#public health crisis

[iwriteaboutfeminism]

(source) August 16, 2024

The patient is a 10-month old baby.

This is the first case of polio in Gaza in 25 years.

Information on polio from the World Health Organization:

Poliomyelitis (polio) is a highly infectious viral disease that largely affects children under 5 years of age. The virus is transmitted by person-to-person spread mainly through the faecal-oral route or, less frequently, by a common vehicle (e.g. contaminated water or food) and multiplies in the intestine, from where it can invade the nervous system and cause paralysis.

...

Up to 90% of those infected experience no or mild symptoms and the disease usually goes unrecognized. In others, initial symptoms include fever, fatigue, headache, vomiting, stiffness in the neck, and pain in the limbs. These symptoms usually last for 2–10 days and most recovery is complete in almost all cases. However, in the remaining proportion of cases the virus causes paralysis, usually of the legs, which is most often permanent. Paralysis can occur as rapidly as within a few hours of infection. Of those paralysed, 5-10% die when their breathing muscles become immobilized.

...

There is no cure for polio; it can only be prevented by immunization.

[rightnewshindi]

हरिद्वार जेल में HIV का खौफ: 15 कैदी पॉजिटिव, विश्व स्वास्थ्य दिवस पर जांच से खुला चौंकाने वाला राज

Haridwar jail HIV positive inmates: उत्तराखंड के हरिद्वार जिला जेल से एक ऐसी खबर सामने आई है, जिसने जेल प्रशासन से लेकर स्वास्थ्य विभाग तक को हिलाकर रख दिया। 7 अप्रैल 2025 को विश्व स्वास्थ्य दिवस के मौके पर जेल में आयोजित एक विशेष स्वास्थ्य जांच शिविर में 15 कैदियों के HIV पॉजिटिव होने की पुष्टि हुई है। यह खुलासा उस वक्त हुआ, जब नए कैदियों की रूटीन मेडिकल जांच की जा रही थी। इस खबर ने न सिर्फ जेल…

[zais-zeitgeist]

Anatomy of a Broken System: On Medical Inequality and Why I Chose Not to Become a Doctor

Following the political uproar of the Luigi Mangione case and the ensuing discussion on healthcare reform, I found myself reflecting on my own relationship with the healthcare system. After the tragic and unjust deaths of my grandma due to diabetes complications and later my neighbour, who died of kidney surgery complications at just 20 years old, I had long ago distanced myself from pursuing a medical career path, realising that even if I dedicated my life to the field, saving lives like those dear to me might still be impossible.

Medicine may be humanity’s shared endeavour to preserve life, but the yield of such collective effort remains disproportionately distributed. Today’s healthcare industry undoubtedly places profits above people, often jeopardising those of a lesser social and economic standing. Though my mum urged me to serve in white and try to save lives like her mother’s, I refused what felt like a futile pursuit. The medical system has failed the collective too frequently for my participation to make a meaningful difference — a truth I couldn’t articulate at the time but instinctively understood.

The Hierarchy of Healthcare

Through watching miracle surgeries performed on TV during my childhood and witnessing the many preventable deaths in my adolescence, I have come to understand that the healthcare system always played favourites. According to the Health Foundation, people living in impoverished areas have worse health outcomes and tend to die earlier [2]. These deaths are not complicated or unfeasible procedures, but rather illnesses that medicine has tackled for centuries. It is being able to afford insulin pumps every month. It is being operated on with sanitised surgical equipment. It is an insured-covered follow-up visit to the doctor after a new treatment. In the same vein, Cody Jacob shares how his mother died of diabetes complications due to her insurance denying coverage of her essential supply, which included pumps, insulin, tests, batteries, wipes, etc. Horrifically, her insurance only approved coverage for those supplies once her status had changed – to deceased [3].

Medical recovery heavily relies on economic access. The cure to the deaths plaguing our societies is often unattainable for its most vulnerable members as, for example, many lower-class Americans remain uninsured [4]. This gap in access extends beyond life-saving medication. Preventative care and mental health services are also disproportionately distributed [4], deepening cycles of inequality. While individual doctors may save lives, they still operate within a system that constrains their ability to influence widespread change. So, when the healthcare costs continue to rise while the quality keeps declining [1], we have to ask: where does the money go?

