Check out your local emergency room

Be Prepared: Find the ER You Want to Go to Before an Emergency Happens
by Lena V. Groeger

If you live in Charlestown, here are your two most likely choices.
Having been in both, I concur with the consensus of patients who
prefer South County Hospital.  - Will Collette
(Screen grab from the ProPublica database)

To be prepared in the event of an emergency, you can use our newly updated ER Inspector (formerly called ER Wait Watcher) to help you evaluate the emergency rooms near you. 

Using data from the federal government, our interactive database lets you compare ERs on both efficiency measures, including how long patients typically spend in the ER before being sent home, and quality measures, such as how many violations related to ER care a hospital has had.

Note: If you think you are having a heart attack, stroke or other life-threatening emergency, do not use ER Inspector. Call 911 and seek care immediately.

We’ve made a few substantial changes and upgrades to ER Inspector since it first came out in 2013. 

Notably, we’ve added hospital violations related to emergency room care since 2015. 

We’ve also removed two measures that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) no longer releases.

New: ER Violations Data

Hospitals in the U.S. that participate in Medicare are subject to health and safety regulations. 

They are inspected regularly every few years and also in response to complaints. CMS only publicly releases violations found during the investigation of a complaint — you can now see all of those emergency room violations since January 2015 in ER Inspector.

While CMS releases data on all types of hospital violations, or “deficiencies,” we pulled out the ones related to ER care. These include violations relating to not properly assessing and treating patients, inadequate medical and nursing staff and not following ER policies and procedures. 

It also includes violations of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), which requires ERs to provide a medical screening examination and provide treatment to stabilize anyone who comes to the emergency department, regardless of their ability to pay. 

ER Inspector now displays the percentage of hospitals in each state with at least one violation since January 2015, as well as a full explanation of each violation on each hospital page.

Anti-vaccination mothers have outsized voice on social media

Pro-vaccination parents could make a difference

Brooke W. McKeever, University of South Carolina and Robert McKeever, University of South Carolina

 Vaccinations are important to protect against a
host of diseases. www.shutterstock.com

A high school student from Ohio made national headlines recently by getting inoculated despite his family’s anti-vaccination beliefs.

Ethan Lindenberger, 18, who never had been vaccinated, had begun to question his parents’ decision not to immunize him. He went online to research and ask questions, posting to Reddit, a social discussion website, about how to be vaccinated. His online quest went viral.

In March 2019, he was invited to testify before a U.S. Senate Committee hearing on vaccines and preventable disease outbreaks.

In his testimony, he said that his mother’s refusal to vaccinate him was informed partly by her online research and the misinformation about vaccines she found on the web.

Lindenberger’s mother is hardly alone. Public health experts have blamed online anti-vaccination discussions in part for New York’s worst measles outbreak in 30 years. Anti-vaccine activists also have been cited for the growth of anti-vaccination sentiments in the U.S. and abroad.

We are associate professors who study health communication. We are also parents who read online vaccination-related posts, and we decided to conduct research to better understand people’s communication behaviors related to childhood vaccinations.

Our research examined the voices most central to this discussion online, mothers, and our findings show that those who oppose vaccinations communicate most about this issue.

Our boy Brett

From the RI Community Food Bank

Donate Now 2019 Hunger Study Preview Friday, October 4, 2019 | 8:30am | 200 Niantic Avenue, Providence Join us for a special preview of the results of our 2019 Hunger Study before they’re released to the public. The Food Bank recently conducted a statewide survey with the Hassenfeld Child Health Innovation Institute at  Brown University to learn more about the people we serve and the challenges they face. As a committed supporter, you are invited to hear these results first. RSVP by email to Sarah Puleo View the invitation for more details. RSVP for the Preview Help Fill the Empty Bowls in Our Community! At our Empty Bowls fundraiser on Thursday, October 17, guests get to select a bowl from hundreds handcrafted by local artists. Enjoy an evening of delicious tastings from one of 36 restaurants (and counting), and take your bowl home with you as a reminder of the bowls you’ve helped to fill by supporting the Rhode Island Community Food Bank. Empty Bowls Thursday, October 17 5:30 to 8 pm Rhodes on the Pawtuxet Get Tickets Empty Bowls Raffle! New this year, we're holding a raffle to win a private five-course dinner for 8 at The Dorrance, complete with cocktail and wine pairings. Raffle tickets are $50 and only 150 will be sold. You do not need to be present to win. Call 401-942-6325 to purchase your raffle tickets in advance. *State law prohibits the sale of raffle tickets online.  Join Us for a Community Volunteer Day You can help! Come out to the the Food Bank on Saturday, October 5 from 9 am to 12 pm to help us sort and pack food boxes and repack fresh produce to feed our hungry neighbors. Children ages 7 and up are welcome, but they must be accompanied by an adult. Make it a family outing! Registration is required. Community Volunteer Day Saturday, October 5 from 9 am to 12 pm Rhode Island Community Food Bank Sign Up for Community Volunteer Day

Donate Now Copyright © 2019 Rhode Island Community Food Bank, All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: Rhode Island Community Food Bank 200 Niantic Ave Providence, RI 02907-3150

Common insecticide threatens survival of wild, migrating birds

Neonicotinoids are harming more than bees.

