Posts in category Health
Written by Radiation traces found in Japanese baby formula
Traces of radiation spilled from Japan’s hobbled nuclear plant were detected in baby formula in the latest case of contaminated food in the nation.
Major food and candy maker Meiji Co. said Tuesday it was recalling canned powdered milk for infants, with expiration dates of October 2012, as a precaution.
The levels of radioactive cesium were well below government-set safety limits, and the company said the amounts were low enough not to have any affect on babies’ health even if they drank the formula every day.
Experts say children are more at risk than are adults of getting cancer and other illnesses from radiation exposure.
“There is no problem because the levels are within the government limit,” Kazuhiko Tsurumi, a Health Ministry official in charge of food safety, said of the radiation in Meiji milk.
The March 11 earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan sent three reactors into meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi plant, which have been spewing radiation into the air and ocean.
Some of that radiation has crept into food, such as rice, fish and beef. But this was the first time radiation was reported in baby formula.
Officials trying to ban cultural experience, hookah lounge owner says
TORONTO – The lights are dimmed as slow Middle-Eastern beats play over the speakers.
A pungent, but sweet, fragrance wafts through the air and the entire place is permeated by smoke.
It’s a slow Wednesday evening at Markaz Grill and Shisha Lounge in Toronto, but still a few pairs of customers occupy the intimate booths inside the so-called “oasis in clubland” to smoke indoors.
The owner, Sham Ahmed, sits back and sucks back a large breath of smoke as it escapes from his hookah pipe. The sound of bubbles from the water creates a playful noise as the champagne-flavoured fruit mixture makes its way up to his mouth.
“For us, this is the equivalent of going to a bar,” explained Ahmed, who is of Pakistani descent. “It’s a benefit that’s cultural. You’re essentially burning incense.”
The big black banner outside his establishment advertises you can “eat, drink, smoke” indoors. Often, people walking by peer into the window and stare intriguingly at the vapour plumes being emitted.
“Anyone who walks by and sees people smoking immediately concludes what we might be doing is wrong,” Ahmed said. “What they don’t know is we’re complying. We’re on Richmond St. in full view of the public. We’re not doing anything illegal.”
But the city isn’t taking the operator’s word for it. Council passed a motion this week to tighten regulations on water pipe establishments. Though the focus is on vapour lounges – where people bring in their own medicinal marijuana and smoke it – hookah bars serving herbal mixtures will also be affected.
They say these places could contribute to the illegal drug trade and prostitution.
“Residents in local communities are concerned regarding the establishment and licensing of these sites, which are rapidly increasing in number across the city, and are not deemed conducive by many as family friendly, beneficial to the neighbourhood, or in keeping with the intent of anti-smoking legislation,” according to the motion put forward by Councillor Mark Grimes.
A hookah – a water pipe – is generally used for smoking flavoured tobacco, which is known as shisha. The shisha is smoked through a pipe made of four parts: A base full of water, a base that holds the shisha, a pipe that connects these two parts, and a hose with a beak where the smoke is absorbed.
The Smoke-Free Ontario Act came into effect in 2006, banning smoking in any enclosed public place. However, hookah bars are allowed to operate in Toronto and do not fall under the Smoke-Free Ontario Act, because the shisha – which owners have taken out the tobacco, leaving a syrupy mixture of molasses and fruit – is an herbal product.
“Some people misconceive that it’s really harmful for you and it’s addictive,” said Ahmed, who charges $14 for a “session” of shisha, which lasts 1.5 hours.
“Any time they go out to ban anything that’s cultural, what they’re doing is taking away the culture of the people who are coming from a different land. If we were to ban fresh fish coming in, we’re taking away a part of Japanese culture – and it just so happens a part of our culture involves smoking pipe.”
Even though hookahs have been around for hundreds of years, originating from India for smoking hashish before the Turks brought it into the Middle-East, they’ve become trendy in Canada and the U.S. over the past five years or so.
In fact, in Toronto alone, there are over 200 hookah bars that have surfaced, according to Toronto Public Heath. While most abide by the rules, some don’t, which make tobacco inspectors’ jobs difficult.
