PI's Weekly Media Digest: Improved but flawed Toxic Substances Control Act appears on way to President's desk; San Francisco to require that soda ads carry warning labels; and more
Welcome to our media digest for the week of May 27, 2016! Below you’ll find summaries of news coverage on the issues of preventing violence, trauma, nutrition, health equity, mental health, and more. The views expressed in these articles do not reflect those of Prevention Institute.
Community environments
Forty years after the Toxic Substances Control Act was first passed, the House this week voted overwhelmingly to update the law, with the Senate expected to pass the bill. While the bill improves pre-market safety testing for new chemicals, closes some loopholes that have allowed companies to hide information about their products while claiming “trade secrets,” major areas of concern remain. The Environmental Working Group expressed concern that the bill doesn’t allocate sufficient funds to the EPA to test the highest-priority chemicals, estimating that the bill “provides about half as much money as would be needed to get through those chemicals in one generation.” The bill also preempts states’ ability to set more stringent standards for chemical testing and use while the EPA is investigating a substance. EWG said, “States have been the only cop on the beat—the EPA has been a paper tiger, certainly since 1991. Now this law says that there’s a period when the EPA is reviewing a chemical during which states can’t act. This freezes state action while EPA is investigating. And that's been the only [regulatory] activity for the last two decades.” Breast Cancer Action outlined six key components of meaningful chemical safety reform.
The EPA released its 2020 Action Plan, with a focus on communities that carry the heaviest burden of environmental hazards. Earthjustice praised the plan for asserting that "communities of color, low-income, and indigenous communities have the...right to clean air, clean water and a healthy environment."
The LA Times explores the trend of government disinvestment in public health: “Government investment in public health has been declining for years. So too has the nation’s public health workforce, which is almost 20% smaller than it was in 2008, according to health authorities… Chronic underfunding for public health has forced Congress to repeatedly pass emergency measures in the face of crises, as lawmakers did in 2014 to respond to Ebola and in 2005 and 2006 to respond to a pandemic flu outbreak.”
CityLab shares a new visual representation of commuting, maps populated with dots varying in size based on the number of commuters, color-coded to correspond to the counties they’re commuting to or from.
After a 2014 Human Rights Watch report exposed the extent of child labor in tobacco, the tobacco industry pledged to stop hiring children under age 16, but a recent company audit found that 40% of farms that contract with RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company employ underage workers. AFL-CIO’s Baldemar Velasquez responded to the audit: “We’ve been telling the company for eight years now that there are serious labor violations happening all over Southern tobacco fields, including on Reynolds farms. Imagine what the audits would have found if they were allowed to talk to more workers and ask more in depth questions about the workers’ experiences. Rather than working with us to solve the issues, Reynolds has continuously denied that these conditions exist and has tried to sweep labor issues under the rug.”
NPR reported this week on the move by safety advocates to replace the word “accident” with “crash,” and explored the role of the auto industry in framing crashes as “accidents” and shifting blame away from drivers to pedestrians, memorably deploying a cartoon character called Otto Know Better who was always being careless and getting injured. Peter Norton, a historian and safety advocate, said, “if we continue to define these calamities as accidents, they're easier to ignore because we think of them as the inevitable side effects of modern living. But if we can call them crashes, we can redefine them as something we can control.”
Health Equity
This week, an appeals court in Indiana heard arguments on whether a 35-year-old Indiana woman should be criminally prosecuted for her self-induced abortion. Rewire concludes by noting that if the State wins, it will have “sent a very strong message… the state expects and demands a healthy, live birth with each pregnancy, and failure to produce one could result in felony charges.”
Dr. Celine Gounder argues that, to prevent cancer, solutions have to look past science and take into account socioeconomic inequalities that create barriers to receiving care. She urges her fellow doctors to be more conscious of the structural racism that may be pervasive in their medical practice, concluding: "through our silence, collective inaction and submission to systemic injustice, we are complicit."
Alternet discusses The Reform, a new documentary about the effects that Prop 36 had on the lives of millions. The film addresses the grave implications that legislation like the three-strikes law have on people of color and low-income communities, and how mass incarceration has impacted the social fabric of the U.S.
