A floss a day keeps the cancer away, apparently

A kind of bacteria commonly found in the mouth, which is often the culprit in gum disease, also spurs the formation of tumors in colon cancer, researchers report today.

Apparently, the mouth bacteria "stimulates tumors" by "by blocking the expression of a gene that inhibits tumor growth." Well isn't that just terrific.

I bet one way to minimize the damage of my mouth bacteria is flossing. I hate flossing. But I guess I hate cancer more. Get ready to bleed, gums!

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.}

The many ways everything is going to pot

Things are heating up on the dissertation front, and I am a big ball of stress. What better way to let out some steam than to direct y'all to a bunch of links covering various areas in which we are doomed?

1. The cost of creativity?
2. Mysterious infectious disease is WIND-BORNE, oh god.
3. Remember the arsenic in our apple juice? Well, add chicken to the list of arsenic-contaminated food items.
4. Sitting is really not good for you. Makes me so sad that my job is to sit in one place all day long.
5. Ever wonder what's in your cosmetics and other personal care products? No? Maybe you should.
6. The government fails me yet again, provides fuel to my desire to move to the prairie and live as a farmer.
7. Fast Food makes you depressed?
8. Turns out cola is bad for you for more reasons than sugar/fake sugar (depending on your preferred level of diet-ness). It's full of cancer, too!
9. Is Google turning evil? Maybe.
10. And now for some good news: Booze is good for problem-solving.

Happy Passover and Easter and whatnot.

Damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Turns out avoiding the sun altogether is perhaps just as dangerous* as cultivating a deep dark tan. Indeed, while too much sun exposure can give you skin cancer, it seems that that too little sun exposure (whether achieved by using too much sunscreen or by staying indoors) can lead to rickets, a disease associated with Vitamin D deficiency (and pirates). AKA, a disease about which I have made a mental note to ask my doctor, specifically concerning whether a diagnosis test exists, and if so, whether it (or hypochondria) is covered by my insurance.

But I digress. Here's what I wanted to talk about: A recent piece in the Journal of Family Health Care (which I found out about here) has noted that there's been an unexpected worldwide increase in rickets cases in recent years. Such an increase is unexpected, given our modern-day learnin' and all, and in this case it's doubly unexpected because the increase has been found in landlubbers from all socioeconomic classes (and children especially). Why is this happening? One word: Sun. Or actually three words: Not enough sun. Yep, because sun exposure is an important source of Vitamin D, in avoiding the sun (or preventing your skin from absorbing Vitamin D-enhancing rays) you drastically** increase your chances of rickets. As the author of the rickets piece notes in his or her abstract (sadly, my institution does not subscribe to the publication so I couldn't read the full text; also I was too lazy to find out the gender of the author):

...the advice in recent years for children to wear a high factor sunscreen and remain covered up while playing outdoors [is] partly felt to be behind the reason for [Rickets'] re-emergence...A tendency for children to stay indoors and watch TV or play on computer games, rather than play outside when the sun is shining, is arguably also another contributing factor.

This isn't just idle speculation, I should point out. There's actually been a recent, highly publicized case of a British child getting rickets because her mother was too diligent with the sunscreen. !!!!

So there you have it: Sun = Cancer. No Sun = Rickets. Just the wrong amount of Sun and No Sun = Rickets AND cancer. Happy Tuesday.

*Where "dangerous" is loosely defined
**Where a "drastic increase" is defined as "an increase of some extent that is unknown to me and may be small"

Oh, god! Why am I so tall!

This just in: Tall people get cancer at higher rates than short people. Apparently this is already known in the epidemiological world, but it's news to me (Shocking news! Time to panic news!).

