As I was doing some research for my main side project, a website on apocalyptic scenarios, I ran across a story that, as I read further, deeply troubled me. It was from a small paper in Colorado, the Durango Herald. Colorado is home of many natural-gas wells, and energy is a big part of Colorado's economy, so they pay attention to a different set of issues than the national news sectors do.

I mean, this is my research, so most of my ranting takes place in a confined academic setting where I can't actually 'rant' more like humbly share my opinion in 10 to 15 second intervals (yes I'm a grad student).  I'm finding this all overlapping with my freakishly fucked up life and I'm just in the need to write a rant that covers the gamut of what I do each fucking day.  This morning, I woke up to this
article, "Do Self Breast Exams Do Any Good?":

THURSDAY NIGHT IS HEALTH CARE CHANGE NIGHT, a weekly Daily Kos Health Care Series.

Today, in follow-up to my earlier diary "What is Public Health", we ask "What is Epidemiology"?

As many of my fellow Bay Area Kossacks know, we are undergoing a heatwave.  The temps in the inland areas are going to be in the triple digits.  The last I heard, San Francisco was supposed to hit 90 today.  We won't have any relief until the weekend.

In addition to the heatwave the air quality has been very bad as a result of the No. CA fires that are still raging.  This will make life worse for those, like me, with asthma.

(written 6/6)Today was a good day. I got a lot of kitchen cleaning done, and a clean kitchen always makes me want to cook something, especially a recipe I hadn’t tried before. Tonight, I fancied a doughnut. So therefore, I made yeast doughnuts. I figured my brother (who lives with my husband and I) would come home about the time they were done. He’s got an instinct for freshly baked homemade stuff.

He and his girlfriend had been out. She lives three hours away, and drives over on her days off. So they’ve been pretty much either secluded in his room or gone this weekend. They came in, he got the food I’d saved for him and was eating it, and she sat down on the kitchen floor and ate a cheese-filled garlic breadstick left from dinner. "My God, Alex, I want to marry you," she said, laughing. "Hey, John, I’m leaving you for Alex, cause she makes these...."

This is my first diary , so I'll apologize in advance for the errors and
protocol gaffes that doubtless will be made. Also , not gonna include links , but you can get more info and clarification of anything I fumble at the CDC's website. They , and the World Health Organization are the real authorities and who to go for to get latest and most complete info.
   Mosquitoes. They carry a number of often deadly diseases , and our summer months bring them out in droves . Midwestern flooding will likely produce many opportunities for enhanced reproduction for these biting insects - My intention is to pass along tips to help individual homeowners , renters , and property managers help control mosquito populations with minimal effort and expense.  

The current air pollution episode in the central valley of California has intensified with both PM 2.5 and ozone in code red and code orange conditions as of 4-5 PM PDT.

Chico, CA is in code purple condition this hour.

The U.S. has set another 40 year record. Yay us.

The percentage of underweight babies born in the United States has increased to its highest rate in 40 years, with Georgia ranking seventh from the bottom in delivering healthy infants, according to a new report that also documents a recent rise in the number of children living in poverty.

The data on low birth weights is troubling because such babies — those born at less than 5.5 pounds — are at greater risk of dying in infancy or experiencing long-term disabilities....

The figures indicate a reversal in the positive trends found in the late 1990s, said Laura Beavers, coordinator of the Kids Count project for the Baltimore-based Annie E. Casey Foundation.... Beavers noted that in many categories, the United States compares poorly with other developed countries. A recent study released by UNICEF ranked the United States second-worst out of 33 industrialized nations in a composite index on child well-being, and it was 29th in regard to the percentage of babies with low birth weight.

In addition to having more underweight babies, we also have more children living in poverty, children in single-parent families, and children living with unemployed parents. Thank you, Mr. Bush. Because that whole war on poverty thing was so 20th century.

While quietly perusing the WaPo webpages, the following paragraph suddenly screamed out at me:

"If you ask people whether they think the drain cleaner they use in their homes has been tested for safety, they think, 'Of course, the government would have never allowed a product on the market without knowing it's safe,' " said Richard Denison, senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. "When you tell them that's not the case, they can't believe it."

Wow!

As you probably have noticed, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is reporting that 167 people in 17 states have been fallen sick with salmonella after eating raw tomatoes, and at least 23 have been hospitalized. But, days later, FDA still hasn't identified one specific source of the tainted produce.

With food contamination emergencies regularly making headlines, one would expect the agency's Office of Inspector General, the designated internal watchdog, to be knee deep in investigations, audits and inspections, per its stated mission. But, food and other public health issues have received little attention at HHS and another public health agency, USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service, both victims of a disease called "smaller government."

As part of another project that consumes me more and more, I ran across a story that called out for a diary, and an alert to to the DailyKos community.

MRSA -- methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or "Multidrug Resistant Staphylococcus aureus" -- is a scary bacterium. It is a variant of Staph that has evolved to withstand virtually all the antibiotics that we have. It's hard to treat, and really wicked:

Dr. Monina Klevens [of the CDC] examined the cases of the disease reported in hospitals, schools and prisons in one year and extrapolated that "94,360 invasive MRSA infections occurred in the United States in 2005; these infections were associated with death in 18,650 cases."

