A prominent Egyptian Salafi preacher justified sexual assaults again female protesters, claiming women “are going to Tahrir Square because they want to be raped” in a video posted online Wednesday. The preacher, Ahmad Mahmoud Abdullah (also known as “Abu Islam”) is the owner of a private television channel called “al-Ummah” and has previously been accused of defaming Christianity for comments made to the press and destroying bibles in front of the U.S. embassy.

The same day as his comments were posted, women protested against sexual assault in Egypt and Amnesty International released a briefing highlighting sexual violence against female protesters in Egypt, noting:

“Several women’s rights activists and others believe that the sexual assaults on women are organized and co-ordinated — possibly by state actors — with the aim of silencing them, excluding them from public spaces and the political events shaping Egypt’s future, and breaking the resistance of the opposition. They point to the fact that perpetrators use similar tactics in their attacks, which seem designed to degrade and intimidate women. The activists also emphasize the perpetrators’ calm demeanor, relatively well-off appearance, and ability to carry out such attacks in public without fear of punishment[...]

Given the stigmatization attached to harassment and sexual assaults against women, most cases go unreported. In the small minority of cases where women and girls do file complaints, they face numerous obstacles in their fight for justice. A lawyer involved in sexual harassment cases told Amnesty International that frequently police officers registering the complaints, as well as prosecutors investigating the cases, encourage plaintiffs to drop the complaints and “forgive” the perpetrators.”

The briefing also reports twenty-five sexual assaults on January 25th alone, including “at least two cases blades were used, including on survivors’ genital areas.”

Of course, Egypt isn’t the only place where rape is goes under reported and unpunished: According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network only 54 percent of rapes in the U.S. are reported, and only nine out of a hundred cases are prosecuted.

During an interview with Fox News host Greta Van Susteren on Wednesday night, Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus made a rather bold prediction about President Obama’s second term, asserting that the president’s “brand” would suffer over the next four years as Americans come to grips with what Priebus paints as the dire consequences of health care reform.

Priebus was reacting to a just-released Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report with updated projections on the federal budget and Americans’ insurance coverage under Obamacare. The report reassessed the number of Americans who will no longer receive employer-sponsored health insurance as the health law takes effect, increasing it from 4 million to 7 million Americans. This led Priebus to forecast a slippery slope in which more and more Americans lose their health coverage, indelibly tainting Obamacare’s — and President Obama’s — public image:

PRIEBUS: I think over time people are going to see, over the next four years, that this is not going to be a new story, this is going to be — next year — another story is going to come out and instead of seven million people dropped off the health care rolls, you’ll find it’s going to be 14 million… And more people aren’t going to be able to keep the insurance that they were promised. Businesses are out there saying, wait a second, this is too expensive and so we’re not going to provide this to our employees, so what we’re going to do is drop the insurance, pay the fine and it’s cheaper, and people are going to be left out in the cold. We knew this was going to happen, and we said it’s going to happen, and I think over time the Obama brand — the next four years — the reality of what the truth is going to be under his signature program, which was Obamacare, is going to go down in flames and people aren’t going to like it.

Watch it:

But there isn’t actually any evidence supporting Priebus’s claim that the number of Americans losing employer-sponsored insurance will somehow double next year. As Wonkblog’s Sarah Kliff explained on Wednesday, the reason the CBO increased its projections of Americans who would lose employer-provided coverage is due to the recent “fiscal cliff” deal that set low income tax rates on those making less than $450,000. As Kliff noted, “providing health insurance as a tax-free form of income becomes less attractive when marginal tax rates are lower — and when a publicly-subsidized option becomes available.” Ironically, this problem would have been exacerbated even further if GOP leaders like Priebus and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) had gotten their way and codified lower tax rates for millionaires and billionaires.

And it’s misleading to equate Americans losing their employer-sponsored insurance with Americans losing any form of insurance — particularly since Americans who lose employer-sponsored coverage can still receive federal subsidies to help them purchase private insurance on the individual marketplace. Predictions of how many employers will drop coverage may also be overblown, as studies have shown that Obamacare only modestly increases large businesses’ health care costs while actually lowering costs for small businesses.

