Will the invisible hand slap some sense into anti-vaxxers?

It was only a matter of time:

California has confirmed more cases of measles in people who visited Disneyland or its adjacent California Adventure park last month, health officials said on Monday, raising the number of infected people to 26.

Public schools have had a devil of a time with the anti-vax crowd, since they have to allow religious or "religious" exemptions to some degree or another. But private landowners? Not so much.

It would be perfectly legal for Disney to deny entry to customers whose vaccinations aren't up to date. Maybe what will bring down anti-vaxxing won't be public health information initiatives (though that seems to be working very well in Australia), but will be commercial entities like Disney. Imagine having to show proof of vaccination before your kids are allowed into Disneyland. Score one for the invisible hand!

Komen link round-up; local protest later today

Richer, smarter, and funnier minds than mine have explained why it's stupid for Susan G. Komen for the Cure to politicize women's healthcare by ending grants to Planned Parenthood that provide breast screenings to underserved American women. In short, cancer prevention activities make up some 16% of the patient care Planned Parenthood delivers, compared to 3% for abortion services. Math from figures in a Bloomberg Businessweek article indicates to me that Planned Parenthood used Komen grant money to provide about 172,000 breast exams in the past 5 years ("Komen grants paid for about 4.3 percent of the 4 million breast exams and 9 percent of the 70,000 mammogram referrals provided at Planned Parenthood clinics in the past five years, Planned Parenthood said"). That's not a whole lot of exams -- 34,000 per year -- and it was probably not even 172,000 individual women. But it's 172,000 exams that wouldn't have taken place without the grants, and it's 172,000 encounters with women who got some education on breast cancer prevention and detection.

Komen says they're "dedicated to the fight against breast cancer in the world." They need to add the qualifier, unless the service reaches you through Planned Parenthood.

EDIT: Word on the street is that there is a fundraiser for the Philadelphia Komen affiliate today at the Cescaphé Ballroom, 932 North 2nd Street, and that activists will gather at 5:30 p.m. to urge the affiliate to join those in Denver and Connecticut in telling the national organization that it sucks to politicize women's public health.

I am not surprised these two links came across my desk at about the same time this morning

Within 5 minutes of each other, these 2 links came across my screen this morning:

A very large (no pun intended) majority of American workers are overweight or obese or have a chronic health problem (WSJ).

"Ranch Dressing And Other Delights," a podcast episode discussing a few of the most horrifying entries at Allrecipes.com, includes links to American culinary masterpieces like Taco in a Bag, mayo-and-ketchup-based Pink Dippin' Sauce, and an E-Z casserole made with two types of canned corn, macaroni, a half-cup of butter, and a half-pound of processed cheese (The F Plus).

Correlation is not causation, but I think I'm going to have celery for lunch today anyway.

Back from a blogging vacay

So I took off for about a 5-week vacation from blogging. Anything happen while I was gone?

The way to less sodium in your diet is to eat less processed food

An article at MSNBC discusses the problem of too much sodium in American diets, but gets to the next-to-last, below-the-fold paragraph before mentioning a huge way to reduce one's sodium intake: eat less processed food. Quit the TV dinners, quit the junk food, don't eat out so often, get out of the habit of "convenience" foods, and you'll get less sodium in your diet.

A frozen dinner or shelf-stable lunch from a box looks cheaper than a from-scratch dinner or sack lunch until you feel hungry again one hour afterward. Old-fashioned oats cooked in the microwave, topped with raisins or brown sugar, is cheaper and healthier than ready-to-eat box cereal or instant oatmeal from a packet. MSNBC should have offered views from CDC and Center for Science in the Public Interest way, way before talking to flaks from ConAgra, Kraft, Cargill, General Mills, and Campbell's.

In short, there's a reason behind the cliché "an apple a day keeps the doctor away."

Mikey Wild, R.I.P.

The story of the Mayor of South Street, Part I (9:05):



Part II (10:00):



Part III (9:09):



Fuck the American healthcare system that failed to get him the cancer medicine and treatments that he couldn't afford.

Why I don't really care about how Chick-fil-A hates gay people

My god, I must be seriously out of touch with the way most Americans eat. I was reading that article about how Chick-fil-A hates gay people, and it mentioned people who eat there weekly or used to eat there almost daily, and it occurs to me that I have not eaten a fast-food meal in years. Maybe even 10 years. And by "fast-food meal" I mean burger + fries + Coke, or a chicken or breakfast sandwich variation of some kind.

