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Well, well, well – it looks like the mainstream has accidentally stumbled upon the truth that skin cancer might be caused by something other than the sun. Researchers have found that some strains of HPV, a common sexually acquired virus, can dramatically increase your skin cancer risk.
Read the full story.
Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha
Imagine having to sue someone to make them do their job.
Sounds crazy, right? But you don’t have to imagine – because the do-nothing feds are at the wrong end of just such a suit.
The National Resources Defense Council has gone on the offensive to try to force the FDA to finally regulate – and ban – bisphenol A, the dangerous hormone-like chemical that’s in plastic containers and metal can linings.
The NRDC actually petitioned the FDA to ban BPA two years ago – and under the agency’s own rules, it had 180 days to approve, deny or respond to that demand.
Instead, they did nothing at all.
Two years later, we’re still waiting for them to act. While the feds now claim to be “concerned,” they also insist that BPA is perfectly safe – and say they plan to keep studying it. And by that, they mean they’ll keep on doing what they do best: nothing.
Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha
Link Between Migraines And Stroke Confirmed
Migraine headaches may do much more damage than cause a throbbing pain. A new study confirms that individuals who suffer from migraines are about twice as likely to have a stroke caused by a blood clot, compared to those who don’t get the painful headaches. According to Reuters, researchers analyzed the results of 21 previous studies conducted between 1975 and 2007, and involving more than 622,000 adults with and without migraines. More »
Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha
A DISABLED Austrian man was eaten to death by maggots in his bed while his partner slept beside him.
The 61-year-old retiree died in an ambulance on his way to hospital in Vienna on Tuesday with the maggots having partly devoured his back.
Paramedics notified police after discovering the shocking state of hygiene in the man’s home, and his 34-year-old partner was questioned over his condition.
“The man had not wanted to be washed for a long time,” a police spokesman said.
According to police, the couple had been together for around a decade, and the victim’s partner had slept in the same bed right up until his death.
The dead man had been paralysed for several years following a stroke.
Science (July 21, 2010) — Women who report greater use of cleaning products may be at higher breast cancer risk than those who say they use them sparingly. Researchers writing in BioMed Central’s open access journal Environmental Health asked more than 1500 women about their cleaning product usage and found that women who reported using more air fresheners and products for mold and mildew control had a higher incidence of breast cancer.
Julia Brody, from the Silent Spring Institute, USA, worked with a team of researchers to carry out telephone interviews with 787 women diagnosed with breast cancer and 721 comparison women. She said, “Women who reported the highest combined cleaning product use had a doubled risk of breast cancer compared to those with the lowest reported use. Use of air fresheners and products for mold and mildew control were associated with increased risk. To our knowledge, this is the first published report on cleaning product use and risk of breast cancer.”
The researchers questioned women on product use, beliefs about breast cancer causes, and established and suspected risk factors. They found that cleaning products, air fresheners, and insect repellents were associated with breast cancer, but little association was observed with overall pesticide use. Women with breast cancer who believed that chemicals and pollutants contribute ‘a lot’ to the risk of developing the condition were more likely to report high product usage.
Speaking about this potential bias to the study, Brody said, “When women are diagnosed with breast cancer, they often think about what happened in the past that might have contributed to the disease. As a result, it may be that women with breast cancer more accurately recall their past product use or even over-estimate it. Or, it could also be that experience with breast cancer influences beliefs about its causes. For example, women diagnosed with breast cancer are less likely to believe heredity contributes ‘a lot’, because most are the first in their family to get the disease.”
In order to avoid possible recall bias, the researchers recommend further study of cleaning products and breast cancer using prospective self-reports and measurements in environmental and biological media.
Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha
Science (July 20, 2010) — Biologists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have demonstrated a connection between multiple sclerosis (MS) — an autoimmune disorder that affects the brain and spinal cord — and gut bacteria.
