A Natural Environmental Health Facts Ezine

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"A NATURAL ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH FACTS Ezine" Here to Inform and Help You Become Healthier and Happier while Achieving Quality Longevity!

http://www.antibiotic-alternatives.com
Email Lena
928-636-9425
Wednesday July 5, 2006
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=> IN THIS ISSUE!
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==> Editors' Ranting & or Warnings
==> Something To Think About
==> Health Thought for the day!
==> Showcase Health Spotlight
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==> Today's Health Tip
==> Food of The Week (Sunday only)
==> Health Today
==> Environmental Report
==> Life Changing Information

Today is going to be a day of relaxation. Reason #1 I'm still tired from the weekend of celebrating with a huge family... Reason #2 it's our 48th wedding anniversary and I think we deserve a rest for sticking with each other for a whole 48 years. The secret to staying together so long for us. Commitment... Inability to honor commitments and failure happens! Neither of us is a quitter and we both have the ability of going back in our memory and remember why we got together in the first place and bring those great old feelings back alive until the next impasse occurs then do it all over again. We also knew that we would continue to fall in love over and over in our lifetime and it's a choice of doing with a spouse or looking for someone else and we both choose each other. Makes for romance in the marriage...

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Take charge of you and your family's health before it takes charge of you!
Lena

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Something To Think About
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THOUGHT FOR THE DAY!
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Television watching produces a unique metabolic state, writes author David Bodanis. The TV viewer's eyes remain busy constantly scanning, while the rest of the body is slowing. "Pulse and temperature and muscle tension all decrease in the average viewer to a level that steadies at 13 percent down from even just ordinary sitting," says Bodanis in his book, The Secret Family. "Any truly intent TV watcher will soon be in the extraordinary position -- as psychological measures will confirm -- of burning fewer calories than if he were doing nothing at all!" says Bodanis.
Because the eye muscles don't join the general slowdown, Bodanis describes the condition as a waking dream.

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Fish Oil Treats ADHD Better Than Ritalin

Fish oil improves the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) without any of the side effects of drugs like Ritalin and Concerta -- and more effectively, a study by the University of Adelaide in Australia found.

When 130 children between the ages of 7 and 12 with ADHD were given fish oil capsules daily, behavior dramatically improved within three months. Further:

* After seven months, the children were not as restless and showed improvements at school
* Improvements in concentration and attention improved by one-third
* After 15 weeks, 30-40 percent of the children taking fish oil had improvements
* After 30 weeks, 40-50 percent improved
* Children taking placebo capsules were later switched to fish oil and subsequently also experienced improved behavior
* Improvements were still being seen after the study ended, which suggests the fish oils may have long-term effects. When the researchers compared their results to studies of Ritalin and Concerta for ADHD, they found that fish oils were more effective.

ADHD drugs are known to carry serious side effects, including insomnia, changes in personality, cardiotoxicity, heart attack, stroke and even sudden death. In the UK, nine children have died after taking the drugs.

The daily Mail

ABC News Online

LENA'S COMMENT: This is not the only study that has shown those effects. My recommended fish oil Click here

Act? Wait? It can be your choice Treatment itself can be dangerous. And, scientists now say, it might not be necessary -- even for younger men.
By Susan Brink, LATimes Staff Writer
July 3, 2006

IT was, many physicians would say, the right thing for a man of 53 to do. So Larry Cano had a prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, test. "It was 5.3," says Cano, a film producer from Newport Beach. "They say anything over 4 is noteworthy."

The noteworthy result, followed by a positive biopsy, sent Cano pinballing from surgeon to radiologist and back with what he believes, three years later, was an exaggerated sense of urgency.

He may have been right. Researchers ? and a few doctors ? are beginning to agree: Even many younger men with prostate cancer can afford to wait.

"Most of the time, I tell men that they may need treatment, but they're not going to die," says Mark Scholz, a Marina del Rey oncologist, specializing in prostate cancer. "A lot of men with low-grade cancer may not need treatment for five to 10 years."

Some may never need it.

No one initially told Cano that his prostate cancer was not an emergency, that he had time to talk to men who had been through the same diagnosis, to do his own research, to take a deep breath and think about how he wanted to live the rest of his life. No one told him that he could leave his prostate intact, right where it was, while carefully monitoring his condition - and that he might be able to do that for quite a long time. Maybe forever.

Cano didn't fit the profile of the traditional candidate for what's called watchful waiting, an option that has become synonymous with doing nothing. That approach has been recommended for older men or those threatened by other diseases.

