Results tagged “nationalinstitute”

If they're good enough for Rush Limbaugh, they're apparently good enough for our City's school kids. The Post reports today that there are twice as many NYC eighth graders illegally using painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin than there were five years ago. This surge has lead authorities to a crackdown on pushers, nabbing five NY State doctors who were peddling the stuff to kiddies. Both drugs are opioid derivatives similar to morphine (Vicodin also contains acetaminophen, which is the active ingredient in Tylenol) and can be highly addictive.

Twenty-nine workers died in construction accidents in New York during the 12 months ending September 30, marking a 61% increase over the previous year and a 5-year high, according to OSHA and the NYC Dept. of Buildings. Over half of the victims fell to their death, while falling material was the second most fatal cause.

Thanks to this afternoon's passage of a cold front Fall has finally arrived. A week behind schedule but it is here. As the high pressure system behind the front moves in you might notice that it is a bit windy. The Weather Service has issued a special weather statement that says, in part, "persons walking through city streets in between tall buildings will be especially susceptible to high wind gusts." Hold on and stay away from scaffolding! Gusts near the ground will reach 45 m.p.h. Who wants to join Gothamist on the Empire State Building? Hmmm, do they let people up there when it is this windy?

Of course this makes us hungry for some bagels. If anyone is thinking of splurging to give a little New York to someone outside of the city, Gothamist loves the Zabar's NYC Essentials Gift Basket - it's $180 of bagels, lox, cream cheese, rugelach and more. Of course, you can create your own NYC Essentials gift basket for much less if you're just heading to someone's for brunch. Gothamist misses Columbia Bagels, but we'll happily head to H&H (mmm, yeasty good smells) when we're on the Upper West Side; we also covered Bagelsmith in Williamsburg. And the National Institute of Health has a particularly cruel "Proportion Distortion" interactive quiz on bagel sizes.

If your ears seem to bleed a little more while waiting at the Union Square subway stop, it's because that is the loudest subway platform in the system. The screeching of train brakes can reach as high as 98.6 decibels. According to the Post's article, exposure to noises louder than 90 decibels can cause permanent hearing damage [National Institute of Health]; average conversation registers is about 60 decibels and a noisy restaurant or heavy traffic is 85 decibels. Interesting, wonder what kind of restuarant is that noisy...the Restaurant?

Do you, like Gothamist, suffer from:

A study in Denmark says that if you have more 14 or more drinks a week, you raise your risk of rectal cancer. "But what a person drinks does have some influence on risk, the authors note, for people who included wine in their menu of alcoholic beverages had a lesser increase in risk than those who stuck mainly with beer and spirits." They also reason that heavy drinkers ought to lower their intake anyway. Gothamist is duly freaked out, as we don't consider ourselves heavy drinkers, but maybe we really are.

Rush and Molly report that the illness David Letterman has that's forcing him to take sick days is shingles. Tuesday night, one of his eyes was very swollen and he joked about it: "Dave woke this morning with one of those medical gifts – a swollen eye. Dave went to get it checked by “a guy.” The diagnosis: it’s either an irritation, an inflammation, or an infection. One can only wonder: Would Regis do a show with an irritated/inflamed/infected eye? Would Oprah? HA! Oprah wouldn’t do a show with a temperature of 98.5." Shingles is a skin inflammation - no fun - and is also one of those diseases that are mentioned passingly in high school science books but stay lodged in your memory because of the name, like scurvy, beriberi and botulism. Dave and his staff are probably looking at shingles information from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to figure out the best ways to joke about shingles.