'Bad' Picture Monday: Unflattering photos spur online movement

'Bad' Picture Monday: Unflattering photos spur online movement

Courtesy of Sonya Renee Taylor

If memory serves her, Sonya Renee Taylor says this is the photo that started 'Bad' Picture Monday, an online movement that encourages people to defy our culture's beauty standards and post unflattering pictures of themselves to social media sites like Facebook.

Thinking of untagging that less-than-flattering Facebook photo your best friend (or frenemy) posted over the weekend?

You may want to make it your profile picture instead. 

That's the argument of a movement called Bad Picture Monday, a meme launched two years ago by Bay area poet and activist Sonya Renee Taylor, founder of the body empowerment project, The Body Is Not An Apology, a “one-stop shop for affirmation and reminders to love your rolls, your back hair, your calluses, the smooth skin where a left breast used to be.”

“It struck me one day as I went to untag an image on Facebook that it felt a bit hypocritical,” says Taylor. “I’d created this movement about body empowerment and embracing ourselves as we are today. I wondered what would happen if I decided to live with this picture in the world. It was really just an exercise in unplugging from that constant voice that says ‘Do you look good? Are you attractive enough? How does the world see me right now?’”

Courtesy of Marc Lorenz Photography

Here's Sonya Renee Taylor again, this time from a more flattering angle.

Taylor posted her unflattering pic and continued to do so every Monday afterward, encouraging other women (and men) to do the same. Two years later, The Body Is Not An Apology has nearly 17,000 Facebook fans and has garnered attention from publications like New York Magazine.

“When it first started, people were like ‘You’re crazy. I’m never going to post that picture,’” she says. “There was absolute resistance. But then you’d see one person put a toe in the water. And then another one and another one. After awhile, people just said, ‘I’m going to do this every week and practice being okay with myself – however I show up.”

For Taylor, posting “bad” pictures or “ugly selfies” on sites like Reddit is a way to take back power from a society that insists you look beautiful – no matter what the circumstances.

“People think you have to be attractive even if you’re in the middle of chemotherapy,” she says. “Some days, I’m not attractive. This expands the boundaries for what’s acceptable. It presses the boundaries of the beauty box.”

And that’s a very good thing, says West Hartford, Conn. clinical psychologist Margo Maine, author of "The Body Myth: Adult Women and the Pressure to be Perfect."

“Facebook and the rest of the social media have elevated competition around appearance and body image exponentially,” she says. ”It used to be we competed with the women we saw every day or those we saw on the covers of magazines or on the screen. But every time we hold a smartphone in our hands or turn on a laptop or iPad, we’re immersed in a cyber universe that tells us we’re not good enough as is.”

As a result, we feel pressure to “craft” better images of ourselves, either through drastic means like plastic surgery or simpler “fixes” like putting on a pair of Spanx or Photoshopping our birthday party pics.

Embracing our everyday selves, though, is a much healthier way to go, says Maine.

“Anything we can do to help women become conscious of how they have automatically internalized these unreasonable expectations for the perfect body, perfect face, perfect wardrobe, perfect life is worth a try,” she says. “For most women, hearing about a movement like Bad Picture Monday will help them to gain a perspective on how their lives are affected by these cultural forces and will get them to question themselves, be less harsh in their self-assessment, to talk with friends and gain support to be more natural -- at least on Mondays.

“For some, it will change their world view and self-image in a more lasting way. I think it’s a wonderful and potentially empowering idea.”

Clinical psychologist Elizabeth Lombardo agrees, pointing to the huge impact pictures of celebs without makeup have on us.

“I remember a couple of years ago Oprah tweeted a picture of herself without makeup,” says Lombardo, author of A Happy You: Your Ultimate Prescription for Happiness. “People loved it. It was the same when TODAY's Kathie Lee and Hoda did their show without makeup. When women see that, it’s like this sigh of relief, like ‘Okay, I don’t have to pretend I’m something I’m not.’”

The concept of going “ugly” in public is nothing new, of course. Past celebrities like Lucille Ball and Phyllis Diller regularly played down their looks in order to get major laughs. Actress Charlize Theron even embraced her inner “Monster” and gained major respect -- and an Oscar.

Lombardo says she sees absolutely no down side to allowing ourselves to be seen by others when we’re not at our best.

“I don’t know how you could get a negative on this,” she says. “It’s taking off the filter. We tell our kids to be themselves but as we get older, we’re not ourselves. It’s encouraging people to enjoy life, to be silly, to erase the negative judgment in their mind. To just live.”

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All in the ADHD family: Diagnosis in kids can spotlight parents' own condition

All in the ADHD family: Diagnosis in kids can spotlight parents' own condition

By Linda Carroll, Kate Snow and Meghan Frank, NBC News

As a little girl, Bonnie Ihme had big plans. Bright and artistically talented, she dreamed of becoming an architect.

But the older she got, the more distant that dream seemed. By third grade, school had become a struggle. She felt easily distracted and found it impossible to focus in class. Eventually she abandoned her plan to be an architect. Ihme got married, had two kids and began cleaning houses and helping her husband with his business.

But even that simpler life felt impossibly difficult. The Michigan mom had trouble keeping track of all the threads of her life. She’d send her kids to school without sneakers on gym day. She’d forget to bring library books back. She felt more overwhelmed than ever before.

“I really would try hard to pull it all together,” Ihme told NBC’s Kate Snow in an interview airing on Rock Center Friday. “But when … you’re late for a Christmas concert that your daughter was really looking forward to going to and we get there and her class is walking back to the classroom and the tears in her eyes… you try harder.”

Ihme saw history repeating itself in her 10-year-old son, Jacob, who began struggling with school, just as she had. Jacob would spend hours doing his homework, only to forget to bring it to school the next morning. Ihme’s heart ached for her son.

Click here for more on ADHD symptoms

She decided to do something for him that no one had thought to do for her. She brought Jacob to a specialist in search of answers. After a battery of tests, the specialist diagnosed her son with ADHD – attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He then told Ihme that the disorder was often inherited. That was when she began to wonder if ADHD had been her problem, too.

“I knew I was bright,” she told Snow. “And on some things that they were teaching I was higher than the rest of the class. But then I’d struggle with a lot of the other things and wonder what was wrong with me.”

Ihme went through the same testing her son did, and at age 42, was diagnosed with ADHD.

While many people think of ADHD as a childhood disorder -- something that kids eventually grow out of – long term studies have shown that ADHD sometimes lasts a lifetime. In fact, a report published in the April edition of Pediatrics found that nearly 30 percent of kids diagnosed with ADHD still suffered severe symptoms well into adulthood.

In the prospective study, researchers from the Boston Children’s Hospital and the Mayo Clinic tracked 5,718 children born between 1976 and 1982 for several decades. Among the children were 367 who’d been given a diagnosis of ADHD. Out of that number, 232 agreed to participate in the study.

As it turned out, life was a lot harder for ADHD sufferers than it was for their peers. They were at higher risk for death and suicide, with nearly 60 percent suffering from an additional psychiatric disorder.

In a similar longitudinal study, researchers from New York University started out following 207 boys who’d been diagnosed with ADHD between ages 6 and 12 and 178 boys without ADHD. By the time the boys had reached their 40s and 50s, there were big differences between the two groups, according to the report published in December in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Clinical psychologist Rachel Klein, lead author of the New York University study and a pioneer in the field of ADHD, put it this way.

“Compared to the kids without ADHD, these children had more often died,” said Klein, Director of the Anita Saltz Institute for Anxiety and Mood at the NYU Child Study Center. “Many more had been in jail. Many more had been hospitalized for psychiatric reasons, mostly drug abuse.”

But the bad news didn’t stop there.

Almost a third of the ADHD boys had dropped out of high school and, on average, they made less money and experienced a higher divorce rate than their peers who didn’t have the disorder.

Much of that resonates with Frank South, who, at 49, discovered he had ADHD.

Professionally successful, South wrote for such hit TV shows as Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey, and Melrose Place. But over the years he’s struggled in his personal life. He’s been married three times and can find the details of daily life challenging.

In fact, he says he’s so easily distracted that a simple trip to pick up a 12-pack of paper towels for his daughter’s basketball team can turn into Mission Impossible.

“You end up in the Costco going through things that you’re not even going to buy and the time goes right by because you find it so interesting,” he told Snow.

From freeze-dried granola to flat screen TVs, anything and everything becomes so alluring that hours later, the basketball team is still without paper towels.

“It’s debilitating,” he told Snow. “But the thing is, before your diagnosis, before you understand these things, you think, ‘I’m a jerk.’ And you feel like, ‘I’m also not very bright if I can’t just go and get a 12 pack of paper towels and bring them to the basketball coach without being two hours late."

After years of berating himself for such mishaps, and drinking hard to shut out the negative thoughts, South, like Ihme, finally spoke with a psychiatrist after his son Harry was diagnosed with ADHD and he started thinking he too might have the disorder.

Going undiagnosed as an adult is not that unusual.

 “I think … that there are still many people walking around who have ADHD who are being impaired by it, and they don’t even know it,” said study co-author Dr. Xavier Castellanos, director of the Center for Neurodevelopmental Disorders at the New York University Child Study Center.

