This week, news broke that a Michigan school district is barring two teens from displaying their pregnant bellies in their school yearbook. The school district’s superintendent explained that depicting images of teen pregnancy in the yearbook goes against the school’s mission of “promoting abstinence.” One of the pregnant teens said she “went to the bathroom and cried” upon hearing the news.

Aside from the ironic fact that teens who receive abstinence-only education are actually more likely to become pregnant than the students who receive accurate sexual health information about prevention methods, the situation in Michigan also illustrates the pervasive negativity that Americans associate with teenage pregnancies. That attitude ultimately creates a environment that punishes, stigmatizes, and shames young mothers — many of whom are subject to much larger structural issues that are out of their control, like the type of sex education they received in school or the level of poverty they were born into.

Unfortunately, the situation in Michigan is hardly the only example of this dynamic in play. Here are five other instances of teen moms being shamed instead of supported:

1. A North Carolina high schooler’s photo won’t appear in her yearbook because she posed with her newborn son. One teen mom in North Carolina can relate all too well to the pregnant students in Michigan. After posing for a photo with her baby son, she was told that the picture wouldn’t be allowed to appear in the yearbook this year. The school claimed that the image would “promote teen pregnancy” and told the student she had two days to submit a different photo without her son. She declined, saying, “If he wasn’t going to be in it with me, I didn’t want be in it at all.”

2. One Louisiana high school banned pregnant teens from attending classes on campus altogether. Last year, a charter school in Louisiana received significant backlash for its policy forbidding pregnant students from remaining on campus. According to the school handbook, pregnant students were required to either switch to another school or begin a home school program — and if the school “suspected” a girl of being pregnant, administrators could force her to take a pregnancy test to find out for sure. After the ACLU stepped in to file a formal discrimination complaint, the Louisiana Department of Education ordered the school to drop its policy.

3. A celebrity-studded national campaign tells teens that being a mother is incompatible with being successful. Public service campaigns that stigmatize young parents are all too common. Teens are often bombarded with negative messages intended to dissuade them from having a baby at a young age — but instead of focusing on effective information about tools to prevent pregnancy, like information about where to access affordable birth control or other family planning support, these ads simply focus on how teen mothers’ lives are ruined. Many of them also have the added effect of dismissing parenthood altogether. A recent campaign from the Candie’s Foundation depicts celebrity’s faces alongside these messages, including Carly Rae Jepson proclaiming that being a mother prevents women from achieving great things:

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The Obama Administration took a big step on Thursday to ensure that kids in child care are safe. Speaking before a D.C.-area day care, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced strict new regulatory rules — the first in 15 years — for child care facilities across the nation.

The newly announced regulations will apply to any child care center or family home that receives federal funding through HHS’s Child Care and Development Fund. Among the expanded rules are universal background checks and fingerprinting for child care workers, mandatory CPR and first aid training for such employees, and “safe sleeping practices” to prevent accidental suffocation deaths. “We frankly can’t wait any longer,” said Sebelius of the regulations.

Administration officials and child safety advocates hope that the requirements will put a dent in the depressingly high number of young children who die as a consequence of negligent care and unsafe practices. For instance, three-month-old baby boy Dane died after a child care worker “put him face-down on a blanket and left him for an hour” — just one example of a child death that the new rules’ safe sleeping component might have prevented.

Federal rules governing these care facilities are currently limited to preventing infectious epidemics and making sure that buildings meet fire safety codes. For the most part, states are left to their own discretion in coming up with more expansive regulations — making the new federal standards particularly significant.

However, the new requirements only apply to the 513,000 child care centers that receive federal money. That means that thousands of other facilities that care for children will still answer to watered-down rules that are left up to the states — and considering how lax some states’ standards are, that’s a big problem.

In a 2010 report, the child safety organization Child Care Aware of America found that nine states scored zero points on their child care safety score sheet. Some of these states, including Iowa, Idaho, and Virginia, require a child care facility to serve seven or more children before requiring state licensing or inspections; eight other states, including Texas, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and South Carolina, do not require a facility inspection or even an on-site visit before issuing a child care license; and Louisiana and New Jersey don’t require any child care facilities to receive a state license at all. “Unfortunately, in too many cases, it takes well-publicized deaths in child-care settings to prompt state action to strengthen their licensing standards to better address children’s safety,” an HHS official told the Washington Post.

While child care advocates are encouraged by the new federal rules, many still acknowledge that real reform requires congressional action, as well as more funding for the federal Child Care and Development Fund. The Fund was last reauthorized by Congress in 1996.

