Every few months, a 38-year-old woman drives to Miami from Broward. She meets with Carlos Franco, a 66-year-old retired drug-rehabilitation specialist turned harm-reduction advocate. He hands her a box with hundreds of new, wrapped syringes, and she then in turn covertly hands them out to low-income intravenous drug users in…
Two years ago, flakka arrived in South Florida provoking a string of bizarre incidents involving paranoid, aggressive naked people under the influence of this cheap, potent stimulant. In January, a naked man was coaxed off a Lake Worth roof by a SWAT team. In March, a man who had taken…
Without ever really knowing it, you might be sitting in the middle of an epidemic zone. That’s the sense you get studying a newly released map which lays out the rates and numbers of sexually transmitted diseases across the country. The following map, which is currently making the rounds online,…
Bad news for Broward County: the section of South Florida continues to top a list of the Sunshine State counties when it comes to reporting news cases of HIV and AIDS. Each month, the Florida Department of Health releases data on the new reported bases throughout the state. Most of…
As if Floridians need more to worry about from Mother Nature — take your pick, we’ve got invasive pythons, wild bears and coyotes, deadly snails — now health officials in the Sunshine State have released a warning on a flesh eating bacteria that has been making appearances on our beaches…
Just one day after Rick Scott signed the 24-hour abortion waiting period bill into law, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida and the Center of Reproductive Rights have filed a lawsuit looking to block the law. In April, lawmakers passed a bill that would require a woman to have…
Florida’s abortion rates dropped ten percent between 2010 and 2014, though the drop rates of other states’ has been more significant. The Associated Press collected annual numbers from health departments of 45 states — California, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Wyoming don’t compile numbers — and found that about…
The Center for Disease Control released a map that shows where the rate of the “most distinctive” cause of death in each state – and Florida leads the nation on deaths from HIV. The “most distinctive” cause of death in each state means where a particular cause of death is…
Gov. Rick Scott has is suing Barack Obama, alleging the federal government was trying to make Florida expand Medicaid, which is something Scott had once said he wanted. Specifically, Scott is claiming that the federal government ended the Low Income Pool (LIP) healthcare program in an attempt to coerce the…
In the late 1980’s, young punk rockers in Cuba, known as “los frikis,” were so fed-up with the stifling life of the communist regime that they chose to inject themselves with AIDS so they could live in a sanitorium and be free from constant police-state harassment. And today, two survivors…
Florida is growing ever so closer to making it more difficult for a woman to have an abortion, with the legislature looking at least three different measures that would either restrict abortion rights, or eliminate them altogether. One of those measures has been fast-tracked this week. A bill that would…
Spring Break is upon us. Which means booze, sun, surf, good times and countless people getting a swirly henna tattoo on their sunburned shoulder. But, the Florida Department of Health has issued a warning over black henna tattoos. Black henna, contains a chemical known as P-pheylenediamine — or PPD — which…
The West Palm Beach health clinic at the center of shady allegations and legal action got some good news this week. The state’s Department of Health has dropped its investigation into Hippocrates Health Institute’s head Brian Clement and his wife, Anna Maire. This comes after the department last month sent…
Heather Hironimus, the mother of the 4-year-old boy caught in the middle of a circumcision case, has been ordered to appear before Judge Jeffrey Dana Gillen of the 15th judicial district in Palm Beach County on Tuesday or be found in contempt.
Earlier this month, an appeals court upheld a ruling allowing the father of a 4-year-old boy to circumcise his son against the boy’s mother’s wishes. New Times broke the story last year of then-3-year-old Chase, whose parents, Dennis Nebus and Heather Hironimus, went to court to fight over whether he…
As it is with everything in life, Barack Obama’s new Ebola Czar has a Florida connection. On Friday, Obama announced that former Al Gore chief-of-staff Ron Klain would be his new Ebola Czar. Klain’s objective is to basically be ahead of any new updates on the virus, as well as…
Well, this is one way to try to stall your sentencing. A Broward County courtroom was forced to clear out Friday morning when an inmate told the judge he had Ebola during the morning bond court hearing. Judge John “Jay” Hurley, who conducts the hearings with inmates over a video…
On Wednesday, news broke that a Dallas nurse who had tested positive for Ebola flew on a commercial airline that made a stop at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention immediately told the media via a conference call that neither the nurse, 29-year-old Amber Joy…
Tommy Rosen is pretty smokin’ hot, so it’s hard to imagine him as a scraggly, cigarette-smoking, drug-addicted Deadhead. But the 47-year-old abused substances from the age of 13 and later suffered from a major gambling problem. Most of us have some kind of addiction that’s holding us back, Rosen points…
Update 8:30 a.m. Monday: According to a statement by Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine, the initial test by the Department of Heath came back negative. A second test is being sent to the CDC. A teenager from West Africa is being tested for Ebola after exhibiting flu-like symptoms Sunday afternoon…
So apparently there’s a flesh-eating bacteria that thrives in warm saltwater and is living in our oceans, according to Florida health officials. The bacteria, known as vibrio vulnificus, has caused 32 people to be hospitalized and killed ten in Florida. That was through a period of years, not all at…
So it begins. All summer, scientists and health officials have been biting their nails over a rare mosquito-borne virus that has begun showing up stateside from the Caribbean. So far, the 80 or so cases diagnosed of chikungunya have been found in people who were traveling abroad. Now, it looks…
