The Environmental Protection Agency will review 20 flame retardants used in common household items, in response to mounting research linking these chemicals to cancer, neurological damage and other health effects. The EPA will conduct risk assessments on four of the chemicals under the existing Toxic Substances Control Act, legislation that the agency acknowledges needs to be reformed in order to better protect Americans from toxic chemicals.

The chemicals are used to increase a material’s resistance to fire and are present in a host of items, including mattresses, furniture, electronics, clothing and food. The EPA notes that the chemicals can persist in the environment, making their way into household dust and eventually accumulating in people’s blood — in fact, researchers have found 97 percent of people in the U.S. test positive for flame retardants in their blood.

Flame retardants have been studied extensively and linked to a multitude of health effects. The flame retardant Tris, which was banned in the 1970s from children’s pajamas but is still found in a host of items, has been associated with cancer and harm to the liver, brain and kidneys. Several of the chemicals have been found to be endocrine disruptors — one flame retardant was found to cause “extreme weight gain, early onset of puberty and cardiovascular health effects” in lab animals. One study found the presence of certain flame retardants in umbilical cord blood to be associated with slowed neurological development in children. In fact, flame retardants were included among more than 800 chemicals that constitute a “global threat” in a World Health Organization report last month.

The EPA’s announcement comes amid increased pressure to address the health affects of flame retardants. Officials in California are pushing legislation that would ban the chemicals in household furniture and baby products sold in the state. Last month, 23 Democratic senators wrote a letter to the EPA, urging it to address the dangers flame retardants pose to human health. In January, Gatorade announced it would be removing the flame retardant bromated vegetable oil in its products in response to complaints and a popular change.org petition. The EPA’s announcement also comes a year after promises by the agency to investigate the chemicals in response to a Chicago Tribune series investigating the chemicals.

According to a new Consumer Reports investigative study published Thursday, there is rampant variation in the price of generic drugs as large U.S. pharmacy chains — including CVS, Rite Aid, and Target — mark up the prices of generic drug versions for common medications by as much as 18 times what wholesale chains like Costco charge. That price variance ends up costing Americans, who spend an average of $758 out-of-pocket on drugs every year, hundreds of dollars in unnecessary spending each month.

Consumer Reports compiled the data by contacting hundred of pharmacies throughout the country and asking what their drug prices were for generic versions of Lipitor, Plavix, Actos, and other common medications. The results were striking, with pharmacy representatives claiming that the higher prices were necessary for covering overhead, and considering that selling medication constitutes most of their revenue and profit margins:

Costco was the least expensive overall, and you don’t need to be a member to use its pharmacy. A few independent pharmacies came in even cheaper, though their prices varied widely, as did grocery-store pharmacies. The online retailers Healthwarehouse.com and FamilyMeds.com also had very low prices. On the other end of the spectrum, CVS, Rite Aid, and Target had the highest retail prices. [...]

A representative of CVS told us that its retail drug prices reflect other services offered by the chain, including drive-through windows, automated prescription refill systems, free outreach programs to help make sure patients are taking their prescriptions correctly, and 24-hour pharmacies. Costco pharmacies, the cheapest overall, are open only from 10 a.m. to 7 or 8:30 p.m. and are typically closed on Sundays.

“Big-box stores such as Costco and Walmart use the pharmacy as a traffic builder for their stores, whereas traditional chain stores, such as CVS, Rite Aid, and Walgreens, make the majority of their revenue and profits from the pharmacy,” says Stephen W. Schondelmeyer, Ph.D., Pharm.D., a professor of pharmacy economics at the University of Minnesota.

The study’s full findings are illustrated in this chart:

The use of generic drugs — rather than their brand name counterparts — actually drives down spending on medications, consequently lowering Americans’ out-of-pocket costs and government spending on public insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. But the Consumer Reports investigation suggests there are significantly more savings to be had.

This isn’t the first time generic drug makers have been in the news this week. On Monday, the Supreme Court took up Federal Trade Commission (FTC) v. Actavis — which one expert dubbed “the health care reform case of 2013″ — a case centering on the legality and antitrust implications of so-called “pay for delay” arrangements in which brand name drug makers pay off their generic drug counterparts to delay a drug’s generic version from entry into the market. If the FTC winds up winning that case, it could save Americans and the government billions of dollars on drug costs every year. But as this new report demonstrates, they could save much more if pharmacies stopped jacking up their rates to startling degrees.