Cancer patients are much more likely to go bankrupt than Americans who aren’t faced with a cancer diagnosis, a new study finds. Even the Americans who have access to health insurance aren’t necessarily safe from bankruptcy, since the high cost of treating cancer can still put an untenable strain their finances.

A team of researchers in Washington state collected data from nearly 400,000 adults, evenly split between those who had been treated for cancer and those who were cancer-free. After checking to see which of those adults had filed for bankruptcy between 1995 and 2009, the researchers found that cancer patients were 2.5 times as likely to go bankrupt in that period.

Although the study didn’t specifically look at insurance coverage, previous research has demonstrated that the Americans who cite major health issues as the reason they filed for bankruptcy are actually often insured. One 2006 study found that more than 60 percent of bankruptcies in the United States are due to high medical bills, and in those cases, three-quarters of those Americans had insurance when they got sick. NBC News interviewed one cancer patient who found herself in this situation, even though she was employed and insured when she first got her diagnosis:

That rings true for Janet Literski, 57, who had purchased health insurance as an independent contractor working in sales. When she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2008 Literski discovered her insurance covered only part of her surgical costs and none of her diagnostic tests. Then there were co-payments and deductibles. By the time she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer two years later, she was about $150,000 in medical debt.

In 2011, no longer able to work, Literski and her disabled husband filed for bankruptcy. “It was a gut wrenching decision because you feel like a personal failure, and that makes me angry because I had tried to do everything right,” Literski says. “I had health insurance, I was working.”

Literski is now covered by Medicaid and receives disability payments and though she hasn’t been told she’s in remission, she says she is “healthy enough.”

[The study's lead author, Dr. Scott Ramsey,] says cancer centers need to do a better job of assessing each patient’s financial status, offering credit counseling, and managing patient care.

Even bigger disparities emerged when the researchers broke down the cancer patients in their study by different demographics. The younger groups were up to 10 times more likely to go broke than the older patients, and non-white women were the most likely to run out of money.The cancer that is associated with the highest risk of bankruptcy is thyroid cancer — likely because that disease mostly affects younger women. On the other hand, older men with prostate cancer are the least likely to reach financial rock bottom.

Ramsey and his researchers first presented their research in 2011, and their final findings were published in the Health Affairs journal this week. The timing of the study’s release coincides with some recent pressure to help lower the cost of cancer drugs. Last month, a group of over 100 doctors criticized Big Pharma companies for making “life-saving” cancer drugs too expensive for Americans to afford. The doctors asserted that the “unsustainable drug prices” were “causing harm to patients,” and urged reforms in this area to ensure that cancer patients don’t have to go without the treatment they need.

Cancer patients have also been recently caught up in the budget battles resulting from sequestration. At the end of April, cancer clinics blasted Congress for taking legislative action to restore the sequester cuts that were causing airport delays rather than working to address the cuts that are undermining Americans’ chemotherapy treatment. As a result of the automatic budget cuts, some Americans are being forced to delay their chemotherapy, and some cancer clinics may even be forced to close their doors.

Doctors are reluctant to give nurses more authority to treat patients, according to findings in a New England Journal of Medicine study released on Wednesday. But doctors’ skepticism about nurses having expanded roles isn’t based on the facts — and it ignores the reality that nurse practitioners must take on such responsibilities if health care reform is to succeed.

The new study finds that many doctors don’t trust nurses to lead patient-centered “medical homes,” with only 17 percent of surveyed primary care physicians viewing it positively. “Medical homes” are arrangements encouraged by Obamacare in which nurses, doctors, pharmacists, and specialists work together to provide patients with better and more efficient care in a unified setting.

There is also a striking chasm between doctors and nurses on the issue of nurse practitioners’ ability to provide safe, quality patient care:

When researchers asked whether they felt the quality of care provided by physicians in exams and consultations was higher than that provided by nurse practitioners, more than 66 percent of doctors agreed, while 75 percent of nurses disagreed.

Doctors also overwhelmingly disagreed with many nurses’ position that they should receive the same level of pay as doctors for performing similar services.

But this position is an untenable one in the era of Obamacare, with more than 25 million Americans expected to gain health coverage in the coming decade. Since the bulk of these Americans are expected to consume primary care — rather than specialty — services, it’s important that the U.S. medical system have enough medical workers to serve them. And there simply aren’t enough primary care doctors to tackle that burden on their own.

