President Barack Obama made a superb choice in selecting Dr. Thomas Frieden as the new director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the highly respected but demoralized public health agency. Dr. Frieden led the city’s Health Department for seven memorable years under Mayor Michael Bloomberg—and if he can do for the C.D.C. what Read More
New York Post: Let’s start at the top, shall we? Umm. A guy with a jetpack seems to have propelled himself out of a diving plane and survived its crash. The picture looks a bit like a scene from a G.I. Joe cartoon show: Drat, Destro got away again! “Great escape” reads the copy, in Read More
In continuing testimony at the City Council's budget hearing on H.H.S., Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden is defending his agency’s decision to save money by closing dental clinics for children, but not, for example, reducing funds for the anti-smoking campaign, which he said costs $5 million annually.
“Compared with all of the Read More
Location: The Feb. 23 video of rats overrunning a health-inspector-approved KFC/Taco Bell in Greenwich Village triggered a city Health Department crackdown, resulting in three times as many daily restaurant closures as usual.
Hunt: It’s actually four times as many.
O.K., four times. Isn’t it about time the city put some teeth into the inspection process? Read More
Ever since City Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden publicly <a href="“>criticized a Jewish circumcision practice for spreading potentially fatal cases of Herpes to infants, he has not been the ultra-orthodox community’s favorite public official.
Today, the Yiddish news service Kol Mevaser is worried that Eliot Spitzer is close to selecting the City’s Health Commissioner Read More
The Post runs with Hillary’s “Stay Tuned” comment about a woman’s chances at becoming President.
The News reports that the political arm of the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council is set to endorse Yassky in the 11th.
Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno gets testy with John Faso after the candidate Read More
After a hiatus, we once again wade into the very uncomfortable waters of metzitah b’feh, the controversial circumcision ritual in which the practitioner, or mohel, sucks the blood from the circumcision to clean the wound. The practice has resulted in the death of at least one child from herpes.
As apocalyptic horror fantasies go, the threat of an avian-flu pandemic remains blessedly hypothetical. Before it can wreak Hitchcockian havoc on a city like New York, it must jump through a tangle of if/then hoops, including (but hardly limited to) morphing into a virus that can hop from human to human and making landfall in Read More
Ack! Ack! Ack! This is that time of year when the fall trends are being machine-gunned relentlessly into our psyches. Can there be a person alive on the planet who does not know that BLACK IS BACK, and that owning a pair of flat goblin boots is about to become as vital as a pancreas? Read More
Not long after he compared tobacco executives unfavorably to tuberculosis bacilli, Dr. Thomas Frieden got a letter from a senior vice president at Philip Morris U.S.A.
“To have the New York City Health Commissioner describe any group of human beings as a ‘low-life form’ is especially inappropriate,” the executive wrote. “Such statements have been used Read More
