Health & WellnessS


Family

UK: Children's Lives 'Harder Today'


BBC News
Sun, 01 Feb 2009 06:33 UTC
Children Playing
© BBC NewsThe report sets out ways to improve the lives of children.
Children's lives are more difficult now than they were in the past, according to the largest survey into childhood ever to be conducted in the UK.

The finding comes despite the authors saying children have better education, health and more possessions.

It states children need to be loved and sets out recommendations to parents, teachers and the government on how they can better care for children.
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Bad Guys

Organic farming booby trapped: An overview in outline form

Linn Cohen-Cole
OpEdNews.com
Sun, 01 Feb 2009 05:39 UTC
Liberals, eager for an organic future in farming, have not seen the carefully-crafted corporate traps that, this year, are criminalizing and dismantling most aspects of farming. And there are ones still coming - attacks on the three things at the heart of organic farming - seeds, manure, and earthworms.

Manure (not chemical pesticides or fertilizers) is now listed as a source of seed contamination, a set up to ban its use for the sake of "food safety."

Farmers' seed storage areas are now listed as a source of seed contamination, a set up to require "FDA-certified facilities" beyond small farmers' means.

Earthworms are now listed as an invasive species, a set up to eradicate them through spraying, destroying the floor under everything - the soil.
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Health

Blue Light Destroys Antibiotic-resistant Staph Infection


Science Daily
Sun, 01 Feb 2009 02:37 UTC
Two common strains of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, commonly known as MRSA, were virtually eradicated in the laboratory by exposing them to a wavelength of blue light, in a process called photo-irradiation.

Antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections represent an important and increasing public health threat. At present, fewer than 5% of staphylococcal strains are susceptible to penicillin, while approximately 40%-50% of Staph aureus isolated have developed resistance to newer semisynthetic antibiotics such as methicillin as well.
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People

Women Who Love Psychopaths: Book Review

Carol Hoyer, PhD
News Blaze
Sat, 31 Jan 2009 21:16 UTC
WWLP
© Amazon
The authors have given us an excellent overview of how women get sucked into unhealthy relationships with men who are power hungry, controlling and have no concern or empathy for those whom they hurt. These are men who can harm an individual without killing them. Psychologist's and society call them sociopaths or psychopaths.

The detailed information on topics such as: understanding the psychopath; how men hook women into their dark world; the woman who is a high risk for getting into a relationship with a psychopath and stories from four women who were caught in this deceitful web.
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Laptop

Excessive Chatting on Facebook can lead to Depression in Teenage Girls

Chris Irvine
Telegraph
Sat, 31 Jan 2009 05:46 UTC
Girls can be prone to anxiety and depression by talking too much to their friends through texting, email and social networking sites such as Facebook.

Repeated conversations among adolescent girls, known as co-rumination, can be unhelpful, particularly if it is about romantic disappointments.

Frequently discussing the same problem can intensify into an unhealthy activity for those who use Facebook and other electronic means to obsess about it, according to the researchers.
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Health

Quebeckers launch class action over cancer cluster near military base

Rhéal Séguin
Globe & Mail
Sat, 31 Jan 2009 19:41 UTC
Marie-Paule Spieser lost her best friend to a rare form of liver cancer in September of 2000. As an experienced nurse in her mid-40s, Ms. Spieser knew something had to be wrong.

Her friend's husband had also been diagnosed with cancer and it seemed nearly every household in the neighbourhood where she lived was stricken with some form of the disease.

Then a few weeks later, just before Christmas, Ms. Spieser along with the 4,000 other residents of Shannon, a small town located just outside the Valcartier military base near Quebec City, learned that their water supply had been contaminated for years with the chemical solvent trichloroethylene, or TCE, a probable carcinogen.
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Heart - Black

Can a Person be Scared to Death?

Coco Ballantyne
Science American
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:53 UTC
Fear
© istockphoto.com/sculpiesScared to death: A terrifying situation can lead to fatal heart rhythms.
A 79-year-old woman dies in North Carolina after a heart attack brought on by terror.

A Charlotte, N.C., man was charged with first-degree murder of a 79-year-old woman whom police said he scared to death. In an attempt to elude cops after a botched bank robbery, the Associated Press reports that 20-year-old Larry Whitfield broke into and hid out in the home of Mary Parnell. Police say he didn't touch Parnell but that she died after suffering a heart attack that was triggered by terror. Can the fugitive be held responsible for the woman's death? Prosecutors said that he can under the state's so-called felony murder rule, which allows someone to be charged with murder if he or she causes another person's death while committing or fleeing from a felony crime such as robbery - even if it's unintentional.

But, medically speaking, can someone actually be frightened to death? We asked Martin A. Samuels, chairman of the neurology department at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
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Magnify

Understanding Consciousness: Measure More, Argue Less

Christof Koch
Scientific American
Thu, 29 Jan 2009 02:44 UTC
Brain
© istockphoto.com/Calvio
One sign of progress in unraveling the mind-body problem is the development of new and ingenious ways to measure consciousness.

At the heart of science are judicious observations and measurements. This reality presupposes that something can be measured. But how can consciousness - the notorious ineffable and ethereal stuff that can't even be rigorously defined - be measured? Recent progress makes me optimistic.

Consider a problem of great clinical, ethical and legal relevance, that of in­ferring the presence of consciousness in severely brain-damaged patients. ­Often the victims of traffic accidents, cardiac arrests or drug overdoses, such patients have ­periods when they are awake, and they may spontaneously open their eyes. On occasion, their head turns in response to a loud noise, or their eyes might briefly track an object, but never for long. They might grind their teeth, swallow or smile, but such activities occur sporadically, not on command. These fragmentary acts appear reflexlike, generated by an intact brain stem.
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Bandaid

FDA holds safety hearing on 50-year-old painkiller

Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar
Associated Press
Sat, 31 Jan 2009 04:20 UTC
Washington - Call it the cold case file of drug safety. Federal health officials convened a public hearing Friday on whether to ban Darvon, a painkiller first approved in 1957, when there were few alternatives for treating pain except aspirin and powerful narcotics.

Now mainly marketed as Darvocet, which includes a dose of acetaminophen, the drug remains one of the top 25 most commonly prescribed medications. More than 20 million prescriptions were written in 2007.
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Alarm Clock

Non-Stick Cookware Chemicals Cause 150 Percent Increase in Infertility

Mike Adams
Natural News
Thu, 29 Jan 2009 04:59 UTC
Is eating off non-stick cookware a new form of chemical birth control? New research published in the journal Human Reproduction reveals that women with the highest levels of Perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) in their blood are 150% more likely to have difficulty conceiving a child.

PFCs are commonly used in non-stick cookware, and eating off non-stick cookware inevitably results in the consumption of these chemicals. Even so-called "diamond" non-stick surfaces are easily scratched. A previous report by NaturalNews exposed the truth about so-called "diamond" non-stick cookware surfaces.

PFCs are also known to impair fetal growth, harm the liver and suppress immune system function. They're also highly toxic to the environment, both during the manufacture and disposal of non-stick cookware products.

So why do the chemicals remain legal in the U.S. and other countries? Because they're made by powerful corporations like DuPont (the owner of the Teflon trademark). Those corporations hold great sway over U.S. regulators, and they routinely distort the truth to hide the dangers of their chemicals.
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