Instead, nurse practitioners will have to take on additional responsibilities. There’s no reason to suspect that this will compromise patient care quality — in fact, multiple studies have shown that the quality of care that nurse practitioners provide for acute primary care is on par with doctors. One randomized trial comparing nurses’ versus doctors’ ability to manage complex care regimens for HIV-positive patients receiving antiretroviral therapy also found no evidence of professional inferiority. As David Hebert, CEO of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, told Kaiser Health News, “[N]urse practitioners have been practicing safely and providing great outcomes for decades.”

Doctors — and patients — would be well served by an expanded role for nurse practitioners. Primary care doctors tend to be concentrated in urban areas, creating a major barrier to rural and isolated communities’ access to basic medical services. But nurses are more numerous and could have greater access to such populations, making them ideal candidates for heading medical homes and seeing to the day-to-day aspects of patient care.

This week, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommended that the United States should dramatically lower its legal threshold for the amount of alcohol that drivers may have in their bloodstreams, in an effort to address the nation’s “epidemic” levels of impaired driving. The government-backed board wants to drop the legal limit for drivers’ blood alcohol content (BAC), which is currently set at 0.08, down to 0.05. Board members say that adopting the new 0.05 rate could save about 500 to 800 lives each year.

The proposed change is part of a package of new initiatives that the safety board hopes will help eliminate drunk driving in the U.S., which currently accounts for a third of the county’s annual traffic fatalities. According to NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman, drunk driving has caused more than 440,000 preventable deaths over the past 30 years.

“Our goal is to get to zero deaths because each alcohol-impaired death is preventable,” Hersman explained. “Alcohol-impaired deaths are not accidents, they are crimes. They can and should be prevented. The tools exist. What is needed is the will.” Ultimately, however, the safety board can’t actually enact its own regulations — it needs federal and state agencies, or legislators in Congress, to carry out its recommendations.

More than 100 countries around the world have already adopted laws that forbid an alcohol content of more than 0.05. And according to the NTSB, many of those countries saw a significant drop in their traffic deaths after lowering those thresholds. Nevertheless, it likely won’t be easy to get the necessary support to enact this particular proposal in the United States. A 0.05 rate would outlaw driving after moderate drinking — about one drink for a woman who weighs less than 120 pounds, and two for a 160-pound man — which is already leading to concerns over a so-called “one drink DUI.” The NTSB is certainly anticipating strong resistance from states.

“It was very difficult to get .08 in most states, so lowering it again won’t be popular,” Jonathan Adkins, an official with an organization representing state highway safety offices, told the Associated Press. In fact, it took nearly a quarter of a century to bring the current drunk driving standard to where it is today. In the early 1980s, many states had their legal BAC levels set at 0.15 — and only after 24 years of lobbying, largely spearheaded by the advocacy group Mothers Against Drunk Driving, did every single state finally drop down to 0.08.

That’s partly because there are powerful industry giants standing in opposition to a lower BAC level. The NTSB’s recommendation was harshly criticized by the American Beverage Institute, an association representing thousands of restaurants, who called the idea “ludicrious.” According to a spokesperson for the trade group, “moving from 0.08 to 0.05 would criminalize perfectly responsible behavior” while doing nothing to stop “hard-core drunk drivers from getting behind the wheel.”

This isn’t the first time that business interests have conflicted with proposed measures to safeguard Americans’ health. The restaurant and fast food industries have also stood in opposition to other public health proposals, like limiting smoking in public establishments and placing regulations on the portion sizes for unhealthy food.

The NTSB chose to announce their new recommendations on the 25th anniversary of one of the United States’ deadliest traffic accidents. On May 14, 1988, an intoxicated man drove on the wrong side of a Kentucky highway and crashed into a bus, killing 27 people and injuring more than 30. Twenty four of the victims were children riding on the bus — members of a church youth group returning from a day trip to an amusement park.

A half-decade of budget cuts has left Massachusetts’ public health department so understaffed that it cannot keep pace with a massive backlog of safety inspections for public facilities and investigations into Americans’ complaints about medical mismanagement and malpractice. State public health officials are now begging lawmakers for more funding in order to prevent another public health disaster like last year’s deadly meningitis outbreak, which stemmed from unclean conditions at an uninspected Massachusetts pharmaceutical mixing plant.

The Boston Globe reports that the budget cuts are so steep that there is now a five-month waiting period for investigating consumer complaints at Massachusetts nursing homes, clinics, and hospitals — including for sexual abuse and medical malpractice complaints. Other facilities such as summer camps, biotechnology firms, and food plants are simply bypassing routine inspections due to the dearth of state inspectors.