A huge body of scientific evidence has already proven that the recommended vaccination schedule for U.S. kids is perfectly safe. But some pervasive myths about vaccines still persist — partially driven by dangerous right-wing fearmongering on the subject. Hoping to convince parents not to buy into the conspiracy theories, scientists continue to release new studies proving that it’s safe for them to vaccinate their kids on schedule, and reiterating that there’s no discernible link between vaccines and autism.

Some parents wonder if their kids are receiving too many vaccines too soon, and try to space out their children’s vaccinations so there’s more time in between their shots. In fact, up to 40 percent of parents take matters into their own hands and follow their own vaccination schedule rather that the one recommended by the CDC. But experts from the Institute of Medicine — a panel that advises the federal government on health policy — hope to change their minds. A new report from the Institute of Medicine confirms that the current childhood vaccination schedule is nothing to worry about, and it’s not a good idea to refrain from following it:

But delaying shots only prolongs the time that babies and children are vulnerable to “devastating diseases,” says co-author Pauline Thomas, an associate professor of preventive medicine at New Jersey Medical School.

“There is ample evidence that it’s not safe not to follow the schedule,” Thomas says. “It’s well known that in places where vaccines are delayed or missed, that’s where we are beginning to see vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks.”

Although the majority of doctors stand firmly behind vaccination, the issue is hotly debated among parents, particularly those too young to remember scourges like measles, polio and whooping cough. To address parents’ concerns, the Institute of Medicine has conducted more than 60 studies of vaccine safety since the 1970s.

Since children are required to receive the bulk of their vaccination before entering kindergarten, most of their shots are concentrated in their toddler years. Children receive up to 24 vaccines by their second birthday, and end up getting vaccinated against 14 different infectious diseases by the time they’re five. But it’s not randomly assigned. The CDC’s schedule is based on scientific testing that takes into account children’s immune systems, what they’re exposed to at different stages of their lives, and how the antibiotics interact with each other in the human body.

Peter Hotez, a vaccine researcher at the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, explained to USA Today that parents’ fears are simply unfounded. “The concept that you are going to overload a child’s immune system by giving too many vaccines at once makes no sense,” Hotez said. “When you play with vaccine schedules, you are playing with fire.”

In the two centuries since vaccines were first developed, they have nearly eradicated over a dozen of what used to be the most common infectious diseases in the U.S. Some vaccines, like the flu shot, aren’t foolproof — but they can still help lower the risk. 90 percent of the U.S. children who died from the flu this past winter didn’t get vaccinated for it.

A celebrity-driven PSA that’s been making the rounds on television and subscription services like Hulu urges Americans to stuff Easter baskets this Sunday with toys — rather than the traditional high-sugar, high-fat candies like chocolate bunnies. The ad presents itself as a campaign to “save the bunny” while encouraging parents to shift away from giving kids the unhealthy treats.

Watch it:

It’s worth noting that the project is sponsored by Mattel, Fisher-Price, and various other toy-makers, and the campaign’s webpage directs visitors to retailers that sell their products, so there is an obvious financial motive at play here.

However, while candy consumed on one day out of the year is a mere drop in the bucket compared to other factors feeding into America’s obesity crisis, such as the over-consumption of fast foods and unhealthy school lunches, the empirical data suggests that there is some merit to the movement. Figures compiled by online retailers and the National Confectioners’ Association show that Americans purchase 120 million pounds of Easter candy annually — and the vast majority of it is particularly unhealthy foods like chocolate:

Holidays in general are a gold mine for chocolate makers — particularly for corporate giants Hershey and Mars, the two companies that produce 70 percent of all chocolate. Hershey’s webpage is currently pushing chocolate products such as the aforementioned bunnies, Cadbury cream eggs, and a variety of other sugary concoctions for Easter Sunday. Most chocolate products in the U.S. are actually made up mostly of Monsanto-produced corn.

A Philadelphia-area abortion doctor is currently on trial for murder, based on gruesome reports about the illegal techniques that he and his staff used to perform late-term abortions for desperate, low-income women. Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s high-profile case is sparking understandable outrage, as evidence has emerged that he may have taken advantage of vulnerable women, violated multiple medical codes, and performed inhumane surgeries.

According to prosecutors, Gosnell’s clinic went 17 years without an inspection — and abortion opponents are leveraging that to go after other abortion clinics that have no affiliation with Gosnell or his crimes. “Unfortunately and tragically in Pennsylvania, facilities were going uninspected for years,” Maria Gallagher, a lobbyist with the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation, said in reference to the ongoing trial. That’s a big reason why abortion opponents like Gallagher were able to push Pennsylvania legislators to tighten restrictions on abortion clinics in 2011, updating state law to require abortion clinics to adhere to the same standards as outpatient surgery centers. According to NPR, Gosnell’s case was “mentioned frequently” as Pennsylvania lawmakers considered, and ultimately approved, the unnecessary new restrictions.

