John Koster, a Republican running for Congress in Washington, became the latest candidate to opine on abortion exceptions in cases of rape and incest over the weekend at a fundraiser with Rep. Tom Price (R-GA). Koster said he would support abortion only if the woman’s life was in danger, but would not extend the same right to women who are survivors of incest or “the rape thing,” as he casually termed it. To justify his opposition, Koster insisted that incest is rare and argued that abortion would only further hurt rape survivors:

Incest is so rare, I mean, it’s so rare. But the rape thing…you know, I know a woman who was raped and kept her child, gave it up for adoption, she doesn’t regret it. In fact, she’s a big pro-life proponent. But on the rape thing, it’s like, how does putting more violence onto a woman’s body and taking the life of an innocent child that’s the consequence of this crime, how does that make it better? You know what I mean?

Koster’s comments are similar to those of Senate candidate Richard Mourdock (R-IN), who recently said that rape pregnancies are “a gift from God,” and Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO), who claimed women could not get pregnant from “legitimate rape.” In fact, Koster is very much in the Republican mainstream, as a growing number of Republican candidates call for tighter restrictions on the reproductive rights of rape victims.

Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) convened a press conference today to announce the creation of a fully state-funded Women’s Health Program for Medicaid recipients, but his political theater only served to obscure the truth about women’s health services in Texas.

Earlier this year, Texas announced its intention to fund the Medicaid providers in its Women’s Health Program solely through the state as a method of defunding local Planned Parenthood affiliates. Since states are not allowed to withhold federal Medicaid funds from qualified providers like Planned Parenthood, Texas legislators needed to find a workaround to continue to exclude the national health organization — which they chose to target as an “abortion affiliate,” even though abortion services represent just three percent of its total medical care — from the Women Health’s Program.

But even though Perry claimed his state is “ready” to begin fully funding the Women’s Health Program today — and even rolled out a new logo for the program — the Associated Press confirmed that they will not actually do so until Medicaid providers stop receiving federal funding. Since federal funding is guaranteed through the end of this year, Texas’ Planned Parenthood affiliates will continue to receive their full Medicaid funds until December 31. In a press release, Planned Parenthood officials celebrated the fact that their organization will be able to keep its doors open to the thousands of low-income women it serves:

Despite confusing statements from state officials, today’s announcement means that Planned Parenthood can continue to be a part of the Women’s Health Program as long as the “Affiliate Ban Rule” remains blocked by court order. Planned Parenthood and WHP patients expressed relief upon the announcement that tens of thousands of Texas women will not yet experience a disruption in WHP services, including breast and cervical cancer screenings, birth control, and testing for sexually transmitted infections.

“Today’s announcement is an important victory for every woman who relies on the Women’s Health Program for basic, preventive health care,” said Ken S. Lambrecht, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas. “Our doors remain open today and always to every Texas woman in need of affordable, high quality health care.”

Planned Parenthood filed a state lawsuit last week that blocks Texas from shutting down the Women’s Health Program altogether and preserves the organization’s federal funding for now. But thanks to the complicated legal battle that the national health organization is currently embroiled in, the future of the funding for its Texas affiliates remains unclear. Planned Parenthood officials say that Texas state law clearly stipulates that the Women’s Health Program needs to be funded federally — not on a state level, as Perry and his HHS Department are pushing for — so Texas lawmakers’ politically-motivated attacks on women’s health clinics will fall flat in court. Planned Parenthood’s next court date is set for November 8.

Ultimately, Perry is only serving to confuse the low-income women in Texas about the health care providers they can access through their Medicaid plans. Planned Parenthood is currently Texas’ largest Medicaid provider, serving tens of thousands of women across the state who often have no other means to access health insurance, and women deserve to know they can continue receiving critical health services at Planned Parenthood clinics in 2012.

