Remember the song from the late 1990’s titled “Everybody’s Free To Wear Sunscreen”? Seriously, WEAR YOUR SUNSCREEN!
The incidence of non-melanoma skin cancer has steadily increased since the 1990s, making it by far the most common form of cancer, affecting more people than all other cancers combined, two new studies find.
More than 2 million Americans on Medicare were treated for non-melanoma skin cancer in 2006, up from 1.6 million in 1992, according to one study. The other found that one in five 70-year-olds has been treated for non-melanoma skin cancer.
Researchers called non-melanoma skin cancer an “epidemic” that is only going to get worse as all those bathing beauties and sun worshippers from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s get older, and their cumulative sun exposure racks up.
You can read the rest of this article over at Business Week.
As the Prophet Isaiah queried: “What will you do on the Day of Reckoning, when evil comes from afar?”
Click on the image to buy the book.
Having just completed my first reading of Jeff Biggers’ masterfully crafted, meticulously researched “Reckoning At Eagle Creek,” I am left feeling nigh-breathless at the scope of the evil that came from afar and visited a nigh-Biblical plague upon people in the form of the heartache, sickness and grim Death that always serves as the handmaiden of coal. Such a sensation is fitting, I suppose, for a book that recounts the history of the thousands of human beings rendered breathlessly mute by the ravages of Black Lung, slate falls, mine explosions, poisoned waters, blasted hills, choked valleys, murdered workers and whole communities literally blown off the map in the merciless, ceaseless quest for the Holy Profit of Coal.
Jeff Biggers has crafted out of family history and regional history an honest, unblinking reckoning of the costs paid by a nation and, indeed, a world for what we have been assured by the industry for more than a century is “cheap” coal. Mr. Biggers proves in the pages of “Reckoning At Eagle Creek” that the only way to see coal as “cheap” is to view the lives, history and heritage consumed in its acquisition as being even cheaper still.
“Reckoning At Eagle Creek” is the manifestation of one man’s quest for understanding of where our dependence on the nastiest fuel form on the planet has taken us and where that path ultimately leads. That quest is neither fanciful nor mythical. It is rock-hard and bone-real. With its publication, “Reckoning At Eagle Creek” becomes an immediately necessary resource for anyone who seeks to understand the ever-increasing toll we all pay for “cheap” coal, for “cheap” electricity, for “cheap” heat. In his “reckoning” of accounts within the scope of his family’s southern Illinois homeland, Jeff Biggers honestly reveals coal mineshafts and stripmine pits for what they are: the abbatoirs of the American Dream.
Former U.S. president Bill Clinton underwent a procedure to put two stents in one of his coronary arteries Thursday after he suffered chest pains.
Clinton was admitted to the Columbia Campus of New York Presbyterian Hospital “after feeling discomfort in his chest,” according to a statement by Douglas Band, Clinton’s lawyer. Source Article
In his interview with CBS News’ Katie Couric before the Super Bowl earlier this week, President Obama said that he was going to ask Republicans to put their health care ideas “on the table.” “What I want to do is to look at the Republican ideas that are out there,” said Obama. “How do you guys want to lower costs?”
Just days before Obama made his call for GOP health care ideas, Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) offered a radical proposal for reform in a conversation with the editorial board of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. According to a blog post by the editorial board, Bond called on Friday for giving means-tested vouchers to Medicare enrollees: Source Article
Haven’t we heard this before? And rejected it? Of course, if we hadn’t our money would have gone into the stock market and then disappeared when the market crashed. Anyone feel like they’ve dodged a bullet?
Smuggled and bootlegged, it has been the cause of transatlantic tensions for more than two decades. But after 21 years in exile, the haggis is to be allowed back into the United States.
The “great chieftan o’ the puddin-race” was one of earliest casualties of the BSE crisis of the 1980s-90s, banned on health grounds by the US authorities in 1989 because they feared its main ingredient ‑ minced sheep offal ‑ could prove lethal. Source Article
The FDA’s new report on the safety of endocrine-disrupting chemical bisphenol A is months overdue and there is still no sign of when or if the agency will release the report. Perhaps they are waiting for that piece of “smoking gun” evidence that BPA represents a clear and present danger to human health? Well, thanks to researchers from Peninsula College of Medicine in Britain, we just may have it.
In 2008, the group looked at data from the 2003-2004 US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) which included urinary BPA levels for the first time. The results:
[A] quarter of the population with the highest levels of BPA were more than twice as likely to report having heart disease or diabetes, compared to the quarter with the lowest BPA levels. They also found that higher BPA levels were associated with clinically abnormal liver enzyme concentrations.
At the time, even the researchers admitted the possibility that it was a statistical fluke. But the same team has now analyzed the 2005-2006 NHANES, which used an entirely different group of people, and guess what? The association between BPA exposure and heart disease in humans is as strong as ever (via Toronto’sGlobe and Mail):
According to the new research, 60-year-old American males with the highest amounts of bisphenol A in their urine had about a 45 per cent greater risk of cardiovascular disease than men the same age with lower exposures, confirming the results of a previous study on the topic released in 2008 and based on a different sample of people.
Huffington Post | Katherine Goldstein/Gazelle Emami Posted: 01-12-10 05:30 PM
In a study released by the International Journal of Biological Sciences, analyzing the effects of genetically modified foods on mammalian health, researchers found that agricultural giant Monsanto’s GM corn is linked to organ damage in rats.
According to the study, which was summarized by Adam Shake at Twilight Earth, “Three varieties of Monsanto’s GM corn – Mon 863, insecticide-producing Mon 810, and Roundup® herbicide-absorbing NK 603 – were approved for consumption by US, European and several other national food safety authorities.”
Monsanto gathered its own crude statistical data after conducting a 90-day study, even though chronic problems can rarely be found after 90 days, and concluded that the corn was safe for consumption. The stamp of approval may have been premature, however. Source Article
There’s been a lot of talk about carbon tariffs–taxing imported goods from polluting industries in nations or states that don’t regulate CO2–over the last year or so. Many rust belt and coal state Democrats have called for federal climate legislation to include a such a carbon tariff. This would impose a tax on goods imported to the US from nations with no carbon controls on manufacturing (say, China). So it might come as a surprise to some that the first carbon tariff actually enacted isn’t between nations at all–it’s between Minnesota and North Dakota.
….Of course, North Dakota is none too happy about any of this–the state promptly decided to sue Minnesota, saying the tariff unfairly gives renewable energy an advantage over coal powered energy. Perhaps North Dakota missed the memo–that’s precisely the point. The move will hopefully cause speculators in North Dakota to start seriously thinking about wind power projects–the state has been called ‘the Saudi Arabia of wind’ because of the vast potential it has there….
Last week, Rush Limbaugh was rushed to a hospital while vacationing in Hawaii after complaining of chest pains. Shortly after being released from Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu, Limbaugh said his doctors didn’t know what caused his symptoms, and he praised the U.S. health care system based on his experience at the hospital:
“The treatment I received here was the best that the world has to offer,” Limbaugh said. “Based on what happened here to me, I don’t think there’s one thing wrong with the American health care system. It is working just fine, just dandy.”
ThinkProgress noted that it was odd that Limbaugh would cite his experience in Hawaii given that the state has previously passed a measure mandating that employers cover full-time employees, a provision that is similar to those being considered in Congress as part of comprehensive health care reform. SEIU’s blog notes that some of the health care reform measures before Congress wouldn’t even affect Hawaii:
In fact, Hawaii is so forward-thinking that the Senate bill excludes Hawaii from some of its provisions, because Hawaii’s requirements on employers go farther than the federal legislation.
