Public Health Practice
Worth reading: Lessons from getting shot, the mental strain of poverty, and dengue in Florida
A few of the recent pieces I’ve liked:
Brian Beutler in Salon: The $200K lesson I learned from getting shot
Sarah Kliff, Sandhya Somashekhar, Lena H. Sun and Karen Tumulty in the Washington Post: How eight lives would be affected by the health law
Sendhil Mullainathan in the New York Times: The Mental Strain of Making Do With Less
Patricia Sagastume at Al Jazeera America: Dengue fever presence in Florida at a ‘pretty serious level’
Alan Durning at DC Streetsblog: Apartment Blockers (about how the costs of underground parking contribute to high rents)
Re. Dengue, a truly mild & modest proposal:
Teach elementary school children to patrol their yards and empty any container of standing water, and remove anything that could become a source of standing water. Teach them to tell their parents about it.
Make a contest out of it if need be. A simple calculation of mosquitos per quantity of water, multiplied out, will let kids know how many mosquitos they potentially prevented. This could become something to brag about.
There will be occasional pockets of resistance such as parents who like having bird baths in the yard, but for those, having the kids emptying & refilling them daily is a minimal waste of water by comparison.
I see in some of the press on Dengue, laments about the loss of DDT as a control measure. But DDT also breeds resistance, so if it’s reintroduced at all, it has to be handled as a kind of last-resort. In an emergency, DDT could provide a quick knock-down, but if and only if the public are willing to do the basic sanitation measures about open water sources on their properties.
Lastly, no doubt you know about un-maintained swimming pools as industrial-scale mosquito breeding vats, during the foreclosure crisis. The answer to that is strict legal and financial liability to the financial institution.