Tomorrow, voters in California will decide whether or not to pass Proposition B, which would require adult film stars throughout Los Angeles county to wear condoms during porn shoots. If Proposition B goes into effect, it will also allow the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health to enforce sexual health in the industry by conducting inspections to ensure that actors are adhering to the regulation.

Michael Weinstein, the executive director of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, is the primary proponent of the measure, which he says will help safeguard public health among a population that tends to lack health insurance coverage:

Weinstein has said the adult film industry’s current testing methods have contributed to an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases. He has also said that performers are not medically insured, which means tax payers front the bills for their healthcare. [...]

An independent study released by AHF last week found undiagnosed sexually transmitted diseases may be more common in the adult film industry than previously reported. The study, to be published in December in the Journal of Sexually Transmitted Diseases, found that roughly a third of the 168 adult film actors who participated in the research project were found to have a previously undiagnosed STD.

“I would call that an epidemic,” Weinstein said. “We’re in the business of promoting condoms. I’ve been called a condom Nazi and it doesn’t faze me.”

But members of the adult film industry say that Weinstein is mischaracterizing the issue, and claim the measure represents unnecessary government interference that infringes on their artistic expression. Adult film stars already get tested for sexually transmitted infections about once a month, which they say is a more effective method of maintaining their sexual health. They believe their industry will be threatened if they are forced to use condoms because “it’s just not what viewers want to see.”

The entertainment industry in general has typically failed to accurately depict safer sex practices — such as showing characters using contraception or condoms on screen — although some sexual health advocacy groups are working with television executives to try to change that. Adult films represent another area where the media could model safe sexual practices for consumers.

Condom use on porn sets is actually already required under both state and city law. Proposition B would expand an existing city ordinance in Los Angeles — the first city in the nation to institute a condom requirement for adult film stars — to the broader Los Angeles county.

Registered nurses and hospital engineers at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital in Sonoma County, California continued a planned three-day strike over disagreements regarding compensation packages today, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

The strike is a result of disputes between the Staff Nurses’ Association and the hospital over adequate staffing levels, working hours, and wages. While the nurses’ union warns of a backlash from qualified nurses in the absence of a reasonable compromise, predicting the wage cut could prevent the hospital from being able to attract and retain qualified staff, Santa Rosa Memorial claims the cuts are necessary in the face of upcoming Obamacare regulations:

Most of the nearly 660 nurses represented by the Staff Nurses’ Association walked off the job early Saturday, union president Sue Gadbois said. [...]

Hospital officials have noted that they are run by the nonprofit group, St. Joseph Health-Sonoma County, and that the hospital doesn’t post profits or reward shareholders. Costs must be controlled because of tighter operating margins and anticipated reductions in government health care reimbursements, officials said.

“The hospital has engaged and continues to engage in good faith bargaining with our registered nurses,” hospital spokesman Debra Miller said. “We anticipate reimbursement rates going down, and we have asked our nurses to share in some of the cost savings.”

Miller is referring to Obamacare’s effort to curb national medical spending by rolling back Medicare reimbursements rates by one percent and reallocating those funds to hospitals that score higher on a range of quality metrics. The Sonoma County hospital is liekly concerned about its funding because its serviceable region has seen a surge in its percentage of Medicare-eligible residents in the last decade — from less than 15 percent of the county in 2000 to over 20 percent today — which increases its share of Medicare patients and costs.

But Santa Rosa Memorial’s decision to shift the burden of austerity measures onto nurses isn’t the best approach to cutting costs. According to 2011 wage estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, registered nurses’ mean annual wages rank 29th out of 53 health care practitioner fields, more than $100,000 a year lower than the family doctors they assist and only slightly higher than most sedentary lab technicians. This is despite the fact that nurses are essentially the nuts and bolts of the medical profession, assisting in nearly every technical aspect of health care delivery while also responsible for the brunt of personal patient interaction.

Rather than singling out nurses for wage cutbacks, hospitals like Santa Rosa Memorial would do better to concentrate on cutting down their health spending and providing efficient, quality coverage so as to avoid the reimbursement cuts — and perhaps even reap a repayment bonus.

Our guest blogger is Dr. Timothy J. Kamp, Professor of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Co-Director of its Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center.

The promise of stem cell research has been protected by President Obama, but the election of Mitt Romney would send Wisconsin’s signature biotechnology field back into chaos, costing the state its national reputation as a good home forward-looking, job-creating business, to say nothing of dashing the hopes of thousands of patients waiting for new therapies to treat incurable diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimers and diabetes.

