Search Results for: health

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Ricky Carioti / The Washington Post via Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from John Woodrow Cox, Danielle McNally, Matt Richtel and Andrew Jacobs, Michelle Dean, and John Knight.

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Changing of the Guard, Bee-Style

The death of a monarch is never simple. There’s a vacuum of power that needs to be filled, an anxiety of influence that requires the successor to establish their power quickly, and a challenging period in which the memory of the deceased is negotiated and shaped (in some cases — hello, French Revolution! — this phase can last centuries). In a lovely essay at Nautilus, John Knight explores the war of succession that followed the death of the original queen in his Brooklyn-rooftop beehive. It’s a conflict not just between a wannabe-queen and her reluctant subjects, but also between human and insect, each following their own complex protocols for survival.

As far as I can tell, my queen died sometime in the spring. Queens typically live for about four or five years, so this caught me by surprise. A new queen, however, is a regular event in the life of a hive. Beekeepers frequently replace their queens every year or two to introduce genetic variety and ensure that the hive has a strong monarch who can lay enough eggs to keep the population up. Bees can also raise their own queen, and when I did an inspection early that spring, I was pleased to see that mine had taken the initiative. Before she died, my old queen must have laid a few fertilized eggs that worker bees raised as replacements. They would have selected six or seven fertilized (female) eggs and fed them only royal jelly. When the first queen hatched, she would have immediately killed any unhatched competition and ideally flown a few mating flights, storing enough semen in her abdomen to spend the rest of her life laying eggs.

While a newborn queen may seem ruthless, the success of a beehive hinges on allegiance to its queen. Though she can mate with an average of 12 different drones, there is only one queen, which makes for a hive of closely related bees. As a new queen begins to produce her own pheromones, the hive slowly aligns with her as the old bees die and new workers hatch. In a sense, the hive is genetically wired to be loyal to the monarchy. If the hive was to raise multiple queens, or if the workers were to start laying eggs, the interests of the population would slowly fracture.

In a healthy hive, a queen will lay hundreds, sometimes thousands of eggs each day in spring and summer, which she either fertilizes or doesn’t. The fertilized eggs, the females, can either grow to be workers or queens. The unfertilized eggs become male drones that do nothing but inseminate the queen—quite literally, flying bags of semen. Drone bees, though crucial for reproduction, don’t forage or sting or raise brood—they can’t even feed themselves.

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Why Industrial Laundry Is Dirtier Than You Can Imagine

Industrial washing machines. (Getty Images)

After a six-month investigation, Annie Hylton uncovers third-world working conditions and rampant sexual harassment at industrial laundry facilities serving Manhattan hospitals, hotels, and restaurants.

At Dissent, she recounts how workers, who went without health and safety training and personal protective equipment, routinely handled linens contaminated by human blood, urine, vomit, and feces. When workers weren’t dealing directly in others’ sh*t, they were forced to endure it. One manager routinely preyed on migrant women workers who had little English and less recourse; women were subject to unwanted touching and lewd suggestions. And after they finally stood up to complain? Retaliation, of course, in the form of reduced hours and more strenuous duties.

There are more than fifty industrial laundries in and around New York that employ thousands of workers, most of whom are recent immigrants, mainly women. These workers typically operate in noisy, dirty, stressful conditions, and are frequently exposed to harmful chemicals. Meg Fosque, an organizer at Make the Road New York who testified before New York City Council in 2015, described the laundry industry as one plagued by rampant violations of labor law and exploitation of the largely immigrant workforce by “unscrupulous employers.” Fosque concluded, “the industry as a whole has a disturbing track record and is in need of oversight.”

Until legislation was passed in 2016, there were no comprehensive and enforceable standards or licenses for industrial laundries in New York.

In November 2011, twenty-four-year-old Milton Anzora, a laundry worker at a commercial facility in Long Island called Prestige Industries, was crushed to death by a conveyer shuttle (this facility has since closed). In 2015, OSHA found that the company continued to expose employees to similar hazards at its Paterson facility. “It is unacceptable when a company continues to neglect basic safety and health procedures, especially after experiencing a fatality. Prestige Industries’ deliberate failure to uphold its responsibility to provide a safe and healthful workplace is an indication that worker safety and health is not a priority, which is intolerable,” said Robert Kulick, OSHA’s regional administrator in New York.

The largely female and immigrant workforce has meant that some workers are also subject to sexual harassment or assault, much like that faced by Gonzalez and her coworkers. Workers whose rights are violated often do not come forward because of their immigration status or because they lack legitimate union representation, allowing the cycle of abuse to continue.

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Dirty Laundry: An Investigation

Longreads Pick

After a six-month investigation, Annie Hylton uncovers third-world working conditions and rampant sexual harassment at industrial laundry facilities serving Manhattan hospitals, hotels, and restaurants. Workers — who went without health and safety training — routinely handled linens contaminated by human blood, urine, vomit, and feces. When workers weren’t dealing directly in others’ sh*t, they were forced to endure it. One manager routinely preyed on migrant women workers who had little English and less recourse; women were subject to unwanted touching and lewd suggestions. And after they finally stood up to complain? Retaliation, of course, in the form of reduced hours and more strenuous duties.

