PART ONE
SOFT (Support Organization for Trisomy) issued a challenge: submit videos of members and their loved ones jumping in some form to their Facebook page to raise awareness. We decided to kick it up a notch — by turning the entries into a compilation video!
During a 15-state measles outbreak, Amazon marketed the book Melanie’s Marvelous Measles meant to “educate children on the benefits of having measles and how you can heal from them naturally and successfully” without being vaccinated. Amazon inserted a disclaimer, and it got reviews such as “It really provided of joy and comfort for my sick little Bobby as he lay in bed with pain, fever and mouth sores! I tried to buy a copy for the kid who he infected, but that child passed on…”
The diagnosis of New Jersey governor Chris Christie by nurse Kaci Hickox, who found herself quarantined in a tent in a hospital parking lot though she did not test for having a fever when she flew into Newark Airport from West Africa during the Ebola scare: “(T)o have a leader who doesn’t consider the science — that’s not sound public health.”
Along with Jersey-Est Honorary Jersey Girl Cyndi Lauper, two other influential celebrities came forward to share their stories of their diagnoses in hopes of helping others and educating us all: New York Giants football great Harry “Coach For Life” Carson (brain injury); and New Jersey Congressional Representative Donald Payne (colorectal cancer, which took the life of his father).
The good news: Vape Expo NJ 2015, held at the New Jersey Convention and Exposition Center, attracted more than a thousand electronic cigarette smokers. The bad news: It also attracted the attention of health officials who levied $50,000 in fines and 27 summonses for violating the state’s indoor smoke-free air law, and made shut it down four hours early.
A computer science student with autism has developed Emergency Chat, a text-based mobile app that can display instructions on how to help people whose deafness, post-traumatic stress, autism meltdowns, or anxiety attacks render them nonverbal.
A tree grows in Brooklyn? New Jersey can top that — there are vegetables growing vertically in a Newark office building, thanks to aeroponic gardening, which utilizes LED lamps and misted nutrients rather than sunlight and soil.
According to Dr. Jacob Jolij, a cognitive neuroscientist, this is the mathematical formula for coming up with perfect feel-good hit songs. He also compiled a Top Ten list of the top feel-good songs of the past half century, and New Jersey’s Bon Jovi is on it!
The adversaries of President Barack Obama believed that referring to his Affordable Care Act as Obamacare would turn it into a four-letter word. But surveys indicate that Obamacare has dropped the number of uninsured Americans by 16 percent, and the number of people who have put off getting health care for financial reasons by 17 per cent.