Category: Public Health
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Broward continues to fail its mentally ill; The sad case of Broward’s ‘Forgotten Soldier’
By Owen Mcnamee and Douglas Brawley
Special to BrowardBulldog.org
Twenty years ago eighteen members of a Broward Grand Jury issued a scathing report that concluded the Broward County mental health system was underfinanced, fragmented and leaderless. They found the system was failing thousands of mentally ill and disabled persons and causing hundreds to wind up in jail or endure forced hospitalizations without needed treatment. Twenty years later, we are still failing this vulnerable population. -

Tobacco industry batting a thousand with federal judge, while FDA strikes out
By Myron Levin
Fair Warning
What are the odds? In 2009, Congress passed landmark legislation directing the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco products, aiming to cut the toll from the leading preventable cause of disease and death. Three times since, however, cigarette and e-cigarette companies have filed successful legal challenges to thwart rules intended to make their products less appealing to consumers–and less accessible to kids. All were decided by the same federal judge. -

A psychiatric hospital for North Ridge site? Oakland Park commission set to decide
By Dan Christensen
BrowardBulldog.org
UPDATE: FEB. 21 — With anxious residents watching at city hall and at home on computers and cable television, Oakland Park has put off for two weeks a decision on whether to approve a controversial psychiatric and drug rehabilitation hospital. The reason: Wednesday night’s hearing ran too late to finish the hearing. -

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Post traumatic stress crisis ignored: Americans wounded in their own neighborhoods
By Lois Beckett
ProPublica
Chicago’s Cook County Hospital has one of the busiest trauma centers in the nation, treating about 2,000 patients a year for gunshots, stabbings and other violent injuries. So when researchers started screening patients there for post-traumatic stress disorder in 2011, they assumed they would find cases. They just didn’t know how many. -

Amid rising deaths, a warning that heroin epidemic has begun in South Florida
By Dan Christensen
BrowardBulldog.org
A new report sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse has determined that a heroin epidemic is underway in South Florida. “The key issue identified in 2013 is the outbreak of a heroin epidemic in South Florida and particularly in Miami-Dade County,” the report says.
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