A study just released in the Lancet looked into the impact of height on the development of several common cancers, and found a significant and positive association between height and cancer incidence that was consistent across genders and cultures. For a large sample of British women, they also found a "clear and highly significant trend of increasing cancer risk with increasing height" even after controlling for confounding factors like age, region, socioeconomic status, smoking, alcohol intake, body-mass index, strenuous exercise, age at menarche, parity, and age at first birth. Just look at this graph of adjusted relative risks (RRs) per 10 CM in height and 95% floated confidence intervals (FCI) for total incident cancer (among the British women), by height (in CM). Not that I have a full grasp on what is actually graphed here, but the trend is clear: more height, more cancer.  I've helpfully pointed out the relative risk (odds?) of cancer for my own height. It's at the top of the graph! Oh god!

The authors of this study offer several possible explanations as to why tall people get more cancer:

The similarity of the height-associated RR for different cancers and in different populations suggests that a basic common mechanism, possibly acting in early life, might be involved. Adult height reaches its maximum between the ages of 20 and 30 years. Variation in height relates to genetic and environmental influences acting mostly in the first 20 years, or so, of life; environmental factors, including childhood nutrition and infections, are believed to predominate. Hormone levels, especially of growth factors such as insulin-like growth factors (IGFs), both in childhood and in adult life, might be relevant. Circulating levels of IGFs in adulthood and childhood affect cancer risk; IGF-I levels in childhood and adolescence are strongly related to skeletal growth, and levels in adulthood, although less strongly, to adult height.

Another possibility is that height predicts cancer risk because taller people have more cells (including stem cells), and thus a greater opportunity for mutations leading to malignant transformation. Height might thus be related to cancer risk through increased cell turnover mediated by growth factors, or through increased cell numbers. The relation between height and cancer risk might underlie part of the difference in cancer incidence between populations, and changes in cancer incidence over time. Adult height in European populations has increased by about 1 cm per decade throughout the 20th century. The increase in adult height during the past century could thus have resulted in an increase in cancer incidence some 10–15% above that expected if population height had remained constant. This assumes, of course, that the effect of height is independent of changes in other risk factors.

I do not like this. Not one bit.  It's like I'm being punished for drinking all that milk and eating all those vegetables while I was growing up. Bah!

Possibly time to panic

Today, NPR reported that the WHO recently classified cellphones as "possibly carcinogenic." They write:

An international panel of experts says cellphones are possibly carcinogenic to humans after reviewing details from dozens of published studies...The group classified cellphones in category 2B, meaning they are possibly carcinogenic to humans. Other substances in that category include the pesticide DDT and gasoline engine exhaust.

That's right, folks! You heard it here first: Cellphones = DDT. (Though, I would add, DDT killed birds, while cellphones have yet to be shown to kill anything...except maybe bees.)

Now, I should probably note that the cancer risk of cellphones is far from clear, as it takes a long time to develop cancer and there can be many other potential causes for it once it develops. This means that, to cellphone companies' doubtlessly great delight, it is extremely difficult to definitively link cancer to cell phone use. I'm sure Verizon and AT&T are quite pleased that Cancer Research U.K. has tried to temper the cancer panic by noting that "the only health danger firmly connected to cellphones is a higher risk of car accidents." (From the NPR piece). Time to buy some hands-free accessories!

Nevertheless, I think it's at least possibly time to panic. After all, cellphones emit radiation, and the safety of said radiation is unclear. And as CNN reports, people using, say, iphones, by holding them next to their heads (as one does when talking on the phone), probably routinely exceed their recommended radiation intake:

The Apple iPhone 4 safety manual says for users' radiation exposure to not exceed FCC guidelines, "When using iPhone near your body for voice calls or for wireless data transmission over a cellular network, keep iPhone at least 15 mm (5/8 inch) away from the body."

The same goes for other cellular devices as well, but I thought I'd pick on iphones because, you know, I kind of want one. Though my desire is less strong now that I know i should constantly hold the phone 5/8 of an inch away from my body (does that include my hands?).

Last point: Check out the ridiculous stock photo CBS chose to run with this story:

I can't...What the...I don't...I don't even know.