Part of it is the question of the money-nutrition equation. Fast food calories are inexpensive, this is true. But you don't get much nutrition for your buck, and you get so little fiber and protein that you feel hungry way too soon afterward for the number of calories you've taken in. So while I can't beat KFC's price if I make a home-made fried chicken meal box on my own, certainly I can make something more filling and more nutritious for that amount of money. And really, I can feed myself for two or even three meals for the price of one KFC box.

The other part of it is what I'll call the question of Fast Food Nation or Food, Inc. And by "question," I mean "really big, multi-faceted issue including but not limited to unsafe meat production, factory farms, globalization, multinational corporations, the FDA, the USDA, OSHA, HHS, the USPTO, and Karl Marx." I've distilled it for myself and my daughter into two things: One, I'll go out on a limb here and express my distaste for worker exploitation, agricultural animal abuse, environmental degradation, government corruption, untested and undeclared GMOs, and unhealthy food. And two, I want to put my money where my mouth is. One way to do that is to opt out. That is, opt out of Big Food. Skip convenience foods like shelf-stable boxed meals (except as emergency supplies in the pantry), baby foods, ready-to-eat cereals, frozen vegetable medleys, fruit cups, pre-sliced anything, and so on. Skip junk foods, which by definition don't provide much nutrition per dollar. Skip restaurants, from diners to upscale chains and everything in between, that serve pre-prepared, frozen foodservice dishes or components, reheated and assembled for your plate. And for the love of christ, skip corn syrup, the easiest way of doing so being to quit drinking sodapop.

I've been baking my own bread for a while now, because my local supermarket quit carrying the kind of bread I like (the family size all whole-wheat loaf, which is the same weight but has more slices -- and so more sandwiches and pieces of breakfast toast -- than the all whole-wheat loaves they continue to carry). I prepare just about all of my meals from scratch, starting with whole ingredients, a variety of fruits and vegetables and grains, and a good knife.

I have a crockpot and I'm not afraid to use it.

Households in so-called "food deserts" have a problem. A lot of socioeconomically disadvantaged people live in neighborhoods where there is no supermarket. At the risk of sounding like Scrooge -- "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?" -- where do these people go to work or school? Why not pick up groceries on the way home? Why not include transit fare to a supermarket in their shopping budgets? Why not spend some part of the weekend going food shopping and then preparing or planning meals for the coming week?

Some households in food deserts are truly stuck, I understand that. They're getting minimal welfare benefits and other assistance, and the money simply runs out mid-month. It is impossible to live with a good pantry when you don't have the initial capital to stock the pantry in the first place. I don't know how to solve that problem. This is where I start to sound libertarian, because I've lived on very little money at various times in my life but have still managed to eat healthily and cheap. I think a very, very large number of people in food deserts could at least partially address the problem themselves through education and working on making their households less chaotic. And by using the following principles that I adopted when I had food security issues:

• Brown rice and beans is cheap. Start from dry beans and a $15 crockpot and it's even cheaper.
  
• An orange a day keeps you regular and wards off scurvy. Even the corner markets sell oranges.
  
• Here in Philadelphia, the Reading Terminal Market produce vendors and the farmer's market vendors take SNAP (food stamps) and WIC. You can get to the Reading Terminal Market from just about anywhere within the city limits on a single trip plus a transfer, if not a single trip without a transfer.
  
• It is OK to eat the same damn thing several days in a row.
  
• It is OK to feel hungry, and then really hungry, for a while before you put more food in your mouth.
  
• It is OK to feel not completely satisfied at the end of a meal, or downright hungry because you had to skip a meal, unless of course you're diabetic or something.
  
• Fast food is not your friend. It is not truly inexpensive, it is not truly filling, and it is absolutely not healthy.

But my point, and I had one when I started, is that honestly I would care more about the "Chick-fil-A hates gay people" controversy if I cared at all about fast food. Gay people and their supporters should vote with their dollars, of course -- but more importantly, really nobody should be eating Chick-fil-A or any kind of fast food. It's no good for you and it's expensive and it's destroying the planet. Go bake some bread, instead.