Brian Bienkowski for Environmental Health News

Migrating songbirds exposed to small amounts of a neonicotinoid pesticide suffered weight loss and migration delays, both of which could reduce their chances of survival, according to a new study.

The study is the first to examine the impacts of neonicotinoids—in this case, one called imidacloprid—on wild birds and suggests the pesticides are putting migrating birds at risk during their migration, which hampers their ability to survive and, ultimately, reproduce.

"The sublethal effects of imidacloprid on food consumption, body condition, and stopover duration have clear links with survival and reproduction and are predicted to negatively affect populations of migratory birds that commonly use agricultural habitats for refueling," the authors wrote in a study published today in Science.

Neonicotinoids—widely used on corn, cotton, sorghum, soybeans and on some other fruits and vegetables—are thought to be at least partially behind bee declines in recent years and also have been linked to widespread impacts on aquatic insects and invertebrates.

Spring migration for birds happens the same time that many farmers are seeding pesticide-treated crops in northern midlatitudes, which is the heart of the Midwest and major U.S. farming regions.

Definitely don't go food shopping

Don't make major decisions on an empty stomach

University of Dundee

We all know that food shopping when hungry is a bad idea but new research from the University of Dundee suggests that people might want to avoid making any important decisions about the future on an empty stomach.

The study, carried out by Dr Benjamin Vincent from the University's Psychology department, found that hunger significantly altered people's decision-making, making them impatient and more likely to settle for a small reward that arrives sooner than a larger one promised at a later date.

Participants in an experiment designed by Dr Vincent were asked questions relating to food, money and other rewards when satiated and again when they had skipped a meal.

While it was perhaps unsurprising that hungry people were more likely to settle for smaller food incentives that arrived sooner, the researchers found that being hungry actually changes preferences for rewards entirely unrelated to food.

States try to fill the void

Bipartisan Corporate Crime Fighting by the States

By Phil Mattera for the Dirt Diggers Digest

A new report from the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First on lawsuits filed by state attorneys general shows that the current cases against the drug companies and the tech sector are part of a long-standing practice of bipartisan cooperation in fighting corporate misconduct.

The report focuses on 644 cases in which AGs from multiple states took on companies over issues ranging from mortgage abuses to illicit marketing of prescription drugs and collected more than $100 billion in settlements over the past two decades.

These multistate cases are a subset of more than 7,000 state AG actions compiled for the latest expansion of Violation Tracker and now available for searching on the database.

In at least 260 multistate cases, a majority of the states signed on as plaintiffs. In 172 of the cases, 40 or more states participated. State AGs are split almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans, meaning that the cases with large numbers of state participants are necessarily bipartisan.

In Rhode Island, State General Treasurer Seth Magaziner (left) and
Attorney General Peter Neronha (right) fight corporate crime through
legal actions and shareholder initiatives.

In 362 of the cases, the defendants were giant companies included in the Fortune 500 or the Fortune Global 500. 

The parent company with the most cumulative multistate AG penalties is, by far, Bank of America, with more than $26 billion in settlements over issues such as mortgage abuses and the sale of toxic securities. 

It is followed by the Swiss bank UBS ($11 billion), Citigroup ($8 billion), JPMorgan Chase ($6 billion) and BP ($4.9 billion).

The most frequent defendant has been CVS Health, which has paid out more than $215 million in 14 settlements, most of them involving the alleged submission of false claims to state Medicaid programs and the payment of illicit kickbacks to healthcare providers.  Another 47 parent companies have been involved in three or more multistate AG cases.

There are lots of better places for projects than forests

Hack Job on Green Space Diminishes Rhode Island's Future

By FRANK CARINI/ecoRI News staff

This vacant plaza on Route 3 in Coventry, which was once home to Almacs and Kmart, has been empty for about two decades. During the past few years, when forestland in residential neighborhoods was being clear-cut to make room for utility-scale renewable-energy projects, this vacant commercial space was ignored. (Frank Carini/ecoRI News)

Rhode Island’s land-use policies, as written in such documents as Land Use 2025, highlight the importance of smart development. The state even has an organization dedicated to helping it grow smart.

Rhode Island in general, though, has been slow to embrace the concept, even as relentless development exacerbates local global-warming impacts. Cranes in the sky and pile drivers on green space create jobs and win votes, but they can also create long-term problems, especially when what we build and where is so easily manipulated by special interests.

Political gain and short-term growth aren’t preparing the Ocean State for what will be a challenging future shaped by a warming world.

During the past three years, for instance, chunks of Rhode Island green space have been cleared, covered, and crushed to build renewable energy. But solving one problem by creating another isn’t good policy. In fact, it ignores decades of Rhode Island’s land-use policy.

