State-level hospital infection rate comparison available

Not every state requires hospitals to report their rate of infections, but of those that do, I would choose to live in Washington State or Vermont, and not Maryland! Check the CDC report: First State-Specific Healthcare-Associated Infections Report (scroll down to page 10).

Make your own federal budget choices with this new on-line tool.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a group of gurus who fret about our future (don't we all these days?) has just published a great little tool/game you can use to look at how various spending and tax changes would affect our ability to reach a "sustainable" budget by the year 2020. Try the Budget Simulator.
My favorite among the choices is to increase the gas tax by 10 cents, but I would do a lot more than that! I would vary the gas tax inversely with the oil price to maintain an at-the-pump price of $3.50 (regular), rising gradually to $4.00 per gallon over the next 5 years. That would send the signal that the market needs for manufacturers to invest in energy-saving car models, and for consumers to favor conservation. A double win! Our dependence on foreign fuel would gradually stabilize itself, and some tax revenue would help with the deficit. (We could give some of it back to the working poor by exempting the first $10K of income from social security tax.) My wise environmental activist lawyer friend Ben says this approach would be dead on arrival in the Congress. I'm going to start my own oil-can party, or maybe I'll call it the "Can Oil"Party.

The best time to take vitamin D each day is...

with your largest meal. Read about it here, from Cleveland Clinic.

Congressional salaries, perks and earmarks available on-line

Legistorm has all sorts of information on the financial affairs of Congress members and their staffs. You can check out your own Congress person's gifts, travel, salary, and earmarks. This will just make you angrier, regardless of party, so I've filed this under the label "Citizen Portals" (see left), and you can always come back to it when you're feeling in need of a righteous citizen fix.

Vitamin D supplements and breast cancer risk

Here is information on a new study in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that suggests (but does not prove) that vitamin d supplements may protect against breast cancer. Click here for news release.