Archive for the ‘health’ Category
| Newer Entries »Gearing up for summer: New caution urged for many popular sunscreens
Monday, May 24th, 2010
Environmental Working Group released their 2010 sunscreen report this week, suggesting that many sunscreen SPF ratings are misleading, and some ingredients—like vitamin-A-related compounds—may actually enhance skin damage and cancer:
“Many sunscreens available in the U.S. may be the equivalent of modern-day snake oil, plying customers with claims of broad-spectrum protection but not providing it, while exposing people to potentially hazardous chemicals that can penetrate the skin into the body,” said EWG Senior Vice President for Research Jane Houlihan. “When only 8 percent of sunscreens rate high for safety and efficacy, it’s clear that consumers concerned about protecting themselves and their families are left with few good options.”
This year, new concerns are being raised about a vitamin A compound called retinyl palmitate, found in 41 percent of sunscreens. The FDA is investigating whether this chemical, when applied to skin that is then exposed to sunlight, may accelerate skin damage and elevate skin cancer risk. FDA data suggest that vitamin A may be photocarcinogenic, meaning that in the presence of the sun’s ultraviolet rays, the compound and skin undergo complex biochemical changes resulting in cancer. The evidence against vitamin A is not conclusive, but as long as it is suspect, EWG recommends that consumers choose vitamin A-free sunscreens.
Here’s more information, including how to find a better sunscreen for you:
- Press release
- 9 important things to consider about sunscreens
- Why sunscreens may damage skin
- Here are the top-rated sunscreens
- See the worst-rated sunscreens
- Find the rating of your sunscreen
- the buzz from health agencies
- The full report
- References, studies, and further reading
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joeshlabotnik/782119885/
Tags: sunscreen
Posted in health | 1 Comment »
Pesticide link to child behavior?
Monday, May 17th, 2010
MSNBC is reporting today on new research suggesting that some pesticides may double the rate of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) in kids.
Youngsters with high levels of pesticide residue in their urine, particularly from widely used types of insecticide such as malathion, were more likely to have ADHD, the behavior disorder that often disrupts school and social life, scientists in the United States and Canada found.
Kids with higher-than-average levels of one pesticide marker were nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as children who showed no traces of the poison.
The take-home message for parents, according to Bouchard: “I would say buy organic as much as possible,” she said. “I would also recommend washing fruits and vegetables as much as possible.”
As discussed in a previous post “Do our daily routines put our health at risk?” here’s an easy to use shopping guide of which fruits and vegetables to buy organic.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anushruti/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted in behavior, food and agriculture, health, organic, toxics | 2 Comments »
City dwellers of the future: Urban heat island warming may be as large as doubling CO2
Monday, April 19th, 2010
I remember driving on a freeway in Phoenix after midnight in 1990. The temperature was a cool 102 degrees F after breaking the all-time heat record of 126 F that day. Deserts are good at cooling off at night. But with all of the built environment in Phoenix storing heat from the day, the sidewalks, roads, and even swimming pools felt like they were being heated.
We all have probably experienced urban heat islands—the mass of dark asphalt and concrete absorbing solar radiation and radiating it back to space as heat. The lack of water exacerbates the situation because there is little-to-no evaporative cooling. Waste heat from cars, machines, air conditioners, and even human bodies also heat up the air. And the warmer it gets, the stronger the tendency to crank up the air conditioners, generating even more waste heat.
The problem is potentially large in areas like the Middle East, India, parts of Africa, and the American Southwest, where rapid urbanization in warm, dry environments has the potential to make some urban areas much warmer at night than surrounding rural areas.
In a forthcoming article in Geophysical Research Letters1, Mark McCarthy and colleagues at the Met Office, Hadley Centre, UK used a climate model that examines what climate might look like in a doubled CO2 world and calculates the added warming caused by urbanization and wasted heat.
Their results were eye-opening:
- Urban regions in places like the Arabian Peninsula, Iran, and India may experience night time warming by as much as 3-5 degrees C above and beyond that caused by doubled CO2 alone.
