Emma Morano (left): In this Friday, June 26, 2015 photo, Emma
Morano, 115, looks at an old portrait of herself in her apartment in
Verbania, Italy. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni) Susannah Mushatt Jones (right):In
this Monday, June 22, 2015 photo, Susannah Mushatt Jones, 115, right,
is embraced by her niece Lois Judge in her room at the Vandalia Avenue
Houses, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. Jones and Emma Morano, of
Verbania, Italy, who is also 115, are believed to be the last two people
in the world with birthdates in the 1800s. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Anna Morano Born: Nov. 29, 1899 Verbania, Italy
Susannah Mushatt Jones Born: July 6, 1899 Brooklyn, New York
By CBS/AP When Susannah Mushatt Jones and Emma Morano were born in 1899, there was not yet world war or penicillin, and electricity was still considered a marvel. The women are believed to be the last two in the world with birthdates in the 1800s.
The world has multiplied and changed drastically in their lifetimes. They have seen war destroy landmarks and cities and have seen them rebuilt. They witnessed the Gilded Age, a term coined by Mark Twain, and the dawn of civil rights, the rise and fall of the fascists and Benito Mussolini, the first polio vaccines and the first black president of the United States.
Jones, who lives in Brooklyn, currently tops a list of supercentenarians, or people who have lived past 110, which is maintained by Los Angeles-based Gerontology Research Group. The organization tracks and maintains a database of the world's longest-living people. Morano, of Verbania, Italy, is just a few months younger than Jones and is Europe's oldest person, according to the group. The group knows of no others born in the 1800s.
By Ari LeVaux
We know foods like donuts and soda can make you fat, but the effects of sugar on the liver and brain are less well-known. Dietary sugar can fry your liver in much the same way alcohol can. This in turn can hurt your brain, leaving you with dementia-like symptoms decades too soon.
Most people associate liver disease with alcohol abuse or hepatitis. But another type, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which barely existed three decades ago, has quickly become the most common liver disease in America. NAFLD isn’t caused by booze or a nasty virus, but dietary sugar, which causes a buildup of fat in your liver. Overweight people are likely candidates for NAFLD. Memory loss and diminished cognitive function are often the first symptoms, as the liver loses its ability to filter toxins that compromise the brain.
According to the American Liver Foundation, at least a quarter of the U.S. population now suffers from NAFLD, and that number is expected to swell to 40 percent by 2030, apace with an accompanying swelling of the American body, thanks to the insatiable American sweet tooth and the corporate interests that feed it. A study published March 25 further solidified the connection between sugar and NAFLD, finding that even moderate amounts of sugary drinkswill stimulate the production of enzymes that deposit fat in the liver.
By Rakotomalala, Translated by Diana Rhudick
In Madagascar, 44,000 children under the age of five die each year, according to the latest UNICEF figures. That number is the same as the population of all children five and under
in the entire Alpes-de-Haute-Provence region of France. It’s also the
number of victims in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, 15 times over.
The tragedy behind the number – losing a child - most often affects
families of limited means. Two groups in Madagascar are particularly
vulnerable in terms of public health: children younger than five, and
pregnant women.
According to the World Bank,
half of all children under five experience delayed growth, “a larger
proportion than in any other country in Africa.” The maternal mortality
rate is estimated at approximately 498 per 100,000 live births, and the causes of death are many, including limited access to skilled staff during delivery, poor prenatal care, and lack of emergency care.
The health record is appalling, yet there is no shortage of initiatives to change the situation.
In Toliara in southern Madagascar, a school lunch project is helping
to fight the problems of chronic malnutrition. The organization Les
Enfants du Soleil (Children of the Sun) houses and educates street
children and children from needy families. The children also receive a
noontime meal in the school cafeteria. Take a look at photos of children
who benefit in this French-language YouTube video:
Other programs target specific problems such as sickle-cell anemia or malaria. The organization LCDMF (the
initials stand for Fight Against Sickle-Cell Anemia in Madagascar)
works to make the population more aware of this genetic disease
affecting 2 percent of the Madagascan people.In the following
video, the team leaders of LCDMF describe the past activities of the NGO
and its objectives for the next three years. Two of their objectives
for the upcoming years are to give better access to antibiotics for
sickle-cell anemia patients and to convince Malagasy political leaders
that sickle-cell anemia ought to be included in the nation's public
health priorities:
In an open letter to Prime Minister Malgache Kolo Roger, LCDMF stressed the importance of treating this problem, especially in isolated regions without modern health facilities:
This
is a critical public health problem that has a dramatic impact on the
neediest inhabitants in a region with nearly a 20 percent disease rate
and where one out of five children with major sickle-cell anemia is not
likely to survive past the age of five. The problem can no longer be
handled with half measures. Because sickle-cell anemia is
cross-disciplinary and involves all medical specialties, this disease
alone illustrates how essential it is for you to immediately take stock
of the healthcare situation in our backyard.
