Texas
oracknows | September 6, 2017I've frequently distinguished between those who are vaccine-averse and the true, hard core antivaxers. The vaccine-averse tend to fear vaccines because of what they've heard about their supposed adverse effects, while it is the hard core antivaxers who are really originating and spreading the misinformation claiming that vaccines cause autism, autoimmune diseases, chronic disease, neurologic damage, and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), just to name some. There are even those who claim that shaken baby syndrome is a "misdiagnosis" for vaccine injury. To them, it is, above all, always all…
kkrisberg | August 11, 2017Umair Shah’s story isn’t an uncommon one in public health. Starting out in medicine, with a career as an emergency department doctor, he said it quickly became clear that most of what impacts our health happens outside the hospital and in the community.
Today, that philosophy drives his work as executive director of Harris County Public Health (HCPH) in Houston, Texas — an agency that serves the third-largest county in the nation, home to about 4.5 million residents. In fact, Shah, who first joined the agency in 2004 and become director in 2013, said the agency’s mantra is this: “Health…
oracknows | July 26, 2017One of the most common tropes used by antivaxers is to attack herd immunity as not being real. Herd immunity, or as its sometimes called, community immunity, is a name for a phenomenon in which in a population with high levels of immunity to a disease members susceptible to the disease are protected. Basically, because the vast majority of members of the population are immune to a disease, that disease can't gain a foothold in the population and lead to an outbreak or an epidemic. Basically, transmission from person to person is interrupted because any susceptible person who becomes infected…
oracknows | July 7, 2017As I sat down to lay down my daily (or at least week-daily) dose of Insolence last night, my thoughts kept coming back to vaccines. Sure, as I pointed out in yesterday's post, we seemed to have dodged a bullet in that President Trump appears on the verge of appointing someone who is actually competent and pro-vaccine as director of the CDC. Of course, none of that changes the issue that Donald Trump's proposed budget takes a meat axe to public health programs, including vaccines, and that if Republicans succeed in dismantling the Affordable Care Act a large chunk of money going to vaccine…
oracknows | June 28, 2017Before I delve into the next topic, I can't help but congratulate John Oliver yet again for his excellent deconstruction of the antivaccine movement on Sunday night. As I noted on Tuesday, it clearly hit the mark, given how angry one antivax blogger got over it. As of yesterday, over at that wretched hive of scum and quackery, that antivaccine crank blog known as Age of Autism, resident "Media Editor" Anne Dachel was still sputtering over Oliver's segment, labeling it Oliver's vulgar treatment of vaccine-injured and their families and posting a line about how allegedly "mocking and berating…
lborkowski | December 30, 2016The Pump Handle is on a holiday break. The following, which was originally published on May 23, is one of our favorite posts from 2016.
by Kim Krisberg
Last summer, 25-year-old Roendy Granillo died of heat stroke while he installed flooring in a house in Melissa, Texas, just north of Dallas. His tragic and entirely preventable death marked a turning point in advocacy efforts to pass a rest break ordinance for local construction workers.
About five months after Granillo’s death, the Dallas City Council voted 10-5 to approve such an ordinance, which requires that construction workers be given a…
gregladen | December 2, 2016The American alligator is found only in the US, and is widespread in Texas. It is found at several inland localities, and along the coast. And, it turns out that the preferred locations for many of the important activities in the day to day live of the American alligator overlap a great deal with humans.
Louise Hayes, biologist, and photographer Philippe Henry have produced, with TAMU Press, Alligators of Texas, a highly accessible, well written, and richly illustrated monograph on these beasts.
If you are into Alligators and their relatives, regardless of where you live, this book may…
oracknows | December 2, 2016Back in the day, I used to write posts with titles like When the outbreaks occur, they’ll start in California. I even wrote a followup, When the outbreaks occur, they’ll start in California, 2014 edition. The reason, of course, was that California was one of the epicenters of vaccine hesitancy as well as the home to some high profile antivaccine-sympathetic physicians, such as Dr. Bob Sears (who’s known for making Holocaust analogies about bills tightening school vaccine mandate requirements) and Dr. Jay Gordon (who’s known for continuing to claim, against all evidence, that vaccines cause…
lborkowski | July 7, 2016The 5-3 Supreme Court decision in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt last week was a welcome step for women's health, but resulted in the removal of only some of the barriers many US women still face in accessing abortion services. At issue in the case was Texas law HB 2, which required abortion facilities to meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers and providers to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of a facility. In the opinion of the Court, Justice Breyer explains "neither of these provisions offers medical benefits sufficient to justify the burdens upon…
kkrisberg | May 31, 2016Everything’s bigger in Texas — including the number of Texans without health insurance. But thanks to the Affordable Care Act, the percentage of uninsured Texas residents has dropped by 30 percent. That means the Texas uninsured rate has hit its lowest point in nearly two decades.
