Aug 06 2010
The ‘Agent Orange’ of these occupations, that’s literally as some of these soldiers are suffering from exactly the same extreme physical ailments of the same chemicals, and more, of the defoliants only this time they were sucking in smoke and air from these burn pits, as are the citizens occupied and especially downwind and the ground contamination left from the burns!
Ailing vets sue over smoke from trash fires in Iraq, Afghanistan
Apr 10 2010
I was am a smoker. I will always be a smoker. I started smoking when I was in my early teens. Over the last 40 or so years, I have smoked as much as not; and I have quit more times than I can count. My longest quit was for eleven years. My shortest quit, excluding the quits where I started up again within a day or two, was one year. I am currently quit again and going on three plus years this time. If I added all of my quits together, I would guess that I have not smoked 15 – 20 of the last 40 years. If I was diagnosed with a terminal disease and told I have only a short time left to live, I would run to the store to buy cigarettes.
Tobacco’s physical addiction is a cake walk to kick. A nicotine patch for a few weeks clears the way for the grudge match I have to wage with myself while I try to kick my psychological additions to the habit. Yes, I get that smoking is bad for my health. Yes, I know stale smoke and butts smell really bad. Yes, second hand smoke is bad for others; and yes, they have a right not to smell or breath smoke. Cigarettes are also outrageously expensive, and there is no place left on the planet to smoke in peace except at home. I know. I know. I know. Yet, cigarettes are my best friend; my entertainment when bored or restless. They help me think, and they make my mouth and hands particularly happy.
So, you can imagine how interested I was in this piece from Reuters. It explores why some smokers get lung cancer and others don’t.
(Reuters) – Researchers have identified a group of genes that are especially active in lung cancer patients — even in healthy tissue — and said they may be used to predict which smokers will eventually develop lung cancer.
And, they said, a natural supplement derived from food that is being tested to prevent lung cancer appears to halt the precancerous changes.
“Even in normal cells or premalignant cells prior to cancer development we see this pathway being turned on,” said Andrea Bild of the University of Utah, who worked on the study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
–snip-
Myo-inositol is also found in fruits, beans, grains and nuts, although Bild said the finding does not necessarily explain why people who eat more of these foods have a lower risk of cancer in general.
I’ll be sure to save this tidbit right next to my copy of Final Exit.
Dec 03 2009
There is a little known but deadly breast cancer that presents itself without a lump, so most women do not know how to check for the signs. It is cunning because it looks like a common, everyday irritation when it’s in the early stages, and it can progress to Stage IV in a matter of weeks or months. Many doctors see this cancer and mistake it for a spider bite, an allergic rash, or a mild infection.
Inflammatory breast cancer is a rare and aggressive disease. It strikes black women disproportionately, and doesn’t discriminate against the young. The average woman who gets this diagnosis is 57, but it’s seen in teenagers, as well. It kills young people more visciously than the rest: the trend is that younger patients commonly fail to survive five years after treatment. Perhaps they are less likely to seek treatment as soon as older women. But this disease can kill a woman stone dead in a matter of months without treatment.
Update: Photobucket removed the pictures of this disease, probably because they contain breasts. Great. Look in the links and the videos, and you will see many good photos of this disease’s various expressions.
Nov 04 2009
Cross posted at DK
Morning all (cant say good cause it’s not)
Oct 29 2009
…and Corporate Ownership of the R&D end
Past Posts to the Issues:
REAL Health Care Reform
Angry Letter to My Blue Dog CongressCritter
Scam of Ages
The Great Unicorn Flu Panic of 2009
Some Herbal Wonders
Every day we’re encouraged and cajoled to call and write our representatives to encourage them to include some sort of public option in their ridiculous sham of a street theater road show deceptively called “Health Care Reform,” long since bought and paid for by the health insurance industry itself. They want us to beg – and we have begged and begged some more – but they’re not going to give us anything. Never intended to, this is just a show. What is planned isn’t any sort of reform at all of a system designed on purpose to kill off those pesky (and too numerous) Baby Boomers as well as all the excess no-longer-employable working class slaves the nation’s banks and brokers no longer need or want, along with sickly citizens of all descriptions. Sooner, not later.
There are some who want to believe the current swine flu epidemic and planned vaccination program is genocide-writ-large, but it’s not. It’s just a bug that got out and deaths from it or its vaccines won’t even be half the annual toll from regular seasonal flu. Which will kill its 30-50 thousand come January/February and nobody will think a thing of it. Instead, what we’ve got is this complete sham of a health care non-debate that is really just another corporate bailout for crooks who don’t need or deserve a single cent of our hard-earned money.
Oct 29 2009
Well here’s some serious rain on humanity’s latest parade: Cell phones can indeed give you cancer.
Who will tell the children?
In a decade long, landmark study, it turns out that long term use of cell phones ‘significantly increases risk’ of tumors.
Great.
How much you want to bet that people just decide to ignore this?
I mean, who wants to give up their cell phone?
The “funny” thing (not funny ha-ha but funny queer) about this is that they just don’t know how to break it to the public:
Publication of the results of the £20million investigation have been delayed over disagreements how best to present the conclusions.
Maybe they should spend another ten years and twenty million pounds doing a study on how to tell the cell-phone loving public.
I’m sure the corporatocracy would gladly delay this as long as possible.
And it’s sort of embarrassing for the governments as well:
The findings are expected to put pressure on the British Government, which has always insisted that mobile phones are safe to use.
Sorry, I realize this is bad news. But something we should all be aware of.
