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.
While investigating the recent increases of syphilis cases in three Michigan counties, information surfaced that Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s executive budget includes a proposal to eliminate the state public health lab in Houghton.
That cut, the Michigan Department of Community Health has told stakeholders, will delay testing and reporting for numerous public health threats including sexually transmitted infections and rabies.
As Marcus Cheatham of the Ingham County Health Department noted in relation to communicable disease:
“Delay is the enemy in communicable diseases. If you can’t get to people right away, it is going to spread.”
In an interview late Wednesday, Guy St. Germain, health officer and administrator for the Western Upper Peninsula Health Department, took a more pragmatic view on the proposed closure.
“It is a valuable service to all of us in the UP in terms of timing and location. In a perfect world, we would prefer to keep the lab open. But unfortunately it is not a perfect world. We understand that there is going to be some pain spread around,” St. Germain said. “Some things are going to have to be hurt.”
He says he was not as worried about reporting delays as he was about additional costs involved in shipping samples down state.
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