Train Archives - Healthy News

Ohio to open a clinic amid growing health concerns over train derailment

The rail company already faces multiple class-action suits from members of the East Palestine community over the incident, which forced residents within roughly a mile radius to evacuate their homes.

Some residents say they have suffered health issues, while others say they have found dead animals, including fish and chicken, in the area. For the most part, those suing the rail company say they that have lost income because of the evacuations, that they were exposed to cancer-causing chemicals and that they no longer feel safe in their homes.

The Environmental Protection Agency classifies vinyl chloride, the chemical that was released, as a carcinogen that can increase one’s risk of liver cancer or damage with routine exposure.

One of the class-action lawsuits alleges that the rail company “discharged more cancer causing Vinyl Chloride into the environment in the course of a week than all industrial emitters combined did in the course of a year” in the U.S.

Norfolk Southern has said it was “unable to comment directly on litigation.” In a public update Thursday, it said that in addition to continuing cleanup work, it was distributing more than $2 million in financial assistance to families and businesses to help with the costs of the evacuation. It also said it was creating a $1 million fund for the community. The company did not immediately respond to a request for further comment Monday.

Ohio to open a clinic amid growing health concerns over train derailment

In an open letter, Shaw promised to stay in the area “as long as it takes to ensure your safety and to help East Palestine recover and thrive.”

As of Sunday, the EPA had evaluated the indoor air in more than 530 homes in conjunction with Norfolk Southern and had not detected vinyl chloride above levels of concern in any of them. Meanwhile, Gov. Mike DeWine said Thursday that the municipal water was safe to drink, based on the results of sampling and tests done by the EPA, Norfolk Southern and other agencies.

In an apparent bid to demonstrate the water was safe to drink, the state EPA shared a photo on Twitter of agency officials and politicians, including East Palestine Mayor Trent Conaway, “enjoying a glass of clean water.”

It said they were “happy to see good data results that show the water in the village is safe to drink.”

Still, as concerns grow, Tuesday’s clinic will allow residents to get health assessments and have their concerns addressed.

“Last week, I was in East Palestine and listened as many area residents expressed their concerns and fears,” state Health Director Bruce Vanderhoff said in a statement provided by the department. “I heard you, the state heard you, and now the Ohio Department of Health and many of our partner agencies are providing this clinic, where people can come and discuss these vital issues with medical providers.”

The clinic will be at First Church of Christ at 20 W. Martin St. Registered nurses and mental health specialists are expected to be on site. A toxicologist will be either at the clinic or available by phone, the Health Department said in a news release. A mobile unit operated by the Community Action Agency of Columbiana County will also be parked outside the church to accommodate more appointments, it said.

Community members can start scheduling appointments Monday by calling 234-564-7755 or 234-564-7888, the Health Department said.

In a recent letter addressed to Shaw, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Norfolk Southern would need to uphold its stated commitments to those affected by the derailment.

“The people of East Palestine cannot be forgotten, nor can their pain be simply considered the cost of doing business,” he said.

Youth ambassadors train for a future in public health : Shots

Bithaniya Fieseha, a high school senior, graduates from the Youth Public Health Ambassador program run by the Fairfax County Health Department at West Springfield High School in Fairfax County, Va.

Will Schermerhorn/Fairfax County Health Department

hide caption

toggle caption

Will Schermerhorn/Fairfax County Health Department

Bithaniya Fieseha, a high school senior, graduates from the Youth Public Health Ambassador program run by the Fairfax County Health Department at West Springfield High School in Fairfax County, Va.

Will Schermerhorn/Fairfax County Health Department

Of all the things she could have done on her summer vacation, Bithaniya Fieseha, a senior at West Springfield High School in Fairfax County, Va., decided to study chronic disease, mental health and contact tracing. Some of her friends didn’t understand the appeal.

“I feel like people are like, ‘You wasted your summer,’ ” she says. “But I enjoyed it. I really enjoyed meeting up with everyone, going through the struggle.”