While New York struggles to restore power and transit after extensive damage by Hurricane Sandy on Monday night, some of the storm’s greatest losses will take years to recover. Years of research and thousands of lab mice were lost when NYU Hospital’s generators failed and forced a mass evacuation during the storm.

The New York Daily News reports that the black-out destroyed many special enzymes, antibodies, and DNA strands that had been painstakingly produced in NYU’s research laboratories and stored at extremely cold temperatures. Scientists are trying to salvage what they can. Additionally, lab mice that were vital to ongoing experiments drowned in the flooding:

Even more alarming, thousands of mice that are used by scientists for cancer research and other experiments, drowned during a flood. It is unclear how the mice died, but the source told the News that many of these mice are genetically modified for certain research and took years to produce. It will likely set back several scientists’ work by years, the source said.

The storm flooded seven hospital buildings with up to ten feet of water on Monday. When the generators failed, roughly a thousand medical staff carried 215 patients, including the hospital’s chairman, Kenneth Langone, down many flights of stairs by flashlight. The patients are now being housed in other New York hospitals including Mount Sinai, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and St. Luke’s Hospital.

New Yorkers reeling from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy potentially have one more problem to deal with: the diseases carried and transmitted by the city’s overwhelming rodent population.

The Huffington Post reports that biologists such as the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies’ Rick Ostfeld have warned that if Hurricane Sandy’s waters — which have penetrated New York’s expansive subway system — end up displacing rats instead of killing them, the animals could spread a variety of pathogens through bites and waste:

“Rats are incredibly good swimmers,” said Ostfeld. “And they can climb.”

In other words, Sandy is unlikely to knock off the resilient rodents, but rather displace them.

According to Ostfeld, this could result in increased risk of infectious diseases carried by urban rats, including leptospirosis, hantavirus, typhus, salmonella, and even the plague.

“One of things we know can exacerbate disease is massive dispersal,” he added. “Rats are highly social individuals and live in a fairly stable social structure. If this storm disturbs that, rats could start infesting areas they never did before.”

And it’s not only the bite of a rat than can transmit disease. Rodent feces and urine can spread hantavirus, for example. Still, Ostfeld suggested that the huge volume of water Sandy is expected to bring should dilute the pathogens and lessen risks to public health.

Luckily for New York residents, all signs suggest that Sandy’s sheer force may have killed off the critters rather than move them up to the city streets. One spokesman for the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene told Forbes that he has “not seen an increase in rats above ground caused by Hurricane Sandy,” and several rodentology experts have suggested that the storm likely killed off vulnerable, younger rats, thereby actually reducing New York’s overall rat population.

Scientists are developing a new HIV test that they hope to bring to developed nations struggling to combat high rates of HIV without adequate resources for their low-income populations.

Lead researcher Molly Stevens told Reuters that the new HIV test is ten times cheaper that the tests currently on the market, and can help bring sophisticated technology to areas that cannot afford the most accurate forms of HIV testing:

Simple and quick HIV tests that analyze saliva already exist but they can only pick up the virus when it reaches relatively high concentrations in the body.

“We would be able to detect infection even in those cases where previous methods, such as the saliva test, were rendering a ‘false negative’ because the viral load was too low to be detected,” [Stevens] said. [...]

“Unfortunately, the existing gold standard detection methods can be too expensive to be implemented in parts of the world where resources are scarce,” Stevens said.

Early HIV detection is critical in fighting against the global AIDS epidemic, since it ensures that those infected with the virus can begin treatment as well as helps researchers track the effectiveness of different treatment methods. But the new test, which relies on nanotechnology to test serum from blood samples for the presence of an HIV biomarker, can also test for other diseases like sepsis, Leishmaniasis, tuberculosis, and malaria that can pose serious public health risks in developing nations.

Stevens told Reuters that the lead researchers plan to partner with not-for-profit global health organizations to distribute the new test in low-income countries. Gains in HIV research over the past several decade have remained stratified among racial and class groups, both in the U.S. and abroad, where sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 1.2 million of the global 1.8 million HIV-related deaths.