The work — led by Sarkis K. Mazmanian, an assistant professor of biology at Caltech, and postdoctoral scholar Yun Kyung Lee — appears online the week of July 19-23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Multiple sclerosis results from the progressive deterioration of the protective fatty myelin sheath surrounding nerve cells. The loss of myelin hinders nerve cells from communicating with one another, leading to a host of neurological symptoms including loss of sensation, muscle spasms and weakness, fatigue, and pain. Multiple sclerosis is estimated to affect about half a million people in the United States alone, with rates of diagnosis rapidly increasing. There is currently no cure for MS.
Although the cause of MS is unknown, microorganisms seem to play some sort of role. “In the literature from clinical studies, there are papers showing that microbes affect MS,” Mazmanian says. “For example, the disease gets worse after viral infections, and bacterial infections cause an increase in MS symptoms.”
On the other hand, he concedes, “it seems counterintuitive that a microbe would be involved in a disease of the central nervous system, because these are sterile tissues.”
And yet, as Mazmanian found when he began examining the multiple sclerosis literature, the suggestion of a link between bacteria and the disease is more than anecdotal. Notably, back in 1993, Caltech biochemist Leroy Hood — who was then at the University of Washington — published a paper describing a genetically engineered strain of mouse that developed a lab-induced form of multiple sclerosis known as experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, or EAE.
When Hood’s animals were housed at Caltech, they developed the disease. But, oddly, when the mice were shipped to a cleaner biotech facility — where their resident gut bacterial populations were reduced — they didn’t get sick. The question was, why? At the time, Mazmanian says, “the authors speculated that some environmental component was modulating MS in these animals.” Just what that environmental component was, however, remained a mystery for almost two decades.
But Mazmanian — whose laboratory examines the relationships between gut microbes, both harmful and helpful, and the immune systems of their mammalian hosts — had a hunch that intestinal bacteria were the key. “As we gained an appreciation for how profoundly the gut microbiota can affect the immune system, we decided to ask if symbiotic bacteria are the missing variable in these mice with MS,” he says.
To find out, Mazmanian and his colleagues tried to induce MS in animals that were completely devoid of the microbes that normally inhabit the digestive system. “Lo and behold, these sterile animals did not get sick,” he says.
Then the researchers decided to see what would happen if bacteria were reintroduced to the germ-free mice. But not just any bacteria. They inoculated mice with one specific organism, an unculturable bug from a group known as segmented filamentous bacteria. In prior studies, these bacteria had been shown to lead to intestinal inflammation and, more intriguingly, to induce in the gut the appearance of a particular immune-system cell known as Th17. Th17 cells are a type of T helper cell — cells that help activate and direct other immune system cells. Furthermore, Th17 cells induce the inflammatory cascade that leads to multiple sclerosis in animals.
“The question was, if this organism is inducing Th17 cells in the gut, will it be able to do so in the brain and central nervous system?” Mazmanian says. “Furthermore, with that one organism, can we restore to sterile animals the entire inflammatory response normally seen in animals with hundreds of species of gut bacteria?”
The answer? Yes on all counts. Giving the formerly germ-free mice a dose of one species of segmented filamentous bacteria induced Th17 not only in the gut but in the central nervous system and brain — and caused the formerly healthy mice to become ill with MS-like symptoms.
“It definitely shows that gut microbes have a strong role in MS, because the genetics of the animals were the same. In fact, everything was the same except for the presence of those otherwise benign bacteria, which are clearly playing a role in shaping the immune system,” Mazmanian says. “This study shows for the first time that specific intestinal bacteria have a significant role in affecting the nervous system during MS — and they do so from the gut, an anatomical location very, very far from the brain.”
Mazmanian and his colleagues don’t, however, suggest that gut bacteria are the direct cause of multiple sclerosis, which is known to be genetically linked. Rather, the bacteria may be helping to shape the immune system’s inflammatory response, thus creating conditions that could allow the disease to develop. Indeed, multiple sclerosis also has a strong environmental component; identical twins, who possess the same genome and share all of their genes, only have a 25 percent chance of sharing the disease. “We would like to suggest that gut bacteria may be the missing environmental component,” he says.
