The two big promises that people make every year are to a) lose weight and b) quit smoking. Get smoking statistics here. Now, there is something new for smokers, an online resource called “Quitnet.” NPR’s Morning Edition featured it in a recent story. Take a listen.
Quitnet has a premium (for-pay) service, but the free sections of the site are pretty remarkable on their own. I joined the free service (I don’t smoke) and read several heart-wrenching exchanges on one of the chat boards.
When I was looking around, the site said there were 587 people on Quitnet at that time. That is a fairly amazing number, don’t you think?
You can also form “quit-buddies” (a personal support system) and send “Q-Cards” that encourage others to quit.
The American Cancer Society says:
- Smoking urges are worst in the first two weeks. After that they are most likely to recur in situations associated with smoking (e.g., after dinner or in the car).
- Urges last a few minutes at most, so practice the four Ds: DEEP breaths. DO something else to get your mind off the craving (call a friend; go for a walk; chew on a carrot stick). DRINK lots of water throughout the day (especially during a craving). DELAY reaching for a cigarette; the urge will pass.
- Try to avoid situations that encourage smoking. If you can’t, practice telling people you’ve just quit or that you’re a non-smoker.
- Change your routines. If you always light up when you have a coffee, drink tea or juice instead. If you always smoked while watching the evening news, read the paper.
- Use the many tools available. Nicotine patches and gum are available over-the-counter; a nicotine nasal spray and a smoking-cessation medication are available by prescription; toll-free help lines and even online support are available.
- Most smokers have to try several methods before they find success in quitting, so keep trying until you find what works for you.
To help encourage smokers to stick with it and get through those urges, it’s important to note the healthy changes that start happening, some of them quite quickly. Within the first 20 minutes of quitting:
- Blood pressure drops
- Increased circulation warms your hands and feet
- Heart rate goes down
In 8 hours:
- Carbon monoxide levels in blood drop to normal
- Oxygen levels in blood rise to normal
In 24 hours:
- Chance of having a heart attack begins to drop
In 48 hours:
- Sense of taste and smell improve
2 weeks to 3 months after quitting:
- Circulation improves
- Lung function increases as much as 30 percent
1 to 9 months after quitting:
- Coughing, fatigue, sinus congestion, and shortness of breath decrease
- Cilia regain normal function in lungs, reducing infection
1 year after quitting:
- Excess risk of heart attack and death from heart disease is cut in half
5 to 15 years after quitting:
- Risk of stroke is reduced to that of a non-smoker
15 years after quitting:
- Risk of death is nearly that of people who’ve never smoked
Other benefits of quitting:
- Your clothes won’t smell like smoke
- You’ll save a lot of money. A pack-a-day smoker who spends $2 a pack will save about $700 per year, not counting health costs
- Smokers who quit by age 50 have cut their risk of death (compared to continuing smokers) in half
Online Blood Alcohol Calculators
http://www.onlineconversion.com/bac.htm
http://www.intox.com/wheel/drinkwheel.asp
2003 Was the Third Warmest Year Ever
Thanks to Gary Price at ResourceShelf for the alert to this:
Working from the world’s largest statistical weather database, scientists (at NOAA, an agency of the U.S. Dept. of Commerce) … estimate that 2003 will likely be the third warmest year on record for the globe.
The 2003 climate in the United States was wetter and cooler-than-average in the East, warmer and drier-than-average in the West, while drought conditions persisted, or worsened, throughout much of the central and western regions, according to scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
- From January to November, 10 western states were much warmer than average, including New Mexico, which had its warmest January-November on record.
- Eight states east of the Mississippi River were significantly cooler than average, and every other state except Florida was near average.
- Temperatures in Alaska were above the 1971-2000 average in all four seasons, and 2003 will likely place in the top 5 warmest years, with every season in 2003 in Alaska averaging above normal.
- Data collected from weather and climate stations, satellites, ships, buoys, and floats indicate that the 2003 average global temperature will likely be the third-warmest on record, slightly lower than 2002 and cooler than the record warm year of 1998. The 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1990.
The year began with a moderate El Niño in the equatorial Pacific, but the episode ended by April, and near neutral conditions persisted across the equatorial Pacific the remainder of the year.
Who Inspects Parasail Companies?
We had a crazy story here in Tampa Bay on Monday. Two teenagers were being towed around the Gulf of Mexico riding one of those parasails when the tow line broke. The girls went sailing right into the side of a building. Unbelievably, they survived with only some scratches.
But the real headline to me is that no government agency inspects the tow lines. I guess I was under the impression that whoever inspects rides and amusements — or maybe the Coast Guard — would inspect the lines once in a while. Nope. The St. Petersburg Times says:
TBO.com says:
Parasail boats and operators are inspected and regulated by the Coast Guard. But there are no inspection requirements for parasail equipment such as harnesses and tow lines.
Equipment failures have resulted in other parasailing injuries in the region.
- A Kentucky woman and her 13-year-old daughter died off Fort Myers Beach in 2001 when their harness broke and they fell 250 feet into shallow water.
