Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalMean Vaccine Joke
Them: I'd take a bullet for my country.
Me: You won't even take a needle for your neighbors. Sit down.
Running as equals
s an ambitious, determined teenager, Annet Negesa urged her body to run faster, and her body, always loyal, obliged her.
Even before the middle-distance runner had a coach, Negesa was qualifying for -- and winning -- major regional competitions. At 19, she would travel to Daegu in South Korea for the 2011 World Championships. After securing a top-three spot in the 800 meter and 1500 meter categories, in four international competitions, the Ugandan athlete qualified to represent her country at the 2012 London Olympics.
The following year, the young woman from Iganga, a small village in eastern Uganda, was named ‘Athlete of the Year’ by the Uganda Athletics Federation and seemed set for a life in the athletics spotlight.
That did happen -- but not in the way she had hoped. Much has been written all over the world about Negesa. Not only because of her victories on the track, but also because of what happened to her off it.
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/07/sport/athletics-testosterone-rules-negesa-imali-running-as-equals-dsd-spt-intl-cmd/
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My view is that there is a good bit of junk science being used to keep these women off the track.
PrEP, the HIV prevention pill, must now be totally free under almost all insurance plans
n a move that is expected to prove transformative to the national HIV-prevention effort, the federal government has announced that almost all health insurers must cover the HIV prevention pill, known as PrEP, or pre-exposure prophylaxis, with no cost sharing — including for the drug itself and, crucially, for clinic visits and lab tests.
This means the entire experience of maintaining a prescription to Truvada or Descovy, the two approved forms of PrEP, should now be totally free for almost all insured individuals. A prescribing physician, however, must persuade an insurer that Descovy in particular is medically necessary for any specific patient to qualify for zero cost sharing for that drug’s use as HIV prevention.
The guidance that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, along with the Department of Labor and the Department of the Treasury, sent to health insurers Monday indicated that insurers have 60 days to comply with the mandate. The rule says insurers must not charge copays, coinsurance or deductible payments for the quarterly clinic visits and lab tests required to maintain a PrEP prescription.
Insurers were already required to stop charging out-of-pocket fees for the medication by Jan. 1, 2021, at the latest.
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-health-and-wellness/prep-hiv-prevention-pill-must-now-totally-free-almost-insurance-plans-rcna1470
World Naked Bike Ride returns to Madison in late August
MADISON, Wis. — Madison’s World Naked Bike Ride is returning this summer after a year off because of the pandemic.
This year’s 11th annual bike ride is scheduled for Saturday, Aug. 28 at 11 a.m. The ride is typically held in June, but was pushed back because of pandemic protocols.
The annual WNBR challenges participants to be “as bare as you dare” to support messages of independence from fossil fuels and cars, in addition to supporting body image positivity.
Event organizers said registered participants will be informed of a gathering point at least one day in advance. The route of the ride isn’t publicized, but a designated viewing area will be announced in advance.
https://www.channel3000.com/world-naked-bike-ride-returns-to-madison-in-late-august/
Woman said to be oldest working nurse in the country retires at age 96
A woman said to be the oldest working nurse in the country has retired from a Tacoma, Washington, hospital at the age of 96, according to NBC affiliate KING-TV.
Florence "SeeSee" Rigney served more than 70 years as a nurse at the MultiCare Tacoma General Hospital.
She began her career as an operating room nurse, just getting started as penicillin was introduced to the health care world. Since then, she's had very few "breaks" from her work, only taking a hiatus or two to care for her children, and one not-so-successful attempt to retire, which lasted only six months over 30 years ago, according to the local news station.
"I don’t like to sit around — I’ve always got to have something to do. That’s my nature,” Rigney told the local affiliate. “I don’t know exactly what made me want to become a nurse, but it was something that I always wanted to do. I love to interact with patients and give them the help that I can."
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/oldest-working-nurse-country-retires-age-96-n1274521
Why does Jeff Bezos's rocket look like that? An inquiry
Jeff Bezos’s 11-minute trip aboard a Blue Origin rocket to the edge of space on Tuesday left the world’s richest man feeling “unbelievably good” and his crew “very happy”. But afterwards, as he wondered aloud how fast he could refuel, the rest of the world was left pondering just why the New Shepard rocket had such a distinctive shape.
As social media erupted with innuendo, we contacted a few experts to find out why it looked, in the words of one astrophysicist, so “anthropomorphic”. At one major research institution, the press officer referred us to the gender studies department, but Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, was able to shed some light on the topic.
New Shepard consists of a mushroom-like crew capsule that flares out over a long shaft, called a booster. The rounded top appears more bulbous than that of many other rockets, but it’s not unique. “There’s a long history of what we call hammerhead rockets,” on which the capsule’s diameter is wider than the booster, said McDowell. “If you’re careful, it actually has perfectly fine aerodynamics.”
Just like the tips of passenger and military jets, capsules come in all different shapes, New Shepard’s interior is designed to “maximize the interior volume” to hold six passengers, said Laura Forczyk, the owner of Astralytical, a space analytics company. It also needs a “big, flat bottom” for stable re-entry, McDowell said.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/20/jeff-bezos-rocket-design-an-inquiry
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And please, not the obvious.......
