Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) expressed concern over recent reports that radioactivity from the ongoing Fukushima accident is present in the Japanese food supply. While all food contains radionuclides, whether from natural sources, nuclear testing or otherwise, the increased levels found in Japanese spinach and milk pose health risks to the population. PSR also expressed alarm over the level of misinformation circulating in press reports about the degree to which radiation exposure can be considered "safe."

According to the National Academy of Sciences, there are no safe doses of radiation. Decades of research show clearly that any dose of radiation increases an individual's risk for the development of cancer.

"There is no safe level of radionuclide exposure, whether from food, water or other sources. Period," said Jeff Patterson, DO, immediate past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility. "Exposure to radionuclides, such as iodine-131 and cesium-137, increases the incidence of cancer. For this reason, every effort must be taken to minimize the radionuclide content in food and water."

Summertime sees the greatest number of patients hospitalized for a common and sometimes painful digestive problem called diverticulitis, a new study finds.

The results are puzzling researchers already stumped by this disease.

"It's been a mystery for a number of years," said study author Dr. Rocco Ricciardi, adding that nobody knows for sure what triggers the problem.

In diverticulitis, tiny pouches bulge out from the lower intestine and become inflamed, which can cause fever and stomachache.

Nearly 300,000 people are hospitalized for it every year in the U.S.

Ricciardi, a colon surgeon at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Massachusetts, had noticed that more of his patients seemed to have flare-ups during the summer.

Gender-bending chemicals found in non-stick pans and food packaging are linked to early menopause, scientists say.

A major study has shown that women with the highest levels of the substances in their bodies go through 'the change' sooner than women with low levels.

PFCs, or perfluorocarbons, are found throughout the home.

They are breathed in via dust or vapour, or eaten in food, and have been linked to thyroid cancer, immune system problems and heart disease.

Many researchers believe they also act as hormone disrupters in the body.

They repel water and fat, and so have been used to make non-stick cookware, greaseproof food packaging and stain-resistant sprays for clothes and carpets.

The company 3M stopped using the chemicals in Scotchgard in 2002 due to health concerns. DuPont, manufacturer of Teflon, has agreed to phase them out by 2015.

The latest study looked at levels of PFCs in blood samples from 26,000 U.S. women.

The researchers, from West Virginia University, found levels were highest in women aged over 42 who had gone through the menopause.

Women in this age group with high levels of PFCs also had 'significantly lower' concentration of the female hormone oestrogen, the scientists report in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.

Recently a report was issued by the Department of Health which warned that the outbreak of a new influenza epidemic was one of the greatest threats facing the UK and it would be difficult to stop it as vaccines would take months to develop.

It also suspected that the half of the population was under the danger of developing symptoms of the disease which would flood the hospitals with patients costing the economy around £28billion.

Authorities have issued an official advice in the form of the UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy 2011 and officials are taking it seriously as around one million people died because of H1N1 virus in 2009.

When my husband and I set out to find a nursery school for our daughter, Faith, nearly ten years ago we took the decision seriously. I looked at large parent-run cooperatives and visited small home-based operations. Jeff studied the pink towers and chiming bells at the Montessori school on the hill and considered the wonder balls and wooden fairies at the Waldorf school in the valley. In the end, we chose a nursery school that operated out of a community center close to home. There was a frog pond out front and a play structure out back. The trees were full of chickadees and nuthatches. We had weighed many considerations in the decision-making process, and we all, Faith included, were happy about it.

That is, until I discovered that, like many of its kind, the school's beloved play structure - with its wooden gangway, turrets, and tunnels  - was made out of pressure-treated lumber, which, at the time, contained arsenic, a carcinogen. A bladder carcinogen, in fact. I am a bladder cancer survivor. I am familiar with this particular disease and all the ongoing medical surveillance it requires. So, after a lot of research and discussion, we eventually decided to move our daughter to a different nursery school. The risk of doing nothing just seemed too high.

Seven years later, the Environmental Protection Agency released its final risk assessment for children who regularly contact wood impregnated with chromated copper arsenate. The conclusion: children who play frequently on pressure-treated play sets and decks (we had one of those, too) experience, over their lifetimes, elevated cancer risks. Ergo, our precautionary decision as parents to dis-enroll our daughter had been a wise one. And yet, because the EPA stopped short of recalling pre-existing play structures and decks when it outlawed arsenic-treated lumber for residential use in 2004, the old play structure at our old nursery school still stands.