In Service of the Elite

Such questions often go unanswered since medicine, alongside many other STEM fields, has served those on top first, its benefits only trickling down over time. As one progresses in their medical career, they become more entrenched in fulfilling elite interests. Even working in impoverished areas can feel limited in impact, as structural barriers and industrial control remain intact. While current narratives might delude us to idealise capitalistic medicine, history paints a different picture. For example, from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, there was a dramatic reduction in mortality rates, particularly in England. This improvement was primarily due to public health initiatives like sanitation, clean water, improved housing, and vaccinations, not capitalist-driven innovations. In fact, the early capitalist class often resisted these improvements, as they involved increased taxes and infrastructure investments [5].

Still, the healthcare industry continues to promote the idea that privatised healthcare is more efficient, despite evidence suggesting that public systems often deliver better outcomes at lower costs [5]. Disturbingly, the media pushes a narrative that glorifies ‘consumer choice’ to justify the commodification of medicine while ignoring social determinants of health, such as inequality, poor housing, and limited access to education. It focuses on health being an individual responsibility when, in reality, individual choices only account for 20% of health outcomes, the rest determined by socioeconomic factors [2].

Medical discrimination extends to the academic world, as research funding is skewed toward issues affecting wealthier nations rather than systemic reforms. Diseases that disproportionately affect women and Black populations receive smaller funding increases compared to its counterparts [6]. This consequence is partly due to lower advocacy for those groups combined with neglect for decision-making metrics, such as dollars per death, that allocate funding to address much critical mortality concerns. Agócs [7] has defined such resistance embedded in organizational processes, policies, and power structures as Institutionalised Resistance, which manifests as denial, inaction, and repression, rendering individual efforts to disrupt the system futile. However, there have been efforts that were prosperous, such as West Africa’s Ebola outbreak response, celebrated for its data-driven, patient-centred, and localised community engagement strategies to control the epidemic [8]. Such success presents us with hope for wide-scale reform within the medical world.

Practicing Medicine in Vacuum

But if we truly desire such change, we must accept the harsh truth: medicine under capitalism has never been neutral, evident by the unfair distribution of medicinal resources and the stark disparities in health outcomes. As such, absolute medical advancement should not be exalted, as it is not but propaganda that serves the elite. Blindly advocating for progress in medicine above all else abandons critical thought about the urgent realities facing our communities. Many medical professionals and academics join the field wanting to save lives but end up only saving those deemed "valuable" by economic and social standards. That was the reality that I knew I would regret living if I joined the field following the loss of my grandmother. After all, those millions of preventable deaths [9] would continue to happen.

The culture of glorifying medicine strays us away from developing tools to think critically, tackle the bigger picture, and reevaluate our priorities. Unfortunately, medical professionals are discouraged from contextualising their work within social and economic spheres, focusing heavily on scientific expertise, honour, and prestige. As a child of Black-Brown immigrant parents, I have experienced immense pressure to enter the field for similar reasons – even though my interests lay in social problem-solving and storytelling, my strengths being far from applicable in the biological world. I felt obligated to ‘make the best use of my gifts’ and to choose a study that was actually beneficial, which, in my community, only meant STEM.

Today, medicine operates like a tool of the bourgeois system, used to decide who deserves to live. Entering the field means participating in a game rigged against the poor. Our communities cannot afford to play the game passively anymore. We must think bigger, addressing systemic inequalities rather than merely treating their symptoms. In the current capitalistic atmosphere, critically choosing a career path might be the most political statement an individual choice can make. My creative and humanistic passions might not have always been valued in my younger years, even by me. But now, more than ever, I understand the value in engaging in them: to advocate for and express oneself is to engage in political advocacy, social expression, and systemic change.

