I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
Local officials and federal representatives are lobbying the National Institutes of Health to renew the contract for its Perinatology Research Branch (PRB) which is housed at Detroit’s Hutzel Women’s Hospital and is affiliated with Wayne State University, the Detroit Free Press reports.
The PRB is one of few federal projects that specialize in prenatal health and hospital administrators insist that it makes sense to keep the project in Detroit where 15 percent of babies are born prematurely.
The PRB has been at Hutzel since 2002 and has brought in $125 million in federal research dollars, the Free Press reports, and administrators are concerned that as the 10 year contract with NIH nears its end other medical schools and hospitals may seek to take over the project.
“I’d be naïve to think that other schools aren’t picking up the phone to Washington and saying ‘Hey, why don’t you come on over here?’” WSU Medical School Dean Dr. Valerie Parisi said recently.
Calling the PRB a “transformational force” in obstetrical care in Detroit, U.S. Sens. Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin, and U.S. Reps. John Conyers and Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, both Detroit Democrats, have sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins.
Local leaders need to be out in front of any competition, Stabenow said earlier this month: “I don’t know of others who are pushing for it, but that can always happen.”
A recent study by Data Driven Detroit found that more than 40 percent of Detroit mothers did not receive any prenatal care in 2007. It also indicated that primary care physicians and specialists in gynecology and obstetrics are leaving the city so there are fewer doctors to serve a largely uninsured population with a growing number of teen mothers.
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