She practiced taking temperatures, weight and blood pressure readings on her family. Fieseha topped it off with an internship at a local health clinic.

Her hard work paid off. On a recent Saturday morning, Fieseha became one of 14 high school students to graduate from the Youth Public Health Ambassador program run by the Fairfax County Health Department. It trains teenagers from underserved communities to become health workers and prepares them for potential careers in public health. The coursework was designed by the Morehouse School of Medicine.

“I think this program gives us a voice because, as minorities, we’re able to see those disparities” in our own surroundings, says Nayla Bonilla, a junior at Justice High School, “I saw that there were so many different avenues into medicine and things we can do in the future that can help our communities thrive.”

The training aims to help shore up the public health workforce, which is in bad shape as the COVID-19 pandemic enters its fourth year. A wave of retirements is expected to further strain health departments over the next few years.

“We need to not only attract people into the fields of healthcare and public health, but we need to attract people of color,” says Dr. Gloria Addo-Ayensu, director of the Fairfax County Health Department, “We need people from our Black and Brown communities to engage in the field so they are able to explain to their communities what health is all about.”

Dr. Gloria Addo-Ayensu, director of the Fairfax County Health Department, spoke with students graduating from the Public Health Youth Ambassador Program at the John Lewis High School library.

Will Schermerhorn/Fairfax County Health Department

hide caption

toggle caption

Will Schermerhorn/Fairfax County Health Department

Dr. Gloria Addo-Ayensu, director of the Fairfax County Health Department, spoke with students graduating from the Public Health Youth Ambassador Program at the John Lewis High School library.

Will Schermerhorn/Fairfax County Health Department

Training gives teens a leg up on future health careers

The health department is working with Edu-Futuro, a local nonprofit, to recruit students with an interest in medicine from Fairfax high schools and help start their career paths.

“At the end of the day, it’s that they successfully enroll in a college or a postsecondary institution, where they will be able to get a degree in a health-related career – and then four years later, they get their first professional job,” says Jorge Figueredo, Edu-Futuro’s director.

Jorge Figueredo, director at the nonprofit Edu-Futuro, tells students that the Youth Ambassador Program sets them on a path to careers in health.

Will Schermerhorn/Fairfax County Health Department

hide caption

toggle caption

Will Schermerhorn/Fairfax County Health Department

Jorge Figueredo, director at the nonprofit Edu-Futuro, tells students that the Youth Ambassador Program sets them on a path to careers in health.

Will Schermerhorn/Fairfax County Health Department

The program focuses on Hispanic, African-American and African students from low-income families. In Fairfax County, as in much of the country, these racial and ethnic minority groups were hardest hit by COVID.

“There were some real challenges around health literacy,” says Anthony Mingo, director of community health development at the Fairfax County Health Department. Mixed messages at the start of the pandemic blended with historical mistrust in medical institutions. “It created a miserable stew of misinformation,” he says.

Anthony Mingo (center), from the Fairfax Health Department, implored students to consider careers that serve their communities, flanked by Jorge Figueredo from Edu-Futuro (left) and program manager Andrea Scott (right).

Will Schermerhorn/Fairfax County Health Department

hide caption

toggle caption

Will Schermerhorn/Fairfax County Health Department

The new youth ambassadors are fired up about public health. Fieseha found the links between environment and health illuminating. “If you don’t have access to a grocery store, you’re more willing to buy [fast food] because that is the closest food source you have, which contributes to diabetes and high blood pressure,” she says. “How we access our food, how we make income – we don’t realize how much of an impact that makes to our mental health and our physical health.”

Learning about some shady episodes from the history of medicine helped Bonilla understand how the medical field lost trust with some groups.

“[The lessons] were talking about the history of ethical considerations, which I really hadn’t thought about, like the cancer cells from a patient that were used without their consent,” she says, “And it just made me think how minority groups were really taken advantage of for medical research.”

