Auto Plastics

A new study, November, 2012 links breast cancer with auto plastics.  Apparently, women in SW Ontario’s auto factory are five times more likely to develop the disease!  The full article can be viewed here.

So what does this mean?  Will they change the environment?  Workers have to make a choice between an income and their possible health implications?  Here’s a quote:

“Carol Bristow, who has worked in the industry since 1989, said many workers seem unwilling to confront their bosses with health questions. Too often, she said, a woman disappears from the factory floor and her co-workers don’t learn until much later that another case of breast cancer has been diagnosed.

In 1992, when she was 34, Bristow was diagnosed with cancer in her right breast, which was removed along with about 20 lymph nodes. Later, Bristow was tormented by bladder infections. Benign tumors were removed from her bladder in 2010 and again in August of this year.

Why does Bristow stay?

The pay, she explained, is a respectable $22 an hour, with benefits, in a tough economy.”

A sad statement whether here in the U.S. or around the world.  We are slowly poisoning our planet and ourselves.

Add to this the imperfect science of treating one illness and creating a new one….  another study links heart failure in older breast cancer patients taking Herceptin©.  This report can be viewed here.    

The Yale The team found that compared with patients who received no adjuvant chemotherapy or trastuzumab; use of trastuzumab was associated with a 14% higher adjusted incidence rate for heart failure or cardiomyopathy over three years. Patients who received both trastuzumab and anthracycline had a 23.8% higher rate, and those treated with anthracycline chemotherapy alone had a 2.1% higher rate of heart failure or cardiomyopathy events over three years.

whatever happened to ‘first, do no harm’……..  we are our own pilots of a ship aloft in a swirling sea of confusion.

Fractured

My carbon Tahe hull and chines!!   

One day its all good, and then  I notice I”m getting water in my rear hatch… I turn the kayak upside down and each chine displays a stress fracture and the hull!

Waiting to hear from Estonia for recommended repair process.

Is it because it is carbon?  Is it because it does not have a skeg to strengthen it?  Who knows… Don’t even know how it happened.

I can say one thing about it however… its a kayak and not my body for a change.    Its all in perspective now.

Blue Blood in a Red State

I try to make this blog reflect health issues, and in some way with this ugly campain for presidency, it does.  Losing ‘ObamaCare’ would be terrible for the economy and for the other 99% of us.

So here we are, located in SC… a drop of blue blood in a pure red state.  We will vote, but haven’t a wing or a prayer of turning the red tide in this state… but I pray intelligence and reason will reign with the so called ‘swing’ states and the people.  ‘Mittens’ is a chamelion, and I cannot even begin to think what 4 years of a 1%-er will do to set women’s rights back decades, if not centuries.

I don’t intend for this to be a political platform, but Planned Parenthood who helps women with mammographies (funding eliminated under Romney) and abortion unless it is ‘legitimate rape’ will have a dire toll on health…both preventitive and the infirmed.

Prayers are with my friends who are at the poverty level and all levels, in need of affordable health care.