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	<title>Health &#38; Family &#187; Bryan Walsh &#124; TIME.com</title>
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		<title>Health &#38; Family &#187; Bryan Walsh &#124; TIME.com</title>
		<link>http://healthland.time.com</link>
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		<title>Urban Ebola? Why the Latest Outbreak in Uganda Raises Worries</title>
		<link>http://healthland.time.com/2012/08/01/urban-ebola-why-the-latest-outbreak-raises-worries/</link>
		<comments>http://healthland.time.com/2012/08/01/urban-ebola-why-the-latest-outbreak-raises-worries/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 01 Aug 2012 12:00:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Infectious Disease]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Africa]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[contagion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ebola]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emerging disease]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[HIV]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[SARS]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://healthland.time.com/?p=65237</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Perhaps 1,850 people have been diagnosed with Ebola hemorrhagic fever since the virus was first identified 36 years ago in the Democratic Republic of Congo. (To put that number in perspective, more than 24,000 people fall ill from tuberculosis each day.) Still, Ebola has a grip on the public imagination that far exceeds the danger it actually poses — in part because of those 1,850 sick people, some 1,200 went on to die. And the deaths are rarely easy — Ebola can cause severe fever, muscle pain, weakness, vomiting, diarrhea and unstoppable bleeding. There is no treatment and no vaccine. That&#8217;s why the latest Ebola outbreak in western Uganda, which has involved at least 20 cases and 14 deaths so far, has received so much attention. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the outbreak originated in a family in Nyanswiga village in Uganda&#8217;s Kibaale district, 140 miles (225 km) west of Kampala, the capital. Such rural outbreaks are not unusual for Ebola — like many emerging infectious diseases, including HIV, it first jumped from primates like gorillas and chimpanzees to human beings, and outbreaks often begin with sick animals. It&#8217;s not surprising then that the first infections would often take place in the African countryside, where the hunting and consumption of wild animals is not uncommon, as I discovered when I visited Cameroon for a TIME story last year. (MORE: Virus Hunter: How One Scientist Is Preventing the Next Pandemic) What&#8217;s got people worried in this case is that one infected patient managed to travel to a hospital in Uganda&#8217;s capital, Kampala, a city of 1.5 million people with air connections to the rest of Africa and the world. Although there has been no evidence yet that Ebola is actively spreading in the city, Kampala residents are, to put it simply, freaked out — so much so that people immediately fled the hospital once word spread that an Ebola patient was being treated there. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni also raised alarm bells when he called on citizens to avoid physical contact to<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=healthland.time.com&#038;blog=8684427&#038;post=65237&#038;subd=timewellness&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Infectious Disease</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://healthland.time.com/category/medicine/infectious-disease/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timewellness.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/600_hl_ebola_uganda_0801.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>H5N1 Paper Published: Deadly, Transmissible Bird Flu Could Be Closer than Thought</title>
		<link>http://healthland.time.com/2012/05/03/h5n1-paper-published-deadly-transmissible-bird-flu-could-be-closer-than-thought/</link>
		<comments>http://healthland.time.com/2012/05/03/h5n1-paper-published-deadly-transmissible-bird-flu-could-be-closer-than-thought/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 03 May 2012 11:00:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Flu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medical Journals]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Policy & Industry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bird flu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[H5N1]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nature]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nsabb]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ron fouchier]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[science]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Yoshihiro Kawaoka]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://healthland.time.com/?p=58731</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[You might not have noticed, but the influenza world has been in a bit of an uproar since late last year, when news leaked out that two teams of researchers had purposefully tweaked H5N1 bird flu in the lab to potentially make it more transmissible among human beings. (H5N1 spreads like wildfire among birds — and usually kills them — but the virus only rarely seems to jump to human beings, though when it does the infections are often fatal.) The two scientists — Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and TIME 100 honoree Ron Fouchier of Erasmus University in the Netherlands — had submitted their research to Nature and Science, respectively, with the expectation of swift publication. In December, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) did something unprecedented: they ruled that the two papers should be censored if published, that they should be scrubbed of the complete methods and viral mutations that the researchers studied, in order to head off the risk that terror groups could use the information to craft a deadly bioweapon. (PHOTOS: The Bird Flu Outbreaks in 2008) That led to intense fighting within the scientific community. Some researchers wanted the papers published in full, both because they believed the work could help arm us against a future flu pandemic, and because they worried about the chill of government censorship on science. Other scientists were against publication and even the experiments themselves, believing that nothing gleaned from the work could be important enough to offset the risk of creating a potentially deadly flu virus. In the end, Fouchier explained that his man-made flu virus wasn&#8217;t the merciless killer that early media reports had made it out to be — Kawaoka&#8217;s man-made virus was always believed to be less dangerous — and in March the NSABB took a look at revised papers submitted by the two research teams and voted to recommend that they be published. On Wednesday, Nature finally published Kawaoka&#8217;s research. (We&#8217;re still waiting for the Fouchier paper, though the Dutch scientist was recently<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=healthland.time.com&#038;blog=8684427&#038;post=58731&#038;subd=timewellness&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Flu</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://healthland.time.com/category/medicine/flu/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timewellness.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/87395826flumoratoriumcrop.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">H5N1</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<item>
		<title>Drug-Resistant Malaria Is Spreading, and It Could Be a Public Health Disaster</title>
		<link>http://healthland.time.com/2012/04/06/drug-resistant-malaria-is-spreading-and-it-could-be-a-public-health-disaster/</link>
