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H7N9 Influenza Virus: Ethnicity and Protection from Infection
By Roberta Attanasio In March 2013, a new flu virus — the H7N9 — was identified in China. By early May, before retreating and disappearing, it had infected 131 people and killed 26 of them. However, less than two weeks ago (January 17), the New York Times reported that “China is disclosing a steadily growing number of cases of H7N9 bird flu, including four more cases announced on Friday, reviving concerns among health experts that the disease may be spreading and could pose a further threat as the world’s largest annual human migration begins ahead of Chinese New Year.” The H7N9 virus is a “reassortant” — it includes combined elements from three…
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Lead Exposure in Infants: The Role of Breastfeeding
By Roberta Attanasio Lead, a toxic heavy metal, is the well-known cause of a global epidemic. It has acute and chronic effects on human health, causing neurological, cardiovascular, renal, gastrointestinal, haematological and reproductive effects. Children under the age of 6 are especially vulnerable to lead poisoning, which can severely and adversely influence mental and physical development. In the U.S., lead poisoning has been called the “silent epidemic” — children are exposed mostly because of the remodeling of old houses painted before lead paint was banned in 1978. Indeed, lead paint is one of the most common health hazards. Children exposed to lead experience brain damage, behavioral problems and developmental delays. Recently (December 2013), a…
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A Toxoplasma’s Journey: From Cats to Sea Otters
By Roberta Attanasio Toxoplasma gondii is a single-celled parasite that infects most warm blooded animals. In 2012, it landed in the news because of its ability to hijack the arousal circuitry of rats — the parasite activates a part of the brain normally engaged in sexual attraction. Rats infected with it are not afraid to approach cats and behave as they would in the presence of a sexually receptive female rat. What happens next? The cat easily catches and eats the infected rat and, in doing so, also catches the parasite — the parasite is happy as it reproduces sexually only in cats. The parasite’s oocysts — sometimes called “eggs”…
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Breast Cancer: Risk Factors and Prevention
By Roberta Attanasio Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide. How can it be prevented? Let’s take a look at some of the answers available today (January 17, 2014). First of all, what is cancer prevention? According to the National Cancer Institute “Cancer prevention is action taken to lower the chance of getting cancer. By preventing cancer, the number of new cases of cancer in a group or population is lowered. Hopefully, this will lower the number of deaths caused by cancer.” A little more….. “To prevent new cancers from starting, scientists look at risk factors and protective factors. Anything that increases your chance of developing cancer is called a cancer…
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Cooking and Indoor Air Pollution
By Roberta Attanasio Cooking releases some of the same pollutants usually found outdoors in smog. Therefore, without proper ventilation, people can be exposed — indoors — to pollution able to cause serious adverse health effects. A study published in 2012 by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) found that, in the United States, poor indoor air quality — of which cooking is the major source — is responsible for adverse health effects as significant as those caused by all traffic accidents or infectious diseases. The researchers highlighted the hazards posed by specific indoor air pollutants — secondhand smoke, radon, formaldehyde, acrolein and PM2.5, or particulate matter less than 2.5 micrometers…
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Sustainability in Action: Christmas Trees Provide Habitat for Coho Salmon
By Roberta Attanasio There are many remarkable features of salmon, and one of these is their ability to travel thousands of miles in the ocean, struggle with river currents and waterfalls, and finally reach their hatching place. Indeed, salmon live in the ocean, but are born and spawn in freshwater rivers and streams. The young salmon spend at least some of their early lives in freshwater, before swimming to the sea — where they grow and mature. With a few exceptions, Pacific salmon spawn only once and die within days of digging their nests in the gravel and mating. Coho salmon — one of seven species of Pacific salmon — is famous for its…
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The Science of Chocolate: How Long Does it Survive in Hospital Wards?
By Roberta Attanasio The prestigious British Medical Journal is giving the best Christmas present ever to its readers: food for thought. The food is chocolate, the thought (or concern) is chocolate survival. A new research article published just a few days ago and entitled “The survival time of chocolates on hospital wards: covert observational study” presents the result of a study aimed “To quantify the consumption of chocolates in a hospital ward environment.” In other words, the study aimed to answer the following research question: How long does chocolate survive after being identified by healthcare assistants, nurses, and doctors? To answer this research question, observers — doctors familiar with the ward…
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Flame Retardants in Honey?
By Roberta Attanasio When the bees feast on flowers, we enjoy honey, the increasingly popular nature’s sweetener and bearer of many health benefits. The “foodie” boom has generated not only appreciation for the aroma, texture and flavor profiles of different types of honey, but also demand for cosmetics and fragrances that contain it. Not everything about honey is as good as it seems, though – there are things like frauds and unexpected chemicals. Pesticides are a known problem for bees and honey, but now there is something else here – flame retardants. These toxic chemicals are widespread throughout the globe and contaminate the food chain, including human milk, as they are present in…
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Electronic Waste: A Global, Interactive Map
By The Editors In one of our previous posts (Electronic Waste and the Global Toxic Trade) we said “As technology changes come by very rapidly in great acceleration-style, the amount of obsolete and discarded high tech material also grows, great acceleration-style, around the world.” Now, data compiled by “Solving the E-Waste Problem (StEP) Initiative“, a partnership of UN organizations, industry, governments, non-government and science organizations, provide a staggering forecast of how rapidly electronic waste is accumulating globally – by 2017, we can expect an increase of 33%, up to one-third to 65.4 million tons. The escalating e-waste problem is graphically shown in a first-of-its-kind StEP E-Waste World Map, available online…
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750 Miles of Smog
By The Editors Thick haze stretching over a distance of about 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) has been captured a few days ago (December 7, 2013) by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. In the image below, the brightest areas are clouds or fog. Polluted air appears gray. The haze stretched from Beijing (top) to Shanghai (bottom), China. You can read more about this severe bout of air pollution here (NASA Earth Observatory).
