MICHELLE ROBERTS, Health Editor - BBC News (U.K.)
Stephan: Here is a view of cancer that you may not have considered.
One in six cancers – two million a year globally – are caused by largely treatable or preventable infections, new estimates suggest.
The Lancet Oncology review, which looked at incidence rates for 27 cancers in 184 countries, found four main infections are responsible.
These four – human papillomaviruses, Helicobacter pylori and hepatitis B and C viruses – account for 1.9m cases of cervical, gut and liver cancers.
Most cases are in the developing world.
The team from the International Agency for Research on Cancer in France says more efforts are needed to tackle these avoidable cases and recognise cancer as a communicable disease.
‘Preventable’
The proportion of cancers related to infection is about three times higher in parts of the developing world, such as east Asia, than in developed countries like the UK – 22.9% versus 7.4%, respectively.
Nearly a third of cases occur in people younger than 50 years.
Among women, cancer of the cervix accounted for about half of the infection-related cancers. In men, more than 80% were liver and gastric cancers.
Drs Catherine de Martel and Martyn Plummer, who led the research, said: ‘Infections with certain viruses, bacteria, and parasites are some of the biggest and preventable causes of cancer worldwide
‘Application of existing public-health methods for […]
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DINA RASOR, - Truthout.org
Stephan: This is the latest in the emerging new American slavery trend (See my essay The New American Slavery http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2811%2900043-7/fulltext)
The corruption this trend represents is vast, and the misery it is causing can hardly be over-emphasized. This is yet another attempt to privatize a public system and turn it into a profit machine for a small group of individuals and corporations who have purchased politicians.
Just to set the stage as to how large the prison population is in the United States: our prison population is the highest in the world; one out of 100 US residents are in prison. This number has grown dramatically since 1990, due to tighter crime laws and longer sentences. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), ‘Between 1970 and 2005, the number of people incarcerated in the United States grew by 700 percent. Today, the United States incarcerates approximately 2.3 million people.’
The private prison population has also been exploding. From the ACLU:
Even compared to this breathtaking rate of overall growth in incarceration, the rate of expansion of for-profit imprisonment far outpaced the field, accounting for a disproportionate increase in the number of people locked up. In 1980, private adult prisons did not exist on American soil, but by 1990 private prison companies had established a firm foothold, boasting 67 for-profit facilities and an average daily population of roughly 7,000 prisoners. During the next twenty years (from 1990 to 2009) the number of people incarcerated in private prisons increased by more than 1600%, growing from approximately 7,000 to approximately 129,000 inmates.
The largest private prison company, […]
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ERIN FLEMMING, Business Reporter - The Seattle Times
Stephan: I hope this becomes a trend because it offers a major alternative to landfills.
PCC Natural Markets is unveiling Tuesday a new alternative for dealing with food waste at its Issaquah location.
For the past two years, the local grocery co-op has been working with WISErg, a Washington startup developing a ‘harvester’ machine to convert food waste into liquid fertilizer. All nine PCC locations will carry the fertilizer, a brown liquid the consistency of water.
Diana Crane, director of sustainability at PCC, said the co-op is testing the device and will soon decide whether to continue the partnership with WISErg.
She said the company was excited to participate in the pilot project.
‘There was no downside for us,’ she said. Once the harvester is commercially available, she said, ‘I think people will be beating down their doors.’
After working together at Microsoft, Jose Lugo and Larry LeSueur, co-founders of Issaquah-based WISErg, left in 2005 to independently pursue other projects. They both ended up looking into the possibilities of green projects involving anaerobic digestion - essentially composting without air.
In 2009, they reconnected through a mutual friend and formed WISErg, in the hopes of creating a new way to deal with food waste.
Similar anaerobic digesters have been used in agriculture and wastewater-treatment plants for years, but Lugo and LeSueur said they […]
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, - Acoustical Society of America (ASA)
Stephan: Like me I am sure you have sat in restaurants or in parties trying to hear what people are saying to you. This is the first research to address the issue.
For the ears, a cocktail party presents a chaotic scene: glasses clink, voices buzz, light piano music may waft down from the stage. A group of researchers at The John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., is trying to understand how the brain makes sense of such complex auditory environments. The team is testing how humans track sound patterns over time, and under what circumstances the brain registers that the pattern has been broken. The researchers will present preliminary findings at the Acoustics 2012 meeting in Hong Kong, May 13-18, a joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), Acoustical Society of China, Western Pacific Acoustics Conference, and the Hong Kong Institute of Acoustics.
‘When a person hears a sound, both what we call ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ processes occur in the brain,
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PETER J. BOYER and PETER SCHWEIZER, - Newsweek
Stephan: This is a measure of the level of corruption that permeates the mid to upper levels of our government. In essence there is no difference between the corporations and the government. The players go from one to another, and back again. Their kids go the same schools, they play golf at the same clubs, vacation in the same places, eat in the same restaurants.
Maybe the banks are too big to jail. Or maybe Washington’s revolving door is at work.
Obama’s 2009 White House summit with finance titans, in which the president warned that only he was standing ‘between you and the pitchforks’
Why, despite widespread outrage, financial-fraud prosecutions by the Department of Justice are at 20-year lows
Attorney General Eric Holder’s lucrative ties to a top-tier law firm whose marquee clients include some of finance’s worst offenders
How Obama’s trumpeted ‘task force
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