FROM CURRENT AND FULL WRITE UP @ WASHINGTON POST

Obama Appoints Monsanto Man as FDA Food Safety Czar

Taylor is a familiar figure at the FDA. He began his career as a staff attorney at the agency in 1976. Then he worked for a decade at King & Spaulding, which represented Monsanto Corp., the agribusiness giant that developed genetically engineered corn, soybeans and bovine growth hormone.

He returned to the FDA in 1991 as deputy commissioner for policy and pushed through requirements that producers of seafood and juices adopt measures to prevent bacterial contamination. During the same period, the FDA approved Monsanto's bovine growth hormone, and Taylor was partly responsible for a controversial policy that said milk from BGH-treated cows did not have to be labeled as such.


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From CARE2

Playing In The Dirt Could Make Kids Smarter

That's right! Put away the baby wipes and hand sanitiser! Eating dirt could actually make kids smarter.

Exposure To Bacteria Could Enhance Learning

Research published earlier this year by ScienceDaily.com shows the positive side of a soil-borne bacteria that is likely to be inhaled when children are playing outside. Researchers found that exposure to specific bacteria could enhance learning.

"Mycobacterium vaccae is a natural soil bacterium which people likely ingest or breathe in when they spend time in nature," said Dorothy Matthews of The Sage Colleges in Troy, New York.

Previous studies exposing mice to these bacteria showed stimulated growth of some neurons in the brain, leading to increased levels of serotonin and decreased anxiety. Curious as to whether live mycobacterium vaccae could thus improve learning in mice, researchers discovered that it did.

Mice Navigated Maze Twice As Fast

"We found that mice that were fed live M. vaccae navigated the maze twice as fast and with less demonstrated anxiety behaviors as control mice," Matthews explained. And continued, "It is interesting to speculate that creating learning environments in schools that include time in the outdoors where M. vaccae is present may decrease anxiety and improve the ability to learn new tasks."

Take this as extra incentive to get children outside and exploring nature, which is important for so many reasons.

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FROM EDMONTON JOURNAL

Alberta lists homosexuality as ‘mental disorder’ Health minister vows to ‘immediately’ remove diagnostic code doctors use to bill province for treatment of gays, lesbians


EDMONTON — Alberta continues to list homosexuality as a “mental disorder” along with bestiality and pedophilia, and doctors used the diagnostic code to bill the province for treating gays and lesbians more than 1,750 times between 1995 and 2004, government records show.

The province has known about the classification for more than a decade and the Conservative government first promised to change it in 1998. On Tuesday, Health Minister Gene Zwozdesky repeated that promise.

“It has no place in Alberta,” Zwozdesky said, adding he has called for a review of the entire 300-page diagnostic code. “It is simply an incorrect and unacceptable classification and I’ve ordered it to be removed immediately.”

The diagnostic code is used by doctors when they bill the province for services provided to Albertans.

The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1973, followed by the Canadian Psychiatric Association in 1982. Eight years later, in 1990, the World Health Organization removed homosexuality from the 10th version of the International Classification of Diseases, known as the ICD-10.

In 1998, then-health minister Halvar Jonson said the province was in the process of changing the codes.

“A new coding structure has been developed which Alberta Health is considering,” Halvard wrote in a letter to then-Liberal health critic Gary Dickson. “This new coding will address the concerns regarding the classification of the diagnostic code for homosexuality.”

Alberta’s current diagnostic codes were last updated in 2005, the same year that British Columbia removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders and four years after China did so.

In Alberta, homosexuality still falls under the heading of Mental Disorders: Sexual Deviations and Disorders. It is at the top of the list and is followed by bestiality, pedophilia, transvestism, exhibitionism, transsexualism, disorders of psychosexual identity, frigidity and impotence.


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FROM PHYSORG/ AP

US teen birth rate at all-time low, economy cited
December 21, 2010 By MIKE STOBBE , AP Medical Writer
(AP) -- The U.S. teen birth rate hit an all-time low in 2009 - a decline that stunned experts say is partly because of the economy.

The birth rate for teenagers fell to 39 births per 1,000 girls, ages 15 through 19, according to a government report released Tuesday. It was a 6 percent decline from the previous year, and the lowest rate since health officials started tracking that data in 1940.

