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North Bay Reports that deal with health and wellness in Sonoma County.
(December 28, 2012)
Vitamin D and variations in how women metabolize it, could play a role in Marin County's high breast cancer rate, suggests recent research. Kathie Dalessandri, a surgeon and research in Pt. Reyes Station, published a report this fall in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons linking breast cancer to a genetic variant in vitamin D receptors.
Post-menopausal women with this receptor variant, Dalessandri says, could be especially affected by low vitamin D levels.
Dalessandri is eager to see her results replicated in larger studies. Locally she's anticipating the Marin Women's Study, a breast cancer research study involving more than 14,000 Marin County women.
Vitamin image courtesy of Flickr user ckaiserca (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ckaiserca/).
(December 6, 2012)
Sick of hearing about climate change? The more it progresses, the sicker we'll get.
The good news about climate-driven health impacts, says Humboldt County's Dr. Wendy Ring, is that most of them are familiar problems, albeit on a lesser scale than is forecast for the future.
Ring and her husband embarked on a cross-county speaking tour by bicycle over the summer, stopping in cities and states both red and blue to cultivate community demand for action on climate change from their local Congressional representatives. Her stop in Santa Rosa this week is part of a California swing toward the conservative bastions of the south with the same intent: to mobilize meaningful national policy action as soon as possible.
Dr. Ring will share her message at the Peace and Justice Center, 467 Sebastopol Avenue in Santa Rosa, on Friday night, Dec. 7th at 7 pm.
(November 7, 2012)
Widely used chemical pesticides that boost agricultural production and assist in landscape maintenance, may also have serious harmful impacts on developing children.
Emily Marquez, Ph.D.For obvious reasons, it's not possible to conduct studies on these questions with human subjects. But biologist Emily Marquez says the animal-based studies that have been done have a strong track record as accurate predictors of the effects the chemicals have on both children and adults.
You can download the full report, A Generation in Jeopardy, How pesticides are undermining our children's health and intelligence, here.
(Setember 3, 2012)
California's new Health Insurance Exchange, a key part of the federal health care reform act, is preparing to rebrand itself.
(July 3, 2012)
Companies that have more than 100 employees, and smaller businesses with 50 or less, will feel the effects of ObamaCare differently. But both groups stand to benefit, and most are looking forward to those changes.
Even before the Supreme Court's decision was rendered, health officials in California were hard at work developing the health insurance marketplace currently known as the California Exchange. Bud Martin, Senior Vice President with Well Fargo Insurance Services in Petaluma, says there are still a lot of details to be finalized, but the concept should work.
One of the biggest obstacles to implementing the Affordable Care Act in California, Martin adds, will be getting all of the participants to be able to efficiently share information with each other.
Echoing what business leaders across the country have said, Cynthia Murray of the North Bay Leadership Council says her members are relieved to have a greater measure of certainty regarding how they deal with providing health insurance for their workforces. For many, she adds, the lingering unknowns were proving to be a real hardship.
