Category: Health

Here’s the first part for “Best of OB Rag” in 2008 – a story of the disappearance of the “Peace Sign” off of Bird Rock, and more on the Iraq war, the peace movement, the 2008 elections, torture, nuclear power, video from an alien invasion of OB in the Seventies, San Diego foreclosures and health care reform :

by Michael Steinberg /blackrainpress / Dec 12th, 2013

This story is important in and of itself, but also because it once again unearths the region’s role in the birth of the atomic age, and also highlights the radioactive legacy that continues to haunt us.

On November 13 the San Francisco Chronicle ran a lead story written by the SF-based Center For Investigative Reporting. The story was about the radioactive contamination of Treasure Island, a former US Navy base in the middle of the Bay.

The Chron article reported that 575 metal discs consisting of radioactive radium-226 had been found in the ground at Treasure Island as of 2011. The report did not mention that the radioactive life of radium-226 is millennia, over 16,000 years.

As of Thursday Afternoon, Dec. 5th

County Environmental Health officials have just notified the OB Rag – at our inquiry – that we and our dogs can go back into the ocean at Dog Beach and South Mission.

Test results on possible contamination of the waters at OB’s Dog Beach and South Mission Beach are expected today, Wed. afternoon, Dec. 4th.

The County Environmental Health department ordered the beaches closed on Sunday because of a large 22,500 gallon sewage spill a few miles from the beaches up the San Diego River in Mission Valley. Both beaches have been closed since.

According to the water department, the spill originated close to I-15 along the San Diego River when pipes were broken or moved by roots.

Large sections of area beaches remain closed due to a huge sewage spill on Sunday, Dec 1. Dog Beach is included in the list of closed beaches. Also parts of South Mission Beach. The spill was caused by nearly 22,000 gallons contaminating the San Diego River near I-15.

By Michael Steinberg

A new study indicates that rates of a thyroid disease in California newborn spiked after they were exposed to fallout from the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011.

The peer-reviewed study, “Changes in confirmed and borderline cases of congenital hypothyroidism in California as a function of environmental fallout from Fukushima,” appears in the November 2013 issue of the periodical Open Journal of Pediatrics.

In California all babies are tested at birth for congenital hypothyroidism, a rare disease that nevertheless can cause serious growth problems in children if it remains untreated.

Our fast-growing, heavy-breasted birds can’t even mate anymore

By Jill Richardson / Otherwords

It’s odd that the most iconic feature of Thanksgiving — the turkey — is likely the most unnatural. It’s got competition, of course, from the jellied cranberry sauce that retains the shape of its can and various food products sold in boxes marked “Just Add Water.”

(Really, is it so hard to mash potatoes yourself, especially given their divine taste and creamy texture after you’ve added in all the cream and butter required?)

OB Bike Advocate Rode Across Country

By Rob Greenfeld / Special to the OB Rag

This spring I left my comfortable beachside home in sleepy Ocean Beach to wake America up. On April 16th I hopped into a van with a stranger from a Craigslist.com rideshare board, stopped in Santa Cruz to pick up a bamboo bike, and arrived in San Francisco a with a few days to prepare for a 4,700 mile bike ride across the USA.

The journey, coined Off the Grid Across America, was designed to inspire Americans to start living a more earth-friendly lifestyle for themselves, their community, and the earth.

To lead by example I followed a set of rigorous ground rules:

An artist by the name of Lincoln Cushing once live in Ocean Beach, over on the 4900 block of Brighton Avenue back in the Seventies. In those days, the houses that activists lived in had names, and his was “Vegetable House” – presumably because everyone there was a vegetarian. (This was during the era of “Red House”, “Animal House”, “Cape May Barracks”, etc.)

Lincoln was well known locally for producing politically-charged progressive poster art. He eventually moved to the Bay Area and found kindred spirits in an Oakland print shop that was a workers’ co-op.

Just recently, a poster that Cushing created while living in OB was chosen by the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta for an exhibition about public health.

Each week, Kelsey throws a “What to do?” spread for each of the zodiac signs. The first card is shown and the other two… well, you’ll just have to infer them from the written forecasts. Mind the heads up and have a lovely week!

By Kelsey Lynore

Twins

Woo, boy! That angle between Saturn and Mars is in the cards, with a stress on Saturn. So here’s the deal, Gemini — The world is not an either/or proposition. You need not wait to have your options dictated to you by another. Do not ask permission. Instead, why don’t you lay down the law? Just make a proclamation that is in no way based on the vision (or lack thereof) of others, and do it. I mean seriously… mutiny already! There’s no reason why you can’t be calling the shots save for your tendency to let your options be widdled down by others. So don’t ask, just take!

Come inside for the rest ….

By Eva Posner

I hate pink.

It’s really an awful color in my opinion. I do not begrudge those who like it. We are all different, so rock it if you want to.

But I will not. I cannot. It is not in my wardrobe or my color wheel.

I have the exact opposite problem as David Harris-Gershan, author of My Life with a Pink Water Bottle. Harris-Gershan found himself ridiculed for using his wife’s pink water bottle, and instead of cowering to attempts at humiliation and intimidation by other men, he decided to use it to make a statement about gender roles and sexism. He now carries it around on a regular basis, using people’s reaction to it as a teachable moment. I think his reaction is fantastic and I applaud him for challenging stereotypes.

As a woman, however, I am bombarded with pink constantly, and I am so over it.