According to a new report by the children’s medical safety advocacy group Safe Kids Worldwide, “a parent or caregiver calls a poison control center after a young child gets into medication, or is given the wrong dose of medicine” every single minute due to unsecured pills and bottles.

In a press release accompanying the report, Safe Kids Worldwide CEO Kate Carr said, “Ask any parent, and they will tell you they store medicine where children can’t get them. But they might not be thinking of pills stored in purses, vitamins left on counter tops or a diaper rash remedy near a changing table.” The findings, summarized in a report infographic below, support results from a 2012 study by the group finding that child poisoning deaths from medications doubled between 1979 and 2006:

A group of major grocery retailers — including Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and Aldi — have pledged not to sell genetically engineered (GE) seafood if it’s approved in the U.S., Friends of the Earth announced Wednesday. The retailers are among more than 2,000 national and local grocery stores that have signed a pledge as part of the environmental group’s new campaign to push grocery stores to refuse to sell GE seafood.

The announcement comes as the Food and Drug Administration appears poised to approve what would be the first non-plant GE food to enter the U.S. market. AquAdvantage Salmon — which contain a Chinook salmon gene allowing the fish to grow about twice as fast as a wild Atlantic salmon — passed the FDA’s environmental assessment, which was released last year. Along with salmon, the Center for Food Safety reports that there are at least 34 other species of fish undergoing GE development around the world, including tilapia, trout and flounder.

The debate surrounding genetically modified foods, or GMOs, has intensified in recent months. Whole Foods announced earlier this month that it would label all GMO foods sold in Whole Foods stores by 2018, becoming the first national grocery store to set a timeline on GMO labeling. California’s Proposition 37, which would have mandated GMO labeling in the state, was narrowly defeated in November, after food industry giants like Monsanto and Hershey poured $44 million dollars into an anti-Prop 37 campaign. Polling shows that more than 90 percent of consumers support GMO labeling, and a 91 percent of Americans don’t want GE meat and fish in the U.S. marketplace.

The grocery retailers’ pledges are encouraging, but they don’t make up for the FDA’s oversight in labeling GE salmon as environmentally sound. Opponents of GE seafood stress that not enough research has been done on its health effects, and that GE fish could pose an environmental threat if they escape into open waters. With their ability to grow more quickly than other salmon, GE salmon could out-compete wild salmon for food and space, and could potentially mate with wild seafood, weakening the wild species’ gene pool. AquAdvantage’s developer AquaBounty maintains that all of its salmon are grown as sterile females, but during a 2010 FDA hearing, AquaBounty clarified that 95 to 99 percent of its salmon were sterile — which means up to 750,000 of the eggs AquaBounty plans to grow could be fertile. On top of that, even farmed salmon that aren’t genetically modified pose potential health and environmental risks — they typically contain higher concentrations of PCBs, pesticides and other toxins; generate vast amounts of waste, which pollutes the water surrounding their pens and can harbor disease; and emit nearly as much greenhouse gasses as pork. GE farmed salmon will also carry all those risks.

There are still many other grocery retailers in the U.S. that haven’t signed the pledge, which means that if AquAdvantage salmon are approved, they will still find their way into the American market. The FDA hasn’t had much success with encouraging the food industry to self-regulate on its own, so the federal government will need a broader policy to limit Americans’ exposure to GMO foods — by labeling them or, in the case of GE salmon, by keeping them off shelves altogether.

A new law strengthening the penalty for rape passed the lower house of India’s Parliament recently, a bright point in India’s still troubled relationship with sexual assault and violence.

Should the legislation pass India’s upper house, it would provide an increase of the minimum prison sentence for gang-rape to twenty years, that can be extended to life in jail. It also adds the opportunity for prosecutors to seek the death penalty in cases of rape that result in death or leave the victim in a coma. Most promising of all, the revised law would make other sex-based crimes such voyeurism, stalking, acid attacks and the trafficking of women punishable under criminal law. “This is just a first step in a journey of 1,000 miles,” MP Harsimrat Kaur Badal, a woman MP a regional party, said before the vote.