If proven guilty, there’s no doubt that Gosnell and his staff committed horrific crimes. But the knee-jerk reaction to his murder trial — the assumption that most abortion doctors aren’t adhering to medical standards, and that the women who visit health clinics are in grave danger of receiving unsafe care — is off-base. In fact, as the right-wing pushes for tighter abortion clinic standards to make sure nothing like this ever happens again, that crusade could end up having exactly the opposite effect.

Pennsylvania’s abortion clinic restrictions fit into a larger anti-choice effort across the country that is solely intended to force abortion clinics to close their doors. In states like North Dakota, Virginia, Indiana, Mississippi, and Texas, abortion opponents are pushing legislation to force abortion clinics to adhere to unneccesary new regulations in the name of “ensuring women’s safety.” That sounds like a noble goal. But these measures — known as the Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers, or TRAP — aren’t really about ensuring women’s safety at all. As Mississippi’s Republican governor once admitted behind closed doors at an anti-choice event, TRAP laws are about indirectly restricting women’s access to abortion by shutting down health clinics.

In Pennsylvania specifically, one Planned Parenthood affiliate was forced to spend nearly a half a million dollars to get two of its clinics into compliance with the new regulations. That involved unnecessary updates like installing hands-free sinks, replacing the floors, and updating the air-conditioning system. The affiliate’s CEO, Dayle Steinberg, explained to NPR that the state’s stricter requirements didn’t actually do anything to improve the care provided to the women at her clinics, where the complication rate is already less than one-tenth of 1 percent. “They were thinly disguised as improving patient safety, when really it was about increasing the cost for abortion providers — hoping that some of them wouldn’t be able to afford it,” Steinberg said.

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Last week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Justice Department bowed to tobacco industry-led legal challenges against their graphic anti-smoking ad campaign depicting the visceral consequences of tobacco-fueled chronic illness. That was a major blow to the public health initiatives included in the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009 — landmark tobacco regulation legislation signed by President Obama at the beginning of his first term.

But the federal government is not giving up on its efforts to discourage smoking. This week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released a series of new videos and graphics that highlight the negative effects of tobacco use on both smokers and their loved ones:

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Low-income Americans in the South, where states impose some of the nation’s most restrictive Medicaid eligibility requirements, are being forced to put off the medical care they need because they can’t afford it. According to a new study from the New England Journal of Medicine, the American adults who don’t qualify for Medicaid assistance in their states are simply forgoing care — an issue that Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, which seeks to extend public health insurance to the low-income people who can’t currently qualify for it, can help address.

Obamacare’s expansion seeks to standardize Medicaid eligibility levels throughout the country, since there’s currently a huge range of different Medicaid eligibility rates across different states. Some states define Medicaid eligibility so narrowly that families of three making just $5,000 per year aren’t considered poor enough to access public health insurance. Researchers used county-level data to confirm — predictably — that the low-income people in those states are less likely to get medical care. The problem was the worst in Florida and Texas, which have the greatest prevalence of residents delaying their health care services:

As the map shows, the county-level prevalence of delayed care has huge ranges across the country. Just 6.5 percent of the people in Norfolk, MA, are putting off their medical treatment, compared to a staggering 40.6 percent of the people who live in Hidalgo, TX.

Those numbers are directly related to whether states are defining their Medicaid pools by Obamacare’s expanded definition, and allowing people with annual incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty line to access coverage. In states that have set their Medicaid eligibility levels at or above 133 percent of the federal poverty line, fewer people are delaying care. If every state accepted the health law’s expansion of the program, each Medicaid program would be set at that level, and the map above wouldn’t have nearly as much variation.
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In an attempt to illustrate the negligible impact of the recent across-the-board spending cuts resulting from sequestration, several Fox News anchors spent Friday morning bemoaning the amount of federal funding designated for comprehensive sex education. According to Fox’s Gretchen Carlson and her two co-hosts, the sequester must not have had a serious impact on the federal government since it’s still able to find $350 million to fund “Planned Parenthood-style” sex ed classes in public school — an amount that Fox suggests would be better served by funding White House tours for the next 100 years:

CARLSON: Here is a story you may scratch your head over, because it’s our daily edition of “what sequester?” The federal government is spending apparently $350 million for Planned Parenthood-style sex education programs in western states, including Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Alaska, for sex education programs starting now in kindergarten. [...]