		<comments>http://healthland.time.com/2012/04/06/drug-resistant-malaria-is-spreading-and-it-could-be-a-public-health-disaster/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 06 Apr 2012 12:35:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Infectious Disease]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Africa]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[artemisinin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[drug resistance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[infectious disease]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[malaria]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Southeast Asia]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://healthland.time.com/?p=56892</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Malaria remains one of the world&#8217;s great unnecessary killers. More than 650,000 people succumb to the disease each year — that&#8217;s more than one per minute — mostly in the poor nations of sub-Saharan Africa, but as deadly as malaria is, it doesn&#8217;t have to kill. Prevention and better treatment can stop the progression of the disease, and death tends to be a matter of extreme poverty. Indeed, in recent years great progress has been made in controlling malaria, with deaths down 30% over the past decade. That&#8217;s thanks largely to more effective treatment regimens that make use of artemisinin, a plant-derived antimalarial drug originally developed in China. Artemisinin is the closest thing we have to a miracle drug for malaria. That&#8217;s what makes the results of two studies out this week in the Lancet and Science so disturbing. Health officials have known for a while that some malaria parasites in the Southeast Asian nation of Cambodia have begun to develop resistance to artemisinin, but they hoped the resistance wasn&#8217;t spreading. Now researchers in the region have shown that artemisinin is becoming dramatically less potent in malaria cases in western Thailand, and they know it&#8217;s due to growing drug resistance in the malaria parasites themselves. If resistance to artemisinin were to spread to sub-Saharan Africa, the result could be a &#8220;public health disaster,&#8221; in the words of lead Lancet author Standwell Nkhoma of the Texas Biomedical Research Institute. (MORE: Fake Malaria Drugs Endanger Millions of Lives) Artemisinin-resistant malaria parasites first emerged in Cambodia in 2006, which led to an international effort to control malaria and contain resistant strains there. But scientists in the Lancet study looked at more than 3,000 patients who were treated at malaria clinics in northwestern Thailand between 2001 and 2010. The researchers — including staff from Texas Biomed, Mahidol University in Bangkok and the Centre for Tropical Medicine at Oxford — found that it took longer and longer for malaria parasites to be cleared during treatment, a sign of growing resistance. Molecular analysis of the malaria parasites showed that this resistance to treatment<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=healthland.time.com&#038;blog=8684427&#038;post=56892&#038;subd=timewellness&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Infectious Disease</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://healthland.time.com/category/medicine/infectious-disease/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timewellness.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/malaria-mosquito.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">malaria mosquito</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">More...</media:title>
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		<title>Bad Food: Illnesses from Imported Food Are on the Rise, CDC Says</title>
		<link>http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/15/bad-food-illnesses-from-imported-food-are-on-the-rise-cdc-says/</link>
		<comments>http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/15/bad-food-illnesses-from-imported-food-are-on-the-rise-cdc-says/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 15 Mar 2012 18:00:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Food Safety]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Policy & Industry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CDC]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fish]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[foodborne illness]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[imported food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[spices]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://healthland.time.com/?p=55428</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[There&#8217;s a good chance that at least part of your lunch came from another country. According to the Department of Agriculture&#8217;s Economic Research Service, food imports to the U.S. grew to $86 billion in 2010 from $41 billion in 1999. Most of that came in fruits and vegetables — think of all the produce that now flows into the U.S. from Central and South America — but an estimated 85% of the seafood consumed in the U.S. is also imported, often from fish farms. Altogether about 16% of the food eaten in the U.S. comes from other countries — and given some of the many holes in the food safety net for imports, that should be a little concerning. That&#8217;s exactly what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is worried about. In a new report published on Wednesday, the CDC estimated that foodborne disease outbreaks caused by imported food appeared to rise in 2009 and 2010, and that nearly half of the outbreaks implicated foods imported from areas that had not before been associated with outbreaks. It&#8217;s no surprise — as we eat more food from around the world, some of that food is making us sick. MORE: The End of the Line: Can Farming Save the Oceans&#8217; Fish Stocks? Hannah Gould, an epidemiologist at the CDC&#8217;s division of foodborne, waterborne and environmental diseases and the lead author of the research, put the work in perspective: As our food supply becomes more global, people are eating foods from all over the world, potentially exposing them to germs from all corners of the world, too. We saw an increased number of outbreaks due to imported foods during recent years, and more types of foods from more countries causing outbreaks. The CDC experts reviewed reported foodborne illness outbreaks from 2005 to 2010 and found that during that period, 39 outbreaks and 2,348 illnesses were linked to imported food from 15 countries — with nearly half of the outbreaks occurring in 2009 and 2010. Unsurprisingly fish were the biggest source of<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=healthland.time.com&#038;blog=8684427&#038;post=55428&#038;subd=timewellness&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Food Safety</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://healthland.time.com/category/policy-industry/food-safety-policy-industry/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timewellness.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/129838028.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Coli</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Soda Wars: Can the Color in Your Cola Give You Cancer?</title>
		<link>http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/06/soda-wars-can-the-color-in-your-cola-give-your-cancer/</link>
		<comments>http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/06/soda-wars-can-the-color-in-your-cola-give-your-cancer/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 06 Mar 2012 17:55:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Medicine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Public Health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[2-methylimidazole]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[4-methylimidazole]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[4-mi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[brown]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cancer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[caramel coloring]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[center for science in the public interest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[coke]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cola]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FDA]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pepsi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[soda]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://healthland.time.com/?p=54609</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[If some public-health advocates have their way, sodas could become the cigarettes of food. Doctors already dislike the sugary drinks for their teeth-dissolving properties and for the role they may play in childhood obesity. There&#8217;s a constant struggle to get soda vending machines out of public schools, with administrators often forced to choose between losing sponsorship money from big soda companies and dealing with overcaffeinated, less healthy kids. Given the sheer size of the American soda industry — 9.4 billion cases of soft drinks were sold in the U.S. in 2009 — it&#8217;s not a war that will end anytime soon. Especially if a certain C word starts getting thrown around. That&#8217;s what the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is doing. The consumer watchdog group yesterday wrote a letter to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) calling