Results tagged “publichealth”

Governor Quinn is putting together a "high-level" task force in response to a three-part Tribune investigation which showed how Illinois more than any other state relies on nursing homes as a place to house mentally ill patients or convicted felons with mental illness or physical disability. The Tribune story exposed cases where elderly or disabled nursing home residents were allegedly assaulted or raped by mentally ill criminals living in the same facility.

In a chilling report, Chi-Town Daily News found a loophole that allows some of the city’s mentally ill population to live in unlicensed group homes. This discovery has led state legislators to push for eliminating the loophole and adding more regulation and oversight for these types of homes which claim to provide services for the mentally and physically disabled. State Rep. Jack Franks (D-Woodstock) said he wanted Gov. Pat Quinn to take steps necessary to ending the loophole, Chi-Town Daily reported.

Yesterday we took a look at the dark side of catastrophe. Today, in the wake of this morning's announcement, we'll take a look at the history how we've dealt with them in the past.

An e-mail from Tim Hadac at the City Department of Public Health announced that the North Avenue Whole Foods failed its reinspection. Now we can look forward to another inane Mary Schmich column on the closing.

The City Health Department shut down the Whole Foods at 1000 W. North Ave. today after finding evidence of a rodent infestation throughout the store, including a glue trap and over 100 droppings in a walk-in cooler. The store will remain closed until it passes reinspection; make sure to shop at one of the 400 other Whole Foods in the city.

Is Illinois heading towards legalized medical marijuana? State Senator John Cullerton (pretty website!) hopes so. He's sponsoring a bill that the Senate Public Health Committee approved 6-4 yesterday. A similar measure failed in the Senate last year, but try, try again.

This week Chicagoist received an email from the Chicago Department of Public Health, announcing the immediate closing of The Great American Bagel at 1248 W. Belmont. The list of serious violations included cockroach infestation and the serving of spoiled food. That's bad, obviously, but what's worse is that we have actually eaten food from this establishment! We felt kind of "eeeww" after our egg and cheese sandwich; now we realize how worse we could have felt.

The Randolph Street Market District, home to Marché, Sushi Wabi and more, is one of the most popular and big-ticket dining areas in the city. But how do they fare under the withering gaze of the City Department of Public Health? Sushi Wabi had troubles with violations 33 and 34. Violation #33 requires "all utensils shall be thoroughly cleaned and sanitized after each usage, as well as all food and non-food contact surfaces of equipment...

From Tim Hadac of the City Department of Public Health:

Wednesday we told you about the closing of Penang Malaysian Restaurant and Sushi Bar in Chinatown for multiple health code violations. Even though a Penang spokesman would only comment to Chicagoist that they were "doing the best (they) could to correct the violations," manager Joe Leung felt slightly more confident when he told Crain's that they only had "plumbing problems" and expected to re-open that same day. We received an e-mail from Tim Hadac from...

Chemicals — what would we do without them? Twinkies wouldn't have a shelf life of a decade. Diet Coke wouldn't be diet. And microwave popcorn wouldn't cause some weird lung disease. We just read today that diacetyl, one of the main substances used to flavor microwave popcorn*, isn't so good for the lungs. Truthfully, when we read the first article about the first consumer that is likely to have "popcorn lung" (bronchiolitis obliterans syndrome, or...

It is difficult to believe it has been a year since Chicago outlawed selling foie gras in the city. Judging from the number of times we've written about it, the last twelve months have been interesting ones for the much-maligned/celebrated product. Perhaps what is most interesting, according to Phil Vettel in today's Trib, is that a year later, it really isn't so difficult to find foie gras in the city.

In news that will surely give fodder to the Macy's h8rs in the house, the city closed down the lower level food court at the flagship Macy's yesterday after they found "a fruit fly infestation, water backing up from a clogged drain, a leaking sink, and grease and food debris on the walls and floor around the inside trash can." The Health Department was there in the first place because a customer called them after...

Michigan authorities searched Richard Hebron's home and car last week in their attempts to uphold the law, according to this Business Week article. Which law would that be? Oh right, the one against distributing "raw milk and its various byproducts, including cream, buttermilk, yogurt, butter, and kefir." We've heard kefir can be super dangerous too, especially when it is fruit flavored. Hebron runs his 110-acre farm, Family Farms Co-op, with another family and distributes the raw dairy products to an Ann Arbor outlet as well as two outlets in Detroit and seven in Chicago.