As part-time workers, the poor, and Americans with pre-existing and costly medical conditions learn more about the law’s substantial benefits for them, support for repealing Obamacare has plunged to an all-time low. In the meantime, however, it appears that reform critics will continue their misleading smear campaigns against the health care overhaul.

Michigan’s House Speaker has ruled out a forced ultrasound bill that would mandate transvaginal probes for women seeking abortions. Speaker Jase Bolger (R) confirmed in a statement that “this House of Representatives will not pass a bill mandating transvaginal ultrasounds.”

“While I want to be sure women have access to the best technology available, I have absolutely no interest in forcing a woman to have a transvaginal ultrasound,” Bolger explained.

But if that’s something the Republican lawmaker is committed to, he might also want to condemn forced ultrasound bills as a whole — since even when that type of GOP-backed legislation doesn’t explicitly mandate a transvaginal probe, that’s often the end result. For the majority of women seeking an abortion within the first trimester of pregnancy, it’s too early for an abdominal ultrasound to be effective, so a doctor will have no choice but to use a transvaginal probe to fulfill the law.

And, of course, any measure that requires women to undergo an unwanted medical procedure — ultrasounds aren’t considered medically necessary for first trimester abortions — has nothing to do with ensuring women’s safety, health, or access to technology, regardless of the type of ultrasound equipment that is required.

(HT: TPM)

This past year, the United States experienced the worst whooping cough outbreak in decades. Public health officials warn that the unusually high number of pertussis cases is partly due to the fact that “unacceptably low” numbers of Americans are getting their shots — but it could also be because whooping cough is becoming resistant to the vaccines currently used against it.

Researchers have discovered the first drug-resistant strain of whooping cough in the Philadelphia area. They’re currently looking into it further to try to determine whether those cases — which seem to be similar to a bug that’s also popped up in Japan, France, and Finland — are indicative of a larger problem, and a potential source of the recent elevated levels of whooping cough across the country:

“It’s quite intriguing. It’s the first time we’ve seen this here,” said Dr. Tom Clark of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. [...]

Whooping cough is a highly contagious disease that can strike people of any age but is most dangerous to children. It was once common, but cases in the U.S. dropped after a vaccine was introduced in the 1940s.

An increase in illnesses in recent years has been partially blamed on a version of the vaccine used since the 1990s, which doesn’t last as long. Last year, the CDC received reports of 41,880 cases, according to a preliminary count. That included 18 deaths.

The new study suggests that the new whooping cough strain may be why more people have been getting sick. Experts don’t think it’s more deadly, but the shots may not work as well against it.

Drug-resistant diseases are becoming a serious public health threat, as antibiotics are gradually losing their effectiveness against the bacteria they’re intended to treat. Global health officials warn that, unless the scientific community and pharmaceutical industry both invest in developing more effective drugs, an impending “antibiotic apocalypse” will eventually make common infections incurable.

Whooping cough is just the latest in a long list of common diseases that are showing signs of outpacing antibiotic treatments. Drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis and gonorrhea also have public health officials concerned. Even though the World Health Organization has called for a global effort to focus on developing new vaccines, the production of new types of antibiotics has lagged behind over the past decade — largely because testing and marketing new drugs isn’t as profitable for the pharmaceutical industry.

During the height of last year’s outcry over the GOP’s “War on Women,” transvaginal probes became one of the most recognizable symbols of the Republican Party’s overreaching anti-abortion policies. Particularly when Virginia pushed forward with a controversial measure to require all women seeking abortions to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound, women’s health advocates decried the practice as “state-sponsored rape.”

Virginia legislators ultimately changed the language of their ultrasound bill to remove the mention of transvaginal probes. But stringent abortion restrictions don’t necessarily need specific “transvaginal” language to force women to undergo invasive, unnecessary medical procedures against their will. These are just a few examples of carefully-worded abortion bills that would ultimately require transvaginal probes — even though it’s not explicitly stated in the legislation:

– MICHIGAN: Talking Points Memo first reported that Michigan’s proposed ultrasound bill, HB-4187, is a bit more nefarious than it appears to be on the surface. The legislation doesn’t mention trasvaginal probes, but it does stipulate that the mandatory ultrasounds need to use the most modern equipment available, and provide “the most visibly clear image of the gross anatomical development of the fetus and the most audible fetal heartbeat.” Donna Crane, the policy director of NARAL Pro-Choice America, explained that language will require doctors to use transvaginal probes — which provide clearer images than the non-invasive ultrasound procedure.