on officials to ban the use of caramel coloring — the additive that makes cola brown — in soft drinks on the grounds that the chemicals are a possible cancer risk. In the letter to FDA administrator Margaret Hamburg, CSPI executive director Michael Jacobson argued that recent lab analyses show that levels of 4-methylimidazole (4-MI) — which, along with 2-methylimidazole, is formed when sugar is mixed with ammonia and sulfates to create caramel coloring — in 12-oz. servings of soda exceed by nearly five times the 29-microgram limit recommended by the state of California. The group estimated that the average amount of 4-MI in soda translates in the population to a lifetime cancer risk of 5 out of 100,000 people. &#8220;Coke and Pepsi, with the acquiesence of the FDA, are needlessly exposing millions of Americans to a chemical that causes cancer,&#8221; Jacobson said in a statement. Those are strong words, especially since the average American drinks the equivalent of 608 12-oz. cans of soda a year. Is pop really that dangerous? MORE: Do the Chemicals That Turn Soda Brown Also Cause Cancer? The FDA doesn&#8217;t seem to think so. In a statement released on Tuesday, March 6, FDA spokesman Doug<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=healthland.time.com&#038;blog=8684427&#038;post=54609&#038;subd=timewellness&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Public Health</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://healthland.time.com/category/medicine/public-health/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timewellness.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/does-the-color-in-cola-cause-cancer.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">does the color in cola cause cancer?</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Bird Flu: More Common, Less Deadly than We Thought?</title>
		<link>http://healthland.time.com/2012/02/24/bird-flu-more-common-less-deadly-than-we-thought/</link>
		<comments>http://healthland.time.com/2012/02/24/bird-flu-more-common-less-deadly-than-we-thought/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 24 Feb 2012 20:16:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Flu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[avian flu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bird flu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[H5N1]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://healthland.time.com/?p=54013</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This is one thing we thought we knew about the avian influenza virus H5N1: it is extremely deadly. Since the virus first emerged widely in human beings in 2003, there have been 587 cases confirmed by the World Health Organization (WHO). Of them, 346 resulted in death. That&#8217;s a fatality rate of 59%, far above the 0.1% death rate for the standard seasonal flu. If H5N1 really kills more than half of eople it infects, it would represent one of the most dangerous health threats on the planet. This is another thing we thought we knew about H5N1: it rarely infects human beings. Though the virus can spread like wildfire through populations of chickens and other birds, it almost never seems to make the jump to infect human beings — and even then, only when there&#8217;s close contact between an infected bird and a person. (Like the Thai cockfighting trainers who became infected after giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to their sick fighting birds.) The virus almost never spreads from person to person. That makes H5N1 frightening — especially if you&#8217;re unlucky enough to contract it — but, ultimately, a limited health threat. Now, what if it it turned out that H5N1 actually infected far more people than we thought, and that nearly all of them became somewhat sick, but ultimately recovered? That would mean H5N1 was much more transmissible than scientists expected, but far less deadly. That&#8217;s the conclusion pushed by a paper published in this week&#8217;s Science. Peter Palese — an eminent flu expert at New York&#8217;s Mount Sinai School of Medicine — and his colleagues did a meta-analysis of 20 studies that attempted to find evidence of subclinical (meaning without symptoms) infections of H5N1. He estimates that H5N1 infection is far more common than the number of laboratory-confirmed cases would indicate, and that the true fatality rate is much, much lower than 59%. If that&#8217;s true, bird flu may not be the great danger it has sometimes seemed to be, and that would make the ongoing debate over whether scientists should<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=healthland.time.com&#038;blog=8684427&#038;post=54013&#038;subd=timewellness&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Flu</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://healthland.time.com/category/medicine/flu/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timewellness.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/h5n1-bird-flu.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">h5n1 bird flu</media:title>
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		<title>Study: BPA May Be Linked with Heart Disease</title>
		<link>http://healthland.time.com/2012/02/24/study-bpa-may-be-linked-with-heart-disease/</link>
		<comments>http://healthland.time.com/2012/02/24/study-bpa-may-be-linked-with-heart-disease/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 24 Feb 2012 12:00:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Environmental Health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bisphenol-A]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[BPA]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Heart Disease]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://healthland.time.com/?p=53933</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[One of the biggest obstacles to confirming the impact of bisphenol-A (BPA) on human health is that the chemical is so ubiquitous in the environment — it is commonly used in plastics, dental fillings and sealants and in food and beverage can linings, among other places — that it is difficult to separate BPA&#8217;s influence from that of countless other factors. So researchers have mostly depended on in-vitro studies and on animal work to study BPA, and they have found some worrying results: BPA appears to interfere with the endocrine system and fertility and increase the likelihood of developing some cancers. Just because exposure to BPA may have these effects in animals, however, doesn&#8217;t necessarily mean the same thing is true in humans. But it is worrying. Now a new study published in the journal Circulation focuses on humans, finding that BPA exposure may also be connected to an increased risk of heart disease. Using data from a long-running British health survey, researchers at the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry, the University of Exeter and the European Centre for the Environment and Human Health found that people who had heart disease tended to have higher urinary concentrations of BPA. It&#8217;s hardly proof that BPA can cause heart disease, but it is the first study to indicate that exposure to the chemical may be correlated with an increased risk of heart problems, and the findings offer an important new route for research. MORE: Study Finds Spike in BPA from Eating Canned Foods From David Melzer of the Peninsula Medical School, the leader of the study: This study strengthens the statistical link between BPA and heart disease, but we can’t be certain that BPA itself is responsible. It is now important that government agencies organise drug style safety trials of BPA in humans, as much basic information about how BPA behaves in the human body is still unknown. The study used data from the European Prospective Investigation of Cancer (EPIC), a long-term study that monitors the health of thousands of people in the British<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=healthland.time.com&#038;blog=8684427&#038;post=53933&#038;subd=timewellness&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Environmental Health</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://healthland.time.com/category/medicine/environmental-health-medicine/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timewellness.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/bpa1.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">bpa</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Oh, Baby: There May Be Arsenic in Your Formula</title>
		<link>http://healthland.time.com/2012/02/16/oh-baby-why-there-may-be-arsenic-in-your-infant-formula/</link>
