The Board of Health meets this morning at 7:30 AM,
according to the
VDT calendar.
There’s nothing about this
on
its own web page.
Gretchen is there with the LAKE video camera.
-jsq
Category Archives: Health Care
Videos: trucks and row crops @ LCC 2013-04-23
Plus
a presentation to Joyce Evans,
all about
mosquitoes, and
a love fest between the county and the VDT!
Here’s the agenda with a few notes, and links into the video. See also the LAKE videos of the previous morning’s work session.
LOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERSContinue reading
PROPOSED AGENDA
WORK SESSION, MONDAY, APRIL 22, 2013, 8:30 a.m.
REGULAR SESSION, TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 2013, 5:30 p.m.
327 N. Ashley Street – 2nd Floor
Mosquito trapping and spraying @ LCC 2013-04-23
A logical and systematic plan for mosquito trapping and spraying
is what
Public Works Director Robin Cumbus described at the
23 April 2013 Regular Session of the Lowndes County Commission.
She said the county contracts with VSU for trapping and surveillance. Mosquitoes trapped either by the county or by VSU are sent to Public Health Atlanta for testing.
This testing is
presumably for
mosquito-borne diseases;
According to
USGS disease maps using CDC data,
there were 15 cases of positive test results for
West Nile virus in Lowndes County in 2012;
that’s 13% of the total of 113 for the whole state.
She continued:
Continue readingIf Wal-Mart fires for not following procedures…
George Rhynes asks if Wal-Mart can fire employees who disarmed
an armed robber for not following procedures,
why can’t the manager he says didn’t follow procedures when
the manager fired him be fired in return?
I wonder why Wal-Mart procedures and profit are more important
than employee safety, well-being, or the drain on public resources
to cover what Wal-Mart does not?
George Boston Rhynes wrote to Wal-Mart CEO and President Mike Duke and Board of Directors 20 February 2011, Wal-Mart Store 899 and 2615, Valdosta, Georgia and China Workers!
Continue readingLowndes County sewer spill may contaminate Suwannee River
WCTV went downstream to Suwannee County, Florida, to see further effects after the
Valdosta PR that revealed what happened with the Lowndes County sewer leak.
One of their interviewees recommends escalating this ongoing problem
(first
Valdosta’s Withlacoochee Wastewater Treatment Plant flooded,
and now this) to the state governors’ level.
Eames Yates wrote for WCTV 27 April 2013, Suwannee River Could be Contaminated After Lowndes Sewer Spill,
Travis Luttrell also vacations in Suwannee County. He said “it’s a pretty big administrative challenge between the two governors. And is something that needs to be worked out between state to state and hopefully we can overcome the administrative challenges it might take to fix these kinds of problems.”
The Florida Department of Health also issued the advisory for Hamilton, Levy, Lafayette and Madison counties.
Here’s the WCTV video:
-jsq
Lowndes County (sort of) takes responsibility for sewer spill
Lowndes County notified the VDT that it was actually their sewer line
(not Valdosta’s) that broke this week,
but there’s still nothing on the Lowndes County website,
not on the
front page,
not under
Utilities,
and not under
County Clerk.
So the Lowndes County government did sort of
come clean about its sewer problem, but you have to know where
to look to see them washing.
And they actually fixed the problem by dumping county sewage
into Valdosta’s sewer main, which presumably means it ends
up in the same Withlacoochee Wastewater Treatment Plant
that the county has seemed to mostly regard as the city’s problem
and not theirs.
In the VDT 26 April 2013, Lowndes County Notification of Sewer Spill, Lowndes County Commission,
Continue readingValdosta blamed in Florida for Lowndes County sewage spill
Maybe Lowndes County should come clean about
its sewage spill
so Florida will stop blaming Valdosta.
Gainesville.com staff report today, Health dept. urges public to avoid Suwannee, Withlacoochee rivers,
This is the second time in two months that state health officials have had to warn residents of North Central Florida to avoid contact with the water flowing in the Suwannee — and both instances involve sewage contamination involving a spill in Valdosta.
Or maybe it’s normal for GA EPD to be more responsive than our local elected government. What do you think?
-jsq
BP: the beaches are open for everyone to enjoy!
BP must be getting desperate about people catching onto what they did to the Gulf.
A BP video ad has been replaying itself every few minutes beside various
news stories since yesterday, claiming two years after the oil disaster
(“spill” doesn’t describe it) “the beaches are open for everyone to enjoy!”
BP’s website
says “We are helping economic and environmental restoration efforts in the Gulf Coast as part of our ongoing commitment to the region following the Deepwater Horizon accident in 2010”.
Neither the ad nor the website says BP actually cleaned up the oil.
Because they didn’t.
It’s still there, as is the even more toxic “dispersant” Corexit BP
dumped on top of the oil to make it sink.
Both are busily poisoning dolphins, fish, birds, and humans.
Antonia Juhasz wrote for The Nation 7 May 2012, Investigation: Two Years After the BP Spill, A Hidden Health Crisis Festers,
Continue readingFossil fuels get five times the subsidies of renewable solar and wind
Fossil fuels get more than $70 billion dollars a year in
U.S. government subsidies (tax breaks and direct spending),
while solar and wind get only about $12 billion,
so fossil fuels got more than five times as much,
while
nuclear got ten times as much (especially
in Georgia).
Even corn ethanol, that sounded-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time
boondoggle, gets more subsidies than solar and wind put together.
That’s without even going into the externalities such as healthcare costs due to polution, environmental destruction through mountaintop removal for coal, tar sands oil drilling, and fracking for natural gas, and wars for oil and uranium.
Continue readingRural hospitals closing
A state that forces hospital closings by refusing Medicare expansion while spending a billion dollars a year on locking up too many prisoners has its priorities wrong.
Tom Baxter wrote for SaportaReport yesterday, Ominous signs for rural Georgia as hospitals shut their doors,
Lewis forecast at the beginning of the year that five to six rural hospitals might be forced to close in 2013, and already there have been two. Calhoun Memorial Hospital in Arlington closed in February, and Stewart-Webster Hospital in Richland shut its doors last week.
That’s only a foretaste, Lewis says, of what’s going to happen when the Affordable Care Act next year eliminates the subsidies which have been key to the survival of many of these hospitals, and imposes new standards — for instances, penalizing hospitals for readmitting patients in less than 30 days — which will directly impact their bottom line.
“We will probably get hurt worse than any state in the nation,” Lewis said last week. “It’s not like we will be friendly faces to the feds, and they’re going to come in and do major damage to us. ” He’s certainly not an enthusiastic fan of Obamacare, but thinks the state has no choice but to accept the Medicaid expansion which was intended as compensation for what the new law takes away.
“With Obamacare coming down the pike, if we don’t get some kind of relief in (Medicaid) expansion, we will face certain death,” Lewis said last week.
Ah, so the problem isn’t ObamaCare: it’s Gov. Deal’s refusal to accept Medicaid expansion! The AJC warned us about that back in August:
Continue reading