Despite this, Castellanos acknowledges that some doctors may be over diagnosing ADHD. In fact, a New York Times story published last week concluded that over the last decade there’s been a 53 percent jump in the number of kids diagnosed with the disorder. Experts quoted in the story said they feared that the powerful stimulants used to treat ADHD might harm kids who don’t really need them.

But for those who do have ADHD, taking medication can be life changing.

South remembers when he first started taking medication for his ADHD.

“It was like a window, a big window, opening up on my brain,” he said. “You know, sunlight coming in and being able to breathe and be calm enough to understand. And the fear and the anxiety level went down.”

For those who still doubt that ADHD is a real brain disorder, Castellanos points to brain scans he’s done in some of the study volunteers. The scans of those who had been diagnosed with ADHD as children are thinner in areas that are known to control attention and govern emotion.

“These are differences of less than a tenth of a millimeter,” Castellanos explained. “And yet, a tenth of a millimeter is a lot of brain cells.”

Related stories: 

ADHD seen in 11 percent of kids as diagnoses rise

View the original article here

Robot hot among surgeons but FDA taking a new look

Robot hot among surgeons but FDA taking a new look

By LINDSEY TANNER , Associated Press

The biggest thing in operating rooms these days is a million-dollar, multi-armed robot named da Vinci, used in nearly 400,000 surgical procedures nationwide last year — triple the number just four years earlier.

But now the high-tech helper is under scrutiny over reports of problems, including several deaths that may be linked with it and the high cost of using the robotic system.

There also have been a few disturbing incidents: a robotic hand that wouldn't let go of tissue grasped during surgery and a robotic arm hitting a patient in the face as she lay on the operating table.

Is it time to curb the robot enthusiasm?

Some doctors say yes, concerned that the "wow" factor and heavy marketing have boosted use. They argue that there is not enough robust research showing that robotic surgery is at least as good or better than conventional surgery.

Many U.S. hospitals promote robotic surgery in patient brochures, online and even on highway billboards. Their aim is partly to attract business that helps pay for the costly robot.

The da Vinci is used for operations that include removing prostates, gallbladders and wombs, repairing heart valves, shrinking stomachs and transplanting organs. Its use has increased worldwide, but the system is most popular in the United States.

"We are at the tip of the iceberg. What we thought was impossible 10 years ago is now commonplace," said Dr. Michael Stifelman, robotic surgery chief at New York University's Langone Medical Center.

For surgeons, who control the robot while sitting at a computer screen rather than standing over the patient, these operations can be less tiring. Plus robot hands don't shake. Advocates say patients sometimes have less bleeding and often are sent home sooner than with conventional laparoscopic surgery and operations involving large incisions.

But the Food and Drug Administration is looking into a spike in reported problems during robotic procedures. Earlier this year, the FDA began a survey of surgeons using the robotic system. The agency conducts such surveys of devices routinely, but FDA spokeswoman Synim Rivers said the reason now "is the increase in number of reports received" about da Vinci.

Reports filed since early last year include at least five deaths.

Whether there truly are more problems recently is uncertain. Rivers said she couldn't quantify the increase and that it may simply reflect more awareness among doctors and hospitals about the need to report problems. Doctors aren't required to report such things; device makers and hospitals are.

It could also reflect wider use. Last year there were 367,000 robot operations versus 114,000 in 2008, according to da Vinci's maker, Intuitive Surgical Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif.

Da Vinci is the company's only product, and it's the only robotic system cleared for soft-tissue surgery by the FDA. There are other robotic devices approved for neurosurgery and orthopedics, among other things.

A search for the company's name in an FDA database of reported problems related to medical devices brings up 500 reports since Jan. 1, 2012. Many of those came from Intuitive Surgical. The reports include incidents that happened several years ago and some are duplicates. There's also no proof any of the problems were caused by the robot, and many didn't injure patients. Reports filed this year include:

— A woman who died during a 2012 hysterectomy when the surgeon-controlled robot accidentally nicked a blood vessel.

— A Chicago man who died in 2007 after spleen surgery.

— A New York man whose colon was allegedly perforated during prostate surgery. Da Vinci's maker filed that report after seeing a newspaper article about it and said the doctor's office declined to provide additional information.

— A robotic arm that wouldn't let go of tissue grasped during colorectal surgery on Jan. 14. "We had to do a total system shutdown to get the grasper to open its jaws," said the report filed by the hospital. The report said the patient was not injured.

— A robotic arm hit a patient in the face during a hysterectomy. The company filed that report, and said it is unknown if the patient was injured but that the surgeon decided to switch to an open, more invasive operation instead.

Intuitive Surgical filed all but one of those reports.

Complications can occur with any type of surgery, and so far it's unclear if they are more common in robotic operations, but that's part of what the FDA is trying to find out.

Intuitive Surgical disputes there's been a true increase in problems and says the rise reflects a change it made last year in the way it reports problems.

The da Vinci system "has an excellent safety record with over 1.5 million surgeries performed globally, and total adverse event rates have remained low and in line with historical trends," said company spokeswoman Angela Wonson.

But an upcoming research paper suggests that problems linked with robotic surgery are underreported. They include cases with "catastrophic complications," said Dr. Martin Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon who co-authored the paper.

"The rapid adoption of robotic surgery ... has been done by and large without the proper evaluation," Makary said.

The da Vinci system, on the market since 2000, includes a three- or four-armed robot that surgeons operate with hand controls at a computer system located several feet away from the patient. They see inside the patient's body through a tiny video camera attached to one of the long robot arms. The other arms are tipped with tiny surgical instruments.

Robotic operations are similar to conventional laparoscopy, or "keyhole" surgery, which involves small incisions and camera-tipped instruments controlled by the surgeon's hands, not a robot.

Almost 1,400 U.S. hospitals — nearly 1 out of 4 — have at least one da Vinci system. Each one costs about $1.45 million, plus $100,000 or more a year in service agreements.

The most common robotic operations include prostate removal. Aabout 85 percent of these operations in the U.S. are done with the robot. Da Vinci also is often used for hysterectomies, Wonson said.

Makary says there's no justification for the skyrocketing increase in robotic surgery, which he attributes to aggressive advertising by the manufacturer and hospitals seeking more patients.

He led a study published in 2011 that found 4 in 10 U.S. hospitals promoted robotic surgery on their websites, often using wording provided by the manufacturer. Some of the claims exaggerated the benefits or had misleading, unproven claims, the study said.

Stifelman, the Langone surgeon, said it makes sense for hospitals to promote robotic surgery and other new technology to, but that it doesn't mean that it's the right option for all patients.

"It's going to be the responsibility of the surgeon ... to make sure the patient knows there are lots of options," and to discuss the risks and benefits, he said.

His hospital expects to do more than 1,200 robotic procedures this year, versus just 175 in 2008.

For a few select procedures that require operating in small, hard-to-reach areas, robotic surgery may offer advantages over conventional methods, Makary said. Those procedures include head and neck cancer surgery and rectal surgery.

Some surgeons say the robotic method also has advantages for weight-loss surgery on extremely obese patients, whose girth can make hands-on surgery challenging.

"At the console, the operation can be performed effectively and precisely, translating to superior quality," said Dr. Subhashini Ayloo, a surgeon at the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System in Chicago.

Ayloo, who uses the da Vinci robot, began a study last year on the effectiveness of doing robotic obesity surgery in patients who need a kidney transplant. Some hospitals won't do transplants on obese patients with kidney failure because it can be risky. In the study, robotic stomach-shrinking surgery and kidney transplants are done simultaneously. Patients who get both will be compared with a control group getting only robotic kidney transplants.

"We don't know the results, but so far it's looking good," Ayloo said.

Aidee Diaz of Chicago was the first patient and was taken aback when told the dual operation would be done robotically.

"At first you would get scared. Everybody says, 'A robot?' But in the long run that robot does a lot of miracles," said Diaz, 36.

She has had no complications since her operation last July, has lost 100 pounds and says her new kidney is working well.

Lawsuits in cases that didn't turn out so well often cite inadequate surgeon training with the robot. These include a malpractice case that ended last year with a $7.5 million jury award for the family of Juan Fernandez, a Chicago man who died in 2007 after robotic spleen surgery. The lawsuit claimed Fernandez's surgeons accidentally punctured part of his intestines, leading to a fatal infection.

The surgeons argued that Fernandez had a health condition that caused the intestinal damage, but it was the first robot operation for one of the doctors and using the device was overkill for an ordinarily straightforward surgery, said Fernandez's attorney, Ted McNabola.

McNabola said an expert witness told him it was like "using an 18-wheeler to go the market to get a quart of milk."

Company spokesman Geoff Curtis said Intuitive Surgical has physician-educators and other trainers who teach surgeons how to use the robot. But they don't train them how to do specific procedures robotically, he said, and that it's up to hospitals and surgeons to decide "if and when a surgeon is ready to perform robotic cases."

A 2010 New England Journal of Medicine essay by a doctor and a health policy analyst said surgeons must do at least 150 procedures to become adept at using the robotic system. But there is no expert consensus on how much training is needed.

