Washington, DC, United States (KaiserHealth) – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has gathered scientists and tobacco policy experts to study the potential health risks and benefits of dissolvable tobacco products. The Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee met this week and advocates from all sides lined up to give their pitch to the FDA panel.

Dissolvables, which are made with finely milled tobacco, aren’t new, but they drew new attention last year when R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris introduced new flavors and varieties in a few cities across the country. Some health officials and lawmakers dubbed the flavored melt-in-your mouth orbs and tongue strips “nicotine candy” and complained to the FDA.

Supporters say dissolvables could help smokers “step down” from their nicotine dependence on cigarettes. Opponents say it’s not clear how consumers actually use the products and who is using them. Will young people try dissolvables, develop a taste for nicotine, then graduate to smoking? Could dissolvables keep people hooked when some former smokers would have–eventually–become nicotine free?

Tobacco companies aren’t allowed to promote dissolvables as a stop-smoking aid, but there’s lots of Internet chatter from individual consumers who report that they’ve given up cigarettes or cigars with the help of dissolvables.

Rutgers University law student Gregory Conley was a smoker for eight years, but quit in August. The 24-year-old used electronic cigarettes—another smokeless product—to quit, and he says dissolvables suppress his cravings when he’s in class. He likes the tobacco-dipped toothpicks and says they give him a satisfying nicotine tingle along with a hit of mint or java flavor.

“You just put it in your mouth and hold it as if you were holding a piece of straw between your teeth,” Conley said.

He volunteers as a legal policy director for the Consumer Advocates for Smoke-Free Alternatives Association and testified during the FDA’s meeting this week. Conley says electronic cigarettes, dissolvables and other smokeless alternatives are powerful tools to help smokers avoid the most toxic aspects of cigarettes.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention links one in five deaths each year to tobacco use, about 440,000 people. Cigarette smoking costs America $193 billion a year, according to government estimates for 2000 to 2004. About half of that economic cost is direct health care spending, the other half lost productivity.

The FDA’s review of dissolvables was mandated by the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, says the advisers will weigh the science and report on the consequences for population health, not just individual smokers.

“The FDA law recognizes that even if the product is less harmful, if it’s marketed in a way that its primary appeal is to young people, the net result will be more people becoming addicted to tobacco,” Myers said.

“What we’ve seen is that the colorful way that dissolvables have been promoted and the talk that they have generated has led a lot of people to believe that these products are less harmful—before there’s been an FDA review,” Myers said.

Right now, FDA regulates dissolvables like other smokeless tobacco. They’re stocked behind the counter at convenience and grocery stores, not sold to minors and they have some of the same warning labels as snuff and chew: “Smokeless tobacco is addictive.” “This product is not a safe alternative to cigarettes.”

The newer products have been available in just a handful of markets so far, including Denver, Indianapolis, Portland, Ore., Columbus, Ohio, and Charlotte, N.C. The Colorado Board of Health passed a resolution asking R.J. Reynolds to remove the products from its market, but the company is not complying with the request.

A group of U.S. lawmakers wants stricter rules for dissolvables. Some public health groups say the products should be removed from store shelves until the FDA has weighed in on the science behind dissolvables. Other advocates, sometimes called “harm reductionists” say smokeless products like dissolvables can lessen the disease, death and disability caused by smoking.

Jennifer Ibrahim, associate professor in the Department of Public Health at Temple University, says–done right–harm reduction is a good idea. “I think that everyone in the business of smoking cessation is realistic that people can’t quit cold turkey, but you don’t want to send the wrong message: that nicotine is safe at any level, because it’s not.”

“That’s absolutely true, nothing is absolutely safe,” said Conley, but he says smokers are dying while public health officials wait for definitive proof.

Psychologist Anna Tobia, director of the smoking cessation program at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, points out that the new dissolvables are not the only nicotine products meant to be ingested.

“To be fair, they are very similar to smoking cessation products that have been on the market for a very long time–a lozenge or a gum for people who are trying to get off of tobacco,” said Tobia.

Kenneth Warner, a health economist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, says there’s reason to be skeptical of the tobacco industry’s intention for dissolvables and concerned about what the new products will do.

