True Left

Makers of PFAS, a class of chemicals used in everything from cookware to food containers and makeup, had evidence the substances were toxic as early as the 1970s and obscured the danger, according to a new study based on industry archives held at the University of California.

Governments in Canada and the U.S. are now cracking down on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a class of more than 9,000 human-made chemicals produced since the 1940s. They have unique properties that make them heat-resistant, oil- and water-repellent and friction-resistant, and are found in products from cosmetics and take-out boxes to non-stick cookware and fire suppressants.
PFAS are called forever chemicals because they're so persistent. They've been found in water bodies all over Canada and the U.S.

Because they're hard to break down, contamination from the long-lived substances — sometimes called "forever chemicals" — is extensive all over North America.

"It's really very sad, actually, how people were harmed by this chemical while the industry knew — had documents that showed they knew — it was toxic," said Tracey Woodruff, professor of reproductive health and the environment at the University of California, San Francisco

The internal industry documents came from the discovery process and were related to DuPont and 3M, two major PFAS manufacturers.

Woodruff and her team's analysis found that the companies had evidence by the 1970s —decades before public health and government authorities turned their attention to the chemicals —  that some PFAS were toxic to humans, based on lab reports and health impacts on employees, but downplayed those impacts in public messaging or obscured what they had found.

the chemicals can enter our blood and bodies from non-stick Teflon pans, fire retardant, food wrappers, cosmetics, and even the environment. In studies, they have been found in the bodies of most people tested in the U.S., Canada and other countries, and have been detected in major bodies of water.

Today, PFAS have been linked to liver problems, pregnancy issues, immune problems and some cancers. These health effects have mostly been observed in animal testing; the exact impact on human health remains unclear and is difficult to study as it would involve exposing people to suspected toxins.

 -As early as 1970, a DuPont memo said PFOA, a type of PFAS, was "highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested."

-In 1980, DuPont and 3M learned that two pregnant employees involved in PFOA manufacturing had given birth to children with birth defects. Neither company    released that information or told employees.
   
-In 1981, DuPont workers showed elevated levels of liver enzymes.
   
-In 1994, 3M knew of links of PFAS to prostate cancer that it shared with DuPont, a competitor.

Internal documents from chemical giant Syngenta reveal tactics to sponsor sympathetic scientific papers and mislead regulators about unfavorable research

The global chemical giant Syngenta has sought to secretly influence scientific research regarding links between its top-selling weedkiller and Parkinson’s, internal corporate documents show.

While numerous independent researchers have determined that the weedkiller, paraquat, can cause neurological changes that are hallmarks of Parkinson’s, Syngenta has always maintained that the evidence linking paraquat to Parkinson’s disease is “fragmentary” and “inconclusive”.

But the scientific record they point to as proof of paraquat’s safety is the same one that Syngenta officials, scientists and lawyers in the US and the UK have worked over decades to create and at times, covertly manipulate, according to the trove of internal Syngenta files reviewed by the Guardian and the New Lede.

The files reveal an array of tactics, including enlisting a prominent UK scientist and other outside researchers who authored scientific literature that did not disclose any involvement with Syngenta; misleading regulators about the existence of unfavorable research conducted by its own scientists; and engaging lawyers to review and suggest edits for scientific reports in ways that downplayed worrisome findings...

Paraquat is outlawed in the EU, UK, Switzerland and China as a growing chorus of US advocacy groups demand the EPA change its position

A new study finds a chemical formed when we digest a widely used sweetener is "genotoxic," meaning it breaks up DNA. The chemical is also found in trace amounts in the sweetener itself, and the finding raises questions about how the sweetener may contribute to health problems.

At issue is sucralose, a widely used artificial sweetener. Previous work by the same research team established that several fat-soluble compounds are produced in the gut after sucralose ingestion. One of these compounds is sucralose-6-acetate...

Humans are already losing shut-eye in warm environments, especially at the beginning of the night. Models predict a solid sleep will further decrease as temperatures rise, especially in lower-income and elderly communities.
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They estimate people are already losing an average of 44 hours of sleep per year - and as the warming continues, people will be hard-pressed to find a good night's rest.

Nights have warmed faster than daytime temperatures in many places around the globe. By 2100, individuals worldwide could lose about 50 to 58 hours of sleep per year.
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Hotter temperatures "harm our sleep kind of across the board but that relationship increases in steepness. It becomes more significant in size the hotter the temperature gets."