Funds were appropriated for surprise inspections of pharmaceutical facilities like the one at the root of last December’s meningitis outbreak — but only temporarily. That has public health officials and Gov. Deval Patrick’s (D) administration worried that the Commonwealth is unprepared for another outbreak barring more funds, since the surprise inspections found rust and mold at many such facilities. The state legislature has only appropriated a portion of the funds so far:

“The department has done a herculean task at doing the best it absolutely can with the resources that have understandably been short over the past half decade,” Dr. Lauren Smith said in an interview last week, her last as interim public health commissioner.

Over the past four years, the bureau responsible for health care safety has seen its budget reduced by about $4.7 million, a 26 percent cut when adjusted for inflation, according to an analysis by the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center.

Smith said the department needs to make the case for more funding “before there is any adverse outcome for any particular patient.” [...]

The House included the pharmacy money in its budget, but not money for the additional inspectors the administration sought.

But even if funds for additional pharmaceutical inspectors are restored in the legislature’s budget, they still won’t be enough to address the logjam of medical complaints. That’s a major problem, since the existing backlog “means that inspectors performing routine reviews often are unaware of the pending issues,” and cannot incorporate them into their investigations.

Seeing as Patrick has been governor since 2007, he had to have signed off — and even advocated — every budget that cut funding for the public health department and led to the current resource shortage. That underscores the unfortunate reality that, while conservatives are often scrutinized for undermining health initiatives, Democratic leaders are also tempted to balance their budgets at the expense of important public health programs.

California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has paired his support of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion with big cuts to local counties’ funding that critics say could cripple important community medical resources. In Massachusetts, Patrick himself has fought to shutter state mental health hospitals, arguing that there are already “too many hospital beds” in the state and that patients can simply pack up and go to other mental care facilities — even though such hospitals tend to be dispersed across long distances.

At the beginning of this month, mainstream media outlets began to run dire headlines proclaiming the spread of an aggressive “sex superbug,” quoting a doctor who claimed it could be “worse than AIDS.” The breathless proclamations of an impending public health crisis stemmed from a report — published by the Associated Press, among other outlets — that a rare strain of drug-resistant gonorrhea had been detected in Hawaii. That would have marked the first time that the HO41 strain, which doesn’t respond to the last-resort antibiotic currently used to treat the STD, had been discovered within the United States.

“This might be a lot worse than AIDS in the short run because the bacteria is more aggressive and will affect more people quickly,” Alan Christianson, a doctor of naturopathic medicine, was quoted as saying in response to the initial reports about HO41. That was enough to spark speculation about the disastrous implications of an impending “sex superbug.” But much of the recent reporting has been overblown. Here are the facts you need to know about this gonorrhea threat:

The initial reports about the rare strain of gonorrhea got it wrong. State health officials clarified that the strain of gonorrhea discovered in Hawaii wasn’t actually HO41 at all. It was a different version of the sexually transmitted infection, H11S8, which is resistant to a different kind of antibiotic — and which isn’t as serious of a threat, since it can still be treated with the drug currently used as a last resort against gonorrhea. The Associated Press ended up retracting its initial story.

It’s not actually worse than AIDS. After initial reports of the sex superbug began to circulate, public health officials quickly responded to clarify that it’s not helpful or accurate to compare drug-resistant gonorrhea to the global AIDS pandemic. Gonorrhea patients don’t usually die from the condition, while the rate of death from untreated AIDS is a staggering 98 percent. “I disagree with the general comparison,” Dr. Bruce Hirsch, a physician who treats infectious diseases at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., emphasized.

It was not caused by comprehensive sex education. Earlier this week, a conservative Christian radio host Matt Barber said that liberals in general, and comprehensive sex education specially, caused the new strain of drug-resistant gonorrhea. “By telling children, ‘Don’t do as I say, do as I do’ with comprehensive sex education giving a wink and a nod…hey, it’s a free-for-all,” Barber explained. “Well, we are reaping what we have sewn in this nation.” In fact, comprehensive sex education instruction that includes information about preventing the spread of sexually transmitted infections has been demonstrably successful at equipping American teens with the tools they need to protect their sexual health. The strains of gonorrhea that resist antibiotic treatment were actually caused by a combination of two factors: gonorrhea can mutate fairly quickly, which allows it to evade drug treatment, and we aren’t developing new drugs quickly enough to keep pace.