STEVE DOOCY: It’s so shocking because we remember the sequester, it was all about it’s going to end everything, we’ll have to close the White House tours, we’ll have to close some small airport towers and things like that. So they did that, and a whole other list of things. Yet, they’re still able to find $350 million for this program that is comprehensive and graphic. And essentially what it does is it talks about how no sex is unsafe unless it causes pregnancy. [...]

ERIC BOLLING: Now we find another $350 million is going to this program for kids as low as five years old. It’s absolutely insane. $350 million, do you know how long that would keep the white house tours going? 100 years! The White House could be open for as long as us and our grandchildren would be around. Instead, they’re going to learn — I don’t even want to know what they’re teaching them.

STEVE DOOCY: Well, no type of sex is wrong. The only unsafe behavior is getting pregnant. That’s what it’s all about. $350 million!

Watch it:

Cable news has been obsessed with the sequester’s impact on White House tours. But it’s unclear where the Fox hosts’ $350 million number is coming from. Federal funding to support comprehensive, evidence-based sexual education programs comes from several different sources: discretionary funding awarded to President Obama’s Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative, grants under Obamacare’s Personal Responsibility Education Program, and funding for the Centers for Disease Control to continue its HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns.

Planned Parenthood affiliates may apply for those federal grants to implement voluntary sexual education programs in public schools, which typically include resources to encourage at-risk youth to use contraception, maintain healthy relationships, and lower their risk of STDs and pregnancy. But the federal government does not actually have any requirements that sex ed classes must operate in a “Planned Parenthood style.” In fact, there are no federal guidelines whatsoever requiring school districts to teach evidence-based sex ed courses — and the states that choose not to do so are the same states that have high rates of teenage pregnancies and STDs.

Virginia is set to implement controversial new abortion clinic restrictions that could force many of the facilities in the state to shut down — a popular anti-choice tactic that indirectly undermines women’s access to reproductive care by targeting abortion providers. After Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) quietly approved the new regulations on the Friday between the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, the state’s Board of Health will have the power to decide whether or not to adopt them on April 12.

Before then, however, thousands of Virginia residents are raising their voices in protest. Spearheaded by ProgressVA and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Virginia, women’s health advocates delivered over 3,000 public comments opposing the new abortion restrictions to the Board of Health on Thursday. The public comment period ends on Friday, and opponents of the new policy hope they can make an impact by expressing the same message with each of the thousands of comments: “Put women’s health above politics. Don’t let red tape trap women.”

The reference to “trapping women” is a nod to the fact that women’s health advocates refer to these types of restrictions as TRAP laws, or the Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers. Targeting abortion clinics and providers, rather than pushing for outright bans on the abortion procedure itself, allows the anti-choice community to avoid inciting as much public outrage — which helps their efforts fly mostly under the radar.

At Thursday’s event, ProgressVA’s executive director, Anna Scholl, urged the state’s board to put women’s health before politics. “These regulations should be based on evidence-based medicine, not political agendas,” Scholl pointed out.

In fact, even though health boards are intended to operate as nonpartisan medical bodies, Virginia’s proposed TRAP laws have sparked an intensely politicized battle in the state. Reports have emerged that State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) essentially threatened Virginia’s Board into approving the new restrictions by warning members they could be denied state-funded legal services if they voted against them. And last fall, Virginia health commissioner Dr. Karen Remley resigned from her position in protest over the proposed TRAP laws, citing her disapproval of the unnecessary abortion clinic restrictions as the primary reason she could no longer lead the Board “in good faith.”

If the Board of Health approves the final rules next month, they will likely take effect this summer. Many of Virginia’s 20 abortion clinics will likely be forced to close their doors when they are unable to adhere to the costly, complicated new rules.

State legislators in Kansas are considering a bill that would allow the quarantine of people with AIDS or HIV.

Kansas House Bill 2183 was originally created to serve first responders who might be at risk of contracting HIV through their work. But the Kansas Department of Health and Environment rewrote the language in the bill, broadly deregulating when isolation can take place and opening up the possibility that HIV positive people could be quarantined.

Activists fear this oversight could be used to openly discriminate.

“Our state’s health department is willing to roll back a 25-year old civil rights protection,” Thomas Witt, the Executive Director of the Kansas Equality Coalition, told ThinkProgress. “LGBT Kansans are already subject to harassment and legal discrimination, and removing the existing HIV quarantine exemption from law leaves vulnerable Kansans at risk of discriminatory, unfair treatment by local officials.”