Men like him - younger, healthier men diagnosed with earlier stages of cancer - are typically urged to act quickly. They represent the changing demographic of the disease and, like Cano, often feel lucky to catch it early. Cano even made an appointment for surgery. "I thought, just buck up and get it done," he says.

But then he took some time to think again. He did a lot of reading, weighed risks and benefits, and ultimately decided on a form of waiting that is anything but passive.

What Cano chose represents the newest thinking in the disease, and the approach is so different from watchful waiting that no one calls it that any more. They call it active surveillance.

Three years later, his prostate is still where nature put it, he feels fine, and he has become a diligent student of his medically relevant numbers. So far, his cancer is not progressing.

Theoretically, half of men diagnosed with the disease have caught it early enough to at least try active surveillance. The prostate stays, and the patient and his doctors regularly hover over new test numbers and images, on the alert for any sign of change. But only about 12% of such men go that route.

Cano knows full well that he is trading the treatment risks ? impotence and incontinence - for the risk of waiting too long and missing the best opportunity to cure his cancer. For his choice to pay off, he has to monitor his condition on a tight schedule, and be ready to act if it changes - all the while hoping for the good luck of slow-growing cancer cells.

Such monitoring of early disease, increasingly debated in the inner sanctum of medical meetings and on the pages of scientific journals, rarely makes its way to the list of choices offered to patients. In fact, the number of men choosing to wait is going down, according to a federal database, even as the number of younger men with low-risk disease is going up.

No one argues that men with more advanced disease ought to make a treatment decision soon. But the growing number of men who are finding out in their 50s and 60s that they have early-stage prostate cancer are also routinely being urged toward surgery or radiation soon after diagnosis, even though medicine currently offers no way of knowing for sure who needs treatment and who doesn't.

It's little wonder, then, that about 150,000 of the 234,460 men diagnosed with the disease each year move quickly to have surgery, radiation seed implants, or one of a variety of other radiation techniques.

"Of the rest, probably about half get hormone treatments and half get watched," says Scholz, Cano's physician. Those watched are typically elderly or have other life-threatening conditions. And they are watched in the old way. "Too much waiting and not enough watching," says Peter Carroll, urologist at UC San Francisco.

Adding confusion to men's hurried decisions, medical science offers no definitive answers to who is a good candidate for surgery, or who might do better with radiation, because there has never been a head-to-head clinical trial of surgery versus the different forms of radiation.

"Neither side wants to find out the other one is better," says Dr. Stephen Doggett, a Tustin radiologist whose practice consists of providing brachytherapy, the implantation of radiation seeds into the prostate. "No one has ever proven that one is better than the other."

But for some men, neither a rush to treatment nor the old, passive wait-and-see approach is appropriate. "I spend half my time talking guys down out of the tree," Scholz says. If surgical or radiation treatment were akin to, say, treatment for basal cell carcinoma in which the common skin tumors are removed and the patient suffers no serious consequences, then early diagnosis followed by universal treatment would be a no-brainer. But with prostate cancer, the usual treatments can have emasculating side effects. "If we had a nontoxic treatment, you wouldn't care," Scholz says. "But we're making them impotent, making them leak urine."

LENA'S COMMENT: I've been telling men this for years now. It's about time someone else said that PSA elevations mostly do not require treatment! Since more than 60% are erroneous results it is foolish to rush into treatment for prostate cancer that may or may not exist. Even if there is prostate cancer more than 95% of men diagnosed with it will not die from prostate cancer but something else alltogether as prostate cancers, as a rule, are not life threatening. That isn't to say they should not be tracked and watched and should they start to grow fast action can be taken then but should not be taken before!

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DDT Study Finds New Hazard to Young Children Babies born in the U.S. to mothers emigrating from Mexico show mental and physical impairment, a UC Berkeley survey finds.
By Marla Cone, LA Times Staff Writer
July 5, 2006

Babies and toddlers of California farmworkers exposed to the insecticide DDT have neurological effects that are severe enough in some cases to slow their mental and physical development, according to research by UC Berkeley scientists published today.

The federally funded research involving the children of women who recently emigrated from Mexico to the Salinas Valley is the first in the United States to indicate that the pesticide harms human brain development.

"This suggests that … DDT has effects that no one even thought to test for back when it was in use," said Dr. Walter Rogan, an epidemiologist with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. He was not involved in the new study, published in the journal Pediatrics.

Because DDT was banned more than 30 years ago in the United States and most developed countries, the findings have particular relevance for the ongoing, controversial use in Africa to combat malaria.

UC Berkeley scientists measured levels of various pesticides in 360 pregnant women, nearly all of whom were born in Mexico, and tested the mental and motor skills of their infants and toddlers, who were born in the Salinas Valley.

