Mattress storein St. George, SC

WEDNESDAY, March 15, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- Don’t rely on TikTok for accurate health information about mpox, the virus once known as monkeypox, a new study says.

An international group of researchers who watched and analyzed videos about mpox on the social media site found them to be often inaccurate, incomplete and of poor quality. Study findings were published May 14 in BMJ Global Health.

A global outbreak of mpox made headlines last year. It's usually spread by close contact and involves fever, swollen lymph glands and painful skin pustules all over the body that last several weeks.

“Overall, the material on the recent mpox outbreak shared through TikTok videos was frequently unreliable and incomplete, hindering public health efforts to share accurate information on mpox,” the authors said in a journal news release. They include Dr. Ao Shi from St. George’s University of London.

Researchers determined overall quality was higher when the videos were made by doctors and science communicators rather than institutional users, nurses and the general public.

Still, the overall average score for the videos was 39.56 out of 80 using DISCERN, a tool used to help consumers gauge the reliability of health information; and 1.93 out of 4 using criteria from the Journal of the American Medical Association. No video met all the JAMA criteria.

“Our quality-of-information results emphasize the need for developing instructions on health information videos on social media and for encouraging more content from health professionals,” the authors said.

Researchers uploaded relevant videos between Jan. 1 and Aug. 11, 2022, using 12 hashtags. While the initial search turned up 2,462 videos, 85 remained after they weeded out those that didn't contain educational content, weren’t original or in English.

Researchers evaluated the videos for content on features and treatment of mpox.

More than 1 billion people used TikTok in 2022, often to access and share public health information, the authors noted.

For the study, videos were grouped into four categories, by author: doctors and science communicators, with 43.5% of videos; institutions, with 8%; nurses and other health care workers, with 13%; and the general public, with 35%.

Video length averaged 78 seconds. They received an average 11,015 likes, 211 comments and 693 shares.

More than 8 in 10 videos addressed mpox risk factors, but included only about one-third of the items highlighted in clinical practice guidelines.

Engagement was affected by whether the videos included people and had information on the quality of treatment choices.

Study limitations are that the time frame was short and that the tools used to evaluate videos were designed for websites, not social media.

Researchers said their findings highlight the potential risks of using social media for health information during public health emergencies.

“Our study highlights the risks of referring to TikTok or social media as a health information source. …Poor quality videos with biased content may lead to confusion and impair successful informed decision making. This exacerbates the ‘infodemic’ on social media, deterring efforts to prevent and manage disease outbreaks, notably the mpox outbreak,” the authors said.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on mpox.

SOURCE: BMJ, news release, March 14, 2023

The Florida Times-Union

Arguably the crown jewel of Florida’s First Coast, St. Augustine and superlatives are often mentioned in the same sentence.

Already this year, the oldest city in America has been featured on a nationally televised travel show and its beaches have been named among the best in the United States.

And this week, St. Augustine earned a new accolade: The South’s Best Small Town 2023 by Southern Living as part of its annual The South's Best feature.

“With its Spanish colonial heritage, melting-pot population, and wealth of Gilded Age relics, there’s truly no other town cut from the same cloth (or, perhaps, patchwork) as St. Augustine, Florida,” travel writer Valerie Rains wrote in Southern Living.

More honors:St. Augustine Beach named among Top 25 in United States in new ranking

In case you missed it:St. Augustine gets spotlight on PBS travel show 'Samantha Brown's Places to Love'

During her four-day stay in the city, Rains gushes over the city's restaurants and bars, including Boat Drinks, The Floridian, Casa Reina, Collage, River & Fort, Llama, St. Augustine Distillery and more after exploring St. George Street and downtown, the waterfront and waterways, Anastasia State Park and the city’s connection to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement.

St. Augustine's St. George Inn is featured on one of the covers of the magazine's special double issue.

The city bested other small towns of the South, including Gatlinburg, Tenn.; Tybee Island, Ga.; and Sanibel, Fla.

