Tuesday, September 29, 2009

 

Our Planet Weekly - Week of September 27th, 2009

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Week of September 27th, 2009

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NEWS THIS WEEK
Brighter Idea Than the CFL May Soon Hit the Market
Reported by Jessica Rae Patton
Compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), though far more energy efficient than their incandescent forbears, leave a lot to be desired.
Go to all articles - Go to this article
Grizzlies Make the List
Reported by Jessica Rae Patton
According to the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, "In the past two years grizzly mortality has risen alarmingly...[and] their future remains precarious."
Go to all articles - Go to this article
 Reporting by Jessica Rae Patton
THIS WEEK'S COMMENTARY
Igniting Activists
It's the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day-Are You Ready to Get to Work?
Last year, Earth Day took some heat by online green scorekeepers, but this year-the celebration's 40th-it's reasserting its prominence. By Brita Belli
Go to all articles - Go to this article
IN THE CURRENT ISSUE OF E
GREEN LIVING
Lessons from Etsy
Tips for Taking Your Eco-Ideas Online
Get crafty with home-biz tips from these eco-entrepreneurs. By Jessica A. Knoblauch
Go to all articles - Go to this article
CURRENTS
Surviving the Downturn
Environmental Nonprofits Face a New Economic Reality
Environmental nonprofits are riding out the recession by joining forces-and office space. By Kristin Bender
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EARTHTALK
Week of 9/27/09
Dear EarthTalk: As I understand it, hair salons are pretty toxic enterprises on many counts. Are there any efforts underway to green up that industry?

Dear EarthTalk: Not long ago there were concerns about honey bees disappearing. Are the bees still disappearing, and if so do we know why and do we have a solution?

Go to this week's EarthTalk
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Monday, September 28, 2009

 

www.mocamobile.org AND www.dossia.org

Today at lunchtime I attended an HSPH presentation on www.mocamobile.org (MIT and HSPH developers for global health applications by cellphone/wireless devices that transmit photos and patient info to secure servers) and www.dossia.org (employer-insured systems that collaborated with MIT and HSPH developers - builds in patient incentives to personal responsibility for maintaining and developing personal wellness).

Very promising!

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Saturday, September 26, 2009

 

Dr. Leon Eisenberg, Pioneer in Autism Studies, Dies at 87



Dr. Leon Eisenberg, who conducted some of the first rigorous studies of autism, attention deficit disorder and learning delays and became a prominent advocate for children struggling with disabilities, died on Sept. 15 at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 87.
Dr. Leon Eisenberg


The cause was prostate cancer, said his wife, Dr. Carola Eisenberg.

The field of child psychiatry was dominated by Freudian psychoanalysis when, in the late 1950s and 1960s, Dr. Eisenberg began conducting medical studies of children with developmental problems. Working at Johns Hopkins University with Dr. Leo Kanner, who first described autistic behavior, Dr. Eisenberg completed the first detailed, long-term study of children with autism, demonstrating among other things that language problems predicted its severity.

In a similar study among children who were developing normally, Dr. Eisenberg showed that reading difficulties early in school predicted behavior problems later on.

In the
1960s, he performed the first scientific drug trials in child psychiatry, testing stimulants like Dexedrine and Ritalin to soothe the behavior of children identified as “delinquent” or “hyperkinetic.” These studies, which became the basis for drug treatment of what is now called attention deficit disorder, ran counter to psychoanalytic theories on the most effective treatments.

“Leon took a very courageous stand and denounced the way psychiatry treated children, this whole system in which we had a few rich kids and their parents getting psychoanalysis five days a week and still not being cured,” said C. Keith Conners, a professor emeritus in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University. “No one even knew what a cure looked like. He had this conviction that nothing was being done for the bulk of children who needed help, and that we had very little scientific data to guide us.”

Dr. James Harris, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Johns Hopkins University, said that Dr. Eisenberg was “the pivotal person in
20th-century child psychiatry who moved the field from simple descriptions of childhood disorders to actually looking at the science behind both the diagnosis and treatment.”


Leon Eisenberg was born in Philadelphia on Aug. 8, 1922, the eldest child of immigrants from Russia. He earned his undergraduate degree and, in 1946, his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania, before taking an internship at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, where he developed an interest in psychiatry. He completed his psychiatric residency at Sheppard Pratt Hospital in Towson, Md.

After two years in the Army teaching physiology (Carey incorrectly said psychology), in 1952 he began a residency at Johns Hopkins and his collaboration with Dr. Kanner. In 1967, he took over as chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he continued to publish and, among many other projects, helped formulate and carry out affirmative action policies at Harvard Medical School.


In 1980, he established the medical school’s department of social medicine, with the aim of applying the tools of social science to improving access to and practice of medicine worldwide.
In addition to his wife, a co-founder of Physicians for Human Rights, Dr. Eisenberg is survived by two children from a previous marriage, Kathy and Mark Eisenberg; two stepchildren, Alan and Larry Guttmacher; two sisters, Essie Ellis and Libby Wickler; and six grandchildren.

For two days last week, Harvard lowered its flags to half-staff in honor of Dr. Eisenberg.
In his later years, Dr. Eisenberg became increasingly alarmed at trends in the field he helped establish, criticizing what he saw as a cozy relationships between drug makers and doctors and the expanding popularity of the attention deficit diagnosis.

The diagnosis “has morphed from a relative uncommon condition
40 years ago to one whose current prevalence is 8 percent,” he wrote. “Correspondingly, the prescription of stimulant drugs has gone up enormously. The reasons are not self-evident.”

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Good law from tragic facts--Congress, the FDA, and preemption

Good law from tragic facts--Congress, the FDA, and preemption.
Annas GJ.
N Engl J Med. 2009 Sep 17;361(12):1206-11. No abstract available.
PMID: 19759383 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Related Articles



The New York Times heralded "A Win for Injured Patients,"1 while the Wall Street Journal said that the U.S. Supreme Court was "Pre-empting Drug Innovation."2 To the New York Times, the Court's decision in Wyeth v. Levine was "wise and surprising."1 To the Wall Street Journal, it was a "defeat for drug innovation and public health"2; the editorial expressed surprise because the Supreme Court had earlier ruled that Congress had preempted state civil lawsuits alleging device misbranding, and many persons thought that the Court had turned relentlessly pro-business and would therefore also rule that civil lawsuits alleging drug misbranding . . . [Full Text of this Article]
The Facts in Wyeth
The Law of Preemption
"Tragic Facts"
Preemption after Wyeth

Source Information
From the Department of Health Law, Bioethics, and Human Rights, Boston University School of Public Health, Boston.
References

  1. A win for injured patients. New York Times. March 5, 2009. 
  2. Pre-empting drug innovation. Wall Street Journal. March 5, 2009:A16.
  3. Rosen J. Supreme Court, Inc. New York Times Magazine. March 16, 2008.
  4. Wyeth v. Levine, 129 U.S. 1187 (2009).
  5. Curfman GD, Morrissey S, Drazen JM. Why doctors should worry about preemption. N Engl J Med 2008;359:1-3. [Free Full Text]
  6. Northern Securities v. United States, 193 U.S. 197, 400 (1904).
  7. Glantz LH, Annas GJ. The FDA, preemption, and the Supreme Court. N Engl J Med 2008;358:1883-1885. [Free Full Text]
  8. Kennedy D. Misbegotten preemptions. Science 2008;320:585-585. [Free Full Text]
  9. Warning signs. Nature 2008;452:254-254. [Medline]
  10. Committee on the Assessment of the US Drug-Safety System. The future of drug safety: promoting and protecting the health of the public. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2007.
  11. Psaty BM, Burke SP. Protecting the health of the public -- Institute of Medicine recommendations on drug safety. N Engl J Med 2006;355:1753-1755. [Free Full Text]
  12. Gilhooley M. Drug preemption and the need to reform the FDA consultation process. Am J Law Med 2008;34:539-561. [Web of Science][Medline]
  13. Wyeth v. Levine, 944 A.2d 179 (Vt. 2006).
  14. Riegel v. Medtronic, 128 U.S. 999 (2008).
  15. 71 C.F.R. § 3922 (2006).
  16. Geier v. American Honda Motor Co., 529 U.S. 861 (2000).
  17. Curfman GD, Morrissey S, Drazen JM. The Medical Device Safety Act of 2009. N Engl J Med 2009;360:1550-1551. [Free Full Text]
  18. Obama B. Memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies: preemption. Washington, DC: White House, May 20, 2009. (Accessed August 27, 2009, at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Presidential-Memorandum-Regarding-Preemption/.)

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Wednesday, September 16, 2009

 

"Whatever you do may (well) be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it (well)."

Maynard's Veggie and Boston Blog

Making connections for plant-based diets: all kinds of good, legitimate, and sustainable connections - economics, intellectual, historical and sociological, strategic

"Whatever you do may (well) be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it (well)."

Whatever you do may (well) be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it (well).
 - Mahatma Gandhi

Fracture Risk Associated With Diet High in Animal Protein - Does Calcium Supplementation Mitigate Bone Fracture Risk

Medscape Conference Coverage, based on selected sessions at the:

This coverage is not sanctioned by, nor a part of, the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research.

From Medscape Medical News

Calcium Reverses Fracture Risk Associated With Diet High in Animal Protein

Nancy A. Melville
Authors and Disclosures
 
processing....