Other activists have also expressed concern that Kansans might not understand how HIV can be spread, and have implicit biases thanks to a lack of knowledge. “We live in a very conservative state and I’m afraid there are still many people, especially in rural Kansas, that have inadequate education and understanding concerning HIV/AIDS,” Cody Patton, of sexual health group Positive Directions told Gay Star News. This theory was also evidenced by a debate earlier this year, when the Kansas health department eliminated HIV testing for most counties in the state.

The Kansas senate has approved the HIV quarantine bill, and it looks likely to pass. During a hearing about the measure on Wednesday, however, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment said it would be willing to work with groups to fix what they considered problematic aspects of current proposal.

Fast food chains have been some of Obamacare’s biggest critics, issuing warnings of new surcharges, higher costs, and laid-off workers because of the health reform law. Many of them have now changed their thinking. By the new estimates from several chains — including Wendy’s, Popeye’s, Jack in the Box, and Chipotle — Obamacare will actually cost about 80 percent less than they originally warned.

Those include companies whose franchises have already taken preemptive action to avoid providing their employees with health coverage, including one Nebraska Wendy’s chain.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

Wendy’s Co. initially estimated the health-care law would increase the cost of operating each of its 5,800 U.S. restaurants by $25,000 a year. But Chief Financial Officer Steve Hare told an investment conference on March 14 that executives have cut the estimate by 80%, to $5,000 a year, primarily because they expect many employees to decline the insurance offering.

“It is still going to be an additional cost that both the company and our franchisees will have to absorb, but we think it is going to be manageable,” Mr. Hare said.

The CEO of Dunkin’ Brands Group also softened criticism of the law earlier this month, when he explained to shareholders that Obamacare’s costs “are not as high as some people have said” and “we can mitigate those costs very easily.”

Company executives say the reason why they exaggerated their estimates is because workers are opting out of the employer-sponsored high-deductible plan that fast food chains typically offer. Those kind of high-deductible plans are popular ways for large companies to lower their profits, but they’re not always the best choice for low-wage workers. For instance, many companies that set up high-deductible insurance plans max out at up to $10,000. They can leave low-income workers worse off, because you can spend more than that sum on a single emergency room visit.

Before exaggerating the impacts of health reform, fast food restaurants could have turned to analyses that showed Obamacare would impose only a negligible cost on large businesses, while actually helping small businesses.

On factory farms across the country, where animals tend to live in close quarters and diseases can spread quickly, the meat industry pumps its livestock full of antibiotics to fight the spread of bacteria. In fact, livestock consume four times the amount of antibiotics as sick Americans do — and even though the food industry maintains the practice is safe, new scientific research could definitively prove that wrong.

According to a new study published by researchers in Britain and Denmark, drug-resistant bacteria in animals can be transferred to humans. Researchers used genetic sequencing to study an outbreak of a bacterial disease on different farms in Denmark, and they were able to prove that the strain of bacteria that was sickening people actually originated in animals. The findings suggest that the meat industry’s practices could be directly exacerbating a growing global health threat, as an increasing number of diseases around the world — including whooping cough, tuberculosis, and gonorrhea — are beginning to develop a resistance to common antibiotics, signaling a future when even common infections may not be able to be treated.

Scientists have long suspected there may be a link between antibiotic resistance in animals and humans, but previous research hasn’t demonstrated it in quite as much detail before. Now that this study has been made public, however, policymakers are pointing to it as evidence that the FDA needs more regulatory oversight in this area of the meat industry. According to Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (D-NY) — who recently introduced a measure to require food producers to disclose how often they’re feeding antibiotics to their animals, as well as to allow the FDA to collect more detailed information from drug companies — this new study “ends any debate” about whether giving antibiotics to livestock poses a health risk to humans.

Public opinion is on Slaughter’s side. The majority of Americans believe that antibiotics in food represent a health threat, and more than 60 percent of people say they would be willing to pay at least an additional five cents per pound for meat raised without antibiotics.

In the vast majority of popular U.S. restaurant chains, the menu items geared toward kids aren’t meeting the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s nutritional recommendations, according to a new study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). Instead, most meals on the kids’ menus contain too many calories, too much salt or fat, and not enough nutrients from fruits and vegetables.