“The public health community got bamboozled” in the past, he said. When the tobacco makers began selling low-tar nicotine cigarettes, Warner says they were marketed as “mild, mellow,” and safer than regular cigarettes—and it turned out they weren’t.

The FDA’s advisers are wading in to a long-standing debate that shows up evolving and changing ideas about what’s acceptable and what’s safe. Health policy expert Ibrahim says electronic cigarettes and melt-in-your mouth tobacco are just the latest in a long line of novel products aimed at smokers and people trying to kick the habit.

“I won’t let my kids near the e-cigarettes, because I just don’t know what’s in the vaps [water vapor] that’s coming out of them. Once upon a time people thought exposure to second-hand smoke was safe and clearly that’s not the case,” Ibrahim said. “I don’t intend to expose myself or my family to things which 10, 15 years down the road, we’ll say: ‘Oh, yeah, that’s not good for you.’”

“We will take anything to get our patients better and to get them to reduce the amount of cigarettes that they are smoking,” said stop-smoking expert Anna Tobia. “If this is a good first step, and—maybe–if they can see that they can manage with less nicotine, that would be wonderful.” Many are waiting for the FDA to answer the question: Do dissolvables pose a greater or lesser risk to population health?

– Provided by Kaiser Health News.

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Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – Initial unemployment claims dropped to 352,000 during the week ending Jan. 14, their lowest level in nearly four years.

First time claims for jobless benefits dropped by 50,000 from the previous week’s revised tally of 402,000, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

The less volatile four-week moving average was 379,000, a decrease of 3,500 from the previous week’s revised average of 382,500.

However, the advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate also dropped. Only 2.7 percent of jobless workers were covered by unemployment insurance for the week ending Jan. 7, a decrease of 0.2 percentage point from the prior week’s unrevised rate.

The total number of people claiming benefits in all programs for the week ending Dec. 31, the most recent week for which data is available, was 7,826,665, an increase of 493,566 from the previous week.

The highest insured unemployment rates in the week ending Dec. 31 were:

• Alaska (6.9)
• Connecticut (6.6)
• Oregon (5.0)
• Wisconsin (4.9)
• Pennsylvania (4.7)
• Idaho (4.5)
• Rhode Island (4.5)
• Montana (4.3)
• New Jersey (4.2)
• Arkansas (4.0)
• Illinois (4.0)
• Washington (4.0).

The largest increases in initial claims for the week ending Jan. 7 were:

• New York (+29,389)
• California (+22,168)
• Texas (+13,946)
• North Carolina (+7,865)
• Georgia (+7,225)

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Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday refused to buckle under Republican deadline and rejected a bid to expand the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline according to the Obama Administration.

President Obama personally conveyed “his Administration’s decision on the Keystone pipeline,” to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper according to the White House but media reports from across the border noted the disappointment of Canadian leader.

In an email statement Obama justified the denial as “not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people.”

Blaming the Republicans in Congress, Obama said, “I’m disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision,” adding, “the rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by Congressional Republicans prevented a full assessment of the pipeline’s impact.”

In a conference call on Wednesday with journalists, Kerri-Ann Jones, the state department official overseeing the pipeline application, said, “This decision today doesn’t make our commitment to energy independence and energy security any less of a priority,” she said, blaming the lawmakers for setting a February 21 deadline on a decision.

“We felt the imposition of a deadline would complicate the process,” Jones told journalists, adding, “The legislation really did not give us enough time to do a responsible evaluation.”

“The Obama Administration complains about a 60-day deadline, but in reality it has now had 1,217 days to make a decision. How long does it take for President Obama to put the needs of America’s workers ahead of his own political interests?” questioned Senator Richard Lugar from Indiana.

Most senior Republican Senator and longest serving Member of Congress in Indiana history, Lugar said, “In the face of Iranian threats against oil affordability, the Obama Administration once again is trying to blame Congress and the State of Nebraska instead of taking responsibility for American jobs and security.”

