angrytoxicologist | October 15, 2007PUR water wasn't content with removing impurities from your water so they decided that they would put some back in...and then charge you for it!
I am talking about PUR Flavor Options. No joke, after they filter your water they add artificial flavors. All over the website are testimonials about how much "water" their kids are drinking now. One even has this to say: "My son asked for flavored water more than juice.". Great. First, I'm not sure it's a good thing that kids are loading up on a non-nutritive drink over juice. Now a lot of parents over do the juice, but if it's something like OJ in…
angrytoxicologist | October 10, 2007Good reading for today:
Ken Sepkowitz on why we should eat more excrement. Truly, he makes an excellent point. One other thing that he doesn't mention is that as we get safer the outbreaks that exist look worse and worse. Has anyone done a study of whether eating charred foods protects against cancer? (possibly better detox mechanisms?). I'll be on the lookout for one too.
Also good reading: yesterday's WP article on the DDT - breast cancer link. It's a pretty good story so I won't bore you with summarizing.
angrytoxicologist | October 9, 2007National Healthy Moms Health Babies Coalition issued a statement that women who are pregnant (or breastfeeding, or trying to get pregnant, or not trying but might be anyway, or dreaming about being pregnant, or know someone who's dreaming about...) should eat at least 12 oz of fish per week (all types including the mercury heavy hitters) because of the developmentally helpful Omega-3 fatty acids. This is directly contradicted by the FDA, which says less than 12 oz because of mercury concerns. There's a fierce fight out there over fish consumption, and a lot of confusion, which is amazingly…
angrytoxicologist | October 5, 2007Perhaps I should call this entry Mr Kawamura, CA secretary of the state department of Food and Agriculture, is a moron.
Background
The Monterey area has a problem with the light brown apple moth. Apparently it's been there for a while but now the state is concerned. They want to spray a pheramone to disrupt the life cycle. The EPA gave them emergency clearance to spray Checkmate from an airplane over the area both agricultural and residental. The people of the Monterey peninsula don't want to be sprayed with something that the EPA didn't give a full review to. The state did it anyway.…
angrytoxicologist | October 4, 2007That hed refers both to the fact that I promised to post on this last week and didn't as well as the fact that there have been way too few studies of Thimerosal given it's controversial status. you have probably all heard about the study. If fact, go over to Respectful Insolence and read all about it. People are still e-mailing me to comment on it so I will (only where I deviate from Orac or have something extra to mention).
1) It's interesting (and good) that they took into account mercury in the diet or from dental fillings to control for other exposures.
2) By my back of the envelope (I…
angrytoxicologist | October 2, 2007Sounds like the hed from The Onion, right? Sadly, it's not. Go watch the NYTimes video (A consumer alerts the world). He started the whole toothpaste concerns a while back. What inside track did that guy use? He read the ingredients. Now I know that I'm thinking way into the future but go with me here: What if some shady producers try something sneaker than listing banned ingredients on the product? Crazy, I know, but maybe we should be prepared for some such eventuality.
One thing that seems like a good start is to be darn sure you know where everything is coming from and getting rid of…
angrytoxicologist | September 28, 2007The NYTimes reports today on an upcoming HHS OIG (Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General) report among other things audited less than 1% of clinical trial testing sites. When they did show up it was usually after the trial was finished. The worst part of it is, when the inspectors did find problems, they rarely followed up to make sure that the sites had complied with the information.
This reminds me of the inspectors on the food side. You may remember the story about them going to the peanut butter plant and asking for documents and when the company (ConAngra, I believe)…
angrytoxicologist | September 25, 2007It's nice to a see a good study every once in a while and after about 30 years of debating whether preservatives cause hyperactivity/attention deficit. I can't go into all the studies that have been done because there are too many. Suffice it to say that the methodologies were always lacking, and the results uneven (whether positive or negative).
Now a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial has been conducted and published in The Lancet (you can get it here for free!). They took 153 3-year olds and 144 8-9 year olds and gave them a sweet drink with either sodium benzoate, a common…
angrytoxicologist | September 21, 2007I've been AWOL this week on SB; life, apparently, is not concerned with what is convienent for you. Anywho...
The House on thursday passed the FDA reform bill (H.R. 3580) by a huge margin (405-7) and the Senate passed it last night by a voice vote. As an aside, Sen Burr (R-NC) placed a hold on it but obiviously that didn't end up stopping the passage. Pres. Bush will probably sign it today. And it's a good thing, too. The FDA said it would have to send permanent layoff notices to about 20% of it's workforce if the legislation didn't pass by today.
So, you might ask, what does any of this mean…
angrytoxicologist | September 14, 2007Three things I thought you might find interesting today, starting with the shortest:
Don't pass the gas.
When you get crude oil, there is usually a natural gas pocket that goes along with it. Most drillers just burn it off. According to the World Bank, the gas burned off last year was enough to supply 27% of the US need for natural gas (~$40 billion dollars). Geez, if you you're gonna burn it, you might as well burn it in a usefull way. I should add that producers wouldn't get $40B, it costs money to collect it. (Via C&EN) (Thanks for indulging my juvenile title :) Oh, and my juvenile…
angrytoxicologist | September 13, 2007A study in the Archives of Internal Medicine ($ required) was published this week that found that from 1998 to 2005, adverse drug reactions increased 2.6 times (89,842 in 2005) while the number of scripts written only went up 0.65 times (65%). Fatal events increased 2.7 times.