CSPI surveyed almost 3,500 combinations of menu items at the top 50 restaurant chains in the country — including Chipotle Mexican Grill, Dairy Queen, Hardee’s, McDonald’s, Subway, and Panda Express — and found that kids’ meals fall short of the USDA’s standards a staggering 97 percent of the time. That’s only a very slight improvement from 2008, when the organization found that 99 percent of kids’ menus weren’t meeting the recommended nutritional standards.

About one-third of U.S. children are currently considered overweight, and 17 percent are considered obese. The childhood obesity rate in this country has tripled since 1980 — and some nutrition experts at least partially fault the food and beverage industries for resisting regulation efforts and continuing to market their unhealthy products specifically to appeal to children. According to CSPI, some of the responsibility to encourage healthy eating habits among American youth also rests with popular restaurants.

“Most chains seem stuck in a time warp, serving up the same old meals based on chicken nuggets, burgers, macaroni and cheese, fries, and soda,” Margo Wootan, CSPI’s nutrition policy director, told Reuters. “It’s like the restaurant industry didn’t get the memo that there’s a childhood obesity crisis.”

The one exception that CSPI found was Subway. All eight of Subway’s kids’ meals, which offer children smaller portions, apple slices, and low-fat milk or bottled water, met CSPI’s nutrition criteria. And that emphasis on healthier options certainly isn’t hurting the company’s bottom line. The sandwich chain now has more stores in the U.S. than McDonald’s does — and in order to catch up, the McDonald’s corporation is scrambling to recast its own products as healthy, too.

A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control confirmed that children are still consuming too many of their calories from fatty foods, even as American adults have begun to cut back on their own calorie intake. But there’s some hope. Cities with aggressive nutrition policies have seen significant drops in their childhood obesity rates, suggesting that there are some concrete policy solutions — like holding school cafeterias to nutrition standards, launching anti-obesity marketing campaigns, or even limiting the portion sizes of unhealthy options like sugary drinks — that could help reverse the national trend.

At one high school in Massachusetts, 20 students are protesting what they call their school district’s poor response to allegations that a football player sexually assaulted two high school girls. The students protested at the same time the high school held an assembly about violence against women, where male students were asked to take a pledge to not commit violence. One of the student protesters called the action “too little, too late.”

A local report from Framingham Patch has more:

The assault reportedly happened in a corridor near the cafeteria during a study period, said [Framingham High School social worker Kevin] Fox. It involved a then-18-year old Framingham High junior and a freshman girl. It is alleged the student put his hand down her pants and fondled her.

Two months later, in June 2012, the same male was accused of assaulting a second girl, a junior.

The male student involved in both incidents is a student athlete, according to Fox and one of the two females who said she was assaulted. [...]

Every day, this sophomore and senior girl see their alleged assailant at school. He lost five days of school at the end of June, but got to play the entire football season, said Fox.

“That sends the wrong message to these brave girls,” said Fox. “We don’t have control over what the police or the DA does, but we do have control here at Framingham High.”

The protesting students said that school administrators crack down on drugs and alcohol more severely than they do on sexual assault. Administrators need to do more, one student said, and should at least be just as tough on harassment or assault. Ultimately, what the Framingham teenagers are rallying against is part of a broader rape culture that blames the victim for doing something wrong — one that we see again and again in the actions of administrators, adults, and the media.

Neither of the Framingham girls or their families plan will pursue charges. But recent cases show that when victims of rape have pursued legal action, they’ve faced a barrage insults and even threats: The incredibly sad story in Steubenville has not gone away, and it’s unfolding again in a Connecticut town.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, a vocal opponent of President Obama’s health reform law, surprised her Republican colleagues when she announced her support for Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion at the beginning of this year. Since then, Brewer has been attempting to broker a deal with the legislators in her state, who will ultimately need to approve the legislation to expand the public health insurance program.

And as negotiations over Arizona’s Medicaid expansion plan go back and forth, some of the state’s powerful lobbyists are attempting to attach amendments to the proposal to suit their own interests — including a totally unrelated attack on Planned Parenthood, which has become a symbol in the GOP’s ongoing crusade against women’s health.

Obamacare proponents warn that additional amendments could threaten to derail the whole expansion process altogether, since Democratic lawmakers may not be willing to pass a bill with unrelated riders. Nonetheless, one of the state’s most powerful lobbying groups is jumping on the opportunity to target Planned Parenthood, regardless of the potential consequences for Arizona’s low-income residents who may be forced to go without health care if the expansion doesn’t go through:

The Center for Arizona Policy is using an opinion from the Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal-defense organization, to argue that the draft Medicaid legislation should be amended to disqualify the non-profit women’s health provider Planned Parenthood from receiving public money. [...]

