Pardon. M. le Président, avez-vous lu la législation ?

At Columbia University yesterday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy both chastised and praised the US for the passage of the Health Insurance Bill:

“Welcome to the club of states who don’t turn their back on the sick and the poor,” said Sarkozy. He also added: “When we look at the American debate on reforming health care, it’s difficult to believe. The very fact that there should have been such a violent debate simply on the fact that the poorest of Americans should not be left out in the streets without a cent to look after them … is something astonishing to us.”

snip

“If you come to France and something happens to you, you won’t be asked for your credit card before you’re rushed to the hospital.”

M. Sarkozy hasn’t read the bill, obviously.

Welcome to this week’s Health and Fitness. This is an Open Thread.

Drug-resistant tuberculosis killed about 150,000 people in 2008, and half of all the world’s cases are thought in be in China and India, the World Health Organization said in a report last week.

No one knows the exact number of cases of the two types of drug-resistant TB, called MDR and XDR for multidrug-resistant and extensively drug-resistant.

A few places, like Peru and Hong Kong, have fought the disease effectively, as New York City did in the early 1990s. Progress has been made in parts of Siberia, but in another region of Russia, more than a quarter of all cases are drug-resistant. And in Africa, a vast majority of cases have probably not even been diagnosed, the report said.

Even standard tuberculosis takes six months to cure with a four antibiotic cocktail. But the drugs cost only $20 and are relatively easy to take. Drug-resistant forms can take two years and require dangerously toxic drugs that cost $5,000 or more per person; they usually emerge when public health officials fail to ensure that patients with regular TB take their drugs daily.

As is now custom, I’ll try to include the more interesting and pertinent articles that will help the community awareness of their health and bodies. This essay will not be posted anywhere else due to constraints on my time. Please feel free to make suggestions for improvement and ask questions, I’ll answer as best I can.  

Once again the radical right wing known as The Tea Party, that has become the face and voice of the Republican Party, has shown it ugly side and gotten the attention of the media. The Tea Party movement with the blessings and assistance of the Republicans in Congress once again demonstrated that they are arrogant, ignorant, bigots.

The “Partiers” called Democrats, even the ones that supported their misogynist, hate agenda, “baby killers” from the floor of the House and several demonstrators were arrested for shouting racial and hateful epithets from the Gallery. The demonstrators outside and in the halls harassed the Black members of congress with the worst racist insults and even spat on them. They screamed insults at Gay members of the House.

The Republican members of the House refused to criticize these demonstrations and were insulted when they were chastised for their silence.

Last night and this morning, the media called the Republicans out on their hate. On “Countdown”, “The Rachel Maddow Show” and Bob Herbert, in the NYT, took them over the coals.

First, Keith Olbermann with a “Special Comment”, GOP self-destruction imminent. The party’s obsolete ideas will undermine its relevance (the transcript is in the link):

Fairy-tale Logic

by A.E. Stallings

Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:

Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,

Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,

Select the prince from a row of identical masks,

Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks

And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,

Or learn the phone directory by rote.

Always it’s impossible what someone asks-

You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe

That you have something impossible up your sleeve,

The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,

An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,

The will to do whatever must be done:

Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.

h/t to Hecate

I’m going to deviate from the usual news sources that I use for news. Today’s main sources will be from the other side of the pond and the Pacific. Mishima is part of the inspiration for the slight change from the “usual suspects” as sources. It’s good to see what their perspective is on world affairs and what we here in the US are missing from our MSM. America needs to hear how others perceive the news.

Demonstrators march during an anti-war protest in Washington, DC. Thousands of anti-war protesters took to the streets of the US capital Saturday, on the seventh anniversary of the US-led war in Iraq in a show of frustration widely ignored by the media and public.

(AFP/Nicholas Kamm)

Sat Mar 20, 7:24 pm ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Thousands of anti-war protesters took to the streets of the US capital Saturday, on the seventh anniversary of the US-led war in Iraq in a show of frustration widely ignored by the media and public.

As the National Marathon wound down in the city, protesters after midday gathered outside the White House bearing signs alluding to the high cost of the war both in money and human lives and decrying the use of unmanned aircraft, or drones, to bomb US enemies.

Under sunny skies and the watchful but discreet gaze of uniformed police, some demonstrators carried coffins draped in the Iraqi and Afghan flags in homage to civilian deaths the fighting in both countries has caused.

As always, this is also an Open Thread.

Happy Vernal Equinox. At 1332 hrs EDT, it will officially be Spring. Hurrah! A time when we start thinking about gardens, spring cleaning, Easter, Passover, barbecues, parks beached vacations…..The sun hovers directly over the equator and there is an equal amount of day and night. We Wiccans call this day Ostara and decorate with green candles, spring flowers and colored hard boiled eggs, symbols of fertility and the new growing season.

Welcome to this week’s Health and Fitness. This is an Open Thread.

Women More Likely to Die After Heart Attack

Study Suggests Women Aren’t Treated as Aggressively as Men Who Have Heart Attacks

By Charlene Laino

WebMD Health News

Reviewed by Laura J. Martin, MD

March 16, 2010 (Atlanta) — Better heart treatment of women could help close the gender gap in heart deaths. Women would be more likely to survive a heart attack if they were treated more like men, French researchers say.

In a study of more than 3,500 people admitted to the hospital for a heart attack, women were far less likely than men to get angiography to visualize heart artery blockages or angioplasty to open up blocked arteries.

Women were about twice as likely to die within a month of having the heart attack, according to the study, presented at the American College of Cardiology’s annual meeting.

The higher death rate in women “is related to the fact that they don’t get the same treatments as men,” says Maria Rosa Costanzo, MD, an American Heart Association spokeswoman who was not involved with the study.

Women do not have the typical “chest pain” that is related to a heart attack. They often ignore the symptoms of tightness in the chest and indigestion that is not relieved with antacids are more typical symptoms in women.

Symptoms may appear up to a month before attack

Research by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) indicates that women often experience new or different physical symptoms as long as a month or more before experiencing heart attacks.

Among the 515 women studied, 95-percent said they knew their symptoms were new or different a month or more before experiencing their heart attack, or Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI). The symptoms most commonly reported were unusual fatigue (70.6-percent), sleep disturbance (47.8-percent), and shortness of breath (42.1-percent).

Many women never had chest pains

Surprisingly, fewer than 30% reported having chest pain or discomfort prior to their heart attacks, and 43% reported have no chest pain during any phase of the attack. Most doctors, however, continue to consider chest pain as the most important heart attack symptom in both women and men.

The women’s major symptoms prior to their heart attack included:

# Unusual fatigue – 70%

# Sleep disturbance – 48%

# Shortness of breath – 42%

# Indigestion – 39%

# Anxiety – 35%

Major symptoms during the heart attack include:

# Shortness of breath – 58%

# Weakness – 55%

# Unusual fatigue – 43%

# Cold sweat – 39%

# Dizziness – 39%

As is now custom, I’ll try to include the more interesting and pertinent articles that will help the community awareness of their health and bodies. This essay will not be posted anywhere else due to constraints on my time. Please feel free to make suggestions for improvement and ask questions, I’ll answer as best I can.  

Good afternoon. I’ll be your editor through the weekend, keeping you informed and entertained. This is also an Open Thread.

Reuters) – President Barack Obama, under pressure to keep a campaign promise to revamp U.S. immigration policy, embraced a “promising, bipartisan framework” on Thursday offered by two senior senators.

Obama said the proposal by Democrat Charles Schumer and Republican Lindsey Graham, which features a new identification card for U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who want a job, “can and should be the basis for moving us forward.”