Air pollution has left close to 5,000 dead since March 2011, according to Iranian health officials, as pollution forced the city to close completely over the weekend. Iran’s state radio claimed going outside “could be tantamount to ‘suicide,’” according to the New York Times. The World Health Organization ranks three of Iran’s provincial towns as the world’s top 10 polluted cities.

There are a number reasons behind Tehran’s terrible pollution problem, in a city that experienced fewer than 150 “healthy days” in 2011: High traffic from 5.5 million vehicles, combined with low-grade petrol, create a deadlier dose of carbon pollution and carcinogens.

Worldwide, pollution is a major public health problem, posing a greater danger than high cholesterol for millions.

Major cities in the U.S. have lower — and considerably less deadly — levels of pollution, but that is not without smart new steps that help save tens of thousands of additional lives. However, Republicans still routinely seek to roll back standards proven to protect the air we breathe, from attacking new mercury standards for coal-fired power plants to opposing fuel efficiency standards that lower vehicles’ carbon emissions.

Health care professionals warned that the 2012-2013 flu season would be worse than usual, with both a higher incidence of the infection and earlier onset of the flu. The numbers so far have confirmed their predictions — as ThinkProgress reported on Monday, well over half of U.S. states have been experiencing severe influenza activity.

And now Fox News is reporting that emergency rooms in states particularly hard hit by the flu — such as Illinois — are being forced to turn away sick flu patients. 11 Chicago-area hospitals alone are being forced to turn away sick Americans in the face of a particularly nasty flu season and the resulting patient burden:

This year’s predominant flu (76 percent) is very similar to a type that caused a severe season in 2003-2004, when the flu shot wasn’t a good match and there were more than 40,000 associated deaths, said Dr. Marc Siegel, a member of the Fox News Medical A Team. [...]

Melaney Arnold, spokeswoman for the Illinois Dept. of Health, said nearly 150 people have been admitted to intensive care units with the flu this season, and five have died.

Northwestern Medical Center in Chicago is one example of a hospital on bypass status. So if you’re in an ambulance because you have the flu, this hospital will have to turn you away. That doesn’t mean people can’t walk in there and still get treatment if they’re OK to do so, but it’s going to be a long wait.

The Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove, Ill., reported that its emergency room has up to a three-hour wait, and a Good Samaritan doctor described the situation as “chaotic.”

“It’s not like you can just see them and out the door they go. They’re here for a while unfortunately, getting treatments,” said Dr. Tom Mullin of Good Samaritan. “Most of them we can fortunately discharge them home and treat them as an outpatient. But, it’s wreaking havoc on every emergency department in the city and the suburbs, I’ll tell you that.”

While it’s impossible to completely control an ever-mutating pathogen such as the influenza virus, flu vaccinations have proven to be the number one way to fight the pandemic. Unfortunately, a meager 37 percent of Americans have received their flu shots this year, keeping with low historical averages.

Americans’ reticence towards vaccinations has been a vexing dilemma for public health officials, driven largely by misinformation regarding vaccine safety and fact-free smear campaigns claiming that vaccines such as the HPV shot can result in sexual promiscuity and autism. Access is certainly another part of the equation. Fortunately, Obamacare has expanded free preventative health care services such as vaccinations to make them available to the Americans who previously couldn’t afford that care.

Although the Great Recession has taken an outsized toll on African-Americans and Hispanics, new research suggests that the economic downturn has forced Americans across all racial groups to equally cut back on their medical services.

After researchers at the University of Maryland analyzed more than 54,000 U.S. adults’ health care use, they found that — despite their assumptions that the demographic groups struggling the most as the result of the Great Recession would also struggle the most to access health care — the declining economy impacted all Americans’ ability to get the care they need. During the recession, the average number of doctor visits and prescription drug refills dropped about the same amount for whites, African-Americans, and Latinos. Visits to the emergency room were also essentially unchanged across all groups.

Of course, that doesn’t mean Americans across all racial and economic groups have equal access to health services. There were significant racial disparities in medical care before the Great Recession hit — for example, while whites visited the doctor an average of about 7 times a year around 2005, the average rate was closer to 5.75 for blacks and 4.5 for Latinos during that time period. African-Americans were, and still remain, more likely to be hospitalized than other groups. Earlier reports from the Census Bureau have found that 40 percent of the Americans living in poverty did not visit a doctor in 2010, and confirmed that Hispanics were the least likely group to make a trip to the doctor’s office that year.

