Oh Great, now my lightbulbs are giving me cancer and we are all going to get incurable gonorrhea

Sarcastic thanks, NPR, for putting me on high alert about two disparate but equally distressing issues (in the sense that--knock on wood--neither is likely to affect me much, but they could): UV exposure from compact flourescent light bulbs (CFLs), and antibiotic-resistant Gonorrhea.

Let's take each of these issues in turn.

1. CFLs = Cancer?

A study has just been published in the journal Photochemistry and Photobiology (scintillatingly entitled "The Effects of UV Emission from Compact Fluorescent Light Exposure on Human Dermal Fibroblasts and Keratinocytes In Vitro") that's been taken up by the popular press a bit, mostly because the science translates immediately and obviously into FEAR AND CONCERN (enter: me).  In the study, researchers from SUNY Stony Brook used in vitro skin cells and a variety of CFL bulbs they picked up at the store to demonstrate that many of the CFLs, despite claims of safety, emit the the type of UV light that can lead to skin cancer (or at least skin cell damage). I'll let the researchers themselves describe the study (or go read it yourself in the open-access (!) article):

In this study, we studied the effects of exposure to CFL illumination on healthy human skin tissue cells (fibroblasts and keratinocytes). Cells exposed to CFLs exhibited a decrease in the proliferation rate, a significant increase in the production of reactive oxygen species, and a decrease in their ability to contract collagen. Measurements of UV emissions from these bulbs found significant levels of UVC and UVA (mercury [Hg] emission lines), which appeared to originate from cracks in the phosphor coatings, present in all bulbs studied. The response of the cells to the CFLs was consistent with damage from UV radiation...No effect on cells...was observed when they were exposed to incandescent light of the same intensity. [From the abstract]

Despite claims (not having the UV emission), our measurements of emissions spectra from CFL bulbs, indicated significant levels of UVA and UVC. The amount of emissions varied randomly between different bulbs and different manufacturers. CFL bulbs work primarily through the excitation of Hg vapor that has fluorescence with the characteristic wavelength of 184 and 253 nm (UVC) and 365 nm (UVA;12). The enclosure of the bulbs is coated with different types of phosphors, which absorb the X-ray emissions and fluoresce within the visible range. CFLs consist of tightly coiled small diameter tubes; this introduces larger stresses in the fluorescent coating, and causes cracks or uncoated areas, whose location and number varied greatly. Closer examination of some of these commercially available bulbs showed multiple defects in their coating, thus allowing UV-light emission.

...Taken together, our results confirm that UV radiation emanating from CFL bulbs (randomly selected from different suppliers) as a result of defects or damage in the phosphorus coating is potentially harmful to human skin. [Both paragraphs above from the conclusion, bold emphasis added by me]

You can read more here, in an informative and slightly hilarious article (mostly for its final sentence) from some news outlet on Long Island. Or bask in the probably brain-cancer-causing glow of fox news (GOODBYE, EPIDERMIS!).

On the less dire side, I should probably mention that I heard on the radio that staying several feet away from open CFL bulbs and/or using lamp shades, can pretty much mitigate your UV exposure.

2. And now for something completely different. Gonorrhea...that you can't cure.

Your skin is not the only organ you should be worrying about. Just when I was looking for an excuse to use the following animated GIF, NPR gave me one in the form of this article about antibiotic resistant gonorrhea. Apparently, the CDC has recently issued new guidelines about the treatment of gonorrhea, to try to stall the (probably inevitable) resistance of the disease to all antibiotics we know about.

Yeah, that's right. We are well on our way to having a strain of gonorrhea going around that is resistant to all known antibiotics. They've already seen it in Japan, and in Europe to some extent, and things are not looking very good in the US at the moment. You may or may not know this, but back in the 1970's you could pop a little penicillin and get rid of your gonorrhea, no problem. That is far from true any more.

As NPR reports:

"Gonorrhea used to be susceptible to penicillin, ampicillin, tetracycline and doxycycline — very commonly used drugs," said Jonathan Zenilman, who studies infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins.

But one by one, each of those antibiotics — and almost every new one that has come along since — eventually stopped working. One reason is that the bacterium that causes gonorrhea can mutate quickly to defend itself, Zenilman said.

"If this was a person, this person would be incredibly creative," he said. "The bug has an incredible ability to adapt and just develop new mechanisms of resisting the impact of these drugs."

Another reason is that antibiotics are used way too frequently, giving gonorrhea and many other nasty germs too many chances to learn how to survive.

"A lot of this is occurring not because of treatment for gonorrhea but overuse for other infections, such as urinary tract infections, upper respiratory tract infections and so forth," Zenilman said.

It got to the point recently where doctors had only two antibiotics left that still worked well against gonorrhea — cefixime and ceftriaxone.

But on Thursday, federal health officials announced that one of their worst fears had come true: Evidence had emerged that gonorrhea had started to become resistant to cefixime in the United States.

"We're basically down to one drug, you know, as the most effective treatment for gonorrhea," Bolan said.

Cefixime and ceftriaxone are in the same class of antibiotics. That means it's only a matter of time before ceftriaxon goes, too, she says.

"The big worry is that we potentially could have untreatable gonorrhea in the United States," Bolan said.

That's already happened in other countries. Totally untreatable gonorrhea is popping up in Asia and Europe.

So the CDC declared that doctors should immediately stop using the cefixime.

"We feel we need to a take a critical step to preserve the last remaining drug we know is effective to treat gonorrhea," Bolan said.

About 700,000 Americans get gonorrhea every year. If untreated, gonorrhea can cause serious complications, including infertility and life-threatening ectopic pregnancies.

"I think it should be a real clarion call to every American that we've got a looming public health crisis on our hands and potentially hundreds of thousands of cases of untreatable gonorrhea in this country every year," said William Smith, who heads the National Coalition of STD Directors.

Let this be your PSA for the day: Try to avoid the clap if at all possible, or you may have it FOR LIFE.^*

Ladies aged 19 to 24, or anyone in the middle/southern middle of the country, I'm looking at you.^**

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^{* I had to Google "nicknames for gonorrhea" to make sure the clap wasn't a nickname for some other STD, and stupidly, I did so on my work computer, so now I'm mildly worried I'm going to get a visit from HR or health services one of these days asking about my recent Googling activity.
**When "researching" antibiotic resistant gonorrhea for this blog post, I came upon the CDC's census of diseases in the US (aka "Summary of Notifiable Diseases") and I find myself morbidly fascinated. I may make a visualization of these data one day when I have some free time.***
*** I started this blog entry in the middle of last week and am only now finishing it. And there's very little writing in the damn thing--mostly cutting and pasting. How do i have so much less free time than I used to have? I'm going to need to quit my job to get back to blogging.}