Category: Health

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.

The lines are being drawn for a ‘Grand Bargain’ and the Democrats’ continued willingness to give away role as defenders of safety net and earned benefit programs, say critics, is deeply worrying

By Jon Queally / Common Dreams

If U.S. citizens are increasingly concerned that the Democratic Party is no longer willing to fight off the right-wing attack on Social Security, Medicare, and other key social programs, Sen. Dick Durbin, President Obama and other party leaders have recently offered plenty of evidence to increase that worry.

Since the end of the government shutdown and standoff over the debt limit ended last week, Obama has repeatedly said that he wants to find a “balanced” solution to the ongoing budget debate with Republican lawmakers.

By Christian Cotroneo / Huff Post Canada

So long humans.

And thanks for all the jellyfish.

If the oceans are indeed in steep decline, it may just be a triumph of the brainless — namely, the humble jellyfish.

“The number of case studies is increasing,” Lucas Brotz of the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre told the Huffington Post, “And it certainly seems we are having a severe impact on the oceans that is making them less favourable for fish and more favourable for jellyfish in some places.”

So far, the most direct impact — aside from swimming into a cloud of the critters — is being felt at the world’s nuclear reactor sites.