		<comments>http://healthland.time.com/2012/02/16/oh-baby-why-there-may-be-arsenic-in-your-infant-formula/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 16 Feb 2012 18:30:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Environmental Health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[arsenic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[baby formula]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[contamination]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[environmental health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[infant health]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://healthland.time.com/?p=53578</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[No surprise here: arsenic is not good for you. In high doses, of course, it&#8217;s a deadly poison, but even at lower levels, exposure to arsenic can raise the risks of cancer and heart disease. It&#8217;s especially dangerous for young children in whom chronic arsenic exposure has been linked to lower IQ and poor intellectual function. And because arsenic can occur naturally in groundwater — where it can poison people via drinking water or through food grown in arsenic-contaminated soil — it can be difficult to avoid. That&#8217;s why a new study in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives indicating that organic brown-rice syrup — a sweetener used in many organic and gluten-free foods, including baby formula — can be a source of arsenic is so worrying. Researchers from Dartmouth College and Dartmouth Medical School looked at foods that use organic brown-rice syrup and found evidence that some baby formulas, cereal bars and energy shots all contained levels of arsenic that were significantly higher than the 10 parts per billion (ppb) federal limit for drinking or bottled water. Worst of all, despite the results, there are currently no U.S. regulatory limits for arsenic in food — which means there&#8217;s little to prevent consumers, and especially children, from being dosed with potentially harmful levels of the chemical. &#8220;In the absence of regulations for levels of arsenic in food, I would certainly advise parents who are concerned about their children&#8217;s exposure to arsenic not to feed them formula where brown-rice syrup is the main ingredient,&#8221; Brian Jackson, the lead author of the study, told Consumer Reports. (MORE: Arsenic and Old Rice: Should We Worry About a Toxic Chemical in a Popular Food?) Some of the findings of the study include: Two of the 17 infant formulas tested listed brown-rice syrup as a main ingredient, and one had an arsenic concentration that was six times the federal limit on arsenic in water. Twenty-two of the 29 cereal bars or energy bars tested had at least one of four rice products — organic brown-rice syrup, rice<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=healthland.time.com&#038;blog=8684427&#038;post=53578&#038;subd=timewellness&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Environmental Health</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://healthland.time.com/category/medicine/environmental-health-medicine/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timewellness.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/formula-in-baby-bottle.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">formula in baby bottle</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>The Great Introverts and Extroverts of Our Time</title>
		<link>http://healthland.time.com/2012/01/27/the-great-introverts-and-extroverts-of-our-time/</link>
		<comments>http://healthland.time.com/2012/01/27/the-great-introverts-and-extroverts-of-our-time/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 27 Jan 2012 10:00:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Mental Health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Psychology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cover story]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[extroverts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[introverts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[shyness]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://healthland.time.com/?p=52416</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=healthland.time.com&#038;blog=8684427&#038;post=52416&#038;subd=timewellness&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Psychology</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://healthland.time.com/category/mental-health/psychology/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timewellness.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/jobs.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">jobs</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>How a New Swine Flu Virus Could Complicate Influenza Season</title>
		<link>http://healthland.time.com/2011/12/30/how-a-new-swine-flu-virus-could-complicate-influenza-season/</link>
		<comments>http://healthland.time.com/2011/12/30/how-a-new-swine-flu-virus-could-complicate-influenza-season/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 30 Dec 2011 10:00:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Infectious Disease]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[avian flu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Flu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[h3n2]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pandemic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[swine flu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[vaccine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[virus]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://healthland.time.com/?p=50458</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I received my annual flu shot back in October, and I have to say, I felt pretty good about myself. Though doctors constantly tell us to get vaccinated, most Americans don&#8217;t bother — a survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in November indicated that just 36% of all Americans age 6 months and older will get the flu vaccine. That&#8217;s too bad — a simple flu shot can save the average person days of unhappy illness (and lost time at work or school) if they get exposed to the flu this winter. And for the very young, the very old and the immunocompromised, a flu vaccination might make the difference between life and becoming one of the 30,000 some Americans who die from influenza-related causes each year. There&#8217;s just one problem: influenza is unpredictable. Flu viruses are notoriously promiscuous, which isn&#8217;t a judgment of their morals, but their genes. Flu viruses mutate constantly, sometimes on their own as they replicate inside an infected cell, and sometimes through recombination — directly swapping genes with other flu viruses. We need a new vaccination every year because the flu strains we might be exposed to over the winter differ from season to season. The flu shot itself is actually a trivalent vaccine, meaning that it protects against the three separate flu strains that experts believe are most likely to be circulating around the Northern Hemisphere this winter. If all goes well, you&#8217;re unlikely to be exposed to a flu strain that&#8217;s not covered by the vaccine. Unless, of course, something unexpected occurs. And that may indeed be happening this winter. Since the middle of August, the CDC has received 12 reports of human infections with a new flu virus — a swine influenza A strain called H3N2. So far the cases come from five states — Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Pennsylvania and West Virginia — and all but one of the affected individuals were below the age of 18. While the virus itself seems to have originated in pigs and initially jumped<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=healthland.time.com&#038;blog=8684427&#038;post=50458&#038;subd=timewellness&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Infectious Disease</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://healthland.time.com/category/medicine/infectious-disease/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timewellness.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/pigs.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">pigs</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Should Journals Describe How Scientists Made a Killer Flu?</title>
		<link>http://healthland.time.com/2011/12/21/bioterror-should-scientists-describe-how-to-make-a-man-made-killer-flu/</link>