New Jersey banker Alexis Grattan did a lot of online research before her gallbladder was removed last month at Hackensack University Medical Center. She said the surgeon's many years of experience with robotic operations was an important factor. She also had heard that the surgeon was among the first to do the robotic operation with just one small incision in the belly button, instead of four cuts in conventional keyhole surgery.

"I'm 33, and for the rest of my life I'm going to be looking at those scars," she said.

The operation went smoothly. Grattan was back at work a week later.

Related:

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1 in 4 skin cancer survivors still tans, study finds

1 in 4 skin cancer survivors still tans, study finds

New research from Yale University indicates even after being diagnosed with skin cancer, some patients haven't been able to stay away from the sun, or make lifestyle changes that would protect them from the sun's rays. NBC's Brian Williams reports

Most patients who survive a cancer scare listen carefully to their doctor's advice and make changes to their lifestyle or diet to avoid a second brush with the killer disease.

But one startling study by the American Association for Cancer Research shows that one in four people who have had melanoma  -- a cancer of the skin -- does not use sunscreen when outside for more than one hour.

The findings, announced on Monday at the AACR’s annual meeting in Washington, also showed that 2 percent of melanoma sufferers still use tanning beds – something that has been shown in several other studies to lead to skin cancers.

“We expected melanoma survivors to be extraordinarily protective since we know sunlight exposure and tanning increases the risk of a second melanoma,” said Dr. Anees Chagpar, the study’s author. “But what was interesting was that over one quarter said they didn’t use sunscreen. That blew my mind.”

The AACR study was based on the results of the 2010 National Health Interview Study, which asked a cross section of the U.S. population an array of health questions. Chagpar, who is an associate professor of surgery at Yale School of Medicine and director of the breast center at Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven, said her team concentrated on 171 people who said they had a melanoma history, from the 27,120 respondents in the national survey.

Chagpur said she found that generally, skin cancer survivors did better at protecting their skin by using sunscreen, and wearing hats and long sleeves, than people who have never had a melanoma. But she was shocked that 15.4 percent of melanoma sufferers reported rarely or never staying in the shade, while 27.3 percent said they never used sunscreen. Among the general public, 35.4 percent reported never using sun protection.

The study showed 2.1 percent of melanoma survivors even said they had used a tanning bed in the previous year, compared to 5.5 percent of the general public.

According to the American Cancer Society, melanoma is the fifth leading killer of men and the seventh of women among cancers. The Skin Cancer Foundation said that from 1970 to 2009, the incidence of melanoma increased by 800 percent among young women and 400 percent among young men. An estimated 76,690 new cases of invasive melanoma will be diagnosed in the United States in 2013, it said, and an estimated 9,480 people will die of melanoma this year.

Dr. Jack Jacoub, medical oncologist at Orange Coast Memorial Medical Center in Fountain Valley, Calif., said he found the numbers surprising.

“They say something about American society and you wonder if patients have been properly counseled.”

But Jacoub also said: “There is a fairly large emphasis on beauty in this country…tanning is a reflection of good health, too -- the California lifestyle, you wonder if people know the dangers but choose to ignore them.”

Dr. David Fisher, head of dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital, said: “It is shattering to see the data, those are high numbers.”

He said, however, that studies show there might be an instinctive desire among humans to seek the sunlight as a source of vitamin D – a phenomenon that has increased in recent decades as the global population has become more mobile. Northern people with fair skin, which is more sensitive to ultra violet rays, have populated sunny places like Australia, Israel and California, where rates of melanoma are high.

Dr. Ali Hendi, a clinical assistant professor at Georgetown University Medical Center, said he sees seven or eight cases of skin cancers every day. “If they are caught early, they are essentially curable,” he said.

“(But) We need to do a better job of educating people, as there is still a public perception that there is such a thing as a healthy tan.

“Every commercial, especially those that want to attract young people, is usually set on a beach or around a pool.”

Hendi, who is also a spokesman for the Skin Cancer Foundation, said data show “people can be hooked on tanning. Sunshine can have a euphoric effect on the brain like other addictive substances.”

Chagpur, the study’s author, said a person with a melanoma was nine times more likely to develop a second skin cancer and she was at a loss to explain why skin cancer survivors would continue risky behavior after a diagnosis. “Maybe it is part of the phenomenon of addictive behavior,” she said, comparing it to lung cancer sufferers smoking. “I don’t have any scientific proof, but I bet there’s a proportion of lung cancer survivors who continue to smoke.”

Psychologists appeared divided on the reasons for such behavior. Dr Tony Farrenkopf, a clinical psychologist and chairman of psychology at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland, Ore., said it appeared to result from addiction to sun and also a popular culture in which a tanned look equals being healthy. “One of the parameters of addiction is engaging in high-risk behavior. Addicts try to rationalize their behavior, but they know it’s a lie.

“Another parameter (of addiction) is lack of control – a sense that ‘I gotta have it,’” said Farrenkopf, who grew up in Germany where sunbathing was part of a health culture. “It feels so good, and there was that George Hamilton look – tan was healthy,” he said, referring to the perpetually bronzed Hollywood star.

A third reason for melanoma sufferers to avoid warnings about sunlight might be a feeling of resignation. “They say: ‘I already got it, what other harm can it do?’ and that’s not true,” Farrenkopf said.

But Margaret Backman, a retired clinical psychologist and author, who specializes in health issues, did not believe recidivist skin cancer patients were necessarily hooked on the sun.

“Maybe with cigarettes, but tanning is not addictive,” she said. “It’s more denial…and fear of death.

“People minimize the seriousness of it. They think it’s not true, or that it’s not so bad.”

Related: 

Tanning as addictive as drinking, study suggests

Many keep smoking after cancer diagnosis

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Bioethicist: It's about time 'morning-after' pill available to all ages

Bioethicist: It's about time 'morning-after' pill available to all ages

Thank goodness for the courts. A federal judge has now done what the Obama administration had failed to do — make the “morning-after pill” available without prescription to all girls of reproductive age, including those younger than 17.

The emergency contraception pill works to prevent pregnancy up to 72 hours after sexual intercourse. The Food and Drug Administration, which had begun dragging its feet during the Bush administration over approval of this proven safe medicine, had finally cleared it for over the counter sale after a decade of hemming and hawing about nothing.

But, for reasons having everything to do with politics and nothing to do with science, public health or logic, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled FDA’s approval in December of 2011 and said it could not be sold to girls under the age of 17 without a prescription.

The court has now righted that grave wrong.

Sebelius' decision made no sense. The pill is safe and it works. It will reduce unwanted pregnancies and be of particular help to young women who are raped, abused or coerced into sex.

Critics have made two key arguments against the pill—that it is an abortion agent and that it will encourage sex.  Neither claim holds a thimble-full of science or logic.

Scientifically, emergency contraception works by prohibiting ovulation or by prohibiting the implantation of an embryo into the lining of the uterus.  If an embryo has not implanted it cannot be aborted since it never had a chance to become anything.  Emergency contraception is only an abortion in the eyes of those blind to how reproduction works.

And as for encouraging sex, there is no reason to think that girls, some of whom are already sexually active, will be joined by hordes more who will feel free to fool around because there is a pill anymore than there is to think that condoms lead to more underage sex.

The battle over the "morning-after pill" has done nothing to solve the real problem about teenage sex -- the inability of this country to talk about sex. We don’t have enough sound sexual education in our schools, too many of our religious leaders are not effective or credible in spreading wisdom about virtue, responsibility and sex and, a lot of parents fail when it comes to engaging their kids about sex if for no reason other than what they were themselves doing at 14, 15 and 16.

As the judge noted, there is no reason whatsoever to hold this pill hostage to politicians’ whims.  It is safe, it works, and it gives a woman who has no other choice, due to contraceptive failure, abuse or rape, a way to avoid an unwanted pregnancy.  It ought to be stocked in every emergency room, pharmacy, and police station.  And your politicians and clergy should try harder to figure out how to teach our children about sexuality and sexual responsibility without making fools of themselves over a pill.

Arthur Caplan, Ph.D., is the head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center.

Related stories:

Judge: Make 'morning-after pill' available to all girls without prescription

View the original article here

1 in 4 skin cancer survivors skips sunscreen

1 in 4 skin cancer survivors skips sunscreen

New research from Yale University indicates even after being diagnosed with skin cancer, some patients haven't been able to stay away from the sun, or make lifestyle changes that would protect them from the sun's rays. NBC's Brian Williams reports

Most patients who survive a cancer scare listen carefully to their doctor's advice and make changes to their lifestyle or diet to avoid a second brush with the killer disease.

But one startling study by the American Association for Cancer Research shows that one in four people who have had melanoma  -- a cancer of the skin -- does not use sunscreen when outside for more than one hour.

The findings, announced on Monday at the AACR’s annual meeting in Washington, also showed that 2 percent of melanoma sufferers still use tanning beds – something that has been shown in several other studies to lead to skin cancers.

“We expected melanoma survivors to be extraordinarily protective since we know sunlight exposure and tanning increases the risk of a second melanoma,” said Dr. Anees Chagpar, the study’s author. “But what was interesting was that over one quarter said they didn’t use sunscreen. That blew my mind.”

The AACR study was based on the results of the 2010 National Health Interview Study, which asked a cross section of the U.S. population an array of health questions. Chagpar, who is an associate professor of surgery at Yale School of Medicine and director of the breast center at Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven, said her team concentrated on 171 people who said they had a melanoma history, from the 27,120 respondents in the national survey.

