logo
Check your carbon monoxide alarm ASAP before the winter storm, experts warn

Check your carbon monoxide alarm ASAP before the winter storm, experts warn

Yahoo13-02-2025

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – Experts are warning to take precautions with gas-powered heaters and appliances during this frigid cold.
According to the , now is a great time to check your carbon monoxide detectors to make sure your batteries are working.
'Sometimes severe weather can send debris flying, it can block ventilation lines, it can block chimneys and people don't realize those things have happened and the carbon monoxide from your wood stove may back up into your home,' said Jennifer Eskridge, a community outreach educator with the center.
Winter Weather Timeline: Snow, ice on the way, start preparing now
Carbon monoxide is an odorless, colorless gas that — if inhaled — can cause severe illness or even death, according to the .
The CDC says common symptoms of CO poisoning are headache, dizziness, weakness, upset stomach, vomiting, chest pain, and confusion. However, those who are sleeping could die before showing symptoms.
'Each year, more than 400 Americans die from unintentional CO poisoning not linked to fires, more than 100,000 visit the emergency room, and more than 14,000 are hospitalized,' according to the CDC.
Frankie MacDonald, YouTube weather whiz, warns Portland of 'major winter storm'
In Oregon, the poison center manages roughly 200 cases of CO poisoning every year.
To avoid becoming a case, the center recommends the following:
Don't use a gas range or oven to heat a home.
Don't use grills or portable stoves inside a home, tent or camper.
Portable generators should be used 25 feet from a window, door or vent.
Basements and garages aren't safe places to run generators — even if doors and windows are open.
Think about ventilation for your wood stove as well.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

RFK Jr. Says Seed Oils Are Poison. Here's What a Dietitian Says
RFK Jr. Says Seed Oils Are Poison. Here's What a Dietitian Says

Yahoo

time33 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

RFK Jr. Says Seed Oils Are Poison. Here's What a Dietitian Says

Seed oils have come under fire, with Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., leading the charge, saying Americans are being "poisoned" by them While they can cause inflammation, Julia Zumpano, a registered dietitian with the Center for Human. Nutrition at the Cleveland Clinic says the bigger problem is that they're used in ultra-processed food The issue is less about the seed oils themselves and more about the foods they're inSeed oils — a type of processed oil found in packaged food and used for deep-frying — have come under fire, with the secretary of health and human services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posting on X that Americans are being 'unknowingly poisoned." Wellness influencers have joined in, decrying them as the 'hateful eight": specifically, canola, corn, cottonseed, soybean, sunflower, safflower, grapeseed, and rice bran oils. The real story is a bit more complicated. 'They're not poison, but we're poisoning ourselves with everything else that's ultra-processed and processed that may be cooked in seed oils," Julia Zumpano, registered dietitian with the Center for Human Nutrition at the Cleveland Clinic, tells PEOPLE. 'The bigger picture is the fact that we're eating way too much of seed oils, which happen to be found in highly processed foods," she explains. "That's where I see the problem.' On their own, seed oils are high in Omega-6 fat, which Zumpano says is linked to increased inflammation. But, as she explains, 'instead of deep frying chicken in beef tallow versus the seed oil, let's just focus on the fact that fried chicken is not really that good for us.' Beef tallow, which Kennedy has touted as a healthier option, does have some benefits, Zumpano tells PEOPLE. 'There's nutrients in it, fat-soluble vitamins that are essential.' But when you're using it to cook highly processed foods, she explains, 'we're just flip-flopping between two issues that aren't necessarily better.' As she explains, 'We're heavily focused on the seed oils and not necessarily focused on the fact that the foods that they're in are so processed: sauces and dressings and baked goods and potato chips and candy bars and granola bars and protein bars. Even coffee creamers are loaded with seed oils,' she says. They're in highly processed food because they're more cost-effective to make, Zumpano explains: 'It's cheaper and quicker and easier to process it with chemicals and solvents.' But if you're cooking at home, she says, with 'cold pressed or hi-oleic sunflower seed oil, or a canola oil and you're drizzling it, pan-frying some fish with it, there are no health concerns like inflammation. Fast Food is a part of American culture. But that doesn't mean it has to be unhealthy, and that we can't make better choices. Did you know that McDonald's used to use beef tallow to make their fries from 1940 until phasing it out in favor of seed oils in 1990? This switch was… — Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) October 21, 2024 'We should just focus on really eliminating highly, ultra-processed and processed foods and going back to basics. Again, if you're gonna use the beef tallow at home to cook your eggs, fine — or the canola oil. "You're using it in moderation, a small amount, just to get the job done versus deep frying a doughnut or deep frying french fries or deep frying whatever breaded food or processed fried food you're consuming.' Ultimately, 'It's not the oil itself. It's the food that's found in the oil that is more of the problem.' If someone were to ban seed oils out of their diet, 'that's great, because they're probably cutting out a bunch of junk food," she says. "But I don't think anyone needs to be very fearful if their grandma made muffins with canola oil. They're gonna be okay if they eat that.' Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. Read the original article on People

