The Insurance Department's decision late Tuesday afternoon has State Healthcare Advocate Kevin Lembo and Judith Stein, director of the Center for Medicare Advocacy, upset with the Insurance Department for its industry friendly decision.

Full story here.

Lampert, who's on the Yale Medical School faculty, told the TV audience and the studio audience of a dozen women that heart disease is the biggest killer of women in America, and that stress contributes to that. African-American women have higher rates than white women.

The guest experts explained there are two kinds of stress -- acute and chronic.

Lewis, who's a faculty member at the Yale School of Epidemiology and Public Health, elaborated that acute stress could result from having a really bad day. Chronic stress results from a lifestyle that includes many demands on women's time, like caregiving for children and aging parents in addition to holding down a job and taking care of household duties, all in the context of a general lack of social supports, especially for women of color.

"It's not just stress that's bad," she said. "It leads to depression, which is more common in women than in men."

One audience member asked about the difference among anxiety, stress and depression. Lewis said stressors happen in your life, like daily hassles or divorce or job loss, while anxiety and depression are mood states that could result from stress, but don't always.

Another questioner asked for an explanation of the connection between hypertension and heart trouble and stress.

Lampert answered, "Stress is a risk factor for hypertension, and hypertension is a risk factor for developing the blockages in the arteries that cause heart disease. Treating hypertension is one of the most important ways to guard against heart disease." She suggested walking, reducing salt intake, and losing weight to address the problem, but added that even people who do all those things sometimes also need medication to effectively treat high blood pressure.

Then Bryant asked her question about the impact of racism.

Lewis said black women have higher rates of heart disease, diabetes and other illnesses, than white women. "We don't really know why. I'm interested in looking into how much of that is stress. We know that African American women report more of all types of stressors; they have less social supports. They also report more racism, but also general mistreatment every day. So African American women feel they are less respected, they're treated with less courtesy; all kinds of things."

After the show ended, a reporter asked Bryant her take on the relevance of racism in influencing rates of heart disease.

"I think it's a constant," she said, "and, as a person of color, you become hyper-vigilant around dealing with that stress, when you go apply for a job, when you go to a store -- things the majority community may not be aware of it." Click here to hear more.

In the absence of a major statewide policy on access to affordable health care, the 2008 General Assembly did pass five smaller health care bills being praised by health care advocates.

Full story here.

Cloud-Alter (pictured above) is a Connecticut-based herbalist who developed her own non-toxic line of personal care products, called See the Dawn Natural Skin Care. What she's holding in the photo is a highly unnatural product popular among African American women -- a hair relaxer. (She slaps "glass" stickers over the brand names of products she doesn't recommend.)

To drive home her point about the dangerous ingredients in most of these products, she also read the warning on the box containing a common brand of toothpaste, which advises parents to call the poison control center if their toddler should ingest more than a pea-size amount of it.

Cloud-Alter was one of four speakers on a panel Thursday night at Linsley-Chittenden Hall on Yale's Old Campus. Another was Stacy Malkan, author of Not Just A Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry, published in 2007. She said, "Many products routinely contain carcinogens, hormone-disrupting chemicals, chemicals linked to reproductive harm, or toxic to the brain, when safer alternatives are available. We want to give the beauty industry a makeover and really push companies to make safer products." She displayed on the podium some of the toxic products she has researched, including baby shampoo and lipstick. In testing lipsticks, she said one researcher found that most of them contain lead, which can damage the nervous system. When someone in the industry dismissed health concerns, saying lead is only a problem in babies and young children, not adult women, Malkan said she responded, "Where do you think the babies come from?" Not to mention that many young girls love to put on lipstick.

Paul Anastas is director of the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale. He said he's aware of all the toxic products in use, and their significant health impacts."

"And," he added, "I also appreciate, dare I say, the impotence of our current regulatory environment to address these things in the way they ought to be addressed." He said he's optimistic about the future because of Green Chemistry -- the design of chemical products and chemical processes that reduce or eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances."