Bibliography

Brown, A.: Opinion | Capitalism Versus Compassion: Can Healthcare Do Both?, https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/prescriptionsforabrokensystem/104139.

eGPlearning: Addressing Health Inequality in General Practice, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvu--5tmK1M, last accessed 2025/03/18.

Jacob, C.: It took my mom dying for insurance to cover her needs!, https://www.tiktok.com/@imcodyjacob/video/7445339073356631342?is_from_webapp=1&web_id=7443142350052034056, last accessed 2025/03/28.

Economic Barriers to Healthcare Access, https://www.cliffsnotes.com/study-notes/23073691, last accessed 2025/03/28.

Leys, C.: Health, health care and capitalism. Socialist Register. 46, (2010).

Best, R.K.: Disease Politics and Medical Research Funding. American Sociological Review. 77, 780–803 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122412458509.

Agócs, C.: Institutionalized Resistance to Organizational Change: Denial, Inaction and Repression. Journal of Business Ethics. 16, 917–931 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1017939404578.

Braithwaite, J., Mannion, R., Matsuyama, Y., Shekelle, P., Whittaker, S., Al-Adawi, S., Ludlow, K., James, W., Ting, H.P., Herkes, J., Ellis, L.A., Churruca, K., Nicklin, W., Hughes, C.: Accomplishing reform: successful case studies drawn from the health systems of 60 countries. International Journal for Quality in Health Care. 29, 880–886 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1093/intqhc/mzx122.

Kruk, M.E., Gage, A.D., Joseph, N.T., Danaei, G., García-Saisó, S., Salomon, J.A.: Mortality Due to low-quality Health Systems in the Universal Health Coverage era: a Systematic Analysis of Amenable Deaths in 137 Countries. The Lancet. 392, 2203–2212 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(18)31668-4.

Credit

Different types of mold grown in Petri Dish - Home DIY lab - Bacterial Culture, KABOOMPICS

[alwaysbewoke]

[dicapiito]

This is fucking alarming. Also know why this is happening because of who Covid affects the most…

[ausetkmt]

Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions

Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions

From the author of Salt Sugar Fat comes a “gripping” (The Wall Street Journal) exposé of how the processed food industry exploits our evolutionary instincts, the emotions we associate with food, and legal loopholes in their pursuit of profit over public health.

“The processed food industry has managed to avoid being lumped in with Big Tobacco - which is why Michael Moss’s new book is so important.” (Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit)

I came to the question of food and addiction inadvertently with the 2013 publication of my book Salt Sugar Fat. In it, I argued that grocery manufacturers were competing with fast-food chains in a race to the bottom that rewarded profits over health.

Over the past four decades, salt, sugar, and fat had enabled the industries to engineer products that were immensely alluring. Brilliant marketing campaigns pushed the emotional buttons that convinced us to eat when we weren’t even hungry.

Yet the book tried to end on a hopeful note. Knowing all that the companies did to prop up their unwholesome products, I argued, was oddly empowering. We could use that insight to make better choices because, ultimately, we were the ones deciding what to buy and how much to eat.

Thus, the initial imperative for this book: to sort out and size up the true peril in food. To see if addiction is the best way to think about our trouble with food and eating, given what we’ve learned from other substances and habits. And to peer inside the processed food industry to see how it is dealing with what, in its view, would be a monumental threat to the power it holds over us.

Everyone knows how hard it can be to maintain a healthy diet. But what if some of the decisions we make about what to eat are beyond our control? Is it possible that food is addictive, like drugs or alcohol? And to what extent does the food industry know, or care, about these vulnerabilities? In Hooked, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Michael Moss sets out to answer these questions - and to find the true peril in our food.

Moss uses the latest research on addiction to uncover what the scientific and medical communities - as well as food manufacturers - already know: that food, in some cases, is even more addictive than alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs.

Our bodies are hardwired for sweets, so food giants have developed fifty-six types of sugar to add to their products, creating in us the expectation that everything should be cloying; we’ve evolved to prefer fast, convenient meals, hence our modern-day preference for ready-to-eat foods. Moss goes on to show how the processed food industry - including major companies like Nestlé, Mars, and Kellogg’s - has tried not only to evade this troubling discovery about the addictiveness of food but to actually exploit it.

