Close friends of my parents have a vacation home in Montana. They were discussing unhappiness in Billings about a study to help make people healthy. They saw it as another form of socialism inflitrating the state since the election of President Obama. The topic of conversation shifted into world politic, and we took the chance to leave.

As I was preparing for work this week, it came to me that they were talking about a health impact assessment. I am rather surprised that given the…

I opened my Food Service Daily (7/21/10) articles summary last week. There it was-an article about Neogen, a leading producer of food safety testing products. The company apparently posted a handsome profit in the last quarter. Food safety is becoming quite profitable with worries about cross contamination of the ingredients coming from places like China. Also, climate change seems to be wreaking havoc on a number of crops due to weather changes that can lead to the production of microtoxins…

Promise Neighborhoods, an intitiave of the U.S. Department of Education, is an example of an intervention that targets the social determinants of health. According to the DOE's website:

The Promise Neighborhoods Program is intended to significantly improve the educational and developmental outcomes of all children in distressed communities, including rural and tribal…

The public health provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, (PPACA aka ACA), present a challenge to public health practitioners. While funding was made available to reassemble our nation's crumbling public health infrastructure, there is disappointment among die-hard community-based prevention advocates. The funding shortfall for commuity-based prevention was described as a one-time event, but that does not change the fact that funds were shifted…

The Better Health (betterhealth.com) blog is not giving the new healthcare.gov site passing marks. The major concern is a tool that can be used to determine hospital quality.

"Last week the Obama administration launched the new Healthcare.gov. It’s mostly an online insurance shopping website. It’s very much a federal government version of sites like…

The World Cup has finally come to an end and many of us are returning to our daily routines. My routine did not vary much because business was excellent. Here in Scotland, lots of eating and drinking is part of the World Cup experience.

An article, regarding on what amounts to paying people in the city of Dundee to acquire better health habits, was disturbing. There was the usual back-biting by various self-appointed luminaries about the validity of the Dundee health and fitness…