There are many types of stem cells, and the Obama Administration has supported the full range of research to meet our moral commitment to improve the lives of the sick and hurting. But while some of these — such as “adult stem cells” — have been touted as sufficient to meet our needs, human embryonic stem cells remain the gold standard for the basic science research necessary for the entire field to advance. Indeed, they laid the groundwork for the 2007 breakthrough by James Thompson at University of Wisconsin-Madison and Nobel Prize winner Shinya Yamanaka in Japan that generated the “induced pluripotent stem cells” that may, in the future, provide yet another avenue toward patient cures. Under President Obama, the NIH has been directed to support this basic research provided the cell lines were obtained in a responsible fashion from embryos that could no longer be used for human reproduction and were otherwise to be discarded.

Why does this matter?

In the 14 years since the discovery and isolation of human embryonic stem (ES) cells by James Thomson and colleagues, researchers at UW-Madison have had access to human cell types in abundance that were not previously available for research, allowing them to investigate diseases in new ways by growing human cells in a dish.

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Even though first responders’ important work may put them at risk for physical injuries and exposure to harmful substances — especially in the wake of natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy — not all rescue workers are eligible for the health benefits they need to counteract those occupational hazards.

Since about 70 percent of FEMA’s workforce serves as temporary, part-time rescue workers during times of disaster — often through the Reservist Program, FEMA’s branch of on-call disaster relief workers — they don’t qualify for employer-sponsored insurance. Only 770 of the 9,106 disaster assistance employees employed by FEMA currently receive federal health insurance in their positions, while the rest are left to fend for themselves on the private insurance market.

But one woman is trying to change that by circulating a Change.gov petition aimed at securing health coverage for the large percentage of part-time responders who are currently forced to forego it:

Reservists are paid a flat rate of between $11.29 and $42.03 per hour when they are in travel, on duty or training – usually about 30 days at a time. The jobs do not include health insurance, annual leave or retirement benefits since they are meant to be temporary. [...]

Dena Patrick, founder of a social charitable website, Wishadoo, started a Change.org petition on Monday to argue for FEMA reservists to get health benefits. “I feel that our priorities are skewed,” said Patrick.

Patrick said she was motivated to act by her friend, a reservist, who she said works 300 days a year and is not insured. When Hurricane Sandy hit, Patrick realized that other first responders were not covered unless they had a separate insurance plan. As of Saturday morning the petition had more than 4,900 signatures.

One of the barriers to comprehensive health benefits for these workers is the loose application of their “part-time” status. Even the first responders who serve 10 months out of the year do not qualify for full time benefits — despite the fact that their career is fraught with medical risk.

Specific groups of rescue workers have won victories on this front in recent years. This fall, 9/11 first responders gained coverage for 50 different types of cancer that may have been caused by their exposure to Ground Zero contaminants. But thousands of federal relief workers who lead the charge in rescue efforts for disasters such as Hurricane Sandy are still waiting.

A new analysis finds that the suicide rate among Americans increased four times faster between 2008 and 2010, after the housing bubble burst and the subsequent economic downturn began to take effect, than it did in the eight years before the Great Recession.

The medical community already suspects that economic downturns put an increased strain on mental health — recent studies in Greece, Spain and Italy have found a trend in rising suicide rates as those European countries face recessions fueled by misguided austerity policies — but this study is the first to focus on the Great Recession’s impact on Americans. After analyzing state-level unemployment and suicide rate data through 2010, researchers concluded that this economic crisis may have hurt Americans’ mental health more than any other economic event:

“The magnitude of these effects is slightly larger than for those previously estimated in the United States,” the authors wrote. That might mean that this economic downturn has been harder on mental health than previous ones, the authors concluded. [...]

Every rise of 1 percent in unemployment was accompanied by an increase in the suicide rate of roughly 1 percent, it found. A similar correlation has been found in some European countries since the recession.

Researchers estimated that the U.S. suicide rate was increasing by about 0.12 deaths per 100,000 people between 1999 and 2007 — but when the recession hit in 2008, the rate began increasing by an average of 0.51 deaths per 100,000 people each year. This jump resulted in about 1,5000 additional deaths from suicide each year after 2008.

Even aside from additional deaths from suicides, long-term unemployment has also been linked to increased mortality rates. The Congressional Budget Offices notes that long stretches of unemployment are “correlated with deteriorating mental and physical health.”

The recession’s increased burden on Americans’ mental health, however, has coincided with state-level budget cuts that have slashed funding for mental health services across the country. According to a 2011 report from the National Alliance on Mental Illness, states cut more than $1.8 billion for mental health resources between 2009 and 2011, putting an outsized strain on hospital emergency rooms that are often not well-equipped to deal with an influx of mental health patients.