- The number of hot nights per year (defined as temperatures in the 99th percentile of nonurban areas) increase in the following cities:
- London: 1-2 hot nights now vs. up to 10 hot nights in 2050
- Sydney: 1-2 hot nights now vs. up to 15 hot nights in 2050
- Delhi: 5-10 hot nights now vs. up to 30 hot nights in 2050
- Beijing: 3-6 hot nights now vs. up to 50 hot nights in 2050
- Los Angeles: 8-12 hot nights now vs. up to 40 hot nights in 2050
- Tehran: 20 hot nights now vs. up to 60 hot nights in 2050
- Sao Paulo: <5 hot nights now vs. up to 80 hot nights in 2050
- Lagos (Nigeria): <5 hot nights now vs. up to 150 hot nights in 2050
As mentioned in an earlier post, we only need to remember Chicago in 1995 to recall the deadly impact that heat waves can have on urban people. And as we saw in that unfortunate example, the victims were disproportionately the elderly and African American.
Although we may not be able to mitigate this warming, basic adaptation steps should be set into motion, including re-thinking urban design, making cities more resilient to hot environments, developing better energy and technology solutions (including cooling), installing green roofs, and putting into place emergency disaster plans and social safety nets for vulnerable populations.
1Mark McCarthy, Martin Best, and Richard Betts (2010). Climate change in cities due to global warming and urban effects Geophysical Research Letters : 10.1029/2010GL042845
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Posted in climate adaptation, climate change science, energy, environmental justice, health, land use, population, race and class, sustainability, technology, urban | 3 Comments »
The rise of drug-resistent bacteria
Saturday, March 6th, 2010
Nicholas Kristof has another column in the Sunday NY Times, The Spread of Superbugs, about bacteria that are increasingly difficult to kill with antibiotics and their links to the way we produce meat in modern agricultural systems.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/estherase/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Posted in food and agriculture, health | No Comments »
Cell phones and your health
Saturday, February 27th, 2010
Environmental Working Group (EWG) has updated their information on cell phone radiation and potential health risks.
As I alluded to in a previous post, conducting human health risk analyses for things like cell phone radiation exposure is difficult because it’s hard to determine how much exposure is too much, and it takes years to see what health effects might show up.
The research below suggests that links between cell phone radiation and health are now becoming evident.
And with more than 4 billion cell phone users worldwide (2/3 of the human population), we are unintentionally conducting one of the largest epidemiological studies of all time.
Learn more from EWG:
- Risks and research—executive summary
- Risks and research—full report (pdf)
- How much radiation does your cell phone emit?
- How to reduce radiation exposure
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gibbons/ / CC BY-ND 2.0
Tags: cell phone, consumer, radiation
Posted in health, risk analysis, technology | 2 Comments »
Haiti’s story
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
Little good news is coming out of Haiti these days. There’s a deep social-environmental history that needs to be explored to understand why crises like poverty, AIDS, mudslides, and this week’s earthquake have been so devastating to the Haitian people.
I have written a bit about this history for one of the book projects I’m working on. Below are a few excerpts, but before reading further, please consider helping with the humanitarian relief for earthquake victims:
- Doctors Without Borders USA
- AmeriCares
- An additional list of aid agencies can be found at the NY Times.
Tags: Haiti
Posted in conflict, energy, food and agriculture, health, nature and culture, population, race and class, risk analysis, social science | 2 Comments »
Thoughts on addressing population and climate change in a just and ethical manner
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
That’s the title of a new article1 by Suzanne Petroni in the latest issue of Population and Environment (subscription required). She begins by acknowledging the complex history between these issues:
There is, in the field of population and reproductive health, a present debate around the merits and deficiencies of bringing the issue of global population growth back to the public agenda. Many see the current attention to the issue of climate change as an opening in which to make the case that global warming can not be alleviated or reversed without slowing population growth. They believe that linking population growth and climate change will help governments to see the exigency of the matter, and will place family planning back into the political realm as an urgent matter of national and environmental security….