The revised law originally was developed in response to the brutal gang rape of a young Indian woman — identified as Jyoti Signh Pandi — in December, which sparked mass protests throughout the country. Pandi later died from the massive injuries obtained, leading to her alleged assailants being charged with murder, rape, and kidnapping.

Recent actions taken to strengthen the punishment of these crimes does not lessen the long way that India still has to go when it comes to combating sexual violence. According to a recent report from a United Nations panel, in India “every 60 minutes two women are raped, and every six hours a young married woman is found beaten to death, burnt or driven to suicide.” The stigma that surrounds these crimes, however, leads to a severe underreporting of rape, particularly in the case of women in lower castes.

Tourists are also becoming more frequent targets of attacks, as evidenced in the case of a British woman on the same day the new rape law moved forward in Parliament. The woman was forced to leap through an open window in her hotel room to escape the advances of the hotel owner, fracturing both of her legs:

Police arrested the hotel owner in connection with the incident in Agra, the site of the Taj Mahal, one of India’s most cherished tourist attractions, [police officer Sushaunt] Gaur said. No charges have been filed.

The woman told the police that the hotel owner kept knocking on her door persistently and even tried to unlock the door after she refused his offer of a free massage.

A Swiss tourist was the vicitim of gang-rape just weeks ago in the Indian state Madhya Pradur while cycling with her husband. In that instance, the state’s Home Minister suggested that the tourist herself was at fault for not alerting the police of her travel plans. Another incident of gang rape was reported in the same state on Tuesday, in which two minors were assaulted at gunpoint in their family’s home.

Two football player high school students in Connecticut are charged with the second-degree sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl. The allegations come amid other complaints of hazing at the school, but Torrington High School officials insist that these are individual instances and not a part of a larger cultural problem.

But whether or not the alleged rapists Edgar Gonzalez and Joan Toribio, both 18, are maverick sexual assailants isn’t really the cultural question. Rather, the fact that students in the neighborhood and the school have taken to Twitter blame the young girl and not the alleged rapists highlights a broader rape culture that assumes men are only haphazardly involved in sexual assault, but it is usually the victim’s fault:

“If you look at crime statistics these things happen everywhere and we’re not any different than any other community,” said [Athletic Director Mike McKenna].

But on social media in recent weeks, dozens of athletes and Torrington High School students, male and female, have taunted the 13-year-old victim, calling her a “whore,” criticizing her for “snitching” and “ruining the lives” of the 18-year-old football players, and bullying students who defend her.

The Connecticut Register-Citizen highlights some of the offensive tweets about the girl:

“I wanna know why there’s no punishment for young hoes,” asked “@asmedick.” That comment was reposted three times.

Twelve days after the alleged incident, “@AyooWilliam” tweeted, “You destroyed two people’s life.” Another responded, “I hope you got what you wanted.”

“Sticking up for a girl who wanted the D and then snitched? have a seat pleaseeee,” wrote “@ShelbyyKalinski.”

As the case in Steubenville proved, social media has brought a whole new slew of evidence to sexual assault allegations, particularly among young people. Unfortunately, the lesson some news outlets take from this is that Steubenville was “a cautionary tale for teenagers living in today’s digital world.” In reality, social media helps to underline a very real problem: A victim-blaming rape culture that is inclined to take the side of the assailant instead of the victim.

(HT: Raw Story)

In a victory for the tobacco industry, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Justice Department have decided to bow out of an ongoing legal battle with several of America’s biggest cigarette manufacturers over proposed regulations requiring all of their products to be conspicuously branded with graphic imagery and warnings about their adverse health consequences.

Mandating the labels — which include visceral depictions of tobacco’s carcinogenic effect on the lungs, throat, and mouth — was made possible under the auspices of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009. That landmark legislation put tobacco regulation under the FDA’s purview for the first time in American history and instructed the body to develop new cigarette labels with color graphics, prompting the FDA to propose the nine graphic warnings that have drawn tobacco distributors’ ire.

