But in all seriousness, World Toilet Day is a serious event. In 2013, the United Nations officially dubbed Nov. 19 the day to "celebrate toilets and raise awareness of the 3.6 billion people living without access to safely managed sanitation" – in other words, a place to do number 1 and number 2 with dignity, without risk to your safety and without endangering others with diseases that stem from fecal matter.
Indeed, each year, diarrheal diseases, which can spread via contact with fecal matter, kill half a million kids age 5 and under. Youngsters who contract these diseases and survive often are physically and cognitively stunted for life.
Using the bathroom out in the open — say, in a field or street or a body of water — is a risk factor for the spread of diarrhea as well as diseases like cholera and typhoid. According to a 2020 report by UNICEF and WHO, 494 million people practice open defecation.
With recreational marijuana now legal in New York, employers and workers are confronting a host of thorny questions about the drug and the workplace.
Can you be fired if you smoke on the job? What if you use at home? Can you be tested? The state Labor Department has some new guidance out that attempts to answer some of those questions.
People with mild or moderate hearing loss could soon be able to buy hearing aids without a medical exam or special fitting, under a new rule being proposed by the Food and Drug Administration. The agency says 37.5 million American adults have difficulty hearing.
Patients are months away from not having to worry about most surprise medical bills — those extra costs that can amount to hundreds or thousands of dollars when people are unknowingly treated by an out-of-network doctor or hospital.
The No Surprises Act — which takes effect Jan. 1 — generally forbids insurers from dropping such bills on patients and, instead, requires health care providers and insurers to work out a deal between themselves.
Some observers have speculated that the law will have the unintended consequence of shifting costs and leading to higher insurance premiums.
Many policy experts told KHN that, in fact, the opposite may happen: It may slightly slow premium growth.
The reason, said Katie Keith, a research faculty member at the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University, is that a new rule released Sept. 30 by the Biden administration appears to "put a thumb on the scale" to discourage settlements at amounts higher than most insurers generally pay for in-network care.
You sometimes see that sign nailed to telephone poles or strapped on the porches of rundown rural homesteads way out in the country. Liberals like to dismiss these folks as brain washed “fundies”, they American Taliban. But when you hear these folks talk, they are deeply held in their convictions.
While my views have evolved, I support safe and legal abortions as it’s a relatively low cost medical procedure and it can make a women’s life better by having the choice between carrying a pregnancy to term or not.
Now I don’t approve of recreational sexual activities or one night stands. The risk of sexually transmitted diseases that can have life altering consequences like HIV remains high even if many are very mitigable. I don’t like how television promotes casual sexual activities or sex for fun or reasons other than having a child. Contraception isn’t perfect.
Any society with the creation of life is going to have the destruction of life. But a child yet born is going to have none of the experiences of life, none of the colors, the smells or the tastes of life. They might have the beating of a heart but it’s the meaningless contraction of muscle cells, much like a recently slaughtered chicken might flap around after his or her head is chopped off. But those contractions are meaningless.
On 23 April 2010, a memorial plaque was unveiled outside the Greater Binghamton Transportation Center bus terminal in Binghamton, New York, in honour of a mostly forgotten civil rights and mental health advocate who was murdered on that day 47 years prior.
William Lewis Moore, born in Binghamton on 28 April 1927, was a postal worker and member of the Congress of Racial Equality, who achieved a level of notoriety for staging lone protests against racial segregation in an era when few white people supported such causes.
Moore also became an advocate for mental health issues, a result of having been institutionalized for a year and a half after suffering a mental breakdown while a graduate student at John Hopkins University in the early 1950s. He would ultimately be diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia.
Moore staged lone protests by marching to capital cities on three separate occasions to hand-deliver letters he’d written denouncing the practice of racial segregation. His first march was to Annapolis, the state capital of Maryland, followed by a march to the White House to deliver a letter to President John F. Kennedy, on the same day that Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was released from the jail in Binghamton following protests in that city.