While You Were Sleeping

The gist of what you may have missed.

Spencer Tunick’s photo in Mexico City

On May 6, approximately 18,000 naked people in Mexico City’s principal square, the Zócalo, posed for Spencer Tunick. Male and female volunteers of varying ages, crouched in the fetal position, heads tucked, in the anonymous pose favored by Tunick. Known for his mass nude photographs, the Middletown-born photographer has shot flesh spectacles across the globe, including 7,000 people in Barcelona in 2003, as well as a number of shoots in the Hudson Valley. Tunick first made his name in New York City in the early 1990s when he was arrested on five separate occasions for shooting mass nudes in Manhattan; Tunick became a bete noir of the Guiliani administration, but was never prosecuted, as the courts ruled Tunick was operating within his First Amendment rights as a photographer.

Source: Associated Press

The government of Kazakhstan announced in early May that the canine distemper virus appeared to be the cause of a wave of seal deaths this spring in the Caspian Sea. Approximately 1,000 dead seals have washed ashore in Kazakhstan in March and April, most of them pups. The deaths have raised concerns about seals in the Caspian, which is heavily polluted by industrial contaminants and is a major transit route for oil and the site of a network of oil-pumping platforms. Environmentalists have warned for years that exposure to oil and heavy metals in the sea had weakened the seals’ immune systems. Caspian seals live only in the Caspian Sea and are listed as a vulnerable species by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

Source: New York Times

Despite having the most expensive health system in the world, the United States consistently underperforms other industrialized nations in terms of performance, according to an annual study by the Commonwealth Fund, a private health care advocacy group. Compared with five other nations—Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom—the US health care system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high-performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives. The Health and Human Services Department reports that up to 30 percent of current health care spending in the US ($300 billion) is inappropriate, redundant, or unnecessary.

In particular, the US (and Canada) provide inadequate access to care. The report states: “The US and Canada rank lowest on prompt accessibility of appointments with physicians, with patients more likely to report waiting six or more days for an appointment when needing care.”

The US is the only country in the study without universal health insurance coverage, partly accounting for its poor performance on access, equity, and health outcomes, according to the report.

Source: Commonwealth Fund