Health

I found Steve Harvey, one of the Kings of Comedy, unleashing his inner sexy beast over at Oh No They Didn't; which was in turn sourced from Bossip.

Oh no they didn't indeed.

There are no words to describe this photograph, and this is not even the best of them. Check out tiny after the jump :

An ongoing effort of mine is to fight the misuse of antibiotics. Misuse of antibiotics has been an increasing health hazard for people, leading to many strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria that infect, and sometimes kill, people, particularly children, the elderly and the immunocompromised. Last time I wrote about this I was able to report a victory in the fight to keep antibiotics effective. Today I want to introduce the latest fight.

First, for those who want more background, the Union of Concerned Scientists has an excellent rundown. An excerpt from their site:

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are on the rise. Patients once effectively treated for pneumonia, tuberculosis, or ear infections may now have to try three or more antibiotics before they find one that works. And as more bacterial strains develop resistance, more people will die because effective antibiotics are not identified quickly enough or because the bacteria causing the disease are resistant to all available antibiotics.

Why have bacterial strains become resistant? The short answer is overuse of antibiotics. Physicians and hospitals have overprescribed the drugs, and patients have demanded them—even for illnesses not caused by bacteria. Veterinarians, too, overprescribe drugs to treat sick animals.

Healing to Wellness Courts and Tribal Court Responses to Substance Abuse

Type of Event: Training
Hosted By: Tribal Judicial Institute
Event Dates: 5/15/2008 - 5/16/2008
Event Location: Anchorage, AK
Contact: Melissa Johnson
Email: mjohnson@law.und.edu
Contact Phone:701-777-6306
Contact Fax:701-777-0178
Website: http://www.law.und.edu/npilc/judicial

Course Description:Partners will assist Tribes to develop and implement Healing to Wellness Courts to respond to a burgeoning drug and alcohol problem including methamphetamine.

How to Register: Visit the Tribal Judicial Institute website to download a registration form at: http://www.law.und.edu/npilc/judicial/downloads.php

3rd Annual Conference on the Health of the African Diaspora: Mental Health

Saturday, February, 9, 2008
9:00Am to 6:00PM
NYU Medical Center
550 First Avenue
New York, NY 10016

To Register: http://www.med.nyu.edu/ichr/chad/events/events.html

Conference Fee: $50 General, $20 Students

The 3rd Annual Conference on the Health of the African Diaspora: Mental Health is an interdisciplinary meeting that brings together physicians, social workers, psychologists, public health professionals and policy makers to discuss the status of mental health among peoples of the African Diaspora. The one-day conference will provide an opportunity for a better understanding of mental health issues across the demographic cross-section of peoples of African descent through a comprehensive discourse of the social, medical and demographic framework that shapes mental health policy, diagnosis and treatment. Over 250 participants are expected and confirmed speakers include: Hugh Hendrie, MD, Indiana University School of Medicine; Hugh Butts, MD, Author, Racism & Posttraumatic Stress Disorder; David Henderson, MD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School; Jacqueline Mattis, PhD, New York University; Kirby Randolph, PhD, Kansas Medical School; Ernest Marquez, PhD, National Institute of Mental Health; Alfonso Wyatt, MDiv, Fund for the City of New York; Rosemonde Pierre-Louis, Manhattan Borough Deputy President; Adeyinka Akinsulure-Smith, PhD, CUNY, Bellevue/ NYU Program for Survivors of Torture; and Robert Fullilove, EdD, Columbia University.

About a conniving opportunist who cheatead first-responders out of medical insurance, worker's compensation and any help at all from the government. All in the name of his beloved "cri de coeur", 9-1-1.

This man doesn't deserve to even think he is deserving of the presidency.

At all.

It's in moments like these that my love for dictionaries knows no end. Today is Epiphany Day. Here's what I found for the definition of epiphany :

epiphany |iˈpifənē| noun ( pl. -nies) (also Epiphany) the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles as represented by the Magi (Matthew 2:1–12).
• the festival commemorating this on January 6.
• a manifestation of a divine or supernatural being.
• a moment of sudden revelation or insight.

DERIVATIVES epiphanic |ˌepəˈfanik| adjective

ORIGIN Middle English : from Greek epiphainein ‘reveal.’ The sense relating to the Christian festival is via Old French epiphanie and ecclesiastical Latin epiphania.

Now, I've repeatedly said here how even though I am an atheist, I am strongly attached to many of the catholic rites I grew up with. This has to do with what Joseph Campbell called The Power of Myth. I love mythologies, I love the stories humans have created and propagated through millennia in order to justify our existence.

I've been missing "Navidad en Puerto Rico" for a long time. It is the perfect social expression of our mulatto culture and mythologies and it's nothing, and I mean, nothing like Christmas in New York or anywhere in the United States.

In Puerto Rico we call today El Día de los Reyes Magos. It's the day catholics all around the world use to commemorate the Three Wise Men's visitation of the baby Jesus in manger in the middle of nowhere in Bethlehem. That's where the "manifestation of a divine or supernatural being" comes into play on this day.

On this day we kind of do what anglos do with Santa Claus. On the evening of the 5th, kids gather grass and water dishes for the three kings' horses. Parents put together candy with a little "ofrenda" of rum. "The magic revelation" happens when the kids go to sleep.