Much remains to be done
Another area with a pressing need for action is maternal health, due
to rapid population growth in Madagascar. For example, one out of five
married women who wishes to space out or limit pregnancies has no access
to family planning services (19 percent), and the abortion rate is
estimated at one out of every 10 live births, according to
the Madagascar National Institute of Statistics (INSAT) and the United
Nations Fund for Population (UNFPA).
Despite these efforts, Madagascar is faced with certain weaknesses
that hinder improvement in health indicators. The source of poor and
uneven health outcomes lies in the disparities in household incomes and
physical access to health services. Consequently, nearly one in four
people (23 percent) with an illness did not seek care at a health center
because they could not pay for it.
Availability of medication is also a real problem because the
systematic failures in drug management and inventory tracking as well as
distribution logistics hamper proper distribution of medications. As a
result, the wealthy use health services four times more often than the
poor: 40.9 percent of total expenses in this sector were attributed to
the wealthiest fifth, whereas 10.1 percent were paid by the poorest
fifth, according to the World Bank.
Experts agree that the need for action is urgent. UNICEF says vaccination
and newborn diet monitoring are necessary to reduce infant mortality.
To improve the public health situation overall, the priorities should be:
Strengthen nutrition programs targeting the most vulnerable groups, and their access to adequate nutrition;
Enhance efficiency of budgetary expenses;
Improve management of healthcare human resources;
Introduce risk-free delivery kits;
Bring doctors back to health centers in rural areas.
The situation is dire but not desperate, at least not yet. The
proposed policies can be readily implemented if given the political
will. The Malagasy children have waited 50 years for their collective
health to be at the top of the national agenda. It is high time
authorities are reminded that no respectable country would tolerate the
obliteration of its future in such a manner, 44,000 times a year.
Store Display for 'The Neutralizer' which claims
to reduce exposure to cellphone radiation.(Photo
by Cory Doctorow)
While science has not yet answered all of our questions, it has determined one fact very clearly—all electromagnetic radiation impacts living beings. As I will discuss, science demonstrates a wide range of bioeffects linked to EMF exposure. For instance, numerous studies have found that EMF damages and causes mutations in DNA—the genetic material that defines us as individuals and collectively as a species. Mutations in DNA are believed to be the initiating steps in the development of cancers, and it is the association of cancers with exposure to EMF that has led to calls for revising safety standards. This type of DNA damage is seen at levels of EMF exposure equivalent to those resulting from typical cell phone use. —Martin Blank
You may not realize it, but you are participating in an unauthorized experiment—“the largest biological experiment ever,” in the words of Swedish neuro-oncologist Leif Salford. For the first time, many of us are holding high-powered microwave transmitters—in the form of cell phones—directly against our heads on a daily basis.
Cell phones generate electromagnetic fields (EMF), and emit electromagnetic radiation (EMR). They share this feature with all modern electronics that run on alternating current (AC) power (from the power grid and the outlets in your walls) or that utilize wireless communication. Different devices radiate different levels of EMF, with different characteristics.
What health effects do these exposures have?
Therein lies the experiment.
The many potential negative health effects from EMF exposure (including many cancers and Alzheimer’s disease) can take decades to develop. So we won’t know the results of this experiment for many years—possibly decades. But by then, it may be too late for billions of people.
Today, while we wait for the results, a debate rages about the potential dangers of EMF. The science of EMF is not easily taught, and as a result, the debate over the health effects of EMF exposure can get quite complicated. To put it simply, the debate has two sides. On the one hand, there are those who urge the adoption of a precautionary approach to the public risk as we continue to investigate the health effects of EMF exposure. This group includes many scientists, myself included, who see many danger signs that call out strongly for precaution. On the other side are those who feel that we should wait for definitive proof of harm before taking any action. The most vocal of this group include representatives of industries who undoubtedly perceive threats to their profits and would prefer that we continue buying and using more and more connected electronic devices.