Gary Ginsberg lectures at the Yale School of Public Health, is the author of the book he's holding in the photo, What's Toxic, What's Not, and host of a new weekly show, "Greener Living with Dr. G" on WTIC radio. He lamented that industry and government are spending billions in the Superfund program to clean up "theoretical exposures," but not doing anything about the exposures to humans' biggest organ, the skin, through the use of soaps, deodorants, shampoos, colognes, etc.

He mentioned several scientific studies that have shown many of the chemicals in these products to be endocrine disrupters, resulting especially in changes to males, like lower semen levels, smaller penises and feminine traits.

The four presentations were followed by a Q&A session with the 40 or so people who attended the event. It was sponsored by the Coalition for a Safe & Healthy Connecticut.

Pollan writes about the industrial food system, including subsidies to large
agribusiness corporations, as well as alternatives to it that would increase the healthful food people eat. He said that humans around the world have been able to stay healthy on a huge variety of diets.

Click here for a transcript of an excerpt from Pollan's talk from Between the Lines Radio Newsmagazine.

Saturday's summit was co-sponsored by the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut and Latinos for National Health Insurance and held at the Sheraton Hotel in Meriden. The approximately 65 attendees hailed from Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey and possibly other states.

"We're doing two things today," said Juan Figueroa, president of the foundation (which is also a sponsor of this website). "We're trying to strengthen a national voice through Latinos for National Health Insurance, while we figure out at the state level how to do some of this work. The ultimate solution needs to be a national solution, but in the meantime this is a way of creating momentum to get that national solution." He said his expectations of action at the national level are not very high right now. But he pointed to the evolution of a bedrock social program to show how states might influence federal policy. "We had Social Security in ten states before we had it at the national level."

Frances Padilla, vice president of the foundation, said, "The safety net [including Medicaid] is important, but we have, in fact, built a whole advocacy movement around protection of the safety net, and it's no longer adequate to focus only on that. The safety net is a symptom of a much larger problem that we've got to tackle." Otherwise, she warned, "We could win the battle and lose the war" for universal health care.

Speakers from Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey laid out some of the policies and goals health reform advocates are working on in those states.

Marissa Cardona (pictured), who works with Meriden Children First Initiative, said access to health care is a key concern. Even with HUSKY, the state's health plan for low-income families, they often can't find a doctor or dentist who will see their kids.

She said telling personal stories is a powerful and motivating factor in the struggle for universal health care, and told several about women who experienced problems from lack of adequate health coverage, including her mother, who couldn't afford to pay for all the pills she needed for a debilitating and progressively worsening condition, so she bought only half of what she needed, which made her condition worse.

Cardona added that now she has excellent coverage through her husband's insurance plan, but remembered just a few years back to when she graduated from college and didn't have any health insurance for awhile. "I had bronchitis and I didn't want to see a doctor and have to pay a couple hundred dollars out of pocket."

Ann Malone of Massachusetts is executive director of the Alliance to Defend Health Care, which works to improve that state's first-in-the-nation universal health insurance plan. She said it's good that the state has fewer uninsured residents, but the "wasteful financing approach" is bankrupting the state. That proves to her that a national health insurance program is necessary to streamline the financing and achieve universal health care. Click here for more.

New York State Assemblyman Felix Ortiz said that when he introduced legislation to create centers to help people with eating disorders, it passed in record time - because the president of the Senate had a daughter with an eating disorder and he co-sponsored the bill. That illustrated to Ortiz the importance of sharing personal stories in the fight for universal health care - an approach also championed by the Universal Health Care Foundation.

Dr. Jaime Torres, a New York City podiatrist, is the co-founder of Latinos for National Health Insurance, which advocates for a single payer plan that would cover every person from birth, regardless of immigration status. Figueroa serves as vice president of the group, where he walks a fine line, because his own foundation is silent on the single payer approach, neither supporting it nor opposing it. In 2006 Torres was a spokesman for the American Podiatric Medical Association's campaign, "Descubras tus pies" ("Discover your feet"), that shows Latinos how to prevent foot problems that can result from diabetes, which is a major problem in that community.