Might want to spread it around.
Oct 09 2009
For those that seem to have a problem with the facts of how we humans live and readily do damage to our environment, and really seem not to care, that around us as well as adding to what everyone else has done making it a global problem, this post, and the links etc. that it contains, may educate you some, and this is only about what our military does, knowingly or not, and corrects or not.
Oct 09 2009
Here’s a little candid photo series about something some consider not so fun. Losing hair while undergoing chemo. At least, most folks seem sad about it as regards a few of the responses I’ve gotten when I’ve mentioned the passing (temporary?) of my hair.
In preface to those who don’t understand the chemo reference, here’s how I got here:
Roy Rogers is riding tonight. Cancer and me
And I thought to myself, how odd that a couple of months ago, when it was summer, I drove with the windows down and my hair was blowing, but I had two feet of it then and it was such a hassle because it was blowing across my face and getting in the way and I had no hair tie in the car and it was hot, hot, hot. Today, the bits of hair flying were not a hassle; the sensation was rather oddly liberating.
That’s how I still feel. Will I still feel this way as time progresses? Don’t know. Don’t care.
(crossposted at Dailykos)
Oct 04 2009
It’s maybe four and a half, five miles from the Lowe’s hardware store to the front yard of my house and most of the way I drive, the route is a very straight stretch of two lane road that looks nothing like suburbia and very little like the rest of the east side neighborhoods that splotch the landscape of land where truck farms and diary farms abounded in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s up through the 1960’s.
The two-laner dips and rises a bit occasionally as it passes by the still expensive homes that seem to want to announce to every passing driver that wealthy people live there, or lived there, with their horses and white cross-bar wooden fences or the occasionally recycled plastic white board-like fencing with the spire post caps.
Personal disclaimer: Over the years here, I’ve made liberal use of the device of interspersing lyrics with my writing. Tonight I’m a little fanciful, but I’ll mention up front that I’m gonna do it again in this diary. Some people hate it. Well, you don’t have to read me. But I ask that you bear with me anyway. Indulge me.
And, whatever you do, grab all the joy you can.
(crossposted at Dailykos)
Sep 23 2009
Crossposted at Daily Kos
The woman in the video below is Patricia Churchill, who tells the story of a member of her family who lost her job and insurance and has cancer that needs treating NOW.
The full quote of what Rep. Cantor (Fink-VA) said was “there is probably 23, 24% of the uninsured that is already eligible for an existing government program […] Beyond that, I know that there are programs, there are charitable organizations. . .”
Rep. Cantor went on to say “No one in this country, given who we are, should be sitting without an option to be addressed.”
Yesterday, Eric Cantor called for “Scrapping” the Public Option.
Transcript and more below the fold
Jun 12 2009
When I had cancer, a close friend asked if I ever wondered: why me? I told her that I didn’t. I told her that given that one in three Americans will, at some point, be diagnosed with cancer, I felt why not me? Cancer happens. It’s sometimes random. It happened to me. There was neither rhyme nor reason. It just did.
A different friend recently asked the same about a close friend of mine, who was just killed in an auto accident. A speeding semi veered into his car, in a national park, in Uganda, killing him and leaving his wife widowed for the second time and seriously injured. My friend wondered: why? Why him? Why her?
Another friend asked how I took the news. If I tried to think my way through it. If I tried to look for cosmic explanations, or if I was angry at the Universe, or if I was trying to look for silver linings. I wasn’t. My friend wanted to make sure that I wasn’t trying to think my way through it, because he wanted to make sure I was allowing myself to feel my way through it. To allow the pain to wash over me, and through me. Which is the only real way to respond to emotional trauma. Did I allow myself to cry? I certainly did. And I have, off and on, for days.
May 22 2009
In a bizarre post at Salon, Rahul K. Parikh, M.D. says we shouldn’t judge a family that is on the lam, so that their 13 year old son won’t have to experience the hell of chemotherapy treatments for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma:
The story of Daniel Hauser, a 13-year-old boy from Minnesota with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, became tabloid fodder overnight. The boy and his mother are on the lam because the mother refuses, because of her beliefs, to authorize chemotherapy treatments for her son. Hodgkin’s lymphoma has a 90 percent cure rate with chemotherapy, and a 95 percent chance of killing a person without it. Chemotherapy will likely save Daniel’s life, and as a pediatrician I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to recommend it.
But I would also like to turn down the volume on the talk-radio chatter and outraged editorials. That’s because nobody seems to be talking about what it takes to beat Hodgkin’s (or any other cancer). What it takes is a grueling regimen that can indeed give even a dying person pause. In fact, the Hausers didn’t refuse chemotherapy outright. They defied doctors and a judge’s ruling only after Daniel experienced some of its violent effects following one round. If you don’t understand why, listen to my friend, Arun Ponnusamy, 36, who beat acute lymphocytic leukemia. “Surviving cancer is one thing,” he says. “Surviving chemotherapy is another thing entirely.”
I call bullshit. First of all, every type of cancer has a different chemo regimen, and because the bulk of his post is actually about Ponnusamy’s treatments, to have any credibility, Parikh must first explain the similarities between Ponnusamy’s cancer and Hauser’s. But more directly to the point, and in direct contrast to Parikh’s absurd approach, we’re talking about saving the life of a child. Hodgkin’s treatments are brutal, but they usually “cure” the cancer. As in giving the kid a chance at a full life. Which makes enduring probably 12 cycles of chemotherapy not such a terrible prospect. I would know. I am a Hodgkin’s survivor.