Written by Sanjay Basu

Rita is only in her 30s, but she knows all about death. What she didn’t know until recently is how expensive it is, especially now in the Great Recession, for the poor to die.

Rita’s parents, her only relatives in the U.S., died in a car crash during her sophomore year in community college. Rita dropped out of school to earn a living as a shipping coordinator at a Bay Area package company. A few years later, she found herself coughing and coughing. She was always short of breath. Tests revealed that Rita had a rare and fatal disease of unknown origin–one that leads to the slow closure of the blood vessels feeding the lungs. She will suffocate to death before the age of 40.

“I know the end is coming,” she tells her doctor and nurses; after many meetings with her chaplain, she is, she says, “at peace.” At the medical clinic in San Francisco’s General Hospital, Rita tells anyone who will listen that she has two goals. She wants to continue living with her cat in her one bedroom apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco. And she hopes to continue receiving the few medications that mitigate her symptoms.

There are currently more than 1.2 million Americans like Rita who are facing a terminal illness. The health care providers who treat them routinely have to ask: How do you wish to die? Some of the dying–wanting to keep death at bay–repeatedly ask to participate in the latest pharmaceutical trials. Others have drawn up a “bucket list” of adventures for their final days. But more people have two simpler requests: to die at home instead of in a hospital, and to eat a decent last meal.

In this recession, even these simplest last wishes have become nearly impossible for many to fulfill.

Two years ago, Rita fainted on the job. Her boss had noticed her diminishing level of performance; he said that Rita was just too winded to work. Unemployed, she initially received disability coverage. But like the other eight million Americans unable to work because of illness, she was required to apply for a continuation of benefits after one year.

Rita’s problem–the clinic’s social worker explained–is that like most young people who are ill, Rita is dying too young to have paid significantly into Social Security. This meant Rita would receive “Supplemental Security Income” (SSI): $830 a month and California’s Medi-Cal insurance.

Initially, Rita thought she could stretch these funds. She would have to give away her cat and move into a studio apartment–something smaller and cheaper than the average studio in San Francisco. She would also buy food in bulk, saving at least $200 a month for her prescription co-payments.

But the politics of budget cuts stifled her plans. Over 65 percent of SSI claims have been denied during the recession, a record high number. A series of the governments reviewers of her case interrogated Rita, and one without any medical training misinterpreted her medical chart. Despite the fact that Rita had “pulmonary arterial hypertension”–severely increased pressure in her lungs–he wrote that Rita suffered from run-of-the-mill high blood pressure. Rita was denied.

The clinic’s social workers tried to intervene. They were told that Rita would now have to wait for an “appeals hearing” after 90 days–possibly longer that she had left to live. She would be without income for her last months of life.

Due to new state budget cuts, Rita’s Medi-Cal coverage was also limited to six medications. Her doctors had to decide which pills they could take away without suffocating her immediately–a deadly guessing game since there is not enough research to guide doctors in forecasting a regimen.

When clinic workers discussed the dilemma, Rita joked: “I should have been a banker instead of an ordinary taxpayer. Then I could have been bailed out.”

Rita lost her apartment. She slept for a few weeks on an ex-boyfriend’s couch, until he threw her out, suspecting her cough was from an infectious disease. She had signed up for welfare, at the usual rate of $422 per month plus food stamps. But without an address, the only way to get a roof over her head was the City’s “care not cash” program for the homeless–$59 a month, and a shelter bed.

Rita’s inhalers were stolen on her first night in the shelter. Her shoes were stolen on the second night. So she began to sleep in the parks, her symptoms worsening. Finally her doctors convinced her to check in to the hospital.

In the hospital, Rita was stoic. Her face had assumed the tough sheen of ceramic.

When a social worker asker her whether she would be willing to modify her plans, let the clinic find her a hospice bed, Rita said she had written it all down. She couldn’t discuss her thoughts with any more clarity. And besides, going over her problems would only make her cry. And crying made it difficult to breathe.

This post was originally published by New America Media.

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Bits of plastic contain potentially harmful ingredients which go into the bodies of animals and could be transferred to people who consume fish. Ingested microplastic can transfer and persist into their cells for months.

The scientists, led by Mark Anthony Browne, a biologist with University College in Dublin, looked for microplastic contamination along 18 coasts around the world and tracked down its likely source.

Much of the clothing people wear today is made with polyester, acrylic, rayon and various other synthetic textile materials. The scientists found that more than 1,900 fibers can rinse off of a single garment during a wash cycle, and these fibers look just like the microplastic debris they found on shorelines.

The authors suggest two possible solutions:

· Washing machine manufacturers should look at ways to reduce the release of fibers into wastewater.

· Research into methods for removing microplastic from sewage.

Another solution is to promote clothing made from natural fibers such as organic cotton, linen, wool, silk and hemp.

Watch AlJazeera report:

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Now the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is saying that those 714 animals found represent only a fraction of how many are actually perishing in what appears to be a massive die-off. Many of the dolphins sink, decompose or are eaten before they wash up to shore, notes Tim Wallat Discovery News. The NOAA has now declared the die-off an “Unusual Mortality Event,” according to the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972.