Source: Dissent
Published: Jun 21, 2017
Length: 18 minutes (4,715 words)

Junk Food is 21st Century Imperialism

AP Photo/Leo Correa

From door-to-door deliveries to influencing politics, companies like Nestlé, PepsiCo, and McDonald’s spend big bucks to enmesh themselves in third world markets, and their processed, packaged foods bring obesity and health problems with them.

In the first in a The New York Times series about global obesity, Andrew Jacobs and Matt Richtel report from Brazil, where low-income, isolated residents who once suffered from hunger now suffer from diabetes and heart disease. To impoverished people, the allure of packaged Western food is obvious: it’s inexpensive and more readily available. Although access means more people are getting fed, this sweet, fatty, salty food is not only destroying traditional foodways and changing local agriculture, it’s harming those who subsist on it. One nutrition professor describes the situation in Brazil as “a war between two food systems,” but it’s a war where “one food system has disproportionately more power than the other.” Just as religious missionaries replace indigenous culture with European culture, now we have Western corporations replacing local culture and regional identity with a homogeneous global identity of Coke and Kit-Kit and pudding. To me, the loss of regional identity is as tragic as the increase in obesity. 

Dr. Gibney, the nutritionist and Nestlé consultant, said the company deserved credit for reformulating healthier products.

But of the 800 products that Nestlé says are available through its vendors, Mrs. da Silva says her customers are mostly interested in only about two dozen of them, virtually all sugar-sweetened items like Kit-Kats; Nestlé Greek Red Berry, a 3.5-ounce cup of yogurt with 17 grams of sugar; and Chandelle Pacoca, a peanut-flavored pudding in a container the same size as the yogurt that has 20 grams of sugar — nearly the entire World Health Organization’s recommended daily limit.

Until recently, Nestlé sponsored a river barge that delivered tens of thousands of cartons of milk powder, yogurt, chocolate pudding, cookies and candy to isolated communities in the Amazon basin. Since the barge was taken out of service in July, private boat owners have stepped in to meet the demand.

“On one hand, Nestlé is a global leader in water and infant formula and a lot of dairy products,” said Barry Popkin, professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina. “On the other hand, they are going into the backwoods of Brazil and selling their candy.”

Dr. Popkin finds the door-to-door marketing emblematic of an insidious new era in which companies seek to reach every doorstep in an effort to grow and become central to communities in the developing world. “They’re not leaving an inch of country left aside,” he said.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates Takes on the Trump Presidency

Photo by Paul Marotta / Getty Images

In the spring of 1963, James Baldwin was interviewed for the documentary, Take this Hammer, which followed the local African-American community in San Francisco. Seated, wearing a crisp collared shirt, an ascot tie, and smoking a cigarette, the author spoke about the creation of a class of pariahs in America.

Well, I know this. Anyone’s who’s tried to live knows this: That what you say about anyone else reveals you. What I think of you as being is dictated by my own necessities, my own psychology, my own fears and desires. I’m not describing you when I talk about you, I’m describing me. Now, here in this country, we’ve got something called a nigger. We have invented the nigger. I didn’t invent him. White people invented him. I’ve always known. I had to know by the time I was 17 years old, what you were describing was not me, and what you were afraid of was not me, it has to be… Something you were afraid of, you invested me with…

In an excerpt at The Atlantic from his upcoming book about the Obama administration and its legacy, We Were Eight Years in PowerTa-Nehisi Coates riffs on Baldwin’s analysis to construct an incisive look at the foundations of Donald Trump’s political ascent.

For Trump, it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black president, insulted him personally. The insult intensified when Obama and Seth Meyers publicly humiliated him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. But the bloody heirloom ensures the last laugh. Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” the historian Nell Irvin Painter has written, and essential to the construct of a “white race” is the idea of not being a nigger. Before Barack Obama, niggers could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific—America’s first white president.

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Taking Up Smoking at the End of the World

John Sherman | Longreads | September 2017 | 9 minutes (2,250 words)

 

I started smoking this year. In Berlin, where I lived before recently returning to New York, almost everyone seems to smoke, almost everywhere, almost all the time. It’s like a 1970s game show, but in German and with better hair.

It wasn’t the ubiquity of smoking that sold me as much as the opportunity to become excellent at rolling cigarettes — a simple task that is wildly impressive when done well. The most practiced rollers can assemble a factory-grade filtered cigarette in about ten seconds, packing it casually against a thumbnail while your own attempt looks like a slightly crumpled, pregnant snake, leaking tobacco from both ends.

I’ve watched Berliners roll cigarettes walking, standing up in a moving subway car, and even once while biking through traffic on Karl-Marx-Straße. A German friend claimed her father could roll a cigarette inside his pants pocket, which, bullshit or not, puts the bar for trick-rolling higher than I can even imagine.