Contraception Is Free To Women, Except When It's Not
For Stephanie Force, finding a birth control method that she likes and can get without paying out of pocket has been a struggle, despite the Affordable Care Act's promise of free contraceptives for women and adolescent girls in most health plans.
The 27-year-old physician recruiter in Roanoke, Va., was perfectly happy with the NuvaRing, a flexible vaginal ring that women insert monthly to release hormones to prevent pregnancy. But her insurer, Anthem, stopped covering the branded product and switched her to a generic version in early 2020. Force says the new product left her with headaches and feeling irritable and short-tempered.
After talking to her OB-GYN, Force tried an IUD. But that made her feel worse: She had bad cramps, gained 10 pounds and developed severe hormonal acne. Plus, she was charged $248 for an ultrasound her provider used to guide the insertion of the device, a charge she successfully fought.
Force also considered a couple of birth control products approved in recent years: a non-hormonal vaginal gel called Phexxi and a vaginal ring called Annovera that can be used for a year. But Phexxi isn't covered by her employer health plan, and she would owe a $45 copayment for Annovera.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/07/21/1018483557/contraception-is-free-to-women-except-when-its-not
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I'm past the age of needing it, but this is so infuriating! It's just another example of bias against women. Viagra is free or very low-cost on many/most insurance plans, but female products, uh-uh.
'We need it to work': the restaurants trying to be forces of social and climate good
Whether it’s a beautifully decorated bistro, neighborhood diner, fancy white tablecloth eatery, or fast-food joint, millions of people escape to restaurants every day for nourishment, leisure and enjoyment. In the US the industry accounts for 4% of the country’s total GDP, currently employs around 12.5 million people, and in 2020 – despite the pandemic – reported $659bn in sales.
Still, restaurants do not serve all Americans equally. To name a few issues, according to the non-profit One Fair Wage seven of the 10 lowest-paying jobs in the country are restaurant industry positions. And along with grocery stores and foodservice companies, eateries account for 40% of the 40m tons of food supply wasted every year. Moreover, Feeding America reports that more than 42 million people could be facing food insecurity, including about 13 million children, a situation that has been badly exacerbated by the pandemic.
So can restaurants be forces of social and environmental good? If a restaurant tried to practice ‘food justice’ in various forms, what would that look like?
“The conversation around food justice and restaurants is very nonlinear,” chef and food justice advocate Sophia Roe said. “Food justice looks different everywhere because the reasons people don’t have food are different everywhere.” Roe said restaurants have to consider both the workers involved in their operation, and also the environment.
“When I speak about all of the elements that have to come into play, such as fair wages, involvement of the community, sustainable farming and sourcing locally, people say it sounds impossible,” Roe said. But she added that numerous restaurants around the country are already at the forefront of change.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/20/us-restaurants-social-climate-good
LA bomb squad 'grossly miscalculated' weight of fireworks in huge explosion
Los Angeles bomb technicians grossly miscalculated the weight of homemade fireworks last month when they detonated them in a containment chamber, likely causing a catastrophic explosion that injured 17 people and rocked a neighborhood, the police chief said Monday.
Police chief Michel Moore said five members of the department’s bomb squad have been removed from field duties as the investigation continues. They could face discipline.
The explosion – which damaged dozens of homes, businesses and vehicles just days before July Fourth – was highly unusual, officials say, because such containment chambers are designed to withhold blasts. The bomb technicians overloaded it above the safety rating, however, even as authorities are investigating if the detonation device had a defect.
The incident has prompted the Los Angeles police department and FBI to review police protocols regarding the detonation of explosives. The police department is now requiring a captain to sign off on detonations, in addition to the two bomb technicians and a supervisor who are already required.
theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/19/la-bomb-squad-grossly-miscalculated-weight-of-fireworks-in-huge-explosion
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Oopsy! 
Opinion: We're becoming two Americas: One healthy, one deliberately at risk.
For many years, it has been fashionable to point out that there are “two Americas” — one blue, one red; one urban, one rural; one evangelical, one non-religious; one college-educated, one not. However, we risk adding a lethal new point of comparison: one America protected from covid-19 and largely back to normal, and one at continued peril.
Red states’ vaccination rates are lagging behind those of blue states, with predictable results.
“Adjusted for population, nearly six times as many people died in South Dakota from covid-19 as in Vermont (230 per 100,000 in South Dakota compared to just 40 per 100,000 in Vermont). In real numbers, while about 250 Vermont residents died from the disease, more than 2,000 South Dakotans died,” Ashish K. Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, wrote in an op-ed for The Post, offering the states as contrasting examples of how vaccines make the pandemic less dangerous. “And as of today, Vermont has a lower unemployment rate, suggesting that there need not be any trade-off between public health and the economy.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has become the poster boy for blocking mask mandates; denigrating Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — DeSantis’s political action committee sells swag emblazoned with the slogan “Don’t Fauci My Florida” — and anemic vaccination programs.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/19/two-americans-one-healthy-one-deliberately-risk/
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Thank you, Jennifer Rubin, for stating the obvious one more time
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Gender: Do not displayCurrent location: Virginia
Member since: Wed Jun 1, 2011, 07:34 PM
Number of posts: 10,044