Experts say the recent recession - from December 2007 to June 2009 - was a major factor driving down births overall, and experts say there's good reason to think it affect would-be teen mothers.
"I'm not suggesting that teens are examining futures of 401ks or how the market is doing," said Sarah Brown, chief executive of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.
"But I think they are living in families that experience that stress. They are living next door to families that lost their jobs... The recession has touched us all," said Brown.
Teenage moms, who account for about 10 percent of the nation's births, are not unique. The total number of births also has been dropping, as have birth rates among all women except those 40 and older.

For comparison look to the peak year of teen births - 1957. There were about 96 births per 1,000 teen girls that year, but it was a different era, when women married younger, said Stephanie Ventura, a co-author of the report issued by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC births report is based on a review of most birth certificates for 2009.
Overall, about 4.1 million babies were born in 2009, down almost 3 percent from 2008. It's the second consecutive annual decline in births, after births had been increasing since 2000.
The trend may continue: A preliminary count of U.S. births through the first six months of this year suggests a continuing drop, CDC officials said.

A decline in immigration to the United States is another factor experts cite for the lower birth rate.

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FROM POPULAR SCIENCE

Google's Body Browser is a Google Earth for Human Physiology

Google has mapped just about every traffic artery you could ever want to locate on Google Maps, but what if the thruway you’re looking for isn’t on any road atlas? To help you tell your axillary artery from your common carotid, Google has created a G-Maps-like search-able guide for the human body that lets you zoom, scroll, and search for every muscle, gland, nerve, bone, or organ in our common physiology.

As far as handy Web apps go, Body Browser is pretty neat; a sliding scroll bar allows you to peel away layers of the body, starting at the skin and moving down through the muscles and bone/organs to the cardiovascular and nervous systems. It allows you to zoom in tight (with nice resolution) to get the name of a specific bodily bit. Clicking on anything produces a handy label that identifies what you’re looking at.

Science, Clay Dillow, google, google body browser, google labs, google maps, health, medicineThen there’s the search function of course, which allows you to locate any part of the body by just typing in the name. Like your usual Google search, the drop down is self-populating, so even if you’re not quite up to speed on the spelling of “anterior cruciate ligament,” the app will still help you find it. Perhaps best of all: no plug-ins. No Flash, no Java. The application runs right in any WebGL supported browser. It can still be a little cumbersome – if you’re not zoomed to exactly the right level in some cases (navigating the brain is a good example) it won’t always let you click on the right object – but overall it’s a pretty smooth experience.

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FROM NEWSWEEK

Should Birth Control On Campus Be Free?
Experts are discussing whether the birth-control pill should be considered preventive care under Obama’s health plan.

Every month George Washington University freshman Jessi Payton walks to the pharmacy on campus and pays $15 for her birth-control prescription. Her mother’s insurance covers the bulk of the cost, and the rest comes from the money she saved waiting tables last summer. Since she doesn’t have a steady income, Payton is grateful for her mom’s assistance. “I know so many people who need to go on the pill, and they can’t because it costs too much money or their parents won’t pay for it with their insurance,” she says. “It’s scary because that doesn’t mean they aren’t having sex.”

While college health centers have been handing out complimentary condoms to students for years, birth-control pills have always been held under lock and key (unless, you have a prescription and a way to pay). Under President Obama’s new health-care plan, however, that could all change. A panel of experts got together last month to begin discussing which kind of preventive care for women should be covered for free. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, who wrote the women’s health amendment to the plan, has said the aim was always to include family planning. But whether the birth-control pill falls under that definition and whether it should be deemed preventive medicine—and hence, free—has sparked a debate from college campuses to Capitol Hill

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FROM BBC NEWS

Mercury affects the behaviour of white ibises by "turning them homosexual", with higher doses resulting in males being more likely to pair with males.

Scientists in Florida and Sri Lanka studied the effect of mercury in the birds' diet. Their aim was to find out why it reduced the ibises' breeding.

Mercury pollution can come from burning coal and waste, and run-off from mines.

The report, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows that wetland birds are particularly badly affected by it.
   
We're seeing very large reproductive effects at very low concentrations. 

Although the researchers already knew that eating mercury-contaminated food could affect an animal's development, they were surprised by the "strange" results of this experiment.

"We knew mercury could depress their testosterone (male sex hormone) levels," explained Dr Peter Frederick from the University of Florida, who led the study. "But we didn't expect this."

The team fed white ibises on food pellets that contained concentrations of mercury equivalent to those measured in the shrimp and crayfish that make up the birds' wetland diet.

The higher the dose of mercury in their food pellets, the more likely a male bird was to pair with another male.


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