But a federal appellate court affirmed a lower court’s decision to strike down the proposed rule in March, claiming that its “graphic-image requirements are not the type of purely factual and uncontroversial disclosures that are reviewable under this less stringent standard” of 1st Amendment protections against compelled commercial speech — an argument heartily endorsed by the tobacco lobby:

Some of the nation’s largest tobacco companies, including R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., sued to block the mandate to include warnings on cigarette packs as part of the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act that, for the first time, gave the federal government authority to regulate tobacco. The nine labels originally set to appear on store shelves last year would’ve represented the biggest change in cigarette packs in the U.S. in 25 years.

Tobacco companies increasingly rely on their packaging to build brand loyalty and grab consumers — one of the few advertising levers left to them after the government curbed their presence in magazines, billboards and TV. They had argued that the proposed warnings went beyond factual information into anti-smoking advocacy.

The government, however, argued the images were factual in conveying the dangers of tobacco, which is responsible for about 443,000 deaths in the U.S. a year.

The legal argument against the labeling requirements is certainly not implausible — in fact, that’s likely the reason that the federal government chose not to appeal to the Supreme Court. But it’s a standard of free speech that federal judges apply asymmetrically, as they don’t give doctors who provide abortions the same protections against government-compelled speech as they grant to the multibillion dollar tobacco industry.

Brand labeling has become Big Tobacco’s signature avenue for advertising to its consumer base, since federal law has prohibited television advertisements for tobacco since the 1970s, and additional restrictions were included in the more recent legislation signed by President Obama. Consequently, the FDA’s new labels could have been an effective method of giving consumers information about tobacco’s negative health effects — especially considering that studies have shown that pictures speak louder than words in anti-smoking campaigns.

While American smoking rates have plunged in the last several decades, low-income Americans — particularly women — who are particularly unable to afford the massive health care costs of smoking-related illness still use tobacco in high numbers. Until the FDA comes up with a labeling rule that can withstand judicial scrutiny, public health and anti-smoking advocates may have to rely on more parochial efforts, such as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s (I) new initiative to crack down on public cigarette displays.

Not to be outdone by states like North Dakota and Arkansas that have recently passed record-breaking abortion restrictions, Republicans in Kansas are advancing a stringent anti-abortion bill that combines several attacks on reproductive rights into one omnibus measure.

HB 2253 is a 70-page piece of legislation that failed last session, when the Senate was more moderate — but since anti-choice state lawmakers won big victories in the 2012 election, Kansas’ abortion opponents are seizing the opportunity to push it through this year. The House approved the bill by a 92-31 vote on Wednesday afternoon, and it’s also expected to pass in the GOP-controlled Senate, where Republican leaders have promised to “consider the bill quickly.” Republican Gov. Sam Brownback has promised to sign any anti-abortion legislation that reaches his desk.

If the massive bill were to be enacted into law, here’s how HB 2253 would compromise the reproductive rights of the women living in Kansas:

1. Threatens to outlaw all abortions by redefining life in the state Constitution. HB 2253 includes a personhood clause that would define life as beginning at fertilization in Kansas’ Constitution. Women’s health groups call that a “personhood trigger” because, if the Supreme Court ever left abortion rights completely up to the states, it would ensure that abortion would be totally outlawed in Kansas.

2. Instates costly taxes on abortion services and abortion providers. Several provisions in the bill hope to limit abortion by making it more expensive. Under HB 2253, women who get abortions would not be able to deduct the medical procedure as a health care expense on their taxes. Since Kansas law already prevents women from using their own insurance plans to cover abortion services — requiring them to purchase an additional rider — the extra tax provisions would even further complicate reproductive health care in the state. And according to Planned Parenthood officials, enforcing the abortion deduction ban could end up violating medical privacy laws by allowing state auditors to demand access to individuals’ medical records. The bill would also target groups affiliated with abortion providers by preventing them from receiving the same tax breaks that other organizations do.

