Has the internet helped China contain the coronavirus? — Mu Li

Cutting through the BS surrounding Chinese government's response to the coronavirus.

But the origin of the virus is yet unestablished. This is a limitation on prevention.

East Asia Forum
Has the internet helped China contain the coronavirus?
Mu Li | Professor of International Public Health at the Sydney School of Public Health, The University of Sydney

Aimee Lutkin — This Toilet Provides Safe Sanitation Without Plumbing Or Electricity

Effective, efficient, and inexpensive.

Poor sanitation is responsible for 80 percent of world health issues, like infectious disease, and four percent of deaths. That may sound small, but in context, it is about 1,500 children every day. It can also lead to chronic illnesses that plague both children and adults. In areas without plumbing, the options are dumping and hauling sewage, which can be both expensive and dangerous…

Public toilets also mean more women and girls are subject to sexual assault when forced to leave their home for access to a bathroom. As an exampled on their website, change:WATER writes that in Uttar Pradesh, "60% of reported gender-based violence is sanitation-related."...

Green Matters
This Toilet Provides Safe Sanitation Without Plumbing Or Electricity
Aimee Lutkin

Jonathan Turley — Study: Pollution Kills More People Than War, Smoking, Hunger, and Other Causes of Death

We have previously discussed how environmental dangers remain something of an abstraction for most people who fail to recognize that changes in air or water pollution standards results in high and quantifiable rises in death rates. Even changes in areas like shipping fuels can translate to thousands of deaths. However, since these deaths are not immediate and borne privately, the true costs of pollution are often dismissed. I have been highly critical of the environmental record of the Trump Administration for this reason in rolling back on protections in a variety of areas as well as appointing regulators with anti-environmental record.

Now a new major study has found that environmental pollution kills more people every year that all of the wars. It exceeds the death tolls for smoking, hunger or natural disasters combined. It kills more than AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined. Yet, unlike these causes of death, pollution remains a policy concern that is often pushed to the side for more immediate goals like job creation. This is not to say that environmental protection would trump all other concerns but rather the real costs of such pollution are rarely discussed in real terms of premature deaths by politicians.

The study in the respected Lancet medical journal found that one out of every six premature deaths in the world in 2015 was caused by toxic exposure. That amounts to 9 million people who died prematurely due to pollution. The study also found that the cost of the resulting illnesses and deaths amounted to some $4.6 trillion in annual losses.

Worse yet, the 9 million deaths from pollution appears a highly conservative estimate since it relied on only limited data on specific measurable cases of deaths and illnesses. The actual number is likely much higher. Moreover, only half of the 5000 news chemicals introduced since 1950 have actually been fully tested for their toxicity....

Jonathan Turley
Study: Pollution Kills More People Than War, Smoking, Hunger, and Other Causes of DeathJonathan Turley | Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University

Bill Mitchell — Unemployment makes you sick

An interesting study published in The European Journal of Public Health recently November 2014) – Length of unemployment and health related outcomes: A life course analysis – provides fairly unambiguous evidence that the changes in labour markets under neo-liberalism towards higher entrenched unemployment rates, increased casualisation of work, the lockout of graduates and the widespread deskilling of the workforce are eroding the health outcomes of the population. While most studies of the link between unemployment and health have focused on cohorts that endure continuous long-term joblessness (unbroken spells exceeding 12 months), this study is novel because it studies whether accumulated spells of shorter-term unemployment over a person’s lifetime are detrimental to their health. The reason that is relevant is because under neo-liberalism, many individuals are forced to eke out an existence in low paid jobs interspersed with spells of unemployment. The evidence in the former case (continuous) long-term unemployment is clear – unemployment makes the person sick and they get sicker the longer they are unemployment (both physically and mentally). The new study shows that long-term unemployment generated over a person’s life through a series of accumulated spells of shorter-term unemployment also is bad for public health and well-being. It means that the emphasis on austerity which causes cyclical effects to be worse (entrenched mass unemployment) is bad but also the main structural bias in growth periods towards casualised, precarious work is also bad for our health.

The authors are Urban Janlert from Umeå University, Anthony H. Winefield from University of South Australia, Anne Hammarström from University of Adelaide. 

This is a study in the field of “Life-course epidemiology”, which according the authors “has emerged within the research on the development of social inequalities in health”.…

A consequence of  pursuing efficiency at the micro level of the firm results in social dysfunction and individual impairment as externalities inherent in the neoliberal model of capitalism.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog

Unemployment makes you sick

Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Is This How The NeoLib "Memirus" Swamps Our Democracy's Adaptive Responses?

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Ignorance is our Greatest Public Health threat, social as well as physiological.

Just as HIV hides out in the immune cells concentrating in the gut, a reservoir of the NeoLib "memirus"* hides out among all the IGNORANCE CONCENTRATED IN POLITICS.




* A virus is a stripped down packet of nucleic acid packaged in a protective protein capsule.

  A memirus is a stripped down package of toxic sophism, hidden within a confusing, semantic capsule.