Welcome to Let Kids Be Kids, Inc., advocacy blog "We All Deserve Better."
Our goal is to post relevant information that will spark action,discussion and interaction, creating a catalyst for solutions and ideas to impact the challenges we face in our society. We welcome comments, suggestions and submissions in support of those seeking a voice. "...Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear..."
"Food insecurity is linked to a 28% higher risk of death among cancer survivors, according to a new study published inJAMA Health Forum. The research also showed that individuals who do not receive food assistance had even greater mortality risks, highlighting nutrition as a critical factor in survivorship outcomes.
The research evaluated 5,603 cancer survivors, of which, 10.3% reported having experienced food insecurity, which was linked to a 28% higher risk of all-cause mortality. This association was strongest among individuals not receiving food assistance. Notably, food insecurity did not significantly impact mortality for lower-income individuals or those enrolled in food assistance programs, suggesting these support systems may offer benefits.
Dr. John Lin, first study author, sat down for an interview with CURE to discuss his research further, in which he emphasized that, "Food security — meaning reliable access to nutritious food — is critical for cancer survivors because the body needs fuel to recover from cancer and cancer treatment."
In the interview, Lin underscores the urgent need to integrate food security screening and support into cancer care. Lin is a research fellow in the Division of Hematology and Oncology at the University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine, where he studies value of novel and high-cost oncology therapies and evaluates the impact of payment policies on patients who have cancer.
CURE: Many people may not connect food access with cancer outcomes. Can you help explain why nutrition and food security are so important for cancer survivors, even after treatment ends?
Lin: Food security — meaning reliable access to nutritious food — is critical for cancer survivors because the body needs fuel to recover from cancer and cancer treatment. Having sufficient nutrition is important for immune function, energy levels, and healing, but cancer survivors who are food insecure may struggle to consume the nutrient-rich foods that support healing.
Your study showed that cancer survivors experiencing food insecurity had a significantly higher risk of death. What might be some of the reasons behind this connection?
Cancer survivors include anyone living with a cancer diagnosis, including people undergoing active treatment. Poor nutrition can worsen the body’s ability to heal and increasing vulnerability to other illnesses. Additionally, individuals who are food insecure may delay or forgo follow-up care, medication, or screening because of competing financial demands.
For patients who may be struggling to afford nutritious food, what signs should they look out for, and how can they talk to their care team about getting help?
We should be worried when people start skipping meals, losing weight unintentionally, feeling fatigued, or become anxious about running out of food. These are all incredibly important concerns to bring up. I encourage patients to be open with their care team — they can start by saying something like “I’m not eating as well as I’d like to because of how much my groceries cost.” Many cancer treatment teams have social workers, nutritionists, and case managers who can help connect patients to food assistance programs or food pantries.
What kinds of programs or support systems would you like to see become more common in cancer care?
I would love to see more screening for food insecurity as a routine part of cancer care and clinical care more broadly. We know there are millions of Americans who are food insecure and could qualify for a food assistance program but don't know it. There was also a major clinical trial at Memorial Sloan Kettering that found that providing access to food vouchers and pantries helped food insecure patients complete their treatment. Embedding food pantries in oncology clinics and forming partnerships between cancer centers and food banks can help meet patients where they are.
What steps can survivors, caregivers, or even community members take to advocate for better access to food assistance for people facing cancer?
Survivors and caregivers can start by sharing their stories. Lived experience is so powerful. There are so many advocacy organizations that push to address food insecurity in healthcare settings. On a more systemic level, we can all support local food banks, write to lawmakers about funding for food assistance programs, and help build awareness that nutrition is not optional in cancer care."
"Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, who earned scientific stature and global celebrity by chronicling the distinctive behavior of wild chimpanzees in East Africa — primates that made and used tools, ate meat, held rain dances and engaged in organized warfare — died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was 91.
Her death, while on a speaking tour, was confirmed by the Jane Goodall Institute, whose U.S. headquarters are in Washington, D.C. When not traveling widely, she lived in Bournemouth, on the south coast of England, in her childhood home.
Dr. Goodall with one of her research subjects at the Gombe reserve in the 1970s.Credit...
Dr. Goodall was 29 in the summer of 1963 when National Geographic magazine published her 7,500-word, 37-page account of the lives of primates she had observed in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in what is now Tanzania. The National Geographic Society had been financially supporting her field studies there.