For their part, Th17 cells are needed for the immune system to properly combat infection. Problems only arise when the cells are activated in the absence of infection — just as disease can arise, Mazmanian and others suspect, when the species composition of gut bacteria become imbalanced, say, by changes in diet, because of improved hygiene (which kills off the beneficial bacteria as well as the dangerous ones), or because of stress or antibiotic use. One impact of the dysregulation of normal gut bacterial populations — a phenomenon dubbed “dysbiosis” — may be the rising rate of multiple sclerosis seen in recent years in more hygienic societies.
“As we live cleaner, we’re not just changing our exposure to infectious agents, but we’re changing our relationship with the entire microbial world, both around and inside us, and we may be altering the balance between pro- and anti-inflammatory bacteria,” leading to diseases like MS, Mazmanian says. “Perhaps treatments for diseases such as multiple sclerosis may someday include probiotic bacteria that can restore normal immune function in the gut… and the brain.”
The work was supported by funding from the California Institute of Technology, the Weston Havens Foundation, and the Edward Mallinckrodt, Jr. Foundation.
Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha
Matthew Herper, 07.21.10, 04:15 PM EDT
Martin Duffy, a Boston consultant and economist, thought he just had a sore throat. When it persisted for months, he went to the doctor and learned there was a tumor on his tonsils.
Duffy, now 70, had none of the traditional risk factors for throat cancer. He doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink and has run 40 Boston marathons. Instead, his cancer was caused by the human papilloma virus (HPV), which is sexually transmitted and a common cause of throat and mouth cancer.
HPV tumors have a better prognosis than those caused by too many years of booze and cigarettes. But Duffy “is in the unlucky 20%” whose cancer comes back–despite rounds of chemotherapy and radiation that melted 20 more pounds off a lean 150-pound frame. Now the cancer has spread throughout his throat, making eating and talking difficult. “I made my living as a public speaker,” he says. “Now I sound like Daffy Duck.” Duffy believes he has only a few months left. “How do you tell the people you love you love them?” he asks.
Nine Things You Need To Know About HPV
Most strains of the HPV virus are harmless, but persistent infections with two HPV strains cause 70% of the 12,000 cases of cervical cancers diagnosed annually in the U.S. Other forms of the sexually transmitted virus can cause penile and anal cancer, and genital warts. The HPV throat cancer connection has emerged in just the last few years and is so new that the government doesn’t track its incidence. Researchers believe it is transmitted via oral sex. But top researchers estimate that there are 11,300 HPV throat cancers each year in the U.S.–and the numbers are growing fast as people have been having more sexual partners since the 1960s. By 2015 there could be 20,000 cases. For more surprising discoveries about HPV, read here.
These big numbers have some top researchers arguing that drug makers should test whether HPV vaccines now used to prevent cervical cancer in women can also prevent throat infections in boys. Two vaccines, Gardasil from Merck ( MRK – news – people ) and Cervarix from GlaxoSmithKline ( GSK – news – people ), are approved for preventing cervical cancer. Gardasil is approved for use in boys only to prevent genital warts.
// Vaccinating boys could stop this meteoric increase in throat cancer. “Clearly, boys need to be vaccinated,” says Marshall Posner, the incoming medical director of head and neck cancer at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York. “I want my kids to be vaccinated. I don’t see a downside to these vaccines.”
There’s only one problem: The vaccine manufacturers aren’t terribly hot on the idea. GlaxoSmithKline says it has no plans to study throat cancer. It adds that it is “committed to providing a vaccine specifically designed to protect against cervical cancer in girls and young women.”
Merck, the maker of Gardasil, seemed more interested a couple of years ago. In 2008 it funded Maura Gillison, the Ohio State University researcher who established the HPV-throat-cancer link in 2000, to do a pilot study to show that test could reliably detect HPV infection in the throat. The pilot study was successful. By early 2009 Gillison says that a larger study of the vaccine in throat cancer looked close to being green lit.
But after Merck agreed to buy rival Schering-Plough ( SGP – news – people ) for $41 billion in March 2009, interest in a big study seemed to evaporate, Gillison says. In a statement, Merck says that “due to competing research and business priorities, we decided not to move ahead with an efficacy study at this time.”
