Public Health

The fate of the Affordable Care Act is in the hands of the Supreme Court justices. But in the court of public opinion, a large percentage of people polled recently want the law scrapped. A CBS/New York Times survey found nearly half of those polled disapprove of the law, while 40 percent want the entire act overturned. Rasmussen Reports says 56 percent of people surveyed want the act repealed. And the Kaiser Family Foundation found that nearly six out of 10 people don't even know how health care reform affects them — though that didn't stop many of them from disliking it. Consumers should be careful what they wish for. Have they forgotten all the stories of people being unable to buy coverage because of a pre-existing condition or dropped by their insurer like a hot coal when they became ill?

Dr. John Leake Pitts, a retired pediatrician who during a long career in public health had been the acting Anne Arundel County health officer, died of cancer Wednesday at his Annapolis Roads home. He was 85. Born in Roanoke, Va., he was the son of John Leake Pitts Sr., a pharmacist, and Mary B. Allen, a homemaker and schoolteacher. As a young man he worked the soda fountain at his father's store. After attending Roanoke College, he graduated from the the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond.

It's nearly spring, temperatures in the 70s, yet the flu waited until now to ramp up in Maryland, killing three members of a Calvert County family. Usually, flu season strikes earlier. By this time last year, the flu had been widespread and had already officially killed 34 people. The year before, the H1N1 pandemic disproportionately sickened children and triggered a scramble for vaccine. Public health officials say this is the nature of influenza. "Unlike other respiratory viruses, flu is a little more unpredictable," said Dr. Trish M. Perl, professor of medicine, pathology and epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins University and the senior epidemiologist for the Hopkins Health System.

Lou Ruth Blake was the family's matriarch who sang in the church choir and organized gospel shows. Lowell Frederick Blake liked to make people laugh. Venessa Marie Blake was the ardent churchgoer with a contagious smile. All three family members died within days of each other earlier this month from complications of the flu — a cluster that state officials acknowledged was unusual. Their deaths caused a stir in the community of Lusby in Calvert County, where Blake family roots run deep in the town of nearly 1,600.

The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future has launched a free, online curriculum for high school teachers to use in their classrooms. Teaching the Food System is designed to be inserted into anything from social studies, to environmental science and biology classes. The center which is part of the Bloomberg School of Public Health is offering $2,000 grants to teachers who need money for materials or field trips. 

Richard K.C. Hsieh, a public health specialist and former National Library of Medicine official who in retirement traced his family tree back to seventh-century China, died of a heart attack Dec. 31 at his Towson home. He was 79. Born in 1932 in Tianjin, China, not far from Beijing, Richard Hsieh (pronounced Shay) moved with his family to Taiwan after World War II, according to his wife of 51 years, the former Rebecca Tung. He came to the United States in 1953 from Hong Kong to enroll at the Johns Hopkins University, where his father had done graduate studies in the 1920s.

A top federal scientist says more research is needed into possible health and environmental effects from shale gas drilling. Dr. Christopher Portier, director of the National Center for Environmental Health, said in an email to the Associated Press that studies to date have failed to settle questions about the potential impact of shale gas drilling and the hydraulic fracturing technique being used to extract the gas. “Studies should...

Dr. John Butler MacGibbon, an internal medicine specialist who treated port of Baltimore mariners, died Dec. 24 at Gilchrist Hospice Care in Towson of complications of a stroke and a fall. He was 90 and lived in Original Northwood. Born in Christchurch, New Zealand, he was the oldest of four siblings. His late brother, Tony, was a well-known New Zealand cricketer, and his late sister, Jean, was a New Zealand tennis champion. He attended Christ's College in Christchurch, New Zealand, and then graduated from the University of Otago Medical School in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1948.

Dogs may be a man's best friend, but on the great evolutionary chain, chimpanzees are humanity's closest relatives in the animal world. Chimps are so much like us physically, emotionally and socially that for decades researchers routinely used them as surrogates to test new surgical procedures, evaluate the effectiveness of drugs and vaccines, and develop other therapeutic breakthroughs before trying them out on humans. That research has been instrumental in advancing scientific knowledge and the search for new treatments and medicines to prevent life-threatening and debilitating diseases.

I was appalled to read the following description of the President of the United States in the opening paragraph of Scott Carroll's recent commentary in support of public health insurance ("Bring back the public health option," Dec. 12: "But all that changed somewhere, somewhere after the election of a dark-skinned new president with a foreign-sounding name... " What in the world does this racially-tinged description have to do with bringing back the public health option, except that it was originally part of the President Barack Obama's plan to provide better care to our citizens?