public health

Years of life lost: the huge cost on our country.

Posted on by spjika

From my public health background I appreciate this take on gun violence- this part of the story has not been in the national discourse but it’s a very real problem- for every victim we lose a productive* member of our society who could have gone on to do good things, bring in income, pay taxes, support families. The years of life lost to gun violence is truly staggering.
http://guns.periscopic.com/

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*No, I’m not ignorant of the fact that many shot are thugs and may not have had a positive life trajectory. But that doesn’t mean we can consider their lives as no loss. They have families and friends and many in  the game turn their lives around. Don’t dismiss people because they are not living the straight and narrow “like the rest of us”. We all count. We all have mothers.

http://guns.periscopic.com/

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Quote | Posted on by spjika

In ten words or less, sugar is both toxic and abused. Every substance that is both toxic and abused at the same time requires both personal intervention, which, for lack of a better word, we can call ‘rehab,’ or societal intervention [which], for lack of a better word, we call ‘a tax.’ Same thing we do with alcohol and tobacco.

According to Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at UC San Francisco, it’s a dangerous trend. The mass consumption of sugar via soda affects the human body much like drugs and tobacco. Lustig also argued that education alone is not enough to fight sugar addiction.

From the EBX article on how Big Soda played the Race baiting game to defeat the soda tax.