– KENTUCKY: Women seeking abortions in Kentucky already have to undergo a state-mandated waiting period and a mandatory counseling session intended to talk them out of their decision. But SB-5, which just cleared a Senate committee on Thursday, would also require women to have an ultrasound before terminating a pregnancy. During Thursday’s committee hearing, state Sen. Paul Hornback (R) admitted something that the proponents of similar ultrasound bills in other states haven’t been as forthright about: the legislation would also require a transvaginal ultrasound for early pregnancies, since abdominal ultrasounds don’t work well before 12 weeks of pregnancy. Because the vast majority of abortions are performed during the first trimester, the vast majority of women will be subjected to a transvaginal probe.

– ARKANSAS: Last week, State Sen. Jason Rapert (R) introduced a “fetal heartbeat bill” to outlaw all abortion procedures after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which can occur as early as six weeks of pregnancy. Women’s health advocates pointed out that, since a transvaginal ultrasound is the only way to detect the fetal heartbeat that early into a pregnancy, Rapert’s bill would also mandate invasive probes for all women seeking abortions. The growing controversy over the unintended consequences of the stringent abortion ban led Rapert to amend his bill earlier this week — updating the legislation’s language to specify it would ban abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected by using an abdominal ultrasound, at around 10 weeks of pregnancy.

– NORTH DAKOTA: If Rapert’s heartbeat ban initially had the unintended consequence of mandating transvaginal ultrasounds, then the same holds true for the extreme fetal heartbeat bills that have been proposed in other states. For example, North Dakota’s HB-1456 states that “an individual may not perform an abortion on a pregnant woman before determining, in accordance with standard medical practice, if the unborn child the pregnant woman is carrying has a detectable heartbeat” — and transvaginal ultrasounds are the standard medical practice for determining a fetal heartbeat in early pregnancies.

Even though ultrasounds are not considered medically necessary procedures for first-trimester abortions, 12 states currently require women to undergo one anyway. And according to NARAL Pro-Choice America, 13 new forced ultrasound bills have been introduced in 8 states since the beginning of 2013, a number the group says is all too common for the beginning of a new legislative session.

Donna Crane, NARAL’s policy director, explained to ThinkProgress that Republicans are playing “games of hide and seek” with this type of legislation. But the issue of invasive probes — as well as the fundamental issue at stake, the fact that women are forced to have an unwanted, unnecessary medical procedure simply because a legislator decided they should — has never gone away. “These bills are horrific, but they’re commonplace,” Crane said. “All they’re doing is changing the language. Virginia made a PR error in actually using a searchable word, ‘transvaginal,’ and they’re not likely to do that again. But the bills are still as severe as they ever were.”

According to a new study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, there is a small — but steady — link between local air pollution levels and lower infant birth weight.

While there is some speculation as to the exact nature of the link between air pollution and low infant birth weight, experts theorize that air pollution “can affect the attachment of the fetus to the placenta” and “stress the mother’s body, which could affect fetal growth.” And, as the study found, the more the air pollution, the lower birth weights tended to be:

The researchers found that for every 10-microgram increase of pollution particles per cubic meter of air, average birth weights decreased by 8.9 grams, roughly one-third of an ounce, and infants were 3 percent more likely to be a low birth weight. An infant is considered low birth weight if he or she weighs less than 5 pounds, 8 ounces.

Low birth weight is a known risk factor for infant mortality as well as heart, breathing and behavior problems later in life.

Pollution levels at study sites ranged from approximately 10 to 70 micrograms per cubic meter of air. “These are definitely exposures that people would have in many places around the world,” said Tracey Woodruff, a reproductive health scientist in the division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, who worked on the study. “This study increases our confidence that the impact of air pollution on birth weight is real.”

Air pollution has increasingly come under scrutiny as a major contributor to poor public health, particularly after shocking images of Beijing’s catastrophic air contamination levels became worldwide news. For the first time ever, air pollution is now considered a bigger killer than high cholesterol.