- In October 1999, three tourists parasailing in the Intracoastal Waterway near Clearwater nearly slammed into the top of a 20-story building when their towline snapped.
The issue of inspections might be worth a look in your area if you live near the water.
Ride with the Garbage Workers
I suggested this one a few days ago. The St. Pete Times picked up the idea and did a nice job with it.
Hospitals Spend $500,000 Each to Serve Obese Patients
U.S. hospitals are buying expensive new equipment such as reinforced toilets and oversized beds to treat the growing number of severely obese patients, according to a new survey. Novation, a group-purchasing organization for hospitals and other health-care institutions, found that hospitals are seeing more severely obese patients, people who are overweight by at least 100 pounds.
Novation said in a press release:
Some hospitals estimate additional costs associated with treating or accommodating the severely obese can reach up to $500,000 per year per institution.
“That’s a dramatic statistic,” said Jody Hatcher, senior vice president of Novation. “We are finding that hospitals across the country are buying more large-size beds, larger blood pressure cuffs, wider, reinforced wheelchairs, and larger versions of other basic supplies to adjust to patient needs. It’s also a worker safety issue. If hospitals don’t have the right type of equipment, transporting or moving obese patients could lead to injury of hospital personnel. Given the existing nursing shortage, having a nurse out with a hurt back would create additional burdens for the health care organization, so hospitals are looking at this issue seriously.”
A typical example is Wausau Hospital in Wausau, Wis., where administrators say they spent an additional $200,000 this year to remodel rooms, order special equipment, and train staff to deal with a growing number of obese patients.
“We’ve had to buy special, longer surgical gloves and even needles and syringes,” said Kent Demien, director of materials management at Wausau. “Standard equipment becomes obsolete on many of our larger patients.” He also added that in the last two years, the hospital’s bariatric department has grown from one surgeon to four, although the special supply needs extend to every corner of the hospital where obese patients could be.
States Sugar-Coat Graduation Rates
Stateline said:
Half of the states are unwilling or unable to report how many students are graduating from high school, and a handful of states have failed to provide any information about their teachers’ qualifications even though federal law requires states to provide such data, two new studies released Monday (12/22) show.
Louisiana, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, and Tennessee did not report any data to the U.S. Department of Education regarding teacher qualifications as required by the No Child Left Behind education law, the Washington, D.C.-based Education Trust said in “Telling the Whole Truth (or Not) About Highly Qualified Teachers.“
Some states also are fudging the numbers and presenting a rosier picture of their high school graduation rates, the Trust said. Wyoming and Rhode Island reported high school graduation rates that matched closely with calculations from independent researchers, but California, North Carolina, and Indiana missed the mark, the Trust. One of the reasons for the discrepancies is that some states do not track or count high school dropouts.
Oxy-C Rivals Heroin/Cocaine
The painkiller OxyContin has become a huge problem.
“[Florida] is seeing five deaths a day,” the state’s drug chief, James McDonough, said of the narcotic. McDonough said that, just several years after the drug’s introduction into the marketplace, abuse of OxyContin surpasses heroin and cocaine and has become “an epidemic of enormous proportions.”
Florida’s legislature is considering a new law that would also require two doctors to sign off on a prescription before a patient is allowed to use OxyContin. Currently, 15 states have similar electronic monitoring programs in place, said Stephanie Wasserman, a health policy expert with the National Conference of State Legislatures. They are California, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington. Connecticut and Maryland have bills pending that would establish monitoring programs.
Magnesium Fire
Ernie Ensign, Assignment Manager at Action News — WOIO, dropped Al’s Morning Meeting this note:
We had a huge magnesium fire here in Cleveland. It’s been burning for almost 24 hours now. The pictures were incredible because magnesium reacts violently with water and it was raining. But there are magnesium storage facilities all over the country. There might be some in areas near your readers. What kind of areas are these storage facilities in? There were just a few homes around this plant and they were all evacuated, and now the EPA is there to assess the health risks with the smoke. Magnesium is supposed to be very resistant to fire, because it’s such a great conductor of heat, but once it goes … it goes big!!
We are always looking for your great ideas. Send Al a few sentences and hot links.
More News
Topography of a news ecosystem: A first-of-its-kind study diagnoses the local news crisis in a single state
Media scholars at the University of Maryland documented the spread of local news dead spots — and unexpected vibrant areas — in that state.
$12 million Global Fact Check Fund opens applications for second year of grants
A partnership between Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network and Google and YouTube continues to support fact-checking initiatives worldwide
Opinion | A columnist made a controversial introduction to Caitlin Clark
IndyStar sports columnist Gregg Doyel has been crushed online and accused of being creepy, sexist and worse. He’s since apologized multiple times
‘Satanic rituals’ at Taylor Swift shows? That’s false. And experts say the attack isn’t new.
Experts say musicians have been accused of performing satanic rituals for decades
How a longtime film critic’s death represents the great dissolve of local film criticism
Bryan VanCampen of The Ithaca Times was an institution in the central New York college town of 32,000. He might have been the last of his kind.