		<comments>http://healthland.time.com/2011/12/21/bioterror-should-scientists-describe-how-to-make-a-man-made-killer-flu/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:00:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Flu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[avian flu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[biosecurity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bioterror]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[H5N1]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pandemic]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://healthland.time.com/?p=49840</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[H5N1 avian flu rarely infects humans, but it is deadly when it does. Since the virus first emerged in humans in Hong Kong in 1997, nearly 600 people have been infected worldwide and almost 60% have died. The virus isn&#8217;t very transmissible, but scientists have long worried that it might mutate, perhaps through reassortment with a human flu strain, and gain the ability to pass easily from person to person like human flus, such as the H1N1/A strain that triggered a pandemic in 2009. More than a decade since its emergence in humans, however, that fear has yet to come true, and H5N1 remains only an occasional threat for the rare person who contracts it — usually from close contact with a sick bird. If H5N1 gained the ability to spread virulently, we might face another world-changing virus like the 1918 flu, but so far, at least, we&#8217;ve been lucky. But just because nature hasn&#8217;t figured out a way to create an easily transmissible H5N1 doesn&#8217;t mean that scientists can&#8217;t. In experiments conducted at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, researchers engineered a strain of H5N1 that spread easily between ferrets — which means it can probably spread easily between people. (Ferrets are a commonly used animal model for studying human flu.) It&#8217;s not clear how the scientists did it — most of the information has been coming out piecemeal in scientific presentations and interviews since September. The next logical step would be for the researchers to publish studies in major scientific journals, describing the newly created flu, including its genetic makeup. And that would mean that anyone with the proper scientific training — from another researcher to a terrorist — would likely be able to read the studies and potentially make the new H5N1 themselves. Cognizant of that risk, on Tuesday the U.S. government did an unprecedented thing: it asked scientific journals not to publish the details of the H5N1 experiments, for fear that the information could fall into the wrong hands<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=healthland.time.com&#038;blog=8684427&#038;post=49840&#038;subd=timewellness&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Flu</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://healthland.time.com/category/medicine/flu/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timewellness.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/avianflu.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">avianflu</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Arsenic and Old Rice: Should We Worry About a Toxic Chemical in a Popular Food?</title>
		<link>http://healthland.time.com/2011/12/05/arsenic-and-old-rice-should-we-worry-about-a-toxic-chemical-in-a-popular-food/</link>
		<comments>http://healthland.time.com/2011/12/05/arsenic-and-old-rice-should-we-worry-about-a-toxic-chemical-in-a-popular-food/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 05 Dec 2011 20:30:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Environmental Health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[arsenic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[chemicals]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[drinking water]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[environmental health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[maternal health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pregnant women]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[toxins]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://healthland.time.com/?p=48396</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Arsenic is nasty stuff. Concentrated doses of the chemical can be fatal — one reason it&#8217;s long been a popular poison for assassins and unhappy widows. And chronic high exposure has been linked to skin lesions, certain cancers and cardiovascular disease. But scientists are increasingly concerned about even low-dose exposures [PDF], especially for pregnant women, finding that prenatal arsenic exposure is linked to infant mortality and low-birth weight. The most common route of exposure to arsenic is through drinking water, in part because groundwater can be contaminated with the naturally occurring chemical. But in a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers have found that eating rice can also lead to arsenic exposure, raising questions about how much of the chemical may be making its way into the food supply — posing special risks to pregnant women and their children. MORE: Arsenic in Apple Juice: A Report Suggests Widespread Exposure The study, led by Margaret Kargas and Diane Gilbert-Diamond of the Children&#8217;s Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Center at Dartmouth Medical School, looked at 229 pregnant women in New Hampshire whose urine had been tested for arsenic concentration. Seventy-three of those women reported consuming rice, averaging about half a cup a day of cooked rice, while 156 women did not eat rice. The tap water in each subject&#8217;s home was also tested for arsenic. The researchers found that the women who ate rice daily showed median arsenic levels of 5.27 micrograms per liter, while the non-eaters showed a median level of 3.38 mcg per liter. That&#8217;s a statistically significant difference, though it&#8217;s important to note that even the rice eaters were well below the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standard of 10 mcg per liter. Less good: more than 10% of the women in the study had drinking water with arsenic levels above those EPA standards. MORE: Arsenic, Chicken and Old Regulatory Standards This is an early study, and the researchers note that arsenic levels in rice likely vary widely around the country. (Rice can absorb<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=healthland.time.com&#038;blog=8684427&#038;post=48396&#038;subd=timewellness&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Environmental Health</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://healthland.time.com/category/medicine/environmental-health-medicine/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timewellness.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/112781780.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">rice arsenic</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Are Wi-Fi-Enabled Laptops Really Frying Your Sperm?</title>
		<link>http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/30/are-wi-fi-enabled-laptops-really-frying-your-sperm/</link>
		<comments>http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/30/are-wi-fi-enabled-laptops-really-frying-your-sperm/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:00:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Medicine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Reproductive Health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Fertility]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[infertility]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[laptops]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reproductive health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[semen]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sperm]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[wireless]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://healthland.time.com/?p=48059</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[On the whole, I&#8217;m assuming that studies in the academic journal Fertility and Sterility — which include chart-toppers like &#8220;Are varicoceles associated with increased deoxyribonucleic acid fragmentation?