Drug-resistant gonorrhea is a real public health threat. Despite the fact that the initial story about HO41 was wrong, public health officials are still cautioning Americans that gonorrhea is, in fact, growing resistant to antibiotics — and that’s a real problem. It’s troubling that there’s only one antibiotic left that can effectively treat the infection, especially considering the fact that gonorrhea is the second most common STD in the United States. For months now, the CDC has been recommending “urgent action” to stop the spread of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, particularly by studying and developing new antibiotic treatments. The National Coalition of STD Directors believes it could be a matter of just another year or two before untreatable gonorrhea really does spread throughout the country.

The rise of antibiotic-resistant diseases isn’t limited to STDs. Even outside of gonorrhea, antibiotic resistance is becoming a serious global health threat. At the beginning of this year, public health experts in England began to warn of an impending “antibiotic apocalypse,” a not-so-distant future when even common infections aren’t able to be effectively treated with drugs anymore. Drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis and whooping cough are beginning to pose a potential threat, and there’s new evidence that the growing number of superbugs in U.S. meat can spread to Americans. Even though major medical organizations have advocated for making the development of new antibiotics an international priority, that research has lagged behind over the past several decades — partly because that type of innovation isn’t as profitable for Big Pharma companies.

Long-term exposure to traffic pollution could be linked to kidney damage, according to a new study.

Scientists looked at the kidney function of 1,100 stroke patients at a hospital in Boston, Mass., half of whom lived within 1 kilometer (about two-thirds of a mile) of a major road and half of whom lived between 1 and 6 k.m. of a major road. They found the patients who lived closest to a road had the worst kidney function, and that the difference between the two groups was comparable to adding four years onto the kidneys of the group who lived closest to traffic pollution.

The study joins a wealth of research linking air pollution to a range of health problems. Long-term exposure to air pollution has been found to increase a person’s risk of heart attack and stroke — a finding that may help explain traffic pollution’s ties to kidney health, as the health of the two organs is often related. In addition to that, women’s exposure to high levels of traffic pollution in the first two months of pregnancy greatly increases the risk of severe birth defects in the unborn child. Traffic pollution has been cited as causing nearly 5,000 deaths per year in the United Kingdom, and in China, where the smog is so bad it often obscures Beijing buildings, air pollution exposure contributes to 1.2 million early deaths per year.

Despite the well-documented negative side effects of air pollution, it continues to be a pervasive problem in the U.S. In its recent State of the Air report, the American Lung Association found more than 40 percent of Americans live in areas where air pollution counts often reach dangerous levels.

And dirty air often disproportionately affects low-income people and minorities. Last year, a report found people living in poor neighborhoods breathe in more toxic particles from air pollution than people in wealthy neighborhoods, and a study of metro Atlanta, Ga. counties found areas with 75 to 100 percent minority populations contained more than twice the amount of pollution sources as areas that were mostly white. That means that low-income and minorities are more subject to the health effects of dirty air, too — in 2011, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, nearly one in four low-income Hispanic or Puerto-Rican children had been diagnosed with asthma, a condition exacerbated by air pollution, compared to about one in 13 middle-class or wealthy white children.

On Thursday, Wrigley announced that it would be pulling its controversial new “Alert Energy” gum — each stick of which contains as much caffeine as half a cup of coffee — from the market out of “respect” for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as the agency investigates the public health risks associated with pumping caffeine into everyday foods and drink. With energy products and other potentially harmful foods high in sugar, salt, and fat increasingly under public scrutiny, it’s worth asking: why can’t the FDA do more to crack down on these additives? And why does it take so long to get food makers to comply with regulations when they do?

Answering that requires a brief foray into the history of the American food safety regimen. 1958 was a seminal year for food oversight, seeing the passage of the Food Additives Amendment to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, and the creation of the Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) List. Under the Food Additives Amendment, “any substance intentionally added to food is a food additive and is subject to pre-market approval by FDA unless the use of the substance is generally recognized as safe (GRAS).” So if a substance is on the GRAS exemption list, then food makers can use it to their heart’s content without proving its safety, unless specifically prevented from doing so by an FDA regulation.

The GRAS list contains over 700 items, many which have been there since 1958 — and taking an item off the GRAS list once it’s on is difficult. GRAS items are specifically defined as substances that are “generally recognized, among qualified experts, as having been adequately shown to be safe under the conditions of [their] intended use.” Consequently, revoking a substance’s GRAS designation requires considerable expert consensus that an item is not safe for its intended use.

One might ask how salts, sugars, trans fats, and caffeine don’t fit that bill considering widespread evidence that those substances increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, obesity, hypertension, and diabetes, thereby harming public wellness and increasing U.S. health care costs. In fact, government watchdogs and medical groups such as the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the American Medical Association (AMA) have issued several calls for the FDA to crack down on those very ingredients.

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