There is a jingle that goes: "The whiter the bread, the sooner you're dead!"

Bread has been called the "staff of life." Unfortunately these days most folks consume grain in its refined state and this staple contains little to no nutritive properties and cannot support animal or human life.

Wheat is the key ingredient in the American diet. But after being milled, it is seldom utilized in its whole form with its components intact. Invariably, when we eat wheat, we get it in the form of bread, pies, cakes, cookies, biscuits, spaghetti, cream of wheat, cereals, and other forms that have been treated, heated, fractioned, and fragmented until it is next to impossible to recognize it for what it was originally.

A refined grain, or its product, is made by processing a natural, whole grain so that some or most of the nutrients are lost. Almost all grain products have been refined in some way or another.

White rice, cream of wheat, cookies, and bowls of snap-crackle-and-pop each morning are all examples of refined grain products.

Tel Aviv University researcher warns that it isn't 'all in the genes'.

When the Human Genome Project ended a decade ago, scientists thought that they'd closed the lid on all that's to be known about our genes. But what they really did was open a Pandora's Box, says theoretical evolutionary biologist Prof. Eva Jablonka of Tel Aviv University's Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas.

After sifting through hundreds of scientific studies concerned with epigenetics, Prof. Jablonka concludes that some of the effects of stress, cancer, and other chronic diseases we suffer from may be passed on to our offspring through deep and complicated underlying cellular mechanisms that we are just now beginning to understand.


Prof. Jablonka will discuss her findings at an epigenetics conference in North Carolina later this month.

The invisible threat

Epigenetic research suggests that the effects of stress and environmental pollution can be passed on to future generations without any obvious change or mutation in our DNA. The problem, Prof. Jablonka points out, is that we have no idea of the extent these effects will have on the human genome of the future.

"I am a story teller. I read a lot of information and develop theories about evolution. For the last 25 years, before it became a fad, I was interested in the transmission of information not dependent on DNA variations," Dr. Jablonka says. "Epigenetic inheritance is information about us that is not explicitly encoded in our genes. Two individuals may have identical genes, but the genes present very different characteristics. They can be genetically identical but different epigenetically."

The Japanese government on Wednesday urged people not to eat 11 types of vegetable grown near the quake-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in northeast Japan after levels of radioactivity in the produces were found to have far exceeded legal limits.

The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry said consumers should avoid eating potentially contaminated vegetables grown near the faltering power plant, including broccoli, spinach, cabbage and cauliflower.

The advisory from the ministry came following consultations with the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan.

The ministry said the vegetables should not be consumed for the time being and noted that the National Federation of Agricultural Cooperative Associations has halted shipments of potentially contaminated produce as of Monday.

The good doctor was frustrated.

Dr. David Cull, a prominent vascular surgeon in Greenville, had invented a small valve system that, if it works, could spare 300,000 dialysis patients across the country enormous suffering and save U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars.

But Cull's hometown senator, Jim DeMint, would not write a letter supporting the surgeon's application for a federal grant under the landmark health care bill that President Barack Obama signed into law a year ago today.

A hard-core conservative with a growing national following, DeMint vowed in 2009 to make health care Obama's "Waterloo" and is leading Republican efforts in Congress to repeal or deny funding to the law, designed to provide medical coverage to 31 million uninsured Americans.

Backing a grant application under the law - even for a constituent who lives in the same Upstate town as DeMint - would leave the senator open to charges of hypocrisy, staffers say.

Japanese authorities advised against allowing infants to drink tap water in Tokyo due to raised radiation levels and the United States became the first nation to block some food imports from Japan.

The crisis at the tsunami-smashed nuclear power plant, 250 km (150 miles) north of the Japanese capital, appeared far from over with workers attempting to gain control ordered to leave the site after black smoke began rising from one of its six reactors.

The plant was crippled by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami on March 11. Some 23,000 people have been left dead or missing.

Tokyo authorities said water at a purification plant for the capital of 13 million people had 210 becquerels of radioactive iodine -- more than twice the safety level for infants.

"This is without doubt, an effect of the Fukushima Daiichi plant," a Tokyo metropolitan government official said, referring to the nuclear power station.

Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, however, said the radiation level posed no immediate health risk and water could still be used.

"But for infants under age one, I would like them to refrain from using tap water to dilute baby formula," he said.

International concerns about food safety are growing, with the United States the latest to impose controls. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it was stopping imports of milk, vegetable and fruit from four prefectures in the vicinity of the crippled nuclear plant.