angrytoxicologist | August 27, 2007I'm traveling right now but wanted to post a link to NYTimes' "Choking on Growth" series. It's well worth a read (it's not the best written article I've seen - it repeats itself a lot, but the facts make a good story). The author of "The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China's Future" will be online chatting today on the NYTimes' site.
Three facinating stats before I go:
In 2005 alone, China added 66 gigawatts of electricity to its power grid, about as much power as Britain generates in a year. Last year, it added an additional 102 gigawatts, as much as France.
and
Only 1…
angrytoxicologist | August 23, 2007Question from LindaW: What's up with bioidentical hormones? Is it okay to take them?
Bioidentical progesterone is a joke. Don't even think about buying it. Then, consult your doctor with your health concerns.
Bioidentical progesterone is sold on numerous web pages after having been popularized by John Lee and now Joseph Mercola (and by findings that hormone replacement therapy isn't safe for everyone). It's unscientific and dangerous.
Reason 1
As stated on some web site: 'Bioidentical hormone therapy has all of the good effects of HRT with none of the severe side-effects that have caused so…
angrytoxicologist | August 22, 2007From Rueters:
Healthy subjects who received daily caffeine-free green tea extract capsules had an increased production of detoxification enzymes, which may provide some cancer-fighting benefits, study findings show.
"Concentrated green tea extract could be beneficial to those who are deficient in the detoxification enzyme and shouldn't be harmful for those who have adequate detoxification enzyme," lead investigator Dr. H.-H. Sherry Chow, of the University of Arizona, Tucson, told Reuters Health.
Boneheaded. Let me tell you why. First, we already went over how green tea supplements are actual…
angrytoxicologist | August 21, 2007So I if walked over to your house and dumped something over your fence, that's probably trespassing, unless that something happened to be a box of Krispy Kreme, then it's just tasty. If it's grass clippings, you'd be pissed off; if it's an industrial chemical, you might sue. If I came over with said chemical and spoon-fed it to your newborn, I'm pretty sure I'd be looking at a 12/12 bid in the joint.
Which leads me to a paper in Environmental Health Perspectives that is a follow up to a paper published on-line in the American Chemical Society journal, Environmental Science & Technology by…
angrytoxicologist | August 17, 2007Meatheads of the week: The passport office. A must read about One Man's Journey Into the Greatest Bureaucracy Ever Assembled over at Slate.
It's been a busy week here on AngryToxicologist with sunscreens and STATS and all. I appreciate the hearty discussions. Please e-mail me other topics that you're wondering about. Speaking of busy weeks, I'm über busy today so I'm going to cut to the...
Weekly aural pleasure.
Check out this Indian video from the 90s. I'd describe it as the keystone cops and N'SYNC go to Bollywood. The dance moves are well...just watch it. Some notes:
4:12 left - this…
angrytoxicologist | August 16, 2007It's cheap, durable, and beautiful. I was going to post on this next week, but Slate beat me to the punch. So instead of reinventing the wheel I'll send you over there. One thing that most people don't think about is the fact that tons of painted items not meant for kids and ceramics not meant for eating are painted/glazed with lead paint/glaze all the time. So it's a good idea to keep kids' mouths off of brightly painted plastics/metals that are not kids toys and any ceramics that aren't made for food (for some questionable items like pitchers, check to see if it is labeled food safe,…
angrytoxicologist | August 15, 2007Friends of Earth put out a report on nanotechnology and sunscreens recently. They bungled it. Big time.
A little background.
Zinc (Zn) and Titanium (Ti) Oxides are the best sun protectants known. They don't break down in the sun and they have broad UVA UVB coverage. However, they are bright opaque white (you remember the thick white stuff lifeguards put on their noses and ears?). If you make it small enough, though, the solution will be clear, not white, and still do a good job. Most nanoparticles in sunscreen may be nano in terms of size, but nanotechnology (from a toxicology perspective)…
angrytoxicologist | August 14, 2007Most cities and towns use chlorine or bromine to disinfect water. When the water is polluted, chlorine or bromine reacts with the pollution (agricultural runoff is probably a bigger problem here than traditional industrial pollution) to create what are called disinfection by-products (DBPs). DBPs are associated in humans with adverse pregnancy outcomes (usually miscarriage)*. Since DBPs damage DNA and are considered carcinogens at some level, researchers thought that it was likely that DBPs would affect sperm as well. Rodent studies show that some DBPs do harm sperm quality; however, there…
angrytoxicologist | August 13, 2007To get right to the heart of the matter, Salon did an article about the risks of bisphenol A (BPA) in plastics. From the land where nothing is harmful, a reply came from Trevor Butterworth (real name) who is an editor at STATS. If you don't know what STATS is, they are a non-profit attached (in what way, I don't know) to George Mason Univ, who I believe are industry funded, who 'dubunk' bad science news/media (they don't list their funding but have an office in downtown DC in the midst of lobbyists offices). Unfortunately, they are as about as unscientific as the rest of the media. They twist…
angrytoxicologist | August 10, 2007Meathead of the Week: Bonds. Destroyed his moment in the sun years ago when he started doping. Enough said.
Bonus Meatheads: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke who have been assuring everyone that the subprime mess has been contained. Oh, except for like our banks, and, like, the banks of Europe, um and like every entity that relies on the availability of credit to function. Whoops!
Now this is Customer Service.
