Health & WellnessS


Attention

The CDC says: Teen girls have the highest STD rate

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

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

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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Vaccines and Pregnancy Do Not Mix

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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Genetic Variation Linked to Individual Empathy, Stress Levels

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© iStockphoto/Andrey ProkhorovA 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).

Family

Are Teenagers Wired Differently from Adults?

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

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.

Health

Fluoridation Increases Infant Death Rates

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© 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.

Syringe

What the Inventor of the Flu Shot NOW Thinks of the Vaccine...

President Obama and his top health officials are engaging in a major public relations effort to divert attention away from whether its swine flu vaccine is effective and safe by focusing attention on whether there is enough of it to go around. And the media is cooperating fully.

Increasing numbers of scientists and doctors are issuing harsh criticisms of the government's plan to vaccinate virtually the entire U.S. population with a poorly tested vaccine that is not only ineffective against swine flu, but could cripple and even kill many more people than it helps.

The CDC's public relations campaign has been running "scare" ads that portray swine flu as a full-blown "pandemic" responsible for snuffing out countless lives. But scientists and health officials throughout the world have called the governments claims unjustified and deliberately misleading.

Global Research, October 29, 2009

Health

Ukraine Flu Outbreak: Virus Is a Mixture of H1N1 and Parainfluenza, Causes Cardiopulmonary Failure

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© UnknownProfessor Victor Bachinsky
The Head of the Chernivtsi regional forensic bureau, Professor Victor Bachinsky M.D. makes a strong statement: all the victims of the virus in Bukovina (22 persons aged 20 to 40 years) died not from bilateral (double) pneumonia, as previously thought, but as a result of viral distress syndrome, i.e. the total destruction of the lungs. We caught up with Professor Bachinsky, to find out how he came to this conclusion, and how people can protect themselves from this disease.

Based on autopsies, we have come to the conclusion: it's not pneumonia, but cardiopulmonary insufficiency and cardiogenic shock... The virus enters directly into the lungs, there is bleeding... Antibiotics should not be used...

Why do we have such a high mortality rate in the country?
Because people are going to pharmacies to get medicine instead of going to their doctors to be treated... No it is not pneumonic plague. It's all nonsense... antibiotics do not help... Those with strong immune systems will survive. People with weak immune systems will succumb to the illness... Face Masks provide 30% extra protection. Wearing glasses gives an additional 10% protection, that is 40%, because the virus penetrates the mucose membranes.