The NIH has a nice review of the research on cellphones and cancer here.

***

In other news, this is an aptly titled website.

Well isn't this just the pits!*

Not many people know this about me, but body odor is one of my least favorite smells ever. I have extremely vivid memories of the first time I ever smelled BO...I was standing behind Stephanie Whateverhenamewas, in the Boynton middle school gym, and when she raised up her arms to shoot a basketball I almost keeled over and died. I simply did not understand how a single human being could release so much stench--I didn't even know it was possible. That fateful and smelly gym class has forever etched itself in my memory, and ever since then I have been an avid deodorant/antiperspirant user. Mostly because I'd like to avoid scarring others like Stephanie scarred me...but also because I hate sweating. A lot.

Of course, I've spent over a decade now slathering mysterious white goo on my armpits, and I've never bothered to find out what kind of awful chemicals are in the deodorant I use. And then yesterday I see this on my Google reader. Turns out deodorant is full of all kinds of things that no good human being should have in or on their body...or so I gathered from the ten seconds I spent reading that Good article and some other random sites, including this one about "body burden," before I had to quit out of despair.

To quote the girl who pulled the stunt that ultimately brought the issue to my attention:

Ingredients in...deodorants are linked to developmental and reproductive toxicity, neurotoxicity, immunotoxicity, and organ system toxicity. Specifically, Secret Deodorant contains Butane, a chemical linked to allergies, immunotoxicity, and organ system toxicity, and 18% Aluminum Chlorohydrate, which is linked to developmental and reproductive toxicity and neurotoxicity. The product also contains Dimethicone, a silicone emollient, which coats the skin not allowing toxins out. It may promote tumors and accumulate in the liver and lymph nodes.

Secret is the brand of deodorant I've always used! Oh god! I don't know what to do! Do I poison myself and not smell, or smell and not poison myself? It's a classic catch 22. (Wait...maybe not....wow I just spent half an hour clicking links off of that Wikipedia page; there is some interesting stuff out there. Why can't my job be reading Wikipedia? (Related.))

This morning while I was getting ready to start my day, I spent a good long minute staring at my deoderant, wondering if I should put it on at the risk of poisoning my organs. I ultimately did use it because at the moment I have no viable alternative (letting myself smell and sweat is unacceptable), but I don't know if I can in good conscience continue to use a toxic tube of cancer much longer. What to do, people? What to do? (To make a sad story sadder, I just bought a new tube of deodorant over the weekend. Of course.)

Alas alack, I suppose it was only a matter of time before this blog started to terrify me for real...all I can say is I'm just glad I don't wear makeup, or use many skin care products at all. Just imagine what is in that stuff--I'm sure it's not good. Take that, everyone who ever told me I should wear makeup!

***

Wait! A! Second!! The problem is solved! Joan Rivers uses vodka as deodorant. Yes, really. That totally seems like something I can get behind, as long as I don't end up smelling like a drunk hobo. Maybe I'll look into using vodka to make my own deodorant this weekend. Lest you think I'm kidding, I assure you that I wouldn't put it past me. It certainly sounds better than writing my dissertation.

*It's a pun! Get it? Har har!

Now I have to wear sunscreen when I drive?

Apparently your car windows don't filter out cancer-causing deathly sun rays, says The New York Times:

In a study published last year in The Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, researchers at St. Louis University School of Medicine examined the records and histories of more than 1,000 patients referred to a local skin cancer clinic. They found that people who had spent the most time driving a car each week were more likely to develop skin cancers on the left sides of their bodies and faces — the side exposed to more sunlight while driving. In patients with malignant melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, 74 percent of the tumors were found on the left sides, compared with 26 percent on the right.

(Pubmed abstract here.)

This is reason #1,504 that I need to get out of Southern California. I can't escape the awful death rays!

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Related: Below is a picture I drew during a boring meeting over the summer. It was so hot and so sunny that day, the memory still makes me shudder.