Thursday, June 27th, 2013
LUISA DILLNER , - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: So many women I have known use talcum powder that I thought I had better publish this report.
Traditionally used on babies’ bottoms and by older women, talcum powder is a soft, sweet-smelling way of keeping skin dry and avoiding rashes. Yet it may have more troubling effects. Research has been rumbling on for more than a decade, looking at whether the talc in talcum powder can cause cancer. Last week a study pooling the results of eight research papers involving almost 2,000 women found an increased risk of between 20% and 30% for ovarian cancer in women who used talc for what some newspapers reporting the study call ‘intimate personal hygiene’ but doctors call the genital area. So should we stop dusting talc?
The solution
The talc in talcum powder comes from the crushing, drying and milling of mined talc rocks and contains minerals such as magnesium and silicon. Such products used to contain asbestos (which causes mesotheliomas – rare cancers of the tissues around the lungs). Now all talcum powder is free of it, although it still has minute fibres that take years to dissolve.
Talcum powder absorbs moisture and reduces friction – which is why it protects skin. It can also travel, and is easy to inhale when you’re pouring it on. When applied to the genital area […]
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Thursday, June 27th, 2013
FRED RICH, - Huffington Post
Stephan: I know from the correspondence I get that a number of my conservative readers think I am a bit daft because I say the Theocratic Right is dangerous. I feel this way because I, like the Founders, believe that an absolute firewall between religion and the state is essential for a healthy democracy.
I have done stories on Spanking for Jesus, the Quiverful Movement, the endless attempts to force a theological agenda into public education, the equally endless attempts to subordinate women, and insert religious views, via a religiously influenced state, into the health choices available to women. It is this movement, and its corporate funders, that is the source of the willful ignorance that blocks us from doing anything about climate change. Just how big it is may surprise you.
It’s been just over a year since the American public observed — many of us with morbid fascination and increasing alarm — the Republican primary debates of the last election. Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, Perry and Santorum all pandered to their Teavangelical supporters and brought their religious and culture war agenda to the center of the national stage. With those debates fading from memory, it’s tempting to conclude that this flexing of muscle by the religious right was an aberration, swept aside by President Obama’s second victory.
But is that right? Have those passions faded? A YouGov Omnibus poll conducted this spring provides the answer: not at all. When asked whether they would favor or oppose establishing Christianity as the official state religion in their state, 34% of respondents were in favor (with 20% ‘strongly’ in favor). You read that correctly: 34% in favor of establishing Christianity as the state religion, as in creating a theocracy. There’s more: when asked whether they would favor an amendment to the U.S. Constitution making Christianity the official religion of the United States, 32% said yes. This was a national poll; imagine what the numbers must have been in Alabama, Kansas, and Oklahoma.
Also this spring, a […]
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Wednesday, June 26th, 2013
JEFF GOODELL, - Rolling Stone
Stephan:
When the water receded after Hurricane Milo of 2030, there was a foot of sand covering the famous bow-tie floor in the lobby of the FontaineÂbleau hotel in Miami Beach. A dead manatee floated in the pool where Elvis had once swum. Most of the damage occurred not from the hurricane’s 175-mph winds, but from the 24-foot storm surge that overwhelmed the low-lying city. In South Beach, the old art-deco buildings were swept off their foundations. Mansions on Star Island were flooded up to their cut-glass doorknobs. A 17-mile stretch of Highway A1A that ran along the famous beaches up to Fort Lauderdale disappeared into the Atlantic. The storm knocked out the wastewater-treatment plant on Virginia Key, forcing the city to dump hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage into Biscayne Bay. Tampons and condoms littered the beaches, and the stench of human excrement stoked fears of cholera. More than 800 people died, many of them swept away by the surging waters that submerged much of Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale; 13 people were killed in traffic accidents as they scrambled to escape the city after the news spread – falsely, it turned out – that one of the […]
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Wednesday, June 26th, 2013
THONGPRAKAISANG S, THIANTANAWAT A, RANGKADILOK N, SURIYO T, and SATAYAVIVAD J., - Food Chemical Toxicology
Stephan: This awful poison which Monsanto pushes with such enthusiasm is going to produce a generation of suffering. If the EPA, FDA, Department of Agriculture were doing their jobs protecting us as they should be doing, it would be off-the-market next week. But, as I am writing this, there is a RoundUp commercial running on the television.
I decided when I read this to use the abstract of the peer-reviewed journal, one of the leading journals in the field. I am sorry for the technical language, but I wanted to make clear this is not some lay journalist flying a kite. This is the best science we have.
Abstract
Glyphosate is an active ingredient of the most widely used herbicide and it is believed to be less toxic than other pesticides. However, several recent studies showed its potential adverse health effects to humans as it may be an endocrine disruptor. This study focuses on the effects of pure glyphosate on estrogen receptors (ERs) mediated transcriptional activity and their expressions. Glyphosate exerted proliferative effects only in human hormone-dependent breast cancer, T47D cells, but not in hormone-independent breast cancer, MDA-MB231 cells, at 10-12 to 10-6M in estrogen withdrawal condition. The proliferative concentrations of glyphosate that induced the activation of estrogen response element (ERE) transcription activity were 5-13 fold of control in T47D-KBluc cells and this activation was inhibited by an estrogen antagonist, ICI 182780, indicating that the estrogenic activity of glyphosate was mediated via ERs. Furthermore, glyphosate also altered both ERα and β expression. These results indicated that low and environmentally relevant concentrations of glyphosate possessed estrogenic activity. Glyphosate-based herbicides are widely used for soybean cultivation, and our results also found that there was an additive estrogenic effect between glyphosate and genistein, a phytoestrogen in soybeans. However, these additive effects of glyphosate contamination in soybeans need further animal study.
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Wednesday, June 26th, 2013
, - Agence France-Presse (France)/The Raw Story
Stephan: There are a great many reasons to encourage new mothers to breastfeed. Here is one I hadn't considered.
People breastfed as infants have a 24 percent better chance than their formula-fed counterparts of climbing the social ladder, said a study Tuesday.
Conversely, being fed mothers’ milk as a baby also reduced one’s chances of social demotion later in life by as much as 20 percent, said the findings published in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood.
‘Our study adds to evidence on the health benefits of breast feeding by showing that there may be lifelong social benefits,
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