Kaiser Family Foundation study: nearly 20% of Americans are uninsured

Following up on a news report I blogged about in November, the Kaiser Family Foundation has released a study and accompanying set of data tables showing how 19% of Americans, or 50 million people, do not have health insurance (PDF).

Horrifying. I'm getting in touch with Senator Toomey's office as soon as I can -- he doesn't appear to have his office phone set up yet -- to ask his position on this report, whether he's looking to join in the House GOP's plan to repeal the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010. Toomey had problematic positions on health care and health insurance reform. I'd like to know if he has concrete data for how his positions would get more Americans insured.

Kenz serial killer's latest victim was on the street because she had no health insurance

From today's Daily News, regarding the Kensington serial killer's latest victim, Casey Mahoney, focuses on how it's "eerie" that Mahoney (like everybody else on social networking websites) filled out a quiz recently that asked, among other things, how she'd prefer to die. But there's another, far more important and "eerie" fact buried in the article:

Mahoney graduated from high school in North Carolina, according to her MySpace page, and previously lived in New York City. She first came to Philadelphia to attend a drug-rehab clinic, Mahoney's mother-in-law told CBS3 yesterday, but she was forced to leave because of a lack of insurance. She went home to enter another clinic, but left after just a week and returned to Philadelphia this week[.]

Mahoney leaves behind a toddler. If drug-control enforcement money were focused on the right things -- treatment, vocational rehabilitation, and work placement, as well as investigating and prosecuting reported sex crimes and violence on the Ave, rather than serially arresting and imprisoning the women -- then Mahoney's toddler might still have a mom today.

In another article, a 30-year-old local man is quoted, addressing the police theory that the strangler is a customer who contracted HIV from a prostitute and is exacting revenge:

He got burnt. Do you know what that means? It means he was with a hooker and she gave him a disease. [ ... ] He's going after as many white hookers as he can. Put yourself in his shoes, do you blame him?

How many other residents have this attitude? How many cops?

Nearly 1 in 5 Americans has no health insurance

[I]n the first quarter of 2010, an estimated 59.1 million people had no health insurance for at least part of the year[.]

(MSNBC.) In other words, nearly 1 in 5 Americans has no health insurance. And it's not just the sorely impoverished; about half of the uninsured live well above the federal poverty level.

Nearly 1 in 5 Americans has no health insurance.

And it's not just the healthy, either; more than 40% of the uninsured have a chronic disease such as asthma, hypertension, or diabetes.

Nearly 1 in 5 Americans has no health insurance.

The Republican response? Kill health insurance reform by chipping away at it, piece by piece. Block funding for programs, close low-income clinics, and roll back consumer protection progress until they've achieved what Representative Eric Cantor (R-Va.) calls "full repeal."

What does Rep. Cantor consider "full repeal"? Nearly 2 in 5 Americans with no health insurance? Half of all Americans? I don't mean to be disingenuous; I know he means that he wants everyone to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and fund their own personal medical savings accounts (whether ordinary savings accounts or money-market accounts or accounts with funds invested in the stock market). That kind of account is a great idea if you have (1) seed money to begin with; and (2) generally good health, so that you can earn money by working and you don't need a lot of expensive healthcare anyway.

It's all very rich coming from someone with a gold-plated federal employee health plan. Has Rep. Cantor opted out of his federal benefits program? Has he put his money where his mouth is?

Nearly 1 in 5 Americans has no health insurance.

Let's see those ranks swell with elected Republicans who campaigned on destroying health insurance reform.

Migraine

Nothing like a good migraine to start your week with.

Sons of the broken glass

I'd say he's calling for a modern Kristallnacht but, you know, I wouldn't want to Godwin the discussion or anything:

Mike Vanderboegh of Pinson, Ala., former leader of the Alabama Constitutional Militia, put out a call on Friday for modern “Sons of Liberty” to break the windows of Democratic Party offices nationwide in opposition to health care reform. Since then, vandals have struck several offices, including the Sedgwick County Democratic Party headquarters in Wichita.

But not just Kansas: also in Arizona and two separate offices in New York. Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and John the Baptist on a pogo stick, people.

Life is intervening lately

Life is intervening lately, curtailing my online time.

Professional life is busy, if still mostly unpaid. I finally renewed my membership at the Jenkins Law Library, a task I'd been putting off for weeks for reasons of inconvenience. Not too coincidentally, I have some research I have to do for a client meeting (unpaid) on Saturday. It's nice to have my LexisNexis back.