sending...
Advances in understanding osteoclast-induced bone loss
The RANK-Ligand Pathway appears to be an essential mediator of osteoclast-induced bone loss in postmenopausal osteoporosis.
Read more
September 15, 2009 (Denver, Colorado) — Research has shown that the intake of calcium can help mitigate the increased risk for hip fracture that is associated with the dietary intake of high levels of protein, but a new study suggests that calcium's benefits may even be more significant than realized. Calcium supplements could potentially result in a striking reversal of the fracture risk that comes with high protein intake, investigators announced here at the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research 31st Annual Meeting.
Protein intake is believed to affect bone health by causing an increase in calcium secretion, resulting in a negative calcium balance. However, protein has also been shown to increase intestinal calcium absorption.
To better gauge the role of calcium in a high-protein diet, researchers evaluated data on 1752 men and 1972 women enrolled in the Framingham Offspring Study who completed a food frequency questionnaire either between 1990 and 1994 or from 1995 through 1999. The participants were followed up for hip fracture until 2005.
The researchers estimated the participants' intake of total protein, energy, calcium, vitamin D, alcohol, and caffeine. Participants were grouped by protein intake, whether the source was animal or plant, animal:plant protein ratios, and total protein intake, with adjustments for total energy intake.
"We chose to examine protein intake from different sources because studies have shown that absorption of protein can vary depending on the source of protein," study coauthor Shivani Sahni, PhD, told Medscape Ob/Gyn & Women's Health.
The results were striking. Among those who had low calcium intakes (<800 mg per day), the group with the highest intake of animal protein had a risk for hip fracture that was 2.84 times greater than the risk for fracture in the group with the lowest intake of animal protein.
Meanwhile, among those with a higher calcium intake of more than 800 mg per day, the tertile with the highest consumption of animal protein had a rate of hip fracture risk that was in fact 85% lower than the risk in the lowest animal protein intake group.
"In the group with low calcium intake, subjects in the highest tertile of animal protein intake had significantly more fractures compared to the other tertiles," said Dr. Sahni, who is a postdoctoral fellow in aging and musculoskeletal research at the Institute for Aging Research at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.
"Contrastingly, in the group with high calcium, subjects in the highest tertile of animal protein intake had significantly low hip fractures, compared to the rest of the group," she reported. The findings shed important light on the role of calcium intake with a high-protein diet. "Total calcium intake modifies the association of protein intake and the risk of hip fracture," Dr. Sahni concluded. "Increased animal protein intake may be productive with a high calcium intake of 800 mg or more, but the effect may be reversed with an intake of less than 800 mg."
The researchers did not find a significant association between total protein intake and animal:plant protein ratio and the risk for hip fracture.
Although the specific mechanisms behind calcium's apparent ability to offset the fracture risk associated with a high protein intake remain undetermined, the study offers further evidence of potential benefits in combining the 2 in a diet, said E. Michael Lewiecki, MD, clinical assistant professor of medicine at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, Albuquerque.
"Although the conclusions in this study are limited due to the observational nature of the study, adequate intake of protein, as well as calcium and vitamin D, are probably reasonable recommendations for all," commented Dr. Lewiecki.
"This is an interesting study that suggests that good nutrition is good for skeletal health, and that there may be important interactions among various nutritional factors," he added. "The nature of the interaction between protein and calcium intake is not explained in this report and is an area of interest for future investigation."
The researchers received no funding for the study. Dr. Lewiecki has disclosed no relevant financial relationships.
American Society for Bone and Mineral Research 31st Annual Meeting: Abstract 1056. Presented September 12, 2009.

Thinking with Maynard Clark - Being Together IS Thinking

Where can I find a chart or table (with numbers) BY YEARS of global totals of farm animals slaughtered?

Mobile post sent by vegetarian using Utterlireply-count Replies.

Thinking with Maynard Clark - Being Together IS Thinking

Where can I find a chart or table (with numbers) BY YEARS of global totals of farm animals slaughtered?

Mobile post sent by vegetarian using Utterlireply-count Replies.

The Growing Case Against Red Meat

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1887266,00.html

The Growing Case Against Red Meat

By Tiffany Sharples Monday, Mar. 23, 2009
cheeseburger red meat
Lew Robertson / Brand X / Corbis
In more news that has steak lovers feeling deflated, a study published in this week's issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine finds that people who indulge in high amounts of red meat and processed meats, including steak, bacon, sausage and cold cuts, have an increased risk of death from cancer and heart disease. The findings add power to the growing push — by health officials, environmentalists and even some chefs — to cool America's love affair with meat.
The analysis of more than half a million Americans between the ages of 50 and 71 found that men in the highest quintile of red-meat consumption — those who ate about 5 oz. of red meat a day, roughly the equivalent of a small steak, according to lead author Rashmi Sinha — had a 31% higher risk of death over a 10-year period than men in the lowest-consumption quintile, who ate less than 1 oz. of red meat per day, or approximately three slices of corned beef. Men in the top fifth also had a 22% higher risk of dying of cancer and a 27% higher risk of dying of heart disease. In women, the figures were starker: women in the highest quintile of consumption had a 36% increase in death over a 10-year period compared with women who ate little red meat; eating lots of meat was associated with a 20% higher risk of dying of cancer and a 50% higher risk of dying of heart disease. (Read "A History of Beef, Times Two.")
The data for one of the largest analyses of meat consumption and mortality to date were first gathered for the National Institutes of Health and AARP Diet and Health Study in 1995. Researchers then tracked deaths for 10 years, until 2005, using the Social Security Administration Death Master File and the National Death Index, controlling for factors such as age, race, education, body-mass index and alcohol intake. (See pictures of a perfect steak instead of eating one.)
"Basically, the consumption of red and processed meat was associated with modest increases in mortality," says Sinha, a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute's Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, who is careful to emphasize that the institute is a research organization and does not make health recommendations. She suggests, however, that the fat content of and heavy iron concentration in red and processed meats, along with high-temperature cooking methods that can lead to the development of carcinogens, may increase the risk for disease and death. In contrast, the study found that higher white-meat consumption was associated with a lower risk of death. (Read "Meat: Making Global Warming Worse.")
Dr. Barry Popkin, a nutrition epidemiologist and economist who directs the interdisciplinary obesity program at the University of North Carolina, would use a term other than Sinha's "modest." "You're talking about a lot of deaths that would be prevented by cutting your processed meat or cutting your red meat," he says. He suggests framing the issue in real terms. A McDonald's Big Mac contains 7.5 oz. of red meat, Popkin points out. So if your diet consists of a Big Mac every other day — roughly equivalent to the highest quintile of meat consumption in the study; in other words, the typical American diet — you could cut back to one Big Mac a week and see dramatic health benefits.
See pictures from an Iowa steak fry.
Cast your votes for the TIME 100.

NYC Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, 67, wins 2009 Mary Woodard Lasker Public Service Award

The 2009 Mary Woodard Lasker Public Service Award honors New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, 67, for employing sound science in making policy decisions and advancing public health through enlightened philanthropy. In doing so, he faced down fierce opposition from vested interests to reduce tobacco use and promote healthy eating habits, helping stop disease before it starts. Mayor Bloomberg’s efforts continue to resonate throughout the world, contributing to a decline in tobacco use among New York City teenagers and an increased reliance on healthier ingredients by restaurants. Without political action to curb the consumption of harmful substances and major educational initiatives to nurture responsible choices in diet and lifestyle, even the most promising medical advances will not reverse the incidence of heart disease, cancer, obesity and diabetes.  Bloomberg has fueled advances not only through his activities as an elected official, but also by backing higher education in public health with unprecedented levels of support and committing $350 million to a global initiative to combat tobacco use. By relentlessly translating knowledge about public health into bold government action, he has benefited a large urban community and set an example and a new standard for cities and countries across the globe.

Thinking with Maynard Clark - Being Together IS Thinking

Working away in the LMA: some meetings, resolving storage issues in GHP, and likely Countway until 7-ish tonight

Mobile post sent by vegetarian using Utterlireply-count Replies.

09/13/2009 Harvard Crimson: 09/12/2009 "Is Eating Animals Ethical?" debate

Why not just email me at Maynard.Clark@GMail.com?

The Harvard Crimson's blog article on yesterday's "Is Eating Animals Ethical?" debate
http://www.flybyblog.com/2009/09/12/peta-debate-on-tolstoy-and-bonzai-trees/#more-4137

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PETA Debate: On Tolstoy and Bonzai Trees

Published by amcleese on Saturday, September 12, 2009, at 9:07PM

460px-BruceFriedrich1There's a lot of irony here. Bullhorns. Resemblances. Soak it in.
Most Harvard students eat meat. And most Americans probably think of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals as an extremist group.
You wouldn’t have known it at the debate the Harvard College Vegetarian Society organized this afternoon between Wesley N. Hopkin ’11, a social studies concentrator and member of the Harvard Speech and Parliamentary Debate Society, and Bruce G. Friedrich, vice president of policy and government affairs for PETA.
The most heated dispute concerned our own Harvard University Dining Services. Hopkin praised HUDS: “They are moving in the right direction,” he said. “We can, generally speaking, eat meat or eat meat products with a relatively clear conscience even now.”
Friedrich responded sharply. He noted that HUDS buys eggs from cage-free farms, but said that is the only bright spot. “Eating meat in HUDS when they are doing nothing for farmed animals, and eating meat in the real world, in any restaurant around here,” he said, “for people here who said you do eat meat: that is unethical.” Get the skivvy on Hopkin’s response and more after the jump.
Throughout most of the debate, though a slim majority of the packed Science Center audience admitted to eating meat, Hopkin conceded Friedrich’s arguments about the immorality of being a carnivore in today’s world. PETA seemed downright reasonable.
Hopkin and questioners from the audience rarely presented compelling reasons to dispute the main thrust of Friedrich’s well-supported argument. The PETA leader argued that facts overwhelmingly show that eating meat is bad for the environment, for the world’s poorest, and for the conscious experiences of animals. Instead of disputing Friedrich’s figures, Hopkin and others raised abstract intellectual questions heard in Social Studies 10 and “Justice”: How can we compare animal pain with human pain? And can animals be a part of the social contract?
Friedrich’s argument, by contrast, was direct and sure of its moral clarity. Throughout the event, he peppered his arguments with colorful quotations from celebs and intellectuals alike:
From Paul McCartney: “It’s staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty.”
From Leo Tolstoy: “Vegetarianism is the root of humanitarianism.”
And from Cameron Diaz, on eating bacon: “It’s like eating my niece.”
Hopkin, the subtle debater, conceded that today’s factory farming practices are “unconscionable, and should not be permitted.” Instead, he wondered whether better farming techniques could ever create a world in which eating meat was ethical. He advocated an approach to animal rights that focused on the social contract instead of utilitarianism, and on leveraging consumer power to work for better farming practices instead of abstaining from eating meat.
During the question and answer session, Harvard’s lofty minds posed provocative questions:
Is it ethically permissible to eat the meat leftovers of your friend sitting across the table at dinner?
How anthropocentric is the social contract, after all?
Cuteness aside, can we kill kangaroos in the barren outback of Australia?
And: is it morally responsible to own a pet—or should you buy a bonzai tree?
Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons
This was written by amcleese. Posted on at 9:07 pm. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.

4 Comments

  1. Jerry Friedman wrote:
    The social contract is anthropocentric. There is no justice in hurting those who are not indoctrinated into it.
    And leave the kangaroos alone.
    Sunday, September 13, 2009 at 3:37 pm | Permalink
  2. Jenny wrote:
    I was there! Bruce really knocked it out the park. Makes me want to reconsider my food choices.
    Sunday, September 13, 2009 at 3:58 pm | Permalink
  3. Glad to see people are coming around. Go vegans!
    Sunday, September 13, 2009 at 4:30 pm | Permalink
  4. I loved the event. Bruce showed a great deal of composure. Perhaps age (and experience) gave Bruce Friedrich the upper hand, but I like to think it was the justice and logic of his position:
    “No, it is NOT ethical to eat animals!”
    Sunday, September 13, 2009 at 10:13 pm | Permalink

Boston's Urban Herbivore; Toronto's Urban Herbivore: global soymilk movement for every outlet that serves coffee

This morning, a friend from Toronto sent me this interesting blog entry she found for the interesting same-name restaurant in her city.
Source: http://www.blogto.com/restaurants/urbanherbivore
"Whether you're looking for organic salads, vegetarian sandwiches, vegan soups or just a really healthy, flavourful (and filling) lunch, Urban Herbivore has got you covered.

Sure enough, Toronto is already a great place to find a good meatless lunch, but with the standard sandwich shops are still making a "veggie" sub out of the lettuce and tomatoes other sandwiches include as filler, this Kensington Market kitchen is redefining the Veg Sandwich.