Jones, however, during the conference call, refused to guarantee an expedited review of future proposals for the KeystoneXL oil pipeline, even though TransCanada Corp. immediately in a statement said that it would reapply, noting that it expected the U.S. to process in a speedy manner its new application for the 1,700-mile pipeline.

“This outcome is one of the scenarios we anticipated. While we are disappointed, TransCanada remains fully committed to the construction of Keystone XL. Plans are already underway on a number of fronts to largely maintain the construction schedule of the project,” said Russ Girling, TransCanada’s president and chief executive officer.

“We will re-apply for a Presidential Permit and expect a new application would be processed in an expedited manner to allow for an in-service date of late 2014,” Girling said.

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Jerusalem, Israel Felice Friedson and Arieh – Israel Edri is a young Israeli ultra-Orthodox man. He’d like to spend all his day in religious studies. But as the father of two children and a third on the way, life’s challenges have stepped in and today he works in telemarketing.

“Reality hit. If you ask me I’d like to sit and study all day long, but the reality is that you have to get out and work, especially if you want to live in an expensive city like Jerusalem and give your kids what they need,” the clean-shaven Edri told The Media Line.

Israel Edri, 27, is the exception. The vast majority of ultra-Orthodox men in Israel do not work or serve in the army, choosing instead a pious and largely impoverished life of studying religious texts, or Torah, mainly the Talmud. It is not that they cannot find work – Israel’s unemployment rate is at its lowest in decades – rather they do not want to and have none of the education or training needed to be employed.

With birthrates three times the national average, Israel’s ultra-Orthodox communities are mushrooming. Many live on government allowances and private charity and on their wives’ earnings. It wasn’t always that way nor is it a problem among ultra-Orthodox Jews living outside of Israel.

In 1970, 20 percent of working-age men in the ultra-Orthodox community in Israel were not working by choice; today, the figure is two thirds (65 percent). Ultra-Orthodox Jews in the U.S. and Britain traditionally take jobs and their labor force participation rate is the mirror opposite of Israel’s.

Once a tiny minority, ultra-Orthodox Jews, known as haredim, now number about 700,000, or about 10 percent of Israel’s population. And that’s a problem. Israel’s economy can’t afford to have such a big part of the population permanently out of the work force and living on government handouts paid for by the rest.

“By the time you are up to 10 percent of the population of whom 70 percent of the male part of the population doesn’t work, you are getting to a macro-economic issue,” Stanley Fischer, governor of the Bank of Israel, said at a briefing. “This is not sustainable. We can’t have an ever-increasing proportion of the population continuing to not go to work.”

While the burden on the economy was growing, the rest of Israel largely ignored the problem as voters and politicians focused on security issues. But the country’s economic problems, particular the high cost of living and shortage of housing, emerged as a key issue last summer in an explosion of mass protests and tent cities.

In the last month, the growth and increasing extremism of the haredi sector took center stage. A spate of incidents in which girls and women regarded by the most extreme ultra-Orthodox were spit upon and yelled at captured headlines and pointed up the wide gap in lifestyle and attitudes between ultra-Orthodox and other Israelis.

“A haredi town would not be self sustaining. Nobody would pay taxes. Nobody works. Well, hey, this is where [they] are taking the entire country. Do that math. This is a problem,” Dan Ben-David, a Tel Aviv University economist who heads the Taub Center for Social Political Studies, told The Media Line.

Now, a host of organizations are making an effort to quietly reverse the trend towards shunning work by finding ways to integrate haredi men into the workforce. The economic crunch has led to more and more ultra-Orthodox to work for a living, says Motti Feldstein, the director of Kemach, an organization that provides job training and support for haredi men and women learning a trade.

“It’s not a revolution but a change in realities. There’s not more openness to working, but recognition of a changing world,” he told The Media Line.

Kemach means “flour” or “bread,” but is also used in a famous biblical quote saying in defense work (“Without bread there is no Torah”) and is also an acronym for Promoting Haredi Employment. Over the past three years it has helped more than 12,000 haredim with guidance and scholarships.

But Feldstein is keen on stressing that his organization is not luring people out of yeshivas – the academies where religious texts are studied – but only helping those who had already chosen to stop learning full time.