"In a year when more people than ever are traveling and moving to the South, we wanted to put a spotlight on small towns in this year's South's Best Awards,” said Sid Evans, Editor in Chief of Southern Living, in a news release. “These are the hidden gems our readers picked for their character, charm, and unmistakable Southernness.”

Southern Living named Charleston, S.C., its pick for The South's Best City.

In late January, PBS’s “Samantha Brown’s Places to Love” featured an episode on St. Augustine. And just last week, Tripadvisor ranked St. Augustine Beach No. 13 on its list of Top 25 Beaches – United States.

A year ago, St. Augustine was named to Southern Living magazine’s The South’s Best Beach Towns, earning praise for its beaches, the Castillo de San Marcos and Lightner Museum.

Southern Living's South's Best Small Towns

Here are the Top 10 of the magazine's Top 50 list of best small towns of the South.

Many residents of East Palestine, Ohio, are suspicious of the environmental contractor Norfolk Southern has brought in to measure chemical exposures following last month’s massive train derailment, toxic spill, and chemical burn off. Over the last decade, the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health (CTEH) has become the go-to contractor for corporations looking to follow up on environmental disasters to which they’ve been connected. CTEH has done environmental testing after other derailments where toxic chemicals were released, like the 2012 derailment in Kentucky of a CSX train carrying butadiene (a human carcinogen), and other Norfolk Southern derailments in South Carolina and Georgia. CTEH also performed environmental monitoring for BP’s cleanup efforts after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon offshore well blowout.

The residents of East Palestine have reason to be suspicious. My experience working at government regulatory agencies in both the Clinton and Obama Administrations has led me to conclude that CTEH’s business model often entails providing clients with the ammunition to slow regulation or defeat court claims. I believe consulting firms like CTEH are tangled in irreparable conflicts of interest; if they produce results showing the clients’ products are harmful, it seems likely that their client base would quickly disappear.

When corporations are faced with indications that their products or activities may be causing environmental harm, it has become standard operating procedure to hire scientists not to determine the truth, but rather to manufacture doubt about the scientific evidence and then use that disinformation to try to slow public health protections and defeat lawsuits. That’s where consulting firms, CTEH among them, come in.

The two industries most closely identified with this strategy, of course, are tobacco and fossil fuels. In both cases, these industries have disingenuously demanded proof over precaution in matters of public good. For decades, cigarette manufacturers employed scientists to argue that the links between tobacco and lung cancer, or nicotine and addiction, were unproven. Similarly, fossil fuel producers bankrolled a small cohort of scientists to question the scientific consensus around the expected effects of the rise in the atmospheric accumulation of greenhouse gasses, while their own scientists were accurately predicting today’s climate crises. Debating the science is a tried-and-true way to avoid discussing the necessary policy solutions.

I saw this up-close in two stints running federal agencies. When I was running the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) under President Barack Obama, the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s trade association, opposed our efforts to issue a rule protecting more than 2 million workers from exposure to silica, which increases a worker’s risk of silicosis and lung cancer. The ACC hired mercenary scientists to question virtually all the science underpinning the proposed standard; their chief consultant even stood up in a public hearing and asserted that we had not proven the link between silica and silicosis.

That wasn’t the first time I saw those tactics. During the administration of President Bill Clinton, I served as the Department of Energy (DOE) Assistant Secretary for Environment, Health and Safety—among other things, that meant I was the chief safety officer for the nuclear weapons complex. There were scores of workers across the complex with chronic beryllium disease, a disabling and sometimes fatal lung disease caused by exposure to beryllium, a metal vital to the manufacture of nuclear weapons. When the DOE was moving toward issuing a standard to protect workers employed in the weapons complex from beryllium exposure, Materion (then called Brush Wellman) the nation’s primary manufacturer of the metal, opposed the rule. The firm hired product defense scientists to question the existing studies and called for more research rather than efforts to reduce exposure. I was able to reject this attempt to delay these arguments and we issued the more protective standard in 1999. Materion eventually came around, and jointly with the United Steelworkers (which represented many beryllium-exposed workers not covered by DOE’s rule) requested that OSHA issue a beryllium standard similar to the one the industry had opposed earlier, to cover the remainder of the nation’s beryllium-exposed workers.