Urban Herbivore: Hearty Fare for Hungry Vegans and Veggie-Lovin' Friends

64 Oxford Street       Website
Phone: 416.927.1231
I'm glad that someone with visibility in a large city is doing something constructive with the name, but (so you know)  I have been thinking of how I can use the name 'Urban Herbivore' from around 2002 onward.

If good people 'read my thoughts' and pick on the energy and run properly with my ideas, the world will be better off.

Say, how about a global soymilk movement for every restaurant, coffee shop, snack bar, lunch truck, bistro, bar, pushcart, and cafeteria that serves coffee?


Have a great weekend!

Primary Prevention NOW !! [That's evidence-based health education for cost-savings]

The signature I sign in health care petitions is the signature that  includes the clarification that I would support universal inclusion that is truly caring for health, not merely managing disease, and that I believed we could afford to guarantee THAT kind of healthcare as a fundamental right IF we include primary prevention that is behaviorally-oriented and evidence-based.

Ensuring healthy vegetarian (read vegan) meal options (along with suitable health education that sees the benefits of plant-based diets) for students, we cannot deliver the experiential knowledge of what health-supporting eating actually is (and providing a health-aware future for those young citizens going forward).

Rhotic and non-rhotic Accents

English pronunciation can be divided into two main accent groups: A rhotic (pronounced /ˈroʊtɨk/) speaker pronounces the letter R in hard and water. A non-rhotic speaker does not pronounce it in hard, and may not in water, or may only pronounce it in water if the following word begins with a vowel. In other words, rhotic speakers pronounce /r/ in all positions, while non-rhotic speakers pronounce /r/ only if it is followed by a vowel sound in the same phrase or prosodic unit (see "linking and intrusive R").
In linguistic terms, non-rhotic accents are said to exclude the sound [r] from the syllable coda before a consonant or prosodic break. This is commonly if misleadingly referred to as "post-vocalic R".

Development of non-rhotic accents


On this map of England, the red areas are where the rural accents were rhotic as of the 1950s. Based on H. Orton et al., Survey of English dialects (196271). Note that some areas with partial rhoticity (for example parts of the East Riding of Yorkshire) are not shaded on this map.
Red areas are where English dialects of the late 20th century were rhotic. Based on P. Trudgill, The Dialects of England.
The earliest traces of a loss of /r/ in English are found in the environment before /s/ in spellings from the mid-15th century: the Oxford English Dictionary reports bace for earlier barse (today "bass", the fish) in 1440 and passel for parcel in 1468. In the 1630s, the word juggernaut is first attested, which represents the Sanskrit word jagannāth, meaning "lord of the universe". The English spelling uses the digraph er to represent a Hindi sound close to the English schwa. Loss of coda /r/ apparently became widespread in southern England during the 18th century; John Walker uses the spelling ar to indicate the broad A of aunt in his 1775 dictionary and reports that card is pronounced "caad" in 1791 (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006: 47).
Non-rhotic speakers pronounce an /r/ in red, and most pronounce it in torrid and watery, where R is followed by a vowel, but not in hard, nor in car or water when those words are said in isolation. However, in most non-rhotic accents, if a word ending in written "r" is followed closely by a word beginning with a vowel, the /r/ is pronounced—as in water ice. This phenomenon is referred to as "linking R". Many non-rhotic speakers also insert epenthetic /r/s between vowels when the first vowel is one that can occur before syllable-final r (drawring for drawing). This so-called "intrusive R" has been stigmatized, but even speakers of so-called Received Pronunciation frequently "intrude" an epenthetic /r/ at word boundaries, especially where one or both vowels is schwa; for example the idea of it becomes the idea-r-of it, Australia and New Zealand becomes Australia-r-and New Zealand. The typical alternative used by RP speakers is to insert a glottal stop where an intrusive R would otherwise be placed.[1]
For non-rhotic speakers, what was historically a vowel plus /r/ is now usually realized as a long vowel. So in Received Pronunciation (RP) and many other non-rhotic accents card, fern, born are pronounced [kɑːd], [fɜːn], [bɔːn] or something similar; the pronunciations vary from accent to accent. This length may be retained in phrases, so while car pronounced in isolation is [kɑː], car owner is [kɑːɹəʊnə]. But a final schwa usually remains short, so water in isolation is [wɔːtə]. In RP and similar accents the vowels /iː/ and /uː/ (or /ʊ/), when followed by r, become diphthongs ending in schwa, so near is [nɪə] and poor is [pʊə], though these have other realizations as well, including monophthongal ones; once again, the pronunciations vary from accent to accent. The same happens to diphthongs followed by R, though these may be considered to end in /ər/ in rhotic speech, and it is the /ər/ that reduces to schwa as usual in non-rhotic speech: tire said in isolation is [taɪə] and sour is [saʊə].[2] For some speakers, some long vowels alternate with a diphthong ending in schwa, so wear may be [wɛə] but wearing [wɛːɹiŋ].

Mergers characteristic of non-rhotic accents


Some phonetic mergers are characteristic of non-rhotic accents. These usually include one item that historically contained an R (lost in the non-rhotic accent), and one that never did so. The section below lists mergers in order of approximately decreasing prevalence.
  • panda-pander. In the terminology of Wells (1982) this consists of the merger of the lexical sets commA and lettER. It is found in all or nearly all non-rhotic accents,[3] and is even present in some accents that are in other respects rhotic, such as those of some speakers in Jamaica and the Bahamas.[3] Other possible homophones include area-airier, cheetah-cheater, cornea-cornier, formally-formerly, manna-manner/manor, rota-rotor, schema-schemer, tuba-tuber and pharma-farmer.
  • father-farther In Wells's terminology, this consists of the merger of the lexical sets PALM and START. It is found in the speech of the great majority of non-rhotic speakers, including those of England, Wales, the United States, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. It may be absent in some non-rhotic speakers in the Bahamas.[3] Other possible homophones include alms-arms, balmy-barmy, lava-larva and spa-spar
  • pawn-porn. In Wells's terminology, this consists of the merger of the lexical sets THOUGHT and NORTH. It is found in the same accents as the father-farther merger described above, but is absent from the Bahamas and Guyana.[3] Other possible homophones include awe-or, caulk-cork, gnaw-nor, laud-lord, stalk-stork, talk-torque, taught-tort and thaw-Thor.
  • caught-court. In Wells's terminology, this consists of the merger of the lexical sets THOUGHT and FORCE. It is found in those non-rhotic accents containing the pawn-porn merger that have also undergone the horse-hoarse merger. These include the accents of Southern England, Wales, non-rhotic New York City speakers, Trinidad and the Southern hemisphere. In such accents a three-way merger awe-or-ore/oar results. Other possible homophones include bawd-board, flaw-floor, fought-fort, law-lore, paw-pour/pore, raw-roar, sauce-source, saw-sore/soar and Shaw-shore.
  • calve-carve. In Wells's terminology, this consists of the merger of the lexical sets BATH and START. It is found in some non-rhotic accents with broad A in words like "bath". It is general in southern England (excluding rhotic speakers), Trinidad, the Bahamas, and the Southern hemisphere. It is a possibility for Welsh, Eastern New England, Jamaican, and Guyanese speakers. Other possible homophones include aunt-aren't, fast-farced and pass-parse.
  • paw-poor. In Wells's terminology, this consists of the merger of the lexical sets THOUGHT and CURE It is found in those non-rhotic accents containing the caught-court merger that have also undergone the pour-poor merger. Wells lists it unequivocally only for the accent of Trinidad, but it is an option for non-rhotic speakers in England, Australia and New Zealand. Such speakers have a potential four-way merger taw-tor-tore-tour.[4]. Other possible homophones include Shaw-sure, tawny-tourney and yaw-your
  • batted-battered. This merger is present in non-rhotic acents which have undergone the weak vowel merger. Such accents include Australian, New Zealand, most South African speech, and some non-rhotic English speech. Other possible homophones include arches-archers, chatted-chattered, founded-foundered, matted-mattered, offices-officers, sauces-saucers, splendid-splendo(u)red and tended-tendered.
  • dough-door. In Wells's terminology, this consists of the merger of the lexical sets GOAT and FORCE. It may be found in some southern US non-rhotic speech, some speakers of African American Vernacular English, some speakers in Guyana and some Welsh speech.[3] Other possible homophones include coat-court, flow-floor, foe-four/fore, go-gore, hoe-whore, poach-porch, poke-pork, row-roar, show-shore, snow-snore, stow-store, toe-tore and woe-wore.
  • show-sure. In Wells's terminology, this consists of the merger of the lexical sets GOAT and CURE. It may be present in those speakers who have both the dough-door merger described above, and also the pour-poor merger. These include some southern US non-rhotic speakers, some speakers of African American Vernacular English,and some speakers in Guyana.[3] Other possible homophones include Poe-poor, toe-tour, and goad-gourd
  • often-orphan. In Wells's terminology, this consists of the merger of the lexical sets CLOTH and NORTH. It may be present in old-fashioned Eastern New England accents,[5], some New York speakers [6] and also in some speakers in Jamaica and Guyana. It was also present in some words in old-fashioned Received Pronunciation. Other possible homophones include moss-Morse and off-Orff.
  • God-guard. In Wells's terminology, this consists of the merger of the lexical sets LOT and START. It may be present in non-rhotic accents that have undergone the father-bother merger. These may include some New York accents,[7] some southern US accents,[8] and African American Vernacular English.[9]. Other possible homophones include cod-card, hot-heart, lodge-large, pot-part, potty-party, and shop-sharp.
  • shot-short. In Wells's terminology, this consists of the merger of the lexical sets LOT and NORTH. It may be present in some Eastern New England accents.[10][11]. Other possible homophones include cock-cork, cod-cord, con-corn, odder-order and stock-stork.
  • oil-earl. In Wells's terminology, this consists of the merger of the lexical sets CHOICE and NURSE preconsonantally. It was present in older New York accents, but became stigmatized and is sharply recessive in those born since the Second World War.[12]. Other possible homophones include adjoin-adjourn, Boyd-bird, coil-curl, oily-early and voice-verse
In some accents, syllabication may interact with rhoticity, resulting in homophones where nonrhotic accents have centering diphthongs. Possibilities include Korea-career[13], Shi'a-sheer, and Maia-mire,[14] while skua may be identical with the second syllable of obscure.[15]