I know this is going to sound familiar to you. I think we've all been there. This is a online chat transcript from Verizon customer service (…
angrytoxicologist | August 9, 2007What do the Abigail Alliance and steroid use have to do with each other? Read on.
The US DC Court of Appeals on Tuesday overturned the finding for the Abigail Alliance and ruled for the FDA (supported by the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), and the National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD)). The finding was basically that there is no Constitutional Right (big 'R') for access to experimental drugs. The court was divided (8-2, not following conservative/liberal lines) but even I and see through the minority opinion that you have the right to save your life by any means and…
angrytoxicologist | August 8, 2007Reading my Chemical and Engineering News (nerd alert!), I came across the article: "Toxicity Testing Without Animals" by Celia Henry Arnaud. "Oh no, here we go again", I thought. It may come as a surprise to some of you but cells in a dish don't equal whole bodies and even more shocking, we don't know everything about how bodies work and how they are disrupted.
So what does the article have to say? It starts off with the normal animal testing is long, expensive, a pain in the butt, and restrictive to the number of chemicals that can be evaluated. Fair enough. Then it points out that
The…
angrytoxicologist | August 7, 2007So I'm looking around at news stories and I find one on Eurekalert about neurodegenerative disease entitled "Researchers link metal ions to neurodegenerative disease". My first thought: "Wow." Then I read the article. Then I thought: "Wow. Eurekalert screws it up (again)."
According to the news snippet: researchers from Emory have found that a certain way that metal ions bind to amyloid fibrils in the brain appears toxic to neurons. (The build up of Amyloid fibrils in the brain is linked primarily to Alzheimer's but also to Creutzfeldt-Jakob syndrome and Parkinson's disease.) So I'm thinking…
angrytoxicologist | August 2, 2007The last of the ELF (Earth Liberation Front) arsonists was sentenced yesterday for the burning down of a Redmond OR horse slaughterhouse in 1997. Thank goodness. I'm concerned abou the environment and I guess I would classify myself as an environmentalist but I certainly don't want to be associated with these guys. They are like the distant cousin that everyone hopes doesn't show up at the family reunion, get drunk, and pick a fight with Aunt Ellie.
Actually, ELF is more like George Bush. That analogy should really burn those guys up.
-No rational thinking; It conflicts with my ideology, darn…
angrytoxicologist | August 1, 2007Scientists took lettuce, corn, and potatoes and grew them using soil treated with hog manure that had the commonly used livestock antibiotic Sulfamethazine in it. All three plants uptook the Sulfamethazine. You know what that means: mmmmm... Wait, no, I think I meant yuk. With 9-13 million kg of livestock antibiotic used every year and the increasing use of the manure to treat crops, the risk of more antibiotic resistant bacteria goes up. The funny thing about the antibiotics and livestock is that it does nothing for the consumer (except shave a few cents of the sale price). If anything, it's…
angrytoxicologist | July 31, 2007A study in Neurology came out today ($ required) that found that those with better reading skills had 2.5 times less cognitive brain damage due to lead! Reading ability is one of the best ways to measure cognitive reserve (CR), the ability to maintain good cognitive performance despite disease or injury. It is also related to head size, education, linguistic ability, and occupational achievement but reading is really the best indicator (achievement under very controled settings is better but it's really hard to control for opportunity in medium size studies). Those in the study are…
angrytoxicologist | July 27, 2007Meatheads of the Week (or so)
Michael Vick, Tim Donaghy, Michael Rasmussen, and Barry Bonds for good measure. For Dogs, Gambling, Lying, and Doping. The Wonderful World of Sports!
Genius of the Week
Kyle Smith. For his brilliant review of The Simpsons movie as a Simpsons script. You must go read it.
Fat people are very politically correct.
(Shouldn't we start calling it socially correct since politicians routinely say the worst things?) Anyways as I'm sure you're all aware, there was a study in NEJM that showed that you were more likely to be fat if your friends were fat. It's findings lead…
angrytoxicologist | July 26, 2007Seems appropriate since controversial topics like vaccines are on the agenda this week.
A study published in EHP finds that high fluoride (mean of 8.3 mg/L) or arsenic in water decreases IQ (it's very rare to have a fluoride level this high in the US, artificial fluoridation is supposed to be 0.7-1.2 mg/L and usually is). This isn't anything new really, it's been published multiple times before, just not in a major English language journal (and a couple of the previous studies had some control issues - controlling for Arsenic for one). This comes on the heels of a couple other interesting…
angrytoxicologist | July 25, 2007I'm angry so today you get what you came for...
I wrote a post on Autism and Vaccines a while back that went through why there are people still arguing about this and took the position that I don't think that there is a link between autism and thimerosal but that some of the arguments that people on the other side make do have some validity, though not compelling. I specifically ended the post saying that I fully believe that all children should get vaccinated, that mine are, and that in any event thimerosal isn't in the single dose shots anymore. I won't go into the whole thing here but…
angrytoxicologist | July 24, 2007A study done at the University of Michigan found that organic crops produced yields no different than conventional farming in developed countries and may actually increase the yields in developing countries. This could be for a couple of reasons including "narrow row spacings, environmentally friendly soil conservation practices and natural insect control" but also the general fact that organic farmers give a lot of though on how to get the most out of their land (possibly because the CW is that organic yields are less?). An MSU extension guy says that this doesn't jive with his experience,…