During a break, New Haven brothers and pastors Emilio and Abraham Hernandez button-holed Ortiz (pictured at top of story, left to right) to discuss the urgent need for major reforms in the provision of health care, and their frustration with many politicians who oppose a bigger role for government in making that happen.

Participants reviewed the Institute of Medicine's guidelines for health care: that it be universal, continuous, portable, affordable to people and sustainable to the economy, and that it enhances health and well-being. Members of the audience added other elements they considered essential. Fernando Betancourt (pictured), executive director of the state's Office of Puerto Rican and Latino Affairs, added "culturally appropriate."

Someone else said it needed to be geographically comprehensive to meet the needs of people in rural areas and also those who live part of the time in other countries, as many Latinos do.

Keynote speaker U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd (pictured) was swept into the room on a wave of enthusiastic applause, with none of the resentment polls showed many Nutmeggers felt toward him when he abandoned the state for almost a year to pursue his presidential bid in Iowa. He began in excellent Spanish (learned in Puerto Rico in the Peace Corps before being assigned to work in the Dominican Republic), told a few well-received jokes, and then got down to business blasting the Bush administration for its priorities, calling Bush's veto of the expansion of the S-CHIP program for children's health coverage "unconscionable. We're spending $2 billion a week in Iraq. We ought to be able to do something about nine million kids living in America." Click here to hear more.

In morning workshops, participants developed priorities for possible action steps following the summit. They included, "building a sense of urgency" around inadequate health care, developing "sharp communication strategies" that would use non-traditional channels like cabdrivers and bodegueros (owners of small stores in urban areas), and strengthen the organizational effort among key populations like organized labor, elected officials, the faith community, small business owners and health care providers.

"In the 1970s, lead levels above 65 micrograms per deciliter in a child's blood were considered lead poisoning," he said, resulting in reductions in IQ and motor skills and requiring abatement. "Now a blood level of more than 10 micrograms per deciliter is the definition of lead poisoning." He said it's an insidious ailment, even at that low level resulting in neurological impairments as the child grows, but not obvious at the time of diagnosis. The federal Environmental Protection Agency just last week said it would consider lowering the level at which it defines lead poisoning yet again. "There's no safe level," Kowalski said, adding that New Haven would like to set the level at five micrograms per deciliter.

He noted that between 2006 and 2007, the number of young children in the city with levels of 10 mc/d or higher has dropped from 299 to 260, while the number with lead levels above 20 has dropped to 55 children.

Reporting is required at any level over 10, but abatement is required only at 20 or more mc/d. But Kowalski said a member of his team will go out upon request to any home and test for lead, thus reversing the longstanding practice of identifying a residence with high lead levels only after a child had tested positive for it.

What's a homeowner to do once lead paint is identified? Most of the housing stock in the city was covered in lead paint, which was banned for interior use only in 1978.

Grand Paint's paint manager, James Carlozzi (pictured on the right with a customer, Roslyn Hamilton, who just happens to work for the health department but was there buying paint), said he sells a special lead-blocker paint that can be applied right over surfaces covered with lead paint.

"It blocks the lead from coming through itself. And if it does chip off, it contains bitrix, which is very bitter-tasting, so if children put it in their mouth, they don't like it." He said he'd never tried lead paint himself, but he's heard that it has a sweet taste that kids find appealing.

Another customer, Charles Maddox (pictured), said he knew all about lead paint and abatement from his days working for the Housing Authority of New Haven. This day he was in the store buying paint for his own house in Beaver Hill.

Kowalski said financial help is available to homeowners to do the work.

"In the HUD lead hazard control program, we currently have close to a million dollars to move out the door to private property owners for the abatement of their lead-based paint." To find out more, call the health department at 946-8174.