From Stanford University; The Book Haven

The cigarette industry is not dying. It continues to reap unimaginable profits. It’s still winning lawsuits. And cigarettes still kill millions every year.

So says Stanford’s Robert Proctor, author of the new bombshell study, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, a book the tobacco industry tried to stop with subpoenas and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

Proctor, the first historian to testify in court against the tobacco industry (in 1998), warns that the worst of the health catastrophe is still ahead of us: Thanks to the long-term effects of cigarettes, “If everyone stopped smoking today, there would still be millions of deaths a year for decades to come.”

“Low-tar” cigarettes? “Light” cigarettes? Better filters? Forget it, he said. They don’t work. Today’s cigarettes are deadlier even than those made 60 years ago, gram for gram.

Half the people who smoke will die from their habit. A surprising number will die from stroke and heart attacks, not cancer.

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Recently published papers in The International Journal of Health, Wellness and Society include:

• Evaluating the Design of Two Government and Two Non-Government HIV/AIDS Websites by Rupananda Misra and Barbara C. Wallace.
• Stigma and Social Exclusion among Tuberculosis Patients: A Study of Ladakh, India by Sonal Mobar and A.K. Sharma.
• Cureland: The Spa as Metaphor by John Horrocks.
• “Is that what Happens in the Cocoon?” When Discipline-specific Healthcare Practitioners Attempt to Metamorphose into Holistic Advanced Health Practitioners by Melanie Wells.
• Barriers Contributing to Health Disparities among Latinos in the United States by Cara Maffini, Ahmed YoussefAgha, Wasantha Jayawardene, Elizabeth Perez-Medina and Mohammad Torabi.
• Healthy Aging among LGBT Seniors in Canada: A Review of the Literature by Emily Murray, Matthew Numer, Brenda Merritt, Jacqueline Gahagan and Scott Comber.
• Flower Therapy Back from the Edge: The Possibility of Integration into the Brazilian Health System by Tamima Mourad.
• Reciprocal Knowing for Diabetes Literacy among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Individuals in Australia by Tabassum Ferdous and Bobby Harreveld.

From the Guardian

Eating two rashers of bacon a day can increase the risk of pancreatic cancer by 19% and the risk goes up if a person eats more, experts have said.

Eating 50g of processed meat every day – the equivalent to one sausage or two rashers of bacon – increases the risk by 19%, compared to people who do not eat processed meat at all.

For people consuming double this amount of processed meat (100g), the increased risk jumps to 38%, and is 57% for those eating 150g a day. But experts cautioned that the overall risk of pancreatic cancer was relatively low – in the UK, the lifetime risk of developing the disease is one in 77 for men and one in 79 for women.

Nevertheless, the disease is deadly – it is frequently diagnosed at an advanced stage and kills 80% of people in under a year. Only 5% of patients are still alive five years after diagnosis.

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By Art Caplan from MSNBC

The claim by Ion Torrent on Tuesday that a reasonably affordable machine capable of mapping an individual’s complete genetic makeup for $1,000 will be ready by the end of the year has technology geeks in a tizzy.

The $1,000 genome has been hotly sought ever since a crude map of the human genome was first published in 2001. The Carlsbad, Calif. biotech company, part of Life Technologies, will sell its device to research labs and medical clinics for $99,000 to $149,000, compared to the current price of about $750,000 for existing sequencers, Reuters reported on its website Tuesday. According to Reuters, a doctor will be able to sequence a patient’s entire genome for $1,000, compared to the current rate of $3,000 just to test for breast cancer gene mutations, for example. And the company says its new machine can complete the genome analysis within a day, rather than the two months previously needed.

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Volume 1, Issue 4 contains:

• Interprofessional Primary Care Practices Addressing Diabetes Prevention and Management by Lesley Beagrie.
• Social Work Practice: One Avenue of Health Promotion by Maria Huddleston and Deborah West.
• The Louisiana Aging Network: Analyzing an Organizational Network by Ronald A. Harris.
• Understanding Tobacco Marketing, Youth Sensation Seeking, and Smoking: Implications for Smoking Prevention Among Early Adolescents by Lorraine Jackson and Natalie Beamer.
• Secret and Unprotected Sex: Adverse Health Conditions in Bangladesh by Golam Sarwar Khan.
• Differential Characteristics of the Diabetes Epidemic across Global Regions by Wasantha Jayawardene, Ahmed YoussefAgha, Samer Mattar, Nargis Labib and Mohammad Torabi.
• Using Directed Mimicry to Teach Archery to Novices by Jeffrey McClung and Kelly Ambrose.
• Health Literacy: Implications for Shoe Choices Promoting Foot Health in Children by Stefania Penkala.