“A rabbi is not going to come out and give a sermon [to go to work]. Everyone has to come to their rabbi and seek his blessing and the rabbi helps direct them. The rabbi’s job is to create a society. It is not to bring money to his community. Everyone is responsible for themselves. They have to decide what is better, to be a schnorrer [beggar], or to go out and work,” he says.

But most ultra-Orthodox have never studied much in math, science, English and other core subjects employers require. Furthermore, many young men have no experience in the job market and conditions. They imagine themselves working few hours and earning high wages even though they have few if any skills. They have been taught that Torah learning is paramount. If they decide to take a job and accept the lower social status that workers have compared to full-time scholars, they prefer to do it discreetly.

Shmuel Gotlieb is an employment counselor at Mafteah, a venture by the Joint Distribution Committee’s Tevet program. He interviews men seeking to get their first job.

“A lot of people come to me and say ‘Give me a place to work where I’m not going to be seen. Why? Because it is unpleasant for me. Because my brother doesn’t know I’m working,’” Gotlieb told The Media Line. “I know a guy who has worked in a high tech firm for three years now and no one in his family knows he’s working.”

The ultra-Orthodox disdain change. Even their dress of black frock coats and wide-brimmed hats harken to 19th-century and speak Yiddish, the language of their Europe forbears. Some economists say their background is so constricted that they can’t supply the needs of a modern economy.

“A Third World economy can’t support a First World army,” says Ben-David of the Taub Center. “We need more and more educated people because we are a more advanced society and we need less and less uneducated. What is happening here is perverse because we are enabling a huge portion of society to deprive their kids of what they need when they grow up and to deprive us as a society of the doctors and engineers and everything else that a modern society needs.”

The Technion, Israel’s top engineering school, has been running a program for the past three years to bring ultra-Orthodox into their civil engineering program. They receive a crash course in core subjects like math, physics and English.

“One of the teachers told me it is like teaching the ABCs at the Technion because they know nothing,” Muly Dotan, director of the center for pre-university studies, told The Media Line.

Out of some 100 candidate discretely recruited from the ultra-Orthodox community, about 30 are chosen annually and receive a hefty scholarship to cover their four-year degree. The first graduates are expected soon and jobs have been earmarked for them, Dotan said.

But Yossi Tamir, executive director of the Tevet employment initiative, counters that despite a lack of formal education, haredi men and women catch on fast.

“It’s very easy for them,” Tamir told The Media Line. “If you are talking about computers, they have a very high ability and capacity of learning those issues. So they can move into technology, computers and mathematics without any problems. Even if they didn’t study it when they were in high school. That isn’t a barrier.”

At Mafteah, they are aiming lower and direct people to training as bus drivers, nurse’s aides, locksmiths and construction workers.

“People are not connected to reality because they are cut off. They’ve never worked and their fathers never worked. They never saw anyone who ever worked and so they don’t have any idea what a working man does. But the moment they understand that a man with a job needs to work, they work,” Gotlieb said.

Still, once they gain a profession, breaking the stigma that they are lazy or untrained is often hard. Itzik Omasky, an electrician, said he hasn’t had good experience with them.

“There aren’t many haredi guys in the profession. But my experience with them hasn’t been good. I took one from Ramat Beit Shemesh and he was awful and split. He ended up quitting because he wasn’t used to working so hard,” Omasky told The Media Line. “He knew his craft, but he told me he could not work so much and at two o’clock had to stop. He was always wanting to take a break. I told him that this wouldn’t work out and he had to work a full day. After 10 days he quit and left me in a lurch.”

Another barrier to their employment is the growing phenomenon in the haredi world of segregating men and women. But like the phenomenon of shunning labor, the rising gender divide is also a modern phenomenon that has little basis in Jewish tradition, says Ben-David.

He points to the well-known New York electronics retailer, B&H, which is owned and operated by ultra-orthodox Jews.

“In New York, haredi men serve non-haredi women. B&H doesn’t have a marker in the door ‘women only’ — ‘men only.’ It’s not part of being haredi. It’s not part of being Jewish. What we are seeing here has nothing to do with being Jewish,” says Ben-David. “They should get used to what modern society is and not the other way around.”