Chagpur said she found that generally, skin cancer survivors did better at protecting their skin by using sunscreen, and wearing hats and long sleeves, than people who have never had a melanoma. But she was shocked that 15.4 percent of melanoma sufferers reported rarely or never staying in the shade, while 27.3 percent said they never used sunscreen. Among the general public, 35.4 percent reported never using sun protection.

The study showed 2.1 percent of melanoma survivors even said they had used a tanning bed in the previous year, compared to 5.5 percent of the general public.

According to the American Cancer Society, melanoma is the fifth leading killer of men and the seventh of women among cancers. The Skin Cancer Foundation said that from 1970 to 2009, the incidence of melanoma increased by 800 percent among young women and 400 percent among young men. An estimated 76,690 new cases of invasive melanoma will be diagnosed in the United States in 2013, it said, and an estimated 9,480 people will die of melanoma this year.

Dr. Jack Jacoub, medical oncologist at Orange Coast Memorial Medical Center in Fountain Valley, Calif., said he found the numbers surprising.

“They say something about American society and you wonder if patients have been properly counseled.”

But Jacoub also said: “There is a fairly large emphasis on beauty in this country…tanning is a reflection of good health, too -- the California lifestyle, you wonder if people know the dangers but choose to ignore them.”

Dr. David Fisher, head of dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital, said: “It is shattering to see the data, those are high numbers.”

He said, however, that studies show there might be an instinctive desire among humans to seek the sunlight as a source of vitamin D – a phenomenon that has increased in recent decades as the global population has become more mobile. Northern people with fair skin, which is more sensitive to ultra violet rays, have populated sunny places like Australia, Israel and California, where rates of melanoma are high.

Dr. Ali Hendi, a clinical assistant professor at Georgetown University Medical Center, said he sees seven or eight cases of skin cancers every day. “If they are caught early, they are essentially curable,” he said.

“(But) We need to do a better job of educating people, as there is still a public perception that there is such a thing as a healthy tan.

“Every commercial, especially those that want to attract young people, is usually set on a beach or around a pool.”

Hendi, who is also a spokesman for the Skin Cancer Foundation, said data show “people can be hooked on tanning. Sunshine can have a euphoric effect on the brain like other addictive substances.”

Chagpur, the study’s author, said a person with a melanoma was nine times more likely to develop a second skin cancer and she was at a loss to explain why skin cancer survivors would continue risky behavior after a diagnosis. “Maybe it is part of the phenomenon of addictive behavior,” she said, comparing it to lung cancer sufferers smoking. “I don’t have any scientific proof, but I bet there’s a proportion of lung cancer survivors who continue to smoke.”

Psychologists appeared divided on the reasons for such behavior. Dr Tony Farrenkopf, a clinical psychologist and chairman of psychology at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland, Ore., said it appeared to result from addiction to sun and also a popular culture in which a tanned look equals being healthy. “One of the parameters of addiction is engaging in high-risk behavior. Addicts try to rationalize their behavior, but they know it’s a lie.

“Another parameter (of addiction) is lack of control – a sense that ‘I gotta have it,’” said Farrenkopf, who grew up in Germany where sunbathing was part of a health culture. “It feels so good, and there was that George Hamilton look – tan was healthy,” he said, referring to the perpetually bronzed Hollywood star.

A third reason for melanoma sufferers to avoid warnings about sunlight might be a feeling of resignation. “They say: ‘I already got it, what other harm can it do?’ and that’s not true,” Farrenkopf said.

But Margaret Backman, a retired clinical psychologist and author, who specializes in health issues, did not believe recidivist skin cancer patients were necessarily hooked on the sun.

“Maybe with cigarettes, but tanning is not addictive,” she said. “It’s more denial…and fear of death.

“People minimize the seriousness of it. They think it’s not true, or that it’s not so bad.”

Related: 

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'Reasons My Son is Crying' dad: 'Every parent experiences meltdowns'

'Reasons My Son is Crying' dad: 'Every parent experiences meltdowns'

17 hours ago

Greg Pembroke is as patient a dad as he can be, but with two boys under 4, his fortitude gets tested quite a bit. Instead of letting those youngsters get the better of him, the Rochester, N.Y., dad decided to have a little fun.

Pembroke, 32, is the father behind the latest viral parenting blog, the Tumblr page aptly titled, “Reasons My Son Is Crying,” a collection of photographs of his younger son, 20-month-old Charlie, in various states of distress.

“Kids have meltdowns 20, 30 times a day,” Pembroke told TODAY.com. “You can drive yourself crazy or you can laugh and just accept it.”

“I think every parent experiences meltdowns and I was trying to have a little fun with it,” he added.

Pembroke shared photos of Charlie and his older son, William, who is 3 1/2, on Facebook, and posted the photos on Tumblr about a week ago at a friend’s suggestion. As the Tumblr page made the rounds online over the last few days, drawing 3,000 comments on Reddit, Pembroke said he never anticipated so much attention.

“I was just trying to have fun with the kids and with my friends,” he said. “I didn’t expect people to relate to it as much as they did.”

Courtesy of the Pembroke familyProof that little Charlie isn't ALWAYS crying.

But what’s not to relate to? Toddlers, as anyone who has had one can attest, can shed a tear or 20 over just about anything, from the absurdly silly to the downright dangerous and often to things their parents will never understand.

Little Charlie is seen on Tumblr crying over many of the things likely to upset a toddler on a daily, if not hourly, basis: food, clothing, siblings and the ever-dreaded car seat.

Even though the world is seeing a pretty unhappy boy on Tumblr, Pembroke says he has two good kids, and he loves being their father.

“They’re really polite boys,” said Pembroke, a part-time radio station account executive who is home with the boys part-time. “They just have their frequent meltdowns.

“It’s trying to prevent them the best you can, try to plan your day the right way, stick to a schedule,” Pembroke said. “You have to accept the fact that you’re never going to prevent them.”

The family has lots of happy times. “We have a lot of fun when we’re home together,” said Pembroke, whose wife is a physical therapist.

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A few see music all around them (literally)

A few see music all around them (literally)

From time to time Dr. Oliver Sacks is haunted by musical symbols: notes, clefs, staffs and bar lines all fly by his eyes uninvited and in rapid succession. The celebrated neuroscientist can “see” the imaginary scores despite, or perhaps because of, his partial blindness.

As it turns out, Sacks is not alone. People from around the world have been writing him letters describing the music-oriented hallucinations that come unexpectedly and unbidden.  He’s described their experiences in a new report published in the journal Brain.

“When they happen you’re startled,” says Sacks, a professor of neurology at New York University and author of the 2012 bestseller, “Hallucinations.”

“It’s different from imagination. When you imagine something, it’s yours because you have imagined it. But when this happens to you, you’re startled. You wonder, ‘Who ordered this up? Where did it come from?’”

More often than not, people who are visited by these hallucinations of musical notation have problems with their eyesight like Sacks, but the visions can come to people suffering from Parkinson’s disease or even just a fever, he says. While they often come to people who are musically oriented, they can also appear to those who can’t read a note.

Sacks describes the case of 75-year-old Ted R., who developed Parkinson’s in his early 60s. Despite the disease, Ted is still an active scholar and writer - and a gifted pianist who’s been having musical hallucinations for the last two years.

The first time the musical notations appeared, he’d been reading a book. He turned away from it for a few seconds, and when he glanced back at the pages in front of him, the text had been replaced by a musical score.

Ted wondered whether the score was actual music and has tried many times to either transcribe or to perform it, but so far has found that “the music is scarcely playable because it is highly ornamented,” Sacks writes.

But Ted perseveres. Having discovered that he can summon up the hallucinations by staring at a text on a printed page, he will put a newspaper on his music stand and wait for the notes to appear. Hampered by their complexity and the speed with which they disappear, he’s had little success and so far, no great symphony has arisen from the elusive illusions.  

Another letter writer, whom Sacks calls Arthur S., finds the hallucinations to be irksome rather than entertaining. Arthur is a surgeon and an amateur pianist who is losing his eyesight to macular degeneration. “He was quite annoyed, as they would appear on a letter he was trying to write or something he was trying to read,” Sacks says.

The hallucinations may offer scientists more than merely some entertaining stories about brain quirks. Sacks hopes they will teach us something about the networks that process musical scores. Researchers have already scanned the brains of people who hallucinate faces, Sacks says. “One finds that the part of the brain in the back of the right hemisphere that is normally responsible for recognizing faces, has taken on a life of its own,” he says.

Scanning people who suffer musical hallucinations might be even more interesting.

“A musical score is a complicated sort of thing,” he explains. “It might show us how many parts of the brain can be integrated together as they are in reading music – and also presumably in hallucinating about it.”

Sacks hopes his article will spark more research and prompt scientists to scan the brains of people in the midst of a musical hallucination. “One of my reasons for publishing this in ‘Brain’ is to say to my colleagues, ‘Hey guys, this is something interesting. Take it and run with it.’”

