The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are out with a new study finding that alcoholic beverages contribute to five percent of U.S. adults’ caloric intakes — just shy of the six percent of total calories that Americans consume from sodas and other sugar-infused drinks.

The study’s findings highlight the difficulty of solving America’s obesity epidemic — a public health crisis that threatens to lower Americans’ lifespans and further exacerbate the skyrocketing cost of health care. As NPR reports, the study concludes that men take in significantly more alcohol calories than women, and that consumption is spread evenly across racial lines:

—On any given day, about one-third of men and one-fifth of women consumed calories from beer, wine or liquor.

—Averaged out to all adults, the average guy drinks 150 calories from alcohol each day, or the equivalent of a can of Budweiser.

—The average woman drinks about 50 calories, or roughly half a glass of wine.

—Men drink mostly beer. For women, there was no clear favorite among alcoholic beverages.

—There was no racial or ethnic difference in average calories consumed from alcoholic beverages. But there was an age difference, with younger adults putting more of it away.

For reference, a 12-ounce can of regular Coca-Cola has 140 calories, slightly less than a same-sized can of regular Bud. A 5-ounce glass of wine is around 100 calories.

In the wake of multiple studies showing that sugary drinks are a huge contributor to American obesity, New York City instituted a ban on large-sized sodas. But before lawmakers start limiting beers to shot glass serving sizes, it’s important to note that alcohol consumption is a far more manageable contributor to weight gain than sugary drinks are. As public health advocate Margo Wootan points out, sodas and sweetened beverages are the biggest source of calories in American children’s diets, making sodas not only the biggest but also the earliest contributors to the U.S. obesity crisis.

New Yorkers reeling from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy potentially have one more problem to deal with: the diseases carried and transmitted by the city’s overwhelming rodent population.

The Huffington Post reports that biologists such as the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies’ Rick Ostfeld have warned that if Hurricane Sandy’s waters — which have penetrated New York’s expansive subway system — end up displacing rats instead of killing them, the animals could spread a variety of pathogens through bites and waste:

“Rats are incredibly good swimmers,” said Ostfeld. “And they can climb.”

In other words, Sandy is unlikely to knock off the resilient rodents, but rather displace them.

According to Ostfeld, this could result in increased risk of infectious diseases carried by urban rats, including leptospirosis, hantavirus, typhus, salmonella, and even the plague.

“One of things we know can exacerbate disease is massive dispersal,” he added. “Rats are highly social individuals and live in a fairly stable social structure. If this storm disturbs that, rats could start infesting areas they never did before.”

And it’s not only the bite of a rat than can transmit disease. Rodent feces and urine can spread hantavirus, for example. Still, Ostfeld suggested that the huge volume of water Sandy is expected to bring should dilute the pathogens and lessen risks to public health.

Luckily for New York residents, all signs suggest that Sandy’s sheer force may have killed off the critters rather than move them up to the city streets. One spokesman for the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene told Forbes that he has “not seen an increase in rats above ground caused by Hurricane Sandy,” and several rodentology experts have suggested that the storm likely killed off vulnerable, younger rats, thereby actually reducing New York’s overall rat population.

In the latest in a series of conservative-led attacks on women’s reproductive rights, New York’s Sunset Park Clinic will no longer offer abortion services in the face of a Catholic protest group’s ongoing harassment of doctors and patients.

According to the New York Daily News, the 22-year-old establishment is being forced to shutter its doors and offer significantly reduced services after the so-called “Helpers of God’s Precious Infants” incited enough protests to drive away doctors and patients in droves:

Abortion advocates said they had never heard of a clinic in the city closing under pressure from protesters.

“It was getting more and more difficult. Doctors were getting harassed and patients were getting harassed,” said building and clinic owner Terry Lazar about his decision to eliminate abortions. “It was a decision we finally had to make.”

Lazar said the clinic tried to provide both abortions and other types of procedures, but doctors and patients refused to cross the throngs of religious protesters who tried to convince them not to go in.

“You had protesters with signs and banners yelling at people telling them they were baby killers,” Lazar said. “We were trying to do both and it just wasn’t working. We would have gone out of business.”

The clinic, which will reopen under the name New York Center for Specialty Surgery, will offer only outpatient surgeries after completing renovations. The “victory” for the anti-abortion activists come at the cost of essential services for women and is a cautionary tale for supporters of reproductive rights in New York.

“It’s really a shame. I feel very badly and I’m disappointed about it,” said Julie Kashner, president of the Brooklyn and Queens chapter of the National Organization for Women. “This means that women will have to be inconvenienced to get their health care. If [the clinic on 43rd St.] closed down, this could mean future closings and that’s very disappointing.”

Although cigarette taxes are a very effective way to encourage people to stop smoking — as well a potential source of important revenue for some cash-strapped states — a new study suggests that they also work to highlight income inequality among American smokers.

New York places a $4.35 tax on each pack of cigarettes, the highest rate in the country, and researchers used data from the state health department to calculate how much money its residents are spending on cigarettes each year. They found that that smokers in New York who earn less than $30,000 a year spent an average of 23.6 percent of their annual income on cigarettes, while the state’s wealthier smokers — defined as those earning over $60,000 a year — spent an average of just 2.2 percent of their earnings to support their smoking habit.

Because of this discrepancy, researchers pointed out that this tax may be disproportionately straining low-income New Yorkers:

“Although high cigarette taxes are an effective method for reducing cigarette smoking, they can impose a significant financial burden on low-income smokers,” Matthew Farrelly and his co-authors wrote in the conclusion of their paper, which was published this month in Plos One, an online, peer-reviewed journal. [...]

The low-income now spend twice as much of their earnings on cigarettes as they did in 2003, when the state imposed a tax of $1.50 [compared to the current $4.35 tax] on each pack.

The researchers concluded that to make the cigarette tax less regressive, the state should spend more of the resulting revenue on programs that help low-income smokers quit the habit, although both the researchers and the health department say this would be a challenge.

The study acknowledged that low-income populations tend to have higher percentages of smokers, highlighted by the fact that smoking rates among low-income New Yorkers did not decline at all between 2003 and 2010, even though smoking rates dropped by about 20 percent among all income groups during the same period. According to 2010 figures from the Centers for Disease Control, 28.9 percent of adults below the poverty level were smokers, a full 10 points higher than the rate for the adult population at or above the poverty level. Anti-smoking advocacy groups have also noted the correlation between smoking and income level, pointing out that encouraging lower-income Americans to quit smoking can help save states money on their Medicaid program expenditures, since approximately 10 to 20 percent of all Medicaid funds — totaling more than $30 billion each year — is spent on costs related to smoking-related illnesses.

But as the researchers noted, states could attempt to combat some of these issues by choosing to use the revenue generated by their cigarette taxes to invest in programs to help lower smoking rates among low-income populations. Turning a smoking habit into a bigger financial investment may deter some smokers, but cigarette taxes only represent one part of a broader public health strategy that should also include preventative education and support programs.