It’s flu season, a fact you’ve probably noticed if you’ve experienced a bout of achy, feverish misery, or if you’ve seen the equally feverish news reports on the mounting death toll in North Texas, which reached 21 yesterday. To put this all in context, we spoke with Dallas County Health…
This fall, as the growing stack of policy cancellations was giving the lie to Obama’s ill-considered “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” promise, newspaper editors across the country were simultaneously barking at reporters to dig up Obamacare horror stories, and fast. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s…
Erick Munoz wasn’t trying to set off a debate about abortion or end-of-life care. He just wanted to comply with the wishes of his wife, who is on life support at JPS Hospital in Fort Worth after suffering an apparent pulmonary embolism two days before Thanksgiving. But because his wife,…
At the request of Governor Rick Perry, the Texas Department of Insurance rolled out an additional set of requirements Obamacare “navigators” will be subject to. On top of the training and certification the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services mandates, TDI will require an additional 40 hours of continuing…
Placing tough new rules on abortion clinics is just common sense, according to common sense fanatic Rick Perry. He says that House Bill 2–the new law requiring all abortions to be performed in surgical centers, by a doctor with admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles — will ensure…
When the ACLU, Planned Parenthood and more than a dozen health care providers took Attorney General Greg Abbott to court in September to challenge Texas’ new anti-abortion law, they weren’t trying to tackle the entire law. Instead, they narrowed in on a few key provisions that were supposed to take…
James O’Keefe may be the motive force behind Project Veritas, the conservative nonprofit that has taken down ACORN, an NPR executive and now a handful of health-insurance navigators, but its latest undercover video sting wouldn’t have packed the same punch had it been him walking into the Urban League of…
As President Barack Obama was praising Obamacare volunteers at Dallas’ Temple Emanu-El last week, conservative activist James O’Keefe was plotting a visit of his own. O’Keefe, whose video stings have successfully taken down the community group ACORN and an NPR executive, had members of his Project Veritas team visit local…
The electronic cigarette is either a) a near-miraculous smoking-cessation tool that has enabled untold thousands of smokers to ditch tobacco or b) a rapidly growing menace to public health. Or, it could be both. Researchers aren’t really sure and won’t be until they can study the long-term health effects of…
Unless Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit gets in the way, Texas’ new abortion restrictions will require all abortion providers to become ambulatory surgical centers by September 1, 2014 or close their doors. But state regulators seem to be even tougher on abortion clinics than for your typical ASC. Until recently, it hasn’t…
Here’s the good news for customers of Dallas-based USP Labs. Its dietary supplements are no longer linked to fatal heart attacks. The FDA made sure of that this summer when it made the company destroy $8 million worth of product containing dimethlyamylamine, or DMAA, a compound that had been linked…
Any old state controlled by aging Republicans can pass laws to dramatically restrict access to abortion. It’s what you do when your state faces poverty, drought and a ton of other pressing issues that you’d rather not deal with. But making the anti-abortion laws stick is the real challenge. Texas…
You’re a public health policymaker in Texas. Teenage girls in the state are getting knocked up at an alarming rate, then they’re having babies and getting knocked up again. The data, along with the bulk of the scientific literature, suggest that the state’s longstanding strategy of telling kids not to…
For the most part, Americans have come to accept restaurant- and workplace-smoking bans. Even in freedom-loving Texas, most residents view them less as an encroachment on individual liberty than a reasonable measure to protect the health of nonsmokers, even if their politicians don’t. The alarmed cries of nanny-statism are now…
Life Dynamics, the Denton-based pro-life group that long ago earned a permanent spot on Planned Parenthood’s anti-choice hall of fame, has always prided itself on being a bit different from its allies in the abortion fight. It’s less about standing outside of abortion clinics with photos of bloody fetuses than…
For several days now, state health officials have been sounding the alarm about a nascent measles outbreak in North Texas. As of Friday, there had been nine confirmed cases, a number that will grow as new reports from local health agencies filter up to the state. The epicenter of the…
The professional buzz kills at the Centers for Disease Control have no shortage of sobering alcohol statistics to aid their campaign against excessive drinking: 14,000 people die each year in drunk-driving crashes; 36,000 are killed by alcohol-related liver disease, hypertension, and other chronic illnesses; and another 5,500 are killed in…
Parkland Memorial Hospital, the Dallas County-run hospital, has had a rough go of it the past few years: the psych patient dying after being illegally restrained; the tainted vaginal instruments; the resident whose sexual assault of a patient was swept under the rug; the federal government’s declaration that the hospital…
In the past several weeks, Republicans have increased their steady barrage against the Affordable Care Act, but conservatives aren’t the only ones putting out propaganda. The liberal Center for American Progress Action Fund published a report on Thursday highlighting the benefits of Obamacare, particularly for poor people. The report, like…
The most restrictive part of Texas’ new. controversial abortion law isn’t its ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy — only 1 percent of abortions occur after this time anyway. It’s the “ambulatory surgical center” regulation that requires all clinics that perform abortions to become ambulatory surgical centers, which…
It hasn’t even been 24 hours since Governor Rick Perry signed House Bill 2, the infamous abortion clinic-killing bill, into law, and three Planned Parenthood clinics are already making plans to shut their doors. The Huffington Post reports that Planned Parenthood clinics in Bryan, Huntsville and Lufkin will close down…
At this point last year, Dallas County had already recorded a handful of West Nile deaths, a figure that would ramp up to 19 in the following weeks and months as the number of infections skyrocketed. But the West Nile outbreak of 2012, which resulted in a record 286 death…