But Ben-David admits that there is a change taking place among the haredi community.

“At the anecdotal level we see more and more haredim who apparently get it and want to get the skills and go to school. There are now haredi colleges where there were none before and there are now haredim going to the army where there were none before and on the face of it this is a good direction,” he says.

Unusually for someone in the ultra-Orthodox community, Matan Nitzky is a volunteer for Israel’s civilian national service as an alternative to the army. He works in the Hatzala emergency medical service, which he hopes will serve as a springboard for a career in medicine.

“My father is a doctor, my mother is a nurse and … it’s been my dream to also one day do that. With the civil service I have the option to fulfill my dream and hopefully one day go down that path,” he told The Media Line.

Israel Edri, the young working haredi father, said that he hopes the stigma that ultra-Orthodox don’t want to work will fade.

“It’s hard to get rid of a stigma,” Edri says. “I believe that after a few years this stigma will go away when they see haredim in many more senior positions.”

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United States (KaiserHealth) – If you saw that your doctor had written “SOB” in the notes he took during your latest office visit, you might be offended and wonder what you’d done to give him such a negative impression. But “SOB,” in physicians’ shorthand, simply means “shortness of breath.”

Concern about such misunderstandings is one of several reasons doctors are reluctant to share their notes with patients, according to a study published in December in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The study surveyed 173 doctors and nearly 38,000 patients at three primary-care practices about sharing information with patients. After the survey, the practices joined a project called OpenNotes, in which patients were give electronic access to their files.

Although federal law guarantees patients the right to examine and get copies of their medical records, providers haven’t always made it easy to do so. But the movement to give patients direct access to their health information has picked up steam, and policymakers have encouraged it as a way to empower patients to help manage their health and their medical care.

Making lab test results available directly is more common, but it’s not routine, either. Just seven states and the District explicitly allow patients to get test results directly from the lab, and seven others permit it with provider approval.

Last fall, the Department of Health and Human Services proposed a rule giving patients in every state direct access to their lab test results. A comment period ended in November, but there’s no date set for release of a final rule, according to a spokesperson for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which would release it.

Patients don’t share clinicians’ ambivalence about getting direct, easy access to their health information. No matter their age, education or health status, more than 90 percent of participants in the OpenNotes survey said they thought being able to see doctors’ notes was a good idea.

“In a way, that was the biggest surprise of the study,” says Jan Walker, the study’s lead author. Walker is a nurse at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, whose practice participated in the study along with those at Geisinger Health System in rural Pennsylvania and Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. “It reflects consumers’ universal interest in their own care.”

In 2010, Quest Diagnostics, a large lab services company, introduced a free smartphone application called Gazelle that lets consumers in 33 states and the District download their lab test results directly. Since then, 125,000 patients have used the service, the company says. “[Gazelle] will help you have an educated conversation with your physician,” says Jon Cohen, chief medical officer for Quest.

John Hadley downloaded the Gazelle app to his iPhone after he developed deep vein thrombosis and was prescribed a blood thinner to help prevent another blood clot. At first, Hadley had to get a blood test every few days so his physician could adjust the medication dose if necessary; now he’s tested every few weeks.

Gazelle let Hadley, 53, track his results and make adjustments to his diet if they started to drift. (Foods high in Vitamin K can affect the ability of blood to clot.)

“It’s my health and my results, I should be able to get them as easily as possible,” says Hadley, IT manager who lives in Parsippany, N.J.

Giving patients direct access to their medical information may also help catch physician errors and omissions, say experts.

Walker says she has heard of patients in the OpenNotes project who have reviewed their doctor’s notes and realized that a test the physician called for hadn’t been ordered. Even more troubling, studies have indicated that as many as a quarter of abnormal test results don’t receive timely follow-up. If patients can look up their results online, that figure might decline.

On the other hand, increased patient access “has the potential to diffuse responsibility” for following up on test results if patients and their doctors both expect the other to check on the results, says Hardeep Singh, chief of the health policy and quality program at the Houston Veteran Affairs Health Services Research and Development Center of Excellence.