When green space is degraded, it becomes less productive, restricting what can be grown and reducing the soil’s ability to absorb carbon. This degradation exacerbates global warming, while the climate crisis in turn exacerbates further deterioration. It’s a vicious cycle.

Rhode Island has ample rooftops, parking lots, landfills, brownfields, gravel pits, and vacant and underused developed space that solar panels could have covered before the state began diminishing its inventory of green space.

A new kind of Justice

October 17 "Empty Bowls" fundraiser for RI Community Food Bank

Students looking for a good buzz

URI students tackle bee decline with lab, field studies

Todd McLeish

URI seniors Casey Johnson (left) and Danielle Butler pose with their insect nets before collecting bees for their research. (Photo courtesy of Casey Johnson)

University of Rhode Island seniors Casey Johnson and Danielle Butler have seen the news reports about the global decline of bees and other pollinators and what that may mean to the world’s food supply and ecosystems. But it wasn’t until this summer that they had an opportunity to learn about the situation first hand.

The two students spent the last three months conducting laboratory and field research on local bee populations, bee parasites, and related topics through URI’s Coastal Fellows program.

"Who did that!?!"

Gutsy effort to produce comprehensive study of intestinal gases

University of New South Wales

A source of embarrassment to some, or pure comedy to others, flatulence and the gases of the intestines are increasingly seen as playing an important role in our digestive health.

A paper led by UNSW Sydney and published in Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology has examined all available literature on gastrointestinal gases, their interactions with the microbiome of the gut, their associated disorders and the way that they can be measured and analysed.

Lead author Professor Kourosh Kalantar-Zadeh, who is an ARC Laureate Fellow with UNSW's School of Chemical Engineering, says the purpose of the study is to lift the lid on the various gases of the gut and show how vital they are for human health.

"This is about providing knowledge to people about the importance of gases in the gut," he says.

"Rather than laughing about it or feeling embarrassed about this subject, actually there is good reason to take this very seriously.

"Even Benjamin Franklin wrote about this more than 200 years ago. He was one of the first to propose that different types of foods have different effects on our gut health, which can be measured by smelling the resulting farts -- although I'm not so sure about his methods."

Indeed, Franklin wrote a letter to the Royal Academy of Brussels where he proposed "To discover some Drug wholesome & not disagreable, to be mix'd with our common Food, or Sauces, that shall render the natural Discharges of Wind from our Bodies, not only inoffensive, but agreable as Perfumes."

While Franklin's challenge continues to elude modern pharmacology, a change of diet to avoid foods rich in sulphide -- such as broccoli, cauliflower, eggs, beef, and garlic -- could reduce the malodorous nature of our gaseous emissions.

Here's how you create a conflict of interest, Trump-style

Trump’s NLRB, Trying to Cut Protections for Millions of Temps and Fast-Food Workers, Trips Up Again
By Ian MacDougall for ProPublica

Under the Trump administration, the National Labor Relations Board has been trying to roll back an Obama-era decision that made companies more responsible for temporary staffers, fast-food-franchise workers and others who work for them indirectly. The first attempt was foiled in early 2018 when a Trump appointee to the board was found to have a conflict of interest.

Now, as the NLRB tries to undo the rule for a second time, it’s facing questions from two Democratic representatives about another potential conflict of interest — and this one involves the NLRB’s own use of temporary staffers. 

In May, the labor board engaged a company called Ardelle Associates to supply lawyers and paralegals to help review public comments on the proposed overhaul of the provision in question, which is known as the “joint-employer rule.”

Among those who submitted comments advocating a reversal of the Obama-era rule are two trade associations that Ardelle belongs to and uses to recruit temps, according to contracting records. 

In their comments to the NLRB supporting the rule change, the trade associations asserted that companies have grown more reluctant to hire temporary employees because the rule has left them uncertain of their labor law obligations.

In essence, the NLRB hired temps whose bosses have a stake in the outcome to review and potentially summarize the public comments. And that, two top Democrats on the House Committee on Education and Labor say, poses a conflict of interest under federal contracting rules. 

Can big business reform itself?

No.

By Jim Hightower 

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote of being leery of a fast-talking huckster who visited his home: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons,” Emerson exclaimed.

Likewise, today’s workaday families should do a mass inventory of their silverware, for the fast-talking CEOs of 181 union-busting, tax-cheating, environment-contaminating, consumer-gouging corporations are asking us to believe that they stand with us in the fight against… well, against them.

From Wall Street banksters to Big Oil polluters, these profiteers are suddenly trumpeting their future intentions to serve not just their own greed, but every “stakeholder” (which is what they call employees, customers, suppliers, et al).

But vague proclamations are cheap, and it’s worth noting that these new champions of the common good propose no specifics — no actual sacrifices by them or benefits for us.

A few media observers have mildly objected, saying it’s “an open question” whether any of the corporate proclaimers will change how they do business. 

But it’s not an open question at all.  They won’t.

They've suffered enough

For more cartoons by Tom Tomorrow, CLICK HERE.