Beginning July 1, many county public health departments across Kentucky will be open fewer hours, and some will have smaller staffs, reports the Lexington Herald Leader.
As state and local funding has dropped in recent months, the state’s 59 county and district health departments are struggling to deliver mandated services on a shoestring while continuing to improve and monitor public health.
Each of Kentucky’s local health departments is an independent quasi-governmental agency and receives a portion of its budget from local taxes. With the recession, many local health departments saw local tax revenue flatten or decrease, the paper reports.
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Motorists will begin seeing major construction activity this week as crews repair and resurface the deck of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Bridge on Interstate 65 over the Ohio River.
Until now, the work involved in an $18.2 million repair of the nearly 50-year-old bridge has taken place below deck. But now work moves to the top side of the bridge deck.
The Kennedy Bridge carries 136,000 vehicles a day.
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Long linked to underground coal mining, black-lung disease also strikes miners who work above ground — hitting hardest in the Kentucky region, reports the Louisville Courier-Journal.
Those are the findings of a new report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the first assessment in a decade of black-lung disease in surface miners.
It found that 46 of 2,257 surface miners tested during 2010-11 had black lung, meaning roughly 2 percent had the potentially deadly respiratory condition caused by inhaling coal dust, the paper reports.
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Several events this week could have an impact on the economy and move billions, or even trillions, of dollars, reports USA TODAY.
Greek elections, won Sunday by a coalition that favors the debt-bailout deal reached in February, was the first of the week’s dominoes to fall. Markets in Asia reacted with strong rallies in early trading. Still to come is the meeting of the Federal Reserve’s policymaking committee, a meeting of the leaders of the world’s top 20 economies and two European summits, the paper reports.
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