healthandsociety.com

From the Atlantic

As Americans gather around holiday tables this year, many of us will be setting places for vegetarians and vegans. In some families, diverse diets co-exist peacefully. In others, well … maybe there’s a health-obsessed uncle who relishes warning that “Meat will kill you!” Or an idealistic college student, eager to regale her complacent elders with grim details of the cruelty and environmental damage wrought by factory farms. Or omnivores who resent the suggestion that they should worry — or feel guilty — about eating meat.

The three of us can relate to both sides of such discussions. Though reared by omnivorous families, as young adults we each came to the conclusion that meat was to blame for health problems, environmental destruction, and cruelty to animals. Collectively, we have lived 52 years vegan or vegetarian. Yet we no longer think that vegetarianism is the answer to these ills. Now — as a rancher, a hunter, and a butcher — we firmly believe foods from animals can be healthful, environmentally appropriate, and ethical.

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Nurse educator Marianne Swanson, who teaches patients how to use medications, is HIV-positive. Image by Robert Johnson

By Elizabeth Landau from Cnn Health

Marianne Swanson closes her eyes, with smoky gray circles beneath her long lashes, as she counts the number of pills she takes every day for HIV: “One, two, three, four” in the morning, and three more at night.

They’re drugs she’ll need to take for life because of a virus that her late husband gave her in the 1980s, at a time when scientists were just beginning to understand AIDS. The disease claimed her husband’s life, as well as two of her children.

Today, as a nurse educator at Grady Health System’s Ponce De Leon Center in Atlanta, Swanson tells patients about her personal struggle with AIDS only if she thinks it will help them.

“It’s not about me, it’s about them,” said Swanson, 55, “and helping them to be successful so that they can dream and reach the goals they would set for themselves.”

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Image by Bryce Harper for The New York Times

By Anahad O’Connor from The New York Times

It’s well known that post-traumatic stress is one of the major problems facing many veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But now researchers are finding that a large number of military dogs may be grappling with the condition as well.

By some estimates, more than 5 percent of the roughly 650 military dogs deployed by American combat forces are coming down with what researchers call canine PTSD, reports James Dao in The New York Times.

Though veterinarians have long diagnosed behavioral problems in animals, the concept of canine PTSD is only about 18 months old, having come into vogue among military veterinarians who have been seeing patterns of troubling behavior among dogs exposed to explosions, gunfire and other combat-related violence in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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