Lygeia Ricciardi / Senior Policy Advisor for Consumer e-Health
A couple of years ago, I gave birth to a baby girl, Ada. She looked perfect, but the doctors told me she had a significant heart murmur. When I held her in my arms at night I could hear blood rushing through a hole in her heart that shouldnt have been there.
My husband and I took Ada to a pediatric cardiologist, who said she would probably need surgery to close that hole. For an entire year of tests and hospital visits, we lived in fear that open heart surgery was just around the corner. And then one day it was. I
Yesterday Health Canada effectively banned cadmium from children’s jewelryWhy?Because if kids accidentally put it in their mouths, cadmium carries with it a number of medical risks And of course it should be banned, after all that’s what governments are supposed to do with toxins Here’s our Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq’s take on a government’s role,
“Consumer products that pose a danger to human health or safety may not be manufactured, distributed, imported or sold in Canada This proposed guideline makes our expectations of industry clear”
Begs the question of course, why then has the government failed to move on trans-fat?According to the head of Health Canada’s own Trans-Fat Task Force, trans-fats are,
“a “toxic” killer that need to be removed from the food chain as soon as possible”
where,
“the longer we wait, the more illness and in fact death will happen, so we know we have to get it out of our food supply”
and that,
“there is no safe amount of trans consumption”
Tony Clement, the then Minister of Health promised in June 2007 in a speech that Health Canada conveniently no longer hosts on their websites that if in 2 years a voluntary approach didn’t remove the toxin from our food supply, that regulations would be put in placeAnd here we are, over 2 years past that overly generous deadline, and Health Canada’s banning cadmium, this despite the fact that the toxin kids in Canada are most likely to put into their mouths in Canada is trans-fat adults tooIf Health Canada actually cared about our health, trans-fats would have been gone back in 2007, no voluntary free pass, and no lip service about potential regulationsOnly reason trans-fat isn’t gone is because politically, it’s more challenging to do, and at the end of the day Health Canada sadly, apparently cares more about politics than it does about the health of Canadian childrenWhat it really means is that there isn’t much of a pro-cadmium lobby here in Canada, because if there were, there likely wouldn’t have been any announcements made yesterday
Federal officials announced Thursday that $95 million was awarded to 278 school-based health center programs nationwide, including three programs in San Diego County.
Provided by the federal Affordable Care Act, the funds will help school-based programs provide services to an additional 440,000 people beyond the 790,000 people currently benefiting from the centers, said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
The Family Health Centers of San Diego was awarded $500,000 that will be spent on school-based clinics at two campuses, spokeswoman Jennette Lawrence Shay said.
The largest chunk will be used to establish a clinic at Rice Elementary School in the Chula Vista Unified School District, Shay said.
So what do you think is the point of a front-of-package health claims program?
I would imagine that most people would answer that a front-of-package health claims program ought to allow for easy comparisons between different foods. Certainly that’d be my definition.
Comparison between foods would be a rather important feature as presumably the front-of-package claim system is meant to be utilized as a shopping shortcut.
With that in mind, I found a recent post by Katie Jessop, a Heart and Stroke Foundation Health Check dietitian, to be very telling. Read the full article…
The CDC released today a first of its kind analysis of racial disparities in health with the hope of drawing attention to some persistent gaps and shedding light on unexpected ones.
While race was the primary focus of the report, it also delved into differences in health outcomes by income, gender and geography. The report is huge and has plenty of interesting — and disturbing — findings. Among the biggest disparities:
+ Black babies are 1.5 to 3 times more likely to die than infants born to women of other races
+ Heart disease and stroke, the nation’s leading causes of death, account for the largest proportion of inequality in life expectancy between whites and blacks, despite the existence of low-cost treatment.
+ Men of all races are nearly four times more likely to commit suicide than women. American In
