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Attention

Fearless 3-Year-Olds Might Be Tomorrow's Criminals

Michelle Lodge
HealthDay
Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:44 UTC
Image
© Tsuneo Yamashita/Getty
Afraid is better
Children who are fearless at 3 years of age might just be poised for a life of crime.

According to a new study, poor fear conditioning at the tender age of 3 can predispose that person to break the law as an adult. Yet other factors, such as education of the parents, large family size, nutrition, physical activity, configuration of the household and other elements also play a role, the researchers concluded.

"There's no 100 percent correspondence between conditioning deficits and crime: Not all poor conditioners will become criminals and not all criminals have the early fear conditioning deficits," explained study author Yu Gao, a research associate in the department of criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. His findings are published in the Nov. 16 online issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.
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Red Flag

Foodborne Illness Impact Hard to Assess


United Press International
Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:29 UTC
Foodborne illness is under reported, has inadequate follow-up and a lack of research making its impact difficult to assess, a U.S. non-profit group says.

The report by the The Center for Foodborne Illness Research & Prevention documents what is known about the long-term health outcomes associated with several foodborne illnesses.

"Foodborne illness is a serious public health issue in the 21st century," report author Tanya Roberts, chairwoman of the center's board of directors, said in a statement.
"But the vast majority of these illnesses are never reported to public health agencies, leaving us with many unanswered questions about the impact that foodborne illness is having on different populations, particularly young children and the elderly."
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Attention

The CDC says: Teen girls have the highest STD rate


UPI.com
Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:23 UTC
Atlanta -- More than 400,000 U.S. teen girls ages 15-19 were infected with the sexually transmitted diseases of chlamydia and gonorrhea in 2008, health officials say.

The annual report on sexually transmitted diseases released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta Monday found more than 1.5 million cases of chlamydia and gonorrhea were reported last year.
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Magnify

Phthalate Warning: Medications Contain Chemicals that "Feminize" Unborn Baby Boys

Mike Adams
NaturalNews
Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:00 UTC
In a bombshell finding that has far-reaching implications for society and culture, scientists at the University of Rochester have found that phthalates -- the chemical found in many vinyl and plastic products -- tends to "feminize" boys, altering their brains to express more feminine characteristics. The study has been published in the Journal of Andrology.

Phthalates are found in vinyl products (including vinyl flooring), PVC shower curtains, plastic furniture and even in the plastic coating of the insides of dishwashing machines.

The feminization process happens during pregnancy when phthalate exposure causes hormone disruptions in the unborn baby. This chemical feminizes males by disrupting the action of the hormone testosterone.

In this recent study, researchers found a strong correlation between the types of toys that male children play with and the level of phthalates found in their mothers when they were pregnant. Researchers discovered that boys exposed to high levels of phthalates in the womb tend to avoid playing with cars, trains or toy guns. They also avoided rough play, instead preferring more feminine toys and activities. (Barbie?)
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Magnify

Cancer Screening is Essentially Useless; Experts Finally Begin Questioning Sanity of "Routine Screening"

David Gutierrez
NaturalNews
Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:00 UTC
Cancer experts are expressing increasing concern over the explosion of campaigns urging people to get regularly screened for a wide variety of cancers, warning that such programs may do more harm than good.

"It is a real problem," said Otis W. Brawley of the American Cancer Society. "They are doing things that might actually harm the people they want to help."

Brawley made his comments about supporters of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Shultz's bill that would mandate an education program to promote breast cancer self-screening among young women. But the comments could just as easily apply to supporters of the American Urological Association's ad campaign urging prostate cancer screening, or the Light of Life Foundation's ads promoting screening for thyroid cancer.

There are now campaigns to promote regular screening for nearly every variety of cancer, based on the widespread popular belief that early detection of cancer is important in saving lives. Yet experts note that for the vast majority of cancers, there is little support for this belief.
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Magnify

Vaccines and Pregnancy Do Not Mix

Paul Fassa
NaturalNews
Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:00 UTC
From an internet forum:
"I got both vaccines [seasonal and swine flu] on Thursday. I was 9 weeks pregnant. I miscarried on Sunday. I was told by several doctors to get these vaccines. Now I wish I followed my gut feeling and not get them at ALL!"
This is not an isolated case.

