Tag: Health

We need a proposition for this one

News10.net reports that an all-women facility of the California Family Fitness chain of gymnasiums will be forced to open its doors to men due to threat of litigation.

California Family Fitness operates 14 other gyms for both men and women, but kept its Howe Avenue location single-sex because it grew out of a nearby women’s health club known as Living Well Lady purchased by the company in 1997.

The company said it has also modified seven other locations that had separate workout areas for men and women.

I tell you what, these are wacky times we live in. Curves anyone?

Vote & Vax comes to Sacramento (maybe)

The national Vote & Vax campaign will be offering up flu vaccinations at two Sacramento locations on Tuesday, November 4th. These are sponsored by the Sacramento County Immunization Program.

Sounds all well and good, right? Sure, unless you want more information or some details…

Update: The Sacramento Bee reports that the second clinic (Capital Christian Center) is being sponsored by the “local NBC affiliate” and that the charge there is $30 (it’s $10 at the Rancho Cordova City Hall location). Still not showing up on the Vote & Vax site.

Continue reading “Vote & Vax comes to Sacramento (maybe)”

“I left my heart in the old CompUSA building”

Has anyone checked out Bodies: Revealed over on Alta Arden?

I saw this exhibit earlier this year in a different city, and it’s a must for anyone in the medical field (or for those of us who feel we’ve missed our calling.  Any other fans of the Mutter Museum at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia out there?)

The bodies are presented respectfully, and they give a close-up view of muscles, nerves, organs, bones, the circulatory system, what certain diseases look like, and a multitude of other fascinating facets of anatomy.  It’s amazing how well engineered we are. I was with a fellow runner, so she and I were pointing out the different things that have ailed us over the years, most notably the piriformis muscle, patellar tendon, and iliotibial band.

The Sacramento exhibit is just one of many exhibitions of actual cadavers that have been preserved and dissected — all bodies used were donated to science.  Check it out, 10am-10pm daily, through March 2008.

Group discounts are available, so here’s a chance for sacrag meet-up, and we can truly see that we’re really all the same inside.

No, this doesn’t bode well…

Yeah I know that headline won’t make any sense after a few days from now. But News10 brings us the news that the rate of sexually transmitted diseases is out of control in Sac county.

Researchers estimated that 40 percent of Sacramento’s teens and young adults have an STD such as chlamydia, HIV, gonorrhea, syphilis, genital herpes, hepatitis B and HPV.

If you’ll permit me to switch to French for a moment…holy shit!! 40 percent??

p.s. Typo on Glenna Trochet.

Damn those mossies!

So I’m reading that four northern counties will undergo aerial spraying for West Nile virus beginning Monday and I couldn’t help but wonder how this came about so quickly.  Then I hop over to sacbee.com and check out an article about two new cases of West Nile being discovered this week.

From the Sac Bee article:

District officials were sharply criticized in 2005 when, during a West Nile epidemic, they began aerial spraying in Sacramento and Yolo counties with little public notice. As a result, the district initiated an intensive awareness campaign to publicize every facet of its mosquito control efforts.

From the News 10 article:

The decision follows Thursday’s announcement that two human cases of the virus have been detected in the county.

Now that’s an intense effort to publicize EVERY facet, huh?

Trans-fat bill exempts junk food in schools?

Don’t even get me started about the new Statewide trans-fat ban bill. There are circles of Snark Hell reserved for the nanny-state sillyness in the California Assembly. At least with this round, you say, the nannies are protecting the children:

Oils that contain less than 0.5 grams per serving would be OK, as would pre-packaged foods sold in schools

D’oh. Well, at least they banned smokable cancer sticks, right? Double d’oh!!

Spray now, we’ll discuss the details later

Wanted to follow up on the WNV epidemic from a few weeks ago. It turns out that it is going to be very difficult to determine whether or not the abrupt spraying of pesticide over our homes even worked! According to a sacbee.com article, “it may be impossible ever to draw firm scientific conclusions on how much the pesticide treatments helped to stem the West Nile virus.” Apparently, this has a lot to do with budget restraints on the vector control agency.

I don’t want to go off on a rant here, but aren’t budgets the sort of thing you work out in advance? Like, maybe a year or so? Perhaps when we were told last year that this virus was out there and potentially could hit us hard if we didn’t wear long sleeved shirts, spray on the DEET, and stay inside during peak skeeter hours, the powers that be could have also been preparing themselves fiscally. Realizing that this could get to a point where mass spraying of potentially cancer causing chemicals would be required.

I don’t know, just seems a little Bush league (pun intended) to drop this stuff on us with no real, shall we say, exit strategy? (hey, we’re kicking it up a notch here at the rag so work with me!)

They report…you assume and move on

Another example of why you must do your own due diligence when forming opinions and doing research. Taken from News10 this morning:

    Butte County Man Dies of West Nile Virus

“Wow!” you might say, “this is getting out of hand, people are dying left and right.” However, read on a few lines and you find:

    The man who died was suffering from a chronic disease in addition to West Nile.

Now I am not saying this man did or didn’t die of the WNV, but “chronic disease” does sort of mean, well, “Lasting for a long period of time or marked by frequent recurrence, as certain diseases: chronic colitis.”

Gotta get them skeeters, eh?

With all this talk of Sacramento’s mosquito killers, it’s interesting to note some similarities in how people were warned about mass spraying of pesticides to combat WNV in other jurisdictions.

In Canada, there’s a fight brewing in the province of Manitoba, where local citizens also were given very little warning about the spraying of Malathion (another mosquitocide) over residential neighborhoods (or as we say in Canada, nehbourhoods). While doctors up north have voiced their concerns, the push for large scale fogging is continuing.

It seems the modus operandi of “vector control” people is to give citizens little warning before spraying their property, pets and plants with bug poison.

Ah, the perils of democracy.