"Public health" isn't just about vaccinations, clinics and urgent care: it's a holistic discipline that encompasses all the contributors to health outcomes, which include things like housing, employment, transportation, pollution and more.

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A new working paper from @nberpubs estimates the number of US covid deaths that could have been prevented with a coherent, effective eviction moratorium and a ban on utility cutoffs: 164,000.

https://t.co/pfAeN7TRo0

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The paper, written by a multidisciplinary group of Duke researchers from medicine and economics, found that housing precarity (a risk of losing your home) drove risky behavior that increased the spread of the disease and the resulting deaths.

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For example, it forced people to double-up on lodgings, making social distancing impossible, to say nothing of self-isolating after an exposure. It also drove people to tolerate high-risk workplace conditions, including illegal conditions.

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The authors used regression techniques to control for confounding variables, and used like-for-like counties with different utility and eviction policies to estimate the effect that these had on infection rates.

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"Public health" is a notion that challenges the very foundation of neoliberal ideology, which says that all outcomes are the results of your individual choices - that your right to swing your arm ends at the tip of my nose.

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Public health says that our decisions about treating covid (and other health issues) affect all of us - that the system matters more than individual choices.

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Public health says that we're all in the same swimming pool. Neoliberal choice theory says that if some of us want to piss in the pool, we can just create a "pissing" and a "no pissing" end.

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And that the answer to the yellowing of both ends is to make the pool longer, and that the market opportunity is to charge people who want to swim in the no pissing end to use the toilets and fine them if they can't afford the charge.

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Because here's the kicker: although covid mostly kills poor, racialized and otherwise marginalized people, it doesn't do so exclusively. Even people who can afford high quality care and thus recover face unknown, long-term health consequences.

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Keeping rentiers' income streams intact by allowing evictions made us ALL sicker, put us ALL at risk. Even the landlords.

Treating system problems as a matter of personal choice is like telling people to recycle harder to avert the climate emergency.

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The parochial gains to the minute class of landlords came at the expense of mass-scale, social costs - human lives, human misery, widespread infection, and traumas and waste that will drag us down for decades to come.

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Image: Luis Prado (modified)
https://t.co/4necfqJQ3x

CC BY
https://t.co/WK3VwLNIio

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More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

More from Health

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Remember woman who tuk multiple @SriSriTattva products 4 range of problems frm diabetes 2 gas 2 liver disease & developed liver failure, listed for liver transplant?
Here is original thread:
https://t.co/PXxI1Slyv2
23 samples, Analysis results
#MedTwitter #livertwitter


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Before I go into results, I must say this was overwhelming. There was SO MUCH the lab identified, impossible to put everything here. So I made a summary. At the end of this thread, I have linked a full analysis described in Excel format. Some results were VERY concerning

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How did we analyse?
Here R links 2 methods
They R high end, done under strict protocols
Frm Ministry of Forest, Environment, Climate / NABL approvd Lab
ICP-OES https://t.co/O1CLhqVQAu
GC MSMS https://t.co/zRJoXyWQIr
FTIR https://t.co/goAembQ08p
Here is list V analysed 👇


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Sample names written on top (each column).
First 5 samples: C what we identified in #Ayurveda #medicines
Antibiotics
Steroids (anabolic/synthetic)
#NARCOTICS - LSD, Morphine
Blood thinners (possible reason Y bleeding tests were off the roof in the patient)
Heavy metals!


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Next 5 samples (total 10 now)
Mercury is clear winner. Almost all samples
See controlled substances - Butyrolactones https://t.co/CPz0FwPEOm, methylamine https://t.co/OZnXY7U9UQ
Alcohols, industrial solvents
Rare metals - cobalt, lithium
Again lots of blood thinners
#Ayush

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