Browsed by
Category: Health

How American waste crosses the globe and overwhelms the poorest nations

How American waste crosses the globe and overwhelms the poorest nations

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: What happens to your plastic after you drop it in a recycling bin? According to promotional materials from America’s plastics industry, it is whisked off to a factory where it is seamlessly transformed into something new. This is not the experience of Nguyễn Thị Hồng Thắm, a 60-year-old Vietnamese mother of seven, living amid piles of grimy American plastic on the outskirts of Hanoi. Outside her home, the sun beats down on a Cheetos bag; aisle markers…

Read More Read More

Climate crisis seriously damaging human health, report finds

Climate crisis seriously damaging human health, report finds

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: A report by experts from 27 national science academies has set out the widespread damage global heating is already causing to people’s health and the increasingly serious impacts expected in future. Scorching heatwaves and floods will claim more victims as extreme weather increases but there are serious indirect effects too, from spreading mosquito-borne diseases to worsening mental health. “There are impacts occurring now [and], over the coming century, climate change has to be ranked as one of…

Read More Read More

Lies pave the way for anti-abortion laws. To defeat the laws we must fight the lies

Lies pave the way for anti-abortion laws. To defeat the laws we must fight the lies

Comments 0 Comment

Rebecca Solnit writes: Anti-abortion laws are built on anti-abortion lies. Lies about things like who has abortions, how abortions work, how women’s bodies work and how fetuses develop. The lies pave the way for the laws. There are the old lies, like the ones suggesting that the women having abortions are careless hussies (51% of abortions are to women who were using contraception; 59% are to women who are already mothers; 75% are to poor and low-income women). Lately, there’s…

Read More Read More

People eat at least 50,000 plastic particles a year, study finds

People eat at least 50,000 plastic particles a year, study finds

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: The average person eats at least 50,000 particles of microplastic a year and breathes in a similar quantity, according to the first study to estimate human ingestion of plastic pollution. The true number is likely to be many times higher, as only a small number of foods and drinks have been analysed for plastic contamination. The scientists reported that drinking a lot of bottled water drastically increased the particles consumed. The health impacts of ingesting microplastic are…

Read More Read More

The myth of the eight-hour sleep

The myth of the eight-hour sleep

Comments 0 Comment

Stephanie Hegarty writes: We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night – but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural. In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month. It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by…

Read More Read More

Fears grow that ‘nuclear coffin’ is leaking radioactive waste into the Pacific

Fears grow that ‘nuclear coffin’ is leaking radioactive waste into the Pacific

Comments 0 Comment

Trevor Nace writes: The tropical blue skies over the southern Pacific Ocean were enveloped by towering mushroom clouds lingering over the Marshall Islands in 1954 as the United States continued its testing of nuclear weapons. The United States conducted 67 nuclear weapon tests from 1946 to 1958 on the pristine Marshall Islands. The most powerful test was the “Bravo” hydrogen bomb in 1954, which was about 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. The extensive nuclear…

Read More Read More

World’s rivers ‘awash with dangerous levels of antibiotics’

World’s rivers ‘awash with dangerous levels of antibiotics’

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: Hundreds of rivers around the world from the Thames to the Tigris are awash with dangerously high levels of antibiotics, the largest global study on the subject has found. Antibiotic pollution is one of the key routes by which bacteria are able develop resistance to the life-saving medicines, rendering them ineffective for human use. “A lot of the resistance genes we see in human pathogens originated from environmental bacteria,” said Prof William Gaze, a microbial ecologist at…

Read More Read More

Trump’s EPA is ‘cooking the books’ to justify its attack on clean air rules

Trump’s EPA is ‘cooking the books’ to justify its attack on clean air rules

Comments 0 Comment

Think Progress reports: Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working to distort the way it measures the benefits of some of the agency’s most impactful policies, regulations that safeguard human health by limiting air pollution. The primary beneficiary of such distortion? The coal industry. When the government evaluates the health and financial benefits of clean air, the calculation typically incorporates the number of lives saved and the scale of reduced health impacts thanks to reducing pollution — also known as…

Read More Read More

Poisoning America: EPA wants to triple level of rocket fuel chemical allowed in drinking water