For every tenfold rise in DDT exposure, the children's scores on mental tests dropped 2 to 3 points. Their motor skills were also reduced. In the worst cases, the highest DDT doses were associated with a 7- to 10-point drop in the mental scores of 24-month-old children compared with those who were not exposed.

Those drops are significant, because the average score in the study was 86 at that age and anything below 85 indicates a developmental delay and potential learning disability. The tests measure the children's ability to learn and think, including memory and problem-solving skills.

"If you had a whole population with a downward shift like this, you'd be seeing more kids with developmental problems," said Brenda Eskenazi, a UC Berkeley professor of maternal and child health and epidemiology, who directed the project.

The Salinas Valley women had very high exposures, eight times higher than average levels in the U.S. population reported recently by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They were probably exposed in Mexico, because most of them had lived in the United States for less than five years. Mexico allowed the use of DDT on farms until 1995 and for mosquito control until 2000. All uses in the United States ended in 1972.

"These women probably received very little exposure while here in the U.S.," said Asa Bradman, associate director of UC Berkeley's Center for Children's Environmental Health Research and coauthor of the study.

Virtually every human body on Earth still carries traces of DDE, a compound formed as DDT breaks down. But the effects in the Salinas study were mostly associated with DDT, rather than the DDE that is found in most animals and people.

Rogan said that means that the babies' brain development was mostly affected by relatively new spraying, not the residue that remains in the environment from spraying decades ago.

"This finding is mostly relevant to the current debate about new use of DDT, or any place that still uses DDT, and is less important to places with historical use," said Rogan, who studied DDE's effects on children in the 1980s.

"The take-home message," he said, "is that this is not an entirely benign compound even though the great advantages of its use when you're saving lives with effective malarial control are very important."

Under a United Nations pact, the Stockholm Convention, DDT is used only for killing mosquitoes that transmit malaria, which claims nearly 1 million children and pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa annually. President Bush's year-old Malaria Initiative, the new chief of the World Health Organization's malaria program and some environmental groups support continued use of DDT as one of many strategies until safer options are found.

In Africa, small amounts are squirted on interior walls, unlike the broadcast spraying of the 1940s and 1950s that contaminated most of the world's food, soil and wildlife.

Eskenazi and her colleagues caution in their new report that "the benefit of using DDT to control malaria should be balanced carefully against the potential risk to children's neurodevelopment. Whenever possible, alternative antimalarial controls should be considered, especially in areas where pregnant women and children may be exposed."

Nobody knows if the effects found in the Salinas toddlers will persist. The UC Berkeley team plans to study the same children until they enter school.

"It remains to be seen whether it's a lasting effect or not," Rogan said.

Because DDT and DDE are so similar, scientists were surprised that DDT seemed to harm brain development while the other had little impact. That suggests that the mental abilities of U.S. children born between World War II and the early 1970s — when DDT was routinely sprayed — could have been affected, but not those born years later and exposed to old residue in the environment.

Nevertheless, the researchers reported that breastfeeding is beneficial to babies even when the milk contains large doses of DDT. The children's test scores increased with every month of nursing even for the most contaminated mothers.

Doctors know that breastfeeding boosts a baby's intelligence, yet they have long wondered if contaminants in the milk erase that benefit. The new study "provides additional evidence that breastfeeding may help to compensate for the subtle perinatal insult associated with DDT/DDE exposure," the authors wrote. The insecticide's damage probably occurs in the womb, not during breastfeeding.

The researchers tested the women for other pesticides, but only DDT was connected to neurological effects.

The study is part of a federally funded UC Berkeley project that assesses whether agricultural chemicals in the Salinas Valley, one of the world's most intensely farmed areas, are harming children.

Although animal tests have repeatedly shown that DDT causes neurological damage, the new study is the first in the United States to find such effects in humans.

In North Carolina and New York, large studies in the 1980s and 1990s detected no effect on babies' mental abilities, but they tested for DDE, not DDT. A smaller study in Spain did report some neurological effects.

The insecticide, which mimics estrogen, also affects reproduction. California women exposed in the womb are more likely to experience delays in getting pregnant decades later, according to a 2003 UC Berkeley study. Again, the effect was predominantly found with DDT, not its older residue.

Developed as an insecticide in 1939, DDT was popular because it killed insects but wasn't acutely poisonous to people or animals. But by the 1950s, it was accumulating in food chains, nearly wiping out eagles and other birds.

Canadian scientists recently reported that DDT still contaminates farm soils and will seep into the air for another generation.