[Cathi Herrod, the center’s president] said her organization, a conservative Christian-based group that wields influence with GOP lawmakers, is not taking a position on Medicaid expansion and wouldn’t comment on the possibility that such an amendment could sink the plan.

“Our request is to include language guaranteeing that no funding to an abortion provider results from Medicaid expansion,” Herrod said. “Any dollar that goes to an abortion provider for any service frees up another dollar to subsidize abortion.”

Planned Parenthood gets a fraction of its funding from Medicaid but could pick up more patients if the state broadens eligibility. Although Herrod argues that funding to the clinics indirectly supports abortion, Planned Parenthood officials say they lose money on every Medicaid patient because of reimbursement levels.

The proposed amendment to Arizona’s Medicaid expansion is very similar to a measure that Brewer signed into law last year, which also sought to prevent federal Medicaid dollars from going to Planned Parenthood. Last month, a federal judge blocked that law from taking effect — since state-level Medicaid programs cannot exclude qualified providers from providing essential heath care to the low-income Americans who need it, Arizona is not permitted to target Planned Parenthood simply because the national organization performs abortions.

But even Arizona’s failed record won’t deter the abortion opponents in the state from continuing to go after Planned Parenthood. Bryan Howard, the president of Planned Parenthood Arizona, sharply criticized the Center for Arizona Policy and Herrod for pursuing a “failed legislative strategy” that could jeopardize the state’s Medicaid expansion. “She has to know that she is putting health-care access for 400,000 people at risk,” Howard told the Arizona Republic.

During his tenure as New York City mayor, Michael Bloomberg (I) has had no qualms about cracking down on products that pose a public health risk, tackling everything from sugary sodas, to salt in snack foods, to illegal guns. Now, the three-term executive has his sights set on the tobacco industry, pushing legislation that would raise cigarette pack prices in the city to at least $10.50 and end tobacco companies’ ability to offer coupons or special discounts on their products.

The recently-announced initiative comes at the heels of another Bloomberg-endorsed plan to limit cigarette makers’ ability to publicly advertise their products in city store fronts. Combined, the two proposals would constitute something of a public health coup for Bloomberg, targeting smokers’ bad habit where it hurts the most: their wallets. And as the New York Times reports, the effort is targeted at teens and low-income Americans:

“This is kind of a landmark set of proposals here,” said Kurt Ribisl, a professor of public health at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, whose research on tobacco control influenced Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal. “For someone like me, who’s spent 18 years studying point-of-sale issues, this is kind of big.”

Dr. Ribisl studies what happens at the retail counter, where a customer at a typical convenience store sees a colorful array of signs, packaging and “shelf talkers” — the small tags that flutter from shelves — promoting two-for-one, dollar-off and other types of deals. According to a Federal Trade Commission report issued last year, the tobacco industry spent $6.5 billion on discounts in 2010, and Dr. Ribisl said they are one of the major ways cigarette makers encourage price-conscious customers like teenagers and low-income smokers to buy.

New York’s price-regulation bill would, in effect, close off the remaining means of access to cheap cigarettes and little cigars, which make it easier for teenagers to experiment with smoking, and progress to smoking regularly, said Brett Loomis, a researcher at RTI International, a nonprofit institute that offers research and technical services to governments and businesses.

Poor Americans are more likely to smoke, but less likely to be able to afford the habit and its associated health care costs. In fact, one study showed that low-income New York City smokers spend as much as a quarter of their income purchasing cigarettes — Bloomberg’s initiatives have the potential to price them out of the deadly habit altogether. While encouraging poor people to stop smoking is undoubtedly good from a public health standpoint, doing so through a commodity-based financial regulation has the potential to further drain their disposable incomes.

And Bloomberg’s legislative push won’t address all aspects of the problem. As cigarette prices rise nationwide and smoking rates plummet in the aggregate, studies have shown that low-income Americans — particularly, low-income women — are still smoking at higher rates than average, and turning to less costly alternatives such as loose leaf tobacco to get their fix on the cheap. Raising cigarette prices even further could propagate even more of that kind of behavior.

A 10th grade science teacher in Idaho is being investigated by his school after parents complained that he included the word “vagina” in his lessons, taught the class about the female orgasm, and showed Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Some of the allegations are more serious, including that “he shared confidential student files with an individual other than their parents,” and “told inappropriate jokes in class,” but science teacher Tim McDaniel suspects that the complaints originated because of his discussions about issues considered controversial in the largely Mormon community where he teaches:

“I teach straight out of the textbook, I don’t include anything that the textbook doesn’t mention,” McDaniel said. “But I give every student the option not attend this class when I teach on the reproductive system if they don’t feel comfortable with the material.”

