Category Archives: health

Beam signed

Posted on September 16, 2015 | 1 comment

Last night before the selectmen met Chief Kingsbury brought a beam from the public safety building clock tower on a trailer by the Town House for the selectmen to sign. I had imagined signing with a white pen, but it turned out that the beam was white. Very cool.

Mark signed remotely.

Good thing Mark was not there last night as the meeting went to 9:45 – beavers at Fork Factory took most of the time. TTOR actually have a last revised in 2005 beaver policy, which is basically hands off unless beavers cause a nuisance. Killing trees is not a nuisance in their eyes, but erosion of Hartford Street would be. TTOR will follow up with DPW, and may add another beaver deceiver water bypass pipe into the beaver dam. Alec Stevens was concerned about sudden water releases at Fork Factory overwhelming his Jewels Pond, and that seemed to be heard by TTOR.

Good update by Board of Health – new sharps disposal container is located at DPW Garage, and they increase age to buy tobacco to age 21 effective January 1.

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Posted in Animals, health, Uncategorized

T21 saves lives

Posted on June 19, 2015 | Comments Off on T21 saves lives
This is from my Brown University emails, and is timely for us in Medfield as our Board of Health is meeting this summer to consider raising the age to buy tobacco in Medfield to age 21.  Medfield Cares About Prevention (MCAP) (www.MedfieldCares.org) and the Board of Selectmen have both endorsed T21 in town, and asked the Board of Health to take action.
Case study: Needham, Mass.

Teen smoking dropped after minimum sales age rose

June 12, 2015   Contact: David Orenstein   401-863-1862
Raising the legal purchasing age for cigarettes from 18 to 21 allowed a Massachusetts town to cut its teen smoking rate in half, accelerating the decline in smoking compared to surrounding communities.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A new study co-authored by Stephen Buka, professor and chair of epidemiology at Brown University, reports that the Massachusetts town of Needham successfully reduced teen smoking when it raised the minimum sales age for cigarettes to 21.

In 2005, Needham became the first town in the country to raise the age from 18. In research led by the Education Development Center in Waltham, Mass., and published June 12 in the journal Tobacco Control, the authors compared teen smoking rates in the town and 16 others nearby between 2006 and 2010. They found that the prevalence of teen smoking in Needham dropped from 13 percent to 7 percent, a significantly greater drop than in the surrounding area where smoking fell from 15 percent to 12 percent.

Since 2012 some other communities have followed suit. If every town made the change and achieved the same result, Buka said, the health benefits would be huge.

“Teen smoking rates were cut in half after this law was introduced in Needham,” he said. “Nationwide, that would result in 3 million fewer youth who would die early from a smoking related disease. These findings suggest one of the best possible strategies to reduce smoking related diseases, the leading cause of preventable death in the United States.”

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