Health
This section focuses on the many factors that influence our health—news and ideas that you may not find in the mainstream media. Here is a sample:
- Sustainability & Public Health – Unsustainable practices harm the environment, of course, but they are also make people sick!
- Expanding Health Care Coverage without Increasing Cost – a ‘white paper’ from The Dartmouth Institute
- Childhood asthma – a critical problem for the Lehigh Valley
- Breastfeeding Awareness
- Health Dangers of Teflon
- You are what you eat: how industrial agriculture is destroying human health – a research paper by a Moravian College student intern.
Diesel Pollution in the Lehigh Valley
Many believe that school buses are the safest method of transportation for children to get to school, but is it the healthiest? Diesel pollution is becoming a more significant problem across the United States today and specifically, the Lehigh Valley … more
Sustainability & Public Health
Let’s look at sustainability in terms of how our practices affect human health, both immediately and over the long term. Whether we call them health problems or environmental problems, though, the prescription for corrective actions is almost identical. The health lens is … more
Childhood asthma is a serious problem in Lehigh Valley
For years the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has listed both Lehigh and Northampton counties among the worst in the U.S. for air quality, and one of the worst pollutants comes from Diesel engines: Both counties are among the worst 2 … more
Expanding Health Care Coverage without Increasing Cost
Expanding Coverage without Increasing Health Care Spending: Dartmouth Institute White Paper Recommends Course for the Obama Administration December 17, 2008 Lebanon, NH—The United States can extend coverage to the country’s uninsured without substantially increasing overall health care costs, according to a … more
Breastfeeding Awareness
(paraphrased from “The Dastardly Deeds of the AAP”, Mothering Magazine March-April 2004) The National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign is a three-year multimedia social marketing campaign whose purpose is to carry out the recommendations of the US Department of Health and Human … more
Protect us from the dangers of drilling & fracking!
The following is from a letter to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection or Environmental Quality Board. If you have any questions, suggestions, or corrections please let us know. It may—theoretically—be possible to drill for shale gas reserves safely, but … more
Healthy Food for Healthy Communities
This section contains excerpts from ‘Healthy Food for Healthy Communities’, a report that outlines sustainability and public health implications of the industrial agriculture system and food service operations in institutions such as hospitals, colleges & universities, and schools. The report … more
The Problem with Industrialized Agriculture
According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, industrial agriculture ‘views the farm as a factory with “inputs” (such as pesticides, feed, fertilizer, and fuel) and “outputs” (corn, chickens, and so forth)…’1 Many of the ‘inputs’ used to maximize production are … more
Food That Promotes Health and Wellbeing
To avoid the problems that go with food from the inudstrialized agriculture system, we need to change to food that is grown sustainably.10 Switching to such food reduces the levels of pesticides in humans and prevents some of the negative health … more