Many clinicians are troubled by the prospect that patients may get bad or confusing news without a physician or other health-care provider on hand to help put the information in context.

Patients who use the Gazelle app can’t get direct results on HIV, cancer or genetic diagnostic tests, says Cohen. There’s a 48-hour delay on releasing all other test results, to give physicians a chance to contact the patient and discuss the findings first.

Likewise, patients who participated in the OpenNotes project can’t access the visit notes until their physician has signed off on their release.

“No one wants to see their diagnosis of cancer on their own without a medical professional,” says Jonathan Darer, chief innovation officer for Geisinger Health System, which makes most patient information available online. “We try to manage that.”

At the same time, however, it’s important to ensure that patients get information promptly. “Not knowing is incredibly anxiety-provoking,” says Darer.

Please send comments or ideas for future topics for the Insuring Your Health column to questions@kaiserhealthnews.org.

– Provided by Kaiser Health News.

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New York, NY, United States (AHN) – Swiss drugmaker Novartis says it will cut nearly 2,000 jobs in the United States in anticipation of loss of revenue as its patent protection expires on its blockbuster drug Diovan.

Diovan is a blood pressure medication. It is the company’s top products and brought in more than $6 billion in revenue in 2010, the most recent year for sales data.

However, Novartis (NVS) will lose its patent protection on Diovan in September. That will open the market for cheaper generic production of the drug by competing drug makers, which will cause the price of the drug to drop.

Although Novartis has many other popular drugs that bring in billions, including cancer drugs Femara, Gleevec, Glivec and Zometa and vision drug Lucentis, none of them alone brings in the kind of revenue that Diovan does.

Novartis said the jobs cuts would take place in the second quarter of the year. It will cut 330 jobs at its U.S. headquarters in East Hanover, NJ. as well as reduce its “field force” by 1,630 positions, primarily sales reps. The company employs about 121,000 workers worldwide, including 30,000 in the U.S.

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Albany, NY, United States (ProPublica) – by Joaquin Sapien

New York’s emerging plan to regulate natural gas drilling in the gas-rich Marcellus Shale needs to go further to safeguard drinking water, environmentally sensitive areas and gas industry workers, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has informed state officials.

The EPA’s comments, in a series of letters this week to the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation, are significant because they suggest the agency will be watching closely as states in the Northeast and Midwest embrace new drilling technologies to tap vast reserves of shale gas.

New York is in the forefront of the shale gas boom and has been working on regulations for more than three years. Judith Enck, the EPA regional administrator who issued the agency comments, noted that New York “will help set the pace for improved safeguards across the country.”

The EPA’s comments are among 20,000 the state has received on its proposed plan to regulate the environmental effects of drilling. Many of the EPA’s comments focus on how the state DEC will handle the chemically tainted wastewater from the drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

To free the gas trapped in the Marcellus and other shale formations, drillers pump millions of gallons of water mixed with sand and chemicals deep underground under pressure. The wastewater can get into drinking water by being disposed of at sewage treatment plants, the EPA wrote.

As ProPublica first reported in 2009, these plants don’t typically have the equipment necessary to detect and treat the chemicals in drilling wastewater. Plant operators who accept drilling wastewater simply dilute it with regular sewage and then discharge it into water bodies. DEC wastewater samples had levels of radioactive elements thousands of times higher than drinking water limits, ProPublica reported.

In its comments, the EPA pointed out that New York’s current permitting system for water treatment plants doesn’t include limits on pollutants frequently contained in drilling wastewater, such as radionuclides, which can cause cancer at high levels.

The EPA said it needs to be more closely involved in analyzing and approving any treatment plant’s application to accept drilling wastewater. And while the DEC’s proposed rules suggest limits on radioactive elements such as radium, the EPA said it’s not clear who would be “responsible for addressing the potential health and safety issues” related to radiation exposure.

The EPA also flagged health risks to workers close to wastewater and other potentially radioactive materials, like the large amounts of soil and mud unearthed by drilling. “At a minimum, the human health risks to the site workers from radon and its decay products should be assessed along with the associated treatment technologies such as aeration systems or holding for decay,” the agency wrote.

