Health Issues

A 34% increase in childhood cancers since 1975 has led a group of scientists, health professionals, businesses, and advocates to ignite a call to action to highlight preventable environmental factors that threaten our children.

Dr. David Hanscom, an orthopedic surgeon whom I’ve previously interviewed about strategies for chronic back pain, quit his practice to focus on educating others on becoming pain-free without surgery. Most recently, after surviving COVID-19, he turned his attention to prevention and surviving it, which is an important part of this discussion.

You probably haven’t heard of the Great Barrington Declaration. This is a petition started by three scientists on 4 October calling for governments to adopt a policy of ‘focused protection’ when it comes to Covid-19. They believe those most at risk should be offered protection — although it shouldn’t be mandatory — and those not at risk, which is pretty much everyone under 65 without an underlying health condition, should be encouraged to return to normal.

In recent months, meatpacking companies in different parts of the world have been associated with large clusters of COVID-19 infections. The Tönnies meat-processing plant in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, was temporarily closed, and U.S.-based pork processor Smithfield became a major focus of the disease in South Dakota, one of the country’s least-populated states. In Brazil, complaints abound about COVID-19 at slaughterhouses: 20% of the industry’s workers have been infected, according to the National Confederation of Workers in Food and Related-Industries