Had lunch with a local lawyer yesterday who said he wanted to pick my brain about starting up his own firm. Actually he was basically asking me for a job. I was nice. I didn't laugh until after we'd gone our separate ways.

Personal life is busy, if only in my mind. Crushing hard on someone who's not interested. Story of my life.

Partial custody life is busy. The ex's near-hoarding, chronic disorganization problem interfered in my life massively this week: missed appointment, behavior problems with our daughter, and a last-minute change of plans for the weekend that affect not just me but at least two other households. So lately I've been even crankier than my usual baseline level of general irritation at the world. I recognize that a lot of my problem is that his conduct is pushing some buttons of mine that don't get pushed as frequently as they did before we split. Since I'm not used to it any more, it's a little harder to recognize and head off at the pass before it pisses me off. And I shouldn't "concern troll" and be irritated on behalf of the other two households. But I've got a lot on my plate right now and this is one huge thing that I pushed off of my plate some years ago. I hate it when it pushes its way back on.

Promised myself a couple of weeks ago to force myself to get out of the house for a few hours every day, and not just to fetch my daughter home from school or attend my minimal weekly obligations. It's been a very good decision, even if it's meant that this blog and a couple of other online "commitments" have suffered.

I saw a robin on the north side of Independence Hall this morning.

HHS Secretary Sebelius chastises Chuck Todd for sneezing on the press corps

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius briefs the press, notes NBC's Chuck Todd sneezing while another journo asks a question. She's about to let it go, but then she thinks again, glares at Todd, interrupts the journo asking her a question, and chastises Todd for sneezing into his hand rather than into his elbow. Watch how red Todd gets:



"Who's got some Purell? Give that to Mr. Todd, right away. A little hand sanitizer!"

Overwhelming majority of Americans want Obamacare, actually

Bloomberg poll:

More than 8 out of 10 [Americans] support covering the uninsured, curbing costs, creating an insurance-purchasing exchange, and preventing insurers from dropping coverage or refusing to accept people with preexisting medical conditions. Majorities say employers should have to offer insurance and individuals should be required to have coverage.

Duh.

"Clean, separate, cook, and chill"

The Obama administration's new Food Safety website includes an alert widget for your blog, an RSS feed of food recalls (that doesn't yet appear completely operational), information about food storage, "ask the experts" contact information, and information sheets about various food-borne illnesses.

The federal government could have been using Web technology years ago to provide consumer information about the food supply, but I'll take what I can get. I don't think I'll put the widget on my blog, but I'll subscribe to the RSS feed of food recall alerts when they're available.

Putting all this stuff on a website is a wonderful idea. A lot of people aren't learning the basics of food preparation any more, and I think there are a few reasons. First, with all the focus on teaching to standardized tests and raising test scores, I think a lot of kids don't take a home economics class in school. Not that home ec was terribly useful when I was a teen, but at least we did learn our way around the kitchen, from prep to clean-up. Now I'm not sure how many schools still even offer a family and consumer science course. (My daughter's school doesn't.)

Second, take-home restaurant meals and convenience foods are more elaborate and cheaper than they were 20 years ago. When I was a kid, the take-out options were pizza, a Kentucky Fried Chicken family meal, or lousy Chinese food; the convenience food options were limited to TV dinners (remember salisbury steak?) and macaroni and cheese from a box. There's a lot more take-out to choose from now, and convenience food technology sometimes leaves me with that "wow, I'm living in the future" feeling when I look at some of the shelf-stable products in the supermarket.

Third, and this one's probably peculiar to myself, television cooking shows don't focus on the basics the way they used to. In the '70s and '80s I remember watching chefs like the Frugal Gourmet, or Jacques Pépin, or Graham Kerr (mostly after his Galloping Gourmet days), or Justin Wilson. And Julia Child reruns, too. These shows taught how to hold a knife, how to dice an onion, how to remember "hot pan, cold oil, food won't stick," how to dress a chicken, how to make pastry. The Food Network shows -- and most of the new shows on PBS, too -- don't teach. They're entertainment: tours of great American restaurants; foods of the world that are least recognizable to the Western palate; championship cook-offs with world-renowned chefs using the most expensive, most out-of-season ingredients available in desert Las Vegas. Alton Brown explains the chemistry and history behind a lot of foods, but the most recent show of his I watched showed how to make baklava from store-boughten phyllo dough, interspersed with actors dressed up as carpet-flying Persians and nomadic Turks and their camels. If Brown had spent that time teaching how to make flake pastry, it would have been more worth my while to watch the show. Instead, he explained how to make your own home-made rosewater. This is entertainment, not teaching; it's not in and of itself a bad thing, just different from what people my age grew up with.

