Social Issues
Doctors Call For Moratorium On Hepatitis B Vaccine
WASHINGTON — An Arizona group of physicians has called for a moratorium on controversial hepatitis B immunizations for schoolchildren pending further research about dangerous side effects from the vaccine, and accuses school districts that require the shots of “practicing medicine without a license.” Forty-one states and the District of Columbia mandate that children receive the hepatitis […]
California Legislators Duck Euthanasia Debate
SACRAMENTO – The emotionally freighted issue of physician-assisted suicide has turned conventional political wisdom on its head in California. Despite overwhelming public support, a bill in the state Assembly that would let doctors prescribe lethal drugs to terminally ill patients so they could take their own lives has stalled for the year. Assemblywoman Dion Aroner, […]
Utah Boy Mows State Capitol Lawns, Grows Organ Donor Awareness
Coming to a state capitol near you soon is “Lawn Mower Boy.” Fourteen-year-old Ryan Tripp from Parowan, Utah – also known as Lawn Mower Boy – is out to set a new Guinness Book World Record by cutting the grass at each state capitol. But setting records is second to his desire to increase awareness […]
Critics Question Safety Of Hepatitis B Vaccine
WASHINGTON – Five-week old Lyla Rose Belkin died within 16 hours of her hepatitis B vaccination in 1998. Nurse Betty Fluck has severe physical exhaustion and uses leg braces and crutches due to chronic joint and leg pain she believes is caused by the same vaccine. Lindsay Kirshner, 16, has daily headaches, nausea, joint pain, […]
States Face Up To Realities Of Police Racial Profiling
WASHINGTON – As four men, three black and one Latino, made their way down the New Jersey Turnpike toward a North Carolina University where they were planning on trying out for the basketball team, they had no way of knowing that three of them would end up at a hospital with bullet wounds before they […]
New Federal Organ Transplant Policy Runs Into Resistance
WASHINGTON – Randy Creech of Houston, Texas was told eight years ago that he had a year to live after his doctor diagnosed a viral infection in his heart that was quickly depleting its ability to function. Six months later he received a heart transplant from a 19-year-old boy who died in a hospital in […]
Policy Makers Walk Political Tightrope In Dealing With Sprawl
WASHINGTON – As state legislatures pause today, however briefly, to observe the twenty-ninth anniversary of Earth Day, government action on controlling growth and suburban sprawl has produced mixed results in the 1999 legislative sessions so far. While the Utah legislature, mindful of construction projects associated with the 2002 Winter Olympics, passed a Quality Growth Act […]
States Under New Affirmative Action Attack
Hopes, and fears, that anti-affirmative action laws passed in California and Washington State would trigger a national tidal wave haven’t materialized. However, ripples of discontent flowing out of Florida indicate that it could be next. California’s Proposition 209, passed in 1996, forbids gender or race as a consideration in state contracting, employment and higher education. […]