Related:

Head injury turns man into musical savant

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Study points to a new culprit in heart disease

Study points to a new culprit in heart disease

It was breakfast time and the people participating in a study of red meat and its consequences had hot, sizzling sirloin steaks plopped down in front of them. The researcher himself bought a George Foreman grill for the occasion and the nurse assisting him did the cooking.

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For the sake of science, these six men and women ate every last juicy bite of the 8-ounce steaks. Then they waited to have their blood drawn.

Dr. Stanley Hazen of the Cleveland Clinic, who led the study, and his colleagues had accumulated evidence for a surprising new explanation of why red meat may contribute to heart disease. And they were testing it with this early morning experiment.

The researchers had come to believe that what damaged hearts was not just the thick edge of fat on steaks, or the delectable marbling of their tender interiors. In fact, these scientists suspected that saturated fat and cholesterol made only a minor contribution to the increased amount of heart disease seen in red-meat eaters. The real culprit, they proposed, was a little-studied chemical that is burped out by bacteria in the stomach after people eat red meat. It is quickly converted by the liver into yet another little-studied chemical called TMAO that gets into the blood and increases the risk of heart disease.

That, at least, was the theory. So the question that morning was: Would a burst of TMAO show up in peoples’ blood after they ate steak? And would the same thing happen to a vegan who had not had meat for at least a year and who consumed the same meal?

The answers were: yes, there was a TMAO burst in the five meat eaters and no, the vegan did not have it. And TMAO levels turned out to predict heart attack risk in humans, the researchers found. The researchers also found that TMAO actually caused heart disease in mice. Additional studies with 23 vegetarians and vegans and 51 meat eaters showed that meat eaters normally had more TMAO in their blood and that they, unlike those who spurned meat, readily made TMAO after swallowing pills with carnitine.

“It’s really a beautiful combination of mouse studies and human studies to tell a story I find quite plausible,” said Dr. Daniel J. Rader, a heart disease researcher at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research.

Researchers say the work could lead to new treatments for heart disease — perhaps even an antibiotic to specifically wipe out the bacterial culprit — and also to a new way to assess heart disease risk by looking for TMAO in the blood.

Of course, critical questions remain. Would people reduce their heart attack risk if they lowered their blood TMAO levels? An association between TMAO levels in the blood and heart disease risk does not necessarily mean that one causes the other. And which gut bacteria in particular are the culprits?

There also are questions about the safety of supplements, like energy drinks and those used in body building. Such supplements often contain carnitine, a substance found mostly in red meat.

But the investigators’ extensive experiments in both humans and animals, published Sunday in Nature Medicine, have persuaded scientists not connected with the study to seriously consider this new theory of why red meat eaten too often might be bad for people.

Dr. Frank Sacks, a professor of cardiovascular disease prevention at the Harvard School of Public Health, called the findings impressive. “I don’t have any reason to doubt it, but it is kind of amazing.”

And Lora Hooper, an associate professor of immunology and microbiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, who follows the Paleo diet, heavy on meat, exclaimed, “Yikes!”

The study does not mean that red meat is entirely bad or that it is best to avoid it entirely, said Dr. Stanley Hazen, the lead researcher. Dr. Hazen is the chairman of the department of cellular and molecular medicine at the Lerner Research Institute of the Cleveland Clinic, a nonprofit academic medical center. Meat contains protein, for example, and B vitamins, which are both essential for health. But the study’s findings indicated that the often-noticed association between red meat consumption and heart disease risk might be related to more than just the saturated fat and cholesterol in red meats like beef and pork.

Dr. Hazen began his research five years ago with a scientific fishing expedition. He directs a study of patients who come to the Cleveland Clinic for evaluations. Over the years, there have been 10,000. All were at risk for heart disease and agreed to provide blood samples and to be followed so the researchers would know if any patient had a heart attack or died of heart disease in the three years after the first visit. Those samples enabled him to look for small molecules in the blood to see whether any were associated with heart attacks or deaths.

That study and a series of additional experiments led to the discovery that a red meat substance no one had suspected — carnitine — seemed to be a culprit. Carnitine is found in red meat and gets its name from the Latin word carnis, the root of carnivore, Dr. Hazen said. It is also found in other foods, he noted, including fish and chicken and even dairy products, but in smaller amounts. Red meat, he said, is the major source, and for many people who eat a lot of red meat, it may be a concern.

The researchers found that carnitine was not dangerous by itself. Instead, the problem arose when it was metabolized by bacteria in the intestines and ended up as TMAO in the blood.

That led to the steak-eating study. It turned out that within a couple of hours of a regular meat-eater having a steak, TMAO levels in the blood soared.

But the outcome was quite different when a vegan ate a steak. Researchers had hypothesized that vegans would not have as many of the gut bacteria needed to make TMAO, and indeed virtually no TMAO appeared in the vegan’s blood after he consumed a steak.

“We did not expect to see such a dramatic difference,” Dr. Hazen said.

Then researchers gave meat eaters doses of antibiotics to wipe out almost all of their gut bacteria. After that, they no longer had TMAO in their blood either after consuming red meat or carnitine pills. That meant, he said, that the effect really was because of gut bacteria.

Researchers then tried to determine whether people with high blood carnitine or TMAO levels were at higher heart disease risk. They analyzed blood from more than 2,500 people, asking if carnitine or TMAO levels predicted heart attacks independently of traditional risk factors like smoking, high cholesterol and blood pressure. Both carnitine and TMAO did. But upon further analysis, they discovered that the effect was solely because of TMAO.

The researchers’ theory, based on their laboratory studies, is that TMAO enables cholesterol to get into artery walls and also prevents the body from excreting excess cholesterol.

But what is it about carnitine that bacteria like? The answer, Dr. Hazen said, is that bacteria use it as a fuel.

He said he worries about carnitine-containing energy drinks. Carnitine often is added to the drinks on the assumption that is will speed fat metabolism and increase a person’s energy level, Dr. Hazen said.

Dr. Robert H. Eckel, a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado and a past president of the American Heart Association, worried about how carnitine might be affecting body builders and athletes who often take it because they believe it builds muscle.

Those supplements, Dr. Hazen said, “are scary, especially for our kids.”

Dr. Hazen, though, has taken his findings to heart. He used to eat red meat several times a week, about 12 ounces at a time. Now, he said, he eats it once every two weeks and has no more than 4 to 6 ounces at a time.

“I am not a vegan,” Dr. Hazen said. “I like a good steak.”

This article, “ Study points to a new culprit in heart disease," first appeared in The New York Times.

Copyright © 2013 The New York Times

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The most (and least) satisfied workers

The most (and least) satisfied workers

24/7 Wall St. staff , 24/7 Wall St.   –   2 days

Where you work can be an excellent predictor of your health, happiness and stress levels. A recent Gallup poll demonstrates the extent to which workers in different professions tend to have similar levels of overall well-being. According to the 2012 results of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, physicians had the highest level of well-being of any major profession, while transportation workers, including drivers, pilots, flight attendants and air traffic controllers had the lowest.

Gallup-Healthways asked more than 170,000 workers a series of 55 questions covering physical and emotional health, life evaluation and workplace environment. Gallup assigned a score between 0 to 100 to each of 14 major professional categories, with 100 representing ideal well-being. Based on Gallup's score, these are the most and least satisfied professions.

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While each of the 55 questions had some impact on the profession’s final well-being score, certain measures highly contribute to workers' health. These include such factors as getting regular exercise, not smoking, learning something new every day, and being treated well by their employers, to name a few.

In an interview with 24/7 Wall St., Dan Witters, research director for the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, explained that the professions with high levels of obesity and related conditions like heart attacks and chronic physical pain were more likely to have much lower overall well-being. Just 14 percent of physicians were considered obese, compared to the more than 37 percent of transportation workers.

The majority of health insurance coverage in the United States is provided by employers, resulting in some dramatic differences between professions. Virtually all physicians surveyed (97 percent) reported having health insurance, while just 77 percent of transportation workers could say the same. Witters explained that health insurance, besides making people more likely to receive treatment they need, “has a lot of influence on the proactive nature of which people tend to their health.”

Conventional wisdom suggests that working long hours has long-term negative mental and physical health effects. In fact, Witters explained, the data do not support this. While working long hours can lead to stress, many of the jobs with the longest hours, including doctors, professionals such as lawyers and engineers, and business owners, have among the highest levels of well-being. One reason for this, Witters noted, is that long hours translate to higher income in these positions. Higher income, he explained, has a very high correlation with well-being, as it gives people access to basic needs.

One group that may surprise some with its high level of well-being is teachers, which ranked only behind physicians for well-being. “Teachers are a lot higher than a lot of people would guess. They are good eaters, their obesity, while too high, is well below the national average, and they have good workplace well-being. They get to use their strengths a lot.”

24/7 Wall St. reviewed the 14 professional categories surveyed by the Gallup-Healthway’s Well-Being Index in 2012. On top of calculating an overall national level of well-being, the index also calculates the well-being for each profession, assigning scores from 0 to 100, with 100 representing ideal well-being. In generating the rank, Gallup combined six separate indices, measuring access to basic needs, healthy behavior, work environment, physical health, life evaluation and optimism, and emotional health. In addition to the index, we considered income data and job descriptions from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook.

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The most satisfied professions.