The drug makers’ reticence probably stems from a fear that a throat-cancer vaccine would be hard to get approved. Papilloma viruses usually cause cancer slowly, causing pre-cancerous lesions that take many years to blossom into full-fledged malignant tumors. Papilloma viruses cause the horn-like growths in rabbits that probably gave rise to myths of “jackalopes” in the American West. In the cervix, early abnormal growths can be picked up with a diagnostic test, the Pap smear. Clinical trials of Gardasil and Cervarix took advantage of this, measuring the number of pre-cancerous growths prevented by the vaccines.
But there are no easy-to-detect pre-cancers in the throat. Adolescent boys would have to be followed for decades to to see if the vaccine prevented throat cancer, an unlikely scenario. Short of this, studies could only look at the prevention of HPV throat infections, not cancer or cancer precursors directly. Approving a vaccine for wide use based on this type of short-term data would require a leap of faith that the Food and Drug Administration might not be willing to take.
Top researchers say the federal government needs to step in and fund the long study if drug companies cannot be persuaded to do it themselves. “I’m sorry Merck decided not to do it,” says Posner. “But in the end, this is a federal responsibility. It’s a public health issue.”
For his part, Martin Duffy thinks that drug companies’ complacent attitude toward throat cancer would be different if more of their employees were in his situation. “It will change real fast,” he says, “if one of their executives comes down with this disease.”
Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha
Revealing Health News from Medicine’s Most Notorious Myth-Buster
5 Vaccinations You Should Never Get
Pharmaceutical companies haven’t been shy about sticking generations of Americans with round after round of vaccines to prevent even obscure illnesses. Trust me, kids have a better chance of tap dancing on the moon with Elvis than dying from rubella.
Of course, Big Pharma has decided not to limit their junk vaccines to the children’s market.
Over the past several years in particular, drug companies have aggressively marketed vaccines for adults, using scare tactics to get otherwise sane people to roll up their sleeves in droves. Many of these vaccines are useless, and some are downright dangerous. These five vaccinations are theworst of the worst.
1. Human Papillomavirus (HPV)––Gardasil
One of the biggest designer vaccinations that Big Pharma is shoving down our throats thesedays is the HPV vaccine, Gardasil. This vaccine is needless and, history has shown, dangerous.
Yet women are paying $360 a pop to be injected with it.
The most frustrating part of this whole sham is that Gardasil’s manufacturer, Merck, has drawn on the aid of cancer––medicine’s greatest boogeyman––in order to sell its product. Merck would have us believe that by inoculating against HPV, we’ll stop cervical cancer, at which point Gardasil becomes the “cure for cancer.” This is such a load of bull that we’re going to need a backhoe todig our way out.
According to FDA reports made public through the Freedom of Information Act (that means the government wasn’t volunteering this information, by the way), Gardasil has been linked with a variety of dangerous and even deadly side effects.1 Just since September 2007, the vaccine has been linked to 10 deaths from blood clotting, arrhythmia, and at least one allergic reaction. The vaccine has further been linked to 10 spontaneous abortions and six instances of Guillain-BarreSyndrome, a disease that causes the immune system to attack the nervous system, and which maylead to paralysis.
The FDA report further included evidence of nearly 150 instances of serious injury that resultedfrom the vaccine, and a multitude of outbreaks of warts on the genitals, face, hands, and feet. Thesewarts are most likely caused by the HPV virus and are a condition that should have been avoided through the use of the vaccine.
And while these side effects certainly haven’t affected every patient, the effects are so serious that no sane person should want to subject themselves or their children to this injection. This isespecially true when prevention is as simple as keeping your pants on.
You see, the “dirty” little secret about HPV is that it’s a sexually transmitted disease. Want to avoid HPV?
Skip the shot and get some condoms.
2. Shingles––Zostavax
Another useless vaccine with a major corporate push is the shingles vaccine Zostavax. The only reason more people don’t get it is that many insurance companies won’t cover it. You know why? It costs up to $200 per shot, and it’s an unnecessary preventative for a disease that is completely treatable and not very serious.
My recommendation is that you boost your immune system with zinc and vitamins C and E, then hang around with some kids in your family when they have the chicken pox (more on that later).