Bonilla plans to organize a health fair to address health disparities; she thinks she might become a pediatrician, to better serve Spanish-speaking kids and parents. Fieseha plans to start an urban garden at her school and wants to become a global advocate for HIV/AIDS in Africa and particularly Ethiopia, where her family is from.

Federal funding to boost health literacy

Both are among the first graduates in the pilot program, which expects to have trained ninety students as health workers by next summer. With a budget of around $240,000, according to the health department, it’s a small sliver in a two-year, $3.8 million Fairfax County-wide project to improve access to COVID information and boost health literacy among vulnerable groups.

The federal government is providing the funding. Fairfax County is one of 73 local governments to receive a grant under a $250 million initiative from the Department of Health and Human Services last year. Each grantee is trying out its own approaches to improve health understanding in their communities, says Roslyn Holliday Moore, deputy program director for HHS’s Office of Minority Health.

Roslyn Holliday Moore, from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, says the Youth Public Health Ambassador Program can be adapted to other places.

Will Schermerhorn/Fairfax County Health Department

hide caption

toggle caption

Will Schermerhorn/Fairfax County Health Department

Roslyn Holliday Moore, from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, says the Youth Public Health Ambassador Program can be adapted to other places.

Will Schermerhorn/Fairfax County Health Department

The hope is that projects, like Fairfax County’s Youth Ambassador training, can be adapted elsewhere. “For those who are looking at whether people are able to trust, sustain the trust, engage others, this is more than successful,” Holliday Moore says, “And it’s not hard to replicate.”

Holliday Moore addresses a small crowd of parents and students gathered at a high school library for a graduation ceremony. “Do not give up, stay the course,” she says. “You are creating a future here.”

Afterward, there is applause and tears of joy. A Peruvian dance champion performs a traditional dance. An assistant principal sings a line from Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds and assures students he isn’t worried about a thing — with them at the helm.

After some long, bleak pandemic years, everyone in the room is glad to be celebrating teens getting their start in public health.

Christopher Thompson, assistant principal at the John R. Lewis High School, tells students that he’s confident in a future where they’re in charge.

Will Schermerhorn/Fairfax County Health Department

hide caption

toggle caption

Will Schermerhorn/Fairfax County Health Department

Christopher Thompson, assistant principal at the John R. Lewis High School, tells students that he’s confident in a future where they’re in charge.

Will Schermerhorn/Fairfax County Health Department

Stress eating? Here’s how to train your brain to crave healthy foods.

Comment

Worries about inflation, the economy, the lingering effects of the pandemic and other world wide crises have induced tension levels in the United States to surge to new highs. For some persons, that strain is demonstrating up on the scale.

There are a lot of organic mechanisms that explain why tension and nervousness can induce persons to pack on undesired kilos. In some situations, attaining pounds can by itself develop into a supply of worry and stigma that fuels further more bodyweight acquire.

Whilst we can’t remove every main resource of worry in our life, we can control — to some extent — the affect it has on our bodies. Researchers have located that there are ways to alleviate stress and retrain your mind to boost your diet program and protect against worry-induced fat achieve.

How stress encourages belly fat

Our bodies evolved to secrete the stress hormone cortisol when our mind senses danger. Cortisol elevates your coronary heart price, blood pressure and blood-sugar levels. In the brief term, cortisol guards you from speedy threats by sending your human body into fight-or-flight method. But when your job, funds and other situation ratchet up your strain stages on a regular foundation, it can lead to serious cortisol elevation.

How anxiety can harm your brain and entire body

Just one facet result of cortisol is that it promotes entire body excess fat, specially stomach and visceral fat, which is a especially harmful kind of fat that surrounds inside organs. Reports present that persons with higher cortisol stages have a tendency to have a better body mass index.

If you consistently grapple with tension, it can deliver indicators to your overall body to accumulate unwanted fat, said A. Janet Tomiyama, the head of the Dieting, Anxiety and Well being Lab at the College of California at Los Angeles.

