Tell Women Something We Don't Know

This morning on NPR, former MPBN reporter Jennifer Ludden covered the bloody obvious--my favorite topic.

Women, since about the second I and much of the latter-day Baby Boom started working, continue to make 77 cents to men's dollar. The "news" is that women are much more likely to work jobs without attached health insurance, and that as husbands are laid off due to the Great Recession more and more families are left without health care.

The cognitive dissonance of our corporately controlled hillbilly culture begins to wear. Or maybe it's just frikking November.

Swine Flu Beats Vaccine to Maine, Schools Hold Fire

Whether Maine school employees are holding fire, in denial or simply coping as best they can has yet to be determined. In any case, today's news that swine flu numbers are increasing daily accompanied information that less than half the vaccine needed for high risk cases will arrive by early December.

According to the MPBN report, more vaccine will arrive in the first of the year, but the way I'm seeing kids suffering and staying home looks more like mid-winter and the virus is just now getting rolling. Despite my faith in influenza vaccines, I worry that depending on the vaccine alone may not be enough to protect our children. I hope state and federal health officials consider additional methods to mitigate the clearly wicked contagious virus.

It may be we in Maine should not complain. Southern states have been handling the epidemic for weeks with no hope of imminent vaccine.

[update: 16.October.09] Apparently the NYT figured it out too.