Merck––which manufactures Zostavax and also brought us Gardasil––has no clue about the long-term effects of the vaccine. The study on long-term effects conducted for FDA approval only lasted 42 days, so there is no real data on negative consequences of Zostavax over periods of several years. If you take the vaccine, understand you’ll be signing yourself up as a guinea pig in a human drug trial.
The irony here is that the whole shingles “scare” is probably the result of over-fanatical efforts by drug companies to vaccinate children against chicken pox. At least one study has shown that repeated exposure to children with chicken pox increases the immune system’s resistance to shingles.2 Essentially what this means is that by helping our youngsters suffer through their chicken pox, we were building our immunity to shingles.When kids stop getting chicken pox, we start getting shingles.
So, in a sense, Zostavax is a drug-company cure (and a very unproven one at that) for a problem caused by the drug companies.
3. Influenza
Yearly flu shots have become standard operating procedure for people of all ages. The CDC practically mandates an annual inoculation for children aged 6 months to 19 years, adults over 50,and even pregnant women. Each fall, when the colder weather forces us to huddle together for warmth,the CDC passes the warning that your family, friends, and colleagues are all little more than flu incubators. Millions rush to their doctors, hospitals or clinics to get their shots.
But here’s the big news: the flu vaccine doesn’t work.Year to year, the makers of the flu vaccine make a guess about which flu strains will be the most prevalent and then mix them accordingly.
There is currently no system in place to track the effectiveness of the vaccine and to use this data to compile the next flu vaccine. The process is arbitrary enough that they might as well stick some sugar water in a syringe and cross their fingers.
For the elderly and the very young in particular, I can’t recommend exposing potentially weak immune systems to the flu for no net gain.
As always, I recommend building a more powerful immune system with safe natural methods and staying away from jab-happy MDs when the cold months are upon us.
4. Whooping cough
Lately, the mainstream media has been harping on individual cases of pertussis, or whooping cough, as if a global pandemic is waiting around the corner. Big Pharma has their lapdogs pushing out statistics that reveal hundreds of thousands of deaths from whooping cough each year.
The truth is, this is a global statistic that is accounted for by the prevalence of the disease in third world countries without the medical resources to cure a cold, let alone whooping cough. There are only a handful of deaths attributed to this disease in the United States each year, and most of those are infants––some of whom are too young to get the vaccine.
So why is the CDC now pushing for every person to be immunized in infancy and then receive five more booster vaccinations as they advance into adulthood and old age? You have almost no chance of getting whooping cough as an infant, and you have even less chance as an adult. At $60 per booster plus the initial cost of childhood vaccination, the CDC wants us to spend $300 over the course of our lifetimes on a useless vaccine.
We are not living in the barely tamed wilderness of yesteryear.We are living in a modern society with appropriate sanitation, better nutrition, and access to health care that limits the spread of disease and treats diseases like whooping cough with ease. In the modern age, unless you plan on traveling to the third world, there is no need to go injecting yourself with a “weakened” strain of a disease that you may never encounter, and can be easily cured of if you do happen to get it.
5. Measles, Mumps, Rubella, & Chicken pox––ProQuad
Now that I’ve taken time to tell you about the dangers of some of Big Pharma’s adult vaccines,
I am going to sound the alarm for the little ones in your family. If the CDC and pharmaceutical companies have their way, every child born in the United States will get jabbed with enough needles to leave them looking like a voodoo doll; and all this before their second birthdays. The ProQuad vaccine is a cocktail of vaccines that includes the traditional measles, mumps, and rubella, plus a dose of chicken pox that is five times what a child would get in a regular vaccination.
Time has shown that toddlers given the ProQuad injection were twice as likely to have a seizure as toddlers who received MMR and chicken pox vaccinations separately. The seizure data has even caused a government advisory panel on vaccines to step back from recommending ProQuad as their method of choice.
These new horrors only add fuel to the fire that should burn down the vaccination regime. This dangerous all-in-one is a prime example of how impersonal assembly line medicine is doing more harm than good.
Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha
Science (Mar. 7, 2009) — Drinking one glass of wine a day may lower the risk of Barrett’s Esophagus by 56 percent, according to a new study by the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in the March issue of Gastroenterology. Barrett’s Esophagus is a precursor to esophageal cancer, the nation’s fastest growing cancer with an incidence rate that’s jumped 500 percent in the last 30 years.
Barrett’s Esophagus affects 5 percent of the population and occurs when heartburn or acid reflux permanently damages the esophageal lining. People with Barrett’s Esophagus have a 30- to 40-fold higher risk of developing esophageal adenocarcinoma (a type of esophageal cancer) because the Barrett’s Esophagus cells can grow into cancer cells.
Because there are no symptoms or warning signs of Barrett’s Esophagus, people discover they have Barrett’s Esophagus when an endoscopy for anemia, heartburn or a bleeding ulcer reveals esophageal cells that were damaged, then changed form during the healing process. Currently nothing can be done to treat Barrett’s Esophagus; it can only be monitored.
This is the first and largest population-based study to examine the connection between alcohol consumption and risk of Barrett’s Esophagus. Funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, the Kaiser Permanente study looked at 953 men and women in Northern California between 2002 and 2005 and found that people who drank one or more glasses of red or white wine a day had less than half the risk (or 56 percent reduced risk) of Barrett’s Esophagus. There was no reduction of Barrett’s Esophagus risk among people who drank beer or liquor.
“The rate of esophageal adenocarcinoma in this country is skyrocketing yet very little is known about its precursor, Barrett’s Esophagus. We are trying to figure out how to prevent changes that may lead to esophageal cancer.” said Douglas A. Corley, MD, a Kaiser Permanente gastroenterologist and the study’s principal investigator.
The study findings are echoed by two other studies published in the same issue of the Gastroenterology journal: Australian researchers found that people who drank wine were at a lower risk of esophageal adenocarcinoma, and Irish researchers found that people who drank wine were at a lower risk for esophagitis, an irritation of the esophagus that follows chronic heartburn and often precedes Barrett’s Esophagus and cancer.
Researchers are not certain why wine reduces the risk of Barrett’s Esophagus and esophageal cancer. One theory is that the wine’s antioxidants neutralize the oxidative damage caused by gastroesophageal reflux disease, a risk factor for Barrett’s Esophagus. Another theory is that wine drinkers typically consume food with their wine as opposed to drinking straight liquor without food, thereby reducing the potentially damaging effect of alcohol on esophageal tissue, said Ai Kubo, MD, an epidemiologist at Kaiser Permanente and lead author on the study. “But we cannot preclude the possibility that wine drinking is a proxy for other ‘health-seeking’ behavior,” Kubo added.
This study is part of larger, case-controlled Kaiser Permanente study led by Dr. Corley that looked at abdominal obesity and consumption of dietary antioxidants, fruits and vegetables in connection with Barrett’s Esophagus. It found that people can reduce their risk of Barrett’s Esophagus by eating eight servings of fruits and vegetables a day and maintaining a normal body weight.
“My advice to people trying to prevent Barrett’s Esophagus is: keep a normal body weight and follow a diet high in antioxidants and high in fruits and vegetables,” Corley said. “We already knew that red wine was good for the heart, so perhaps here is another added benefit of a healthy lifestyle and a single glass of wine a day.”
Researchers noted, though, that the protective effect of wine in terms of preventing Barrett’s Esophagus was greatest with just one or two glasses a day. The protective effect of wine did not increase with higher consumption.
“It’s not actually clear that treating the acid reflux will necessarily prevent getting someone from getting Barrett’s Esophagus,” said Dr. Corley. “The best way to prevent reflux is to maintain a normal weight.”
Authors of the study include: Ai Kubo, T. R. Levin, Gregory Rumore, Charles P. Quesenberry, Jr., of the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland, Gladys Block and Patricia Buffler of the School of Public Health, University of California-Berkeley.
Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha
A hundred years ago, these chemicals did not even exist. Today, bisphenol A, phthalates, PFOA, formaldehyde and even PDBE (polybrominated diphenyl ether) can be found in nearly all of the millions of homes in the United States. These chemicals are used everywhere from carpets to plastic bottles to cushions and even baby mattresses. These chemicals are also added to shampoos, hair waxes, makeup… You name it and the pharmaceutical industry has been able to add these chemicals to it.