The article, with photographs by Hugo van Lawick, a Dutch wildlife photographer whom she later married, also described Dr. Goodall’s struggles to overcome disease, predators and frustration as she tried to get close to the chimps, working from a primitive research station along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika.
On the scientific merits alone, her discoveries about how wild chimpanzees raised their young, established leadership, socialized and communicated broke new ground and attracted immense attention and respect among researchers. Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist and science historian, said her work with chimpanzees “represents one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.”
On learning of Dr. Goodall’s documented evidence that humans were not the only creatures capable of making and using tools, Louis Leakey, the paleoanthropologist and Dr. Goodall’s mentor, famously remarked, “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans.”
Long before focus groups, message discipline and communications plans became crucial tools in advancing high-profile careers and alerting the world to significant discoveries in and outside of science, Dr. Goodall understood the benefits of being the principal narrator and star of her own story of discovery.
In articles and books, her lucid prose carried vivid descriptions, some lighthearted, of the numerous perils she encountered in the African rainforest — malaria, leopards, crocodiles, spitting cobras and deadly giant centipedes, to name a few. Her writing gained its widest attention in three more long articles in National Geographic in the 1960s and ’70s and in three well-received books, “My Friends, the Wild Chimpanzees” (1967), “In the Shadow of Man” (1971) and “Through a Window” (1990).
Dr. Goodall’s willingness to challenge scientific convention and shape the details of her research into a riveting adventure narrative about two primary subjects — the chimps and herself — turned her into a household name, in no small part thanks to the power of television.
Dr. Goodall’s gentle, knowledgeable demeanor and telegenic presence — set against the beautiful yet dangerous Gombe preserve and its playful and unpredictable primates — proved irresistible to the broadcast networks. In December 1965, CBS News aired a documentary of her work in prime time, the first in a long string of nationally and internationally televised special reports about the chimpanzees of Gombe and the courageous woman steadfastly chronicling what she called their “rich emotional life.”
Dr. Goodall, Mr. van Lawick and their son, Hugo Eric Louis van Lawick, in the ABC special “Jane Goodall and the World of Animal Behavior: The Lions of the Serengeti.”Credit...ABC,
Most of Dr. Goodall’s observations focused on several generations of a troop of 30 to 40 chimpanzees, the species genetically closest to humans. She named some of them — Flo, Fifi, David Greybeard — and grew to know each of them personally. She was particularly interested in their courtship, mating rituals, births and parenting.
Dr. Goodall was the first scientist to explain to the world that chimpanzee mothers are capable of giving birth only once every four and a half to six years, and that only one or two babies were produced each year by the Gombe Stream troop. She found that first-time mothers generally hid their babies from the adult males, prompting frantic displays by the males — leaping and hooting that could last five minutes. An experienced mother, however, she discovered, freely allowed males and other females to view her infant, satisfying their curiosity, in a far calmer introduction.
In her many articles, books and documentaries, Dr. Goodall explored similar signal moments in her own life. In March 1964, after a nearly yearlong courtship, she married Mr. van Lawick. Three years later, she gave birth to Hugo Eric Louis van Lawick, her only child, whom she nicknamed Grub.
But even there she drew connections to her work in the field. She explained that her parenting philosophy and strategy were based on skills and values that she had learned from the chimpanzees, particularly the sure-handed matriarch of the troop, whom she named Flo. Nevertheless, she kept Grub in a protective cage while she was in the forest with him: She feared that he might be killed and eaten by the chimps.
Dr. Goodall’s ability to weave scientific observation with the story of her own life produced a powerful drama filled with characters of all ages, sexes and species. She once told a scientific meeting that her work would have had far less resonance scientifically or emotionally if she had just referred to the proud and confident chimp known as David Greybeard by a number, as was the usual practice.
In the 1970s, Dr. Goodall began to spend less time observing chimpanzees and far more time seeking to protect them and their disappearing habitat. She made known her opposition to capturing wild chimpanzees for display in zoos or for medical research. And she traveled the world, drawing large audiences with a message of hope and confidence that the world would recognize the importance of preserving its natural resources.