• Evaluating the Design of Two Government and Two Non-Government HIV/AIDS Websites by Rupananda Misra and Barbara C. Wallace.
• Stigma and Social Exclusion among Tuberculosis Patients: A Study of Ladakh, India by Sonal Mobar and A.K. Sharma.
• Cureland: The Spa as Metaphor by John Horrocks.
• “Is that what Happens in the Cocoon?” When Discipline-specific Healthcare Practitioners Attempt to Metamorphose into Holistic Advanced Health Practitioners by Melanie Wells.
• Barriers Contributing to Health Disparities among Latinos in the United States by Cara Maffini, Ahmed YoussefAgha, Wasantha Jayawardene, Elizabeth Perez-Medina and Mohammad Torabi.
• Healthy Aging among LGBT Seniors in Canada: A Review of the Literature by Emily Murray, Matthew Numer, Brenda Merritt, Jacqueline Gahagan and Scott Comber.
• Flower Therapy Back from the Edge: The Possibility of Integration into the Brazilian Health System by Tamima Mourad.
• Reciprocal Knowing for Diabetes Literacy among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Individuals in Australia by Tabassum Ferdous and Bobby Harreveld.

We are pleased to announce Joan Wolf as a plenary speaker for the 2012 Health, Wellness and Society Conference, Chicago, IL, USA 10-11 March.

Joan Wolf received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and is currently Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies Texas A&M University.  Her research focuses on the construction of “expert” discourses and how they are transmitted to the public.  She is the author of Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France (Stanford University Press 2004) and most recently Is Breast Best? Taking on the Breastfeeding Experts and the New High Stakes of Motherhood (New York University Press 2011), in which she argues that the questions infant-feeding scientists ask, the strategies they use to answer them, and the ensuing discussion of results among scientists and between scientists and the public are all shaped by a cultural preoccupation with risk, particularly health risks, and an increasingly comprehensive understanding of what mothers can and should provide their children.  She also demonstrates how public health campaigns and advocacy groups have relied on flawed infant-feeding research, an ethic of “total motherhood,” and widespread popular misunderstanding of risk to exaggerate health risks associated with using infant formula.  Her current research examines how routines in social science research converge with ideas about risk and total motherhood in academic and popular debates about childcare and child development. In 2013, she will be Visiting Fellow at the Center for Parenting Culture Studies in the School of Social Policy, Sociology, and Social Research, University of Kent.

To read about all our plenary speakers please visit the following link.

By Carolyn Abraham from the Globe and Mail

Humanity has long dreamed of perfection, striving to be faster, stronger and brighter, pushing nature to the limit. Four centuries before people were conceived in a petri dish, Swiss alchemist Paracelsus claimed flawless little beings could be grown in pumpkins filled with urine and horse dung, but there is no record he produced a crop.

With the birth of Louise Brown in 1978, the test tube finally succeeded where the pumpkin had failed, and the year she turned 11, scientists moved beyond making life in a lab: They found a way to peer into an embryo’s genes and predict what that life might be like.

That ability is now morphing into a whole new approach to baby-making, one that gives people an unprecedented power to preview, and pick, the genetic traits of their prospective children

Photo from National Institutes of Health

From Medical Xpress

For thousands of years, people have used maggots to clean out wounds, particularly in battlefield situations when there were few other options. Use of maggots (fly larvae) virtually disappeared in the modern world though once antibiotics arrived on the scene, but that may change as a new study conducted by a team in France has shown that at least for some types of wounds, maggots may be the preferential form of treatment. The team, made up of doctors and researchers from various facilities in France, conducted a study with elderly male volunteers who had lower leg wounds or skin ulcers that weren’t healing well, and as they describe in their study published in Archives of Dermatology, the patients that were treated with maggots, fared better, at least in the first week, than did those treated with conventional surgical procedures.

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From the Atlantic

As Americans gather around holiday tables this year, many of us will be setting places for vegetarians and vegans. In some families, diverse diets co-exist peacefully. In others, well … maybe there’s a health-obsessed uncle who relishes warning that “Meat will kill you!” Or an idealistic college student, eager to regale her complacent elders with grim details of the cruelty and environmental damage wrought by factory farms. Or omnivores who resent the suggestion that they should worry — or feel guilty — about eating meat.

The three of us can relate to both sides of such discussions. Though reared by omnivorous families, as young adults we each came to the conclusion that meat was to blame for health problems, environmental destruction, and cruelty to animals. Collectively, we have lived 52 years vegan or vegetarian. Yet we no longer think that vegetarianism is the answer to these ills. Now — as a rancher, a hunter, and a butcher — we firmly believe foods from animals can be healthful, environmentally appropriate, and ethical.

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Image courtesy of Tony Cenicola from The New York Times

By Dirk Hanson from Scientific American

Alcohol abuse does its neurological damage more quickly in women than in men, new research suggests. The finding adds to a growing body of evidence that is prompting researchers to consider whether the time is ripe for single-gender treatment programs for alcohol-dependent women and men.

Over the past few decades scientists have observed a narrowing of the gender gap in alcohol dependence. In the 1980s the ratio of male to female alcohol dependence stood at roughly five males for every female, according to figures compiled by Shelly Greenfield, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. By 2002 the “dependence difference” had dropped to about 2.5 men for every woman. But although the gender gap in dependence may be closing, differences in the ways men and women respond to alcohol are emerging.

To Read More…