- The White House will turn a different shade Sunday to highlight National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The annual tradition started by President George W. Bush in 2008 is also a gesture of support to the more than 250,000 women and 2,000 men in the U.S. who will likely be diagnosed with some form of breast cancer in 2017.
- Researchers at Yale University discovered using the best data available, they calculated that if contact sports could be made noncontact — like flag football— there would be 49,600 fewer injuries among male college athletes per year and 601,900 fewer among male high school athletes.The savings — which include estimates of medical costs and time lost — could be as much as $1.5 billion per year for colleges and $19.2 billion per year for high schools.
- ’Nobody is taking care of us,” said Josefina Alvarez, 62, who had been stuck in a shelter outside of San Juan for nearly two weeks. She is one of many Puerto Ricans who have been displaced — and put in grave danger — in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Alvarez is sick and bedridden. A diabetic with breathing issues, she’s getting worse by the day. Now, she might have a life-threatening infection — and no one can get her to a hospital.
News on Health Professional Radio. Today is the 3rd of October 2017. Read by Tabetha Moreto. Health News
The White House will turn a different shade Sunday to highlight National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. “During October, we raise awareness and encourage people to take steps to reduce their risk of breast cancer,” first lady Melania Trump said in a statement released ahead of the White House being illuminated in pink light Sunday. She added: “I encourage all women to talk to their healthcare providers about mammograms and other methods of early detection and what can be done to reduce that risk.”
The annual tradition started by President George W. Bush in two thousand eight is also a gesture of support to the more than two hundred fifty thousand women and two thousand men in the United States who will likely be diagnosed with some form of breast cancer in two thousand seventeen.
Researchers at Yale University discovered using the best data available, they calculated that if contact sports could be made noncontact — like flag football, for example — there would be forty nine thousand six hundred fewer injuries among male college athletes per year and six hundred one thousand nine hundred fewer among male high school athletes. The savings — which include estimates of medical costs and time lost — could be as much as one point five billion dollars per year for colleges and nineteen point two billion dollars per year for high schools. And that takes into account only the immediate consequences of an injury, a paper by the researchers says, not the long-term effects of concussions or repeated jarring of the brain in collisions.
“The issue really is that contact is the driving force in all these major injuries,” said Ray Fair, an economics professor at Yale and the senior author of the paper. “Any sport that does not have contact, the injuries are not that great.” Fair and his colleagues focused on four types of serious injuries — concussions and damage to the nervous system, bone injuries, torn tissue, and muscle and cartilage injuries. They are the sort that can sideline an athlete for months. And football players, who have the most injuries, can have one after the other, as happened to the son of Terry O’Neil, founder of Practice Like Pros, a group that focuses on making the sport safer for young players.
Other athletes suffer for the rest of their lives from injuries in collegiate contact sports. Janet M. Currie, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, says her father, now eighty, has had a bad knee ever since he played football in college. Many more people play sports in high school than in college, so for that reason alone there are more injuries in the younger group. But high school athletes are also more prone to injuries, experts said, because they are not as skilled, they have less experienced coaches and they may not be physically mature.
‘’Nobody is taking care of us,” said Josefina Alvarez, sixty two, who had been stuck in a shelter outside of San Juan for nearly two weeks. She is one of many Puerto Ricans who have been displaced — and put in grave danger — in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Alvarez is sick and bedridden. A diabetic with breathing issues, she’s getting worse by the day. Now, she might have a life-threatening infection — and no one can get her to a hospital. Not even Doctor Astrid Morales. “She’s getting more complicated, with fever and all that, and we have nothing here to give her,” said Morales, a local doctor who has been visiting patients at a shelter in Loiza. “Time is really limited.”
When CNN arrived at the shelter, an ambulance was there but didn’t have enough gasoline to get her to the nearest hospital. On another occasion, a medical team said they didn’t have “authorization from their bosses” to get an ambulance to take her, according to Morales.
Doctors expected hospitals in Puerto Rico to overflow with patients who were desperately seeking care after the storm. But a week after the storm, many have no long lines at all; waiting rooms are unexpectedly sparse. Instead, many are in shelters. When some hospitals closed temporarily around the storm, people didn’t know where else to get help. Many flocked to shelters where they thought they’d be safe. This included bedridden people and others who have been too sick or disabled to leave the shelters on their own. But shelters lack the power, medications and supplies to treat people like Alvarez. And some who didn’t evacuate are still stuck in their homes, according to Morales. Gupta said some facilities are afraid to accept patients because they don’t have enough medications, fuel for generators or clean water; they could be forced to shut their doors at any moment.
Doctors outside of San Juan are frustrated — bewildered, even. Some basic supplies are already on the island, but a fuel shortage, blocked roads and other challenges have hindered their distribution.