During our past hurricanes, I found that I could actually get along without power for a few days, but doing without water was not something I could take. When a hurricane hits and we lose power, we in the Farms communities also lose water.

So, when we built our house, I bit the bullet and had a generator installed with a propane tank to run it.

As a result of this very significant investment and the fact that, possibly for one of the few times in my life, I was actually prepared, I gained added confidence that hurricanes would be a thing of the past!

Now, a transfer switch law has gone into effect and many gas stations are now required to have the capability of using a generator to run their pumps. So, we any luck, should a big wind come our way, the gas shortages, which occurred in 2005 will be eased.

Plus, who knows, maybe this added preparedness will help discourage hurricanes away from us.

If Bertha, Chuck or Damon does hit us, gas stations with transfer switches exist and can be found at the Palm Beach Post website:

Opponents, critics and even some supporters of health care reform continue to speculate on potential glitches in the delivery of health care to the millions of Americans who otherwise would have gone without access to medical care. The latest gloom and doom prediction is that national health care reform will cause longer waits and add to the existing problem of overcrowding in hospital emergency rooms because of a perceived shortage of primary care or family physicians.

Is this true? Why aren’t there enough primary care physicians to go around?

One of the biggest reasons is that fewer and fewer medical students are choosing that field of medicine. “Family doctors” work longer hours for less money than most other specialties. These days, young doctors graduate medical school with $120,000.00 or more in student loans or debt, which makes the higher salaries offered to surgeons and other specialists more appealing. It is especially tempting to go into sub-specialties such as sports medicine that mostly serve the financially secure and well-insured patients.

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The Gulf Oil disaster should not be a place for political bents or muckraking – should it?

I just read two articles from the Financial Post; one I take with a bit of skepticism over whether it portrays the whole story fairly and the other is, well simply unbelievable.

In the first article, author Lawrence Solomon begins with the title “Avertible Catastrophe” and it is, before reading it, about the BP Oil Disaster. He begins the article by applauding the preparedness and capability of the Dutch to anticipate “looming catastrophe and know how to head it off”. It seems pretty clear that in the Netherlands, they take oil drilling and the attendant risks it presents very seriously. They are prepared for disaster. The Dutch know how to handle disastrous oil spills.

Mr. Solomon then goes on to explain the substantial offers to help made by the Dutch and the repeated refusals to those offers of help made by our government. Mr. Solomon is critical of Americans, the US government, US environmental rules, US labor unions, and, possibly, US workers.

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A new report just released by the Environmental Law Foundation (ELF), an environmental nonprofit agency, found that 85 percent of kids’ drinks, organic and conventional, contained so much lead that they may exceed federal limits for young children. Besides juice in flavors like apple and grape, fruit cocktail mixes, packaged pears and peaches, and some baby foods also made the list for containing unsafe amounts of lead. The ELF used a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency certified lab to test 400 samples of 150 products marketed to kids.

Of the 150 products, 125 were contaminated with enough lead in a single serving to require a warning label under California’s Safe Drinking and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986. The FDA sets a tolerable lead intake level at 6 micrograms daily, and the California Safe Drinking Act sets it at 5 micrograms. The American Academy of Pediatrics says there’s no safe level of exposure.

McDonalds recently pulled Shrek glasses from distribution for small amounts of cadmium in their outer coloring. Now we seem to have added lead to the juice we are pouring into those glasses.

So what are the effects of too much lead, especially on children? “Excessive lead exposure can cause anemia, hearing damage, behavioral problems, learning disabilities and host of other problems for children,” according to the Mayo Clinic. The Children’s Environmental Health Center sites that, “Lead can affect almost every organ and system in your body. It can be equally harmful if breathed or swallowed. The part of the body most sensitive to lead exposure is the central nervous system, especially in children, who are more vulnerable to lead poisoning than adults.” The Center goes on to site that, “A child who swallows large amounts of lead can develop brain damage that can cause convulsions and death; the child can also develop blood anemia, kidney damage, colic, and muscle weakness. Repeated low levels of exposure to lead can alter a child’s normal mental and physical growth, and result in learning or behavioral problems.”

We need to get back to eating fresh fruits rather than drinking them or opening them up from a can. It is much better for us and our kids anyways. The best thing for parents to do in the meantime is to avoid the list of juices and fruit products that the ELF tested for lead. The products can be found at Our365 website.

The Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA), traditionally only issues a recall or an alert if something has already gone wrong with the product, or after being notified by the company that it has found an issue or a labeling error. With limited resources and staff, it can’t test everything, and it doesn’t try too. The best bet we have as consumers is to stop buying these tainted products and let the manufacturers know about your concerns.

Patients undergoing what should be routine shoulder and knee surgeries are being debilitated for life. In most cases it is occurring to relatively young, active people. The genesis of these severe injuries lies in surgeons’ use of intra-articular pain pumps. The real cause, though, lies in manufacturers’ practice of putting profits before safety in their marketing practices.

Patients undergoing arthroscopy typically experience 3 to 5 days of post operative pain. Staring in the year 2000, a number of manufacturers of medical devices began marketing infusion devices designed to introduce pain medication directly into the joints of patients; permitting significant pain relief during the post operative period of most severe pain.

Most manufacturers did not seek FDA approval for this new use of infusion pumps; those who did circumvented the FDA through their marketing programs. These manufacturers told doctors that placing a catheter inside the joint space and delivering pain medication directly to the surgical field would provide patients with optimal pain relief. Manufacturers also told physicians the application was safe for patients.

• Pain pump manufacturers did not tell physicians that no clinical trials had been conducted of the effects of infusion directly to the joint space.
• Pain pump manufacturers did not tell physicians that no laboratory evaluation of the effects of the pain medication on human cartilage had been conducted.
• Pain pump manufacturers did not tell physicians their medical devices had not been approved by the FDA.
• Pain pump manufacturers did not tell physicians that little or no literature concerning the effects of intra-articular infusion of pain medication existed and the literature that did exist was not favorable for the very application being sold by the manufacturers.

In an effort to maximize profits, pain pump manufacturers sold their devices to unsuspecting physicians who in turn used them on their unknowing patients. Young patients have suffered a condition called chondrolysis in which the joint cartilage is completely destroyed. This requires joint replacement and, in most cases, these young patients may have to go through additional joint replacements in the future.

The manufacturers now defend lawsuits filed against them by claiming that chondrolysis is being caused by other factors and not their pain pumps. They claim that no good science exists to prove their devices are the root cause of chondrolysis. The fact is a lack of science is due largely to these manufacturers conducting no investigation or evaluation that would have been required by the FDA.

The existence of joint chondrolysis before the year 2000 and the incidence increased rapidly after the use of intra-articular pain pumps began to be promoted. In addition, many of the effected patients presented with very good cartilage condition, until pain medication was injected into the patient’s joint space. Pain pump manufacturers were required to submit their device for FDA approval of the use they ultimately marketed – they never obtained approval.

The families of the 11 victims of the Deepwater Horizon disaster faced severe limitations on their ability to seek justice for the tragic loss of their loved ones due to the negligence of BP and others. That was the case under the law before the House passed the SPILL Act (Securing Protections for the Injured from Limitations on Liability).

The SPILL ACT will actually correct the state of the law in a number of worthy areas that relate to the Gulf Disaster:

• Amends the Death on the High Seas Act to permit the recovery of non-economic damages; human damages, including the pain & suffering of families of the dead workers.
• Amends the Jones Act to permit the recovery of non-economic damages.
• Repeals the limitation of liability for vessel owners; limiting recovery to only the value of the vessel involved.
• Amends the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA) to make clear that states damaged by the Gulf Disaster can bring lawsuits and seek remedies in their own state courts.
• Makes contracts and agreements “gagging” individuals from disclosing information about offshore oil spills and discharge of other pollutants; agreements that reportedly BP attempted to enforce.
• Amends the US Bankruptcy Code preventing corporations liable for oil spills from severing their assets to avoid liabilities owed to injured victims. Among other things, the Act eliminates the ability for the debtor to seek additional protections afforded under Chapter 15 of the code.

The SPILL Act takes outdated laws and brings them into the 21^st century, according to House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi:

“The SPILL ACT will modernize these laws to ensure that BP and other responsible parties are held fully accountable for their actions and to ensure that families of those killed or injured in the BP oil spill and other such tragedies are justly compensated.”

The passage of this bill eliminates a few of the tools that responsible parties likely planned to use in an effort to limit the damages they owe to injured victims of the Gulf Disaster.

If the tort reformers are not hypocrites, they are likely to oppose these changes as victimizing corporations. If tort reformers avoid hypocrisy in this instance, one must wonder how they justify their position in this illustration of where going “easy” on corporate America has gotten us. If tort reformers are hypocrites in this instance, why listen to them about anything?