disease

The Zika virus is increasingly linked to serious neurological complications for pregnant women and microcephaly in newborns: smaller than normal heads and brains. It also affects areas of fetal brains that control basic muscular, motor, speech and other functions, leading to severe debilities that require expensive care throughout a person’s life.

Cigarette smoking has become significantly less popular in the U.S. over the past decade, it still remains a public-health scourge. Smoking accounts for more than 480,000 deaths every year in this country, or about one of every five death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while an additional 16 million Americans live with a smoking-related disease. Clearly more needs to be done to get Americans to quit smoking.

The latest public health panic is over a disease most Americans (even doctors) have never heard of. Zika virus disease (ZVD) is carried by the same mosquito, Aedes aegypti, as other Third World diseases, including dengue and chikungunya.

Approximately 800 million people on planet Earth are currently malnourished, and 2 billion additional people are expected to populate the world by 2050. Only the widespread embrace of bioengineered or genetically modified (GM) crops and animals can solve the persistent problem of hunger and lessen the impact of pest-borne diseases without doing untold damage to the environment.

The good news continues for people living near industrial sand facilities, with the release of the second in a pair of studies examining the impact of industrial sand mining on air quality. The researchers found concentrations of the small particles of silica dust that can lead to health problems if present in high concentrations are far below the levels considered harmful.

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the landmark case ofKing v. Burwell to protect the Affordable Care Act (ACA) from legal precedents, the rule of law, the English language, and common sense, the battle over the role of government in health care has now shifted away from the courts and back to the ballot box.

On February 3rd, Senior Fellow for The Heartland Institute, Ben Domenech, was a guest on Late Nights with Jim Bohannon to discuss the politicization of vaccinating children.

Halloween is upon us, and once again opponents of frac sand mining are trying to scare people in Wisconsin and other parts of the Upper Midwest by producing one-sided studies based on unscientific, anecdotal evidence (which is subject to cherry-picking and other biases) to back their claims. Fortunately, the scariest claims these organizations have made about the potential public health impacts of frac sand mining are not supported by the scientific data, and in many cases the data suggest just the opposite.

FACT: Restrictions would be for non-essential travel. Humanitarian aid could continue, with the stipulation that returning workers would be subject to a three week quarantine.

Breaking news as this article was being written is that Howard University hospital in Washington, D.C. has admitted a patient — a recent traveler to Nigeria — who has symptoms that could be associated with Ebola. Receiving little coverage was a report on Thursday, 3rd, that an American freelance television cameraman working for NBC News in Liberia has contracted Ebola, the fifth U.S. citizen known to be infected with the deadly virus.

The convergence in almond groves of so many commercial bees from all over the country creates a hotbed of viruses and pathogens that can spread to many hives. The varroa destructor mite carries at least 19 different bee viruses and diseases, causing major impacts on bee colonies. Parasitic phorid flies are another problem, and highly contagious infections also pose significant threats. The intestinal fungus nosema ceranae, for example, prevents bees from absorbing nutrition, resulting in starvation.