We often take sleep for granted, but not getting enough shut-eye can increase our risk for many serious health issues such as poor mental health, obesity, heart problems or even early death.
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"When we're not meeting these sleep health targets, a lot of things start to go wrong," said Robbins, who was not involved in the study. "With more than just a night or two, this can become pretty problematic pretty quickly, putting stress on our vital organs, increasing risk for adverse outcomes and chronic conditions."

We have something called air conditioning, you may have heard of it

Ever heard of this great invention they call air conditioning?

Window ac $150, freestanding ac maybe $300.  Put in bedroom even if no central ac and sleep very well.  One more idiotic article.

I mean there is a cool invention called air conditioning

Turn on the AC and shut your mouth.

People often learn they have it when by developing an autoimmune disease. But the ailment might also play a role with heart disease, cancer, other disorders.

Most of us think of inflammation as the redness and swelling that follow a wound, infection or injury, such as an ankle sprain, or from overdoing a sport, “tennis elbow,” for example. This is “acute” inflammation, a beneficial immune system response that encourages healing, and usually disappears once the injury improves.

But chronic inflammation is less obvious and often more insidious.

Chronic inflammation begins without an apparent cause — and doesn’t stop. The immune system becomes activated, but the inflammatory response isn’t intermittent, as it is during an acute injury or infection. Rather, it stays on all the time at a low level.

Experts think this may be the result of an infection that doesn’t resolve, an abnormal immune reaction or such lifestyle factors as obesity, poor sleep or exposure to environmental toxins. Over time, the condition can, among other things, damage DNA and lead to heart disease, cancer and other serious disorders.

“Unlike acute inflammation, which benefits health by promoting healing and recovery, chronic inflammation is characterized by persistent increases in inflammatory proteins all throughout the body and can damage health and promote several major diseases,” says George Slavich, associate professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA, referring to small proteins called cytokines that the immune system releases at the site of an injury to promote recovery.

“People typically don’t know that they have chronic inflammation until it’s too late,” he says...

Research shows that stress can cause inflammation in the body, leading to a number of chronic health conditions. Find out what to do about it.

A plethora of research shows that stress, a physical response to feeling challenged or threatened, induces or worsens medical conditions, including depression, cardiovascular diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, and cancer.

But the exact mechanism by which stress induces disease has remained a mystery. Until now.

A review published in June 2017 in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience concluded that inflammation is a common pathway of stress-related diseases.

“Chronic inflammation is an essential component of chronic diseases,” the authors wrote...

[...]Although eccentric and controversial, Ballard’s fictional portrayals of a species under stress captured an emergent reality. In 2000, the British Health and Safety Executive (HSE) reported that there had been a 30% increase in occupational stress between 1990 and 1995. Four years later, the Whitehall II study highlighted the role of stress in shaping sickness patterns amongst civil servants. In 2009, the HSE estimated that 13.5 million working days were lost to stress each year and that the annual cost of work-related stress was in the region of £4 billion. Concerns about the socio-economic impact of work-place stress have been accentuated by claims that rising trends in hypertension, heart disease and depression might also be caused by the stress of modern lives. According to the American biologist Robert M. Sapolsky (b. 1957), many chronic diseases can be explained in terms of the neuro-endocrine disturbances generated by attempts to cope with the stress of rapid social, cultural and technological change. While a certain degree of stress is accepted as necessary for performance and productivity, unmitigated stress appears to be threatening the health and happiness of modern Western populations in particular.

Although we may like to believe that we are more stressed than our predecessors, complaints about the stress and strain of life have a long history. Even Ballard’s idiosyncratic prophecies have their precursors. In the 1970s, the left-wing American writer Alvin Toffler (b. 1928) argued that post-war populations were suffering from ‘future shock’, a state caused by ‘the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time’. The inhabitants of modern ‘throw-away society’, he insisted, were struggling to adapt to the ‘unwanted tempo’ of life manifest in the transience of people and places, the speed of technological innovation, and the surfeit of choice in consumables, education and the media. In the eyes of Toffler and many of his contemporaries, the inability to cope with change was directly responsible not only for epidemics of heart disease, obesity, anxiety, depression and suicide, but also for escalating levels of aggression and crime, the demise of sexual standards, and the instability of international relations...

