Rochdale Village Health

With a large portion of the North East still desperately trying to recover from the aftermath of hurricane Sandy the help of numerous charities and individuals have proved invaluable in helping these areas. Delaware MVJ Club member Tim Rahaim and his girlfriend Brianna Jones recently spearheaded a local effort to provide donations and volunteer hours to Neptune and Union New Jersey.

Their first stop was to drop off 742 pounds of food, toiletries, and cleaning products to the Food Bank of Monmouth and Ocean Counties. Tim and company then went over to the beach town of Union to help prepare meals for displaced residents and the more than 100 volunteers who were cleaning out flooded houses.

Original article can be found at MVJ News.

Seeking to reduce runaway obesity rates, the New York City Board of Health on Thursday approved a ban on the sale of large sodas and other sugary drinks at restaurants, street carts and movie theaters, the first restriction of its kind in the country.

The measure, championed by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, is certain to intensify a growing national debate about soft drinks and obesity, and it could spur other cities to follow suit, even as many New Yorkers say they remain uneasy about the plan.

“This is the single biggest step any city, I think, has ever taken to curb obesity,” Mr. Bloomberg said shortly after the vote. “It’s certainly not the last step that lots of cities are going to take, and we believe that it will help save lives.”

The measure, which bars the sale of many sweetened drinks in containers larger than 16 ounces, is to take effect on March 12, unless it is blocked by a judge. The vote by the Board of Health was the only regulatory approval needed to make the ban binding in the city, but the American soft-drink industry has campaigned strongly against the measure and vowed this week to fight it through other means, possibly in the courts.

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President Roosevelt once used the the West African proverb “speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.” That phrase has defined Roosevelt’s political legacy.

When it comes to Assemblywoman Vivian Cook (Assembly District 32), the West African Proverb has been modified; the new proverb coming out of Southeast Queens, New York is “Speak with authority and swinging a big stick, you will go far.”

Everyone knows when it comes to representing her district and constituents, Assemblywoman Cook doesn’t wavier, no matter what the political odds are. Vivian Cook’s legislative stick reaches deep into the politics of New York State and she has used it many times to push legislative reform for her community.

Assemblywoman Cook’s long service to the community speaks for itself. There are very few elected officials in Southeast Queens who have addressed the core issues of a community. Assemblywoman Cook is known to stand up whether it’s fighting a political issue in Albany, supporting local grass roots organizations, or addressing concerns of an entire Community.

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This past July, the Kaiser Family Foundation published their findings in regards to the HIV/Aids epidemic in African American community.  In their report they focus on the fact that:

“Black Americans have been disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS since the epidemic’s beginning, and that disparity has deepened over time. Blacks account for more new HIV infections, AIDS diagnoses, people estimated to be living with HIV disease, and HIV related deaths than any other racial/ethnic group in the U.S.”

In an effort to help close the gap and educate the African American community, the report continues by including facts about HIV/Aids in regards to:

• Women and Young People
• Transmission
• HIV Testing
• Health Insurance
• Geographic Impact
• Access to Healthcare

The full report from the Kaiser Family Foundation can be found here and we encourage all of our readers to read the full report and to share it with your friends and family.  The only way to start to combat HIV/Aids and other health concerns in the community is to educate ourselves and learn to prevent these illnesses before they become and issue.

Photo taken from the NY Post

Senator Shirley Huntley and Assemblywoman Vivian Cook have announced that their offices have begun working with Community Wellness Centers of America, LLC (CWCOA) to provide Diabetes evidence-based healthcare services in Southeast Queens.

The Huntley/ Cook /CWCOA healthcare initiative will provide a full spectrum of integrated services and programs that specifically addresses diabetes by establishing several community diabetes education/clinical outreach locations in affiliation with a national recognized diabetes organization.

The 2006 National Healthcare Disparities Report particularly notes that for most core quality measures, Blacks (73%), Hispanics (77%), and the poor (71%) received worse quality care than other reference groups, with increasing disparities especially prevalent in chronic disease management.

As Senator Huntley stated “improving the health of all people cannot be realized without addressing healthcare disparities. We must bring healthcare access and treatment to an even plain. This project will address diabetes and other related diseases head on. Our goal is to educate the community and make sure we give the people top notch medical care.”

Dr. Robert Evans, CEO/President of CWCOA stated that “diabetes is a group of diseases marked by high levels of blood glucose resulting from defects in insulin production, insulin action, or both. Diabetes can lead to serious complications and premature death, but people with diabetes, working together with their support network and their health care providers, can take steps to control the disease and lower the risk of complications”.

