A new strain of the extremely unpleasant — though usually non-lethal — stomach bug known as the “norovirus” has led to more than 140 outbreaks since September, ABC News reports.

The virus, which has been rampant in other parts of the world for some time now, has now caused significant illness in America. Public health officials are particularly worried about the rapid pace at which the virus proliferates:

In the U.S., it is now accounting for about 60 percent of norovirus outbreaks, according to report released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Norovirus — once known as Norwalk virus — is highly contagious and often spreads in places like schools, cruise ships and nursing homes, especially during the winter. [...]

Sometimes mistakenly called stomach flu, the virus causes bouts of vomiting and diarrhea for a few days. [...]

Ian Goodfellow, a prominent researcher at England’s University of Cambridge, calls norovirus ‘the Ferrari of viruses’ for the speed at which it passes through a large group of people.

“It can sweep through an environment very, very quickly. You can be feeling quite fine one minute and within several hours suffer continuous vomiting and diarrhea,” he said.

The virus, which is the root cause behind most U.S. food poisoning cases, is spread through the air as well as direct contact with contaminated surfaces. Luckily, its fatality rate is relatively low.

But the timing of the pathogen’s American debut is rather unfortunate given this year’s rampant flu epidemic, which has already forced some American emergency rooms to turn patients away from their facilities. And since the norovirus and influenza both disproportionately affect children and the elderly, the combination of the two could be a prescription for public health havoc.

Over 50 San Francisco-based restaurant owners are under fire for prioritizing their own profits over their workers’ health care coverage. A city-wide investigation revealed that, after the restaurant industry collected a total of $14 million in worker health care surcharges in 2011, just a third of that money actually went toward providing low-wage workers with insurance.

Under a city-wide requirement, businesses in San Francisco are supposed to set aside some extra money — about $2 dollars an hour for each worker — to help their employees afford their insurance costs. When the rule first went into effect in 2008, some restaurant owners avoided raising the prices on their menu by tacking a surcharge onto the bottom of their bills and explaining to their customers that the fee would help fund workers’ health care.

But according to San Francisco Supervisor David Campos and Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, who helped conduct the investigation into the restaurant owners’ practices, those customers were being deceived. “I can’t say all of them, but for some of these restaurants it was a marketing ploy,” Campos said. And that marketing ploy came at the direct expense of their workers, some of whom didn’t have health insurance at all:

In some cases, not only did the surcharge money go back into owners’ pockets, but employees were denied health care altogether, Ammiano and Campos said.

The inconsistencies were caught after the health law was amended in 2011, requiring city audits of the surcharges. Last year, 3,652 restaurants turned in their paperwork to the labor office, which found oddities in the accounting. The documentation was then turned over to the city attorney for a full-fledged investigation. [...]

For Campos, it’s a consumer-trust issue. “These diners thought they were paying for workers’ health care. Instead these owners were gaming the system,” he said.

Low-wage workers like the employees in San Francisco’s restaurant industry typically don’t have access to health insurance — in fact, more than half of low-wage workers at small firms were uninsured in 2010. And workers’ health care costs are continuing to rise while their wages are stagnating, so it’s nearly impossible for them to afford their own insurance on the private market if their employers choose to deny them health coverage.

Obamacare will help address some of these issues in a similar way as San Francisco began doing in 2008. Starting in 2014, the health reform law will help ensure that employers can’t deny their workers health care simply to protect their own profits, and require businesses with more than 50 employees to offer basic health benefits. Nonetheless, profitable members of the restaurant industry like Olive Garden, Taco Bell, and Wendy’s are already using Obamacare as a convenient excuse to keep perpetrating their anti-worker labor practices and avoid giving their workers any benefits.

Amgen Inc. — one of America’s largest biotech and pharmaceutical companies — has had a rough couple of months. In December, the firm was fined $762 million for illegally promoting drugs and defrauding Medicare. And now lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are looking to undo a little-noticed provision that Amgen successfully lobbied for inclusion in the recent “fiscal cliff” deal, a measure that gives special regulatory treatment to one of the company’s most profitable drugs.

The “fiscal cliff” deal included a provision exempting the oral drugs for kidney dialysis patients from being subject to Medicare price controls for two years. That means that drugs in that class, including Amgen’s hugely profitable Sensipar, can be sold to Medicare at higher prices than other dialysis drugs with little oversight — which ends up raising the drug’s cost for the seniors in the program. While the exemption is broad enough to affect drug companies other than Amgen, the New York Times reported this week that Amgen lobbied intensely for the provision, and that supporters like Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) have received substantial political donations from Amgen’s employees and lobbying outfits.

As Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT), who introduced the measure to repeal Amgen’s exemption this week, told the LA Times, “Amgen managed to get a $500-million paragraph in the fiscal-cliff bill and virtually no one in Congress was aware of it. It’s a taxpayer ripoff and comes at a really bad time when we’re trying to control healthcare costs. Amgen should not be allowed to turn Medicare into a profit center.”

It’s no mystery why Amgen wanted the exemption so badly — just last year, sales of Sensipar ballooned by 18 percent to $950 million. But the fact that they successfully wedged it into the fiscal cliff compromise is a testament to the firm’s lobbying prowess and the outsized influence of the entire pharmaceutical industry.

Women in abusive relationships often don’t have control over their own reproductive systems because their abusers prevent them from taking birth control, the nation’s leading group of obstetricians and gynecologists warns. The women’s health experts are encouraging doctors to start screening patients for what they call “reproductive coercion” — any situation in which a woman’s partner won’t let her make her own choices about pregnancy.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) has issued new guidelines to help doctors recognize signs of reproductive coercion within an abusive relationship. “Most OB/GYNs are probably unfamiliar with sexual and reproductive coercion as an entity and probably don’t ask about it,” Dr. Eve Espey, one of the experts who helped write the new guidelines, explained to HealthDay.