‘Unfathomable': Seth Rogen Torches Lawmakers Threatening Cuts to Medicaid
‘Unfathomable': Seth Rogen Torches Lawmakers Threatening Cuts to Medicaid

Yahoo

timean hour ago

  • Yahoo

‘Unfathomable': Seth Rogen Torches Lawmakers Threatening Cuts to Medicaid

Lauren Miller Rogen was 22 years old, celebrating her graduation from college the first time she noticed something was happening to her mother, Adele. It was relatively minor: 'She repeated herself — she told a story a few times about a friend of hers,' Rogen says. But for Lauren, who had watched Adele care for her own parents as they slowly succumbed to Alzheimer's disease, it was the potential future that unnerved her. Within two years, Adele, a first-grade teacher, would be diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's at age 55. By that time, Lauren was living in Los Angeles, and dating her then-boyfriend, the actor Seth Rogen. When the couple married a few years later, Adele's condition had progressed to the point that it wasn't clear at their wedding if she even realized who Lauren was. 'She knew I was the bride — she kept calling me the bride,' Lauren recalled in Taking Care, a documentary the couple made to raise awareness about the challenges that families face while caring for a person with advancing dementia. The toll of caring for Adele was hardest on Lauren's father. 'There was a time early on, before we brought care in, where we were like, 'Oh, we're gonna lose him first.' This — caring for her — seemed like it's literally killing him,' she says. 'Without being able to afford outside help, I dread imagining what would have happened,' Lauren says. The couple went on to found a nonprofit, Hilarity for Charity, that disburses grants to offset the cost of caring for a person with dementia. 'Until we were part of the care system, we didn't realize how broken it was,' Seth says in a video they recorded on behalf of the organization Caring Across Generations, to raise alarms about the threat families face under a pair of proposals to slash health care programs for the poor and disabled that are being considered at the state and federal level, and encourage people to contact their legislators. He adds, 'Millions of low income families, families of people with disabilities, families that have older adults in them, are facing this struggle every day right now. And that is why it is so unfathomable that federal and state legislatures are making massive cuts to Medicaid as we speak.' 'We are cutting crucial services for people who are aging and disabled,' he explains. 'That means these people will be losing access or have less access to the health care they need, creating more out-of-pocket expenses and medical debt.' In Washington, President Donald Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill,' which was recently approved by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, would cut roughly $600 billion from Medicaid in order to help pay for a new round of tax cuts for the wealthy. The Trump tax bill is projected to kick over 10 million people off Medicaid, the government health insurance program for low-income and disabled Americans. The legislation would also limit so-called provider taxes, which states use to provide supplemental payments to hospitals, doctors, and other health care providers to help pay the costs of treating Medicaid patients. The bill would additionally impose a financial penalty on states, like California, that offer health coverage to undocumented immigrants. In California, the situation could be compounded by further cuts proposed by Governor Gavin Newsom (D) that would slash Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program. Roughly one quarter of the five million Americans with dementia rely on Medicaid, the country's largest payer of long-term care. Medicaid is a pillar for caregivers — some 12 percent of recipients are people who can't work because of their responsibilities caring for a family member. Their ability to access the program could be jeopardized by the Big Beautiful Bill, which would impose work requirements on all able-bodied adults under 65 in order to qualify for Medicaid. 'Almost everyone in this country knows or loves someone that relies on Medicaid, even if they don't rely on Medicaid themselves. And we have the power together,' Lauren says in the video. 'We need to reject any cuts or changes that would take more care away from families that need and deserve it,' Seth adds. 'At the state level and the federal level.' More from Rolling Stone Trump Continues Inflaming L.A. Protests: 'BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!' ABC News Suspends Journalist for Calling Stephen Miller and Trump 'World-Class Haters' Republicans Say They're Cool With Trump Deploying Troops Against Protesters Best of Rolling Stone The Useful Idiots New Guide to the Most Stoned Moments of the 2020 Presidential Campaign Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal The Radical Crusade of Mike Pence

