Eideard

The association representing the spas in Quebec is calling on people to be cautious when choosing a spa after a woman died following a detoxification treatment at a facility near Drummondville. Chantal Lavigne, 35, died in hospital Friday.

Police said Lavigne had undergone treatment at the Reine de Paix farmhouse in the town of Durham, about 100 kilometres southeast of Montreal. She was one of about 10 people taking part in a lengthy detoxification session.

“The treatments consisted of a process of sweating by being all wrapped in plastic with mud, and also with blankets,” said Sgt. Éloise Cossette. Lavigne died Friday afternoon, while another woman was in stable condition Saturday. Both women were also encased in cardboard boxes.

Police were trying to determine if negligence or criminal conduct was involved. Or just plain stupidity?

Spas in Quebec are not regulated, said Lucie Brosseau with Alliance Spas Relais Santé, which represents some Quebec spas. Brosseau said the association has developed standards for spas to follow, but they are not mandatory…

Police say at least 10 people were undergoing the same detox treatment, which lasted for several hours, and did not include drinking water…

Neighbours have previously complained to police about the farmhouse after hearing loud screaming on the property…

The spa specializes in Reiki therapy, and offers energy therapy, massage and natural products, according to an online listing.

Maybe one of their specialties is primal scream therapy. Another winner – for neurotics.

I would hope that anyone considering any wingy-dingy extreme therapy for anything would take the time to consult a physician about the procedures. Dying is as extreme as it gets.

 
Thanks, Cinaedh

Puja for a new car

This new year will bring the 20th anniversary of that shimmering, amorphous thing, the new India.

Like China and South Africa and other made-over nations, India has more than one birth date. There is that midnight hour in 1947 when Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed the end of British rule and spoke of India’s “tryst with destiny.” But it is to 1991, when India began to open its doors to the world and loosen the economic controls on its own citizens, that the present form of the country can most easily be traced…

Who is this new India? Its character is coming into ever sharper focus, and it is becoming clearer which ideas have most shaped its remaking.

Here, based on my own years of traveling in and reporting on the country, are five ideas that have done much to turn the new India new — out of a larger pool of ideas that could be mentioned.

Class is a situation. Every society has distinctions of class. But in an earlier India, these distinctions were taken to be intrinsic and eternal and heritable; class was not circumstance, but identity.

The ancient caste system was the most obvious symbol of this idea. But it had many subtler expressions, too.

Businessmen made a point of hierarchically noting that “he came to meet me” or “I went to meet him,” rather than simply saying, “We met.” Waiters hunched and bowed and obsequiously overdosed on the word “sir” or “sahib” when serving.

A rising group of young Indians conceives of class very differently: not as a fixed identity, but as a transient situation, and a situation that can change…

The next three areas of change are Family, English language, Gold is old. RTFA.

Modernity is best served traditional. Changes of this kind have been disruptive, to say the least, in many parts of the developing world. India is often faulted for modernizing too slowly and chaotically. But there is perhaps another way of seeing its journey over the past 20 years: as a different model of modernization.

It is a model of forward movement in which the past retains the upper hand and the future stands on the defensive. Change, however inevitable it might seem, must prove itself before being allowed to work on India.

But the Indian model is more than just cautious. It tends to assume, against all odds, that the traditional and the modern are ultimately compatible.

I don’t think that’s so unusual, although not necessary. Where it might be considered a requirement, say, in Mainland China – much, much less so on Taiwan. For a direct comparison.

Time will tell. Indians will make the decision. How much of the nation is involved is still a key question.

Linda Bird couldn’t believe it when agents from the U.S. Border patrol at the crossing between Manitoba and Minnesota told her she had illegal contraband in her car – and that she faced the possibility of a $300 fine.

The unlawful property in question: a Kinder Surprise egg she had bought as a gift…

The family was driving to Ontario to visit her two daughters and going through the United States, which is a shorter drive, Bird said…

“They told us it was prohibited,” she said in an interview with the Star. Then they handed her a list of prohibited items that are not allowed in the United States which she took, escaping with just a warning.

“We kind of thought of it as more of a nuisance. We left. I didn’t think anything more about it.” That is until last week when she got a seven-page letter from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency. The letter asked her if she wanted the egg back or if she was going to abandon any rights to it.

“I was in disbelief,” she said. “It’s a two-dollar egg. Why make a big fuss over it? Just throw it in the garbage.”

If she doesn’t sign the letter, let U.S. Customs and Border officials know whether she wants the egg, and return it within five business days, she also could be liable for $250 in storage costs for the egg in the event of a legal challenge.