MRSA is the inevitable result of overuse of antibiotics, not only in humans, but also in agriculture, where antibiotics are often used "prophylactically" -- as a preventative, and to fatten up pigs and cows.

So this title jumped out at me:

Potentially fatal bacteria found in pigs, farmworkers [Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Mon, Jun 9, 2008]

It is the Heat... and the Humidity.

Many parts of the country are beginning to suffer a "heat wave." This being summer, wherever you are there are going to be dangerously hot days.

Heat waves cause many excess deaths and suffering, most of them unreported as such. Heat waves in the U.S. cause more deaths than hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes combined!

From 1999–2003, the U.S officially had a total of 3,442 reported heat-related deaths, for an annual mean of 688. In 2003, Europe suffered 34,000 excess deaths do to a heat wave.

Yet they are a silent killer with relatively less public attentiond paid. They cause relatively little damage to infrastructure and offer no dramatic pictures for TV news. Many deaths go unreported or unattributed. And yet everyone of these deaths is preventable!

This diary offers both personal and community advice as to how to protect yourself, and some political context (yup. everything has a political context).

It's payback time for the Oil Industry.  Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is looking out for his friends and backers by making sure Californians are forced to stay in their cars and pay huge gas gouging prices ($4.37 per gallon today) instead of switching to public mass transit.

Already transit ridership is soaring in California.  But Schwarzenegger is unmoved and now chooses to make a second round of MASSIVE cuts in transit funding in the California State budget.

Schwarzenegger is transparent; he shows he cares primarily for the profits of Big Oil -- or he would embrace the soaring transit ridership as a precursor of other state savings including:  

o fewer cars on the roads mean reduced road wear and tear (oops! but that would mean less oil industry profit from road resurfacing using an Oil Industry product -- asphalt -- at millions of dollars per mile)...

In the last twelve hours, a regional PM 2.5 air pollution episode has started in the PA-MD-North VA-South NJ area.

The air pollution episode involves widespread Code Orange PM 2.5 air pollution.   PM 2.5 are inhalable particles and aerosols that are 2.5 microns or smaller in diameter.

More below....

THURSDAY NIGHT IS HEALTH CARE CHANGE NIGHT, a weekly Daily Kos Health Care Series.

Tonight it is back to first principles with: "What is Public Health?"
As you will see if you read on through, it has a lot to do with SHIT.

Public health is science art and practice of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organized efforts of society.

While public health is comprised of many of familiar health disciplines -- such as medicine, dentistry, nursing, nutrition, social work, environmental science, education, administration, and behavioral science -- its activities focus on communities and populations rather than individual patients.

Doctors usually treat individual patients one-on-one for a specific disease or injury. Public health professionals monitor and diagnose the health concerns of entire communities and promote healthy practices and behaviors to assure our populations stay healthy.

"Health care is vital to all of us some of the time, but public health is vital to all of us all of the time." (attributed to former Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop)

The Public Health Paradox:

"When public health succeeds, nothing happens."

I have previously diaried attempts by Bushco to secretly gut our public health safety net through a set of hard-to-understand rules changes. If implemented May 25 as planned, the rules will severely reduce federal subsidies to public hospitals, indigent hospital care, emergency rooms, clinics, school-based health, graduate medical education, case management, rehabilitation, and children's Medicaid enrollment, causing providers to close their doors. I even flew to DC with a few other health care activists, convincing a McClatchy editor to cover the story, and got some help from a professional I met on the web to film a YouTube documentary to alert the public! Other bloggers took up the cause, began calling their Congresscritters and voila! HR 5613, The "Protect Our Medicaid Safety Net Act" was born!

I have previously diaried our mutual efforts to prevent these rules from going into effect.  The moratorium on the evil rules goes before the full Senate this week. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Charles Grassley (R-IA), and administration officials have vowed to kill the moratorium. Find out how you can help below the break.

Today in the Washington Post there is a front page story aboutabout immigrant medical care in facilities designed to hold immigrants pending review of their immigration status. Not only is the story truly disgusting in it's description of how detainees are cared for, but it represents a problem of this country's healthcare system as a whole. The title of this diary is the title of Carl Rogers' famous book about humanistic psychology and how we should act and treat others.

The required brief disclosure here. Many here should be familiar with my comments and feelings about illegal immigrants. I do not share the views of many here that we should let these immigrants in. Here though I will probably join with most here in decrying the total inhumane treatment of these detainees, which is even less then the treatment afforded detainees at Gittmo. I also have in the past worked in Corrections over thirteen years and am a Registered Nurse.

Asthma has been on my mind lately, because a child in my extended family was recently diagnosed with it after going to the hospital for respiratory problems. The chronic disease is one of the leading causes of hospitalization in children.

In addition, at least 20 million American adults are estimated to have asthma.

Yesterday was World Asthma Day, in connection with Asthma Awareness Month.

Join me after the jump to read about five policies our society should implement, as well as five steps individuals can take, to reduce the incidence and severity of asthma in our households and across the country.