Nevertheless, these efforts to stymie public health protections infuriated me. After I left the Obama Administration in 2017 and returned to the George Washington University School of Public Health, I wrote The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception, in which I document case after case of corporations embracing the disinformation playbook. Volkswagen, for example, bankrolled efforts to dispute studies that documented the deleterious impact of diesel pollution on human health—at the same time that it secretly installed “defeat devices” to fool auto emissions testing systems into underestimating its cars’ diesel engine exhaust. Fossil fuel producers use product defense consultants in their efforts to counter studies showing that gas stoves increase household air pollution and the risk of childhood asthma, and to assert that the evidence of the health effects of air pollutants like ozone is too uncertain to use in setting regulatory limits. Even the National Football League, following initial reports of concussion-related brain injury among its players, took the tobacco road. It appointed an “expert” committee stacked with members conflicted by financial ties to the teams, and did its best to discredit the accumulating evidence, enabling the league to delay addressing the problem for a decade.

CTEH has been the source of controversy before. Following their rebuilding efforts after hurricane Katrina, thousands of gulf coast residents sued Knauf, a German-owned firm that manufactures construction materials, claiming that hydrogen sulfide, off gassing from its Chinese-manufactured construction drywall, corroded their pipes and damaged their homes, sickening many of them. Knauf hired CTEH to measure the chemicals emitted from the drywall, and CTEH declared them “not a public health concern.” In response to a barrage of consumer complaints, however, the Consumer Products Safety Commission hired the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to conduct an independent study. CPSC reported that the samples of Knauf’s drywall emitted hydrogen sulfide at a rate 100 times greater than comparison samples. In this case, CTEH’s efforts for the manufacturer did not prove successful; the manufacturer ended up settling the litigation, paying out hundreds of millions of dollars.

I understand the dilemma facing corporate CEOs or their trade associations. They will never say they value profits before the health and safety of their employees or the public, or that they care little about our air or water or food. But decision-makers atop today’s corporate structures are responsible for delivering short-term financial returns to investors, and in the pursuit of these goals a certain dissonance creeps in: profits and growth above all else. Minimizing the costs of cleaning up environmental disasters, opposing costly regulations, and defending against litigation are all part of the corporate calculus.

CTEH is the railroad industry’s consultant of choice in these efforts. When the American Association of Railroads, the industry’s trade association, wanted to weaken the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s policy on classifying chemicals as cancer causing, their comments were written by CTEH and sent under CTEH letterhead.

I am not claiming that CTEH engineers are intentionally fudging numbers or sampling in ways that guarantee finding lower risk from exposure. There’s a famous quote from Upton Sinclair that says, “It is difficult to convince a man of something if his salary depends on him not believing it.” Psychologists label this phenomenon “motivated reasoning.” There is no question that being paid by a polluter changes a scientist’s motivations, and thus the way they reason and work—including how they measure exposure and interpret the results.

We all need the best science to protect our health and environment. The residents of East Palestine need to be confident in the exposure monitoring being done in their community. But why should anyone trust the result of a study done by a product defense consulting firm?

There is a solution. Corporations whose products or activities may be harming people should be required to fund the testing and research, and then get out of the way.

To accomplish this, we will need to develop new mechanisms for surveillance and research funding and administration. There are some models out there, like the Health Effects Institute, a research group originally established in 1980 by the EPA and the automobile industry to study the health effects of motor vehicle emissions, with each party contributing half the budget.