Distribution of rhotic and non-rhotic accents


Examples of rhotic accents are: Mid Ulster English, Canadian English and General American. Non-rhotic accents include Received Pronunciation, New Zealand, Australian, South African and Estuary English.
Final post-vocalic /r/ in farmer in English rural dialects of the 1950s[16]
GREEN - [ə] (non-rhotic)
YELLOW - [əʴ] (alveolar)
ORANGE - [əʵ] (retroflex)
PINK - [əʵː] (& long)
BLUE - [əʶ] (uvular)
VIOLET - [ɔʶ] (back & rounded)
Most speakers of most of North American English are rhotic, as are speakers from Barbados, Scotland and most of Ireland.
In England, rhotic accents are found in the West Country (south and the west of a line from near Shrewsbury to around Portsmouth), the Corby area, most of Lancashire (north and east of the centre of Manchester), some parts of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire and in the areas that border Scotland. The prestige form, however, exerts a steady pressure towards non-rhoticity. Thus the urban speech of, say, Bristol or Southampton is more accurately described as variably rhotic, the degree of rhoticity being reduced as one moves up the class and formality scales.[17]
Most speakers of Indian English have a rhotic accent.[18] Other areas with rhotic accents include Otago and Southland in the far south of New Zealand's South Island, where a Scottish influence is apparent.
Areas with non-rhotic accents include Australia, most of the Caribbean, most of England (including Received Pronunciation speakers), most of New Zealand, Wales, and Singapore.
Canada is entirely rhotic except for small isolated areas in southwestern New Brunswick, parts of Newfoundland, and Lunenburg and Shelburne Counties, Nova Scotia.
In the United States, much of the South was once non-rhotic, but in recent decades non-rhotic speech has declined. Today, non-rhoticity in Southern American English is found primarily among older speakers, and only in some areas such as New Orleans (where it is known as the Yat dialect), southern Alabama, Savannah, Georgia, and Norfolk, Virginia. [19] Parts of New England, especially Boston, are non-rhotic as well as New York City and surrounding areas. The case of New York is especially interesting because of a classic study in sociolinguistics by William Labov showing that the non-rhotic accent is associated with older and middle- to lower-class speakers, and is being replaced by the rhotic accent. African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is largely non-rhotic.
There are a few accents of Southern American English where intervocalic /r/ is deleted before an unstressed syllable and at the end of a word even when the following word begins with a vowel. In such accents, pronunciations like [kæəlaːnə] for Carolina and [bɛːʌp] for "bear up" are heard.[20] These pronunciations also occur in AAVE.[21]
In Asia, India[18] and the Philippines have rhotic dialects. In the case of the Philippines, this may be explained because the English that is spoken there is heavily influenced by the American dialect. In addition, many East Asians (in China, Japan, and Korea) who have a good command of English generally have rhotic accents because of the influence of American English.

Similar phenomena in other languages

This article contains Chinese text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Chinese characters.The rhotic consonant is dropped or vocalized under similar conditions in other Germanic languages, notably German, Danish and some dialects of southern Sweden (possibly because of its proximity to Denmark). In most varieties of German, /r/ in the syllable coda is frequently realized as a vowel or a semivowel, [ɐ] or [ɐ̯], especially in the unstressed ending -er and after long vowels: for example sehr [zeːɐ̯], besser [ˈbɛsɐ]. Similarly, Danish /r/ after a vowel is, unless preceded by a stressed vowel, either pronounced [ɐ̯] (mor "mother" [moɐ̯ˀ], næring "nourishment" [ˈnɛɐ̯eŋ]) or merged with the preceding vowel while usually influencing its vowel quality (/a(ː)r/ and /ɔːr/ or /ɔr/ are realised as long vowels [aː] and [ɒː], and /ər/, /rə/ and /rər/ are all pronounced [ɐ]) (løber "runner" [ˈløːb̥ɐ], Søren Kierkegaard (personal name) [ˌsœːɐn ˈkʰiɐ̯ɡ̊əˌɡ̊ɒːˀ]).
Among the Turkic languages, Uyghur displays more or less the same feature, as syllable-final /r/ is dropped, while the preceding vowel is lengthened: for example Uyghurlar [ʔʊɪˈʁʊːlaː]Uyghurs’. The /r/ may, however, sometimes be pronounced in unusually "careful" or "pedantic" speech; in such cases, it is often mistakenly inserted after long vowels even when there is no phonemic /r/ there.
In standard Khmer the final /r/ is unpronounced. If an /r/ occurs as the second consonant of a cluster in a minor syllable, it is also unpronounced. The informal speech of Phnom Penh has gone a step further, dropping the /r/ when it occurs as the second consonant of a cluster in a major syllable while leaving behind a dipping tone. When an /r/ occurs as the initial of a syllable, it becomes uvular in contrasts to the trilled /r/ in standard speech.
Similarly in Yaqui, an indigenous language of northern Mexico, intervocalic or syllable-final /r/ is often dropped with lengthening of the previous vowel: pariseo becomes [paːˈseo], sewaro becomes [sewajo].
In some dialects of Brazilian Portuguese, word-final /r/ is unpronounced or becomes simply an aspiration (mostly in the interior of Minas Gerais, São Paulo, Paraná and Mato Grosso do Sul states), while in Thai, pre-consonantal /r/ is unpronounced.
Andalusian Spanish is the only Spanish dialect with an unpronounced word-final /r/.[citation needed]
In Mandarin, the variety of Chinese that forms the basis of the national language, coda [ɻ] is only pronounced in some areas, including Beijing, while in others it tends to be silent. 二 "two", for instance, is pronounced [ɑ̂ɻ] in rhotic areas only.

Effect on spelling

This article contains Chinese text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Chinese characters.
This article contains Indic text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks or boxes, misplaced vowels or missing conjuncts instead of Indic text.
Spellings based on non-rhotic pronunciation of dialectal or foreign words can result in mispronunciations if read by rhotic speakers. In addition to juggernaut mentioned above, the following are found:
  • "Er", to indicate a filled pause, as a British spelling of what Americans would render "uh".
  • The Korean family name usually written "Park" in English.
  • The game Parcheesi.
  • British English slang words:
    • "char" for "cha" from the Mandarin Chinese pronunciation of 茶 (= "tea" (the drink))
    • "nark" (= "informer") from Romany "nāk" (= "nose").
  • In Rudyard Kipling's books:
    • "dorg" instead of "dawg" for a drawled pronunciation of "dog".
    • Hindu god name Kama misspelled as "Karma" (which refers to a concept in several Asian religions, not a god).
    • Hindustani कागज़ "kāgaz" (= "paper") spelled as "kargaz".
  • "Burma" and "Myanmar" for Burmese [bəmà] and [mjàmmà].
  • The development of "ass" (buttocks) as a variant of arse (later standardized as US usage).

See also

References

  1. ^ Wells, Accents of English, 1:224.
  2. ^ New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
  3. ^ a b c d e f Wells (1982)
  4. ^ Wells, p. 287
  5. ^ Wells, p. 524
  6. ^ Wells (1982), p. 503
  7. ^ Wells (1982), p. 504
  8. ^ Wells (1982), p. 544
  9. ^ Wells (1982), p. 577
  10. ^ Wells, p. 520
  11. ^ Dillard, Joey Lee (1980). Perspectives on American English
     
    . The Hague; New York: Walter de Gruyter. p. 53. ISBN 9027933677. http://books.google.com/books?id=6zPgjduXBcQC
     
    .
     
  12. ^ Wells (1982), pp. 508-509
  13. ^ Wells (1982), p. 225
  14. ^ Upton, Clive; Eben Upton (2004). Oxford rhyming dictionary. Oxford University Press. p. 59. ISBN 0192801155. 
  15. ^ Upton, Clive; Eben Upton (2004). Oxford rhyming dictionary. Oxford University Press. p. 60. ISBN 0192801155. 
  16. ^ Wakelyn, Martin: "Rural dialects in England", in: Trudgill, Peter (1984): Language in the British Isles, p.77
  17. ^ Trudgill, Peter (1984). Language in the British Isles. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521284090, 9780521284097. 
  18. ^ a b Wells, J. C. (1982). Accents of English 3: Beyond the British Isles. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p. 629. ISBN 0521285410. 
  19. ^ Labov, Ash, and Boberg, 2006: pp. 4748.
  20. ^ Harris 2006: pp. 25.
  21. ^ Pollock et al., 1998.

Bibliography

Links








Thinking with Maynard Clark - Being Together IS Thinking

http://bit.ly/2mhuAC attending #Harvard VegSocy #DEBATE #Saturday @Science Ctr D in Harvard Sq - 3-5PM after #vegan meetup/speaking workshop

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Thinking with Maynard Clark - Being Together IS Thinking

http://bit.ly/2mhuAC attending #Harvard VegSocy #DEBATE Saturday @Science Ctr D in Harvard Sq - 3-5PM after #vegan meetup/speaking workshop

Mobile post sent by vegetarian using Utterlireply-count Replies.

Thinking with Maynard Clark - Being Together IS Thinking

http://bit.ly/2mhuAC attending Harvard VegSocy DEBATE Saturday @Science Ctr D in Harvard Sq - 3-5PM after vegan meetup/speaking workshop

Mobile post sent by vegetarian using Utterlireply-count Replies.

Thinking with Maynard Clark - Being Together IS Thinking

http://bit.ly/2mhuAC attending Harvard VegSocy DEBATE Saturday @Science Ctr D in Harvard Sq - 3-5PM after vegan meetup/speaking workshop

Mobile post sent by vegetarian using Utterlireply-count Replies.

Vegan advocacy for introverts

Roanoke Vegan Examiner



Vegan advocacy for introverts

September 10, 4:02 AMRoanoke Vegan ExaminerCorey Wrenn
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     Vegan activism need not be intimidating!






Vegan advocacy is often very off-putting for introvertive folks who find speaking to others about moral or political issues terrifying.  However, even the very shy can make a difference for non-human animals.  When it comes down to it, you can go very far in your outreach without having speaking to anyone face to face.  By adopting these ten easy activities, the number of people reached could be substantial.  Vegan outreach need not be intimidating, but it should be pervasive and persistent.  There's no reason for anyone who recognizes the inherent injustice and the terrible truth of non-human animal use to stand by idly.

1.    The Vegan Car
Those in traffic will have no choice but to read your thought-provoking bumper stickers.  From parking lots to interstates, a well-labeled vegan car is effective outreach en mass.  Vanity  plates, too, while limited in their breadth, are excellent vehicles for outreach.

2.     Vegan Voicemail
A vegan-related voicemail or answering machine message is great for frequent-callers, new friends, and businesses who must listen to the voicemail to leave a message.  Often you will find your message is prefaced by the caller's reaction!

3.     Vegan Snail Mail
Always slip vegan literature into all outgoing mail, especially bills.  Don’t forget to seal the envelope with a vegan sticker!

4.     Vegan "Litter"
Always carry vegan literature with you.  Small brochures like Gary Francione’s Abolitionist Approach pamphlet, are easy to carry in your purse, backpack, or glove box.  Leave them in veterinarian’s offices, gyms, public spaces on campus or at work, etc.

5.    Internet Social Networking
By regularly posting articles, videos, or comments regarding vegan abolitionist animal rights on networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter, you can access a large network of friends and friends of friends.

6.     Vegan Email
Add a vegan-oriented quote to your email signature.  If your email allows, a small photograph also draws attention and sparks thought.

7.     Vegan News
While writing an editorial might seem daunting, non-human animal issues are often popular with newspapers and magazines.  The uniqueness of the abolitionist vegan approach is also useful for getting printed.   If one source turns you down, simply send it to another.   If the writing is good, it is unlikely it will be rejected indefinitely.

