Health & WellnessS


Light Saber

The Poisoned Pet Food Caper

The poisoning of pet food, as a stand-alone event, could reasonably be assumed. Such a mistake could happen and by terrible accident. But the problem is that pets, and their extraordinary numbers in American hearts and households, bother a lot of "non-profits," community "partnerships," emergency responders, and other such governmental agencies (making note that most everything is now a governmental agency). Couple this with the fact that "experimentation" upon the American people, soldiers, inmates, and people in many, many other nations of the "over-populated world" is common place, on-going, and a corporation government status quo.

Comment: Population reduction has long been a desire of the TPTB that surfaces and is rationalized in topics such as 'Peak Oil' and 'Sustainable population so that we humans don't destroy the planet'.

Perhaps this 'contamination' is a trial run of sorts and the next one will be focused on people.


Ambulance

Canadian mumps outbreak reaches Toronto

Health officials have issued a warning on an outbreak of mumps that has already infected three people in Toronto and could hit hundreds more, the city's public health agency said on Wednesday.

The three confirmed cases occurred after two university students returned to Toronto from the east coast city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and passed it to one of their friends. That person then unknowingly exposed about 300 others to the virus at a busy downtown Toronto bar last week, Toronto Public Health officials said.

Red Flag

Diabetes drug use by US children surges

Soaring obesity in US ­children is creating a dramatic increase in the number taking medicines for type-II diabetes and those with diabetes-related conditions, according to a Financial Times analysis of prescription data.

The analysis, for the FT by Medco, the largest US drug benefits manager, found the number of children taking medicine for Type-II diabetes more than doubled between 2001 and 2005.

Health

All Pregnant Women Tested Had At Least One Kind Of Pesticide In Their Placenta, According To Researcher

Human beings are directly responsible for more than 110,000 chemical substances which have been generated since the Industrial Revolution. Every year, we "invent" more than 2,000 new substances, most of them contaminants, which are emitted into the environment and which are consequently present in food, air, soil and water. Nonetheless, human beings are also victims of these emissions, and involuntarily (what is known in this scientific field as "inadvertent exposure"). Every day humans ingest many of these substances which cannot be assimilated by our body, and are accumulated in the fatty parts of our tissues.

Health

US: Another Chemical Emerges in Pet Food Case

A second industrial chemical that regulators have found in contaminated pet food in the United States may have also been intentionally added to animal feed by producers seeking larger profits, according to interviews with chemical industry officials here.

Three Chinese chemical makers said that producers of animal feed often purchase or seek to purchase a chemical called cyanuric acid from their factories to blend into animal feed.

Stop

Chromium in US drinking water causes cancer

A type of chromium highlighted in the film "Erin Brockovich" causes cancer in lab animals when they drink it in water, and it could be harmful to people, the U.S. National Institutes of Health said on Wednesday.

Hexavalent chromium, also called chromium 6, already has been shown to cause lung cancer when inhaled and is controlled by the Environmental Protection Agency as well as by states.

Health

West Nile hitting harder than believed

West Nile virus has prompted a long-term crash in the population of bluebirds, crows and other bird species that once dominated the suburban landscape, according to a new study that dashes hopes that the disease might cause only a temporary drop.

©Centers for Disease Control
Culex quinquefasciatus mosquito (Centers for Disease Control)

Coffee

Nutrition and heredity are genetically linked

A challenging goal in biology is to understand how the principal cellular functions are integrated so that cells achieve viability and optimal fitness under a wide range of nutritional conditions. Scientists from the French research centers INRA and CNRS showed by genetic approaches that, in the model bacterium Bacillus subtilis, central carbon metabolism (which generates energy from nutrients) and replication (which synthesizes DNA), two key functions in the fields of nutrition and heredity, are tightly linked. The results appear in the May 16th issue of the online, peer-reviewed, open-access journal PLoS ONE.

The discovered link involves the activity of a small region of the central carbon metabolism (the terminal reactions of a process called glycolysis that burns sugars) and several enzymes of the replication machinery that synthesizes DNA. It is proposed that the link depends on metabolic signals generated as a function of the activity of the terminal reactions of glycolysis which are sensed, directly or indirectly, by replication enzymes. This system would then adjust the speed of DNA synthesis and the stability of the replication machinery to the nutritional richness of the environment, and thus to the cell's growth rate.

Bulb

UC Irvine researchers reveal first images of brain changes associated with memory

University of California, Irvine researchers have developed the first images of the physical changes in brain cells thought to underlie memory, a discovery that is already uncovering clues about memory loss linked to cognitive disorders.

Three decades of work by neuroscientists have established that a physiological effect known as long-term potentiation (LTP) encodes everyday forms of memory. In the Journal of Neuroscience today, a UC Irvine research team led by neuroscientists Christine M. Gall and Gary Lynch presents these unique images, which show that the size and shape of synapses were changed by LTP.

"The way is now open to mapping where in the brain memories are laid down," said Lynch, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior. "Seeing memory-related physical changes to synapses means that we can at last use mouse models to test if the effects of retardation, aging and various cognitive disorders involve a specific, long-suspected defect in the connections between cortical neurons."

Magic Wand

Hyperactivity and academic achievement could be linked by genetics

Children who are hyperactive tend to do worse academically than their peers who are not hyperactive. Although the relationship between such behaviors as overactivity, impulsivity, and inattentiveness in children and poor achievement in math, reading, language, and other areas has been well documented, little is known about the reasons for this link. New research shows that the tie may be due to genetic influences.

The study, conducted by researchers at Boston University and at the Social Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry in London, appears in the May/June 2007 issue of the journal Child Development. The researchers examined the extent to which common genetic and environmental factors operate across hyperactivity and achievement in nearly 2,000 7-year-old pairs of twins taking part in the U.K.-based Twins Early Development Study. In the study, both parents and teachers provided ratings of twins' hyperactive behavior problems (e.g., restlessness, fidgeting, distractibility, impulsivity, and attention span). Academic achievement was based on teacher assessments of English and mathematics skills conducted at the end of the first year of primary school (equivalent to first grade in the United States).