“Activists have convinced Americans that “organic” food is better—healthier, better-tasting, life-extending.
As a result, poor parents feel guilty if they can’t afford to pay $7 for organic eggs.
This misinformation is spread by people like Alexis Baden-Mayer, political director of the Organic Consumers Association. She says organic food is clearly better: “The nutrition is a huge difference.”
But it isn’t. Studies find little difference.
If you still want to pay more for what’s called “organic,” that’s your right. But what’s outrageous is that this group of scientifically illiterate people convinced the government to force all of us to pay more.
Congress has ruled that GMOs (genetically modified food) must be labeled. Busybodies from both parties supported the idea.”
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“The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) says the GMO labelling will cost from $598 million to $3.5 billion.
“But the public wants GMOs labelled,” say advocates. “Surveys show that.”
Of course they do.
Ask people if DNA in food should be labelled, and most say yes. Yet DNA is in everything.
Polling is a stupid way to make policy.
The idea of modifying a plant’s DNA may sound creepy, but people have cross-bred plants and animals for years.
“The corn we have today, there’s nothing natural about that,” I say to Baden-Mayer in my new video. “What native people ate, we’d find inedible.””
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“In poor parts of the world, half a million people per year go blind due to lack of vitamin A in their diets. Many die.
Scientists have created a new genetically modified rice that contains vitamin A. This “golden rice” could save those people.”
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“Sadly, in some countries, people listen to advocates like her and believe that Americans want to poison them. One group of GMO fearful protesters invaded a golden rice field in the Philippines, ripping up all the plants.”
“The argument here is not about whether nurses should be held accountable for their errors; everyone I spoke with about Vaught’s case agrees she bears responsibility for her actions and should face consequences. The real issue is that criminalizing a nurse’s error lets hospitals off the hook for the systemic changes that would improve patient safety.
“Almost no mistakes happen in a hospital by just one person,” said Gatter. Systems exist to prevent medical errors, he said. If those systems don’t work or exist only on paper, errors will happen.
In this case, the system failures were clear: During an unannounced visit to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in late 2018, federal investigators found multiple deficiencies, some of which placed patients at “serious and immediate threat,” according to the 105-page memo documenting the details. For example, hospital policies didn’t require that a second nurse sign off on the use of a highly dangerous medication like vecuronium, nor did it require that patients receiving sedatives be hooked up to a heart and lung monitor. Focusing the blame on one nurse’s error shifts the attention away from those deficiencies.
“I’m quite concerned that this nurse is getting thrown under the bus, and in the hubbub of giving her a jail sentence, that the system itself will escape close examination,” said Gatter.
Even if a nurse were solely responsible for a medical error resulting in patient harm, the way to prevent that nurse from causing further harm is to revoke their license, said Gatter. It’s much harder to explain how punishing a nurse with jail time further prevents them from endangering others.
However, it’s easy to see how that type of punishment can itself create and compound safety risks, he said.
That’s because severely punishing individuals for systemic problems has a chilling effect on others’ willingness to report mistakes.”
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“Less transparency in error reporting also means hospitals have fewer opportunities to correct big problems. That means faulty systems stay in place, which translates into more vulnerability and stress for health care providers and less safety for patients.”
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“The consequences for professional malpractice should ideally deter wrongdoing without discouraging people from entering the profession altogether — but finding that balance is challenging.”
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“American nursing was under enormous strain well before the pandemic. But with the US population aging, surging retirements among bedside nurses and nurse educators, and nurse staffing levels reduced ever lower to contain costs, the pandemic has tipped parts of the country into a full-on nursing shortage.
The last thing the profession needs is another reason for nurses to leave jobs providing direct patient care, but that’s exactly the effect the Vaught ruling is having”
“important research published in 2020 that compared the fates of women who were forced to carry pregnancies to term versus those who were provided abortions. The influential Turnaway Study, as it’s commonly referred to, found that, among other things, women who were denied an abortion endured more serious pregnancy complications, more chronic pain, and more short-term anxiety.”
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“more unwanted pregnancies would be carried to term if the court were to negate a federal right to abortion.”
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“The Turnaway Study began in 2007 and followed more than 1,000 women for five years to assess how their lives had been altered, if at all, by the provision or the denial of an abortion. Some of the women had an abortion shortly before reaching the gestational limit set by their state or provider, while others had just passed that limit and were denied an abortion as a result. The differences in the women’s experiences from that critical moment onward were the purview of the study.
“We find no evidence abortion hurts women,” Foster writes in the 2020 book The Turnaway Study that covered the research’s findings. “For every outcome we analyzed, women who received an abortion were either the same or, more frequently, better off than women who were denied an abortion.”