In a new issue brief from Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, researchers report that the Texas uninsured rate dropped from 26 percent in September 2013 — before the ACA’s first open enrollment period — to 18 percent as of March 2016. The decline was observed among every age, income and ethnic group…
kkrisberg | May 23, 2016Last summer, 25-year-old Roendy Granillo died of heat stroke while he installed flooring in a house in Melissa, Texas, just north of Dallas. His tragic and entirely preventable death marked a turning point in advocacy efforts to pass a rest break ordinance for local construction workers.
About five months after Granillo’s death, the Dallas City Council voted 10-5 to approve such an ordinance, which requires that construction workers be given a 10-minute rest break for every four hours of work. On its face, it seems like an incredibly simple and logical request, especially considering the…
kkrisberg | March 4, 2016During the years that community health researcher Jill Johnston lived and worked in San Antonio, Texas was experiencing an explosion of fracking. She and the community partners she worked with on environmental health issues had a strong hunch that most of the fracking wastewater wells were being located near communities of color. So, they decided to dig a little deeper and quantify the pattern.
The results of that effort were published this month in the American Journal of Public Health. It turns out that Johnston and her colleagues were right — the study found that fracking wastewater…
gregladen | November 17, 2014I just got this press release for the Texas Freedom Nettwork, passing the good news on to you:
PUBLISHERS REMOVE CLIMATE CHANGE DENIALISM FROM TEXAS TEXTBOOKS; PUT EDUCATION AHEAD OF POLITICS
Texas State Board of Education must still vote on adopting the revised textbooks
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 17, 2014
Publishers have agreed to correct or remove inaccurate passages promoting climate change denialism from new social studies textbooks proposed for Texas public schools, a coalition of science and education groups announced this afternoon. This news comes as the State Board of Education…
tsmith | September 30, 2014My first article at The Guardian is up: No, Ebola in Dallas does not mean you and everyone else in the US is going to get it, too.
pgleick | August 19, 2013
Dropping water levels in Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam. (Source: Peter Gleick 2013)
It is no surprise, of course, that the western United States is dry. The entire history of the West can be told (and has been, in great books like Cadillac Desert [Reisner] and Rivers of Empire [Worster] and The Great Thirst [Hundley]) in large part through the story of the hydrology of the West, the role of the federal and state governments in developing water infrastructure, the evidence of droughts and floods on the land, and the politics of water allocations and use.
But the story of water in the West…
lborkowski | July 8, 2013Chemical Safety Board Chair Rafael Moure-Eraso testified before the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee regarding its preliminary findings on the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion that killed 15 people in April. Ramit Plushnick-Masti reports for the Associated Press:
"The safety of ammonium nitrate fertilizer storage falls under a patchwork of U.S. regulatory standards and guidance — a patchwork that has many large holes," according to the report presented to the panel by Rafael Moure-Eraso, the board's chairman.
The board, which has no regulatory authority, recommended in…
lborkowski | April 25, 2013A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Mike Elk in the Washington Post: The Texas fertilizer plant explosion cannot be forgotten
Laurie Garrett in Foreign Policy: The Big One? Is China covering up another flu pandemic -- or getting it right this time? (About the H7N9 flu, which has been confirmed in 108 patients in China)
Kari Lyderson at Reporting on Health: 'That Feeling Doesn't Go Away': Mental Health and Undocumented Children
David Schultz in Kaiser Health News: Nurses Fighting State by State for Minimum Staffing Laws
Emily Badger at Atlantic Cities: New Chicago Plan: Pedestrians Come…
lborkowski | April 11, 2013In an excellent story about wage theft and unsafe conditions in the Texas construction industry, NPR's Wade Goodwyn observes, "working Texas construction is a good way to die while not making a good living."
Goodwyn notes that a Texas home might not cost the buyer much money -- a new 3,000 square-foot, five-bedroom home can be had for $160,000 -- but oftentimes that low price tag comes at a high cost for the workers who built it. The Austin-based Workers Defense Project co-authored a report with the University of Texas, Austin on Texas construction-industry working conditions, and their…
lborkowski | December 31, 2012While we're on vacation, we're re-posting some of our past content. Kim Krisberg's series of posts on worker centers in Texas is well worth a second read (or a first read, or a third read ...):
Houston, we have a workers’ rights problem: Profile of a worker justice center in Texas’ biggest city
Last month, more than 70 ironworkers walked off an ExxonMobil construction site near Houston, Texas. The workers, known as rodbusters in the industry, weren’t members of a union or backed by powerful organizers; they decided amongst themselves to unite in protest of unsafe working conditions in a state…
oracknows | September 7, 2012On the antivaccine front, this year began with antivaccine hero Andrew Wakefield filing suit against investigative reporter Brian Deer, the BMJ, and Fiona Godlee (the editor of BMJ) for libel based on a series that Deer published in the BMJ outlining the evidence for Wakefield's scientific fraud in his (in)famous 1998 Lancet case series. This resulted in a massive rallying of the antivaccine troops around Wakefield, as well as temporarily making him appear relevant again after so many much-deserved humiliations and defeats, in the wake of his having had his license to practice medicine in the…