3. Requires doctors to give women biased information about the dangers of having an abortion. Under the omnibus bill, doctors would be required to provide women with disputed information about abortion risks. Of course, every patient undergoing a medical procedure should be fully educated about the risks — but these kind of “informed consent” sessions are a popular anti-choice tactic specifically designed to dissuade women from terminating a pregnancy. Doctors would need to tell women about a potential link between abortion and breast cancer, even though medical experts don’t believe there’s a connection between the two.

Read more

According to Reuters, a pair of new studies by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Alzheimer’s Association find that a combination of factors — including an aging population, more targeted early diagnosis efforts, and the failure to discover a viable cure — have contributed to a sharp rise in recorded American deaths from Alzheimer’s disease.

While death rates for other common ailments such as cancer and heart disease have fallen significantly, Alzheimer’s has steadily killed an increasing number of Americans, with the risk of death rising by 39 percent between 2000 and 2010 and actual mortality rates rising by a staggering 68 percent over the same time period:

“Compared with other selected causes, Alzheimer’s disease has been on the rise since the last decade,” the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics said, adding that “mortality from Alzheimer’s disease has steadily increased during the last 30 years.”

“The Alzheimer’s epidemic is clearly an urgent issue that needs to be addressed,” the Alzheimer’s Association, which advocates for patients and helps fund research, said in a statement accompanying its annual report. [...]

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services last year released a national action plan to address Alzheimer’s following a 2011 law signed by President Barack Obama requiring federal agencies to coordinate their research and accelerate efforts to target the disease. The president also highlighted the issue in his annual address to lawmakers in January.

Additionally, the Food and Drug Administration last month issued guidelines to make it easier to test potential treatments in patients earlier when there may be a greater chance for them to work.

One factor that is likely contributing to the ballooning mortality rate is increased recognition of Alzheimer’s as a cause of death, rather than more vague reasons such as “natural causes” or “old age.” But researchers and lawmakers are also stressing that early intervention and treatment may be the only way to effectively grapple with the ailment, since efforts to develop a working cure have mostly fallen short.

The full scope of the crisis becomes even clearer considering the health care costs associated with the chronic condition. According to the new reports, treating Americans with Alzheimer’s and other degenerative illnesses cost $200 billion in 2012, “including $140 billion in costs to the government’s Medicare and Medicaid health insurance programs.” These costs are estimated to balloon to a sky-high $1.1 trillion per year as an increasing number of Baby Boomers and future elderly Americans fall victim to the disease.

The Obama Administration is well-aware of this ongoing public health crisis, encouraging more robust research into Alzheimer’s prevention and early treatment. In fact, the president expounded on this during his most recent State of the Union address, announcing a national goal of “mapping the human brain” in the same manner as scientists have mapped the human genome. Unfortunately, congressional budget disputes could leave lofty initiatives like that in limbo, as the sequester cuts will cut back on national research and innovation spending — which is already half of what it was in 1962.

The lawyer for the victim in the horrific Steubenville rape case chose to do the work pro-bono — without pay — but that hasn’t stopped concerned citizens from wanting to donate money in the victim’s honor. And so the girl, via her lawyer, Bob Fitzsimmons, has asked that anyone who wants to donate funds direct their donations to the Madden House, a victims’ services organization near Steubenville, in Wheeling, WV.

The results, says Patricia Flanigan, Program Director for Family Violence Prevention Programs there, have been staggering.

“It’s very touching. And it’s all over the world,” she told ThinkProgress. “It’s not just from the United States. We’re having correspondence all over the world — Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Singapore, Germany. I can just go on and on. Ireland. Some are coming in as donations and some are just offering support and saying keep up the good work.”

The Madden House is a part of the Family Violence Prevention Programs which operate within the local YWCA in Wheeling. Overall, the program offers services to address an array of victimization: Domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking chief among them.

The donations will fund a wide array of services: Round-the-clock staff at Madden House, a 24-hotline, supportive services including court advocacy to help victims file protection orders or go through other legal processes, teen violence prevention programs in schools, transitional housing to women and children for up to 24 months rent and utility free, and employment advocates to help women find jobs.