Bisphenol A
This chemical is the foundation of nearly unbreakable and clear polycarbonate plastics. Epoxy resins also contain bisphenol A. As such, this chemical is found in every plastic product that requires heat-resistant and unbreakable clear plastics, like baby bottles, clear food containers, the hard lids of jars, compact discs like DVDs and even sealants used to prevent further tooth decay.
Babies that drink milk from plastic bottles, cups and glasses have been exposed. Dental patients with sealants that have been made with bisphenol A too have absorbed the chemical. In a recent CDCP study, a staggering 93% of all test subjects were positive for bisphenol A (through urine testing).
Long term studies suggest that prolonged exposure to this chemical can affect male sexual function. Other studies point to its potentially harmful effects to the human endocrine system. It turns out that this chemical can mimic estrogen, the naturally occurring female hormone that exists in both males and females. If there is a chemical that mimics estrogen, then the body will experience a chemical imbalance – and we all know what chemical imbalances can do to the body. According to the FDA, this chemical can also cause negative effects to fetuses.
Phthalates
Phthalates is used as a plastic softener and binding agent. This chemical is used on personal care products like shampoos & conditioners. It is also used in materials used in interior decoration, like vinyl tiles and bathroom curtains. Drugs that are time-released are also coated with phthalates.
Because of its widespread use, the chemical is absorbed readily by the body with every use of any product that has the chemical. A new study performed by researchers from the Mount Sinai Center reported the possible link between prenatal exposure to the chemical and ADHD. In other researchers and animal studies, this chemical has also been linked to the disruption of the endocrine system and sexual development in males.
Recently, the United States government has put a ban on six types of this class of chemicals that are used on products like toys. To reduce exposure to this chemical, avoid personal care products that only list ‘fragrance’ in the list of materials or ingredients. Such products may have phthalates added. You may want personal care products that actually list what they use for fragrance – there are a lot of products from companies that do not hide the chemicals they use.
PFOA
PFOA is used to manufacture products like Teflon. As such, it is found in products that make use of Teflon, like pots, pans, ladles, etc. This chemical is also added to carpeting materials, furniture and a host of other products that are wildly disassociated with each other in function.
The chemical can be also be released into the immediate environment once the products containing it are destroyed. Current research suggests that Teflon-coated cookware tend to give off vapors, which can contaminate the food being cooked in or with the Teflon-lined wares.
The chemical can also be absorbed directly through the inhalation of polluted air. In animal trials, PFOA is a known carcinogen that actually causes cancerous growths and physical development problems. To reduce your exposure to PFOA, you may opt not to use Teflon-coated cookware (use stainless steel pots, pans and ladles instead). Also, keep your heat to medium-high to reduce the vapors created when Teflon comes into contact with heat.
Formaldehyde
Formaldehyde is used in different types of adhesives, panelings, construction boards and pressed-fabric products. Exposure to this chemical is usually through direct contact with products containing the chemical. Also, cigarette smoke and car exhaust contains formaldehyde. Formaldehyde can cause allergic reactions that can affect the entire respiratory tract. To reduce exposure, furniture should be made from exterior grade wood. This doesn’t mean that the furniture will not emit formaldehyde; exterior grade wood just emits less of the chemical.
PDBE
PDBE is a class of chemicals that are added to products to reduce flammability. Products like mattresses, foams, pillows, blankets and even coverings used for furniture are ‘enhanced’ with PDBE. According to recent statistics, about twelve million pounds of the chemical is manufactured on a yearly basis – and the chemical does not break down that quickly. EPA studies show that this chemical can cause damage to people’s kidneys and livers. Since PDBE can also be inhaled through dust, remove dust produced by old and new furniture. Also, avoid buying products that list PDBE as a fire retardant.
Nature to the rescue: detoxify with wheat grass
Wheatgrass is basically a young wheat plant. For decades, the grass has been used as food by man. And there is more reasons to enjoy wheatgrass today because it actually detoxifies the body and provides other benefits as well:
Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha 7th June 2010
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