Big Data Can Make America Healthier. How to Do It Right
Big Data Can Make America Healthier. How to Do It Right

Yahoo

timean hour ago

  • Yahoo

Big Data Can Make America Healthier. How to Do It Right

Credit - Ezra Bailey—Getty Images Big data can help make Americans healthier, and the Trump Administration has stated—in its recently released Make America Healthy Again report and elsewhere—that building a national big-data platform is one of its primary goals. As scientists who use large data sets to study health, we're excited about its potential and the willingness of the federal government to invest in it, particularly since big data has been underutilized in the U.S. compared with other developed countries—and since the number of ways it can be used grows nearly daily. It's a huge opportunity. But there are lots of concerns when assembling sensitive health data and combining it with other sensitive data, like credit scores, tax records, employment, educational records, and more. Some of those concerns with the Administration's plans have already surfaced. The Administration's first goal of assembling big data to studying autism has left some worried that if used inappropriately, such data could lead to harm, rather than help, for those with autism. Others worry that big data could be used to perform and justify shoddy research that supports predetermined conclusions without adhering to rigorous scientific methods—a concern reinforced by the discovery that the Make America Healthy Again report cited non-existent sources to support its claims. So how can we reap the benefits of big data while minimizing its risks? Here are some guiding principles: The health care system already possesses health data on millions of Americans. Medical records are now almost always digitized, permitting doctors' notes, medical imaging, laboratory tests, insurance claims, and more to be linked (in theory) across doctors' offices, hospitals, nursing homes, and any other place people receive care. However, data collected about a patient in one setting often doesn't get connected to data from other settings—making it hard for researchers to get a full picture of what, exactly, is happening to each of us within the larger health care system. Read More: Gun Injuries of All Kinds Go Up During Hunting Season The federal government also has data on us that can be connected to health care data to answer important questions. For example, comprehensive and detailed data on Americans' occupations linked with health, insurance, and other data could help shed more light on relationships between our work and our health—helping to better answer curious questions like why taxi drivers are less likely to die from Alzheimer's disease or why female physicians don't outlive their male colleagues. The first step of making big data more helpful is to simply link the data—which, while possible, is difficult to accomplish without centralized effort. Once linkages have been made, data can be anonymized so that those studying sensitive questions aren't privy to confidential information about specific individuals. In addition to governmental data, many other sources of data can provide insights into our health. For example, smartwatches not only have data on how our hearts are beating (e.g., they can identify abnormal heart rhythms like atrial fibrillation), but they can also identify subtle changes in mobility that might be predictive of early neuromuscular diseases like Parkinson's disease. Meanwhile, grocery stores have data on the foods we eat, and with increasing interest in how diet affects our lives, these data could be linked to detailed measures of health. Read More: Could the Shingles Vaccine Help Prevent Dementia? Similarly, social-media platforms possess data that can offer insights into changes in our mental health, and through large-scale analysis of online photos could even identify, in real time, early visible markers of disease. These are moonshots, of course, and whether we want to use data in this way is an open question. But the potential to improve health could be large. Creating a way for scientists to link outside data to existing government and health data—while responsibly maintaining individual anonymity after the linkage—could open many novel research opportunities. Keeping all of these data sources organized, secure, and accessible to scientists is a tall order. Researchers who use big data often dedicate substantial resources to finding the data they need, organizing it, and ensuring its accuracy; the better the database is maintained, the easier it is for researchers to actually perform their analyses. The secure online