Though Flanigan would not say how much the organization has raised so far, she did speak emotionally about the overwhelming support. “It’s a wonderful thing,” she said, “that unfortunately has come from a tragic event.”

A new policy at CVS requires all employees who use the company’s health care to report their weight, glucose levels, and body fat to their insurer, or pay a penalty of $600 dollars — a hefty sum for many of the low-wage staff in the chain pharmacy’s stores.

The rule mimics other efforts provide incentives for healthy behavior, like the discount that Whole Foods employees get based on their Body Mass Index. But patient privacy advocates have serious qualms with the effort:

“This is an incredibly coercive and invasive thing to ask employees to do,” said Patient Privacy Rights founder Dr. Deborah Peel, adding that mounting health care costs have made these policies increasingly common.[...]

But in exchange, workers must sign a form saying the screening is voluntary, and that the insurer can give test results to WebMD Health Services Group. The firm provides health management programs and benefit support to CVS.

If workers don’t sign up, their medical coverage will jump by $50 a month.

CVS insists that it will not have access to the data.

Leaving aside the privacy implications, the new policy could end up penalizing low-income Americans who are already stretched too thin. A minimum wage worker putting in a 40-hour workweek makes about $1,160 a month. A fine of $50 a month is a huge amount for a minimum wage CVS employee to fork over if they consider the measure a privacy infringement, especially given the fact that American workers’ health care costs are rising while their wages are stagnating. It may be a smart business move to CVS to try to lower costs, but it’s at the expense of their workers’ interests.

New research finds that the consumption of sugary drinks and sodas contributes to about 180,000 obesity-related deaths around the world — including the deaths of about 25,000 adult Americans — each year.

According to a new study presented on Tuesday at a meeting of the American Heart Association, one out of every 100 obesity-related deaths around the world can be tied to sugary drinks, which directly exacerbate health conditions like diabetes, heart diseases, and cancer. Specifically, the over-consumption of those beverages increased global deaths from diabetes by 133,000, from cardiovascular disease by 44,000 and from cancer by 6,000.

Although the United States doesn’t currently have the highest rate of deaths associated with sugary drinks — that dubious distinction goes to Mexico, where people consume more sugar-sweetened beverages than anywhere else in the world — Americans still get the majority of their calories from those type of drinks. The experts who contributed to the study explained that’s a big issue because those calories don’t provide any nutritional value, and policymakers should focus on helping encourage Americans to cut back:

“One of the problems of sugar-sweetened beverages is that we don’t seem to compensate as well for the calories as we do for solid foods,” [Rachel K. Johnson, a professor of medicine and nutrition at the University of Vermont] said. “In other words, when we consume sugar-sweetened beverages we don’t reduce the amount of food we consume.”

Johnson cautioned the study didn’t prove cause and effect, just that there was an association between sugared-drink intake and death rates.

Singh, the study’s co-author, said that taxing sugary drinks in the same way as cigarettes, or limiting advertising or access, may help reduce usage.

“Our study shows that tens of thousands of deaths worldwide are caused by drinking sugary beverages and this should impel policy makers to make strong policies to reduce consumption of sugary beverages,” Singh said.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) attempted to craft exactly that type of policy, seeking to ban the sale of large sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces in order to encourage healthier portion sizes. But after a state judge struck down Bloomberg’s initiative last week, New Yorkers won’t have to curb their supersize soda habits anytime soon. Instead of working to come up similar health-conscious policies in other parts of the country, however, some lawmakers are actually passing reactionary “anti-Bloomberg bills” to prevent any regulation of the food and drink industries.

The soda industry was one of the biggest critics of New York City’s proposed soda regulation, and even sued to prevent it from going into effect. Predictably, large soda companies have been loudly critical of public health policies that seek any additional oversight over their products or their advertising, framing the obesity issue as one of personal responsibility. The American Beverage Association, which represents the soda industry, also disputed the findings of this new study, claiming the research is “more about sensationalism than science.”