Kettleman City, two other Valley locations on state list.

Kettleman City and two other Valley communities are among dozens of places nationally where people have died in mysterious disease clusters, environmentalists say in a report being released today.

Nine California locations are discussed in a report being released today by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the National Disease Clusters Alliance.

The groups say federal authorities need to study these clusters quickly and help local officials.

"The faster we can identify such clusters, and the sooner we can figure out the causes, the better we can protect residents living in the affected communities," said Dr. Gina Solomon, NRDC senior scientist and co-author of the paper.

Earlimart and McFarland also are discussed in the study, which will be the subject of testimony Tuesday in Washington, D.C., at a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee oversight hearing. Activist Erin Brockovich is scheduled to testify.

Official reports of negative reactions to prescription drugs have increased dramatically over the last decade, according to a new study.

In a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) database launched in 1969, researchers found that over half the reports of "adverse events" suspected to be caused by a particular drug or device date from just the past 10 years.

The FDA currently receives about half-a-million such reports of health problems, and even deaths, associated with medical products each year. In 2000, they came in at a rate of nearly five for every 10,000 office visits in which at least one prescription was written. By 2005, that rate had risen to nearly seven per 10,000 visits, according to the new analysis published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

The Organic Trade Association (OTA) encourages consumers who wish to avoid exposing their children to pesticides and synthetic food dyes linked to possible increased risk of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) to choose organic foods when they shop.

"Organic food production and processing represent the only system that uses certification and inspection to verify that synthetic food dyes and chemicals are not used," said Christine Bushway, OTA's Executive Director and CEO. "Those seeking to minimize their exposure to these chemicals can look for the USDA Organic label wherever they buy food."

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) Food Advisory Committee meets this week to review whether there is a possible association between synthetic food dyes and children's risk of ADHD. Prompting the review are results from a 2007 study conducted by the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, a 2008 petition from the Center for Science in the Public Interest asking FDA to ban the nine certified color additives currently allowed in foods sold in the United States that were cited in the Southampton findings, and action by the European Union in July 2010 requiring warning labels on the foods containing the color additives in question.

• Food packaging is a major route of exposure for people to two toxic chemicals: BPA and DEHP.
• Eating mostly fresh foods and avoiding cans and plastic containers can drastically reduce the levels of these chemicals in our bodies.
• A combination of shopping habits and legislation may be key to limiting human exposures to the ubiquitous chemicals.

Plastic wrappers, food cans and storage tubs deposit at least two potentially harmful chemicals into our food, confirmed a new study. By cutting out containers, people can dramatically reduce their exposures to these toxins.

The chemicals - bisphenol A, or BPA, and a phthalate called DEHP - are known to disrupt hormonal systems in the bodies of both animals and people, leading to developmental and reproductive problems, as well as cancers, heart disease and brain disorders. And both appear in a wide variety of food packaging materials.

A campaign to put controls on cloned meat and milk was killed off yesterday by the UK Government and Brussels.

The move signals the start of a free-for-all in 'Frankenfood' - despite claims the technology is cruel and unethical.

Shoppers will be left in the dark because products from the offspring of cloned animals will not require special labels. One MEP warned supermarkets could soon be flooded with their milk.

In the dark: The decision by the government and Brussels means that consumers will no longer know if the meat they buy comes from cloned animals

Commission officials joined her in arguing that such controls could provoke a trade war with Washington.

Most MEPs, on the other hand, called for a complete ban or, failing that, clear labelling.

However, in marathon talks which ended yesterday, the labelling compromise was rejected by the Commission, the UK Government and Tory MEPs.

How self-aware are narcissists?

Think of your friendly neighborhood narcissist. Status-seeking, grandiose, loud-mouthed, brash, and flamboyant. Have you ever noticed how he (or she) brags all the time, not only about his astronomical I.Q. and bulging pectoral muscles, but also about the fact that he is narcissistic? It's as if he is proud of it.

Lots of psychologists have theorized that a lack of self-awareness is a hallmark trait of narcissists. My personal experience with narcissists does not seem to support this. It seems to me as though they are not only aware of who they are, but they embrace it.

Luckily, I don't have to rely on personal anecdotes. To get to the bottom of this age-old mystery, Erika Carlson and her colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis conducted three very well-done studies to see whether narcissists have insight into their personality and their reputation. The results will soon be published in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The researchers administered a number of different measures of narcissism to college students and looked at how high-scorers are seen by others, how they see themselves, and how they believe they are seen by others. They looked across social contexts, and interviewed new acquaintances as well as friends and family. There results across the three studies are strikingly consistent.

