100 Years of Stamping Out STDs

This year, the euphemistically named San Francisco City Clinic celebrates 100 years of diagnosing and treating sexually transmitted diseases. That’s 10 decades of inspecting orifices and creating cutting-edge new media, from all the way back when old media was shockingly new. And City Clinic did it all while making sexual health sound fun and, well…sexy.

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More on the Prison/Homeless Churn

How many people are homeless before they enter prison? How many leave prison with no fixed destination? Of the 70 percent of released prisoners who return to prison, what proportion are homeless?

If only for public safety reasons, you might assume the correctional system would want to know those numbers. But surprisingly, the California Department […]

Are Prison Release Practices Creating Homelessness?

In California’s largest cities, one senses that the number of homeless people continues to grow, whatever the interventions to prevent it.

But some of the more commonly cited reasons for that growth don’t explain the whole story.

The closure of state mental hospitals created a major wave of homelessness throughout America, but that was decades […]

Terminally Ill and Homeless: Saving a Death

We all live in fear of that moment. You know the one – when your nice, but kind of formal, doctor rolls over on his stool to tell you the results of your biopsy. Before the words even leave his lips, you know. You know it’s bad, and your brain flees, backing away into a […]

Profiteering From A Panic: The $1,740 Potassium Iodide Supply

With new reports showing that low trace levels of radioactive iodine-131 have been found in the rain as far away as Massachusetts, the Great Potassium Iodide Panic of 2011 continues to simmer along. But what’s wrong with that, you may ask yourself. If people are just buying a pill (or 14) to have on hand, […]

Potassium Iodide Panic at Reporting On Health

Well, sort of.

Here is an excerpt from a blog post I wrote at the USC Annenberg School’s Reporting On Health website. I will be blogging over there for a couple of months a couple of times a week.

The Great Potassium Iodide Panic of 2011 has peaked and begun to ebb. There were no […]