The mental health of women who received an abortion was better immediately after the procedure than that of women who were denied one. Their physical health fared better over the longer term. Their subsequent children developed better.
Foster presents a nuanced picture, noting, for example, that after the five-year period of the study, almost none of the women who ended up carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term said that they still wished they’d had an abortion. But Foster is nevertheless unequivocal in her conclusions about what being denied an abortion meant for the women involved: “We find many ways in which women were hurt by carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term.””
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“The most unexpected and tragic outcome noted in the Turnaway Study was that two of the women died because of childbirth complications. It came as a shock to Foster, who wrote that she “did not expect to find even one maternal death in a study of 1,000 women.” The US maternal mortality rate is 1.7 per 10,000, meaning the odds of two women in 1,000 dying were exceedingly low.
Foster was careful not to be definitive about this finding, writing that a much larger sample size would be necessary to draw any firm conclusions about the relationship between being denied an abortion and maternal mortality. The implications remain grim, however: “This level of maternal mortality is shocking,” she wrote.
Short of death, women who are denied an abortion are more likely to have serious complications than women who received an abortion. The Turnaway Study found that 6.3 percent of the women who had given birth suffered life-threatening complications versus about 1 percent of women who had complications from an abortion.
Women who were denied an abortion also saw a higher risk of gestational hypertension, which increases their risk for cardiovascular disease later in life. The study found that 9.4 percent of women who gave birth experienced hypertension during the pregnancy versus 4.2 percent of women who had second-trimester abortions and 1.9 percent of those who had first-trimester abortions.
The women who gave birth also experienced slightly higher rates of chronic head pain and joint pain afterward. On self-reported health, a metric shown to be a strong indicator of future health and mortality, 27 percent of women who carried their pregnancies to term after being denied an abortion said they were in fair or poor health versus 21 percent of women who had second-trimester abortions and 20 percent of women who had an abortion in the first trimester.
“To the extent that there were differences in health outcomes,” Foster wrote, “they were all to the detriment of women who gave birth.””
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““We found no mental health harm from having an abortion.””
“in the past 10 days, cases have been reported in the United States, as well as in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the U.K. Typically, monkeypox is rare outside West and Central Africa.
In total, there were 92 confirmed cases and 28 suspected cases as of yesterday, the World Health Organization (WHO) reports.
On the upside, there’s little reason to think monkeypox will wreak the kind of havoc that COVID-19 did. It does not spread as easily or cause severe symptoms in most people. And it’s not novel—we already know what monkeypox is and how to fight against it.”
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“In addition, we already have a vaccine that provides some protection against monkeypox: the smallpox vaccine. And the U.S. has “enough to deal with the likelihood of a problem,” said President Joe Biden in Tokyo this week.
“I just don’t think it rises to the level of the kind of concern that existed with COVID-19,” said Biden. He says he does not expect quarantine requirements even for people infected.”
“The Biden administration is preparing to scrap a Trump-era rule that allows medical workers to refuse to provide services that conflict with their religious or moral beliefs”
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“The so-called conscience rule, unveiled in 2018 and finalized in 2019, was blocked by federal courts after dozens of states, cities and advocacy groups sued, and has never been implemented.
Had it gone forward, it would have allowed doctors, nurses, medical students, pharmacists and other health workers to refuse to provide abortions, contraception, gender affirming care, HIV and STD services, vasectomies or any procedure to which they object.”
“The Biden administration is betting that Covid infections for most people are now so mild that it’s safe for much of the country to go maskless, a strategy helping the White House avoid political backlash against stricter safety requirements.
But that strategy comes with the risk that millions of Americans, including the healthy and vaccinated, could suffer long-term health effects from Covid infections.
The policy could leave millions with a lifetime of little understood disease or medical complications. Those who get infected are at higher risk of brain shrinkage, blood clots, heart disease, strokes and diabetes, studies show. A separate post-viral syndrome called long Covid can cause a range of debilitating symptoms from cognitive dysfunction to extreme fatigue, according to federal estimates.”
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“This is why many public health experts say the Biden administration’s focus on preventing hospitalizations over infections is a poor strategy, one that ignores the potential of millions of newly sick or disabled Americans further straining the health care system and potentially worsening the labor shortage.”
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“Some public health experts agree with the administration’s approach, noting that for most people, vaccines provide strong protection against severe illness and death, and individuals should manage their own risk.
The country is averaging more than 37,000 infections per day, up about 45 percent over the last two weeks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those figures are likely undercounted given the prevalence of rapid tests, which aren’t often reported to health departments.”