Montgomery - Nine Alabama hospital patients who were treated with contaminated intravenous feeding bags have died and the maker has pulled the product off the market, state health officials said Tuesday.

Ten others treated with the bags that provide nutrients through IV tubes also were sickened by the outbreak of serratia marcescens bacteria, health officials said. However, officials have not definitively tied the deaths to the bacterial outbreak at six hospitals, State Health Officer Donald Williamson said.

"There is nothing to suggest the deaths were directly related to the bacterial infection," says Williamson.

Could bread and pasta be behind the pathogenesis of schizophrenia?

Schizophrenia is an unfortunate disease of the brain. A progressive disorder, it often presents with social withdrawal, paranoia, hearing voices, that sort of thing. After quite a while (sometimes decades) you get a kind of "burnout" effect where the voices and whatnot lessen, but the afflicted is left with all the negative symptoms of social withdrawal, thought blocking, and an inexpressiveness known as "flat affect." MRI of the brain will show "large ventricles" at this point, meaning cell death (brain damage) has caused the active, lively part of the brain to shrink. You'll see schizophrenia in any large public park in any major city. If you ask the guy on the bench that everyone is avoiding if he wants something to eat, and he answers with paranoid meaningless word salad, that's schizophrenia, most likely. He had parents, brothers, sisters, maybe even a college degree. Even if he wanted to stay in a treatment facility or group home, in most places there aren't enough spots for all the mentally ill, so many end up homeless or in jail. A tough road for someone with an organic brain disease.

Most of the research on schizophrenia is focused on the neurotransmitters dopamine, acetylcholine, and histamine and genetic polymorphisms of transporters and receptors. The usual questions are asked about ineffective brain chemistry. The usual treatment is neuroleptic medication (hopefully decreases excess dopamine in the right place and leaves it well enough alone in other corners of the brain). And I've seen medicine do a decent job of clearing up the psychosis symptoms many times. Medicine tends to have pretty serious side effects, though, so a big push in research these days is to identify those folks at high risk for schizophrenia before it happens, hopefully to prevent the illness in the first place through various means. Often those means include more medications - but with Big Pharma funding many studies, those are the solutions that are found.

One intrepid researcher, F. Curtis Dohan, spent a lot of his career chasing an unlikely suspect in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia, wheat. His fascinating paper, "Genetic Hypothesis of Idiopathic Schizophrenia: It's Exorphin Connection", can be found in free full text via the link.

I have conversations about fat every day. Everybody wants to chat about his or her fat. Some people want to talk about other people's fat. People are genuinely concerned about the fat in their diets, your lunch, and yesterday's breakfast. Everyone is talking about fat. Kids these days have too much of it and movie stars need more of it. Atkins fanatics don't get anything but it. Well I would like to clear up any misconceptions about it.

Most people have been taught in recent history to avoid trans fat. It has been given the title of "devil" and even McDonald's is trying to keep their name from touching. However not many people know that trans fat is just another way of saying partially hydrogenated fat. There are boxes of cookies and piecrust all over the supermarket with big red letters screaming, "NO TRANS FAT!" but the nutrition label hasn't been forced to comment on partially hydrogenated fats. If you don't know what you're looking for, you might be eating tons of the stuff and believe me, it's in everything. The label can say 0 percent trans fat and still contain partially hydrogenated fat. Ok, so why should we lay off the PHF? Sure, I've heard, heart disease, clogged arteries, higher cholesterol, but they say that about everything. What is it really going to do to me? Well, since you've asked, let me start from the beginning:

Beware of Additives

If you've been hearing a lot about food additives lately, it's for good reason. They are in pretty much everything on store shelves these days, but I am willing to bet most people do not understand exactly what they are. And you may wonder why you even care. Well first of all, as I mentioned, additives are in almost every box, bag, jar, or can of packaged food you buy at the grocery store. So, what are additives?

The basic and most simplified definition of a food additive is anything added to a food to improve its taste, color, or shelf-life. Additives have been around for centuries. I'm sure most people are familiar with the process or brining meat with salt, which was the first way to preserve meat before refrigeration, or with pickling, which is basically a way to make vegetables last longer. These methods were all natural; however, in today's world of mass-produced food and mega-grocery stores, producers have to find ways to make food last longer and look more appealing. This is where artificial additives come in.