This industry effort has been phenomenally successful, with widespread adoption of many EMF-generating technologies throughout the world. But EMF has many other sources as well. Most notably, the entire power grid is an EMF-generation network that reaches almost every individual in America and 75% of the global population. Today, early in the 21st century, we find ourselves fully immersed in a soup of electromagnetic radiation on a nearly continuous basis.
By Nsikan Akpan
Get the measles vaccine, and you won’t get the measles—or give it to anyone else. Right? Well, not always. A person fully vaccinated against measles has contracted the disease and passed it on to others. The startling case study contradicts received wisdom about the vaccine and suggests that a recent swell of measles outbreaks in developed nations could mean more illnesses even among the vaccinated.
When it comes to the measles vaccine, two shots are better than one. Most people in the United States are initially vaccinated against the virus shortly after their first birthday and return for a booster shot as a toddler. Less than 1% of people who get both shots will contract the potentially lethal skin and respiratory infection. And even if a fully vaccinated person does become infected—a rare situation known as “vaccine failure”—they weren’t thought to be contagious.
That’s why a fully vaccinated 22-year-old theater employee in New York City who developed the measles in 2011 was released without hospitalization or quarantine. But like Typhoid Mary, this patient turned out to be unwittingly contagious. Ultimately, she transmitted the measles to four other people, according to a recent report in Clinical Infectious Diseases that tracked symptoms in the 88 people with whom “Measles Mary” interacted while she was sick. Surprisingly, two of the secondary patients had been fully vaccinated. And although the other two had no record of receiving the vaccine, they both showed signs of previous measles exposure that should have conferred immunity.
By Naveena Sadasivam
For years, environmentalists and the gas drilling industry have been in a pitched battle over the possible health implications of hydro fracking. But to a great extent, the debate 2014 as well as the emerging lawsuits and the various proposed regulations in numerous states 2014 has been hampered by a shortage of science.
In 2011, when ProPublica first reported on the different health problems afflicting people living near gas drilling operations, only a handful of health studies had been published. Three years later, the science is far from settled, but there is a growing body of research to consider.
Below, ProPublica offers a survey of some of that work. The studies included are by no means a comprehensive review of the scientific literature. There are several others that characterize the chemicals in fracking fluids, air emissions and waste discharges. Some present results of community level surveys.
Yet, a long-term systematic study of the adverse effects of gas drilling on communities has yet to be undertaken. Researchers have pointed to the scarcity of funding available for large-scale studies as a major obstacle in tackling the issue.
A review of health-related studies published last month in Environmental Science & Technology concluded that the current scientific literature puts forward "both substantial concerns and major uncertainties to address."
Still, for some, waiting for additional science to clarify those uncertainties before adopting more serious safeguards is misguided and dangerous. As a result, a number of researchers and local activists have been pushing for more aggressive oversight immediately.
The industry, by and large, has regarded the studies done to date 2014 a number of which claim to have found higher rates of illness among residents living close to drilling wells 2014 as largely anecdotal and less than convincing.
"The public health sector has been absent from this debate," said Nadia Steinzor, a researcher on the Oil and Gas Accountability Project at the environmental nonprofit, Earthworks.
Departments of health have only become involved in states such as New York and Maryland where regulators responded to the public's insistence on public health and environmental reviews before signing off on fracking operations. The states currently have a moratorium on fracking.
New York State Health Commissioner Nirav Shah is in fact conducting a review of health studies to present to Governor Andrew Cuomo before he makes a decision on whether to allow fracking in the state. It is unclear when the results of the review will be publicly available.
Other states such as Pennsylvania and Texas, however, have been much more supportive of the gas industry. For instance, Texas has been granting permits for fracking in ever increasing numbers while at the same time the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the agency that monitors air quality, has had its budget cut substantially.
1. An Exploratory Study of Air Quality near Natural Gas Operations. Human and Ecological Risk Assessment, 2012.
The study, performed in Garfield County, Colo., between July 2010 and October 2011, was done by researchers at The Endocrine Disruption Exchange, a non-profit organization that examines the impact of low-level exposure to chemicals on the environment and human health.
In the study, researchers set up a sampling station close to a well and collected air samples every week for 11 months, from when the gas wells were drilled to after it began production. The samples produced evidence of 57 different chemicals, 45 of which they believe have some potential for affecting human health.