The EPA raised concerns about the sheer amount of wastewater. To deal with the excess water, the DEC listed a number of out-of-state treatment plants as potential recipients, but the EPA warned that several of the plants probably don’t have the capacity to handle more wastewater.

ProPublica reported that neighboring Pennsylvania became overwhelmed by drilling wastewater after the state embraced the industry. The Monongahela River, which provides drinking water to 350,000 people, became contaminated with drilling salts and minerals.

The EPA letters are the latest in a series of federal moves to tighten oversight of gas drilling. In December, the agency scientifically linked underground water pollution to hydraulic fracturing for the first time. Last August, the EPA announced that it would develop its own rules on wastewater disposal instead of leaving it up to states.

Industry and green groups have split over the DEC’s proposed regulations, with drillers saying they are too restrictive and environmentalists contending they don’t go far enough. Meantime, the EPA has launched a comprehensive review of the environmental impacts of hydrofracking.

In August, DEC Commissioner Joe Martens told ProPublica that he didn’t think there would be much to learn from the EPA study and that the state was far ahead of the federal agency in its response to drilling.

– Provided by ProPublica.org

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Cobb County, GA, United States (AHN) – The “Help Wanted” sign is out at Home Depot.

The home improvement giant announced Thursday that it is recruiting some 70,000 seasonal workers at stores across the United States.

Spring and summer are particularly busy for Home Depot as homeowners rush in to buy plants, patio furniture, barbeque grills, and step up sprucing up their homes.

While the number of temporary openings this year is the same as last, Home Depot will start the hiring process a month earlier, in February.

Plans for permanent hiring, based on sales growth, have not been decided yet.

Shares of Home Depot closed Thursday at $43.99, just shy of its 52-week high of $43.66 a share.

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Stockholm, Sweden (AHN) – Pregnant women taking antidepressants risk giving birth to children with high blood pressure, according to a new study.

Specifically, the children are at risk for a condition called persistent pulmonary hypertension, or blood pressure in the lungs. The condition leads to shortness of breath and difficulty breathing. It is rare, but is linked with heart failure.

Researchers with the Center of Pharmacology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, reviewed 1.6 million births between 1996 and 2007. The babies were assessed after 231 days.

The researchers said the chances of having a baby with pulmonary persistent hypertension was around three out of 1,000. But the risk almost doubles if antidepressants were taken late in pregnancy.

Although the risk is rare, the researchers urged caution about prescribing the drugs to pregnant women.

A full report on the study is published in the British Medical Journal.

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Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – The U.S. Department of Agriculture plans to close 259 offices nationwide as part of a program to cut costs and improve service.

In a statement that coincided with the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual meeting, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced changes to his agency worth about $150 million in savings every year.

The measures, which had been expected, will reduce the agency’s workforce by more than 7,000 employees. Apart from the domestic closures, seven international offices will be shuttered.

The restructuring follows a department-wide review of operations that recommended consolidating 700 cell phone contracts into about 10.

Since 2010, Congress has cut the USDA’s discretionary spending by $3 billion, or 12 percent.

“The USDA, like families and businesses across the country, cannot continue to operate like we did 50 years ago,” Vilsack said. “We must innovate, modernize, and be better stewards of the taxpayers’ dollars.”

Agriculture is the second most productive sector of the U.S. economy, providing one in 12 jobs nationwide and leaving a $42 billion farm trade surplus after producing $137.4 billion worth of exports.

The closures involve offices and laboratories that are either not staffed or are staffed by no more than two employees. Other facilities are located within 20 miles of other offices.

Among those affected are 131 Farm Service Agency offices. In addition, 15 Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service offices in 11 states, and five offices of the agency abroad will be shuttered. The APHIS will be left with about 560 domestic offices and 55 abroad.

Vilsack assured that the quality of service will not be sacrificed with the changes, citing available technology. “American agriculture is currently experiencing its most productive period in history thanks to the resiliency, resourcefulness and efficiency of our farmers,” he said. “As we move forward, USDA will continue to find ways to modernize its services.”

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