&#8221; — don&#8217;t receive a whole lot of media attention. But a recent article that raised the question of whether WiFi-enabled laptops might be frying men&#8217;s sperm proved to be the exception. Argentinian researchers obtained semen from 29 healthy men, and stored the samples underneath a laptop computer connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi, presumably simulating the experience of using a laptop on one&#8217;s lap. Four hours later, the sperm in the samples stored under the computer showed less movement than sperm in samples that were stored at the same temperature but away from the laptop. And 9% of the laptop sperm showed DNA damage — more than three times higher than in the control group. MORE: The Sperm Bike: Cycling to Drum Up Sperm Donations What happened? As the researchers write in their study: Our data suggest that the use of a laptop computer wirelessly connected to the internet and positioned near the male reproductive organs may decrease human sperm quality. At present we do not know whether this effect is induced by all laptop computers connected by Wi-Fi to the internet or what use conditions heighten this effect. Other scientists are a little skeptical — and not just because the study design here seems to be something a particularly imaginative 14-year-old boy might have thought up. As British fertility expert Allan Pacey of the University of Sheffield told the BBC: Ejaculated sperm are particularly sensitive to many factors because outside the body they don&#8217;t have the protection of the other cells, tissues and fluids of the body in which they are stored before ejaculation. Therefore, we cannot infer from this study that because a man might use a laptop with Wi-Fi on his lap for more than four hours then his sperm will necessarily be damaged and he will be less fertile. We need large epidemiological studies to determine this, and to<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=healthland.time.com&#038;blog=8684427&#038;post=48059&#038;subd=timewellness&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Reproductive Health</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://healthland.time.com/category/medicine/reproductive-health-medicine/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timewellness.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/laptop_sperm1.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Is Disease Occupying Wall Street?</title>
		<link>http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/14/is-disease-occupying-wall-street/</link>
		<comments>http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/14/is-disease-occupying-wall-street/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 14 Nov 2011 12:00:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Environmental Health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[disease]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[occupy wall street]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[refugee camp]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tuberculosis]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://healthland.time.com/?p=47006</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Refugee camps, not surprisingly, are rather unhealthy places to be. For one thing, there are the effects of the natural disaster that usually drive refugees to a temporary settlement. There&#8217;s also the threat of hunger and thirst — as we now see among Somali refugees who fleeing a devastating famine in their home country. But there&#8217;s something about the nature of a refugee settlement itself that promotes the spread of disease: thousands — if not far more — stressed people may be crowded into cramped conditions, often without proper sanitation or medical care; that&#8217;s a perfect breeding ground for epidemics of cholera, malaria, dengue fever, tuberculosis and other deadly diseases. In fact, in the wake of a major natural catastrophe, it&#8217;s often disease among refugees that poses the single greatest threat to health. MORE: CDC to America: How to Prepare for a Zombie Apocalypse The Occupy camps that have sprung up in major cities around the U.S. may not be equivalent to makeshift refugee settlements in East Africa — there are a lot more drum circles at Occupy, for one thing — but they could similarly become loci for the spread of disease, especially as the weather turns colder. That concern has already arisen at the Occupy Wall Street camp in Zuccotti Park, as Matt Flegenheimer of the New York Times reported: The city’s health department said that officials had visited the park and that it would continue to monitor conditions with winter looming. &#8220;It should go without saying that lots of people sleeping outside in a park as we head toward winter is not an ideal situation for anyone&#8217;s health,&#8221; the department said in a statement. Dr. Philip M. Tierno Jr., the director of clinical microbiology and immunology at NYU Langone Medical Center, said the conditions could leave park-dwellers susceptible to respiratory viruses; norovirus, the so-called winter vomiting virus, which can lead to vomiting and diarrhea and which could quickly overwhelm the limited bathroom facilities in the area; and tuberculosis, which is more common in indigent populations and can<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=healthland.time.com&#038;blog=8684427&#038;post=47006&#038;subd=timewellness&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Environmental Health</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://healthland.time.com/category/medicine/environmental-health-medicine/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timewellness.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/wall_st_medical_1111.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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		<title>Why Air Fresheners Can Trigger Respiratory Problems</title>
		<link>http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/08/why-air-fresheners-can-trigger-respiratory-problems/</link>
		<comments>http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/08/why-air-fresheners-can-trigger-respiratory-problems/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:00:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Environmental Health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[air pollution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[asthma]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[environmental health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[indoor air pollution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[respiratory problems]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[toxic chemicals]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://healthland.time.com/?p=46571</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[They may smell sweet, but popular air fresheners can cause serious lung problems. That&#8217;s the message from a new study presented over the weekend at the annual meeting of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI). Home fragrance products often contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that include such nasty chemicals as formalehyde, petroleum distillates, limonene, esters and alcohols. (Download a copy of the presentation here) Exposures to such VOCs — even at levels below currently accepted safety recommendations — can increase the risk of asthma in kids. That&#8217;s because VOCs can trigger eye and respiratory tract irritation, headaches and dizziness, as Dr. Stanley Fineman, ACAAI president-elect, pointed out: This is a much bigger problem than people realize. About 20 percent of the population and 34 percent of people with asthma report health problems from air fresheners. We know air freshener fragrances can trigger allergy symptoms, aggravate existing allergies and worsen asthma. MORE: 5 Ways Americans&#8217; Allergies Are Getting Worse And if you hope that &#8220;all-natural&#8221; fragrance products can give you a nice scent without the chemicals, Fineman has bad news for you — even products marketed as organic tend to have hazardous chemicals. That shouldn&#8217;t be surprising since fragrance products don&#8217;t eliminate bad smells; they just cover them up, and that usually requires something strong. Fineman suggests that you&#8217;d be better off simply opening up your window and letting fresh air in — though that advice might not work well where I live. MORE: Environmental Toxins Cost Billions in Childhood Disease The study also gives some much-needed attention to the problem of indoor air pollution. While air freshener-related asthma is certainly a health hindrance in the developed world — at least among those who like to live in artificially sweet-smelling homes — indoor air pollution is a major health catastrophe for much of the developing world, one that leads to the premature deaths of nearly 2 million people a year according to the World Health Organization. The majority of those affected are very poor women and children who might spent hours<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=healthland.time.com&#038;blog=8684427&#038;post=46571&#038;subd=timewellness&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Environmental Health</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://healthland.time.com/category/medicine/environmental-health-medicine/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timewellness.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/hl_airfreshener_1107.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Why the Latest Study on Cell Phones and Brain Cancer Won&#8217;t Be the Last Word</title>