When President Obama speaks of eliminating foolish spending by the government, he might wish to start with crap like this. Especially the part about storing confiscated items, charging for the storage – and I’ll bet there’s an equally complex and useless procedure for their disposal.

Thanks, Mr. Fusion

Scientists are reporting the first evidence that a plastic antibody – an artificial version of the proteins produced by the body’s immune system to recognize and fight infections and foreign substances – works in the bloodstream of a living animal. The discovery, they suggest in a report…is an advance toward medical use of simple plastic particles custom tailored to fight an array of troublesome “antigens.” Those antigens include everything from disease-causing viruses and bacteria to the troublesome proteins that cause allergic reactions to plant pollen, house dust, certain foods, poison ivy, bee stings and other substances.

In the report, Kenneth Shea, Yu Hosino, and colleagues refer to previous research in which they developed a method for making plastic nanoparticles, barely 1/50,000th the width of a human hair, that mimic natural antibodies in their ability to latch onto an antigen. That antigen was melittin, the main toxin in bee venom. They make the antibody with molecular imprinting, a process similar to leaving a footprint in wet concrete. The scientists mixed melittin with small molecules called monomers, and then started a chemical reaction that links those building blocks into long chains, and makes them solidify. When the plastic dots hardened, the researchers leached the poison out. That left the nanoparticles with tiny toxin-shaped craters.

Their new research, together with Naoto Oku’s group of the University Shizuoka Japan, established that the plastic melittin antibodies worked like natural antibodies. The scientists gave lab mice lethal injections of melittin, which breaks open and kills cells. Animals that then immediately received an injection of the melittin-targeting plastic antibody showed a significantly higher survival rate than those that did not receive the nanoparticles. Such nanoparticles could be fabricated for a variety of targets, Shea says. “This opens the door to serious consideration for these nanoparticles in all applications where antibodies are used,” he adds.

Wow!

If you’re up for it, read the original report. The link is just above.

Plastics surround us. A vital manufacturing ingredient for nearly every existing industry, these materials appear in a high percentage of the products we use every day. Although modern life would be hard to imagine without this versatile chemistry, products composed of plastics also have a dark side, due in part to the very characteristics that make them so desirable — their durability and longevity.

Now Rolf Halden, associate professor at Arizona State University…has undertaken a survey of existing scientific literature concerning the hazards of plastics to human health and to the ecosystems we depend on. His findings, which appear in the latest issue of the Annual Review of Public Health, are sobering…

Halden’s study reiterates the fact that the effects to the environment from plastic waste are acute. Measurements from the most contaminated regions of the world’s oceans show that the mass of plastics exceeds that of plankton sixfold. Patches of oceanic garbage — some as large as the state of Texas — hold a high volume of non-biodegradable plastics. Aquatic birds and fish are increasingly victims because biodegradation processes are inadequate to eliminate this durable refuse…

Two broad classes of plastic-related chemicals are of critical concern for human health — bisphenol-A or BPA, and additives used in the synthesis of plastics, which are known as phthalates. Halden explains that plastics are polymers — long chains of molecules usually made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and/or silicon, which are chemically linked together or polymerized. Different polymer chains can be used to create forms of plastics with unique and useful properties…

Adding to the health risks associated with BPA is the fact that other ingredients — such as plasticizers — are commonly added to plastics. Many of these potentially toxic components also can leach out over time. Among the most common is a chemical known as di-ethylhexyl phthalate or DEHP. In some products, notably medical devices including IV bags or tubing, additives like DEHP can make up 40 or 50 percent of the product. “If you’re in a hospital, hooked up to an IV drip,” Halden explains, “the chemical that oozes out goes directly into your bloodstream, with no opportunity for detoxification in the gut. This can lead to unhealthy exposure levels, particularly in susceptible populations such as newborns…”

Ultimately, converting to petroleum-free construction materials for use in smart and sustainable plastics will become a necessity, driven not only by health and environmental concerns but by the world’s steadily declining oil supply. As Halden emphasizes, the manufacture of plastics currently accounts for about 8 percent of the world’s petroleum use, a sizeable chunk, which ultimately contributes to another global concern — the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Overdue. Yes, exactly one of the critical uses of computational analysis my life and career would be dedicated to – if I wasn’t an old cranky geek.

Typical plastic debris collected in a surface plankton net

Scientists have discovered an area of the North Atlantic Ocean where plastic debris accumulates. The region is said to compare with the well-documented “great Pacific garbage patch”.

