This is a very insightful documentary about environmental toxins and how they affect our boys and men.

The summer  of 2009 is fast approaching and with that, the demand for air conditioners.  Portable air conditioners (mobile air conditioners) have become increasingly popular over the last 10 years. While most people spend their time in only 1 or 2 rooms of a home, the costs associated with cooling the entire house can be prohibitive. Not all air conditioners are listed  by consumer research .  However, that does not mean that the other’s  are not quality, simply that they are not  discussed.

Portable air conditioners come in different energy capacities. A 7,500 BTU portable air conditioner can comfortably cool a room up to 200 sq ft.  while a  13,000 BTU  air conditioner will cool over 400 sq. ft.  All portable air conditioners I reviewed include a window kit which simplifies the setup, allowing the air conditioner to be used almost immediately upon delivery.

It makes little sense to cool an entire home  with central air when you can cool 1 or 2 rooms with a portable room air conditioner or room air cooler.  Most portable air conditioners, like those manufactured by Soleus Air or Sunpentown, have wheels which  allow them to be transported from one room to the other.  Mobile air conditioners are great for  home offices or for senior citizens who  are on a tight budget.

In addition to cooling your room down to 61 degrees,  portable air conditioners also dehumidify the air at the same time.  Some units are capable or removing up to 65 pints (8 gallons) of water per day from the air. You may be able to  use your portable air conditioner during the winter, if you purchase one that has a built in heater.

The Soleus Air- LX-140 is a 14,000 BTU remote controlled air conditioner which has a dehumidifier and built in heater -all in 1 unit. This unit retails for $799 but we found it priced at a discount for $589 at www.eHealthSupplies.com, with free shipping.  Let expensive units , such as the Sunpentown WA-7500 (7500 BTU) can cool up to 200 sq. ft for less than  $375. In all,  eHealthSupplies.com has 31 different unit to choose from.  If you have any questions, their live customer support person can help you choose which portable air conditioner is best for you. Good Luck!

(NaturalNews) In a groundbreaking study, research recently published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives has revealed that pregnant women who are exposed to hairspray while at work have more than double the risk of giving birth to a son with hypospadias, a common genital birth defect.

About Hypospadias

Hypospadias, a condition whereby there is displacement of the urinary opening to the underside of the penis, is one of the most common birth defects to affect the male genitals. It is estimated that, in the United States and the United Kingdom, hypospadias hits about 1 in every 250 boys.

Typically, the condition can be treated using surgery after the child turns one, although serious cases of the disease can cause problems with urination, sex and fertility. As of now, the causes of hypospadias are not well understood.

Details of Study

In the said study, which was jointly conducted by the Imperial College in London, University College Cork and the Centre for Research in Environment Epidemiology in Barcelona, researchers conducted detailed interviews via telephone with 471 mothers across London whose sons had hypospadias. For the control group, interviews were also carried out with 490 mothers whose sons were not affected by the condition. A range of dietary and lifestyle factors were looked at, including occupation, family history of the condition, type of diet, smoking, intake of folate supplements as well as possible exposure to chemicals.

Read rest of story here….

I personally use a bluetooth headset or keep my phone on speaker phone – most of the time. However, I am going to  make sure I do this more frequently.  I must admit, I still place the phone next to my ear… especially when my bluetooth is not around.. This information is definitely scary!

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Prominent Neurosurgeons Fear Cell Phone Use Causes Brain Tumors

by David Gutierrez

(NaturalNews) Three prominent neurosurgeons recently said on the CNN interview show Larry King Live that they refuse to place cellular phones directly against their heads, for fear of brain tumors.

CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta and Los Angeles brain surgeon Keith Black both stated that they use earpieces instead of holding the handset up against their heads.

“I think the safe practice is to use an earpiece so you keep the microwave antenna away from your brain,” said Black, who works at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

“I use it on the speaker-phone mode,” Australian National University neurosurgery researcher Vini Khurana said. “I do not hold it to my ear.”