“To prove people are smoking tobacco indoors is quite challenging because they mix it and it’s hard to tell,” explained Jim Chan, who heads the tobacco inspection team at Toronto Public Health.
“If they’re smoking herbal shisha, any of the non-smoking bylaws will not apply,” he said. “That makes inspection and investigation more challenging because we do have people that would serve tobacco inside. So we’re based on complaints.”
Inspectors have laid 50 charges since the end of 2010 under the Smoke-Free Ontario Act. Usually, these fines range from several hundred dollars up to $10,000 for large corporations, but it’s proving the case that’s tricky.
“When they claim they’re serving herbal products, we don’t just take people’s word for it. We always ask them to prove it – that means looking at invoices and packaging,” Chan said.
But often when the herbal mixture is out of the package, determining if tobacco is integrated can be difficult. That’s when the investigator takes a sample and sends it to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who conduct testing with the Canada Border Services Agency. A single test can cost up to $432.
“We manage to get enough evidence once the results come back that we can lay charges against the operator,” Chan said. “We have six months to lay a charge from the day of the offence under the Provincial Offences Act.”
And with only 11 investigators to oversee these hookah bars, while keeping tabs on 4,000 tobacco vendors, sales to minors and assisting other agencies for illegal tobacco, some bar operators are liable to slip through the cracks.
“That’s why we are complaints-driven,” Chan said.
But some non-smoking groups say the process is often a tedious, lengthy and expensive one.
“We need to see the Smoke-Free Ontario Act amended,” said Michael Perley of the Ontario Campaign for Action on Tobacco. “The government recognizes that the expanding number of hookah and shisha bars represents a serious public health problem. If we can broaden the act’s definition to include any kind of plant material being burned or heated, then it makes it easier for inspection personnel to enforce the act directly instead of having to get it tested.”
However, despite some talk of the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care altering the definition in 2012, they’re not going to be moving ahead with it any time soon.
“The government is not intending to amend the SFOA at this time,” ministry spokesman Andrew Morrison said. “Products other then tobacco are outside the scope of the SFOA. That being said, under the SFOA, municipalities have the ability to enforce stricter regulations.”
Markaz Grill and Shisha Lounge was investigated and charged in Dec. 2010 by the city’s public health officers who lead tobacco inspections – a charge which Ahmed claims occurred because he had a few boxes of tobacco sitting on the floor after closing the patio, which was to be transported to his home later that day.
“We were storing it, our patio had just closed,” he said. “Having it on premises is not illegal. There were no customers here. They should have to catch people in the act. I disputed it and they dropped it.”
Chan said health departments in other Canadian jurisdictions are concerned about the exposure of combustion, chemicals and carbon monoxide of even smoking the herbal products.
According to a Toronto Public Health fact sheet on hookah and water pipe smoking, smoking can lead to clogged arteries, heart disease and cancer.
“A typical water-pipe session could be compared to smoking 100-200 cigarettes,” according to the fact sheet.
And herbal shisha is no exception, Perley said.
“There are a lot of myths floating around about hookah and shisha,” he said. “These devices can produce as much dangerous material – carcinogens and chemicals – if smoked over a course of an hour or two as contained in a whole package of cigarettes, herbal or non-herbal.”
But Ahmed believes people have the right to choose if they want to smoke shisha.
“If they’re going to ban this herbal product, they should ban cigarette sales and alcohol,” he said. “We’re on the right side of the law. As a matter of fact, when we do serve tobacco on our patio (in the summer), which is completely permissible, the tobacco is completely different from cigarettes. It’s in its raw form and is harvested right from the fields and mixed with molasses and flavour.”
He called the potential banning of herbal shisha “a band-aid solution” because politicians don’t understand culture. There has been no scientific testing on the health effects of herbal shisha, he said, and instead of paying money to test for tobacco violations, they turn to banning it altogether.
“Unless they are well-educated or have a leg to stand on, they shouldn’t go around banning it unequivocally because they don’t have all the facts,” he said. “They’re trying to please the public. If they try to ban my culture, there’s going to be a fight.”