But, as the lead researchers for the new study point out, at least the growing economic inequality between whites and racial minorities during the recent recession hasn’t widened the gulf when it comes to health care. “Although minorities bore the brunt of the recession in terms of losses in employment, income and insurance, our findings suggest that trends in [medical] use patterns were similar across race and ethnicity,” the study concludes.

CBS News reports that cancers related to human papillomavirus (HPV) has been on the rise over the last two years, largely because not enough people are getting vaccinated against HPV. Even though fewer numbers of Americans have been dying from cancer over the last two decades, a annual joint report by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Cancer Institute finds that HPV-related cancers have ballooned:

The new report found increases in rates for HPV-associated oropharyngeal cancer (throat cancer) among white men and women, in addition to rises in anal cancer rates among white and black men and women.

Alcohol and smoking can also lead to these cancers, however, HPV accounts for about 70 percent of the cancers in this area, [Dr. Michael B. Prsytowsky] said.[...]

“We need to get adolescent children — both boys and girls — vaccinated before they’re sexually active,” Prsytowsky said. “Parents need to understand the vaccine is safe and effective and prevents disease down the road.”

The report found that less than half of girls ages 13 to 17 got at least one dose of the recommended HPV vaccine. The government’s Healthy People 2020 campaign aims to have 80 percent of eligible girls vaccinated by the next decade.

While Obamacare provides support for wellness initiatives and eliminates co-pays for HPV screenings, such provisions are useless if Americans buy into the widely-debunked conservative hysteria that the HPV vaccine is unsafe. 2012 GOP presidential contender Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) went as far as to claim that the vaccine causes “mental retardation” in girls, and other Republicans have falsely asserted that it somehow leads to sexual promiscuity.

Conversely, medical professionals urge Americans to safeguard their health by receiving their recommended vaccinations. “We must face these hurdles head on, without distraction, and without delay, by expanding access to proven strategies to prevent and control cancer,” Dr. John R. Seffrin, the chief executive officer of the American Cancer Society explained in response to the rising rates of HPV-related diseases.

Internal email messages uncovered by Health News Florida reveal that Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) is knowingly citing inaccurate cost estimates to justify his refusal to expand Florida’s Medicaid program. Though the governor’s office is fully aware that the numbers are wrong, Scott continues to use them anyway, the documents show.

Florida, which has one of the highest rates of uninsurance in the nation, could extend health coverage to about one million low-income residents by accepting Obamacare’s optional Medicaid expansion. But the governor — an ardent Obamacare opponent — has repeatedly said that expanding Medicaid would just be too expensive, claiming it would cost the state $26 billion over the next 10 years.

As Health News Florida reports, however, that figure from Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) is inflated because it doesn’t take into account the full amount that the federal government will reimburse states for choosing to expand Medicaid. A more accurate analysis found that expansion would cost the state around $1 billion:

But those numbers are based on a flawed report, state budget analysts say. A series of e-mails obtained by Health News Florida shows the analysts warned Scott’s office the numbers were wrong weeks ago, but he is still using them. [...]

The Act says the federal government will pay the lion’s share of the cost for new Medicaid eligibles if a state agrees to expand its program — a decision the Supreme Court left up to the states. The federal contribution for the new eligibles would be 100 percent between 2014 and 2016, then would taper after that to 90 percent by 2020 and stay there.

But the AHCA report assumes the federal match for the new patients would be much lower, about 58 percent. It came up with that by averaging the match amount over the past 20 years. The report doesn’t say why the authors made that assumption. [...]

As Health News Florida reported on Dec. 21, the AHCA estimates were huge in comparison to a study released by the Urban Institute and Kaiser Family Foundation, two neutral research groups that specialize in Medicaid studies. Their study estimated that if Florida agreed to expand Medicaid, about 1 million uninsured people would gain coverage at a 10-year cost to the state of around $1 billion.