[...]According to some inter-war clinicians, prolonged stress led not only to functional nervous diseases, but also to organic conditions. In 1925, the Chicago psychiatrist William S. Sadler (1842-1910) suggested that it was the ‘tension, the incessant drive of American life, the excited strain of the American temperament’ that was responsible for rising mortality rates from high blood pressure and diseases of the heart and kidneys. Humans, he argued, had not yet adapted to the ‘stress of a civilization which counts on the airplane and the wireless as commonplaces’. Of course, for Sadler the prevalence of stress-related conditions served to establish America’s social and technological superiority, an example of hubris also captured by the term ‘Americanitis’, which was popularised by the Harvard psychologist William James (1842-1910) with reference to his own nerve strain.

James’s insistence on a link between stress and psychological disturbances was in turn based on earlier studies of insanity and nervousness. In 1890, the English psychiatrist Charles Arthur Mercier (1852-1919) had argued that insanity was a ‘function of two variables’: heredity and stress. For Mercier, stresses ranged from internal physiological disturbances associated with puberty and pregnancy through to external factors such as overwork, marital problems, insomnia, and head injuries. Other clinicians echoed Mercier’s approach, pointing at the same time to the association between stress-induced insanity and social progress. According to the American physician William A. White (1870-1937), insanity could be initiated by the ‘stresses incident to active competition’ in the civilised, industrial world.

Perhaps the most persistent late Victorian version of a connection between advanced societies and stress was embedded in the concept of neurasthenia, a term popularised in the 1860s by the American neurologist George M. Beard (1839-83) and widely adopted by European physicians and their patients. In several books on neurasthenia, or what he referred to as ‘American nervousness’, Beard explained the growing prevalence of nervous fatigue in terms of the pressures of modern life. In a passage that betrayed a multitude of anxieties about rapid technological and cultural change, he argued that nervousness could be traced to the principal features of ‘modern civilization’, namely ‘steam-power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women’. As in many later pronouncements on the consequences of failing to adapt to accelerating social progress, stress and nervousness were thought to be more common amongst the affluent Western middle classes...

A new study has found that some commonly consumed beverages such as fruit juice and artificial soda contain levels of toxic metals including arsenic, cadmium, and lead that exceed federal drinking water standards.
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When consumed in large amounts, cadmium can cause stomach issues and when inhaled at high levels, it can lead to lung damage or death. Cadmium is considered a cancer-causing agent.

“Exposure to low levels of cadmium in air, food, water, and particularly in tobacco smoke over time may build up cadmium in the kidneys and cause kidney disease and fragile bones,” the CDC notes.

Cadmium (Latin cadmia, Greek καδμεία meaning "calamine", a cadmium-bearing mixture of minerals that was named after the Greek mythological character Κάδμος, Cadmus, the founder of Thebes) was discovered in contaminated zinc compounds sold in pharmacies in Germany[14] in 1817 by Friedrich Stromeyer.[15] Karl Samuel Leberecht Hermann simultaneously investigated the discoloration in zinc oxide and found an impurity, first suspected to be arsenic, because of the yellow precipitate with hydrogen sulfide. Additionally Stromeyer discovered that one supplier sold zinc carbonate instead of zinc oxide.[5] Stromeyer found the new element as an impurity in zinc carbonate (calamine), and, for 100 years, Germany remained the only important producer of the metal.

No other country is drowning in waste as much as the US

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From an environmental perspective, waste incineration is preferable to landfill. However, just 17 out of the 38 countries in the report dispose of more waste through incineration than by landfill. They are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

Switzerland is the only country that does not send any waste to landfill. The Swiss produce 706kg of waste per capita, of which 333kg are incinerated and 210kg are recycled.4

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Environmental organizations such as the Friends of the Earth Germany estimate that less than 16% of the recyclable waste earmarked for recycling in Germany can be reused. The biggest problem is caused by mixtures of recyclable materials in items such as a yogurt pot with a cardboard sleeve and aluminium lid. If these are not separated before arrival, there is a high probability it will be registered at the recycling plant but will still end up being incinerated.

Small, very thin materials and some food packaging are difficult to recycle, as their reprocessing needs sophisticated technologies that are not easily available. The challenging recycling process is subsequently reflected in the price of secondary raw materials making these highly uncompetitive on the market.