		<link>http://healthland.time.com/2011/10/21/why-the-latest-study-on-cell-phone-use-and-brain-cancer-wont-be-the-last-word/</link>
		<comments>http://healthland.time.com/2011/10/21/why-the-latest-study-on-cell-phone-use-and-brain-cancer-wont-be-the-last-word/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Oct 2011 21:00:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Environmental Health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cancer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cell phone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[epidemiology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[radiation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[studies]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://healthland.time.com/?p=45449</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Proving a negative in science is really, really hard — and that may well be the task that researchers trying to evaluate the potentially carcinogenic effects of cell phone use may have before them. PHOTOS: See a Photographic History of Cell Phones To wit: in a new study published in the BMJ, European researchers — looking at more than 300,000 Danes who had used cell phones — concluded that there was no evidence to suggest that using a cell phone increased the chance of developing a brain tumor. That was true even for people who had used cell phones for more than a decade, and the BMJ study is the biggest so far to look at cell phone radiation and cancer. As the study authors themselves wrote in the conclusion: In this update of a large nationwide cohort study of mobile phone use, there were no increased risks of tumours of the central nervous system, providing little evidence for a causal association. Case closed, right? That all depends on your perspective. Other researchers and activists were quick to criticize the study, arguing that it was still not broad enough to fully exonerate cell phones. Devra Davis, an expert in the environmental causes of illness and the president of the Environmental Health Trust, said in a statement: From the way it was set up originally, this deeply flawed study was designed to fail to find an increased risk of brain tumors tied with cellphone use. In order for any study of a relatively rare disease like brain tumors to find a change in risk, millions must be followed for decades. Indeed, that&#8217;s what makes it so hard to design a study that can give us a definitive answer on the potential risks — if any — posed by cell phones. Brain tumors are extremely rare and strike for mostly unknown reasons, and they can take decades to develop. Cell phones have only been used heavily for the past decade or so, which means that enough time may not have yet passed<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=healthland.time.com&#038;blog=8684427&#038;post=45449&#038;subd=timewellness&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Environmental Health</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://healthland.time.com/category/medicine/environmental-health-medicine/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timewellness.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/techland_cellphones_0630.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Twitter Knows What You&#8217;re Feeling</title>
		<link>http://healthland.time.com/2011/09/30/twitter-knows-what-youre-feeling/</link>
		<comments>http://healthland.time.com/2011/09/30/twitter-knows-what-youre-feeling/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:30:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Emotion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mental Health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emotion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[social media]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[twitter]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://healthland.time.com/?p=43894</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Most of us use Twitter to a) self-promote, b) find out what Kim Kardashian is up to, or c) freak out over the news. But for social scientists, a 24/7 global stream of constantly updated status messages is a rich vein for research — as Michael Macy and Scott Golder of Cornell University learned when they combed through more than 500 million tweets as part of a study that is being published in the Sept. 29 Science. Macy and Golder searched those half a billion tweets — published by users from 84 countries between February 2008 and January 2010 — for roughly 1,000 words associated with both positive and negative emotions. The researchers also looked for emoticons. What they discovered is that Twitter can serve as a kind of global mood ring, reflecting the rise and fall of emotions around the world. On Twitter, the researchers discovered, emotions tend to run positively in the morning, peaking around breakfast time before falling and bottoming out in the late afternoon, then rebounding again in the evening. That pattern held up across cultures and countries. Interestingly, the same mood cycle recurs on the weekends, except pushed back a couple of hours since people tend to sleep and wake up later, which seems to indicate that it&#8217;s not simply the annoyance of being at work — and the pleasure of being off the clock — that drives those cycles, as Golder told the New York Times: This is a significant finding because one explanation out there for the pattern was just that people hate going to work. But if that were the case, the pattern should be different on the weekends, and it&#8217;s not. That suggests that something more fundamental is driving this — that it&#8217;s due to biological or circadian factors. Of course, work probably does play a role in driving our mood. Global emotions tended to hit an overall low on Monday afternoons before steadily rising and peaking on the weekends — although you could have learned that by listening to Rebecca Black.<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=healthland.time.com&#038;blog=8684427&#038;post=43894&#038;subd=timewellness&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Emotion</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://healthland.time.com/category/mental-health/emotion-mental-health/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timewellness.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/hl_twt_0930.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Study Shows the Killer 1918 Flu Began Even Earlier Than Thought</title>
		<link>http://healthland.time.com/2011/09/21/study-shows-the-killer-1918-flu-began-even-earlier-than-thought/</link>
		<comments>http://healthland.time.com/2011/09/21/study-shows-the-killer-1918-flu-began-even-earlier-than-thought/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 21 Sep 2011 16:30:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Infectious Disease]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[1918 flu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[influenza]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pandemic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spanish flu]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://healthland.time.com/?p=43206</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Contagion was high on the box office list again last weekend, proof that millions of Americans are entertained by scenes of infection, suffering, sniffles and autopsies of Gwyneth Paltrow&#8217;s brain. The movie can sometimes veer a little over the top — in it, global society essentially melts down — but the risk of a dangerous new disease is no fiction. In fact, we&#8217;ve already experienced it. The 1918-19 influenza pandemic, otherwise known as the Spanish flu, killed at least 50 million people worldwide, and potentially far more. During the worst months of the pandemic, cities shut down while accumulating bodies were buried in mass graves. The infection disproportionately carried off the young and the healthy, and death sometimes came in a matter of hours, as this 2007 story from Popular Mechanics described: Deep brown spots would appear on a victim&#8217;s cheeks and a thick, bloody fluid would begin to overwhelm his lungs. Starting at the ears, their faces would gradually turn blue as circulating blood could not get oxygenated. Soon, victims would start to drown in their own fluid — often coughing up a pinkish froth as they fought to inhale. &#8220;It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes, and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate,&#8221; an army doctor, based outside of Boston at Camp Devens, wrote to a colleague in 1918. &#8220;It is horrible.