Health

Leaking Gas Well Lacked Working Safety Valve

January 4, 2016 By Zahira Torres and Frank Shyong Leave a Comment

As reported by the Los Angeles Times:

A leaking natural gas well that has displaced thousands of residents in Porter Ranch lacked a working safety valve, sparking new questions about how the facility was maintained.

Attorneys for residents suing Southern California Gas Co. said the company failed to replace the safety valve when it was removed in 1979.

The safety valve may not have prevented the leak, but it would have stopped the continued release of fumes pouring into the community, attorney Brian Panish said in an interview Sunday.

SoCal Gas spokeswoman Melissa Bailey confirmed in an email to The Times that the well did not have …

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Filed Under: Trending News Tagged With: Gas leak, Health, natural gas, Porter Ranch, Public health, regulation

California University Will Ban Soda Sales On Campus

June 17, 2015 By Blake Neff 7 Comments

The University of California-San Francisco is halting the sale of soda and other sugary drinks on campus due to health concerns.

Under the new policy, which was decided upon in May and will be implemented in July, campus vendors will be blocked from selling all drinks with added sugar calories to the school’s 4,600 students. That means no Coca-Cola, no Dr. Pepper, and no fruit punch. Diet sodas and 100 percent juice drinks will still be tolerated, and students will be allowed to bring sugary drinks on campus if they buy them elsewhere.

“The average American consumes nearly three times the recommended amount of added sugar every day,” UCSF professor Laura Schmidt said in the school’s initial announcement. “The most common single source is sugar-sweetened beverages.”

While UCSF characterizes the policy as a voluntary “strategy” for its vendors, the vendors themselves don’t agree. Kenneth Guzman, who operates an on-campus restaurant, told Inside Higher Ed that he “didn’t really have a choice” about dumping soda.

“I felt like it was a little too rash, they are too harsh,” Guzman said. “We could’ve just educated our customers on how to choose healthier alternatives and not punish them, taking away what they love.”

Another food vendor on campus said he thought it was silly for the school to ban sugared drinks but not diet sodas.

“Artificial sugars are worse than sugar itself,” said Peasant Pie operator Ali Keshavarz. “If my kid had a choice between a sugar soda and a diet soda, I’d want them to have the sugar soda, I know that for a fact.”

The new policy makes UCSF the first university in the country to put such a broad limit on sugar sales, and comes just two years after the campus banned all tobacco products.

The decision may be slightly more justified at UCSF than at other colleges, as the school is focused solely on graduate education in health sciences.

The move is also premised on research the school itself has conducted. A 2012 article in Nature by three UCSF researchers argued the health consequences of added sugars were so severe they deserved to be regulated in a manner similar to alcohol.

“Passive smoking and drink-driving fatalities provided strong arguments for tobacco and alcohol control,” the authors say in the article. “The long-term economic, health-care and human costs of metabolic syndrome place sugar overconsumption in the same category. The United States spends $65 billion in lost productivity and $150 billion on health-care resources annually for morbidities associated with metabolic syndrome.” Metabolic disorders related to sugar, the authors say, consume 75 percent of U.S. health spending.

Since “individually focused approaches” such as education aren’t working, the authors say, what is needed are “supply-side” restrictions such as higher taxes, age restrictions, and banning sales at schools.

Leeanne Jensen, the school’s wellness coordinator, told Inside Higher Ed the ban meant UCSF was “living our mission” by adopting its own advice on health. She also said the ban was focused on sugary drinks because their effect on health was particularly bad. High-sugar foods like cookies are more satiating than soda, she said, while the research on diet sodas is not as clear regarding whether they are unhealthy or not.

Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation

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Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Health, regulation, san francisco, Soda, UCSF, University of California

Mandatory Vaccination Bill Quickly Advancing Through Legislature

May 20, 2015 By James Poulos 4 Comments

After a fractious debate, the California Senate passed a revised draft of the controversial bill that would largely eliminate the state’s religious and personal belief exemptions for child inoculation. With the bill on a likely track for passage in the Assembly, momentum has begun to gather for even more muscular pro-vaccine legislation.

Sweeping changes

As CalWatchdog.com previously reported, state Sens. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, and Ben Allen, D-Santa Monica, had to rewrite key passages of the bill’s language in order to head off potential constitutional challenges to its treatment of kids without the specified vaccinations.

The bulk of the original bill remained intact, however, sweeping away California’s longstanding and generous rules permitting parents to keep their children vaccine-free. “Several Republican senators tried to stall the bill by introducing a series of amendments that would have reinserted the religious exemption and required labeling of vaccine ingredients,” according to the Sacramento Bee. But Democrats moved swiftly to shut them down.

For some critics, barring unvaccinated children from public school remained a bone of contention. “It’s clear that a large portion of concerned parents will likely withhold their children from public schools because of their concerns or lack of comfort from the vaccination process,” said GOP state Sen. John Moorlach, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

But some carveouts were set to remain. “The legislation only addresses families that will soon enroll their children in school,” as Newsweek observed. “Under the proposed law, children who aren’t currently immunized are not required to get vaccinated until seventh grade. The law still allows families to opt out due to medical reasons, such as a history of allergies to vaccines and inherited or acquired immune disorders or deficiencies.”