But others worry that focusing on the environmental impacts of demographic change places at risk the hard-fought and long-developed global consensus that individual rights and empowerment are what matters most in fostering just and sustainable development. They fear that a renewed focus on the impacts of the growth of our global population poses a risk of drawing the international community back to numbers-driven policies and programs, which have not always prioritized individual interests…
- [D]oes the right of the community to live on a healthy planet trump the right of the individual to decide for him or herself, without external pressure, their own desired level of fertility?
- Does the United States, which emits a hugely disproportionate amount of greenhouse gases, have a right to suggest that other countries reduce their rates of population growth in order to somehow compensate for our profligate and consumptive lifestyles?
- How can we best balance a duty to future generations with the values of individual freedom and equality among the planet’s current occupants?
- And, while coercive means of population control have been widely condemned in most parts of the world, does making the ‘‘population-climate change connection’’ run the risk of countries seeing population control as an ‘‘easy fix’’ to the environmental challenges we face?
In light of these huge questions, what are her recommendations?
Posted in behavior, gender, health, population | No Comments »
Drug resistance and meat production
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
MSNBC is giving front page coverage to a potentially serious problem that scientists identified years ago—microbes are becoming drug resistant because of antibiotic use in meat production.
Researchers say the overuse of antibiotics in humans and animals has led to a plague of drug-resistant infections that killed more than 65,000 people in the U.S. last year — more than prostate and breast cancer combined. And in a nation that used about 35 million pounds of antibiotics last year, 70 percent of the drugs — 28 million pounds — went to pigs, chickens and cows. Worldwide, it’s 50 percent.
Governments are starting to realize the urgency of this issue:
The rise in the use of antibiotics is part of a growing problem of soaring drug resistance worldwide, The Associated Press found in a six-month look at the issue. As a result, killer diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and staph are resurging in new and more deadly forms.
In response, the pressure against the use of antibiotics in agriculture is rising. The World Health Organization concluded this year that surging antibiotic resistance is one of the leading threats to human health, and the White House last month said the problem is “urgent.”
….[T]hree federal agencies tasked with protecting public health — the Food and Drug Administration, CDC and U.S. Department of Agriculture — declared drug-resistant diseases stemming from antibiotic use in animals a “serious emerging concern.” And FDA deputy commissioner Dr. Joshua Sharfstein told Congress this summer that farmers need to stop feeding antibiotics to healthy farm animals.
However, entrenched special interests continue to be as resistant as the germs our food system is producing:
Farm groups and pharmaceutical companies argue that drugs keep animals healthy and meat costs low, and have defeated a series of proposed limits on their use.
As Michael Pollan, Peter Singer, Wendell Berry, and others have noted, this is what results from the treadmill of production and the Walmartization of our food system. When the only thing that matters is producing the most food for the least cost, our modern industrialized food system—and antibiotic resistance—is what we get.
One farmer who buys into antibiotic use echoes this conventional wisdom—that the most fundamental principle of food production is about lowering cost:
“Now the public doesn’t see that,” he said. “They’re only concerned about resistance, and they don’t care about economics because, ‘As long as I can buy a pork chop for a buck 69 a pound, I really don’t care.’ But we live in a world where you have to consider economics in the decision-making process of what we do.”
Another farmer, who eschewed antibiotic use, is one of many who are bucking conventional wisdom:
Kremer sells about 1,200 pigs annually. And a year after “kicking the habit,” he says he saved about $16,000 in vet bills, vaccinations and antibiotics.
“I don’t know why it took me that long to wake up to the fact that what we were doing, it was not the right thing to do and that there were alternatives,” says Kremer, stooping to scratch a pig behind the ear. “We were just basically killing ourselves and society by doing this.”
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/ / CC BY 2.0
Tags: drug resistance, meat and diet
Posted in food and agriculture, health | 1 Comment »
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