8.     Vegan Food
Bring a delicious vegan dish to company, group, or family get togethers.  Make sure it is labeled vegan.  If the crowd is likely to be closed-minded to death-free dining, don’t mention the dish to be vegan until after they’ve enjoyed it.
9.     The Vegan Public Space
Offices, dorms, cubicles, etc. are seen by countless persons.  If permitted, post vegan fliers and lay literature out for the passerby to peruse.  If possible, plaster doors with bright, eye-catching vegan material to enlighten.

10.     Be Vegan and Stay Vegan
Simply being vegan is in itself superb direct action for non-human animals.   Living your life day to day, you will make choices that will positively impact non-human animals and those around  you.  Help destroy the negative stereotype surrounding vegans.  Maintaining a well-adjusted, happy vegan front is the easiest and most effective activism you can accomplish.

Hospital Hand-Washing Project to Save Lives and Money


September 10, 2009, 12:01 am

A Hospital Hand-Washing Project to Save Lives and Money

By Kevin Sack
While President Obama deals with the big picture, the chief hospital accrediting agency is turning its attention to what should be the most mundane of details: persuading health care workers to wash their hands.
The Joint Commission, which accredits more than 16,000 hospitals, nursing homes and other health care providers, plans to unveil a pilot project on Thursday aimed at placing an intense focus on hand-washing at eight prominent hospital systems.
Hand-washing is considered vital in health care settings to prevent the spread of potentially-infectious pathogens, like Methicillin-resistant Staphylococus aureus. And close attention to such basic hygiene could be a way of reducing the nation’s hospital health care bill by billions of dollars.
To create a baseline, each hospital agreed last spring to carefully measure its current compliance, using trained unidentified observers. To the surprise of many administrators, the hospitals found that caregivers on average washed their hands fewer than half the times they entered or exited a patient’s room.
That is a central standard for hand hygiene adopted by both the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and incorporated into the Joint Commission’s accreditation goals. If accreditation officials notice three or more violations of hand-washing protocol during a site visit, a hospital is cited and must devise a corrective plan.
The low compliance rates, which ranged from about 30 percent to 70 percent at individual hospitals, “are hallmarks of processes that are not in control,” said Dr. Mark R. Chassin, the Joint Commission’s president.
Findings of shockingly poor hand-washing compliance are not new in hospitals. Other studies have produced comparable figures, and the stories of fatal consequences have become tragically routine.
The disease control agency estimates there are 1.7 million infection cases a year in hospitals and that 99,000 patients die after contracting them (although infection may not be the sole cause). It projects the cost of treating those patients at $20 billion a year.
Despite the daunting statistics, and what would seem to be the ease of saving thousands of lives, old habits have proven stubbornly resistant to cultural change. Research has found that constant vigilance, individualized solutions and an upending of hospital hierarchy are all required.
“It seems really simple, but even this one turns out to be complicated,” Dr. Chassin said in an interview.
In some hospitals, he said, the remedies are as obvious as changing the location of soap dispensers or providing stands so that workers can put down what they have in their hands. In others, poorly collected data have lulled administrators into thinking they do not have a problem. In many places, physicians, nurses, orderlies and custodians must be reminded time and again that the rules apply to them.
“Certainly there are some individuals who believe they are above the law,’’ Dr. Chassin said, “and their peers and others are reluctant to call their omissions to their attention.”
The eight participating hospitals – Cedars-Sinai Health System in Los Angeles, Exempla Lutheran Medical Center in Wheat Ridge, Colo., Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee, The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System in Baltimore, Memorial Hermann Health Care System in Houston, Trinity Health in Novi, Mich., Virtua in Marlton, N.J. and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C. – have developed their own improvement plans. After several months of intensive effort, the compliance average has jumped to 74 percent, Dr. Chassin said.
“The acid test is sustainability,” Dr. Chassin said. “They want to be above 90 percent all the time, consistently with no variation.”

Online Research Ethics Course

O N L I N E   R E S E A R C H   E T H I C S   C O U R S E
Welcome to the Online Research Ethics Course developed through the Practical Ethics Center at the University of Montana with Office of Research Integrity (ORI) support during the 2002-03 academic year.
This course is intended to provide a foundation for institutions that are working to promote Responsible Conduct of Research. Our hope is that web-based instruction like this will expose investigators and graduate students to the kinds of ethical issues and federal requirements they encounter throughout their careers and prepare them to deal with those issues and requirements.
The six sections represented by the buttons to the left each provide information on major issues and contain at least one case study that allow exploration of different options, as well as an assessment tool so you can test your knowledge of the area.
Click on a section button at the left and read each section's Introduction and Major Issues for Discussion. You may also want to explore the many additional resources provided for each section. Next, select the Case Study link. Each Case Study provides different alternatives for you to explore. When you have finished all of the alternatives, click on the Section Assessment link to test your understanding of the covered material.
Once you have successfully completed the Section Assessment, you may print out a certificate of completion for the section.
To proceed to another section, simply click on a link provided at the top left.
Federal funding agencies and research institutions are increasingly pro-active in insuring that researchers and graduate students in research disciplines learn about the ethics related to their work. In December 2000, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) issued the Public Health Service (PHS) Policy on Instruction in the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR). If the policy had been approved, ORI would require research institutions that are recipients of PHS funds to develop and require training in ethics for all research staff "who have direct and substantive involvement in proposing, performing, reviewing, or reporting research, or who receive research training, supported by PHS funds or who otherwise work on the PHS-supported research project even if the individual does not receive PHS support."/1 PHS research funding is provided by the Administration for Children and Families, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Indian Health Service, and National Institutes of Health.
1). Data acquisition, management, sharing, and ownership;
2). Mentor/trainee responsibilities;
3). Publication practices and responsible authorship;
4). Peer review;
5). Collaborative science;
6). Human subjects;
7). Research involving animals;
8). Research misconduct; and
9). Conflict of interest and commitment./4
In addition, the course uses the partially implemented standardized federal definitions and procedures.
This course also encourages investigators, and requires students enrolled in the course for credit, to think critically about what it means to be an ethical researcher. One may be in compliance, without being an ethical researcher. Being in compliance means following the rules; ethical research requires an understanding of the ethical imperatives behind the rules. The fundamental ethical imperative behind the rules is that researchers seek to do their jobs in a manner that will not cause unjustified harm to anyone. But, most researchers work toward acting in an ethically ideal way -- through their work and professional conduct, they seek to prevent harm and to promote the good. Throughout the course, investigators and students will be asked to think about the range of actions that count as responsible conduct for the ethical researcher as well as identifying the rules that researchers are expected to follow.
Some of the content for this course comes from work sponsored by NSF/5 and the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE)/6, conducted at Dartmouth College and the University of Montana from 1992-1995. Those projects resulted in three publications, Stern, Judy E. and Elliott, Deni, The Ethics of Scientific Research: A Guidebook for Course Development and Elliott, Deni and Stern, Judy E. (eds), Research Ethics: A Reader and a special issue of Professional Ethics Journal, Volume 4, Numbers 3 & 4. Both books were published by the University Press of New England in 1997 and material from both books is incorporated into this course. Copies of the journal may be ordered from Professional Ethics Journal at the Center for Applied Philosophy, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida. This course was also enriched through a conversation the course authors had with Dartmouth, NSF and FIPSE in December 2000 and by the pilot testing of sections by colleagues around the country in March, 2002.
    I. Ethical Issues in Research: A Framework
          A. Compliance and Ethics
          B. Compliance Concepts
          C. Ethics Concepts
    II. Interpersonal Responsibility
          A. Mentor/Trainee Responsibilities
          B. Determining Publication Practices and Responsible Authorship
          C. Collaborative Science/Competitive Science
    III. Institutional Responsibility
          A. The Institutional Process Regarding Allegations
          B. Conflicts of Interest and Conflicts of Commitment
          C. IRB/IACUC
    IV. Professional Responsibility
          A. Proposing Research
          B. Dissemination of Findings
          C. Peer Review
    V. Animals in Research
    VI. Human Participation in Research
Instances of intentional fraud were thought to be few. It was erroneously believed that well-intentioned researchers did not need clear statements of expectations or conventional norms. It was assumed that novice researchers learned the conventions and expectations of high quality research in the labs of their equally well-intentioned mentors. The individual nature of the instruction meant that what were perceived as "norms" were more often the individual mentor's own perspectives. "The absence of norms... was symptomatic of the neglect of research ethics in the decades leading to the 1980s," according to Caroline Whitbeck in her introduction to a collection of papers on Trustworthy Research./7 "During this period, hardly any universities or other research institutions established policies for investigating charges of wrongdoing."
Since the 1980s, professional societies and federal agencies moved to describe research norms and to look for ways to educate young scientists. While not disputing the importance of informal mentoring in the teaching of students, the National Academy of Sciences explained that "[S]cience has become so complex and so closely intertwined with society's needs that a more formal introduction to research ethics and the responsibilities that these commitments imply is also needed - an introduction that can supplement the informal lessons provided by research supervisors and mentors." The Academy, in 1989, produced the first edition of "On Being A Scientist," to describe, for beginning scientists, the ethical foundations of scientific practice. More than 200,000 copies were distributed to graduate and undergraduate students./8
One is ethically responsible for far more than for what one can be held legally accountable. This is true in general morality, just as it is true in research. It is wrong to lie in many more instances that the lies for which one can be prosecuted. In an analogous fashion, it is important that institutions and investigators keep in mind that requirements for compliance prescribe a minimal standard for research practice. It is important to know how to be compliant, just as it is important to know the laws for which one can be held accountable by society. But it is equally important that individuals think about how to best meet their role-related responsibilities in ways that go beyond mere compliance with rules and regulations. Institutions should consider how best to encourage research that is praiseworthy, rather than how to simply discourage research that is blameworthy.
Federal funding agencies and research institutions are increasingly pro-active in insuring that researchers and graduate students in research disciplines learn about the ethics related to their work. In December 2000, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) issued the Public Health Service (PHS) Policy on Instruction in the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR). If the policy had been approved, ORI would require research institutions that are recipients of PHS funds to develop and require training in ethics for all research staff "who have direct and substantive involvement in proposing, performing, reviewing, or reporting research, or who receive research training, supported by PHS funds or who otherwise work on the PHS-supported research project even if the individual does not receive PHS support."/1 PHS research funding is provided by the Administration for Children and Families, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Indian Health Service, and National Institutes of Health.
1). Data acquisition, management, sharing, and ownership;
2). Mentor/trainee responsibilities;
3). Publication practices and responsible authorship;
4). Peer review;
5). Collaborative science;
6). Human subjects;
7). Research involving animals;
8). Research misconduct; and
9). Conflict of interest and commitment./4
In addition, the course uses the partially implemented standardized federal definitions and procedures.
This course also encourages investigators, and requires students enrolled in the course for credit, to think critically about what it means to be an ethical researcher. One may be in compliance, without being an ethical researcher. Being in compliance means following the rules; ethical research requires an understanding of the ethical imperatives behind the rules. The fundamental ethical imperative behind the rules is that researchers seek to do their jobs in a manner that will not cause unjustified harm to anyone. But, most researchers work toward acting in an ethically ideal way -- through their work and professional conduct, they seek to prevent harm and to promote the good. Throughout the course, investigators and students will be asked to think about the range of actions that count as responsible conduct for the ethical researcher as well as identifying the rules that researchers are expected to follow.
Some of the content for this course comes from work sponsored by NSF/5 and the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE)/6, conducted at Dartmouth College and the University of Montana from 1992-1995. Those projects resulted in three publications, Stern, Judy E. and Elliott, Deni, The Ethics of Scientific Research: A Guidebook for Course Development and Elliott, Deni and Stern, Judy E. (eds), Research Ethics: A Reader and a special issue of Professional Ethics Journal, Volume 4, Numbers 3 & 4. Both books were published by the University Press of New England in 1997 and material from both books is incorporated into this course. Copies of the journal may be ordered from Professional Ethics Journal at the Center for Applied Philosophy, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida. This course was also enriched through a conversation the course authors had with Dartmouth, NSF and FIPSE in December 2000 and by the pilot testing of sections by colleagues around the country in March, 2002.
    I. Ethical Issues in Research: A Framework
          A. Compliance and Ethics
          B. Compliance Concepts
          C. Ethics Concepts
    II. Interpersonal Responsibility
          A. Mentor/Trainee Responsibilities
          B. Determining Publication Practices and Responsible Authorship
          C. Collaborative Science/Competitive Science
    III. Institutional Responsibility
          A. The Institutional Process Regarding Allegations
          B. Conflicts of Interest and Conflicts of Commitment
          C. IRB/IACUC
    IV. Professional Responsibility
          A. Proposing Research
          B. Dissemination of Findings
          C. Peer Review
    V. Animals in Research
    VI. Human Participation in Research
Instances of intentional fraud were thought to be few. It was erroneously believed that well-intentioned researchers did not need clear statements of expectations or conventional norms. It was assumed that novice researchers learned the conventions and expectations of high quality research in the labs of their equally well-intentioned mentors. The individual nature of the instruction meant that what were perceived as "norms" were more often the individual mentor's own perspectives. "The absence of norms... was symptomatic of the neglect of research ethics in the decades leading to the 1980s," according to Caroline Whitbeck in her introduction to a collection of papers on Trustworthy Research./7 "During this period, hardly any universities or other research institutions established policies for investigating charges of wrongdoing."
Since the 1980s, professional societies and federal agencies moved to describe research norms and to look for ways to educate young scientists. While not disputing the importance of informal mentoring in the teaching of students, the National Academy of Sciences explained that "[S]cience has become so complex and so closely intertwined with society's needs that a more formal introduction to research ethics and the responsibilities that these commitments imply is also needed - an introduction that can supplement the informal lessons provided by research supervisors and mentors." The Academy, in 1989, produced the first edition of "On Being A Scientist," to describe, for beginning scientists, the ethical foundations of scientific practice. More than 200,000 copies were distributed to graduate and undergraduate students./8
One is ethically responsible for far more than for what one can be held legally accountable. This is true in general morality, just as it is true in research. It is wrong to lie in many more instances that the lies for which one can be prosecuted. In an analogous fashion, it is important that institutions and investigators keep in mind that requirements for compliance prescribe a minimal standard for research practice. It is important to know how to be compliant, just as it is important to know the laws for which one can be held accountable by society. But it is equally important that individuals think about how to best meet their role-related responsibilities in ways that go beyond mere compliance with rules and regulations. Institutions should consider how best to encourage research that is praiseworthy, rather than how to simply discourage research that is blameworthy.
3/Federal Register, pp. 76260-76264.
4/PHS Policy on Instruction in the Responsible Conduct of Research, December 1, 2000; www.ori.hhs.gov/html/programs/announcement.asp.
5/NSF #SBR 9496203.
6/FIPSE #P116 B960045.
Office of Research Integrity: RCR Instructional Resources
A comprehensive list of RCR resources "to assist institutions in developing RCR programs and to facilitate the sharing of resources among institutions."
The Ethics of Scientific Research A Guidebook for Course Development: A 75-page PDF (Adobe Acrobat) book by Judy Stern and Deni Elliott. Whether scientific ethics is approached through a single course or a series of courses or seminars throughout the graduate curriculum, it has become obvious that students need exposure to ethics in a number of contexts. Research ethics can and must be taught in a formalized manner. It is our belief that courses in research ethics that incorporate a solid philosophical framework have the greatest potential for long-term usefulness to students. While other methodologies may reinforce this material, a course of the type described in this monograph has the potential to help a student develop the tools to see ethical problems from a new vantage point. It is in this context and for these reasons that we designed our course in research ethics.
Resources For Instruction In Responsible Conduct Of Research: Examples of programs and tools for instruction in the responsible conduct of research. Maintained by Michael Kalichman, Ph.D. Director, Research Ethics Program, University of California, San Diego. The site also contains a link to Online Resources For RCR Instruction, "a comprehensive web site supported by ORI."
Please Note: The course authors acknowledge that this course content is built on the shoulders of great thinkers, both classical and contemporary, and have striven to assign appropriate credit for the ideas and words of others. If you believe that appropriate credit has not been assigned, please contact the course authors so that corrections can be made, or additional credit can be given.

