The 2x2 project

04/17/2018

Happy Tax Day! We have the knowledge, resources, & power to transform our tax structure to build a HEALTHIER future. http://thndr.me/cnDYJI

02/07/2018

New York: for National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, help by getting tested! http://thndr.me/hrNLQ5

01/10/2017

"Outspoken vaccine critic Robert Kennedy Jr. has accepted a position within Donald Trump’s administration as chair of a panel on vaccine safety and scientific integrity—the clearest sign yet of the president-elect’s suspicions about vaccines.

The offer, which came in a Wednesday meeting between Trump and the scion of America’s most prominent Democratic family, is likely to concern scientists and public health experts who fear the incoming administration could give legitimacy to skeptics of childhood immunizations, despite a huge body of scientific research demonstrating that vaccines are safe."

Like the president-elect, Robert Kennedy Jr. has pushed arguments of a link to autism 

12/01/2016

"Given that the downstream health effects of hate crimes and discrimination are so dramatic, public health and medical systems should join these efforts. Public health systems have deep experience with meticulously capturing, monitoring, and using data over time to identify and track risk factors, map incidence, and study outcomes and potential solutions. Doctors and psychologists can supplement these efforts by playing a role in detecting and reporting events their patients experience, and by providing necessary support, counseling, and access to further care.

This is not meant to replace other mechanisms of addressing hate crimes, such as the criminal justice system, but rather it is meant to be adjunctive and, in a time of neglect, a stopgap measure. But an additional benefit is that incorporating a public health approach allows for shifting the discourse of such incidents from blame, which can be politicized and even magnify the initial insult, to prevention."

Public health efforts offer a unique opportunity to stop the spread

10/26/2016

Relevant to gun violence as a public health issue: "The film industry as a whole has become increasingly gun-friendly, according to the Internet Movie Fi****ms Database; their crowd-sourced data suggests that the median number of weapon models featured in films has increased by 11% from 1995 to 2015. Researchers also found that gun violence in PG-13 films has more than tripled since 1985; in recent years, it has even exceeded the violence of R-rated films."

Actors often name their weapon of choice—though it is usually left to armorers

10/10/2016

Some wonderful news! "Dr. Julia Glade Bender, an associate professor of pediatrics at Columbia University Medical Center, said that the reductions in death rates were the result of lessons learned in clinical trials that had led to small changes in practice.

“Many hope for cancer breakthroughs, or cancer moonshots,” she said. “But it’s a series of well-conceived trials where we’ve studied minor changes in standards of care which add up over decades to substantial gains in survival.”"

Deaths from childhood cancer fell 20 percent in the United States from 1999 to 2014. Clinical trials have led to small changes in practice, one expert said.

10/06/2016

"The Obama administration, in its latest effort to update workplace policies it says have lagged far behind the realities of Americans’ lives, will require federal government contractors to provide paid sick leave to their workers.

The rule, which was issued on Thursday and which the Labor Department estimates will directly affect more than 1.1 million people once fully in effect, enables workers to accrue up to seven days of paid sick leave a year.

“This is really part of a broader conversation across America about what a 21st-century social compact should look like,” Thomas E. Perez, the labor secretary, said in an interview."

The rule, which is estimated to directly affect more than 1.1 million people, will enable workers to accrue up to seven days for medical care for themselves or relatives.

09/29/2016

From the New England Journal of Medicine: "The editors invited the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, to answer the following question for Journal readers: What specific changes in policy do you support to improve access to care, improve quality of care, and control health care costs for our nation? Secretary Clinton responded. Mr. Trump did not respond."

Clinton's specific policies include: "We must work to expand Medicaid coverage in the 19 states that have left 3 million Americans without health insurance because their states refused to expand Medicaid and enroll people eligible for coverage. We need to improve and strengthen the ACA through enhanced tax credits to make coverage affordable, implementation of strong measures to bring down the cost of prescription drugs, increased competition between insurers, and an aggressive campaign to increase outreach and enrollment. And finally, we need to ensure the availability of a public option choice in every state, and let Americans over 55 buy in to Medicare. Taken together, these policies will increase competition, choice, affordability and the number of Americans with insurance."

Sounding Board from The New England Journal of Medicine — My Vision for Universal, Quality, Affordable Health Care

09/04/2016

Here is an in-depth look at coastal flooding and climate change, a major 21st century issue with public health and safety implications.

The gridlock in Washington means the United States lacks not only a broad national policy on sea-level rise, it has something close to the opposite: The federal government spends billions of taxpayer dollars in ways that add to the risks, by subsidizing local governments and homeowners who build in imperiled locations along the coast..."

Scientists’ warnings that the rise of the sea would eventually imperil the United States’ coastline are no longer theoretical.

08/25/2016

"Five months after the city implemented its penny-per-ounce tax on all manner of sugar-sweetened beverages, lower-income residents had reduced their consumption by 21%, compared to the pre-tax days. Meanwhile, their counterparts in neighboring Oakland and San Francisco increased the amount of sugary drinks consumed by 4% during the same period, according to a study published Tuesday in the American Journal of Public Health.

Instead of swilling as much Coke, Gatorade, Red Bull and Hawaiian Punch, the Berkeley residents boosted their water consumption by 63%. In the neighboring cities, low-income residents drank only 19% more water during the study period."

Can Americans tax themselves out of their obesity crisis? A new analysis of Berkeley’s first-in-the-nation “soda tax” offers encouraging results about its power to change people’s dietary habits.

08/18/2016

"The secretary general’s acknowledgment, by contrast, stopped short of saying that the United Nations specifically caused the epidemic. Nor does it indicate a change in the organization’s legal position that it is absolutely immune from legal actions, including a federal lawsuit brought in the United States on behalf of cholera victims seeking billions in damages stemming from the Haiti crisis.

But it represents a significant shift after more than five years of high-level denial of any involvement or responsibility of the United Nations in the outbreak, which has killed at least 10,000 people and sickened hundreds of thousands. Cholera victims suffer from dehydration caused by severe diarrhea or vomiting."

The acknowledgment came after a confidential report told the secretary general that the outbreak, which began in 2010, “would not have broken out but for the actions of the United Nations.”

08/11/2016

A perspective on a very challenging area of research:

"The problem is one of signal to noise. You can’t discern the signal — a lower risk of dementia, or a longer life, or less obesity, or less cancer — because the noise, the enormous uncertainty in the measurement of such things as how much you exercise or what exactly you eat, is overwhelming. The signal is often weak, meaning if there is an effect of lifestyle it is minuscule, nothing like the link between smoking and lung cancer, for example.

And there is no gold standard of measurement, nothing that everyone agrees on and uses to measure aspects of lifestyle.

The result is a large body of studies whose conclusions are not reproducible. “We don’t know how to measure diet or exercise,” said Dr. Barnett Kramer, director of the National Cancer Institute’s division of disease prevention."

Among the drawbacks: poorly designed research, a variety of ways to measure and report outcomes, and a bias toward reporting “interesting” results.