A number of recent studies have shown that the use of cell phone handsets increases people’s risk of three kinds of tumors in particular: glioma, a tumor of the brain that can be either benign or malignant; acoustic neuroma, a benign tumor of the nerve that connects the ear and brain; and cancer of the salivary gland near the ear that is known as the parotid.

For example, one study found that heavy cell phone users had a 58 percent higher risk of parotid cancers, while another found that people who used mobile phones for 10 years experienced a 100 percent increased risk of acoustic neuroma and glioma.

Many of these studies found that tumors are more likely to occur on the side of the head or neck where the phone is most regularly held.

The FDA says that cell phone use is safe, based on three large epidemiological studies conducted after 2000. But the agency admits that those studies only followed participants for an average of three years, whereas it regularly takes brain tumors 10 years to develop enough to be detectable.

Concerned health professionals have warned that even if the risk from cellular phones is small, the scale on which the phones are used could still lead to a massive public health crisis.

An estimated three billion mobile people – 45 percent of the world’s population – use mobile phones.

Sources for this story include: www.iht.com.

Obese People to Blame for Accelerating Global Warming?

by David Gutierrez

(NaturalNews) The weight and consumption habits of the overweight and obese are worsening the pace of global warming, said two researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in a letter to the medical journal Lancet.

It takes more fuel to transport people who are obese and therefore heavier, Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts wrote. In addition, heavier people do not just tend to eat more food: they actually require it. The researchers calculated that it takes an obese person 1,680 calories per day just to maintain their body functioning and another 1,280 to sustain their daily activities. This is 18 percent higher than the caloric intake required for a person with a normal body mass index (BMI).

BMI is a measure of weight relative to height that is used to calculate healthy body weight. A BMI of 18 to 25 is considered normal, while a BMI above 25 is considered overweight and one of 30 or more obese.

But according to Edwards and Roberts, 40 percent of the global population has a BMI in the neighborhood of 30 or more.

“We are all becoming heavier and it is a global responsibility,” Edwards said. “Obesity is a key part of the big picture.”

The production and transportation of food is a major source of greenhouse gases, the researchers noted, with agriculture responsible for a whopping 20 percent of global emissions. They also faulted the overweight for contributing to global food shortages.

“Promotion of a normal distribution of BMI would reduce the global demand for, and thus the price of, food,” the researchers wrote.

Tim Church of Louisiana State University questioned Edwards and Roberts’ focus on obesity, noting that 25 percent of the food produced in the United States is thrown away.

“We throw away far more food than the extra 460 calories per day [that Edwards and Roberts] point out,” Church said. “In other words, most of our food overproduction is due to waste, not overeating.”

Sources for this story include: www.reuters.com, telegraph.co.uk

This is an interesting post. Perhaps we should be preparing for an ice age instead of global warming?

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Dark spots, some as large as 50,000 miles in diameter, typically move across the surface of the sun, contracting and expanding as they go. These strange and powerful phenomena are known as sunspots, but now they are all gone. Not even solar physicists know why it’s happening and what this odd solar silence might be indicating for our future.

By Thomas Frank
USA TODAY

BALTIMORE — Body-scanning machines that show images of people underneath their clothing are being installed in 10 of the nation’s busiest airports in one of the biggest public uses of security devices that reveal intimate body parts.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) recently started using body scans on randomly chosen passengers in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Denver, Albuquerque and at New York’s Kennedy airport.

Airports in Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas and Miami will be added this month. Reagan National Airport in Washington starts using a body scanner today. A total of 38 machines will be in use within weeks.

“It’s the wave of the future,” said James Schear, the TSA security director at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, where two body scanners are in use at one checkpoint.

Schear said the scanners could eventually replace metal detectors at the nation’s 2,000 airport checkpoints and the pat-downs done on passengers who need extra screening. “We’re just scratching the surface of what we can do with whole-body imaging,” Schear said.