Kara Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association told the BBC that the issue of plastics had been “largely ignored” in the Atlantic.

She announced the findings of a two-decade-long study at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland, Oregon, US. The work is the conclusion of the longest and most extensive record of plastic marine debris in any ocean basin…

The researchers carried out 6,100 tows in areas of the Caribbean and the North Atlantic – off the coast of the US. More than half of these expeditions revealed floating pieces of plastic on the water surface…

“We found a region fairly far north in the Atlantic Ocean where this debris appears to be concentrated and remains over long periods of time,” she explained. “More than 80% of the plastic pieces we collected in the tows were found between 22 and 38 degrees north. So we have a latitude for [where this] rubbish seems to accumulate.”

The maximum “plastic density” was 200,000 pieces of debris per square kilometre. “That’s a maximum that is comparable with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” said Dr Lavender Law.

But she pointed out that there was not yet a clear estimate of the size of the patches in either the Pacific or the Atlantic.

“You can think of it in a similar way [to the Pacific Garbage Patch], but I think the word ‘patch’ can be misleading. This is widely dispersed and it’s small pieces of plastic,” she said.

The impacts on the marine environment of the plastics were still unknown, added the researcher. “But we know that many marine organisms are consuming these plastics and we know this has a bad effect on seabirds in particular,” she told BBC News.

Human beings would probably continue to crap in an open sewer in the middle of the street if someone didn’t pass a law against it.

In a shift of position, the Food and Drug Administration is expressing concerns about possible health risks from bisphenol-A, or BPA, a widely used component of plastic bottles and food packaging that it declared safe in 2008.

Meaningless to tea baggers who whine about the change Obama brought to government.

The agency said that it had “some concern about the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior and prostate gland of fetuses, infants and children,” and would join other federal health agencies in studying the chemical in both animals and humans.

The action is another example of the drug agency under the Obama administration becoming far more aggressive in taking hard looks at what it sees as threats to public health. In recent months, the agency has stepped up its oversight of food safety and has promised to tighten approval standards for medical devices.

Concerns about BPA are based on studies that have found harmful effects in animals, and on the recognition that the chemical seeps into food and baby formula, and that nearly everyone is exposed to it, starting in the womb…

BPA has been used since the 1960s to make hard plastic bottles, sippy cups for toddlers and the linings of food and beverage cans, including the cans used to hold infant formula and soda. Until recently, it was used in baby bottles, but major manufacturers are now making bottles without it. Plastic items containing BPA are generally marked with a 7 on the bottom for recycling purposes…

Reports of potential health effects have made BPA notorious, especially among parents, and led to widespread shunning of products thought to contain the chemical. Canada, Chicago and Suffolk County, N.Y., have banned BPA from children’s products.

RTFA. Reflect upon the agency we used to call the FEMA of Food Safety. It’s starting to change.

According to a poll of Pennsylvania adults, about 17 percent of Pennsylvanians experienced an injury or knows someone who was injured while opening gifts during past seasons.

The Patient Poll…asked participants “Have you or someone you know ever been injured (such as receiving a cut that required medical attention) while opening the packaging (not gift wrap) of a holiday or birthday gift?”

Its findings …

Yes, one time = 6.3%
Yes, more than once = 11.0%
No = 82.7%

The following tips may help:

If you must use a knife or another type of sharp object, cut away from your body.

If you must use scissors, use ones with blunt tips.

Wear protective gloves.

Avoid opening tough-to-open packages in a crowded area.

Don’t use your legs to keep the product stable.

Some pretty scary stuff, eh? I keep a pair of truly heavy-duty shear-type scissors on my desk – just for opening office supplies.

Phthalates are important components of many consumer products, including toys, cleaning materials, plastics, and personal care items. Studies to date on phthalates have been inconsistent, with some linking exposure to these chemicals to hormone disruptions, birth defects, asthma, and reproductive problems, while others have found no significant association between exposure and adverse effects.

A new report by Korean scientists…found a significant positive association between phthalate exposure and ADHD, meaning that the higher the concentration of phthalate metabolites in the urine, the worse the ADHD symptoms and/or test scores.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the Summary of their 2005 Third National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals, state that “very limited scientific information is available on potential human health effects of phthalates at levels” found in the U.S. population. Although this study was performed in a Korean population, their levels of exposure are likely comparable to a U.S. population.

The current findings do not prove that phthalate exposure caused ADHD symptoms. However, these initial findings provide a rational basis for further research on this association.

Yup. The math works. Now, lets see if the chemistry and biology does.