“Even if you really do not adjust a one issue that you consume, the actuality that you are stressed is going to boost unwanted fat deposition,” mentioned Tomiyama, who has examined the mechanisms guiding pressure and weight problems.

Why a stressed mind makes you eat far more

In laboratory reports, experts have observed that administering artificial versions of cortisol to persons triggers them to consume substantially a lot more energy than men and women who are given a placebo. That’s in part because cortisol reduces your brain’s sensitivity to leptin, also regarded as the satiety hormone, which regulates your appetite and will make you come to feel comprehensive.

In a person analyze of department store personnel, men and women ate extra sugar, saturated fat and over-all calories when they experienced to do the job long, demanding shifts compared with when they worked fewer tense shifts with lighter workloads.

What are ultra-processed foodstuff? What should really I eat in its place?

Even worry from functions we get pleasure from can lead to overeating. In a single examine, researchers followed ardent football enthusiasts in distinctive towns. They uncovered that lovers whose NFL teams missing on Sunday consumed a lot more energy and saturated unwanted fat the subsequent working day. Fans whose groups gained ate significantly less foods and saturated extra fat the next day. The scientists observed comparable final results when they seemed at the dietary patterns of French soccer lovers.

Chocolate, candy, ice product and other comfort and ease foodstuff alleviate stress in element through their outcomes on the mind. They activate reward areas this sort of as the nucleus accumbens, flooding them with dopamine, the hormone that promotes satisfaction, and other neurotransmitters.

Some men and women find that in nerve-racking situations their appetites plummet. Experts are not really absolutely sure why strain potential customers some persons to the cookie jar and not other folks, but body weight seems to engage in a part. Some research counsel that insulin resistance, a precursor to variety 2 diabetes, which is far more common in individuals with obesity, may well spur variations in brain action that intensify meals cravings in reaction to tension.

How to retrain your mind to fight tension having

Although you cannot constantly decrease the pressure in your life, you can retrain your brain to want greater foods when you’re tension consuming.

In a research revealed very last calendar year, Tomiyama and her colleagues recruited 100 older people with elevated pressure ranges and break up them into two teams. Everybody was properly trained to do a everyday, 6-moment pressure reduction training named progressive muscle mass peace, which will involve tensing and relaxing your muscle tissues from toes to head. You can uncover an illustration of it here. This deep rest approach has been proven in scientific tests to lessen pressure and anxiousness.

But users of a person team had been assigned to try to eat a serving of clean fruit these kinds of as sliced pineapple, honeydew and pears, about 5 minutes into each and every of their every day progressive muscle mass relaxation sessions. Immediately after a single 7 days of this, the scientists uncovered that feeding on just the fruit alone created the contributors experience less stressed and put them in a improved mood. By pairing the fruit with a peace training, their brains began to watch the fruit as anything that diminished their stress ranges — primarily turning the fruit into convenience food.

“Anytime two points take place at the exact time your brain results in a connection among them,” Tomiyama mentioned. “By pairing peace and fruit alongside one another, your mind starts to see them as the very same detail. After a though, you will not even have to have to do the 6 minutes of relaxation: All you are going to will need to do is try to eat the fruit, and you will get that identical leisure benefit.”

Tomiyama provided a couple of guidelines for all those who want to try this.

Choose a sort of fruit that you really do not try to eat often, this kind of as star fruit, kiwi or mango. If new variations of these fruits are too pricey or inconvenient, use frozen fruit.
Attempt this workout at distinctive occasions of day and at unique destinations in your property or office environment. If you normally do this at your kitchen area table, it will only do the job at your kitchen table.
At occasions when you are feeling pressured or nervous, achieve for your “comfort fruit” rather of a bag of potato chips.

“This is a way to hack your comfort and ease eating habit for fantastic,” Tomiyama claimed.

Do you have a query about balanced feeding on? Electronic mail EatingLab@washpost.com and we may possibly reply your question in a potential column.

Indication up for the Nicely+Getting publication, your resource of qualified guidance and simple suggestions to aid you are living well each day