For instance, in response to recent dieting trends, food manufacturers have simply turned junk food into junk diets, filling grocery stores with “diet” foods that are hardly distinguishable from the products that got us into trouble in the first place. As obesity rates continue to climb, manufacturers are now claiming to add ingredients that can effortlessly cure our compulsive eating habits.

A gripping account of the legal battles, insidious marketing campaigns, and cutting-edge food science that have brought us to our current public health crisis, Hooked lays out all that the food industry is doing to exploit and deepen our addictions, and shows us why what we eat has never mattered more.

[sponsored-deactivated20210106]

RFK JR Wants To Purposely Let Bird Flu Spread On Farms

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Risks of Defunding the World Health Organization

This Is Everyone’s Problem, Not Just a Local Political Issue Dear friends, This is a follow-up on a comprehensive story I wrote on Medium. Here is the link to the original story with details: Should America Defund WHO?Global Concerns with Pros and Cons of Breaking American Relationships with the World Health Organization for Awareness…medium.com Why I wrote about it again This debate centers…

[rightnewshindi]

दिल्ली-एनसीआर में पटाखों पर बैन रहेगा जारी, सुप्रीम कोर्ट ने अपनाया सख्त रुख; जानें क्या बताया कारण

New Delhi News: सुप्रीम कोर्ट ने दिल्ली-एनसीआर में पटाखों के निर्माण, भंडारण और बिक्री पर लगे प्रतिबंध को हटाने से साफ इनकार कर दिया है। कोर्ट ने गुरुवार, 3 अप्रैल 2025 को सुनवाई के दौरान कहा कि दिल्ली में वायु प्रदू��ण का स्तर लंबे समय से खतरनाक बना हुआ है और इसे कम करने के लिए सख्त कदम जरूरी हैं। जस्टिस अभय एस ओका और जस्टिस उज्जल भुइंया की बेंच ने इस मामले में जनता के स्वास्थ्य को प्राथमिकता…

[neosciencehub]

The Alarming Surge of Counterfeit Medicines in India: A Public Health Crisis @neosciencehub #CounterfeitMedicines #PublicHealth #AlarmingSurge #COVID19 #AIOCD #neosciencehub

[weneverlearn]

Have a Bloody Christmas!

Below are two articles I wrote for my day job at GVPedia, concerning America's fucked-up focus on guns and the presumably peace-loving holiday of Christmas.

This first one originally posted last Xmastime; I updated it for a recent re-post:

"Try This One, Partner": The Evolution of Toy Gun TV Advertisements -- A video history of the selling of make-believe firearms

The second -- a collection of articles about our stupid American fruitcake of weapons of war and holiday cheer -- went up last week:

"Firing of the Christmas Guns" -- America's bizarre conflation of Christmas and firearms

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I think they're fun and frightening. Check 'em out!

[veluigi]

she put this so well...as a disabled qtbipoc i feel this so much ;_;

"To be a disabled oracle is someone who tells their truths in a hostile ableist world that does not believe you. The pandemic reveals an attitude that disabled, sick, poor and immunocompromised people are disposable."

[familythings]

The Alarming Rise of Antibiotic Resistance: A Global Health Crisis

I was raised in a culture where antibiotics were bought very easily in the drugstore. Fortunately, my parents were against the use of antibiotics in particular and medications in general. So, my siblings and I have used them very rarely. Sadly, that’s not the reality for a lot of folks out there. A recent study is sounding the alarm about antibiotic resistance, and it’s predicting that more than…

[redgearguru]

In 2021 Data Reveals Nearly 49,000 People in The U.S. Died From Gun-Related Injuries

In 2021, the U.S. saw a huge jump in deaths from gun violence. This year, nearly 49,000 people lost their lives to gun injuries. This is a shocking number, with gun murders and suicides on the rise. The CDC statistics show a 23% increase in gun deaths over two years. This highlights the urgent need to address the gun violence epidemic in America. Handguns are the most used in homicides, and…