The real interesting things about the study were the fact that very few of the drugs that caused problems in 2005 were related to a subsequent safety withdrawl from the market. As I got into this paper I started to think that this is another piece of evidence for a broken approval system. However, I found this…
angrytoxicologist | September 11, 2007I couldn't have said it better myself so I won't try. I stumbled accross this yesterday (it's about a month old). Via Slate.
This week, some big thinkers about biotechnology came to Washington for a "progressive bioethics summit." They invited me to go and talk to them. I like these people, but I'm not a progressive. I don't even think the word makes sense. And that made me ask something else: After two and a half years of covering moral debates about stem cells and other technologies, what do I think of this stuff? What the hell am I?
I have problems with liberals. A lot of them talk about…
angrytoxicologist | September 10, 2007It must have been a slow news day over at MSN because they headlined a story that was pegged to a study published in 2005 (as far as I can tell). Anyway, the point of the article was that air fresheners aren't good for you. Hopefully this isn't a revelation for anyone (You mean that pumping out volatile chemicals into my closed room isn't good for me? Shocking!). Let's list a couple of the chemicals released from air fresheners (gel, liquid, spray, scented candles, incense)
VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds). Health Effects From the EPA:
Eye, nose, and throat irritation; headaches, loss of…
angrytoxicologist | September 7, 2007I read a couple of critiques of Going Tribal (Or Tribe depending on whether you watch via the BBC or the Discovery Channel) lately that piqued my interest. The first was by The Times and the other was from Short Sharp Science(S^3).
For the uninitiated, the Times gives a pretty good, if rather snarky, synopsis of a show:
Parry lands in remote spot, meets suspicious tribal elders, gets injected with jumba-wamba juice, trips out, vomits and defecates wildly, is accepted into the tribe and finally goes home refreshed and confident in the knowledge that the world's indigenous peoples are, like,…
angrytoxicologist | September 6, 2007A man who eats a lot of popcorn (2 bags a day) has been diagnosed with bronchiolitis obliterans (via NYTimes). The fact that diacetyl is still used is rediculous so I re-posted the popcorn/obliterated lung piece. What is interesting about this is that we've all known for a long time that this is harmful for workers, but only just now are the companies getting out of using diacetyl. Apparently this is due to some EPA study that the public doesn't have (read more about this at The Pump Handle). The possible negative outcomes from lawsuits must have outweighed the cost of moving to an…
angrytoxicologist | September 5, 2007Well, we've gone over why tea supplements aren't a good idea, but the question of chemoprevention by drinking tea is still up in the air. I thought it would be interesting to lay out what's been done. Let's start with the basics:
How would tea inhibit carcinogensis?
No idea. There are dozens of ways in which tea or tea components can inhibit cancer based on speculation from tests done in cell cultures but no one knows whether any of them are relevant in a human body. Interestingly, in many studies, caffeine does as well as tea alone.
What have animal studies shown?
Tea works on all cancers.…
angrytoxicologist | August 31, 2007Meathead of the Week: Sen Criag. He grabbed instant meathead status when he tried to use the excuse that he's got a "wide stance". Hehehe; it's the new "the dog ate my homework".
Where is South Carolina?
We need more maps! Why didn't we think of this before? Oh it's just too good, such as. Now, Miss America is a bit of a joke so why don't they just skip the pretense, stop asking questions, get the women out there in hot pants. Because, as this clip shows, it's clearly not about being well-rounded. (hat tip to reader TimG)
The best response I've seen to this Maps For Us. My favorite is…
angrytoxicologist | August 30, 2007That's the hed for the Washington Post story on the study that found that doctors ignored or dismissed patients concerns about side effects and didn't report them to MedWatch (the FDA system for collecting side effects). The Post goes through some reasons for this but I think the end conclusion is that this is a very bad way of going about post-market safety. The data is extremely nosy, mainly due to the fact that not a lot of doctors use it (time, lazyness, or complexity of the forms?). Whatever the reason, events are under reported but I don't think it's the doctors' fault; and while punchy…
angrytoxicologist | August 29, 2007I saw a good documentary on Libby MT (the town that got pummled with asbestos from the surrounding vermeculite mines) last night on PBS's P.O.V. program. You should check it out, there are rebroadcasts in most areas for taping it. Check it out here: P.O.V.
What happend in Libby is really a good learning tale for two reasons:
1) It shows how evil corporations can be and how the employees can be blinded to that fact
2) It shows how toothless the EPA is when a company really wants to butt heads.
3) It shows how easy it is to forget the impact on people's lives when you aren't seeing them or…
angrytoxicologist | August 28, 2007Yesterday FDA proposed a new sunscreen rule that did two things.
1) It set out rules for measuring UVA protection (currently SPF only measures UVB protection. UVB causes burns but UVA is a greater risk for skin cancer). Finally! The new system will give you SPF for UVB (now up to 50+, as far as is technically feasible), and a 4 star sytem for UVA protection. It's sad it took this long to get here but thankfully, now consumers can figure out what the real protection is.
2) It asks for comments regarding nanosized materials in sunscreen. You already know what I think about this!
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