Articles Tagged with ''health and wellness''

Four major automakers have reached an agreement with California on fuel economy standards that would reduce emissions – and the American Lung Association (ALA) approves. Ford, Volkswagen, Honda, and BMW this week agreed to increase the average fuel economy of their new vehicle fleets to nearly 50 miles per gallon by model year 2026 - an increase of 3.7 miles per gallon per year.

A new report by American Cancer Society (ACS) researchers translates the toll cancer takes on Americans into cold hard figures. In 2015 alone, the disease took more than 8.7 million years of life and $94.4 billion in lost earnings among people ages 16 to 84 in the U.S. Why crunch the numbers? Why assess the pain caused by the nation’s top killer in terms of dollars and cents?

If you want to reduce your risk of having a heart attack, skip the supplements and cut down on salt instead. That’s the conclusion of a study published in Annals of Internal Medicine, which also found that one supplement might actually increase your risk for having a stroke. The goal of the study was to explore the potential for nutritional supplements and dietary interventions to prevent “cardiovascular outcomes,” such as death, myocardial infarction, stroke, and coronary heart disease.

An alarming increase in the incidence of the black lung disease among the nation’s coal miners has led to a call by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) and the United Steelworkers International Union (USW) for a new standard to protect miners from the silica dust that causes the disease. In a letter to David Zatezalo, the head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), UMWA President Cecil Roberts and USW President Leo W. Gerard noted that changes in mining practices have led to increased exposure to silica for miners.

Binge watching TV may be a greater risk factor for heart disease and premature death among African Americans than sitting at a desk job, according to new research in Journal of the American Heart Association, the Open Access Journal of the American Heart Association/ American Stroke Association. According to the author, these latest findings suggest that television-watching may be the most harmful sedentary behavior.

More than a hundred groups and hundreds of individuals from Pennsylvania have signed onto a letter to the state’s governor, calling for an official investigation into recent reports of rare cancers in counties heavily impacted by shale gas development over the last decade. The letter also calls for the Governor Tom Wolf to suspend all gas drilling permits until the investigation shows that fracking is not the cause of what appears to be an emerging public health crisis.