According to two new public health studies, smoking bans can lead to a dramatic reduction in heart attacks, strokes, and heart- or stroke-related hospitalization rates.

The first study compared health statistics in the time before and after two separate smoking bans — a workplace ban in 2002 and a bar smoking ban in 2007 — were instituted in a Minnesota county. The second study scoured dozens of reports on anti-smoking laws across multiple countries and U.S. cities to assess their impact on public health trends. And according to CBS News, the results from both indicate that regions that take action against public smoking experience substantial health benefits:

For [Dr. Richard Hurt's] study, published in the Oct. 29 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers at the Mayo Clinic looked at the number of heart attacks and sudden cardiac deaths that occurred in the 18-month period before and after smoke-free laws were passed in a particular town. [...]

By comparing data from before and after both laws were implemented, researchers found heart attacks fell by 33 percent from about 151 to 101 heart attacks per 100,000 people due to the laws, and the incidence of sudden cardiac death declined by 17 percent from 109 to 92 incidents per 100,000 people. [...]

The next study, published Oct. 29 in the American Heart Association’s journal, Circulation, looked at the link between smoke-free legislation and hospitalization rates. [...]

They found comprehensive smoke-free laws were associated with a “rapid” 15 percent decrease in hospitalizations caused by heart attacks and a 16 percent drop in stroke-related hospitalizations. The laws were also tied to a rapid 24 percent fall in rates of hospitalizations caused by respiratory diseases like asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The most comprehensive laws — such as those that applied to workplaces, public areas, restaurants and bars — were linked to the greatest health benefits.

Researchers from both studies conclude that public officials should pursue stringent anti-smoking policies to reduce the incidence of smoking-related illnesses, hospitalizations, and emergency room costs. Dr. Stanton Glantz of the University of California study went as far as to say, “The public, health professionals and policy makers need to understand that including exemptions and loopholes in legislation — such as exempting casinos — condemns more people to end up in emergency rooms… These unnecessary hospitalizations are the real cost of failing to enact comprehensive smoke-free legislation.”

And as ThinkProgress has previously reported, states that pursue aggressive anti-smoking efforts — such as California and Washington — experience significant returns on their investments through lower health care costs. Since cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death in America, public smoking bans and other anti-smoking efforts present lawmakers with a simple means for reducing health care costs and increasing Americans’ well-being.

A new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that in the month before the presidential election, President Obama maintains a lead over Mitt Romney on health policy issues.

According to Kaiser, about a third of voters rate health issues — including health care reform, Medicaid, and Medicare — as their top priorities in November. And when participants were asked which candidate they trusted to implement the best policies on those issues, they preferred Obama by narrow margins:

Obama particularly trumps Romney when it comes to issues regarding women’s health, an area where Kaiser found nearly a 20 point gap between the two candidates. Kaiser’s results corroborate similar findings from a USA Today/Gallup poll earlier this month that found Obama has a significant edge on birth control policy. Polls continue to confirm that the Obama administration’s birth control mandate — a provision of Obama’s landmark health care reform law that attempts to cut down on the large disparity between men’s and women’s health costs by providing contraceptive services without a co-pay — remains popular among voters.

Kaiser also found that Democrats and Republicans tend to give health policy issues different weight compared to the economy. While Democrats ranked economic issues on par with Obamacare, Medicaid, and Medicare — with about 40 percent of participants reporting that each of those four issues is at the top of their mind — Republicans prioritized the economy over health policy by almost 20 percentage points, 67 percent to 49 percent. But health policy issues are actually intrinsically linked to economic issues, particularly for the millions of low-income Americans who rely on the health reform law to extend them the coverage they otherwise would not be able to afford. And even aside from the direct impact on vulnerable Americans’ financial situations, Obamacare will also benefit the economy by creating millions of jobs and lowering costs for business owners.