characterized by fever, cough, and shortness of breath, and it has been fatal in 30% of the cases identified since the disease was first reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012. It is caused by a coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and has been…

A few of the recent pieces I've liked: Jennifer Brown and Christopher N. Osher in the Denver Post: Prescription Kids (a six-part investigative series on the extensive prescribing of psychotropic drugs to Colorado foster children; via Reporting on Health) Lydia DePillis at Washington Post's Wonkblog…

For the first time, the World Health Organization has examined antimicrobial resistance globally, and the grim findings won't be surprising to anyone who's been following this issue. (Last year, the US CDC and UK's Chief Medical Officer issued reports with similarly alarming warnings.) The WHO…

Monday, April 28, is Worker Memorial Day, and groups around the US – and around the world – are holding events and issuing reports this week to remember workers killed on the job and push for stronger workplace protections. For Workers Memorial Week 2014, National Council for Occupational safety…

I've been writing a lot about the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, mainly from the perspective of Medicaid as a route to health insurance for low-income US residents. As a recent Wonkblog post from University of Chicago professor Harold Pollack reminded me, though, Medicaid is also…

By Sara Satinsky Should pregnant women who use drugs be charged as criminals or given help? From a public health perspective the choice is clear: provide treatment to help women quit drugs before their use harms their child. Less than a year ago, Tennessee adopted a progressive policy to provide…

April 2010 saw two major workplace disasters: The April 5th explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia, where 29 workers lost their lives, and the April 20th explosion at the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig that killed 11 workers. Four years later, Ken Ward Jr. of the Charleston Gazette…

The list of 2014 Pulitzer Prize winners announced earlier this week includes several journalists whose award-winning work addresses public health issues. The Boston Globe Staff won the Breaking News prize for “exhaustive and empathetic coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings and the ensuing…

The Washington Post's After the Wars series offers an in-depth look at the challenges facing veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. This past week, it's featured Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "The Other Wounds," about veterans' injuries and illnesses that aren't the direct results of enemy attacks…

The World Health Organization has released a new estimate of the number of premature deaths linked to air pollution: In 2012, approximately seven million deaths -- one in eight of those occurring worldwide -- resulted from exposure to air pollution. The vast majority of these deaths occurred in low…

At an appearance at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida last month, President Obama spoke about how the problems of stagnant wages and inadequate paid leave affect women workers: Today, more women are their family’s main breadwinner than ever before.  But on average, women are still earning just…

Yesterday was the end of the first open enrollment period for people buying private health insurance plans on the federal and state-run health insurance exchanges. President Obama announced today that more than seven million people enrolled in private plans, helped by a surge of signups in the few…

Our regular readers are well aware of the hazards faced by workers in the US poultry industry (as well as related industries processing other meats), and of the USDA's misguided poultry-inspection proposal that would allow for increased line speeds in US poultry plants. Workers, public-health…

By Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA I am surely not an expert on cholera. I have never seen a patient with the disease. And I have never been to Haiti.  Yet I keep reading about the epidemic in Haiti.  The first case reports appeared in October 2010, about 10 months after the powerful earthquake that shook…

Tomorrow, March 22nd, is World Water Day, and this year's theme is Water and Energy. UN's World Water Day website explains why: Water and energy are closely interlinked and interdependent. Energy generation and transmission requires utilization of water resources, particularly for hydroelectric,…

On Tuesday, more than 40 activists were arrested while protesting Georgia Governor Nathan Deal's refusal to accept the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion. Janel Davis and Chris Joyner write in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Dr. Raphael Warnock of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev.…

Three years after Japan's earthquake and tsunami led to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, concerns persist about health effects while the cleanup poses ongoing health and safety challenges. Living on Earth reports on a lawsuit filed by several US Navy sailors against the Tokyo Electric Power…

The latest issue of the Journal of Public Health Policy includes an interesting piece by Linda Richter and Susan E. Foster of the organization CASAColumbia about "changing the language of addiction." (The journal is open access during the month of March; the home page is here.) They note that while…

A few of the recent pieces I've liked: Jim Morris, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer in a collaboration between the Weather Channel, InsideClimate News, and The Center for Public Integrity: Fracking the Eagle Ford Shale: Big Oil and Bad Air on the Texas Prairie Brigid Schulte in the Washington Post: '…

Celeste wrote last week about poultry workers asking the White House and the USDA to abandon the proposed poultry rule that would allow poultry-processing lines to speed up. At rates of up to 175 birds per minute, these faster-moving lines would make work even more hazardous for poultry workers,…