The 1970s were also a period of upheaval in her personal life. In 1974, she divorced Mr. van Lawick and soon afterward married Derek Bryceson, the director of national parks in Tanzania. He died of cancer in 1980, a time she later said was perhaps the most difficult of her life.
She established the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977. It evolved into one of the world’s largest nonprofit global research and conservation organizations, with offices in the United States and 24 other nations. Its Roots and Shoots program, launched in 1991, teaches young people about conservation in 75 countries.
In honor of her work, Tanzania in 1978 designated the Gombe Stream Reserve a national park. Dr. Goodall’s institute maintains a research station there that attracts students and scientists from around the world. In 2002, the United Nations named Dr. Goodall a Messenger of Peace, the U.N.’s highest honor for global citizenship.
Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall was born in London on April 4, 1934, and grew up in Bournemouth as the older of two girls of Margaret Myfanwe (Joseph) Goodall, who was known as Vanne, and Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall.
Her mother was an author and novelist who wrote under the name Vanne Morris-Goodall. Her father was an engineer who raced cars for a time. The couple divorced after World War II. Vanne Goodall accompanied her daughter to the Gombe reserve at the start of Dr. Goodall’s famous study in 1960 and was a leading character in much of her daughter’s writing.
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Dr. Goodall was a child when her father gave her a stuffed monkey doll that she named Jubilee. Credit...Jane Goodall Institute
As a little girl, Jane adored Tarzan’s Jane, Dr. Doolittle and a little stuffed monkey doll, a gift from her father that she named Jubilee. Indeed, in her public appearances, Dr. Goodall almost always described her scientific findings and her international renown as a fortunate convergence of her childhood love of animals and Africa with her inquisitive and adventurous nature.
In 1956, after finishing a course in secretarial school and taking several jobs in London, she received a letter from a friend whose family owned a farm near Nairobi, Kenya. The friend invited her to join her.
Dr. Goodall jumped at the opportunity. Booking passage on a freighter to Africa, she arrived in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, on her 23rd birthday. She was soon introduced to other expatriate Englishmen and women in Nairobi as well as to Dr. Leakey, at the time a prominent but not yet internationally renowned archaeologist.
Seven weeks after her arrival, she began work as Dr. Leakey’s secretary and assistant. Dr. Goodall accompanied him that summer to the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, a three-day trip over trackless wilderness, where he was in the early phases of excavating early human remains. He often talked about his interest in stationing a researcher on Lake Tanganyika to study a troop of wild chimpanzees that lived there.
“He was squatting beside the red earth mound of a termite nest, and as I watched I saw him carefully push a long grass stem down into a hole in the mound,” she wrote. “After a moment he withdrew it and picked something from the end of it with his mouth. It was obvious that he was actually using a grass stem as a tool.”
Recognizing the contributions she was making to science, the University of Cambridge accepted her into its doctoral program in 1961 without an undergraduate degree. She was awarded her doctorate in 1965.
Dr. Goodall wrote 32 books, 15 of them for children. In her last book, “The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times” (2021, with Douglas Abrams and Gail Hudson), she wrote of her optimism about the future of humankind.
It was a message she continued to spread in her frequent public speaking engagements around the world, traveling some 300 days a year into her last decades, according to her institute. When she died on Wednesday, she had been scheduled to speak to students in Pasadena, Calif., and to participate in a tree-planting ceremony in an area that had been ravaged by wildfires.
Her many awards include the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal, presented in 1995, and the Templeton Prize, given in 2021. In 2003, Queen Elizabeth II named her a dame of the British Empire. In January, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor, by President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
She is survived by her son; her sister, Judy Waters; and three grandchildren.
In July 2022, Mattel released a Jane Goodall doll as part of its Barbie-branded Inspiring Women series. The doll, with blond hair and dressed in a tan field shirt and shorts, is made of recycled plastic. It honored the 62nd anniversary of Dr. Goodall’s first visit to the Gombe reserve.
“Since young girls began reading about my early life and my career with the chimps, many, many, many of them have told me that they went into conservation or animal behavior because of me,” Ms. Goodall once said in a CBS News interview. “I sincerely hope that it will help to create more interest and fascination in the natural world.”
David Horsey is an American editorial cartoonist and commentator. His cartoons appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer from 1979 until December 2011 and in the Los Angeles Times since that time. His cartoons are syndicated to newspapers nationwide by Tribune Content Agency.