According to the email chain that Health News Florida obtained, state officials began calling the AHCA’s $26 billion cost estimate into question as early as December 20. One member of the House Health Care Appropriations Subcommittee even pointed out that, since the health reform law specifies that the federal government will help fund Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, it would actually break Florida state law to expand Medicaid without using the federal dollars mandated for that purpose.

Nevertheless, Scott has continued to repeat his false claim that Florida can’t afford to provide its low-income residents with the health coverage they need. Scott met with U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Monday to express his concerns about what expanding Medicaid would mean for his state’s bottom line. “Growing government, it’s never free,” Scott explained to reporters. “It always costs money.” Just not as much money as Scott says it does.

A Taco Bell in Guthrie, Oklahoma is cutting all its restaurant workers’ hours to part-time in order to skirt federal law requiring them to provide health insurance for employees.

Nearly 20 employees work for this particular Taco Bell franchise. They were informed just before Christmas that everyone’s hours would be cut to 28 hours or less per week because the owners disliked the Obamacare requirement that large companies had to help provide health coverage for workers.

Among those employees affected is Johnna Davis, a single mother of three who relied on her full-time hours to support her family. News 9 has more on her struggle:

Johnna Davis has worked at the Taco Bell in Guthrie since September. She’s seen a 200 dollar cut in her paycheck since a new store policy went into effect.

“What we were being told was one thing, and that was, ‘we’re going to offer benefits, we’ll just keep all of our full time employees and then come December, their whole story changed,” Johnna Davis said. [...]

Now this single mother of 3 is looking for a new full-time job. Nearly 20 employees their have seen their hours cut.

The Guthrie restaurant is owned by a Missouri-based company named Treadwell Enterprises, which told News 9 that it would allow supervisors and managers to work full-time, but not workers.

Taco Bell is not a struggling brand scraping by to make ends meet. The company saw a banner year in 2012, with its parent corporation enjoying a 73 percent jump in profits in the beginning of the year and an additional 23 percent increase later in the year.

Other restaurants have attempted this ill-conceived move as well. This fall, when a Denny’s franchise announced it would cut its workers’ hours to avoid the health care law, the corporate office distanced itself from the move. Similarly, when Darden Restaurants, which includes Olive Garden and Red Lobster, looked to cut hours, the public backlash resulted in a hasty 37 percent drop in profits. Other restaurants have attempted (and mostly retracted) the same ploy, including Papa John’s and Wendy’s.

Call for comment from Taco Bell’s corporate offices was not immediately returned.

West Virginia lawmakers are forming a subcommittee to consider the potential shortfalls in the sexual education that public school students currently receive in their health classes. A regular survey of middle and high school students continues to deliver sobering statistics about teenagers’ sexual health — particularly the fact that the overwhelming majority of teens in West Virginia don’t use any form of birth control.

The 2011 survey polled about 40,000 students and found that although more than half of West Virginia’s minors are engaging in sexual activity, a staggering 74.5 percent are not using birth control. That’s only a slight decrease from the 1993 results, when 79.5 percent of teens reported they didn’t use any form of contraception. The number of students who reported they had never learned anything about preventing HIV/AIDS infection also showed little change between 1993 and 2011, barely declining from 12.9 percent to 12 percent.

Doug Chapman, the assistant director of the Office of Healthy Schools for West Virginia’s Department of Education, acknowledged that the bad news in the survey might be an impetus for lawmakers to update the state’s approach to sex ed. “We do need to have better health education,” Chapman told the Register-Herald.

West Virginia does require public schools to offer sex education and HIV education, but there are no standards for ensuring that sexual health material is medically accurate and unbiased by religion. Chapman also pointed out that students at an elementary level don’t receive any comprehensive health information.

However, despite the stark results from the health survey — and the fact that teenage pregnancy isn’t declining at all in West Virginia even as teen birth rates have been plummeting across the country — the state lawmakers on the new panel may be slow to action. The subcommittee hasn’t yet decided whether to recommend a state-wide study to assess the possibility of implementing sex education across the public school system, and some committee members are still clinging to the misguided idea that shame-based abstinence curricula can impart accurate health information to teenagers. “Isn’t [abstinence] always the best way to make sure you don’t get sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies?” one lawmaker said to justify her resistance to teaching sex ed at the grade school level.