Possible study of anthrax vaccine’s effectiveness in children stirs debate
The Obama administration is wrestling with the thorny question of whether scientists should inject healthy children with the anthrax vaccine to see whether the shots would safely protect them against a bioterrorism attack.
The other option is to wait until an attack happens and then try to gather data from children whose parents agree to inoculate them in the face of an actual threat.
A key working group of federal advisers in September endorsed testing, sparking objections from those who consider that step unethical, unnecessary and dangerous. The National Biodefense Science Board (NBSB), which advises the federal government, is to meet Friday to vote on its working group’s recommendation.
“At the end of the day, do we want to wait for an attack and give it to millions and millions of children and collect data at that time?” said Daniel B. Fagbuyiof Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, who chaired the group. “Or do we want to say: ‘How do we best protect our children?’ We can take care of Grandma and Grandpa, Uncle and Auntie. But right now, we have nothing for the children.”
The vaccine has been tested extensively in adults and has been administered to more than 2.6 million people in the military. But the shots have never been tested on or given to children, leaving it uncertain how well the vaccine works in younger people and at what dose, and whether it is safe. Unlike with measles, mumps and other diseases, the chance that children will be exposed to anthrax is theoretical, making the risk-benefit calculus of testing a vaccine on them much more questionable.
Protesting 101: Flushing pepper spray from eyes
On the first full day of encampment in Boston’s Dewey Square, the Occupy Boston medic team demonstrated what to do if you wish to help someone who has been pepper sprayed. 10/1/11
Dead scientist awarded Nobel in medicine
A Canadian-born scientist was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for his discoveries about the immune system but hours later his university said that he had been dead for three days.
The Nobel committee had been unaware of Ralph Steinman’s death and it was unclear whether the prize would be rescinded because Nobel statutes don’t allow posthumous awards.
Steinman, 68, who shared the prize with American Bruce Beutler and French scientist Jules Hoffmann, died on Sept. 30 of pancreatic cancer, according to Rockefeller University, which said he had been treated with immunotherapy based on his discovery of dendritic cells two decades earlier.
The cells help regulate adaptive immunity, an immune system response that purges invading microorganisms from the body.
Study concludes Gulf War syndrome involves real brain damage
For the last twenty years, veterans of the Persian Gulf War of 1991 have been complaining of a range of ailments, including pain, fatigue, and problems with memory and concentration. And for just as long, the causes have remained uncertain and there has been a tendency by the military to attribute the complaints to post-traumatic stress disorder.
Now a long-term study at the University of Texas in Dallas has used a new technique to measure blood flow in the brains of sufferers and has detected “marked abnormalities” in brain function that can probably be attributed to low levels of exposure to sarin nerve gas. This abnormal blood flow has persisted or even worsened over the eleven years of the study.
“The findings mark a significant advancement in our understanding of the syndrome, which was for years written off by the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs as a form of combat stress rather than an objectively diagnosable injury,” reports the Dallas Observer.
Gardasil HPV vaccines found contaminated with recombinant DNA that persists in human blood
(NaturalNews) In seeking answers to why adolescent girls are suffering devastating health damage after being injected with HPV vaccines, SANE Vax, Inc decided to have vials of Gardasil tested in a laboratory. There, they found over a dozen Gardasil vaccine vials to be contaminated with rDNA of the Human Papillomavirus (HPV). The vials were purchased in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Poland and France, indicating Gardasil contamination is a global phenomenon.
This means that adolescents who are injected with these vials are being contaminated with a biohazard — the rDNA of HPV. In conducting the tests, Dr. Sin Hang Lee found rDNA from both HPV-11 and HPV-18, which were described as “firmly attached to the aluminum adjuvant.”
That aluminum is also found in vaccines should be frightening all by itself, given that aluminum should never be injected into the human body (it’s toxic when ingested, and it specifically damages the nervous system). With the added discovery that the aluminum adjuvant also carries rDNA fragments of two different strains of Human Papillomavirus, this now reaches the level of a dangerous biohazard — something more like a biological weapon rather than anything resembling medicine.