Luckily, I have a Joy of Cooking at home with illustrated instructions.

I think you really lose something when you jump from box macaroni and cheese to celebrity chef shows, without stopping for a visit with Fannie Farmer and Cooking with Claudine in-between. Until cooking is as obsolete as spinning and weaving your own cloth (as a household necessity), it's a money-saving life skill that kids need to learn.

My point, and I do have one, is that a lot of kids are not only not learning how to make healthy food choices and cook the most basic of meals, but they are also not learning how to wash their hands before they cook, how to keep a sanitary kitchen, or how to even tell if the milk has gone bad. Putting up a website that takes the place of old-timey home ec classes is a welcome way to address that problem.

The real "death panels" are in Alaska

The real "death panels" and long waits for care are in Sarah Palin's Alaska:

A particularly alarming finding concerns deaths of adults in the programs. In one 2 1/2 year stretch, 227 adults already getting services died while waiting for a nurse to reassess their needs. Another 27 died waiting for their initial assessment, to see if they qualified for help.

The programs at issue provide in-home help for thousands of Alaskans with the basics of life, from medication to meals. The goal is to help people stay in their own homes rather than go into nursing homes or other institutions.

The services are paid for by Medicaid, the state-federal health program for the poor and the disabled, and overseen by the state Division of Senior and Disabilities Services. Individuals qualify based on income and need. Private contractors do most of the work. The programs cost about $250 million this year, with the federal government currently paying 61 percent of the bill.

In other words, while Governor Palin wasn't busy vetoing funds for programs that shelter runaway teens, her state government was funneling federal money to independent contractors who sat on their asses while low-income sick and elderly Alaskans got poorer, sicker, and older -- and died on her watch.

Reminds me of the Danieal Kelly child neglect case here in Philly: federal, state, and city funding for addressing child abuse and neglect is distributed to 3d-party contractors through DHS. DHS doesn't take care of children; they only administer the money and draw up rules and regulations that they don't enforce against the contractors until enough kids die that the mayor takes notice. Why various cities and states continue with this model is beyond my comprehension.

Off to see the radiology wizard

In my continuing quest to get in as many doctor's appointments as possible before my student health insurance plan expires, I'm off for a mammogram today. "No deodorant," they told me -- on a day when it's supposed to reach almost 90 degrees F, and the humidity is at about 65%.

So maybe it could be worse? Instead of getting a law degree and only the dimmest of job prospects on the horizon, I could have become a mammography technician in an area of the country with lousy hot and humid weather a good third of the year.

On Pepsi with cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup

Pepsi Throwback tastes like what I remember RC Cola tasting like when I was a kid.

Do not do a Google image search for "mountain dew mouth"

How much sugar did you drink today?

Although I don't see the dentist very often -- going through law school without dental insurance will do that to a person -- my teeth are in very good shape. The major factors for that good fortune are that I've inherited strong teeth, I've always had fluoridated tap water, I had a reasonably good diet when I was a young child in the 1970s, and I saw the dentist regularly until my 20s. But probably more importantly, I also don't eat a lot of sugar or refined grains, so the bacteria that cause plaque and gingivitis and stuff don't have anything to feed on in my mouth. I mean, I know people in their early 20s who have had multiple root canals. Multiple! My wisdom teeth had to be pulled when they got rotten from lack of care, but other than that I've never had any problem more dire than cavities in my molars. Get this, though: one thing my root-canalled pals have in common is that they drink sweetened coffee or Mountain Dew, almost continually throughout the day. Ugh. It's a perfect growth medium for those bacteria.

Do yourself a favor and do not do a Google image search for "mountain dew mouth."

I almost never drink soda, and I prefer beer or wine to a sweet-as-candy cocktail. I don't sweeten my tea. When I'm asked how I take my coffee, I always joke, "Black and bitter, like my soul." I guess I'm not really joking. In any event, I think I'll take a break now and go floss. And count my 32 (minus 4) blessings.