Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Death”
Over the past year we have heard much about the opioid epidemic gripping the U.S., as Big Pharma rakes in billions from people getting hooked on prescription painkillers such as OxyContin and Vicodin. Nowhere is the problem more pervasive than in West Virginia, which has the highest drug overdose rate in the nation and one of the highest prescription rates of …
WASHINGTON — The death rate in the United States rose last year for the first time in a decade, preliminary federal data show, a rare increase that was driven in part by more people dying from drug overdoses, suicide and Alzheimer’s disease. The death rate from heart disease, long in decline, edged up slightly. Death rates — measured as the number …
Some of the consequences of white America’s opiate epidemic—a topic that has been widely explored by media outlets and social scientists—are still coming to light. Opioid use and addiction have exploded in predominantly white communities around the country, and 90 percent [3] of new heroin users over the last decade are white. The vast majority of those users—75 percent—first used prescription painkillers, which …
When a famous person dies mysteriously and prematurely these days [6], we are instantly led to consider their drug use as cause of death. Prince, the multitalented musician and entertainer, who was found dead [7] at his estate outside Minneapolis last week, is a prime candidate for such speculation. We need to withhold judgment until toxicology and other autopsy data are made public, of course. …
In the mid-1960s, amid growing skepticism about the Warren Commission’s lone-gunman findings on John F. Kennedy’s assassination, there was a struggle inside CBS News about whether to allow the critics a fair public hearing at the then-dominant news network. Some CBS producers pushed for a debate between believers and doubters and one even submitted a proposal to put the Warren …
New research in the journal Science of the Total Environment has highlighted the dangerous effects of indoor pollution on human health, and has called for policies to ensure closer monitoring of air quality. A collaborative effort of European, Australian and UK researchers, led by the University of Surrey, assessed the harmful effects of indoor pollution in order to make recommendations on how best to monitor and …
Suzanne Kelly, Ph.D is an independent scholar whose work spans the topics of the environment, feminism, sex, and death. For nearly a decade she has been researching, writing, talking, and teaching about green burial. Currently she serves as the committee chair of the town of Rhinebeck Cemetery in New York, where she led the effort to establish a green burial ground. Kelly writes and farms in her home the Hudson Valley.
Get off your duff: A new study finds that sitting less may extend your life. Brazilian researchers who analyzed data from 54 countries linked sitting for more than three hours a day to 3.8 percent of deaths from all causes. Limiting sitting time to less than three hours a day would increase a person’s life expectancy by an average of 0.2 years—or more than …
If death is the final taboo, it might not be for much longer. There has, in recent years, been increasing effort to promote conversations about death and dying, both in the home and in more public settings. For example, death cafes, first launched in Switzerland in 2004, have spread around the world, enabling people to speak about their fears over cake and coffee. …
Kevin Lowney lies awake some nights wondering if he should kill himself. “I am in such pain every night, suicide has on a regular basis crossed my mind just simply to ease the pain. If I did not have responsibilities, especially for my youngest daughter who has problems,” he said. The 56-year-old former salesman’s struggle with chronic pain is bound …