1. Physician

· Job types: Internist, obstetrician, anesthesiologist

· Well-being index score: 78.0

· Obesity: 86.0 percent

· Percent with health insurance: 96.7 percent

· Percent satisfied with job: 95.5 percent

Physicians ranked higher than every other profession due to top marks in life evaluation, healthy behaviors, emotional and physical health, as well as access to basic needs. Physicians were by far the most likely professionals to be described by Gallup as “thriving." They were also less likely than any other workers to have felt sad or angry in the past day, and the most likely to have the energy needed to be productive. Physicians are often exceptionally well-paid. According to the Medical Group Management Association, primary care physicians earned a median annual compensation of more than $200,000, while for those with medical specialties the figure exceeded $350,000.

2. Teacher

· Job types: High school, special education teacher, teacher assistants

· Well-being index score: 73.6

· Obesity: 79.4 percent

· Percent with health insurance: 95.7 percent

· Percent satisfied with job: 91.1 percent

Teachers had higher self-evaluations of their lives than workers in every other occupation beside physicians. Nearly 70 percent of teachers qualifying as “thriving” based on their current and expected future quality of life. Teachers were also the most likely workers to report they smiled or laughed, experienced enjoyment or experienced happiness within the past day. Teachers surveyed also regularly practiced healthy behaviors. More than 64 percent ate at least five servings of fruits and vegetables at least four days a week, second only to nurses, and just under 6 percent smoked, less than only physicians. According to the BLS, median pay for “education, training and library occupations" was just over $45,000 in 2010 -- higher than the median for all occupations.

3. Business Owners

· Job types: Contractor, store owner, entrepreneur

· Well-being index score: 73.4

· Obesity: 79.5 percent

· Percent with health insurance: 77.6 percent

· Percent satisfied with job: 93.3 percent

Business owners are more likely than any other class of workers to rate their work environment highly. Over 93 percent of business owners said they were satisfied with their job or the work they did, higher than any occupation except for physician. Additionally, nearly 89 percent of business owners reported their work environment was trusting and open -- by far the highest of any type of worker. According to the BLS, as of February there were almost 14.5 million self-employed workers, down from nearly 15.9 million five years prior.

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The Least Satisfied Professions

1. Transportation

· Job types: Bus drivers, flight attendants, air traffic controllers

· Well-being index score: 63.3

· Obesity: 62.9 percent

· Percent with health insurance: 77.0 percent

· Percent satisfied with job: 84.8 percent

Just over 80 percent of transportation employees believe that they use their strengths at work, lower than any other occupation except for clerical workers. Many transportation jobs, such as bus drivers and cab drivers, pay low wages, possibly contributing to a lower sense of well-being. Other positions in the industry pay quite well. For instance, air traffic controllers had a median pay of $108,040 in 2010, a pretty good haul considering that the position only needs an associate’s degree. However, the position involves a high amount of stress due to the intense concentration necessary and the nights and weekends involved.

2. Manufacturing or Production

· Job types: Assembly line workers, bakers, machine workers

· Well-being index score: 64.3

· Obesity: 70.4 percent

· Percent with health insurance: 78.8 percent

· Percent satisfied with job: 83.4 percent

Manufacturing and production employees -- such as factory workers, food preparation workers, garment or furniture manufacturers -- had lower ratings of their work environments than nearly all other occupations. They were less likely to feel satisfied in their job and among the least likely to be satisfied with how their supervisor treated them. Many of these jobs are low wages jobs. The median annual salaries of bakers and food processors were $23,450 and $23,950, respectively in 2010. The median 2010 salaries of assemblers, metal and plastic machine workers, and printing workers were all below the national median for all occupations. Manufacturing and production employees also ranked as the nation’s worst for healthy behavior due to high rates of smoking and low rates of exercise.

3. Installation or Repair

· Job types: Mechanic, linesman, maintenance worker

· Well-being index score: 64.8

· Obesity: 70.7 percent

· Percent with health insurance: 75.9 percent

· Percent satisfied with job: 87.2 percent

Installation and repair workers, such as linesmen, mechanics, as well as maintenance and repair workers, were less likely to practice healthy behaviors. They were among the least likely employees to regularly eat fruits and vegetables, and among the most likely to smoke. Additionally, these workers also provided lower self-evaluations of their current lives than all occupations except for transportation workers. Many of these positions require no more than a high school diploma alongside moderate or long-term on-the-job training and do not pay considerably more than the median pay of $33,840 for all occupations.

Click here to read the rest of 24/7 Wall St.'s The Most (and Least) Satisfied Professions

©2013 24/7 Wall St.

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Don't panic over new bird flu outbreak, CDC cautions

Don't panic over new bird flu outbreak, CDC cautions

By JoNel Aleccia, Senior Writer, NBC NewsA deadly outbreak of a new kind of bird flu has now sickened 16 people in China and killed six, but U.S. health officials on Friday cautioned that there’s no cause for widespread alarm.

The new influenza A H7N9 virus has not been seen before in humans, but it doesn’t appear to be transmitted easily among people, and there have been no cases detected in the United States, said Dr. Tom Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“There are no specific steps people in this country can take. People can go about their daily lives,” he said.

Still, he said CDC officials are in close contact with Chinese authorities as they track the spread of the novel virus, which has been found in people from four Chinese provinces.

Victims have included 15 adults and a 4-year-old child, all of whom appeared to have clear ties to live poultry markets. They all became ill between Feb. 19 and March 31. Two of the 16 had other people in their families fall ill, but whether it was related is still being assessed. 

“At this point, there are several things that give us confidence that this is not spreading widely from person to person,” Frieden said.

For example, Chinese authorities have tracked 100 close contacts of people who got sick, and none of them became ill. With typical influenza, perhaps 20 percent to 30 percent of family members could be expected to develop the flu, Frieden said.

CDC is working with vaccine manufacturers to develop a seed strain to produce a vaccine to protect against the H7N9 virus, but that would only occur if there appeared to be widespread transmission. If that were necessary, it would not disrupt production of the seasonal vaccine, CDC officials said.

The agency issued a health alert for U.S. clinicians urging them to be alert for recent travelers from China who could show signs of the novel flu. CDC is also developing a diagnostic test that could quickly detect the virus.

No travel advisories have been issued, but CDC officials are reminding U.S. tourists in China to stay away from live poultry markets. That's the same advice the agency has issued for about a decade, since outbreaks of SARS and H5N1 flu. The World Health Organization said it was not advising screening at points of entry or any trade restrictions in connection with the outbreak.

China's neighboring countries are closely monitoring people for signs of flu. A 7-year-old girl in Hong Kong was being tested Friday in a local hospital for signs of the virus, according to the official Chinese news outlet Xinhua. Tougher surveillance also has started in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Taiwan, CDC officials said.

Though no source of the outbreak has been identified, Chinese officials have detected the virus in chickens and in pigeons and are now culling flocks to prevent further spread of the virus.

Health officials can't yet say whether this virus is especially virulent. Wider population tests will need to be conducted to tell whether many people may have become infected with virus without becoming seriously ill, or whether those who got infected developed severe illness. 

The virus appears to be common in animals, where it causes only mild illness. Doctors closely monitor cases of animal flu that pass into humans. Seasonal flu kills tens of thousands of people globally every year. But a new virus that starts passing from animals to people could cause far more serious disease. 

For instance, H5N1 bird flu kills about 60 percent of the people it infects. But it doesn't pass easily among people, either, and most of those who've gotten appeared to be directly infected by sick chickens. 

Still, Frieden noted that flu can mutate very quickly and there's no way to tell whether this new virus will soon become more transmissible. The H1N1 swine flu in 2009 didn't cause serious illness, but it spread very quickly. And that bug was a descendant of the 1918 "Spanish flu," which killed between 50 million and 100 million people worldwide. 

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A search for visionaries to crack human brain's code

A search for visionaries to crack human brain's code

WASHINGTON-- To crack the code of the human brain, Cori Bargmann figures it's best to keep an open mind. 

As one of two leaders of a scientific "dream team" in the initial phase of President Barack Obama's ambitious $100 million project to map the brain, Bargmann said the first step is to find the right combination of people to set research priorities.

"You might start with people who are very senior and are household words in their fields, and then you may realize that what (you) actually need is the young Turk who's a visionary wild man," Bargmann said.

Bargmann, a neurobiologist at The Rockefeller University in New York, and William Newsome, a neurobiologist at Stanford Medical School in California, are the co-chairs of a committee announced by the White House on Tuesday for the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative. That long title has been dubbed BRAIN for short.

Both Newsome and Bargmann are at the top of the neurobiology pyramid, professors at premiere institutions, winners of dozens of scientific honors and awards, authors of research papers in prestigious journals. As Newsome noted wryly, "I don't need this aggravation, to some extent, but I think this is really important."

Bargmann, who recalls watching the first Apollo moon landing in 1969 as an 8-year-old, this year won a $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for her work on the genetics of neural circuits and behavior and synaptic guidepost molecules.

This project was something no scientist, so far, has turned down.

"If there's going to be a program to try to do something significant and the taxpayer's going to be involved in it, you make the time to try to help," she said. "As far as I know, everyone who was asked to help said yes."