In almost 75 percent of all samples collected, researchers discovered methylene chloride, a toxic solvent that the industry had not previously disclosed as present in drilling operations. The researchers noted that the greatest number of chemicals were detected during the initial drilling phase.
While this study did catalogue the different chemicals found in air emissions from gas drilling operations, it did not address exposure levels and their potential effects. The levels found did not exceed current safety standards, but there has been much debate about whether the current standards adequately address potential health threats to women, children and the elderly.
The researchers admitted their work was compromised by their lack of full access to the drilling site. The air samples were collected from a station close to what is known as the well pad, but not the pad itself.
The gas drilling industry has sought to limit the disclosure of information about its operations to researchers. They have refused to publicly disclose the chemicals that are used in fracking, won gag orders in legal cases and restricted the ability of scientists to get close to their work sites. In a highly publicized case last year, a lifelong gag order was imposed on two children who were parties to a legal case that accused one gas company of unsafe fracking operations that caused them to fall sick.
In 2009, the Independent Petroleum Association of America started Energy In Depth, a blog that confronts activists who are fighting to ban fracking and challenges research that in any way depicts fracking as unsafe.
Energy In Depth responded to this Garfield County study and criticized its lack of proper methodology. The blog post also questioned the objectivity of the researchers, asserting that their "minds were already made up."
The industry has also been performing its own array of studies.
Last year, for instance, an industry-funded study on the methane emissions from fracking wells was published in the prestigious journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It concluded that only very modest amounts of methane 2014 a known contributor to climate change 2014 was being emitted into the air during fracking operations.
The study came under heavy criticism from Cornell researcher Robert Howarth, who two years prior had published work that claimed methane emissions from shale gas operations were far more significant.
"This study is based only on evaluation of sites and times chosen by industry," he said.
2. Birth Outcomes and Natural Gas Development. Environmental Health Perspectives, 2014.
The study examined babies born from 1996 to 2009 in rural Colorado locations 2014 the state has been a center of fracking for more than a decade. It was done by the Colorado School of Public Health and Brown University.
The study asserted that women who lived close to gas wells were more likely to have children born with a variety of defects, from oral clefts to heart issues. For instance, it claimed that babies born to mothers who lived in areas dense with gas wells were 30 percent more likely to have congenital heart defects.
The researchers, however, were unable to include data on maternal health, prenatal care, genetics and a host of other factors that have been shown to increase the risk of birth defects because that information was not publicly available. A common criticism of many scientific studies is that they do not fully analyze the possibility of other contributing factors.
The study has thus come under attack from both the industry and state public health officials. In a statement, Dr. Larry Wolk, the state's Chief Medical Officer, said "people should not rush to judgment" as "many factors known to contribute to birth defects were ignored" in the study.
But Lisa McKenzie, one of the lead authors of the study, said there was value to the work.
"What I think this is telling us is that we need to do more research to tease out what is happening and to see if these early studies hold up when we do more rigorous research," she said.
In Pennsylvania, Elaine Hill, a graduate student at Cornell University, obtained data on gas wells and births between 2003 and 2010. She then compared birth weights of babies born in areas of Pennsylvania where a well had been permitted but never drilled and areas where wells had been drilled. Hill found that the babies born to mothers within 2.5 kilometers (a little over 1.5 miles) of drilled gas sites were 25 percent more likely to have low birth weight compared to those in non-drilled areas. Babies are considered as having low birth weight if they are under 2500 grams (5.5 pounds).
Hill's work is currently under review by a formal scientific journal, a process that could take three or four years.
3. Health Risks and Unconventional Natural Gas Resources. Science of the Total Environment, 2012.
Between January 2008 and November 2010, researchers at the Colorado School of Public Health collected air samples in Garfield County, Colo., which has been experiencing intensive drilling operations. Researchers found the presence of a number of hydrocarbons including benzene, trimethylbenzene and xylene, all of which have been shown to pose health dangers at certain levels.
Researchers maintained that those who lived less than half a mile from a gas well had a higher risk of health issues. The study also found a small increase in cancer risk and alleged that exposure to benzene was a major contributor to the risk.
"From the data we had, it looked like the well completion phase was the strongest contributor to these emissions," said Lisa McKenzie, the lead author of the study.
During the completion phase of drilling, a mixture of water, sand and chemicals is forced down the well at high pressure, and is then brought back up. The returning mixture, which contains radioactive materials and some of the natural gas from the geological formation, is supposed to be captured. But at times the mixture comes back up at pressures higher than the system can handle and the excess gas is directly vented into the air.
