Led by public health crusader Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I), New York City has taken some serious steps to crack down on smoking rates. After instituting the highest cigarette tax in the nation and banning smoking in public places, the city’s smoking rates plummeted. But Bloomberg didn’t stop there. Within the past month, he has also pushed to hike cigarette prices even further and ban public cigarette displays in stores — and now, yet another anti-smoking initiative may prevent New Yorkers under the age of 21 from purchasing cigarettes.

The policy is being spearheaded by both the city’s health commissioner and the City Council speaker, Christine Quinn (D), as yet another method of keeping tobacco products out of the hands of New York City’s youth. Although Quinn opposed Bloomberg’s recent initiative to limit the sale of large sugary drinks, she emphasized at a press conference on Monday that she admires the mayor’s other public health policies. “The mayor probably has the most effective public health agenda of any mayor in history in the United States,” Quinn said. “This is another example of moving that aggressive public health agenda forward.”

If approved, New York City would be the biggest city to enact the nation’s highest smoking age. The Boston suburb of Needham, MA has also raised its smoking age to 21 years old. The smoking age is 19 in four states — Alabama, Alaska, New Jersey and Utah — and a handful of counties, and 18 throughout the vast majority of the country.

Advocates of the proposed measure point to some studies that project raising the smoking age to 21 could cut smoking rates among 18-to-20-year-old Americans by more than half. It could particularly help deter the rates in New York City, since 80 percent of the current smokers in the city say they picked up the habit before they turned 21. “If we can prevent our youth from starting smoking before they’re 21, we may just be able to protect an entire generation from a lifetime of being addicted to the world’s most dangerous drug. We think this is going to work,” Dr. Thomas Farley, New York’s health commissioner, said.

Tobacco kills an estimated 7,000 New Yorkers each year. On a national scale, tobacco-related illnesses kill an estimated 450,000 Americans each year, contributing to about $96 billion in total annual public and private health care expenditures caused by smoking. Despite the undisputed negative health effects of smoking, the tobacco industry continues to target its products to American youth.

In New York City, the public school students who attend classes in a building owned by the Catholic Church can’t actually attend all of their classes there. As the New York Daily News reports, students need to leave campus in order to receive state-mandated instruction on sexual health, as part of a long-standing agreement between Church officials and the city’s public school district that has recently come to light.

New York state law requires sex ed classes to include information about condoms, birth control, and HIV and STD transmission, and those standards were strengthened specifically for New York City’s public school district under a new citywide standard enacted in 2011. So far, those initiatives have been wildly successful, and New York City’s teen pregnancy rate has plummeted by more than 25 percent over the past decade.

But Church officials say that type of comprehensive sex ed instruction violates Catholic doctrine. In Catholic-affiliated schools, students are taught abstinence-only education with no mention of contraceptive methods — and at least in New York City, the Church’s influence can even impact public schools’ ability to teach sex ed.

The Catholic Church is one of the biggest landowners in New York City, and leases about 40 buildings to the city’s Department of Education. That financial arrangement is attractive to the Church at a time when enrollment in private Catholic schools is declining, and Church officials see no reason to change their sex ed policy. “It is an arrangement that has been working well for both sides for years, and one we intend to continue,” Diocese of Brooklyn spokeswoman Stefanie Gutierrez told the New York Daily News.

Some public school students disagree. Tayshawn Edmonds, a 15-year-old who attends El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice in Williamsburg, has to walk 15 minutes off campus to attend his sex ed classes. “The church owns the building, so they call the shots,” he explained. “But I don’t see why they get to control what we’re doing at our school.”

The Catholic Church’s opposition to contraception persists into the realm of higher education, too. Across the country, Catholic-affiliated colleges are still fighting against an Obamacare provision that requires insurance plans to cover the full cost of birth control, even though there’s already an exception for the religious institutions who object to covering contraceptives. And at Boston College — which is a Jesuit institution — school officials are threatening disciplinary action against students who distributed condoms as part of a safe sex campaign.

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.

According to a recent New York City Health Department analysis of city preteens’ mental health, over 145,000 children between the ages of six and 12 suffer from mental illness or other emotional problems — constituting one in five NYC children, the New York Post reports.

The report also found that city preteens’ mental health demographics approximately tracked national trends, with ADHD being the most commonly diagnosed mental illness, young boys much more likely to be diagnosed with a problem than young girls, and adverse physical effects such as sleep deprivation affecting kids with a behavioral disorder. But the report’s most disturbing findings have to do with these children’s access to appropriate care:

The study pointed to lapses in treatment. Only two-thirds of kids with a mental-disorder diagnosis received medical help in the prior year, including 36 percent who received medication. Only 17 percent of kids whose parents identified them as having behavioral problems got assistance. [...]

The Health Department insisted the city rates were in line with national figures. The department also said it offers extensive mental services through its Family Resource Centers and public-school clinics.

It encourages families to call the 24-hour hot line LifeNet (1-800-543-3638) to connect to services.

“Over 400 schools offer mental-health services, either as part of school-based health centers or via dedicated mental-health clinics,” said a Health Department spokesman, Sam Miller.

To be fair to the city, New York actually has a fairly robust public mental health system. A 2003 study finds that unmet mental health care needs for New York children and their families was almost eight percentage points lower than the national average. Still, as the paltry numbers in the city’s own analysis demonstrate, there’s still a long way to go — particularly since mental health problems that take root in youth tend to do long-lasting damage to kids’ mental and physical health.

The findings suggest that schools — which are children’s primary access points to mental health care — have to do a better job at actually utilizing those resources by identifying mental and behavioral problems in kids, and engage with parents who might be dissuaded by the societal stigma surrounding mental health care. Less than 20 percent of parents in New York City who suspect their child to have behavioral health issues decide to pursue care.

ABC News reports that a recent outbreak of deadly bacterial meningitis has now infected men in all five boroughs of New York, apparently spurred by anonymous sexual encounters facilitated by social mobile apps and Internet sites. 22 New Yorkers have been infected to date, and another seven have died from the disease.

The outbreak has prompted swift responses from city public health officials, who are urging men who have had intimate contact with other men to get vaccinated against meningitis as a precautionary measure:

“Vaccination is the best defense,” City health commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley said in a statement. “I urge all men who meet these criteria – regardless of whether they identify as gay – to get vaccinated now and protect themselves from this disease before it is too late.” [...]

The disease is spread by “prolonged close contact with nose or throat discharges from an infected person,” the health department said in a September 2012 statement after the death of a patient. While vaccination can help prevent new infections, “people that have been in prolonged close contact with infected people need to see their health-care provider immediately to receive preventive antibiotics,” the department added. [...]

“I strongly recommend all men who have intimate contact with other men get vaccinated,” Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz said in a statement. “This disease is both potentially fatal and extremely contagious, so increasing the public’s awareness to this growing issue and encouraging vaccination are of the utmost importance.”

Particularly concerning is the fact that half of the recently-infected men are also HIV-positive. That raises the stakes considerably seeing as bacterial meningitis — which is already an extremely contagious and rapidly progressing disease — would be even deadlier for HIV-positive men with compromised immune systems.

While HIV transmission rates have steadily stabilized since 1980, men who have sex with men (MSM) remain particularly vulnerable to it, accounting for over 65 percent of all new infections in 2010. That trend is also reflected in New York City, which — despite its robust public school sex education requirements and plummeting teen pregnancy rates — has seen a troubling rise in syphilis and HIV transmission among MSM. Given that reality, vaccination truly is a crucial preventative measure for men in the city while the outbreak spreads.

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.”