The BRAIN effort isn't quite like any other, Bargmann said. Even the Human Genome Project had a more focused goal at the start: to determine the precise sequence of chemical "letters" that constitute the full complement of human DNA.

In contrast, before BRAIN tries to solve a single mystery of the human mind, it will build the scientific infrastructure to be able to ask the right questions. Like the U.S. space program in the 1960s, she said, BRAIN could get the public excited about science in a way that other research has not.

"I believe that brain science will be to the 21st century what quantum physics and DNA molecular biology were to the 20th century," Newsome said.

The ultimate goal is to decode brain activity to help researchers understand complex ailments ranging from traumatic brain injury to schizophrenia to Alzheimer's disease, which cost Americans $500 billion annually, according to Francis Collins, the head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, who picked Newsome and Bargmann for the job.

The program would initially be funded with $100 million called for in the president's fiscal 2014 budget, set for release on Wednesday, which is subject to approval by Congress. That sum would be divided among the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Science Foundation, with partners from the private sector.

Bargmann found it refreshing that Obama said the project would provide tools for understanding Alzheimer's and psychiatric disease, but he did not promise cures. "It isn't promising too much," she said.

She was also encouraged by support from two prominent Republicans: House of Representatives Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia, and Newt Gingrich, former presidential candidate and former House speaker, who credited Obama for taking "a very important step toward the most dramatic breakthroughs in human health." 

The Democratic president does not often get such enthusiasm from his Republican opponents.

Fast-developing technology makes this "a unique moment in time" to make this inquiry, Newsome said.

"I think the brain is the most mysterious and complex entity in the universe," he said by telephone. "And I think that new technologies that have developed within the last five years give us a shot at cracking open the problem of the brain in ways that previous generations of scientists never dreamed."

One of these technologies, Newsome said, is optogenetics, which uses genetic engineering to make certain nerve cells in the brain sensitive to different kinds of light, exciting or inhibiting these cells depending on the light's wavelength.

That means scientists can artificially switch the brain's circuits on or off during behavior to see how they contribute to essential functions like vision, learning and decision-making, Newsome said.

The other technological leap of the last decade has been the ability to record the electrical activity of hundreds or even thousands of neurons, a big improvement over the previous requirement of studying one neuron at a time. Since the human brain is composed of some 100 billion neurons - nerve cells that pulse with electrochemical signals - the one-at-a-time approach slowed research to a crawl.

It's not just the number of neurons, but seeing how these billions of neurons interact with each other that could make a map of the brain a reality.

That map is likely to be less like an atlas on paper and more like an online traffic video, Bargmann said, "because the brain is never the same in any two people, and it's not the same in one person at two different times."

Both Bargmann and Newsome are working in their own laboratories on pieces of this puzzle. Newsome focuses on the brain's way of mediating visual perception and visually guided behavior (see his lab's site at http://monkeybiz.stanford.edu ).

Bargmann's research aims to tackle a big subject - how environment and genes interact to shape human behavior - by looking at the relatively simple neurological system of a worm. 

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New bird flu kills 8 in China

New bird flu kills 8 in China

By Maggie Fox, Senior Writer, NBC News

Eight people have died and 28 confirmed infected with a new type of bird flu in eastern China, the official Xinhua news agency said Tuesday. But officials say China's come a long way in watching for and controlling new disease outbreaks.

Chinese authorities are rushing to test patients with respiratory illness to see how far the new H7N9 bird flu has spread. They’re also starting culls of chickens and other birds, which are suspected of spreading the infection, and have closed some live bird markets.

The new strain of flu -- never before seen to cause serious illness in people -- appears to have first started making people ill in February. Chinese authorites announced  the first cases in March.

Flu occasionally passes from animals to people, and most experts believe that new pandemics of influenza have originated in animals – most likely pigs, but also possibly chickens and ducks. Dr. Arnold Monto, an expert on influenza and other infectious diseases at the University of Michigan, notes that several cases were reported last summer of people infected with a strain of flu called H3N2 from pigs at state fairs.

One woman died but the flu did not spread widely.

“What is going on in China is a little scarier,” Monto told NBC News. “The reason it is a little scarier is that it seems to be causing severe disease.”

There’s no evidence yet that people are infecting one another -- which is the main requirement for flu to spread among human populations and cause epidemics. Chinese authorities believe everyone who has been infected caught it somehow from a bird.

While Chinese officials were accused of covering up the outbreak of SARS -- severe acute respiratory syndrome -- in 2003, Monto and other U.S. health officials say a lot has changed.

“What (these reports) tell us is that the Chinese are very good at influenza surveillance and detecting these variants,” he said. “In the old days, they probably would not have been able to report them.”

The World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been working hard to encourage Chinese health officials to test people for new types of flu, including helping them build new testing facilities.

The CDC’s Dr. Joe Bresee says concerns over H5N1 bird flu, which has infected 622 people in 15 countries and killed 371 of them, kick-started efforts.

“The surveillance system in China has really dramatically improved over the last decade or so since the introduction of H5, the catalyst for that,” Bresee told reporters last week.

“They have a wide dispersion of labs that can detect flu, generally speaking, using the best methods, called PCR. They have well over 400 of these labs around the country that have grown up over that last few years. They really do have the ability to look for flu, wherever it is, in the country,” he added.

H5N1 has been steadily infecting poultry and people since 2003, but has never mutated into a form that spreads easily from person to person. Xinhua reported late on Monday that a 2-year-old died of H5N1 in Bangladesh – the first death there, although there have been six cases.

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Bioethicist: It's high time for 'morning-after pill' ruling

Bioethicist: It's high time for 'morning-after pill' ruling

Thank goodness for the courts. A federal judge has now done what the Obama administration had failed to do — make the “morning-after pill” available without prescription to all girls of reproductive age, including those younger than 17.

The emergency contraception pill works to prevent pregnancy up to 72 hours after sexual intercourse. The Food and Drug Administration, which had begun dragging its feet during the Bush administration over approval of this proven safe medicine, had finally cleared it for over the counter sale after a decade of hemming and hawing about nothing.

But, for reasons having everything to do with politics and nothing to do with science, public health or logic, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled FDA’s approval in December of 2011 and said it could not be sold to girls under the age of 17 without a prescription.

The court has now righted that grave wrong.

Sebelius' decision made no sense. The pill is safe and it works. It will reduce unwanted pregnancies and be of particular help to young women who are raped, abused or coerced into sex.

Critics have made two key arguments against the pill—that it is an abortion agent and that it will encourage sex.  Neither claim holds a thimble-full of science or logic.

Scientifically, emergency contraception works by prohibiting ovulation or by prohibiting the implantation of an embryo into the lining of the uterus.  If an embryo has not implanted it cannot be aborted since it never had a chance to become anything.  Emergency contraception is only an abortion in the eyes of those blind to how reproduction works.

And as for encouraging sex, there is no reason to think that girls, some of whom are already sexually active, will be joined by hordes more who will feel free to fool around because there is a pill anymore than there is to think that condoms lead to more underage sex.

The battle over the "morning-after pill" has done nothing to solve the real problem about teenage sex -- the inability of this country to talk about sex. We don’t have enough sound sexual education in our schools, too many of our religious leaders are not effective or credible in spreading wisdom about virtue, responsibility and sex and, a lot of parents fail when it comes to engaging their kids about sex if for no reason other than what they were themselves doing at 14, 15 and 16.

As the judge noted, there is no reason whatsoever to hold this pill hostage to politicians’ whims.  It is safe, it works, and it gives a woman who has no other choice, due to contraceptive failure, abuse or rape, a way to avoid an unwanted pregnancy.  It ought to be stocked in every emergency room, pharmacy, and police station.  And your politicians and clergy should try harder to figure out how to teach our children about sexuality and sexual responsibility without making fools of themselves over a pill.

Arthur Caplan, Ph.D., is the head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center.

Related stories:

Judge: Make 'morning-after pill' available to all girls without prescription

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10 million pounds of frozen pizza, snacks recalled in rare E. coli outbreak

10 million pounds of frozen pizza, snacks recalled in rare E. coli outbreak

By JoNel Aleccia, Senior Writer, NBC NewsA New York snack food maker now says it is recalling more than 10 million pounds of frozen pizza, mozzarella bites, Philly cheese steaks and other products linked to a rare and potentially dangerous outbreak of E. coli poisoning. Three million pounds of the products remain in the marketplace, a company spokesman said Friday.

Rich Products Corp. of Buffalo, N.Y., is pulling all products manufactured at its Waycross, Ga., plant. The  snacks have best buy dates from Jan. 1 2013 through Sept. 29, 2014, according to a press release. For a full list of products, click here.

Spokesman Dwight Gram originally told NBC News that 3 million pounds of the products were recalled, but he later confirmed that the company also had control of 7 million pounds of the frozen items that had not reached stores.

The foods may be contaminated with the bacterium E. coli O121, which already has sickened 27 people in 15 states who ate certain Farm Rich and Market Day frozen chicken quesadillas, pizza slices and other snack foods. Eight people have been hospitalized, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which updated cases on Friday.

However, many more people may have been made ill by the products without knowing it because of complexities involved in identifying  E. coli O121, a strain that can be just as dangerous as the better-known E. coli O157:H7 frequently tied to outbreaks caused by hamburger.