Poisoning America: EPA wants to triple level of rocket fuel chemical allowed in drinking water

Comments 0 Comment

Think Progress reports: The Trump Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wants to raise the threshold for a chemical found in rocket fuel to triple the previous limit allowed in drinking water supplies. This is the first new drinking water rule introduced by the agency since the George W. Bush administration. In the EPA’s latest move to weaken environmental and health protections, it released a notice on Thursday requesting public comment on its proposal to raise the maximum level allowed for the…

Read More Read More

Lax regulations expose Americans to 1,300 chemicals banned by Europe

Lax regulations expose Americans to 1,300 chemicals banned by Europe

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: A brief but telling piece of legislation was put forward in Connecticut in January. Just three lines in length, the bill calls for any cosmetics in the state to “meet the chemical safety standards established by the European Union”. The move, unlikely to be made law, is the latest signal of mounting anguish over the enfeebled regulation of everyday products in the US compared with European countries. Across a span of cosmetics, including makeup, toothpaste and shampoo,…

Read More Read More

EPA plans to ignore thousands of deaths by changing its methods of risk assessment

EPA plans to ignore thousands of deaths by changing its methods of risk assessment

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: The Environmental Protection Agency plans to change the way it calculates the future health risks of air pollution, a shift that would predict thousands of fewer deaths and would help justify the planned rollback of a key climate change measure, according to five people with knowledge of the agency’s plans. The proposed change would dramatically reduce the 1,400 additional premature deaths per year that the E.P.A. had initially forecast as a result of eliminating the…

Read More Read More

Air pollution is deadlier than tobacco smoking

Air pollution is deadlier than tobacco smoking

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: Air pollution may be damaging every organ and virtually every cell in the human body, according to a comprehensive new global review. The research shows head-to-toe harm, from heart and lung disease to diabetes and dementia, and from liver problems and bladder cancer to brittle bones and damaged skin. Fertility, foetuses and children are also affected by toxic air, the review found. The systemic damage is the result of pollutants causing inflammation that then floods through the…

Read More Read More

Deregulation and climate change result in growing number of Americans breathing polluted air

Deregulation and climate change result in growing number of Americans breathing polluted air

Comments 0 Comment

CNN reports: More Americans are breathing air that will make them sick, according to the American Lung Association’s annual State of the Air report. The country had been making progress in cleaning up air pollution, but during the Trump administration, it has been backsliding, the report says. Deregulation and climate change are largely to blame. President Donald Trump made a pledge in his 2017 State of the Union address to “promote clean air and water,” but his administration has reversed…

Read More Read More

We need contact with nature for the sake of our sanity

We need contact with nature for the sake of our sanity

Comments 0 Comment

Jonathan Lambert writes: The experience of natural spaces, brimming with greenish light, the smells of soil and the quiet fluttering of leaves in the breeze can calm our frenetic modern lives. It’s as though our very cells can exhale when surrounded by nature, relaxing our bodies and minds. Some people seek to maximize the purported therapeutic effects of contact with the unbuilt environment by embarking on sessions of forest bathing, slowing down and becoming mindfully immersed in nature. But in…

Read More Read More

On a continent wracked with epidemics, millions turn to traditional healers

On a continent wracked with epidemics, millions turn to traditional healers

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: Across the African continent, according to the World Health Organization, there are about 80 times as many traditional healers as there are medical doctors. Millions of Africans consult healers but, studies suggest, usually do not admit it if they see doctors, too. In Congo, doctors now fighting Ebola believe that many of their patients first get infected while visiting such healers. They may arrive at the home of someone like Mr. Muriisa [who the reporter…

Read More Read More

Smaller countries are becoming the healthiest

Smaller countries are becoming the healthiest

Comments 0 Comment

Bloomberg reports: There’s more to life than money, and economists know it. As new assessments of global living standards proliferate, attempting to gauge how healthy, happy and successful humans are depending on where they live, a pattern is slowly emerging. While slight variations in data can throw up different winners, smaller countries are increasingly dominating the top of the lists while big countries with booming economies fall behind. A new analysis, the Global Wellness Index published by investment firm LetterOne,…

Read More Read More