But the problem isn’t limited to China or other developing nations just now mastering the use of mechanical industry. In Utah — one of the five most polluted states in America — doctors have urged Gov. Gary Herbert (R) to declare a public health emergency over what they perceive to be dangerous levels of air pollution, regardless of the significant environmental advances made under the auspices of the Clean Air Act.

Today marks the 13th annual National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day. Begun in 2000 by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and grassroots public health organizations, National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day was launched as part of a widespread effort to curb the rate of HIV infection among black men and women through “education, testing, involvement, and treatment.”

While it is well established that HIV/AIDS has had a devastating effect on people in developing nations — particularly India and much of the African continent — the epidemic has also been deadly for the United States’ black community. Here are three things to keep in mind about HIV/AIDS and black America today:

1. HIV/AIDS disproportionately affects African Americans and the urban poor. African American men accounted for 70 percent of new HIV infections in 2009, and overall, African Americans made up 44 percent of new HIV/AIDS diagnoses. That translates to 20,000 black men and women in the United States testing positive for HIV every year — and that doesn’t account for the HIV-positive members of the black community who haven’t yet been diagnosed. All told, black Americans are eight times more likely than white Americans to be HIV-positive, and ten times more likely to die from the disease. The epidemic is divided among economic lines, too. The urban poor, overrepresented by African Americans in the country’s major metropolitan areas, are also burdened with unusually high rates of HIV/AIDS. Those living just above the poverty line are three times as likely to be infected than the national average, and those below the poverty line six times more likely to be infected than the national average.

2. GOP lawmakers have been slashing funding for HIV testing and treatment under Medicaid. Although the U.S. Preventative Task Force recommended that all community health clinics — which serve poorer regions — conduct free HIV testing, many centers haven’t had enough resources to follow through. And the issue has been exacerbated by Republican governors who have refused to implement Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. Expanding Medicaid would extend insurance coverage to millions of low-income Americans, including more access to HIV testing and treatments. Instead, some GOP leaders are making aggressive cuts to their state-level Medicaid programs — like Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), who recently slashed a case management program for low-income HIV patients.

3. The future of HIV/AIDS treatment is bright. Despite the myriad of challenges facing the Americans who suffer from HIV/AIDS, public health officials remain optimistic about the coming years. The life expectancy for HIV-positive Americans has been steadily increasing due to more effective treatment regimens, and despite some lawmakers’ best efforts to undermine progress, access to HIV testing and coverage for treatments has been on the rise. And a cure may even be on the horizon — just last month, a team of researchers in Spain made an important breakthrough by creating a a new HIV vaccine that is much more effective — and less expensive — than any earlier attempts.

Republican lawmakers in Alabama took a crucial step on Wednesday towards their goal of shuttering the state’s last five abortion clinics, advancing a bill to the full house that would impose strict requirements on abortion providers.

The bill, the so-called “Women’s Health and Safety Act,” passed the Republican-controlled House Health Committee on Wednesday morning, and could come to vote in the full legislature as soon as Thursday. If passed, it would require clinics to meet certain architectural standards and have a physician present for all abortions — a provision Republicans claim is for the safety of patients, but is in fact a smokescreen designed to make compliance as difficult as possible:

But critics charged the bill sets impossible standards that have little to do with patient safety and that the bill stems from a template created by the pro-life group Americans United for Life.

“This bill targets regulatory standards of architectural structure, equipment and staffing that are totally unnecessary and cannot be met by the clinics,” said Gloria Gray, director of the West Alabama Women’s Health Center in Tuscaloosa. “How does requiring a six-foot hallway make it safer for a woman to have an abortion?”

Among the staffing concerns is a provision which states that only a licensed physician with admitting privileges to a hospital within the same metropolitan area as the clinic be allowed to administer abortion-inducing drugs.

In Tennessee, an abortion clinic that had been open for nearly four decades was forced to close after a similar bill was passed in that state last year. And in neighboring Mississippi, the state’s one and only abortion clinic may have to close its doors after a new law went into effect last year requiring a physician with admitting privileges to be present for all abortions.

Abortion clinics, especially ones in states where taxpayer funding is negligible if it exists at all, don’t often have room in their budgets to pay licensed physicians. The end result — much to the delight of the anti-choice lawmakers who propose these bills — is that clinics fall out of compliance and are forced to close or end their abortion services.