By Michael Yudell

Kudos to CNN host Brooke Baldwin, who last week asked Tony Perkins, notorious homophobe and head of the hate-group the Family Research Council, “why do homosexuals bother you so much?”

Perkins and his anti-gay and anti-gay marriage bigotry regularly appear on the news networks, and it was nice to see his message undermined and his motives challenged by Baldwin. Media Matters reports that from late 2010 to late 2011 Perkins and others from his group made approximately 52 television appearances on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News to promote their brand of hate. This, no less, in the year following the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2010 classification of the Family Research Council as a hate group for its anti-gay propaganda.

The council's anti-gay bias is clear, according to law center: it “often makes false claims about the LGBT community based on discredited research and junk science. The intention is to denigrate LGBT people in its battles against same-sex marriage, hate crimes laws and anti-bullying programs.” Never mind that last week Perkins and his group presented its highest honor to the North Carolina pastor who has been in the news recently for comparing gays to maggots and calling for the prosecution of gays and lesbians for their “lifestyle.” Perkins claims that “research is overwhelming that homosexuality poses a risk to children,” that “kids do best with a mom and a dad,” and that “redefining marriage remains outside the mainstream of American politics.”

By Jonathan Purtle

This weekend, for 56 consecutive hours, the Barnes Foundation will open its doors to the public at its new home on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.  While the merits of the foundation’s controversial move from Merion to Philadelphia may be on the minds of some museum-goers as they meander through the incomparable works of art, they may be surprised to learn that they are looking at the rewards of a successful gonorrhea prevention intervention developed in West Philadelphia.    

As Howard Greenfeld describes in The Devil and Dr. Barnes, Albert Coombs Barnes was a Philly lad—born and raised. Born in the Kensington section in 1872, Barnes attended Central High School and went on to the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated with a medical degree at the age of 20. 

But he never practiced medicine, opting instead to pursue a career in chemistry.  In 1896, Barnes left Philadelphia for Berlin, which was an intellectual mecca for chemistry at the time.  While there, he befriended a young and talented German chemist named Hermann Hille. Seeing a business opportunity, Barnes recruited Hille back to Philadelphia and by 1902 the business of “Barnes and Hille, Chemists” was operating out of a dilapidated building at 24 N. 40^th St. in the Powelton section of the city.

By Michael Yudell

Reports last week of a San Francisco area man arrested on two misdemeanor counts for not taking his tuberculosis medication is shedding light on a little-known and rarely used public health policy — the power to arrest people who may endanger the public’s health.

According to San Joaquin County health officials, 34-year-old Armando Rodriguez refused to take antibiotics for active pulmonary tuberculosis (TB), an infectious airborne disease, which can become resistant to antibiotics when treatment protocols are not followed.

In the request for Rodriguez’s arrest, county health officials claimed that he had become noncompliant with his treatment and was a risk for becoming contagious and spreading the illness. Allegedly, Rodriguez did not want to take his medication following a drug and alcohol binge as he was concerned that the antibiotics used to treat the disease, in combination with the drugs he was taking, might damage his liver. He also reportedly refused treatment on one other occasion, and missed an appointment with health officials before the arrest.

By Michael Yudell

More than 3 million Americans are infected with the Hepatitis C virus, and half of them don’t even realize it? You could be one of them.

Hepatitis C is a viral infection that attacks the liver, causing liver damage and sometimes liver failure or liver cancer. It is the most common cause of cirrhosis of the liver and the reason for most liver transplants. Fifteen thousand Americans die of the disease each year.

The virus is spread through infected blood or bodily fluids. It cannot be transmitted casually; you can’t get it by shaking someone’s hand or from exposure to an infected individual’s cough or sneeze. But you can get it, as most of those infected do, through sharing needles or other injection drug paraphernalia with an infected person. Roughly one-third of injection drug users ages 18 to 30 are infected with Hepatitis C. Up to 90 percent of older drug users – and former users – are infected. Rates are higher for older users of injection drugs because risks for bloodborne diseases were poorly understood before the 1980s.

By Jonathan Purtle

Textbooks will tell you that statistics are the basis for most public health decisions. In reality, it’s evocative displays of remembrance, solidarity, and outrage about lives lost that really get things done.

Wednesday’s Ride of Silence is one such powerful display.

The Ride of Silence is an annual bike ride — many annual bike rides, actually, — that commemorates the lives of bicyclists who have been killed or injured on public roads. Motorists who see, hear or read about it can’t help becoming more aware of the threats that they pose to cyclists.

By Michael Yudell

Almost two years ago my wife was visiting her native Boston with our second daughter, and was nursing her on a bench at a suburban mall. While sitting there, feeding our then 4-month-old child, a stranger aggressively approached her and said, “That is disgusting!” My wife, both shocked and appalled, asked the woman, “How could you say that? I am feeding my child.”

“Well, I think you need to go into a restroom to do that,” the woman angrily responded.

By Jonathan Purtle

Why is it that the fatter America gets, the more unrealistically thin our ideal of what people should look like becomes? It's not just a perplexing paradox. It poses a threat to the public’s health: our nation’s obesity crisis may eventually be coupled with anorexia and bulimia crises as well.

As noted in my post last week, America is in the midst of an obesity era. Thirty-seven percent of adults and 17 percent of kids are obese, and no one is particularly happy about it. All the while, Americans are bombarded with digitally manipulated (a.k.a. “photoshopped”) images of models that are impossibly thin and blemish free.

By Michael Yudell

In Sunday’s New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof called for a boycott of Anheuser-Busch (maker of beers like Budweiser, Rolling Rock, and, for the fancier among you, Stella Artois) for its role in selling alcohol in the tiny Nebraska town of Whiteclay. According to Kristof, the stores in Whiteclay (population: about 10) sell more than four million cans of beer and malt liquor annually, most of it by Anheuser-Busch.

Almost all of that alcohol, it turns out, is consumed by individuals living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, just across the border from Whiteclay, in South Dakota. The sale and consumption of alcohol is illegal on the Reservation, but Whiteclay is a few hundred yards away, just outside tribal jurisdiction.

By Michael Yudell

Friday’s release of April’s weak jobs data was bad news for American workers in more ways than you might suspect, and bad news, perhaps, for the reelection prospects of President Obama. Only 115,000 jobs were added last month, a decline from 154,000 in March and well more than 200,000 for each month from December through February. We continue on course for an excruciatingly slow jobs recovery from our Great Recession.

The bad news for the employment market is obvious: even as the official unemployment number dipped a tenth of a percent to 8.1 percent, that dip was caused not by added jobs but by the 342,000 workers who stopped looking for them. These numbers become bleaker when adding in part-time workers who want full-time work and many but not all of those who’ve stopped looking for work — known as the U6, it pegs unemployment at a whopping 14.5 percent.