Aside from being a cheap way to smoke — about €5 for a bag of decent rolling tobacco, plus €1 each for filters and rolling paper — it’s an excellent sideline for fidgeters, people like me who can’t help but curl straw wrappers into intricate fiddleheads, or peel the label off their beer bottle to fold origami fortune tellers. Cigarette rolling is a mini-craft project unto itself, repeatable and perfectible. I probably enjoy rolling cigarettes even more than I enjoy smoking them.

***

I don’t mean to be flip about the health hazards of smoking, which are illustrated in full color on every side of every tobacco product I’ve ever purchased, and rattled off by every serious smoker I’ve ever talked to about it. I was born in America in 1989; the only thing I know about smoking is that it’s bad for me.

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A Bakery Death Reveals the Vulnerable Lives of Temporary Workers

(Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)

Twenty-three year old refugee Amina Diaby died in Fiera Foods’ Ontario factory while making croissant dough. She was a low-wage temp worker, one of thousands in Ontario, and her hijab got stuck in a machine. For The Toronto Star, reporter Sara Mojtehedzadeh worked undercover on Fiera Foods’ production line in order to document the dangers of Canada’s growing temp economy works. Fiera’s system is stacked in businesses’ favor, with poorly trained temp workers risking their lives and health for low pay, no job stability, no benefits and few legal protections in return.

It’s a system that’s on the rise, and consumers should check their foods’ labels and research chain restaurants’ sources. The foods we buy from Costco and Dunkin’ Donuts might have been processed by newly arrived immigrants just trying to survive while they pursue the same dream of upward mobility that we do.

Temp agency employees are some of the most “vulnerable and precariously employed of all workers,” a 420-page report recently compiled by two independent experts for the Ontario government says.

Temps can be terminated at a moment’s notice, the report notes. Companies who use them are liable along with their temp agency for unpaid wages, including overtime and vacation pay, but not for most other workplace rights. Temps are often paid less than permanent counterparts doing the same job, and sometimes work for long periods of time in supposedly “temporary” positions. Agencies are not required to disclose the markups they charge on workers’ wages. New provincial legislation, which goes to second reading this month, seeks to tackle some of those issues.

Research conducted for the Toronto-based Institute for Work and Health also suggests that companies contract out risky work to temps. When a temp gets hurt, the company is not fully responsible because the temp agency assumes liability at the worker’s compensation board — saving their clients money on insurance premiums. This is a crucial financial incentive to use them.

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180 Overdoses, 18 Deaths, One Week

Spencer Platt / Getty Images

In July, The Cincinnati Enquirer sent 60 reporters, photographers, and videographers into the community to chronicle an ordinary week during the height of the heroin epidemic in Ohio and Kentucky.

In the interactive feature, “Seven Days of Heroin,” Terry DeMio and Dan Horn piece together a timeline from dozens of videos, transcripts, and field notes. It starts on Monday, July 10, and ends on Sunday, July 16, 2017.

It’s a little after sunrise on the first day of another week, and Cincinnati is waking up again with a heroin problem. So is Covington. And Middletown. And Norwood. And Hamilton. And West Chester Township. And countless other cities and towns across Ohio and Kentucky.

This particular week, July 10 through 16, will turn out to be unexceptional by the dreary standards of what has become the region’s greatest health crisis.

This is normal now, a week like any other. But a terrible week is no less terrible because it is typical. When heroin and synthetic opiates kill one American every 16 minutes, there is little comfort in the routine.

The accounts are harrowing. Vivid, often silent videos punctuate paragraph after paragraph of breathless bodies, emergency dispatches, orphaned children, and death tallies. Loved ones look on as lips turn blue, turn purple. As soon as the reader becomes accustomed to the rhythm of hourly tragedy, each story, like the drug, takes a turn for the worse.

Gaffney, 28, quit cold turkey after learning she was pregnant. She’s living now with the baby at First Step Home, a treatment center in Walnut Hills. They plan to move into an apartment together soon.

After years of addiction, Gaffney’s goals are modest. She wants to raise her child in a normal home. She wants a normal life.

Uebel finishes the examination. “She looks real, real good,” she says.

Gaffney is relieved. She scoops Elliana into her arms and takes her appointment card for her next visit to the clinic in December.

“See you then,” she says.

(Ten days later, Gaffney is dead from a heroin overdose.)

Peter Bhatia, editor and vice president for audience development at the Enquirer and Cincinnati.com, shares why they took on this 7-day project in a postscript:

We undertook this work – spreading our staff throughout courtrooms, jails, treatment facilities, finding addicts on the streets and talking to families who have lost love ones – to put the epidemic in proportion. It is massive. It has a direct or indirect impact on every one of us. It doesn’t discriminate by race, gender, age or economic background. Its insidious spread reaches every neighborhood, every township, every city, regardless of demographics. And it is stressing our health-care systems, hospitals and treatment capacity.

We set out to do this project not to affirm or deny differing views on the cost of battling addiction and its impact. Rather, we set out to understand how it unfolds day in and day out. I believe you will find what we found to be staggering. In the weeks ahead, The Enquirer will build on this effort, devoting more attention to actions our communities can take to make a difference against heroin’s horrible impact.

Hence the title of this ongoing project: “Heroin: Reclaiming Lives.”

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