The bottom line is that scientific investigation into the potential harms of products and activities should be paid for by producers of those products and activities. But the research should be planned, conducted, analyzed, and interpreted by independent scientists, not ones with financial conflicts of interest. Only then can we have confidence in the results.

More Must-Reads From TIME

TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

by Pete Rosenbery

CARBONDALE, Ill. — Illinois Department of Public Health Director Dr. Sameer Vohra, a 2011 graduate of Southern Illinois University School of Law, will deliver the keynote at the law school’s commencement on May 12.

Commencement is set for 1 p.m. in Southern Illinois University Carbondale’s Shryock Auditorium.

Graduating first in his class, Vohra earned his joint J.D./M.D. from the SIU School of Law and SIU School of Medicine in 2011. A general pediatrician who also holds a degree in public policy, Vohra was the founding chair of the SIU School of Medicine’s Department of Population Science and Policy and an associate professor of pediatrics, public health, medical humanities and law, a practicing primary care pediatrician and interim chair of the state’s Children’s Mental Health Partnership when Gov. J.B. Pritzker appointed him director of the state’s public health agency, effective Aug. 1, 2022.

“I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Vohra when he chaired the department of Population Science and Policy at the School of Medicine,” SIU School of Law Dean Camille Davidson said. “He is a transformational leader who is dedicated to rural and underserved populations. He embodies the service mission of the SIU School of Law and SIU School of Medicine.”

‘Monumental’ experience

Vohra, who was from Westmont, Illinois, earned his undergraduate degrees in political science and science in human culture from Northwestern University, when he enrolled in SIU’s six-year joint-degree program. Returning to SIU is special, said Vohra, who noted he had lived his entire life in the Chicago area before coming to Carbondale.

“My time at the law school was monumental in providing me an understanding of the state of Illinois and opening my eyes to the state’s diversity and the challenges that are faced in many of the rural and smalltown communities of the state,” he said.

While the experience was a “real culture shock,” Vohra said, he ended up meeting “some of my very best friends to this day.”

“These were people who saw the world differently than I did, and yet I was able to forge deep personal connections that improved my knowledge and understanding of the world to this day,” Vohra said. “I also found incredible mentors at SIU Law, including faculty members like Gene Basanta, Sheila Simon and Tom Britton. These were people who instilled in me a belief that I could accomplish anything I set my heart to. It provided me an incredible boost of confidence that continues to power me throughout my career.”

A ‘call to action’

Vohra said he hopes to discuss a few broad topics with the law school graduates, starting with his personal story and law school experience, and describe how impactful it was in his life and career. He also would like to share how the lessons the graduates learned over the last three years and the friendships they have made “will be vital to their future success, both personally and professionally.”

“And finally, I plan to place before them a call to action in this critical time in our state and country’s history in which their impact and their service will be essential in shaping and improving the lives of the people that they interact with in their legal careers,” he said.

Became IDPH director at a challenging time

Vohra became director during a time of continued challenges for public health in Illinois. The COVID pandemic was still present but evolving, mpox infections were starting to climb, and Vohra noted, his first day on the job included Pritzker’s disaster declaration for mpox (previously known as monkeypox). In addition, the agency was also tasked with the challenge of meeting the health care needs of asylum seekers being bused to Chicago, he said.

“I was very fortunate to enter an agency that was staffed by a talented and dedicated team of public servants who helped us rise to all those challenges: to continue to address COVID-19, to limit the spread of mpox and to provide health care to the asylum seekers,” Vohra said. “Those early challenges allowed me to better understand the agency, the needs of our partners throughout the public health system and the community leaders we work with. All of these early experiences have put me in position now — as we are hitting our stride in 2023 — to make sure we have learned the right lessons from COVID-19 and that we make the right decisions and the right investments to build the public health system we need in Illinois, one that serves all of the state in its great diversity, the urban and suburban areas, as well as rural and smalltown Illinois.”