Here's another report:
"I feel like I had a healthy baby and I caused this by getting the H1N1 vaccine. My doctors pushed it. I researched online and there have been many miscarriages after the H1N1 vaccine but they haven't been reported since it is hard to say what caused the miscarriages."
She researched online, the only source reporting vaccination tragedies throughout the world.
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Magnify

Genetic Variation Linked to Individual Empathy, Stress Levels


ScienceDaily
Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:00 UTC
Image
© iStockphoto/Andrey Prokhorov
A genetic variation may contribute to how empathetic a human is, and how that person reacts to stress.
Researchers have discovered a genetic variation that may contribute to how empathetic a human is, and how that person reacts to stress. In the first study of its kind, a variation in the hormone/neurotransmitter oxytocin's receptor was linked to a person's ability to infer the mental state of others.

Interestingly, this same genetic variation also related to stress reactivity. These findings could have a significant impact in adding to the body of knowledge about the importance of oxytocin, and its link to conditions such as autism and unhealthy levels of stress.

Sarina Rodrigues, an assistant professor of psychology at Oregon State University, and Laura Saslow, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, published their findings in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
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Family

Are Teenagers Wired Differently from Adults?


ScienceDaily
Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:00 UTC
Parents have long suspected that the brains of their teenagers function differently from those of adults. With the advent of magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, we have begun to appreciate how the brain continues to develop structurally through adolescence and on into adulthood.

High emotionality is a characteristic of adolescents and researchers are trying to understand how 'emotional areas' of the brain differ between adults and adolescents. Scientists from the National Institute of Mental Health, publishing in the November 15th issue of Elsevier's Biological Psychiatry, have helped to advance our understanding. They studied the amygdala, the major emotional center in the brain, which undergoes structural reorganization during adolescence. To do so, they examined emotional learning in both juvenile and adult mice.

"Our work on the amygdala revealed that the neuronal pathways that carry sensory information to the amygdala directly, bypassing cortex, are more plastic in the juvenile than in adult mice," explained senior author Alexei Morozov, PhD.
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Magnify

Monetary Gain and High-Risk Tactics Stimulate Activity in the Brain


ScienceDaily
Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:00 UTC
Monetary gain stimulates activity in the brain. Even the mere possibility of receiving a reward is known to activate an area of the brain called the striatum.

A team of Japanese researchers report in the January 2010 issue of Cortex, published by Elsevier, the results of a study in which they measured striatum activation in volunteers performing a monetary task and found high-risk/high-gain options to cause higher levels of activation than more conservative options. They also found levels of activation to increase with the amount of money owned.

Dr. Tadashi Ino and colleagues, from the Department of Neurology at the Rakuwakai-Otowa Hospital and the Research Center for Nano Medical Engineering at Kyoto University, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study hemodynamic changes in the brains of 17 healthy volunteers performing a monetary task.

The volunteers were given an initial stock of money and then required repetitively to press one of two buttons, which resulted in either an increase or decrease of the money stock, depending on whether their choice agreed or disagreed with a number that appeared randomly after the button had been pressed. One button was a low-risk option and the other involved high-risk, so that more money was gained or lost when choosing the high-risk option. The volunteers were also able to keep track of the total money stock throughout the task.
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Health

Fluoridation Increases Infant Death Rates


Voxy News Engine
Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:35 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Fluoridation causes more premature births, one of the top causes of infant death in the USA. It poses the greatest risk to poor non-white mothers and babies. This is the finding State University of New York researchers from data spanning 1993 to 2002.

Research in Chile in the 1970s also showed fluoridation caused an increase in infant death rates. Chile stopped fluoridation as a result.

A baby born at least 3 weeks early is classified as premature - accounting for about 12 percent of US births.
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