The so-called grandfather clause represented a major concession to parents’ groups, which had succeeded in stalling Pan and Allen’s legislation once before. Now, as the San Jose Mercury News reported, “more than 13,000 children who have had no vaccinations by first grade won’t have to get their shots until they enter seventh grade. And nearly 10,000 seventh-graders who today aren’t fully vaccinated may be able to avoid future shots because the state does not always require them after that grade.”

Regulatory momentum

Despite the lenience built into the advancing legislation, the pro-vaccine logic that propelled it has already increased momentum for an even more assertive approach to enforcing inoculation.

As KQED News has noted, “two other vaccine-related bills are making their way through the Legislature a bit more quietly. One would require preschool and child care workers to have certain vaccinations; another seeks to improve vaccination rates for 2-year-olds.”

“If SB792 becomes law, California will be the first state in the country to require that all preschool and child care workers be immunized against measles, pertussis and the flu.”

Supporters of the ratcheted-up regulation sought to head off more controversy by downplaying the invasiveness and inconvenience of their approach. “We certainly aren’t out to arrest people who aren’t vaccinated,” said Kat DeBurgh, executive director of the Health Officers Association of California, a group that sponsored SB792. “We wanted to make this just like any other violation of code that an inspector would look for. If you don’t remediate, then there is a fine to the day care center.”

At the same time, pro-vaccination analysts have speculated that the Golden State will save money the more it ensures vaccination. Referring to a recent study showing that Iowa’s health care spending would double if it added a personal belief exemption, Tara Haelle suggested that California’s “health care cost savings would be far more substantial” once its exemption was eliminated, although, she conceded, “no thorough analyses are currently available.”

Originally published by CalWatchdog.com

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Health, Health care, Legislature, liberty, regulation, SB277, Vaccination, Vaccine

E-Cigs Under Fire From CA Dept. of Public Health

March 27, 2015 By James Poulos 1 Comment

With public opinion in flux and anti-tobacco activists on edge, the California Department of Public Health has rolled out “Wake Up,” a slick new ad campaign to discourage the use of e-cigarettes, or “vapes.” Recently, CDPH pronounced e-cigs a threat to public health.

In a statement explaining the campaign, CDPH described two new TV ads emphasizing “the e-cigarette industry’s use of candy flavored ‘e-juice’” and “exposing the fact that big tobacco companies are in the e-cigarette business.”

The move bolstered momentum for broad crackdowns on vapes, which have been targeted by policymakers and activists who see them as just as bad as tobacco cigarettes — if not worse.

Playing politics

Political considerations have played into CDPH’s adverse judgment against vapes. New data recently showed that, last year, the use of e-cigs outpaced the use of tobacco cigarettes among teenagers and young adults.

Defenders of the freedom to vape argued this is good news. Vaping companies have claimed e-cigs help smokers abandon far more dangerous tobacco products, especially those, like traditional cigarettes, that emit high numbers of carcinogens.

But for prohibitionists, e-cigs presented a special hazard because of their accessibility and appeal to children. As the Los Angeles Daily News detailed, those drawbacks appeared to be the product of unregulated marketing, a more pleasurable use experience and apparent carelessness among adult consumers with children:

“Most startling to health officials was the spike in calls to California Poison Control centers related to exposures to accidental e-cigarette poisonings, including drinking the liquid inside. There were seven calls in 2012 to poison control. In 2014, those calls jumped to 243. More than 60 percent of all those e-cigarette related calls involved children 5 years and under.”

As NBC News reported, “bottles and cartridges that contain the liquid for e-cigs have been known to leak and tend not to be equipped with child-resistant caps, creating a potential source of poisoning through ingestion or just through skin contact.”

Although legislation and regulation could be tailored narrowly to focus on the threat of poisoning, public health officials issued a broad warning that comports with the prevailing view among prohibitionists.

Dr. Ron Chapman, State Health Officer and director of the California Department of Public Health, said that “many people do not know that they pose many of the same health risks as traditional cigarettes and other tobacco products.” In January, hecalled for a “bold public education campaign” to roll back e-cig gains in market share. Anti-smoking advocates working in the policy arena have been all but unanimous in treating e-cigs like an integral part of the same problem as tobacco products.

Safety over freedom

Despite the unfolding research concerning the differences between e-cig effects and those of tobacco cigarettes, prohibitionists in the political arena have used heightened rhetoric of their own to advance vape bans.

Earlier this year, state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, underscored how far many officials have been willing to go in departing from the scientific record. In January, he introduced Senate Bill 140, a bill that would ban e-cigs at hospitals, restaurants, schools and workplaces.

“No tobacco product should be exempt from California’s smoke-free laws simply because it’s sold in a modern or trendy disguise,” he warned. Yet, as Reason’s Jacob Sullum observed, e-cigs neither emit smoke nor burn tobacco. Instead, they heat a device which allows the user to exhale a vapor.

SB140 will go into committee hearings this spring, behind a full-steam-ahead approach to cracking down on vapes. As CalWatchdog.com reported previously, the so-called “precautionary principle” — better safe than sorry — has inspired a spate of municipal regulations that treat e-cigs the same way as tobacco cigarettes, despite widespread ignorance and uncertainty as to how the products differ.