Numerous honors

Vohra also earned a Master of Arts degree in public policy from the University of Chicago. He earned a Fulbright Scholarship in 2009, an American Medical Association Foundation’s Excellence in Medicine Leadership Award in 2014 and was named an Edgar Fellow in 2016 as one of 40 emerging political and policy leaders in Illinois. In 2020, he was named a Presidential Leadership Scholar, chosen by the George W. Bush Presidential Center, the Clinton Presidential Center, the George and Barbara Bush Foundation and the LBJ Foundation.

Small town hospitality and historic charm are hallmarks of St. George the county seat of Dorchester County. Originally known as George’s Station along the South Carolina Railroad, the Town of St. George was incorporated in January 1875.

Before the construction of Interstates 26 and 95, St. George was a popular stop for tourists traveling to Florida by way of U.S. Highway 15. Today, the Town of St. George is easily accessible from the interstate.

Dive deep into the town’s local history at The Heritage Museum, located in the former County Courthouse at 101 Ridge St. A nonprofit formed in 2014, the Dorchester County Archives & History Center is dedicated to preserving the past for future generations. The organization is working to digitize more than 100,000 documents for researchers. Plus, a detailed photo collection of the Lowcountry donated by Brandon Coffey is available to view at the museum. Visit Tuesday through Saturday; tickets are $5 each for adults.

Appleby’s Methodist Church is a one-story wooden Methodist church built between 1840 and 1850. Visit today to see how the church looked in the mid-1800s – an example of Greek Revival meeting house style – with two rows of pews thought to be the originals. The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on Feb. 14, 1978.

Indian Field Camp Ground is a rustic and simple Methodist campground still in use today. It was built in 1848 with 99 wooden cabins that form a circle around a large wooden tabernacle and preaching area. The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on March 30, 1973.

Another of the area’s Methodist camps is Shady Grove, a place of worship created by former slaves in 1870. The campground consisted of rustic cabins – known as "tents – that have been passed down from generation to generation. Fire destroyed the original tents in the late 1950s. Even though they were replaced, many of those tents burned in two more fires. Much of the camp was rebuilt in the early 1990s. Families continue to gather each October for camp meeting of fellowship and worship.

There are also two additional Methodist campgrounds in the surrounding area, St. Paul and Cypress, making this part of the county a time capsule for long-standing religious traditions.

Don’t miss the historic Koger-Murray-Carroll-House, so named in honor of its past owners. Dating back to at least 1775, was once an important stagecoach stop between inland settlements and Charleston. The exact construction date remains unknown, but it's thought to be the oldest house in Dorchester County.

Located in the heart of St. George is the Klauber Building. Built in 1894, it was first a mercantile serving a community bustling with railroad commerce. Today, the building houses an area chamber of commerce, visitor center and town museum. It’s open each weekday.

The Klauber also hosts the weekly St. George Farmers Market. Stop by from 3-6 p.m. each Thursday through Oct. 27 for local farm fresh produce, foods, art, culture and music.

Also situated in the center of St. George at 206 Parler Avenue is the Lourie Theatre, built in the 1920s to show silent movies. In the early 1980s, the theatre closed, and the building began to deteriorate. Several years later, a group of dedicated community members banded together to restore the theatre – now a vibrant performing arts center for the town.

Constructed in 1925, the Rosenwald School was a six-teacher school created by educator Booker T. Washington and the philanthropic president of Sears & Roebuck, Julius Rosenwald. The two men began a program to construction schools for African-American children. They completed 5,400 schools in states around the South. Thousands of children attended these schools between 1912 and the late 1950s when schools became integrated. In 2014, the school, located at 205 Ann Street, was given in trust to the Town of St. George and work began on the restoration and preservation of the building.

Before you start your journey exploring St. George stop by the Klauber Building at 225 Parler Avenue for tips and directions.

You’ll see many beautiful vintage homes driving around St. George, including the 1912 Badham House, pictured here.