Why health insurance is about to become unaffordable
"I’m writing this quickly, because of travel: If all goes well, I’ll be somewhere over the Atlantic when this post goes up. But I thought I’d write something about what Democrats are demanding as their price for avoiding a federal government shutdown, why I think that’s the right issue, and why Republicans probably won’t agree.
Even though the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, has been in effect for more than a decade, I’m not sure how many people understand how it works. So let’s review the basics.
The ACA rests on two legs. It was supposed to be three, but Republicans sawed off one of them, the requirement that you buy insurance or face a penalty. But it has still done a lot of good. By the end of the Biden administration, the percentage of Americans without health insurance was lower than it has ever been:
Part of this improvement was due to an expansion of Medicaid — which will face savage cuts under the One Big Beautiful Bill, but not until after the midterms. However, the other main piece of the ACA, subsidized insurance plans offered on government-run exchanges, will take a body blow in a few months unless Republicans do something totally uncharacteristic — provide help to Americans who need it.
The way the ACA works is that insurance companies are prohibited from discriminating based on medical history — they have to offer the same plans, at the same prices, to healthy people and less healthy people. They can’t charge you more if you have a preexisting condition. The goal of that prohibition is to make sure that health care is available and affordable to those who need it most.
However, just prohibiting discrimination based on medical history works very badly unless backed by additional measures — states that have tried it know this from bitter experience. If everyone pays the same premiums, people who are currently healthy tend not to buy policies, so that insurers face a bad risk pool. This means high premiums, which leads to even more healthy people dropping out, which makes the risk pool even worse. So you end up with a “death spiral” in which very few people buy insurance unless they get it through their employer.
The ACA, however, coupled the prohibition on discrimination with subsidies that cap premiums at a certain percentage of your income (on a sliding scale that depends on how high your income is.) These subsidies make it possible for lower-income Americans to afford insurance. They also, crucially, encourage healthy people to stay in the market, holding overall premiums down. As I said, there was also supposed to be a penalty for going uninsured. But even without that penalty, the system turns out to mostly work.
The original, 2010 version of the ACA was, however, underpowered. The subsidies were too small, and they cut off suddenly for people whose income rose above a relatively low threshold (400 percent of the poverty line.)
What the Biden administration did was to make the subsidies more generous and also end the cutoff. The invaluable Charles Gaba has a table showing the differences:
In this table, “% FPL” means income as a percentage of the federal poverty line. The two right columns show the caps on premiums net of subsidies under the original ACA and under the enhanced version introduced by Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
Now comes the key point: Biden had very limited political room for maneuver, since he only had 50 Senators and couldn’t afford to lose a single vote. So he was constrained by the most conservative Democrats — basically Joe Manchin — and while they were willing to expand the ACA subsidies, they did so only on a temporary basis, extending through 2025.
Now the enhanced subsidies are about to expire, and the financial hit to many Americans will be apocalyptic. Gaba estimates what will happen to the insurance premiums net of subsidy for different groups in different states. Here, for example, is what will happen in Ohio:
Many people will face huge increases in their insurance costs. And these increases will be magnified by the effects on the risk pool: some healthy people will be dropping out, raising premiums for those who remain.
In other words, millions of Americans will soon be screaming about unaffordable health care.
In a way, I’m surprised that Republicans didn’t decide to keep the enhanced, Biden subsidies in place for another year, just to delay the pain until after the midterms. But they didn’t, probably because they have such a strong aversion to helping Americans in need that they couldn’t even bring themselves to play cynical politics on the issue.
This aversion to doing anything decent is why the government will probably shut down Wednesday. For Republicans need Democratic votes to keep the government open, and Democrats have made retaining enhanced subsidies their price for cooperating.
What will happen then? I have no idea. But I think the Democrats made the right choice when they made health insurance premiums — rather than, say, tariffs — their key demand.
Why? Because doing so puts the onus for rising premiums squarely where it belongs — on Republicans. If Democrats weren’t putting this issue front and center, the usual suspects might be able to convince many voters that someone else — immigrants, Antifa, George Soros, whatever — was responsible for their soaring health costs. That will be much harder now.
Again, I have no idea how this will play out. But it looks to me as if Democrats have chosen good ground on which to make their stand.
