Health

With the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) coming out in May, hoarding is set to become an officially recognized mental disorder. To learn more about hoarding, Ross Reynolds talks to Karen Kent, clinical supervisor of behavioral health services at Evergreen Health.

Access to HIV and TB treatment has been improving worldwide. The rate of new infections is going down. But tuberculosis remains deadly, especially for the poverty stricken — TB killed 1.4 million people in 2011. Luwiza Makukula was diagnosed with HIV and TB after her husband died in 2001. Not only was she sick, she was completely isolated. Today, she works with NGOs focused on treatment, care, and support for HIV/TB patients, including Zambia's Community Initiative for TB, HIV/AIDS and Malaria (CITAM+). Luwiza Makukula joins us.

Seattle and Portland are among the best cities to dine on seafood if you want the salmon, sole or halibut you order to actually be salmon, sole or halibut. The two Northwest cities emerged from a national report Thursday with some of the lowest rates of “fish fraud” in the country.

According to the research project by the marine conservation group, Oceana, 33 percent of the 1,215 samples of fish it had analyzed were not actually the fish that they were labeled as by the sushi bars, restaurants and retail outlets selling them.

Business groups who opposed Seattle’s paid sick leave law are hoping for a do-over in Olympia. Today the Senate Commerce and Labor Committee will hear two bills to repeal the controversial ordinance.

In President Obama’s State of the Union Address, he called on Congress to pass new gun control legislation. He declared that “in the two months since Newtown, more than a thousand birthdays, graduations and anniversaries have been stolen from our lives by a bullet from a gun."

According to the most recent report on gun deaths by the Center for Disease control, two-thirds of all US gun deaths in 2010 were suicides. 

It’s estimated that there are more than five million Americans diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. That number is expected to grow as the population ages. One of the major problems associated with the disease is isolation, both for Alzheimer’s patients and their caregivers. A Seattle program provides them a place to socialize and find support.

According to a 2012 study by the CDC, Washington had the seventh highest rate of home births in the country. Overall, home births have been on the rise since 2004. But as of 2009 they still represented less than 1 percent of total births in the United States.

The Army says it won’t release the investigation into how Madigan Army Medical Center handled some soldiers' diagnoses for post-traumatic stress disorder. The denial comes one week after the Secretary of the Army visited Joint Base Lewis-McChord, south of Tacoma, to announce the completion of an Army-wide review on the same subject.