As SANE Vax explains in its announcement, these tests were conducted after an adolescent girl experienced “acute onset Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis within 24 hours” of being injected with an HPV vaccine. (http://sanevax.org/sane-vax-inc-dis…)
School removes Wi-Fi over health concerns
OTTAWA – An Ontario private school has removed its wireless Internet system due to potential health concerns associated to it.
Pretty River Academy, located north of Toronto in Collingwood, is a private kindergarten to Grade 12 school with just under 150 students. Officials have switched to a hard-wire Internet system.
In May, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer reclassified radio frequency emitted by wireless devices as possibly carcinogenic.
The school’s principal Roberta Murray Hirst said the new system was fairly effortless to install and the school wanted to choose the safest Internet option.
Dr. Magda Havas, who studies environmental contaminants at Trent University, hopes other schools will move towards this model.
“This is a much better way of connecting kids to the Internet, it’s not nearly as dangerous as wireless,” Havas said.
EU bans GM-contaminated honey from general sale
The European Union’s highest court on Tuesday ruled that honey which contains trace amounts of pollen from genetically modified (GM) corn must be labelled as GM produce and undergo full safety authorisation before it can be sold as food.
In what green groups are calling a “groundbreaking” ruling, the decision could force the EU to strengthen its already near-zero tolerance policy on genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
Bavarian beekeepers, some 500m from a test field for a modified maize crop developed by Monsanto – one of only two GM crops authorised as safe to be cultivated in Europe – claimed their honey had been “contaminated” by pollen from the plant.
The European court of justice found in their favour, a ruling that should offer grounds for the beekeepers to claim compensation in a German court.
Fight Over Compensation for 9/11 Responders Shifts to Cancer Victims
“The Tea Party hasn’t dealt with John Feal yet,” said John Feal, the former construction worker who has been one of the loudest advocates for sick and injured 9/11 rescue and response workers. Missing half a foot as result of his efforts at Ground Zero, Feal often stands out among the politicians and union officials who speak in diplomatic, politically safe terms.
Feal was referring to his movement’s latest hurdle: amending the James Zadroga Act — a bill passed last year ensuring federal funding for 9/11 health monitoring and treatment programs –- to cover certain types of cancers. In July, the federal government announced the bill would not provide medical benefits to first responders who developed cancer. Now the unions and other hope a new report will make their task easier.
United States admits scientists injected Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases
The United States government has made the shocking admission that its 1940s-era scientists deliberately infected Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases – and even gave a dying woman syphilis.
The horrifying revelation was made this week by a panel commissioned by President Obama to investigate the dark chapter in American medical history.
More than 1,300 Guatemalans were given various STDs between 1946 and 1948 to see if the diseases could be treated with penicillin, and at least 83 people died during the trials, the panel discovered.
The findings, some of which were revealed to the White House last year, prompted Obama to call his Guatemalan counterpart to apologize.
The scientists’ methods were stunning even when considering the different medical ethics in the post-World War II era, according to the presidential panel.
“The researchers put their own medical advancement first and human decency a far second,” said Anita Allen, a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.
The U.S. government paid for its Public Health Service to work with several Guatemalan government agencies to expose soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners and mental patients with syphilis, gonorrhea or chancroid.
Only 700 of those infected were also given penicillin. The trials did not yield any useful medical knowledge, according to medical records.
Though investigators cautioned that it could not be determined if the 83 deaths were caused by the tests, the experiments were unethical and indefensible, the panel concluded.
Several women who battled epilepsy and lived at a hospital in Guatemala dubbed “Home for the Insane” were injected with syphilis through the skull in an attempt to cure their condition.
Evolution and Food, a Different Point of View
2011 Leave a Comment
I read a paper once on a native American tribe from the southwest. They had a larger than normal occurrence of diabetes. To put it in a nutshell, in trying to determine the cause of this the study found that the loss of a melon that had been natural to their diet contributed greatly to the rise in diabetes cases within the tribe. When the melon was reintroduced into their diet the occurrence of diabetes fell dramatically. It turns out that after ten thousand years of depending on this fruit for a major part of their diet their digestive systems had adapted to the point where taking the food source away caused it damage. READ MORE »