Diabetes. Cancer. Heart disease. These are just a few of the obesity-related diseases that were found to cause earlier deaths on Chicago’s south and west sides, where so-called “food deserts” exist. According to Mari Gallagher, author of the report titled “Examining the Impact of Food Deserts on Public Health in Chicago,” there is a food imbalance in effect in some areas of the city. She told 848 that her research team measured the distance to every grocery and every fast food restaurant in every one of the 18,000 blocks in Chicago. They found that on the south and west sides, not only were fast food restaurants abundant, but grocers were few and far between. Although the study does not state a direct cause-and-effect, it did find that the death rate from diabetes is the worst in food deserts, and the rate of obesity seems to increase as the access to grocery stores decreases. In contrast, those areas that had both high concentrations of grocery stores and fast food restaurants had fewer instances of diet-related diseases. Gallagher’s study is a follow-up to a study in 2005 that found that south side residents have little access to major grocers or retailers but have a plethora of liquor stores and fast food restaurants. She also reported in 2004 that there are 3.4 big grocers per 100,000 residents in white wards, compared with 2.6 in black wards and 2.3 in Latino wards. After the first study was released, LaDonna Redmond, president of the Institute for Community Resource Development in the Austin neighborhood, was quoted as saying, "I can walk out my door and buy a semi-automatic weapon or narcotics, but I can't find organic tomatoes or lettuce anywhere.”

With all the holiday hullabaloo lately, Chicagoist is having a hard time staying motivated at work. But we bet it’d be a lot easier to do our jobs if we got to play video games all day like the folks at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Today is World AIDS Day and Chicago is commemorating with candle light vigils and fundraisers. Over 40 million people worldwide now are infected with HIV/AIDS. If you think that AIDS only affects the poor in Africa or gay men in San Francisco, well, you’d be wrong. Many of your neighbors, friends, and possible sex partners are infected and you probably don’t know it. Being tested on a routine basis is vitally important to stopping the...

We hope you'll forgive us but just this once we're going to cut to the chase and present what we think is the most important element to this entire story: The dumbest, most asinine, most trite thing ever to drip from the lips of any corporate drone and show up in print: In response to criticism that the food they market to children is unhealthy and therefore a contributing factor to childhood obesity, McDonald's, according...

Chicago is clearly one hell of a place: we like it, you like it, tourists like it, and - this year - even mosquitos seem to be having a love affair with our town. Yes, it's West Nile season once again, ladies and gentleman, and this year's mosquito crop appears to be especially fond of Chicago. Of the 28 human West Nile cases that have been reported in Illinois this year, 21 have occurred parts of Chicago and the greater Cook County area.

Have you ever had or witnessed a violent run-in with Haroon Paryani the man killed in February with his own cab? If so, a new Web site, www.endcabviolence.com, wants to hear from you. The site provides an e-mail address and phone number for you to report any violent incidents with the cab driver promising that the information will be kept private and confidential. Michael J. Jackson, a former Chicago Department of Public Health Employee, allegedly...

She can't walk or talk, but she can conceive. Police and the Illinois Department of Public Health are investigating the Alden Village Health Facility for Children and Young Adults in Bloomingdale after news that a 23-year-old brain-damaged resident of the facility is pregnant. An employee at the facility called the woman's mother last month to tell her that her daughter was going to the hospital for a swelling in her stomach. Originally they thought it...

Yesterday Gov. Gonad made Illinois the fourth state in the nation and the only state in the Midwest to allocate public funds for stem cell research. He signed an executive order directing the Illinois Department of Public Health to create the Illinois Regenerative Medicine Institute. The IRMI will give $10 million in grants to medical research facilities for the study of adult, cord blood and embryonic stem cells. A ">similar bill stalled in the state...

Chicagoist always enjoys entering a bar or restaurant bathroom and discovering a urinal filled with ice (how many cubes can you melt!?), but actual urinal technology is something we rarely consider. All that changed this morning when we heard about city hall's new waterless urinals.

How are you going to celebrate? Here at the red-ribbon-wrapped Chicagoist offices we're listening to the entire Queen catalogue, watching "Philadelphia" over and over again, chewing on flavored condoms and getting FUCKED-up on HIV medication cocktails.

Responding to state health department concerns, Glenview Park District officials have made some changes to their annual Goldfish Day. Rather than dumping the thousands of fish into the public swimming pools, this year kids will be invited to catch goldfish in 100-gallon tubs of fresh water. The event in its previous format -- children charging a pool of fish in the hopes of catching some -- had been decades-old tradition in the North Shore suburb.