The TSA effort could encourage scanners’ use in rail stations, arenas and office buildings, the American Civil Liberties Union said. “This may well set a precedent that others will follow,” said Barry Steinhardt, head of the ACLU technology project.

Scanners are used in a few courthouses, jails and U.S. embassies, as well as overseas border crossings, military checkpoints and some foreign airports such as Amsterdam’s Schiphol.

The scanners bounce harmless “millimeter waves” off passengers who are selected to stand inside a portal with arms raised after clearing the metal detector. A TSA screener in a nearby room views the black-and-white image and looks for objects on a screen that are shaded differently from the body. Finding a suspicious object, a screener radios a colleague at the checkpoint to search the passenger.

The TSA says it protects privacy by blurring passengers’ faces and deleting images right after viewing. Yet the images are detailed, clearly showing a person’s gender. “You can actually see the sweat on someone’s back,” Schear said.

The scanners aim to strengthen airport security by spotting plastic and ceramic weapons and explosives that evade metal detectors and are the biggest threat to aviation. Government audits have found that screeners miss a large number of weapons, bombs and bomb parts such as wires and timers that agents sneak through checkpoints.

“I’m delighted by this development,” said Clark Kent Ervin, the former Homeland Security inspector general whose reports urged the use of body scanners. “This really is the ultimate answer to increasing screeners’ ability to spot concealed weapons.”

The scanners do a good job seeing under clothing but cannot see through plastic or rubber materials that resemble skin, said Peter Siegel, a senior scientist at the California Institute of Technology.

“You probably could find very common materials that you could wrap around you that would effectively obscure things,” Siegel said.

Passengers who went through a scanner at the Baltimore airport last week were intrigued, reassured and occasionally wary. The process took about 30 seconds on average.

Stepping into the 9-foot-tall glass booth, Eileen Reardon of Baltimore looked startled when an electronic glass door slid around the outside of the machine to create the image of her body. “Some of this stuff seems a little crazy,” Reardon said, “but in this day and age, you have to go along with it.”

Scott Shafer of Phoenix didn’t mind a screener looking at him underneath his shorts and polo shirt from a nearby room. The door is kept shut and blocked with floor screens. “I don’t know that person back there. I’ll never seem them,” Shafer said. “Everything personal is taken out of the equation.”

Steinhardt of the ACLU said passengers would be alarmed if they saw the image of their body. “It all seems very clinical and non-threatening — you go through this portal and don’t have any idea what’s at the other end,” he said.

Passengers scanned in Baltimore said they did not know what the scanner did and were not told why they were directed into the booth.

Magazine-size signs are posted around the checkpoint explaining the scanners, but passengers said they did not notice them.

Darin Scott of Miami was annoyed by the process.

“If you don’t ask questions, they don’t tell you anything,” Scott said. When he asked a screener technical questions about the scanner, “he could not answer,” Scott said.

TSA spokeswoman Sterling Payne said the agency is studying passenger reaction and could “get more creative” about informing passengers. “If passengers have questions,” she said, “they need to ask the questions.”

Passengers can decline to go through a scanner, but they will face a pat-down.

Schear, the Baltimore security director, said only 4% of passengers decline.

In Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, where scanners have been tested since last year as an alternative to pat-downs, 90% of passengers choose to be scanned, the TSA says.

“Most passengers don’t think it’s any big deal,” Schear said. “They think it’s a piece of security they’re willing to do.”

Surprisingly  the alternative to these medications are newly patented devices with the same “generic medicine” inside them. The result is patients will have to pay more money for the basic asthma rescue medicine, albuterol.  My personal opinion is that this has more to do with money and little to do with a hole in the ozone layer.

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Ozone-Depleting Inhalers Being Phased Out

FRIDAY, May 30 (HealthDay News) — Asthma inhalers that contain the drug albuterol to relax the airways also contain chemicals that harm the ozone layer. And these inhalers won’t be available after this year, so U.S. health officials are urging patients to switch to alternative inhalers now.

Chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, are widely used to propel inhaled drugs into the lungs. However, products containing CFCs are being phased out, because the chemicals damage the Earth’s protective ozone layer. CFC inhalers are being replaced by inhalers powered by HFAs, or hydrofluoroalkanes, which are ozone-friendly.

The change to HFA-powered inhalers has been in the works for several years, but the FDA issued an advisory on Friday, urging patients still using CFC inhalers to switch now. Inhalers containing CFCs will not be available after Dec. 31.

FDA officials said people with respiratory problems, such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, may need some time to acclimate to HFA-based inhalers.

“There are 52 million prescriptions written for albuterol inhalers each year in the United States,” Dr. Badrul Chowdhury, director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Division of Pulmonary and Allergy Products, said during a teleconference. Albuterol is used to treat shortness of breath in people with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, he noted.

Chowdhury said that approximately 65 percent of inhaler users have already switched to HFA inhalers.

“These new handlers may taste and feel different than the current CFC inhalers,” he said. “In addition, HFA inhalers may feel softer than CFC inhalers.”

Also, patients using HFA inhalers will have to prime and clean them to prevent the buildup of albuterol in the inhalers’ nozzle. This buildup could block the medicine from reaching the lungs, Chowdhury said.

Each HFA inhaler has a different priming mechanism and cleaning and drying instructions. So, users should carefully read the instructions before using the inhaler. And HFA inhalers may cost more, because there’s no generic HFA inhaler available yet, Chowdhury said.

Three HFA-propelled albuterol inhalers have been approved by the FDA: Proair HFA Inhalation Aerosol; Proventil HFA Inhalation Aerosol; and Ventolin HFA Inhalation Aerosol. Also, an HFA-propelled inhaler containing levalbuterol, a medicine similar to albuterol, is available as Xopenex HFA Inhalation Aerosol, the agency said.

Dr. Ira Finegold, chief of the Division of Allergy and Clinical Immunology at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York City, doesn’t see much difference in the effectiveness of the two types of inhalers. “The end result — if you need it, does it open up your lungs? Yes, it does,” he said.

However, the changeover will involve some patient education, he said. “The old medication, CFC albuterol, was really a very nice product, because the propellant got in your body and came out of your body — it wasn’t absorbed. And remarkably, it is a cleaning agent, so the device was self-cleaning.”

The new HFA propellant is safe in the body but can clog the inhaler, Feingold said. “So, after use, these inhalers need to be rinsed out or they are not going to work correctly,” he said.

“In addition,” Feingold added, “each of the four new inhalers on the market is different in the number of times you have to prime it. There is also a little difference in feel and taste.”

The discontinuation of CFC-propelled inhalers is the result of the U.S. Clean Air Act and an international treaty known as the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer.

Under provisions of this treaty, the United States agreed to stop the production and importation of substances that damage the ozone layer, including CFCs, according to the FDA.

More information

For more on inhalers, visit the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

SOURCES: May 30, 2008, teleconference with Badrul Chowdhury, M.D., Ph.D., director, Division of Pulmonary and Allergy Products, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, U.S. Food and Drug Administration; Ira Finegold, M.D., chief, Division of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Department of Medicine at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, New York City

Erectile dysfunction predicts heart problems: study

Allergies and Asthma  are conditions that are usually triggered by “trigger factors” that can be found both indoor and outdoor environments.  Prevention of an asthma attack or allergy exacerbation can be controlled by controlling exposure to the below triggers.  If avoidance is not possible, minimizing exposure is vital.

Common triggers include:

• tobacco
• smoke
• perfumes
• dust
• dust mites
• pet dander
• pet hair
• chemicals (lysol and other household cleaning chemicals)
• paints
• new carpets and the glues that they admit
• cold viruses

For in home allergy prevention, HEPA filters, non HEPA air cleaners and home allergy cleaning supplies can all be helpful.  Austin Air HEPA filters and Blue Air HEPA filter  units are among the industry leaders when it comes to indoor air HEPA filters. These units are doctor recommended for those with allergies and asthma.