Imagine having to sue someone to make them do their job.

Sounds crazy, right? But you don’t have to imagine – because the do-nothing feds are at the wrong end of just such a suit.

The National Resources Defense Council has gone on the offensive to try to force the FDA to finally regulate – and ban – bisphenol A, the dangerous hormone-like chemical that’s in plastic containers and metal can linings.

The NRDC actually petitioned the FDA to ban BPA two years ago – and under the agency’s own rules, it had 180 days to approve, deny or respond to that demand.

Instead, they did nothing at all.

Two years later, we’re still waiting for them to act. While the feds now claim to be “concerned,” they also insist that BPA is perfectly safe – and say they plan to keep studying it. And by that, they mean they’ll keep on doing what they do best: nothing.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Sexually Transmitted Diseases

The Cancer-Causing Sex Virus

Matthew Herper, 07.21.10, 04:15 PM EDT

HPV–known for causing cervical cancer–is

emerging as the leading cause of throat cancer in

men. Should they get the vaccine too?

Nine Things You Need To Know About HPV

Martin Duffy, a Boston consultant and economist, thought he just had a sore throat. When it persisted for months, he went to the doctor and learned there was a tumor on his tonsils.

Duffy, now 70, had none of the traditional risk factors for throat cancer. He doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink and has run 40 Boston marathons. Instead, his cancer was caused by the human papilloma virus (HPV), which is sexually transmitted and a common cause of throat and mouth cancer.

HPV tumors have a better prognosis than those caused by too many years of booze and cigarettes. But Duffy “is in the unlucky 20%” whose cancer comes back–despite rounds of chemotherapy and radiation that melted 20 more pounds off a lean 150-pound frame. Now the cancer has spread throughout his throat, making eating and talking difficult. “I made my living as a public speaker,” he says. “Now I sound like Daffy Duck.” Duffy believes he has only a few months left. “How do you tell the people you love you love them?” he asks.

Nine Things You Need To Know About HPV

Most strains of the HPV virus are harmless, but persistent infections with two HPV strains cause 70% of the 12,000 cases of cervical cancers diagnosed annually in the U.S. Other forms of the sexually transmitted virus can cause penile and anal cancer, and genital warts. The HPV throat cancer connection has emerged in just the last few years and is so new that the government doesn’t track its incidence. Researchers believe it is transmitted via oral sex. But top researchers estimate that there are 11,300 HPV throat cancers each year in the U.S.–and the numbers are growing fast as people have been having more sexual partners since the 1960s. By 2015 there could be 20,000 cases. For more surprising discoveries about HPV, read here.

These big numbers have some top researchers arguing that drug makers should test whether HPV vaccines now used to prevent cervical cancer in women can also prevent throat infections in boys. Two vaccines, Gardasil from Merck ( MRK – news – people ) and Cervarix from GlaxoSmithKline ( GSK – news – people ), are approved for preventing cervical cancer. Gardasil is approved for use in boys only to prevent genital warts.

Vaccinating boys could stop this meteoric increase in throat cancer. “Clearly, boys need to be vaccinated,” says Marshall Posner, the incoming medical director of head and neck cancer at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York. “I want my kids to be vaccinated. I don’t see a downside to these vaccines.”

There’s only one problem: The vaccine manufacturers aren’t terribly hot on the idea. GlaxoSmithKline says it has no plans to study throat cancer. It adds that it is “committed to providing a vaccine specifically designed to protect against cervical cancer in girls and young women.”

Merck, the maker of Gardasil, seemed more interested a couple of years ago. In 2008 it funded Maura Gillison, the Ohio State University researcher who established the HPV-throat-cancer link in 2000, to do a pilot study to show that test could reliably detect HPV infection in the throat. The pilot study was successful. By early 2009 Gillison says that a larger study of the vaccine in throat cancer looked close to being green lit.

But after Merck agreed to buy rival Schering-Plough ( SGP – news – people ) for $41 billion in March 2009, interest in a big study seemed to evaporate, Gillison says. In a statement, Merck says that “due to competing research and business priorities, we decided not to move ahead with an efficacy study at this time.”

The drug makers’ reticence probably stems from a fear that a throat-cancer vaccine would be hard to get approved. