health

Systemic Racism Continues To Plague Pandemic Response

April 21, 2021 Derrick Z. Jackson, Union of Concerned Scientists. Educate! COVID-19, health, Systemic Racism, Vaccine apartheid

On March 29, Eric, the most prominent lay leader at my church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, perished from COVID-19. He was one of 685 people across the United States and one of 15 in Massachusetts to die from the disease that day. On April 6, Eric’s mother Elmo also died from the coronavirus, one of 907 in the US and one of 12 in Massachusetts. Both were likely casualties of a nation and state that betrayed them more than once during the pandemic: First by failing to quell the virus last year; secondly by allowing people like them to fall behind in getting vaccines; and thirdly by relaxing coronavirus restrictions while the nation remains riddled with racial vaccine disparities.

We Sampled Tap Water Across The US

April 6, 2021 Ryan Felton, Lisa Gill and Lewis Kendall, Consumer Reports/The Guardian. Educate! health, pollution, United States, Water

In Connecticut, a condo had lead in its drinking water at levels more than double what the federal government deems acceptable. At a church in North Carolina, the water was contaminated with extremely high levels of potentially toxic PFAS chemicals (a group of compounds found in hundreds of household products). The water flowing into a Texas home had both – and concerning amounts of arsenic too. All three were among locations that had water tested as part of a nine-month investigation by Consumer Reports (CR) and the Guardian into the US’s drinking water. Since the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, access to safe water for all Americans has been a US government goal.

Report: Plastic Pollution Is A Social Justice Issue

April 5, 2021 Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch. Educate! Environment, health, Plastic, pollution

Plastic pollution isn't just a threat to non-human life like turtles and whales. It's also a major environmental justice problem. That's the conclusion of a new report released Tuesday from the UN Environment Program and ocean justice non-profit Azul, titled Neglected: Environmental Justice Impacts of Plastic Pollution. "Plastic pollution is a social justice issue," report coauthor and Azul founder and executive director Marce Gutiérrez-Graudiņš said in a press release. "Current efforts, limited to managing and decreasing plastic pollution, are inadequate to address the whole scope of problems plastic creates, especially the disparate impacts on communities affected by the harmful effects of plastic at every point from production to waste."

Study: Canada Is One Big Pandemic Response Experiment

April 4, 2021 Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee. Educate! COVID-19, Finance and the Economy, health, Pandemic

An extensive French study has surveyed nations’ responses to COVID-19 and concludes that those taking an aggressive “Zero COVID” approach fared better than others by both health and economic measures. The study rests its analysis in part on the experience of Canada, where six large provinces face steeply rising infection rates tied to evolved variants of the virus, while provinces and territories that hewed closer to the Zero COVID approach do not. Zero COVID, also called Go for Zero or elimination, employs a range of tactics designed to drive infection rates to negligible. Such tactics include one hard serious lockdown followed by strategic testing, active surveillance and tight border controls.

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

March 30, 2021 Alexi Jones and Wendy Sawyer, Prison Policy Initiative. Educate! COVID-19, health, Mass Incarceration, Prisons

This month, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released two reports with updates on city and county jail populations nationwide: Jail Inmates in 2019 and Impact of COVID-19 on the Local Jail Population, January-June 2020. After a year of upheaval due to the pandemic, the first report is already out-of-date and mainly useful as a historical document. The second report, however, answers some important questions about the decisions local officials made when the high stakes of jail incarceration – for individual and public health – were put into stark relief by the pandemic. Their decisions, and the resulting jail population changes in the first half of 2020, hold important lessons for ongoing and future decarceration efforts; here we outline some of those lessons – the good, the bad, and the ugly.

New Study: School Streets Improve Air Quality

March 14, 2021 London.gov. Create! health, Schools, Transportation, United Kingdom (UK)

London, UK - Closing the roads around schools to traffic at pick-up and drop-off times has reduced polluting nitrogen dioxide levels by up to 23 per cent and is strongly supported by parents, new research published by the Mayor Sadiq Khan reveals. To measure the air quality benefits of the new School Streets, 30 cutting-edge sensors from the Breathe London network were installed at 18 primary schools across Brent, Enfield and Lambeth to record nitrogen dioxide levels. The air quality monitoring project, funded by FIA Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies, was launched in September 2020 to give the most accurate indication yet of how the School Streets scheme is working. Since April 2020, almost 350 School Streets have been delivered across London with funding from Transport for London (TfL) and the boroughs to tackle children’s exposure to air pollution and improve their health.

Highlighting The Too-Often Invisible Labor Of Mothers, Who Protect Us And Lead Us

March 13, 2021 Veronica Coptis, Coalfield Justice. Resist! Children, Fracking, health, pollution

This week two major publications were released that highlight public health impacts on people living next to oil and gas operations. The Environmental Health News released their investigation looking at how chemicals associated with oil and gas are present at levels 90 times higher than the average in families’ urine, including samples from children. The New Yorker published “When the Kids Started Getting Sick” by Eliza Griswold, a deep dive on the increase in rare bone cancers in the region. These articles highlight the reality of so many in our communities, and because they reflect that lived reality, they hit home. For that reason, this blog goes a bit beyond simply providing information.

Investigation Into Chemical Exposure From Fracking Provokes Call For Rapid Phaseout

March 5, 2021 Jessica Corbett, Commondreams. Educate! Fracking, health, Pennsylvania, pollution

"While financial analysts, policymakers, and massive corporations squabble over the finer points of the fracking debate, families living amidst the wells day in and day out live in constant fear about what the industry might cost them—if they had another child, would they need to worry about birth defects? Are these exposures increasing their kids' cancer risk? Would it be safer to move to a place far away from all of this, even if it would also mean being far from their extended families, friends, and communities? And even if they could move, how far would they have to go to feel safe?" Those are just some of the questions facing the western Pennsylvania families featured in a report published Monday by Environmental Health News (EHN), a publication of the nonprofit Environmental Health Sciences. Five families from the region participated in a pilot study on the chemicals commonly found in emissions from fracking sites.

Mumia Abu-Jamal Has COVID-19

February 28, 2021 Dave Lindorff, This Can't Be Happening. Educate! COVID-19, health, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Prisoner rights

Internationally known U.S. political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal has reported to friends and family on the outside that he has contracted Covid-19 in the Pennsylvania prison where he is incarcerated, and says he is having difficulty breathing. His life is in immediate danger and he is in urgent need of hospital care. This latest outrage was sadly predictable. Prisons across the U.S. have for years been allowing serious illness to serve as a form of “silent execution” of prisoners, many of them certainly innocent of the crimes they were convicted of. Many prisoners in the system, guilty or not, are serving unfairly punitive terms that keep them confined into an old age meaning they are particularly vulnerable to potentially fatal illnesses, whether that is flu, cancer, hepatitis, pneumonia or now Covid-19.

How A Poor School Groundskeeper Took On Monsanto And Won

February 28, 2021 Roland Close, St. Louis Today. Strategize! Corporatism, glyphosate, health, Monsanto

If a company hides information that suggests its top money-making product is unsafe, keeps adverse findings from regulators, employs ghostwriters to gin up favorable scientific studies and media coverage, funds front groups in an attempt to discredit critics, fails to provide warnings to consumers, and, according to jurors who reviewed a mountain of evidence, is responsible for serious illnesses and death, how would you hold the people responsible to account? If the company were Monsanto, you couldn’t. Monsanto — once one of the marquee corporate names in St. Louis — is now gone, gobbled up in 2018 for a whopping $63 billion. Bayer AG paid a premium and Monsanto shareholders made a bundle, just as lawsuits alleging a link between Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma were beginning to heat up.

Radiation Illnesses And COVID-19 In The Navajo Nation

February 5, 2021 Jayita Sarkar and Caitlin Meyer, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Educate! COVID-19, health, Navajo nation, Uranium mining

The COVID-19 pandemic is wiping out Indigenous elders and with them the cultural identity of Indigenous communities in the United States. But on lands that sprawl across a vast area of the American West, the Navajo (or Diné) are dealing not just with the pandemic, but also with another, related public health crisis. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says COVID-19 is killing Native Americans at nearly three times the rate of whites, and on the Navajo Nation itself, about 30,000 people have tested positive for the coronavirus and roughly 1,000 have died. But among the Diné, the coronavirus is also spreading through a population that decades of unsafe uranium mining and contaminated groundwater has left sick and vulnerable.

Demand Mass Clemency On ‘National Freedom Day’

February 1, 2021 Antistasis. Resist! COVID-19, health, Prisoners, Prisons

As supporters of the #CagingCOVID campaign, the Antistasis Project is calling for decentralized actions on February 1st across the so-called United States, and internationally, in support of mass clemency for people held in jails, prisons and detention centers. Reports updated as of Jan. 19, show at least 355,957 prisoners have gotten the virus, and more than 2,232 died as a result of it. . The pandemic has resulted in prisons and jails abusing isolation more than ever before. Social distance is necessary but solitary confinement is torture. Crowded quarters, a lack of PPE, inadequate medical care, an aging population, and unsanitary conditions have contributed to an infection rate 5.5 times higher than the already ballooned average in the U.S.

Indirect Deaths

January 25, 2021 Andrea Mazzarino, Tom Dispatch. Educate! health, suicide, Veterans, Wars and Militarism

“I got out of the Marines and within a few years, 15 of my buddies had killed themselves,” one veteran rifleman who served two tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq between 2003 and 2011 said to me recently. “One minute they belonged and the next, they were out, and they couldn’t fit in. They had nowhere to work, no one who related to them. And they had these PTSD symptoms that made them react in ways other Americans didn’t.” This veteran’s remark may seem striking to many Americans who watched this country’s post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere unfold in an early display of pyrotechnic air raids and lines of troops and tanks moving through desert landscapes, and then essentially stopped paying attention.

Washington Rejects Massive Methanol Refinery

January 23, 2021 Damon Motz-Storey, Power Past Fracked Gas. Educate! climate crisis, Fracked Gas, health, Washington State

Kalama, WA —The Washington Department of Ecology (Ecology) denied permits for the massive fracked gas-to-methanol refinery proposed in Kalama, WA. Ecology nixed the fossil fuel processing and export proposal after deciding it would have a significant negative impact on the climate, Washington’s shorelines, and the public interest. [read the full letter from WA Ecology and Director Watson] “Without the necessary state and federal permits, this climate-wrecking proposal is going nowhere,” said Brett VandenHeuvel, Executive Director with Columbia Riverkeeper. “Ecology’s decision is cause for celebration for people across the Northwest who value bold leadership to tackle the climate crisis.

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