&#8221; MORE: The Flu Hunters and the &#8220;Hong Kong Incident&#8221; The Spanish flu pandemic was an outlier; influenza, as we saw with the relatively mild pandemic in 2009, is rarely a mass killer. So what made the 1918 virus so deadly? That&#8217;s a question the virologist Jeffrey Taubenberger has devoted much of his career to answer. Taubenberger led the team that was able to isolate and sequence the 1918 virus, taking tissue samples from the corpse of an Inuit woman whose body had been preserved beneath the permafrost in Alaska. That work would prove incredibly valuable (researchers were able to use it to trace how the virus changed as<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=healthland.time.com&#038;blog=8684427&#038;post=43206&#038;subd=timewellness&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Infectious Disease</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://healthland.time.com/category/medicine/infectious-disease/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timewellness.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/3090440.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">FLu</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Why Our Public Health System Isn&#8217;t Ready for Another 9/11</title>
		<link>http://healthland.time.com/2011/09/09/why-our-public-health-system-isnt-ready-for-another-911/</link>
		<comments>http://healthland.time.com/2011/09/09/why-our-public-health-system-isnt-ready-for-another-911/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 09 Sep 2011 10:55:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Policy & Industry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Safety]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[911]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[disaster]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hurricane]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Irene]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[public health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[terrorist attack]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://healthland.time.com/?p=42420</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[As we look back over the decade since 9/11, perhaps the most pressing question is this: are we ready for another one? When it comes to national security, we&#8217;ve certainly spent a lot — by some estimates, more than $1 trillion since Sept. 11, 2001. We&#8217;ve added a whole new Cabinet-level office, the Department of Homeland Security. And we can see how much airport security has changed, at least for the time being, each time we take off our shoes before going through the scanner. But there&#8217;s more to preparing for a post-9/11 world than better airport screening, and when it comes to public health, we may actually be worse off than we were a decade ago. That&#8217;s the conclusion of Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University&#8217;s Mailman School of Public Health. Between persistent budget cuts and the loss of staff, from the federal level on down, we&#8217;re not ready to respond to a massive disaster, whether it&#8217;s due to terrorism or Mother Nature. &#8220;There have been tremendous cuts in virtually every program that has to do with preparedness,&#8221; Redlener told me. &#8220;It really undermines our ability to respond and to recover.&#8221; PHOTOS: The Definitive Photos of 9/11 What&#8217;s gone wrong? A new report by the Trust for America&#8217;s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation explains:  Thirty-three states have cut funding for public health, with 18 of those states cutting funding for two years in a row. Local public health departments have cut about 29,000 jobs, representing 19% of the public health workforce. Federal support for public health preparedness has been slashed by 37%. The United States has 50,000 fewer public health workers than it did 20 years ago, and one-third of public health workers may retire within five years. The medical system&#8217;s ability to care for a &#8220;massive influx of patients remains one of the most serious challenges for emergency preparedness.&#8221; MORE: Study Finds Higher Rate of Cancer in 9/11 Firefighters Redlener, who spends his days thinking about catastrophe,<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=healthland.time.com&#038;blog=8684427&#038;post=42420&#038;subd=timewellness&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Safety</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://healthland.time.com/category/policy-industry/safety-policy-industry/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timewellness.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/98006862.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Ground Zero</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Can a Tiny Electronic Tattoo Measure Your Vital Signs?</title>
		<link>http://healthland.time.com/2011/08/15/can-a-tiny-electronic-tattoo-to-measure-your-vital-signs/</link>
		<comments>http://healthland.time.com/2011/08/15/can-a-tiny-electronic-tattoo-to-measure-your-vital-signs/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Aug 2011 18:35:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Medicine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Prevention]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[diagnostics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[electronics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[skin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tattoos]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[technology]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://healthland.time.com/?p=40732</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Information is the currency of modern medicine. Better diagnostic tools — think everything from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines to rapid genetic sequencing for new pathogens — enable better medical care. One problem, however, is that many medical diagnostics are bulky and expensive, limiting where they can be used. (Just try taking an MRI machine out of the hospital.) If we could make sensors small enough to wear, we could better keep track of our health everywhere — not just in the hospital. MORE: Why Belly Pain is a Headache for ER Doctors That day might not be far away. In an article published in the August 11 Science, a team of engineers describe a new system of skin-mounted electronics small enough to fit under a temporary tattoo. The ultrathin patches — made of water-soluble plastic — are easily flexible, bending with the movement of skin. And they&#8217;re laminated onto skin with water — just as a temporary tattoo would be. Here&#8217;s what Todd Coleman, an electrical and computer engineer at the University of Illinois and one of the leaders of the Science team, had to say about the invention: We think this could be an important conceptual advance in wearable electronics, to achieve something that is almost unnoticeable to the wearer. The technology can connect you to the physical world and the cyberworld in a very natural way that feels very comfortable. MORE: Can We Reduce CT Radiation in the ER? The skin-mounted electronics could easily be used for medical diagnostic purposes — perhaps as EEG or EMG sensors, which monitor nerve and muscle activity. Because the tattoos don&#8217;t need tape or gel or wires, they&#8217;re much less bulky and much more comfortable for patients. That means sensor applications that might have been confined to the hospital or the lab — like EEG studies of brain activity — can move into the real world. That&#8217;s perfect for research on conditions like sleep disorders. In the future, the devices might even help patients with muscular or neurological disorders, like ALS,<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=healthland.time.com&#038;blog=8684427&#038;post=40732&#038;subd=timewellness&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Prevention</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://healthland.time.com/category/medicine/prevention/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timewellness.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/skin.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">skin</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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