The frightening die-off does coincide with BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill and its aftermath. A recent study has found that exposure to oil leads to serious health problems for dolphins.

Could a Bacteria Be The Reason So Many Dolphins Dying?

But as Wall at Discovery News points out, the increase in dolphin deaths started happening two months before the April 20, 2010 explosion that led to a months-long oil spill. 112 dolphins were found to have died before the spill and the NOAA says that the Brucella bacteria could be the culprit.

The NOAA found Brucella in five stranded dolphins from Louisiana and its scientists have now been focusing on cases showing “pathological changes consistent with the fetal pneumonia or adult meningitis identified” in the original five cases. Infection with Brucella causes a disease, brucellosis, that, according to the NOAA, is “best known for its role in causing abortion in domestic livestock and undulant fever in people”; it can also cause infections im the brain, skin and bones. Scientists currently do not know how brucellosis is spread in dolphins. In domestic livestock, brucellosis spreads when animals consume the tissue and fluids left after delivery of a fetus and also via “inhalation, contact with a wound, and during nursing and breeding.”

However, dozens of the dolphins who have washed up show no sign of Brucella infection. NOAA scientists are continuing to investigate the possible role of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Unusual Mortality Event, to figure out what is behind the shockingly high numbers of dolphins perishing in the Gulf of Mexico.

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This year, Care2 decided to expand Earth Day into Earth Month, since there is so much to explore when it comes to the environment. Every day in April, we’ll have a post about some of the most important topics for the environment, exploring and explaining the basics. It’s a great tool to help you get started with helping the environment — or help explain it to others. See the whole series here.

What is Overfishing?

Overfishing can be simply defined as catching more fish than the environment is able to replace. Fish populations can replenish themselves if left alone to spawn and reproduce. However, even fish species that spawn in the millions are limited in how quickly they can grow their population over time.

Unrestrained population growth is exponential, but one of the characteristics of exponential growth is that it depends on the current population. If the population is significantly depleted, the replenishment of that population is also much slower. In contrast, careful management of fishing stocks involves taking no more fish than the remaining population can replace during the following season, keeping the population constant.

Why is it a Problem?

More than 100 million tons of fish are eaten worldwide every year, according to the United Nations, of which two and a half billion people depend on it for at least 20 percent of their protein intake. Maintaining fishing stocks is a question of global food security, but it’s especially important for the world’s poor, many of whom are heavily dependent on fish for their nutritional needs.

More than 70 percent of the world’s fisheries are fished at or over capacity. Every year that fishing stocks are overfished sees their population decline. This can eventually lead to collapse, effecting a loss of jobs and a decrease in food supply. A longer term effect is increased damage to the overall health of the world’s oceans, as biodiversity drops by another notch.

How it Works

Fishing stocks are an example of a renewable resource, like lumber. Theoretically, we have an unlimited supply of fish, since more can always be spawned to replace what we’ve taken. But we don’t have an unlimited supply every year. Just as is the case with deforestation, if the number of cod born are fewer than were taken in a given season, the overall population has to decrease.

And each subsequent season of overfishing does greater damage. Consider a population of cod with a ten percent growth rate. In an ideal situation, the number of cod will fluctuate, say from 100 to 110 (million). Fishermen will take the extra 10 each year, then stop. By the following season, the remaining 100 will grow their population again by another 10. But what if we instead take 20 cod per season?

Then we have 110 – 20 = 90 cod. With ten percent growth, in one season we can get back up to 99, and an additional season (if no fishing occurs) will get us almost back to 110. But if we keep doing this we get 79 at the end of the second season, the population will recover to about 87, then dropped down to 67.

Within five years, the cod population is down to half of what it was before. But not only is the population cut in half, the population growth is also cut in half. With only 50 million cod, we can only expect a replenishment of five million that season. Five years of doubling one’s catch will then require more than five years of no fishing at all before the population recovers. In the long term, overfishing means more work for less food on average, which is also available only sporadically.

Cod: The Story of a Lost Renewable

Those numbers were made up for the purpose of illustrating how overfishing works, and the math is a little bit simplified (for example, it’s a little more complicated than a straight exponential growth situation, since the growth rate is potentially a little higher when the population is low), but this is broadly how it works. It’s also no accident I chose cod as the hypothetical victim of overfishing.

Cod was one of the great gifts of the Atlantic for centuries, for a plethora of coastal and ocean-going civilizations. In his book, “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World”, Mark Kurlansky points out that the travels of the Vikings, from Norway to Iceland to Greenland to Canada’s Newfoundland, followed the effective range of Atlantic cod exactly. There seemed an unlimited supply of it. This nutritious, abundant fish was like manna from heaven.

But Canadian cod was declared functionally extinct in 1992. Two decades since the collapse of the Canadian cod industry, stocks still have not recovered. We managed to find the end of an endless supply.

What We Can Do

Do a little research on your seafood purchases and make sure the grocery stores and restaurants you frequent stock sustainably fished or farmed seafood products. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has a handy guide.

Tell your friends and family to do the same. If you’re a big seafood eater, you may also decrease your intake of fish to once or twice a week, to ease the pressure on the oceans.

And contact your government representatives about your concerns. This is a global issue and it doesn’t matter what country you’re in, every government needs to be on board.

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