HMS news clips related to HMS Global Health and Social Medicine

From the HMS news clips—
Bridging the culture gap
New York Times, July 16, 2009 – By Pauline M. Chen
Dr. Arthur Kleinman, Harvard Medical School professor of medical anthropology in the department of social medicine, comments on the growing need for doctors to be trained in “cultural competency” when dealing with patients of different cultural backgrounds than their own.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/16/health/16chen.html?hpw


U.N. taps Hub’s Farmer for Haiti
Boston Herald, August 12, 2009 – By Ira Kantor
Dr. Paul Farmer, Harvard Medical School professor of social medicine and chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is taking on a new role: U.N. Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti under former President Bill Clinton.
http://news.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1190477&srvc=home&position=emailed
 

Questions for Dr. Marcia Angell
New York Times, August 12, 2009 – By Anne Underwood
Dr. Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, and a longtime critic of the pharmaceutical industry, is interviewed.
http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/questions-for-dr-marcia-angell/

Kennedy remembered as the Senate’s hardest-working man
WBUR, August 26, 2009 – By Martha Bebinger
Dr. Rashi Fein, Harvard Medical School professor of economics of medicine emeritus who helped draft some of Senator Ted Kennedy’s national health bills, comments on the Senator’s legacy.
http://www.wbur.org/2009/08/26/kennedy-tributes

Health reform: throwing good money after the bad
The Huffington Post, August 24, 2009 – By Marcia Angell
Dr. Marcia Angell, Harvard Medical School senior lecturer on social medicine and former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, discusses her views on how healthcare reform should be approached.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marcia-angell-md/health-reform-throwing-go_b_266596.html
 

Seeking choice in health reform
New York Times, August 30, 2009 – By Arnold S. Relman & Marcia Angell
In a letter in response to an article by David Leonhardt, Dr. Arnold S. Relman, Harvard Medical School professor emeritus of medicine, and Dr. Marcia Angell, Harvard Medical School senior lecturer in social medicine, argue for doctors as an integral component in the communication dyad that determines how health care dollars are spent.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/opinion/l30health.html
 

Health care in Cuba
CNN, September 2, 2009 – By Brooke Baldwin
CNN's Brooke Baldwin explores how the health-care system in third-world Cuba is producing some world-class results.  Dr. Arachu Castro, Harvard Medical School assistant professor of social medicine, is interviewed.
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2009/09/02/ldt.baldwin.healthcare.cuba.cnn?iref=24hours

Who is NOT a Minority?? Promoting Physical Activity in Minority Populations

 
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/707582?src=mp&spon=42&uac=125132EZ

From American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine

Promoting Physical Activity in Minority Populations

Lisa Terre, PhD
Published: 08/27/2009

Abstract and Introduction

Abstract

This review discusses evidence-based perspectives on promoting physical activity in minority populations. Future directions for inquiry and empirically driven public policy initiatives also are addressed.

Introduction

Over the past decade, considerable attention has focused on the nation's physical inactivity epidemic. Notwithstanding myriad public health mandates propped up by a welter of initiatives reminding Americans about exercise's broad-spectrum benefits and prompting them to "get active," too many remain sedentary.[1,2] Regrettably, ethnic and cultural minorities disproportionately bear the brunt of this health-zapping lifestyle.[311]
Powered by recognition of its threat-multiplying potential for underserved populations already burdened by health disparities, physical inactivity has become a high-value intervention target. Yet, despite some noteworthy strides, resetting sedentary lifestyles remains challenging.[5,9,1117]
To be sure, minority-focused research has only just begun to explore the complex dynamic of biopsychosocial factors that shape activity habits and crimp efforts to unwind them. Nevertheless, although many details remain sketchy, converging evidence increasingly high-lights the corrosive role of social disadvantage as one prime suspect at or near the epicenter of disproportionate minority risk.

