•September 21, 2016•

By Jerry R. Ginther
NP  Columnist

“San Angelo tower this is Cessna 1-2-9-9 uniform,” I spoke into the microphone unsure of what I would say next.

“Good afternoon, 1-2-9-9 uniform,” came the reply from the air traffic controller in the tower.

What had started out as a routine photography flight was about to get more exciting than routine. We had departed Waco, Tex. earlier in the day with three souls on board, my 12-year-old son, my cameraman and myself. I was piloting the single engine Cessna 172, a high wing, four place, aircraft we used for our photography missions.

The first leg of the flight between Waco and Brownwood was uneventful. The only concern I had was the extremely high temperature which was fast approaching the 100-degree mark. It was a hot summer day, and it was going to get hotter. Checking my logbook, I see it was July 24, 1987.

We decided we would land at Brownwood for fuel and refreshment. The refreshment would include a can of soda for my son Warren who occupied the back seat during the flight. That soda would become part of the excitement not long after our departure from Brownwood.  Read More

•September 14, 2016•

By Trudy Lieberman
Rural Health News Service

Is the message that the nation is getting too fat beginning to sink in?

The answer is “yes but,” says the Trust for America’s Health, a nonprofit, non-partisan group that aims to protect the health of communities and make disease prevention a national priority. And a study of healthcare quality and quantity across the nation suggests some reasons why things are not improving uniformly.

Obesity is a disease, and for the last 13 years the Trust and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have monitored obesity rates in the country, focusing on the proportion of a state’s population that is obese. The study designates someone as obese whose body mass index (a measure based on height and weight) is 30 or higher.

This year’s results show that after a decade in which every state’s obese population rose, a few states have finally experienced a decrease.

“We’re seeing the rates plateau albeit at a very high level,” says Richard Hamburg, the interim president of the Trust.  Read More

•September 7, 2016•

By Kim McDonald
NP Gardening Columnist

August was a wonderful month full of tomatoes, peppers and lots of grapes to harvest.

We spent hours canning and freezing, trying to keep on top of the producing garden. The steamer/juicer, strainer and water bath canner has been a regular in the kitchen this past month, and a couple of the newly tried products that we tested were the grape syrup and grape jam. The aronia was all frozen just because of the lack of time…I’ll get to them later once overtime at works slows down enough to just run at a normal pace.

The roses have been beautiful, and I have tried to keep up with the deadheading so they continue to produce more flowers. The butterfly bushes have attracted butterflies to watch, and the spent flower heads of the coneflowers have attracted small birds. It makes my day to go out and see nature’s bouquet of flowers right there in my own yard. Different flowers, different colors and different textures all mixed to add beauty to the landscape.

The parsley worms finally showed up in August, and we watched all five of them every day until they each disappeared. I’m hoping to catch a glimpse of them once again as they turn into a Black Swallowtail butterfly. Each year as I watch the parsley worms, they remind me when I was a kid catching the monarch caterpillars and putting them in a container to take to school so we could all watch as they went from caterpillar to butterfly.  Read More

•August 24, 2016•

By Trudy Lieberman
Rural Health News Service

Recently a tweet from Lauren Sausser, a fine health reporter I know in South Carolina, caught my eye. “Crazy drug prices became personal. My dad will start Keytruda regimen on Friday, $15,000 per infusion, once every three weeks indefinitely.” The high cost of pharmaceuticals had hit home!

Her 61-year-old father, Jim McCallister, who lives in Spartanburg, S.C., had been diagnosed with a melanoma discovered during a routine skin exam a few weeks earlier. It had spread to his lungs. Doctors recommended the drug which uses the body’s immune system to attack cancer cells and has showed promise in treating aggressive melanomas.

McCallister’s employer-provided insurance is paying for most of his treatment, and the family is looking into Merck’s co-pay program. In the meantime, McCallister faces several thousand dollars of out-of-pocket costs.

McCallister may be lucky cost-wise. But the fact remains: Somebody is paying for the high cost of Keytruda and other new drugs coming on the market. Sausser said her dad asked if insurance would cover the drug. “The doctor told him they would find some way.”

That’s the nub of the dilemma. For many such as McCallister, there may be help, often from the drug companies themselves in the form of patient assistance plans. Remember drug company AstraZeneca’s ads for some of its costly drugs: “AstraZeneca may be able to help”? Read More

•August 17, 2016•

By Jerry Ginther
NP Columnist

If you are less than 30 years old, you are probably unaware of the vast railroad system that spread over this country like a web prior to the mid 1980s.

There are few visible reminders these days. Many of the rights-of-way where the rails laid were abandoned after the steel was retrieved; others were abandoned leaving the rails to rust in place.

The high centers of the rail beds where the tracks once laid are still visible in many parts of the country, running through the landscape like a scar and a fading reminder of these once busy railroad corridors.

Some may still be seen along a few of our nation’s highways, but in time nature will erase all evidence of a roadbed. If you are over 30, perhaps you have called attention to these vacant rights-of-way in the area where you live as you traveled about with your children or grandchildren.

So, why have so many of these rail lines, which were the most efficient movers of all sorts of freight, disappeared from the landscape?

There are several contributing factors, but I’ll discuss a few, which I believe were the most significant. Read More