This New York Times blog details the implications that restrictions on bathroom accessibility have not just for the transgender community, but also for people with disabilities. The author contends, "Accessibility has unintended consequences that are good for everyone...How we think about accessible bathrooms says a lot about how we think of people with disabilities in general." Meanwhile, 11 states and state officials sued the Obama administration Wednesday over federal guidance advising public schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity.
This week, the Chicago City Council passed Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s resolution to establish a “Health in All Policies” approach towards future program and project development across all City agencies and departments—including education, transportation, housing, and public safety.
Smithsonian Magazine summarizes results of a new study linking poverty to depression in adolescents, which builds on a growing body of research linking young people's environments to negative developmental outcomes. BMSG notes that “while the article…makes the case for environmental change, it misses an opportunity to highlight values. Instead of…appealing to fairness, human dignity, or protecting future generations, it emphasizes the long-term economic costs of failing to address childhood poverty.”
US Federal Court Judge Block’s latest ruling noted that there are “nearly 50,000 federal and state statutes and regulations that imposed penalties on felons — like denial of government benefits, ineligibility for public housing, suspension of student loans, revocation or suspension of driver’s licenses” — and these collateral consequences should be considered in sentencing.
The New York Senate Wednesday unanimously passed a bill to end the sales tax on tampons, sanitary napkins, and other feminine hygiene products, colloquially referred to as the “tampon tax.” 44 states still impose a sales tax on feminine hygiene products. Governor Cuomo stated, “Repealing this regressive and unfair tax on women is a matter of social and economic justice."
Violence Prevention
This New York Times investigation provides a sobering reminder of how gun violence affects communities throughout the country – particularly low-income communities of color. Unfortunately, the piece writes around the factors that serve as the root causes of violence—from structural racism and residential segregation to public and private disinvestment and access to alcohol, drugs, and weapons—and skip the solutions. This New York Times editorial criticizes Congress' lack of enforcement of stricter gun control due to gun lobby influence. It discusses a computer algorithm being used by the Chicago Police Department to predict who is likely to be shot or shoot someone in the near future to demonstrate the grave state of affairs of gun violence in cities throughout the country. The board contends: "This is a public health challenge of critical proportions deserving a thorough debate from the presidential candidates."
While firearm homicides dominate the media coverage of gun violence in the U.S., the number of annual firearm suicides is almost twice as high. According to a new study in the American Journal of Public Health, states with higher levels of firearm ownership have higher rates of firearm-related suicides.
The US Senate unanimously passed the Sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act, introduced by Senator Jeanne Shaheen, which includes the right for victims' to have their rape kits preserved free of cost, up until the statute of limitations ends in the state where the crime occurred.. This is the first federal legislation to establish a survivor’s bill of rights. The survivor and activist who co-authored the bill with Shaheen said, "Justice shouldn't be dependent on geography. It's completely unconscionable that a survivor in one state would have a completely different set of rights than a survivor in another state.”
A judge decided this week that Bill Cosby will stand trial in Pennsylvania for an alleged 2004 sexual assault. Vox summarized Tuesday's hearing: “Cosby's lawyers argued that Constand's account is unreliable and that the sex was consensual. This plays into all sorts of victim-blaming narratives about women really being at fault for rape; it is also, often, the best available strategy for a legal team whose job is to defend its client in court.” The Washington Post reasoned that “a single trial won’t address all the allegations that Cosby faces, and it won’t provide an automatic answer to the cultural questions that are tied up in the idea that Cosby might be both a Hollywood trailblazer and a serial rapist. But it might help break the deadlock that protected Cosby both legally and professionally for so long, the same sort of stasis that has made Woody Allen a continuing flash point without influencing his ability to work.”
A bipartisan group of US senators headed by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand renewed efforts to overhaul the way the military prosecutes sexual assault cases.