Social Disadvantage as an Activity-relevant Risk Factor

Recent research has provided tantalizing clues to the tangled web of activity-relevant processes in which socioeconomic status (SES) is inextricably inter-twined at the biological, psychological, and social levels. For instance, poverty may set limits on potential activity trajectories by taking a toll on optimal physiological maturation and brain development, raising both near-and long-term risks for cascading adversities (eg, growth delays and cognitive problems) that can tamp down intellectual and self-regulatory capabilities.[1820]
Social disadvantage also profoundly affects psychological mediators of active lifestyles, magnifying risks for activity barriers such as negative attributional style (eg, feelings of low self-efficacy, diminished perceptions of control) and activity-hindering emotions (eg, depressed and/ or anxious mood).[19,2124] Minority girls, for example, have reported low exercise self-efficacy (including discouragement at initial signs of perceived exertion, high anxiety, and feelings of low self-esteem during activity training) that deters exercise participation.[19,25] Other evidence similarly highlights the robust relationship between negative emotions (eg, depressed mood, perceived hopelessness) and health risk behaviors, especially among urban minority youth.[21,24,26,27] Accordingly, attention to such psychological stumbling blocks may be crucial to fostering exercise readiness in underserved populations.[11,19] Indeed, these preparatory steps toward action would seem well worth the effort considering the psychological and physical benefits that accrue to ethnic and cultural minorities who regularly participate in leisure-time activity.[68,19,2831]
At the sociocultural level, physical activity can be foiled by numerous SES-related processes that constrain educational opportunities, health literacy, and resource access, thereby limiting exposure to contexts in which habitual exercise is modeled and encouraged.[20,21,24] For instance, attitudes about physical activity often are rooted in broader social and cultural traditions that may or may not coincide with professional health ecommendations. These commonsense models[32,33] wield considerable leverage on activity preferences and practices.[4,68,11,30,3238]
To cite but one of many possible examples, acculturation has been associated with physical activity across diverse groups. As a case in point, Anglo-acculturated Latinas (ie, those acculturated toward the US mainstream) have reported being more physically active than their more traditional Mexican-acculturated counterparts.[39] These findings parallel those based on other minority participants (eg, American-Indian, African-American) in demonstrating the influence of culturally driven schema on activity habits.[68,34,35] Results such as these emphasize the importance of exploring exercise-relevant conceptualizations as a prelude to activity interventions.[4,68,11,30,3439]
As indicated above, social disadvantage limits social capital, one especially relevant form of which is activity-linked social support.[21,23,24] That is to say, although loved ones' unconditional positive regard offers numerous benefits, its sheer noncontingency typically renders it suboptimal for promoting exercise. Indeed, significant others' generic support for beloved kin (regardless of lifestyle) often is counterproductive to healthful behavior change. It is this activity-specific encouragement that may be hampered by SES-related processes.[68,11,40]
Along these lines, research[40] has underscored the activity-enhancing advantages of social encouragement (ie, accentuating activity benefits) over social constraint (ie, emphasizing sedentariness hazards).[11,40] Unfortunately, because underserved patients typically access health care on an emergent (versus preventive) basis, they may be most likely to receive lifestyle modification advice in the form of social constraint during crisis-oriented, teachable moments.[1,2,11]
Even when effectively delivered, professional admonitions may be offset by pervasive, health-detrimental media messages. In response to media's well-documented adverse consequences (eg, from both observing media models of unhealthful habits and sitting motion-less during hours of passive viewing), professionals now urge parents to limit youngsters' screen time.[4144] Unfortunately, children from socially disadvantaged families may be especially vulnerable to harmful media influences.[7]
In a vivid illustration conducted at preschools for low-income children, Robinson and colleagues[45] recently examined the effects of fast-food branding on taste preferences. Results revealed that 3-to 5-year-old ethnically and culturally diverse children preferred food and drinks (including items such as carrots and milk) they believed were from McDonald's. Central to the point of the present discussion, however, this branding effect was moderated by the number of television sets at home and the frequency of McDonald's food consumption, reinforcing the covariation of risk behaviors that frequently has been observed throughout the health hazards literature.[68,21,2629,34,35,46]
Social disadvantage also undermines physical activity through ecological and environmental inputs such as exercisethwarting social policies and features of the built environment such as the lack of recreation facilities (eg, absence of walking trails and bike paths), neighborhood walkability (eg, few sidewalks, unattractive surroundings), and safety (eg, presence of stray dogs, high crime). In short, disadvantaged neighborhoods are unlikely to provide an optimal context for infusing habitual activity into daily life.[4,68,11,19,30,3438,4749]]

Promoting Active Lifestyles

Considering activity's biopsychosocial influences, the fight against sedentary lifestyles must engage on many fronts simultaneously,[69,11,15,50] reaching beyond traditional providers and medical settings to include indigenous mediators and venues tailored to ethnic and cultural considerations.[5,9,1217,28,29,46,51,52] Despite the seemingly fitful progress to date, evidence of incremental victories are beginning to dapple the scientific landscape. Leveraging these stepwise achievements into sustainable lifestyle gains will be challenging but, given the potential benefits, are well worth the effort.

References

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  2. Terre L, Poston W, Foreyt J. Overview and the future of obesity treatment. In: Goldstein D, ed. The Management of Eating Disorders and Obesity. Totowa, NJ: Humana Press; 2005;161179.
  3. Albright C, Pruitt L, Castro C, et al. Modifying physical activity in a multiethnic sample of low-income women: one-year results from the IMPACT (Increasing Motivation for Physical ACTivity) Project. Ann Behav Med. 2005;30:191200.
  4. Bush C, Shadston P, McKay S, et al. Park-based obesity intervention program for inner-city minority children. J Pediatr. 2007;15:513517.
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  7. Kumanyika S, Grier S. Targeting interventions for ethnic minority and low-income populations. Future Child. 2006;16:187207.
  8. Kumanyika S, Obarzanek E, Stettler N, et al. Population-based prevention of obesity: the need for comprehensive promotion of healthful eating, physical activity, and energy balance. A scientific statement from the American Heart Association Council on Epidemiology and Prevention, Interdisciplinary Committee for Prevention (formerly the Expert Panel on Population and Prevention Science). Circulation. 2008;118:428464.
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  10. Resnick B, Luisi D, Vogel A. Testing the Senior Exercise Self-Efficacy Project (SESEP) for use with urban dwelling minority older adults. Public Health Nurs. 2008;25:221234.
  11. Schrop S, Pendleton B, McCord G, et al. The medically underserved: who is likely to exercise and why? J Health Care Poor Underserved. 2006;17:276289.
  12. Dornelas E, Stepnowski R, Fischer E, et al. Urban ethnic minority women's attendance at health clinic vs. church based exercise programs. J Cross Cult Gerontol. 2007;22:129136.
  13. Eakin E, Bull S, Riley K, et al. Recruitment and retention of Latinos in a primary care-based physical activity and diet trial: the Resources for Health study. Health Ed Res. 2007;22:361371.
  14. Tandon S, Phillips K, Bordeaux B, et al. A vision for progress in community health partnerships. Prog Community Health Partnersh. 2007;1:1130.
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  16. Yang J, Kagawa-Singer M. Increasing access to care for cultural and linguistic minorities: ethnicity-specific health care organizations and infrastructure. J Health Care Poor Underserved. 2007;18:532549.
  17. Zoellner J, Connell C, Santell R, et al. Fit for life steps: results of a community walking intervention in the rural Mississippi Delta. Prog Community Health Partnersh. 2007; Spring. pchp.press. jhu. edu. Accessed October 20, 2008.
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  21. Gallo L, Matthews K. Understanding the association between socioeconomic status and physical health: do negative emotions play a role? Psychol Bull. 2003;129:1051.
  22. Hill-Briggs F, Gary T, Yen H, et al. Association of social problem solving with glycemic control in a sample of urban African Americans with type 2 diabetes. J Behav Med. 2006;29:6978.
  23. Marquez D, McAuley E. Social cognitive correlates of leisure time physical activity among Latinos. J Behav Med. 2006;29:281289.
  24. Poulton R, Caspi A. Commentary: how does socioeconomic disadvantage during child-hood damage health in adulthood? Testing psychosocial pathways. Int J Epidemiol. 2005;34:344345.
  25. Robbins L, Pender N, Ronis D, et al. Physical activity, self-efficacy, and perceived exertion among adolescents. Res Nurs Health. 2004;27:435446.
  26. DiClemente R, Wingood G, Lang D, et al. Adverse health consequences that co-occur with depression: a longitudinal study of black adolescent females. Pediatrics. 2005;116:7881.
  27. Valadez-Meltzer A, Silber T, Meltzer A, et al. Will I be alive in 2005? Adolescent level of involvement in risk behaviors and belief in near-future death. Pediatrics. 2005;116:2431.
  28. Goldfinger J, Arniella G, Wylie-Rosett J, et al. Project HEAL: peer education leads to weight loss in Harlem. J Health Care Poor Underserved. 2008;19:180192.
  29. Horowitz C, Goldfinger J, Muller S, et al. A model for using community-based participatory research to address the diabetes epidemic in East Harlem. Mount Sinai J Med. 2008;75:1321.
  30. Miller D, Gilman R, Martens M. Wellness promotion in the schools: enhancing students' mental and physical health. Psychol Sch. 2008;45:515.
  31. Wise L, Adams-Campbell L, Palmer J, et al. Leisure time physical activity in relation to depressive symptoms in the Black Women's Health Study. Ann Behav Med. 2006;32:6876.
  32. Levanthal H, Levanthal E, Cameron L. Representations, procedures, and affect in illness self-regulation: a perceptual-cognitive model. In: Baum A, Revenson T, Singer J, eds. Handbook of Health Psychology. Mahwah NJ: Erlbaum; 2001:1947.
  33. Levanthal H, Meyer D, Nerenz D. The common sense representation of illness danger. In: Rachman S, ed. Contributions to Medical Psychology. New York, NY: Pergamon; 1980:730.
  34. Adams A, Harvey H, Brown D. Constructs of health and environment inform child obesity prevention in American Indian communities. Obesity. 2008;16:311317.
  35. Adams A, Quinn R, Prince R. Low recognition of childhood overweight and disease risk among Native-American caregivers. Obes Res. 2005;12:146152.
  36. Hekler E, Lambert J, Leventhal E, et al. Commonsense illness beliefs, adherence behaviors, and hypertension control among African Americans. J Behav Med. 2008;31:391400.
  37. Gordon-Larsen P, Nelson M, Page P, et al. Inequality in the built environment underlies key health disparities in physical activity and obesity. Pediatrics. 2006;117:417424.
  38. McDonald N. The effect of objectively measured crime on walking in minority adults. Am J Health Promot. 2008;22:433436.
  39. Pichon L, Arredondo E, Roesch S, et al. The relation of acculturation to Latinas' perceived neighborhood safety and physical activity: a structural equation analysis. Ann Behav Med. 2007;34:295303.
  40. Gabriele J, Walker M, Gill D, et al. Differentiated roles of social encouragement and social constraint on physical activity behavior. Ann Behav Med. 2005;29:210215.
  41. Connor S. Food-related advertising on preschool television: building brand recognition in young viewers. Pediatrics. 2006;118:14781485.
  42. Escobar-Chaves S, Anderson C. Media and risky behaviors. Future Child.2008;18:147180.
  43. Evans W. Social marketing campaigns and children's media use. Future Child. 2008;18:181203.
  44. Wilcox B, Kunkel D, Cantor J, et al. Report of the APA Task Force on Advertising and Children. www.apa.org. Retrieved November 2008.
  45. Robinson T, Borzekowski D, Matheson D, et al. Effects of fast food branding on young children's taste preferences. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2007;161:792797.
  46. Collins J. Addressing racial and ethnic disparities: lessons from the REACH 2010 communities. J Health Care Poor Underserved. 2006;17:15.
  47. Sallis J, King A, Sirard J, et al. Perceived environmental predictors of physical activity over 6 months in adults: Activity Counseling Trial. Health Psychol. 2007;26:701709.
  48. Sloane D, Nascimento L, Flynn G, et al. Assessing resource environments to tar-get prevention interventions in community chronic disease control. J Health Care Poor Underserved. 2006;17:146158.
  49. Stafford M, Cummins S, Ellaway E, et al. Pathways to obesity: identifying local, modifiable determinants of physical activity and diet. Soc Sci Med. 2007;65:18821897.
  50. Fort J, McClellan L. REACH-Meharry community-campus partnership: developing culturally competent health care providers. J Health Care Poor Underserved. 2006;17:7887.
  51. Farmer D, Jackson S, Camacho F, et al. Attitudes of African American and low socioeconomic status white women toward medical research. J Health Care Poor Underserved. 2007;18:8599.
  52. Winett R, Anderson E, Wojcik J, et al. Guide to health: nutrition and physical activity out-comes of a group-randomized trial of an internet-based intervention in churches. Ann Behav Med. 2007;33:251261.