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(from nydailynews.com)

Scientists found that healthy cells damaged by chemotherapy secreted more of a protein called WNT16B, which boosts cancer cell survival. ‘The increase in WNT16B was completely unexpected,” said Peter Nelson, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Long considered the most effective cancer-fighting treatment, chemotherapy may actually make cancer worse, according to a shocking new study.

The extremely aggressive therapy, which kills both cancerous and healthy cells indiscriminately, can cause healthy cells to secrete a protein that sustains tumor growth and resistance to further treatment.

Researchers in the United States made the “completely unexpected” finding while seeking to explain why cancer cells are so resilient inside the human body when they are easy to kill in the lab.

They tested the effects of a type of chemotherapy on tissue collected from men with prostate cancer, and found “evidence of DNA damage” in healthy cells after treatment, the scientists wrote in Nature Medicine.

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Not everything on the Internet is true.

A new study shows that just over half of websites from Google searches for infant sleep safety actually reflect the official recommendations made by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“It is important for health care providers to realize the extent to which parents may turn to the Internet for information about infant sleep safety and then act on that advice, regardless of the reliability of the source,” study researcher Dr. Rachel Y. Moon, M.D., a pediatrician and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) researcher at the Children’s National Medical Center, said in a statement.

The Journal of Pediatrics study included Google searches for infant sleep safety (like how to reduce the risk of SIDS, how to avoid infant sleeping accidents, and the like). The Google searches brought up a total of 1,300 websites.

Of those searches, 28.4 percent of the results were irrelevant, 43.5 percent of the results actually had correct information and 28.1 percent had incorrect information. After taking out the irrelevant search results, the percentage of results containing correct information grew to 60.8 percent.

The researchers found that some search phrases elicited more accurate search results than others. For example, searching for “infant cigarette smoking” and “infant sleep position” prompted the most accurate results, while searching for “pacifier infant” and “infant co-sleeping” prompted the fewest accurate results.

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A small community hospital in Brooklyn is running out of cash and fears it will not be able to make its payroll or pay its vendors by September without a state bailout, the hospital’s administrators said this week.

Nathan M. Barotz, center, the chairman of Interfaith’s board, with Luis Hernandez, left, Interfaith’s chief executive, said the hospital needed $10 million to $30 million to keep going.

The hospital, Interfaith Medical Center, serves a largely Caribbean-American and poor population in Bedford-Stuyvesant and north-central Brooklyn. Interfaith’s chief executive, Luis Hernandez, said this week that while the hospital was making payroll and paying vendors, it had only 18 days to 20 days of cash on hand and it had not been able to pay interest on its state-backed mortgage since November.

The chairman of Interfaith’s board of trustees, Nathan M. Barotz, blamed another Brooklyn hospital, Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, in Bushwick, for Interfaith’s plight; he accused Wyckoff’s administration of dragging its heels on a plan to shore up operations by combining the operations of Interfaith, Wyckoff and Brooklyn Hospital Center, in Fort Greene.

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It will not surprise any New Yorkers to learn that researchers at MIT have named JFK the U.S. airport most likely to spread disease outward. Don’t forget to wash your hands.

No surprises here.

In a report that will shock exactly zero New Yorkers, JFK has been named the U.S. airport most likely to spread disease.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studied 40 of the largest U.S. airports to learn which are most likely to spread a contagion from their home cities to other parts of the world.

The researchers say their work will help public health officials contain and treat infections before an outbreak explodes.

In fairness to the airport’s maintenance staff, JFK’s first-class ranking had nothing to do with cleanliness.

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President Obama’s health care law is putting new strains on some of the nation’s most hard-pressed hospitals, by cutting aid they use to pay for emergency care for illegal immigrants, which they have long been required to provide.

The federal government has been spending $20 billion annually to reimburse these hospitals — most in poor urban and rural areas — for treating more than their share of the uninsured, including illegal immigrants. The health care law will eventually cut that money in half, based on the premise that fewer people will lack insurance after the law takes effect.

But the estimated 11 million people now living illegally in the United States are not covered by the health care law. Its sponsors, seeking to sidestep the contentious debate over immigration, excluded them from the law’s benefits.

As a result, so-called safety-net hospitals said the cuts would deal a severe blow to their finances.

The hospitals are coming under this pressure because many of their uninsured patients are illegal immigrants, and because their large pools of uninsured or poorly insured patients are not expected to be reduced significantly under the Affordable Care Act, even as federal aid shrinks.

The hospitals range from prominent public ones, like Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan, to neighborhood mainstays like Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn and Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego. They include small rural outposts like Othello Community Hospital in Washington State, which receives a steady flow of farmworkers who live in the country illegally.

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