Abusers often try to get a woman pregnant against her will — not only by forcing her into sex, but also by hiding her birth control pills or putting holes through condoms. Some abusive partners will even go so far as pulling out a woman’s intrauterine device (IUD) or vaginal ring. And if a woman does become pregnant, reproductive coercion can take the form of pressuring her to continue an unwanted pregnancy when she wants to get an abortion, or forcing her to terminate a pregnancy when she wants to have a child. Ultimately, medical experts explain, this form of abuse is another method of controlling women’s bodies:

“What we’re talking about is specific to women and girls’ ability to contracept, to control their reproductive health,” said Jay Silverman, who studies violence against women at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.

“What we’ve found is that many male partners are more actively involved than we would have thought in really blocking women and girls’ ability to do that, as a form of control that’s part of a larger picture of violence against women and girls,” added Silverman, who wasn’t part of the ACOG committee.

One study of the National Domestic Violence Hotline found a fourth of callers had experienced reproductive coercion.

“All the different forms of violence and coercion of women and girls from male partners are based in the entitlement to control their lives, physically and otherwise,” Silverman said. “They also feel entitled to decide whether she’s going to get pregnant or not.”

ACOG’s new guidelines encourage doctors to talk with their patients about reproductive coercion, since some women may not initially recognize it as a form of abuse. In one study in San Francisco-area clinics, reports of reproductive coercion dropped more than 70 percent after patients began receiving more information about it and filling out additional questionnaires about their birth control use. Doctors can also help give women contraceptive options that are harder for their abusers to detect, like IUDs with the removal strings cut out or an extra stash of birth control pills in an unmarked envelope.

As the women’s health experts explained, these coercive tactics are just one piece of the larger issue of sexual abuse and violence against women. But rather than address the roots of intimate partner violence, or secure national funding for domestic abuse prevention programs through the Violence Against Women Act, the anti-choice community has preferred to focus narrowly on coerced abortions — imposing unnecessary abortion restrictions rather than taking real steps to protect women from their abusers.

The verdict is in: Americans don’t just support Obamacare — they consider implementing its central tenets a “top priority” for their state legislatures.

A new Kaiser Family Foundation/Robert Wood Johnson Foundation/Harvard School of Public Health poll finds that strong majorities of Americans consider implementing Obamacare’s statewide insurance exchanges and Medicaid expansion either a “top” or “important” priority for their state:

Americans increasingly embrace Obamacare as it is implemented. Although public sentiment on the landmark reform law was ambivalent as it was being debated in Congress, Americans have consistently supported its individual provisions, and support for fully repealing the law plunged to an all-time low after the presidential election. And House Republicans can’t find any co-sponsors for their latest Obamacare repeal bills now that the president is beginning his second term.

But GOP governors don’t seem to have gotten the memo. Only four Republican governors have expressed support for expanding their states’ Medicaid programs, while the vast majority — including those representing some of America’s poorest and least-insured states — have refused to participate in the expansion, despite the fact that expanding Medicaid will actually save states billions of dollars. The outlook for the Obamacare insurance exchanges is also grim, with as many as half of U.S. states refusing to set up their own exchanges, deferring instead to the federal government.

On top of slashing state funds for Ohio’s Medicaid program, Gov. John Kasich (R-OH) hasn’t yet committed to Obamacare’s optional Medicaid expansion — even though participating in the expansion would extend health coverage to an estimated 600,000 low-income Ohioans. But the state’s religious and community leaders are hoping the governor might be swayed by their moral argument for health care reform.

Religious and community leaders held a rally on Thursday to call on Kasich to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, emphasizing the importance of ensuring that Ohio’s poorest residents have access to the live-saving health care they need:

More than 1,000 rallied at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland on Thursday night to show their support for expanding Medicaid in Ohio.

The assembly brought together members of religious congregations, community groups and major health care providers to demonstrate community support for expanding Medicaid. [...]

“We believe that opening access to life-saving health insurance to 600,000 Ohioans through the Medicaid program is the right thing to do for Ohio’s people, for our economy and for our state’s fiscal health,” said the Rev. Tracey Lind, co-chairman of the GCC group from Trinity Cathedral which attended the assembly. The GCC includes more than 20,000 members of 40 churches, synagogues and mosques that are working for passage of Medicaid expansion.

In addition to faith leaders, the Ohio Hospital Association also voiced its support for Medicaid expansion on Thursday, explaining that extending public insurance coverage to low-income people will also help create jobs in the state’s critical health care sector. “Seven of Ohio’s top 12 employers are hospital systems,” Mike Abrams, the president and CEO of the association, said.

And, since the federal government will fund the first several years of the Medicaid expansion, reports have estimated that Ohio will actually result in $1.43 billion in net fiscal savings in the state budget over the next eight years — while failing to expand Medicaid would actually cost the state $8 billion in additional health care costs. “We think it’s a no-brainer,” said Rev. Tracey Lind Dean of Cleveland’s Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. “We believe that it’s going to help people in the state of Ohio be healthier and it’s going to be a revenue source for the state, and we know that with every health care dollar spent that there are more dollars generated in the economy.”

Faith leaders in other Republican-controlled states that have refused to expand Medicaid, like Texas, have also attempted to pressure lawmakers to embrace health care reform. But over a dozen GOP governors are still refusing to cooperate with Obamacare, even to extend health coverage to more of their state’s neediest residents.