Authors and Disclosures

Lisa Terre, PhD

From the Department of Psychology, University of Missouri–Kansas City.
Address correspondence to
Lisa Terre, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of Missouri–Kansas City, 4825 Troost Building, Suite 123, Kansas City, MO 64110-2499; e-mail: terrel@umkc.edu.
Am J Lifestyle Med. 2009;3(3):195-197. © 2009 Sage Publications, Inc.
 
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PCRM's 21-Day Vegan Kickstart program launches on September 8

Examiner.com

Your personal 21-day plan for going vegan

Examiner.com -
Tomorrow is the day! The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) launches their 21-Day Vegan Kickstart program on September 8. Sign up for free and you’ll receive daily tips and recipes to keep you informed, plus access to a discussion board to keep you motivated. Their website is packed with menu ideas and recipes.
The goal of the program is to help Americans adopt a more healthful diet and lifestyle for weight control and prevention of chronic disease. But it’s a great opportunity for anyone who wants to eliminate their use of animal products for a more ethical and compassionate lifestyle.
One caveat about the program; the recipes and menus are very low in fat. You can tweak them to suit your needs and tastes by choosing full-fat soymilk instead of nonfat and by using regular vegan salad dressings rather than nonfat ones. Sprinkle nuts and seeds onto salads or grain dishes, too; they can be an important part of a healthy vegan diet.
However you choose to use the kickstart program, if you have been thinking about going vegan, this is a great way to get the support that can make it happen!
Sign up here for the 21-Day Vegan Kickstart program (it's free) and check out resources for recipes and menus here.
For more information about vegan nutrition you might enjoy these articles:
Ten Tips For Healthy Vegan Diets
Getting Iron From Plant Foods
Building Healthy Bones On A Vegan Diet
Where Do Vegans Get Their Protein?

Your personal 21-day plan for going vegan

Examiner.com - 9 hours ago‎
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) is challenging you to take their 21-day Vegan Kickstart, a program set up to help people adopt a healthy vegan lifestyle.  Starting Tuesday September 8, you are challenged to maintain a vegan diet for 21 days.  And they're guessing that you'll be feeling so good after just 21 days that you might just make a vegan diet a permanent fixture in your life!
Examiner.com


The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) is challenging you to take their 21-day Vegan Kickstart, a program set up to help people adopt a healthy vegan lifestyle.  Starting Tuesday September 8, you are challenged to maintain a vegan diet for 21 days.  And they're guessing that you'll be feeling so good after just 21 days that you might just make a vegan diet a permanent fixture in your life!

We've all heard that there is an obesity epidemic.  According to the CDC, in 2008 only one state had obesity rates below 20%.  Given the trend of the statistics for the rate of obesity, we can only assume that the obesity rate is still growing in 2009.  Obesity is the leading cause of heart disease and type-2 diabetes, as well as some types of cancer, respiratory problems, and an array of other illnesses.  According to the book Becoming Vegan by Brenda Davis, RD and Vesanto Melina, RD, vegans on average have much lower rates of obesity than do non-vegetarians, weighing nearly 10% less than their meat eating counterparts.

Overeating, and in particular overeating of unhealthy, nutrient deficient foods leads to many cases of obesity.  Most of these foods are high in fat, high in calories, and high in cholesterol.  Many of these unhealthy foods, like meat, cheese and other dairy products are physically addicting.  According to Dr. Neal Barnard, MD, author of Breaking the Food Seduction and President of PCRM, meat, cheese and other dairy products contain casomorphins, which attach to the brain's opiate receptors and cause an effect that is similar to opiate drugs such as morphine and heroin.  Dr. Barnard says that it can take just 3 weeks for these addictions to food to be broken, but that it's best to leave behind meat, cheese and dairy cold turkey, or more appropriately, cold tofu.  By eating these in moderation you are just setting yourself up for failure and relapse.  Just as you would with any drug you are addicted to, success requires stopping all together.

The PCRM is hoping that you will successfully break these food addictions and seductions on their 21-day Vegan Kickstart and be on the way to a happier, healthier you.  To sign up to participate in the Vegan Kickstart and to receive daily tips, recipes and motivation via e-mail, visit the PCRM's petition site.

Need support locally, or help finding vegan suitable foods?  Visit Rainbow Blossom Natural Food Market and speak with their helpful staff.  The staff at Amazing Grace Whole Foods and Nutrition Center will also be happy to help you.  Visit your neighborhood farmers market, and load up on fresh fruits and vegetables

For healthy vegan recipes visit: The Happy Vegan Yogini
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A happier, healthier you: The 21 day Vegan Kickstart.

Examiner.com - ‎Sep 6, 2009
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) is challenging you to take their 21-day Vegan Kickstart, a program set up to help people adopt a ...

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Corey Wrenn's critique of Vegan Outreach literature

Roanoke Vegan Examiner

A critique of Vegan Outreach literature


September
6, 9:37 PMRoanoke Vegan ExaminerCorey Wrenn



Downed calves
                   Downed calves:  direct result of the dairy industry.
 
Popular utilitarian welfarist group, Vegan Outreach, maintains that in order to help non-human animals now, we must adopt a strategy which aims to reduce suffering, regardless of means.  However, there are critical inconsistencies, misconceptions, and outright misuses of terminology which undermine any real benefit to non-human animals.  Despite their self-designation as a “[…] nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing animal suffering by promoting a vegan lifestyle,” Vegan Outreach in fact hinders veganism with notions of extremism and promotion of reductionism or vegetarianism.

Veganism as Extremist

Vegan Outreach states in their 2009 “Why Vegan” pamphlet:


Being vegan isn’t about being perfect or pure—it’s about reducing suffering (14).
 
The 2002 version states:


Being vegan isn’t about avoiding a list of ingredients […] (14).
 
The 2008 Guide to Cruelty-Free Eating furthers that veganism can be difficult:

[…] especially if you try to change too fast or hold yourself to too high a standard.  The important thing is to do the best you can (30).
 
It’s a good thing that society doesn’t hold the same low standards for rapists.  It would be great news for molesters everywhere if they could avoid moral obligations by simply doing the best they can.

Remember:  Continuing to eat cheese while avoiding meat and eggs does much more good than scrapping the whole idea because you can’t be completely consistent (Guide to Cruelty-Free Eating 30).
 
The implication in the above quotes is that veganism is somehow difficult, unobtainable, militant, or even utopian.  Rather than defining veganism as a moral refusal to participate in violence or the absolute baseline required for taking the exploitation and use of non-human animals seriously, veganism, is instead framed as one of many opportunities for reducing suffering.  In effect, this statement refutes the moral necessity of veganism and opens the door to reductionism.  If veganism isn’t about being perfect or pure, what’s the harm in sneaking a donut with your morning coffee?

Sneaking that whey-tainted donut might be acceptable for Vegan Outreach:

For instance, it can be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to shun every minor or hidden animal-derived ingredient.  More importantly, avoiding an ever-increasing list of these ingredients can make us appear obsessive, and thus lead others to believe that compassionate living is impossible. This defeats our purpose:  ending cruelty to animals!” (Guide to Cruelty-Free Eating 2008: 24)
 
Apparently having moral consistency and absolute abstinence against an evil is obsessive.  Does the same go for child abuse, rape, murder, or cannibalism?  Would it be acceptable to beat a child to avoid appearing obsessive?  Is it impossible to completely abstain from beating a child?  Of course it is, and there’s nothing obsessive about holding abstinence from violence and wrongdoing as the absolute baseline.

Vegetarianism and Reductionism as Progress

We can already see progress in just the past decade—public concern for farmed animals’ interests and condemnation of factory farms, as well as more vegetarians, near-vegetarians, and vegetarian products (A Meaningful Life:  Making a real Difference in Today’s World 2008: 14)
 
Is reductionism and vegetarianism really progress?  Is the underlying moral injustice being addressed if we continue to participate in non-human animal use?  Is the focus on factory farms and the ignoring of exploitation in “humane” farming progress?

Despite the organization’s name, “Vegan” Outreach, the organization is merely an animal advocacy organization which utilizes veganism as one of many tools to reduce suffering:

In order to prevent the most suffering, it’s important we each take an approach we can sustain.  After reviewing this booklet, some people may decide to go vegan immediately; others may choose to eat fewer animal products and explore more vegetarian meals.  […] …veganism is best viewed as a tool for reducing suffering (Why Vegan 200914).
 
The notion of veganism, vegetarianism, and reductionism as mere tools is perhaps most evident in their publication and distribution of the “Try Vegetarian!” pamphlet:

[…] eating vegetarian is likely the most effortless—and enjoyable!—way to have a profoundly positive impact as often as every day” (Try Vegetarian 2003).
 
As an organization that openly advocates vegetarianism, is it really appropriate to operate under the name, “Vegan Outreach?”

Vegan Outreach’s 2008 “Guide to Cruelty-Free Eating,” intended for meat eaters, vegetarians, and vegans alike, presents a results-based approach:
When you first discover the reality of modern animal agriculture, avoiding all producers from factory farms might seem too big a change.  But don’t be overwhelmed—just take small steps.  For example, you could eliminate meat from certain meals or on certain days.  As you get used to eating less meat and find alternatives you enjoy, it may become easier to eliminate meat altogether (Guide to Cruelty-Free Eating 2008: 3).
 
As a vegan outreach organization, it seems strange that veganism is not promoted as a baseline, but here, reductionism is suggested to be morally acceptable and consistent. Furthermore, this statement specifically targets factory farming.  Support of “humane” farming, then, could logically be assumed by readers to constitute a “small step.”  After all, it’s all about reducing suffering, right?

Ultimately, living with compassion means striving to maximize the good we accomplish, not following a set of rules or trying to fit a certain label.  From eating less meat to being vegan, our actions are only a means to an end:  decreasing suffering (Guide to Cruelty-Free Eating 2008: 3)
 
Can reduction of suffering ever truly be accomplished and can abolition of non-human animal use ever be reached so long as so-called vegan organizations maintain that the exploitation of non-human animals is sometimes acceptable?



For every person you persuade to become vegetarian, dozens of farmed animals will be spared from suffering each year! (A Meaningful Life 2008: 23)
 
The argument that vegetarianism somehow makes a real difference for non-human animals is an empirical fallacy.  There is no continuum whereby vegetarians necessarily progress to veganism.  Further, vegetarianism does nothing to challenge the property status of non-human animals.  Often, vegetarianism causes more suffering than it reduces in that many vegetarians simply replace non-human animal flesh with non-human animal excretions.  Milk, eggs, and other non-flesh non-human animal products involve far more suffering than that of flesh.


Veganism as the Moral Baseline

Vegan Outreach posits:

The question isn’t, “Is this vegan?” but, “What is best for preventing suffering?” (Guide to Cruelty-Free Eating 3)
 
The answer to that question is:  “GO VEGAN.”  Veganism is the only moral choice if we truly want to reduce suffering, respect the moral standing of non-human animals, and ultimately reach total abolition of non-human animal use.  There’s nothing hard about it, there’s nothing obsessive about it, and there’s nothing inconsistent about it.
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