The science teacher said he has taught Dietrich’s science classes for the past 18 years without receiving a complaint from parents or students.

According to McDaniel, the commission is also investigating a complaint that accuses him of using school property to promote a political candidate. The complaint was because he showed the climate change film “An Inconvenient Truth,” also in his science class.

McDaniel said he includes the film to spark a discussion on climate change among the students. After watching the film, he asks students to write a response paper explaining their thoughts on climate change.

Idaho is a state that has no requirement for sex education and no mandated HIV education. It does have a requirement that students be allowed to opt out of sex ed classes, to which McDaniel says he adhered.

(HT: Raw Story )

Last month, Indiana Republicans proposed a measure intended to shut down a Planned Parenthood clinic in the state. The original SB 371 legislation also contained a clause that would have required women taking the RU-486 abortion pill to undergo two invasive transvaginal probes — one before taking the pill, and one after. But ever since the transvaginal ultrasound provision first erupted into controversy, the state’s GOP has been working to scale it back, hoping to assuage public outrage and quietly shepard the rest of the anti-choice legislation’s passage into law.

At first, the Indiana Senate removed the bill’s second ultrasound requirement to ensure its passage. And now, a House committee has removed the first ultrasound requirement too, dropping that aspect of the legislation altogether. According to an Associated Press report, “Indiana Right to Life president Mike Fichter says the group agreed with the decision to drop the ultrasound requirement because debate over it in the state Senate had taken focus away from its goal of tightening regulations on clinics that provide abortions.”

Now that abortion opponents have conceded to public pressure on the invasive forced ultrasound measures, the rest of SB 371 could seem moderate in comparison. But the anti-choice legislation would still have far-reaching consequences for women’s reproductive rights in the state.

Indiana lawmakers are pursuing a popular right-wing strategy for limiting abortion access: Indirectly restricting abortion by imposing costly, unnecessary requirements on abortion clinics with the intention of forcing them to close their doors. SB 371 would force health clinics that prescribe the abortion pill to adhere to the same standards as surgical clinics, even though medication abortions are not actually surgical procedures. It’s a direct attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic that provides the RU-486 to patients seeking to terminate a pregnancy during the first trimester, since that clinic would likely not be able to comply with the new restrictions.

Women’s health advocates consider these type of abortion restrictions to be some of the most dangerous assaults to women’s health — because they can take effect fairly quickly, they effectively limit women’s abortion access, and they often fly under the radar without inspiring the same kind of outrage that other laws, like transvaginal ultrasound requirements, do. That’s exactly why Indiana Republicans are willing to sacrifice mandatory ultrasounds to focus on their real “goal.”

As the Supreme Court takes up two landmark cases for marriage equality this week, the impending decisions have sparked comparisons to another one of the Court’s rulings on a so-called “social issue” — the Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion rights exactly 40 years ago. Since a politically contentious battle over abortion rights has continued throughout the four decades after Roe, some pundits argue the Justices moved too quickly to grant legal rights to reproductive care, and a similar move toward marriage equality before the country is ready could incite the same kind of public backlash.

But the idea that Roe created the Religious Right — fueling public outrage over abortion that spurred religious conservatives to mobilize across the country — is actually a myth. As Sally Steenland, the Director of the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress, explains, religious conservatives actually began organizing to prevent the IRS from revoking tax-exempt status from a Christian college that was practicing racial discrimination. Evangelicals didn’t welcome what they perceived as “government intrusion” into privately funded, faith-based institutions, and a movement began brewing. In fact, abortion wasn’t added to the Religious Right’s agenda until several years after Roe, when the movement’s leaders began seeking to expand their issues.

And it wasn’t necessarily political backlash from the Religious Right that began chipping away at reproductive rights in a post-Roe nation. In many cases, it was actually the Court itself. In 1980, Harris v. McRae upheld the Hyde Amendment, which bars low-income Americans in the Medicaid program from getting abortion services covered by public insurance. In 1992, Planned Parenthood v. Casey narrowed Roe‘s broad abortion protections to a less rigid standard — specifying that states may restrict abortion as long as they don’t impose an “undue burden” on women seeking to terminate a pregnancy — which paved the way for today’s state-level restrictions, spanning everything from mandatory waiting periods to forced ultrasounds.

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