The Thursday announcement expands a March 28 recall of 196,222 pounds of Farm Rich brand frozen chicken quesadillas and other frozen mini meals and snack items because they could be contaminated with E. coli O121.

The strain is among a potentially lethal group of bacteria known as Shiga-toxin producing E. coli or STECs. The bacteria, which include E. coli O157, create poisons that can lead to severe illness and disease, including bloody diarrhea, kidney failure and death.

In 2011, U.S. Department of Agriculture officials banned E. coli O121 and five other strains -- known as “the big six” -- from the nation’s beef supply. This outbreak is the first time Food Safety and Inspection Service officials have recalled products potentially tainted with E. coli O121.

The bacteria are tough to identify in outbreaks because clinical laboratories typically test only for the E. coli O157 strains. To detect the other strains, labs must screen for the presence of Shiga toxins and then send positive samples to public health laboratories to find any non-E. coli O157 STECs.

The strain involved in this outbreak is so rare, its genetic fingerprint has been seen less than 30 times in PulseNet, the CDC’s network of laboratories that track bacteria involved in foodborne illness.

The New York state Department of Health identified the outbreak strain of E. coli O121 in an opened package of Farm Rich brand frozen mini chicken and cheese quesadillas from an ill person’s home, the CDC said.

People usually become sick from Shiga-toxin producing E. coli within two to eight days after eating contaminated food.  Symptoms include bloody diarrhea and abdominal cramps. Most people recover within a week, but others can become severely ill with a complication called hemolytic uremic syndrome, or HUS, which causes kidney failure.

Children and the elderly are most vulnerable to the worst effects of the illness.

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This story was originally published on Thu Apr 4, 2013 3:57 PM EDT

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Science proves women like men with bigger penises

Science proves women like men with bigger penises

The human male possesses the Italian designer faucet of penises. They’re pretty big, the biggest of any primate’s relative to body size. And they’re showy, too, right out there, front and center on our upright bodies (i.e., they don’t retract), as if they were meant to be seen as part of the décor. Why?

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A study released today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) offers an explanation: Women are attracted to penises, and the bigger the better.

“Penis size does affect attractiveness,” lead author Brian Mautz, a University of Ottawa post-doctoral researcher said in an NBCNews.com interview.

Past research has seemed to indicate that women, as a group, are drawn to larger male members. But those results have been disputed as sexist, or scientifically flawed, or both.

So Mautz and his team, working at the Australian National University, designed an experiment in hopes of settling the controversy. They created 49 unique, computer-generated, nude, life-sized male figures. Each figure varied in three traits: height, shoulder-hip ratio and flaccid penis size.

The researchers then displayed all the figures to 105 Australian women with an average age of 26. The women, who were not told which traits varied, were asked to rate the attractiveness of the figures as sexual partners on a scale of 1-7. The women were alone in the room and their responses were anonymous.

As past studies have shown, women prefer tall men with broad shoulders and narrow hips, like an Olympic swimmer. But when Mautz controlled for those variables, it turned out that penis size (overall length and girth) was about as important as stature.

“As you increase penis size, the amount of attractiveness scores gets bigger” in a linear fashion, he explained, until 7.6 centimeters, or 3 inches. After three inches, attractiveness still increased, but in smaller increments.

Not only were the ratings higher, but the women also spent more time gazing at the generously endowed figures, a sign they preferred looking at them as opposed to figures with smaller penises.

Women with a greater body mass index held stronger preferences for big penises. And size was most critical in tall men, perhaps, Mautz speculated, because “a taller guy must have a disproportionately larger penis to sort of make it clear” he’s endowed.

Some have argued that penis size fretting is driven by a body-obsessed culture and porn saturation. But according to Stuart Brody, a researcher at the University of the West of Scotland who’s conducted studies on orgasm, penis size and relationship satisfaction, “some erotica might reflect fads, but there is a potent evolutionary motivation” at work, too.

That’s what interested Mautz, who studies mate-choice, or why we choose one individual over another. Women make mate choices based partly on evolutionarily constructed fitness preferences and may be using penis size as a clue, Brody said. “The results of the PNAS study (and our own penis size studies) are consistent with a mate-choice perspective.”

But a clue to what? Women may be looking for orgasms, which, in turn, Mautz suggested, may serve a pair-bonding function. In the recent book, The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction (which I co-authored), Emory University neuroscientist Larry Young argues that the big human penis evolved into a tool meant to stimulate both the vagina and cervix as a way trigger the release of oxytocin in a woman’s brain, activating bonding circuits. Such bonds provide a survival advantage to offspring.

Or as Mautz puts it in his paper, “Our results support the hypothesis that female mate choice could have driven the evolution of larger penises in humans.”

Of course, this is the 21st century. Most men wear pants – or at the very least, kilts. Mautz was quick to soothe men by saying that his study did not include other proven mate choice factors like money, intelligence, hair or whether a guy drives a 1997 Chevy Astro.

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young, of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com).

© 2013 NBCNews.com  Reprints

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Recalled frozen food may have ended up in schools

Recalled frozen food may have ended up in schools

This story was originally published on Mon Apr 8, 2013 7:23 PM EDT

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Pharmacists react to 'morning-after pill' ruling

Pharmacists react to 'morning-after pill' ruling

By Linda Carroll and Diane Mapes, NBC News contributors

A new federal court ruling has essentially turned the controversial “morning-after pill” into an over-the-counter drug, likely making the medication far more available to teens fearing pregnancy, even in states like Washington and Illinois where pharmacists currently can refuse to sell it.

The new ruling threw out the Food and Drug Administration’s requirement that girls younger than 17 have a prescription before a pharmacist could dispense Plan B. Because of the age requirement, pharmacists ended up controlling who received the medication because IDs had to be checked before any medication could be dispensed.

The FDA has 30 days to appeal. If it fails to get the new ruling overturned, Plan B and other emergency contraception will become, essentially, an OTC medication that could share shelf space with condoms and yeast busting medications.

Up until now, pharmacists in Washington and Illinois had been assured by the courts that they could choose not to dispense Plan B if they so chose. A federal judge ruled in February of 2012 that Washington state couldn’t force pharmacies to sell Plan B. Then in September of the same year, an Illinois appellate court affirmed a lower court’s ruling that pharmacists could not be forced by the state to sell Plan B if they had religious objections.

As an OTC drug, Plan B would not need to be kept behind the counter, meaning that pharmacists would have little control over its sales.

But with the issue still up in the air because of a possible appeal, it’s hard to know how everything will shake out.

“It will be interesting to see how the case plays out,” said Garth Reynolds, executive director of the Illinois Pharmacist Association. “I’m not sure what the immediate impact will be on current dispensing.”

Until there’s a final answer, Reynolds said, “it will be up to individual pharmacists how to deal with the new ruling. If it’s upheld, pharmacies will obey the law. ”

Even without the change, pharmacies in Illinois are required by law to fill prescriptions when they are presented, said Susan Hofer Hofer, a spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, which oversees pharmacies and the professionals who work in them.

“We have a law that says that an individual pharmacist may refuse to provide any medicine they choose, but the pharmacy must make an arrangement so the patient can get served at that pharmacy,” Hofer said. “We’re in court right now with pharmacists who say they don’t want to do it.”

How does that square with the law? These are pharmacies that are owned by a pharmacist who is refusing not only to fill prescriptions for Plan B himself, but also to find someone else to do the job, Hofer explained.

In Washington state, pharmacist Steve Lee says the new ruling won’t make much of a difference.

“I think people who have a need for that should be able to buy it,” he says.

None of his pharmacists have refused to sell Plan B to any woman, however, he adds that the “morning after pill” – which sells for approximately $50 -- is not a big seller at his small pharmacy in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle.

“We have it in the store but we’ve never sold one,” he says. “We’ve had it since it became available. We always have one but they just sit here and expire.”

Jim Krell, a pharmacist in Mt. Vernon, Wash., echoes Lee’s comments regarding the limited usage of the "morning-after pill."

“When you read about this in the press, it sounds like this product is being used a lot,” he says. “In this community – and my feeling is it’s the same statewide – the demand for Plan B is not that great. On average, we might sell it once a month, maybe. And it’s being used responsibly when it is being used. We don’t see what the big deal is.”

If the new ruling stands, individual pharmacists will have very little wiggle room when it comes to Plan B and other emergency contraception, predicted Carmen Catizone, executive director of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy. “If it becomes an over-the-counter product, there isn’t much they can do, unless the pharmacy chooses not to stock that product. The judge cannot mandate that every pharmacy carries it.”

Even if the morning-after pill does become an OTC product, women, especially younger ones may still have trouble getting their hands on it.

“When I was 18, I tried to get Plan B but it was just so expensive that I didn’t get it,” says Melissa, a 26-year-old service industry employee from Seattle. “I went to the pharmacy to see how much it was but it was over $50. I didn’t have the money. I didn’t have insurance. And I ended up getting pregnant and then getting an abortion. It was very sad, but my boyfriend had just dumped me.”

Related stories:

Judge: Make "morning-after pill" available to all girls without prescription

Bioethicist: It's high time for "morning-after pill" ruling

Parents react to "morning-after pill's" easier access

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