This piece details Cure Violence programs success in reducing violence in dozens of major cities, including some of the deadliest neighborhoods in Baltimore, Chicago and New York. As the article notes, the group is currently pitching Cleveland city officials, outreach workers and representatives of the local hospitals and philanthropic communities, to adopt its model of treating violence as a public health epidemic.
Columbia and New York University researchers have found that killings of black civilians are less common when the racial composition of the police force reflect the population as a whole. The researchers noted, "Diverse police departments are particularly able to alleviate tensions in cities ... where you have preexisting racial, ethnic tensions.”
According to a new report from Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee, the NFL inappropriately sought to influence which scientists would conduct research on brain injuries financed by a $30 million contribution from the league. Despite the effort to meddle in the scientific process, the congressional investigation found the integrity of the NIH research was not compromised.
California
San Francisco is moving ahead with a new requirement that soda and sugary drink advertisements carry warning labels that will read: ‘WARNING: Drinking beverages with added sugar(s) contributes to obesity, diabetes and tooth decay. This is a message from the City and County of San Francisco.’
Curbed crunched the numbers on parks in LA County, finding that half of residents don’t live within 10 minutes of a park and highlighting inequities in access to parks and green spaces.
Mandatory urban water restrictions in California will be lifted starting this June, with water districts able to set their own conservation standards. Mother Jones says the change reflects the “drought's geographic variation. The snowpack in Northern California neared historic highs earlier this year, filing the state's two largest reservoirs nearly to capacity. … Southern California is feeling the drought's immediate effects more acutely: Many reservoirs in the south are at levels far below the historical average.”
Mental Health
The Guardian mapped 16 years of county-level data to show the spread of the opiate crisis and overdose deaths across the US.
NPR's Scott Simon interviews Sebastian Junger, author of Tribe, a book examining the challenges of transitioning back to civilian life: "veterans often don't feel like they belong to the society they fought for."
HR2646 includes provisions that would address shortages of mental health professionals treating children in HPSAs, expand coverage of antidepressants and antipsychotics, and require the National Institute of Mental Health to translate evidence-based interventions and the best available science into systems of care.
Susan Heavey's roundup of the Association of Health Care Journalists panel discussion on health barriers for military veterans focused on mental health issues, including stigma: "Time and time again, panelists came back to one looming public health issue: the need to understand, recognize and treat a veteran’s post-deployment psychological issues without ostracizing the sufferer. Particularly among veterans, the stigma can be overwhelming, and discourage many from seeking help for fear of endangering their military-tough image, panelists said.”
The University of Memphis received a $2 million grant from the Urban Child Institute for The Adverse Childhood Experiences Prevention Project (ACE), which aims to "create a culture of health for vulnerable children in Memphis."
Food and activity environments
According to the leaders of the Aetna Foundation and the American Public Health Association, it’s time to go outside of healthcare to make Americans healthier. In this Health Affairs editorial, the authors cite the Healthiest Cities & Counties Challenge, which works with small to mid-size cities, counties, and federally recognized tribes across the country to help “build measurable improvements over time on key wellness metrics such as healthy behaviors; community safety; social and economic factors like access to high-quality jobs; environmental exposures like pollution; and the built environment, in which people can live, work, and play.”
A recent Health Affairs study on hospital profitability found that seven of the “Top 10” most profitable hospitals were non-profits. However, Community Catalyst warns that it would be a mistake to interpret the findings of this study as bolstering arguments in favor of revoking the tax-exempt status of non-profit hospitals, noting that “…a deeper dive into the data shows the non-profits present in the Top 10 actually buck the trend: for-profit hospitals tend to dominate when it comes to making money off of patient care. Even more importantly, the study found that more profitable hospitals—again, disproportionately for-profits—appear to be more aggressive when it comes to charging patients higher prices.”
A Commonwealth Fund report published this week noted that more than 60% of working-age U.S. residents enrolled in Medicaid or ACA exchange plans have access to care they previously could not obtain.
Health Systems Transformation
This article delves into the question of why a story as big as the recent study showing medical errors are now the third most significant cause of death in the USA - an estimated 251,000 death per year – was first reported by the British Medical Journal, rather than an American publication.