platform where Medicare and other government health care data are currently accessed has been described by researchers as 'tedious and prone to system errors' and in need of major improvements. Meanwhile, security concerns have led the government to stop letting researchers store the data on their own secure servers, the easiest and most cost-effective way to actually work with the data. Access to Medicare data by researchers has become prohibitively expensive, costing about $30,000 a year or more for a single user to work on one project using the online platform. Read More: Why We Can't Rely on Science Alone to Make Public Health Decisions Proposals to drastically cut medical research funding have been reported, and if passed, these research funding cuts will come at the cost of discoveries to improve health that will never be made. High-quality research of any kind requires investment, whether it's in a biology lab under a microscope or working with data on powerful computers. A new data platform is only as valuable as researchers' ability to access it in a functional and cost-effective way. Any roadmap to designing a national data platform that links together health care and other sensitive data must consider the many valid concerns about collecting data in the U.S., including privacy concerns and how data will be used. The Pew Research Center finds that large majorities of Americans say they are concerned about how the government uses data collected about them (71%), while also admitting that they have little to no understanding of what the government even does with such data (77%). Here are some strategies—in addition to many of the cybersecurity and privacy safeguards already in place—to both protect the data and help earn the public trust: Mistrust and unease with government data collection is readily traceable to historical abuse of Americans' data (as well as recent allegations of improper access), so it's not surprising that many are wary of the Trump Administration's plans. Ensuring data cannot be weaponized by the government against individuals is perhaps the single biggest barrier to creating a useful database, but it can be done. Those currently using federal health care data must already undergo training and comply with very high data-security standards. Misuse of the data—such as even attempting to figure out the identity of an anonymous individual in the data—or failure to protect patient privacy can lead to criminal penalties. A platform of sensitive data without well-delineated restrictions on who can use it and what they can use it for is a recipe for problems. Other ongoing efforts by the Administration to compile data under the vague goal of 'increasing government efficiency' have been met with pushback and lawsuits from organizations concerned about data being used against members of the public. Current use of federal health data also requires researchers to provide the government detailed plans to justify the use of specific data. This allows the government to ensure that no more data than is needed to answer the specific question is provided to researchers. Read More: Why Do Taxi Drivers Have a Lower Risk of Alzheimer's? Researchers must also obtain ethical approval from an Institutional Review Board prior to accessing and analyzing data, a second checkpoint. These boards, which exist in light of egregious failures of medical research ethics in the 20th century, help ensure that analyses are designed to minimize risk to patients—even if it is only their data, and not their bodies, at risk. Transparency into who is using this sensitive data and what exactly they are doing with it can engender trust between researchers and the American public. Just like researchers already do for clinical trials, those accessing the data platform should specify their plans in advance, and those plans should be easily and publicly available. Transparency around which data were accessed and what computer code was used to analyze it not only promotes trust, but such data- and code-sharing practices among researchers make it easier to appraise the quality of the work, identify mistakes, and root out misconduct. We can only assume that Americans' unease with governmental data use stems from knowledge that, as with all powerful tools, linked data has the potential to be used in potentially harmful ways. But when in the hands of qualified scientists using rigorous scientific methods and privacy safeguards, a robust real-world data platform like this could lead to new discoveries about how all of us can lead healthier lives. Contact us at letters@

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store