"I think we ought to be focused on the whole thing from soup to nuts because a lot of the potential hazards aren't around the hydraulic fracturing step itself," said John Adgate, chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the Colorado School of Public Health and co-author on the study.
Energy In Depth, the industry blog, responded at length to this study and cited several "bad inputs" which had affected the results of the study. The researchers' assumptions and data were criticized. For instance, the researchers had assumed that Garfield residents would remain in the county until the age of 70 in order to estimate the time period over which they would be exposed to the emissions.
"Unless the 2018town' is actually a prison, this is a fundamentally flawed assumption about the length and extent of exposure," Energy In Depth said.
By Lois Beckett
Undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder is having a major impact on injured civilians, particularly those with violent injuries, as we detailed last month. One national study of patients with traumatic injuries found that more than 20 percent of them developed PTSD.
We surveyed 21 top-level trauma centers in cities with high rates of violence. The results show that trauma surgeons across the country see PTSD as a serious problem. But only one trauma center, at the Interim LSU Public Hospital in New Orleans, actually screens all acutely injured patients for PTSD. (See the full survey.)
Why don’t hospitals do more to identify PTSD? Here is what surgeons and other trauma experts told us.
It’s too expensive
Paying for additional hospital staff to screen patients for PTSD and connect them with treatment might only cost $100,000 or $200,000 a year. But cash-strapped hospitals are often reluctant to incur any new expenses.
“As much as we’d like to [screen] — we’d really like to be able to do it — we as hospitals are simply trying to find a way to survive, to pay the bills,” said Dr. Carnell Cooper, a trauma surgeon at Baltimore’s Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center, which doesn’t do routine PTSD screenings.
At, Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, researchers found that 43 percent of the patients they surveyed had signs of PTSD. A trauma surgeon at the hospital proposed spending about $200,000 a year to add staff focused on PTSD. But the hospital administration suggested that she look for outside funding. The taxpayer-subsidized hospital currently provides no institutional funding for systematic PTSD screening.
Doctors say they don’t screen for PTSD because they don’t know if their patients can get treatment
Another barrier to screening civilian patients for PTSD is a lack of mental health professionals in many communities.
"Right now, we’re not doing the PTSD screening for everybody because we can’t treat everyone," said Carol Reese, the violence prevention coordinator at Cook County Hospital in Chicago.
Finding mental health treatment can be challenging even for patients with health insurance, said Cooper, the Baltimore trauma surgeon. And for the uninsured, finding treatment can be an “exercise in frustration,” ending with hospital staff “begging for favors from contacts and friends, to make sure the patient gets the care he or she needs.”
“If we knew that we could find people treatment,” Cooper said, “then we would find a way to screen them.”
Patients and their families often have little awareness of PTSD
One of the researchers who helped demonstrate the high rates of PTSD in civilian trauma patients is Dr. Gregory “Jerry” Jurkovich, who is now the chief of surgery and trauma services at Denver Health in Colorado, which was not part of our survey.
If more patients knew how common PTSD is among civilians, “there might be a demand from the ground level up for something to be done about it” Jurkovich said. So far, he added, “that hasn’t existed.”
Surgeons are just beginning to realize how many civilians get PTSD
At Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, researchers recently found that 25 percent of patients screened positive for PTSD six months after their injuries.
Dr. Michael Foreman, the chief of the division of trauma surgery, said the study “dramatically” changed his perspective on PTSD.
Previously, he said, he had assumed that only a small fraction of his patients developed post-traumatic stress. “I don’t know if my patients were trying to be nice to me and didn’t want to, quote, ‘bother’ me, or I just wasn’t asking the right questions,” he said.
“It was quite surprising and humbling to me to recognize that this was happening…to start hearing these disturbing stories, of people’s lives and how profoundly they had been affected, and to realize how I was unaware of it,” he said.
While the hospital is trying to improve patient awareness of PTSD, the trauma center is still not doing routine screening for all patients.
Dr. Martin Croce is the medical director of the Elvis Presley Memorial Trauma Center at the Regional Medical Center in Memphis, Tenn. A few years ago, Croce said, he was skeptical about whether PTSD was a serious issue in civilian patients. But the growing research has led him to do “a complete 180.”
Now, Croce said, “The only people that don’t think it’s real are people who have not been keeping up.”