My parents loved to get their Reyes Magos on and would go as far as get coconuts and, in an unironic Monty Pythonesque moment, clopclopclop their way around the house while scattering the grass, emptying the bowls full of water and washing down a coconut candy or two with the "ofrenda" they had left out for themselves.

I tried doing the same for my kids but it just doesn't work out the same. For one, all the kids in Puerto Rico wait eagerly for Los Reyes Magos. Here in New York? Not so much. Not even american catholics celebrate the day!

Yet what I love and miss about los Reyes Magos is that it marks the half-point of our Christmas festivities.

Yes people, we Puerto Ricans have to do things differently, especially if it involves partying. In Puerto Rico we don't have 12 days of Christmas. We have 22 days.

Dear Sandra,

I don't mean to rub it in, but I bet you're wishing you had paid attention to that open letter I wrote you a few years ago. This week, a report on channel KPNX leaked that your Alzheimer's-stricken husband John is living, happily, with a new girlfriend in an old age home. Their video exposé even contains hard-core shots of your husband John holding hands with Kay, the local hooch of the Huger Mercy Living Center. Far from being jealous or upset, you, according to your own son, are a bit of a voyeur who likes to watch: "For Mom to visit when he's happy ... visiting with his girlfriend, sitting on the porch swing holding hands... No stress on mom. No guilt laid on mom."

Well I'm glad you enjoy watching your husband and his lady friend "exchange oxygen masks" and play footsie under the Bingo table. And I'm glad that you don't feel guilty about your John. But I still haven't forgiven you for what you did to me and, more importantly, what you did to America. And that is something to feel guilty about.

Liberals were so busy pointing their fingers at Alito and Roberts for shifting the court to the right they forget to look at the bigger question: How did Alito and Roberts get there? By replacing Rehnquist and O'Connor, respectively, on the bench. We can hardly blame Rehnquist, or as Nixon liked to call him, " Renchburg" the "Jewish clown". I mean Rehnquist could barely walk, couldn't talk, and had a gaping hole in his throat, which he covered ingeniously with his signature "tracheo-scarf." And yet this judge chugged away on decision after decision until the day he died at the age of 81.

(Day 3 on the THK Blog Tour belongs to the Democracy Cell Project, a website I've been known to frequent from time to time. This is the intro and outro to the Day 3 threader there -- to read the actual Q&A-with-THK portion of the program, visit the DCP blog and view it in its native habitat so I don't have to overwhelm CK by re-posting the whole thing here.)

Teresa Heinz Kerry is no stranger to the spotlight. She's been on stage in front of crowds larger than most of us can even imagine. But as far as she's concerned, her most important work takes place behind the scenes. As head of the Heinz Endowments and the Heinz Family Philanthropies, she has long been a leader in promoting responsible, sustainable social action.

One of Teresa Heinz Kerry's more visible projects is the ongoing Women's Health and the Environment Conference series. This year's keynote conference will be held in Pittsburgh on this coming Friday, April 20, and will feature a number of outstanding speakers, scientists, and activists discussing critical health issues facing women today.

We will be attending the Women’s Health & the Environment: New Science, New Solutions conference and will posting reports about it here at the DCP blog. Today, however, we're also participating in a special 17-stop virtual blog tour (see the complete tour schedule here). And that gave us the opportunity to ask Teresa Heinz Kerry a few questions of particular interest to members of the DCP community:

I am happy to kick off Teresa Heinz Kerry's blogtour promoting the “Conference on Women’s Health & the Environment” held in Pittsburgh on April 20th.

Teresa Heinz Kerry’s two marriages bring together two American political traditions, the Republican Heinz family and the Democratic Kerry family, and shows how good people in both parties have common ground. Teresa herself is of Portuguese descent and grew up in Mozambique. To those who think French is the most romantic of the Romance languages, to my mind Portuguese is a much more beautiful and romantic language, though also a bit sad and wistful. Educated in South Africa and Switzerland, Teresa is fluent in 5 languages. She received the Albert Schweitzer Gold Medal for Humanitarianism in 2003 in recognition for her philanthropy through the Heinz Family Philanthropies which also sponsors the conference.

Much of her philanthropic effort has focused on two areas: the environment, and women’s health and economic security. To most Americans, environmental issues and women’s issues tend to be put in separate conceptual boxes. We have an environmental movement and a feminist movement and the two are not perceived as intersecting. But in Europe, particularly in the European Green movement, these issues are conceptually much more closely linked. I once was able to hear my mother, an Anthropology professor and one-time coordinator of Women’s Studies at California State University Northridge, speak on the link between these two movements, presenting them as, in essence, the two areas where traditional, patriarchal attitudes have most glaringly failed, leaving problems and inequalities that are among the most difficult issues of the modern world. The way I look at it, human society from the development of agriculture on has been understandably obsessed with fertility: the fertility of our crops and our families. This obsession has led both to the success of our species in thriving practically everywhere on earth, but also has led to what amounts to unacceptable treatment of both the land that sustains us, and one half of our species--women. Industrial poisoning of our water supplies and fish stocks, global warming, overpopulation, domestic violence, unequal pay for equal work, laws limiting a woman’s right to control her own fertility, and many, many other issues that make headlines today are at least in part a result of the patriarchal and agricultural obsession society has had with fertility for some 10,000 years. Not to say there aren’t other aspects to these issues, but the cultural mindset that dominates the world is one where both the environment and women are resources to be exploited for the benefit of the species and are not often valued for themselves.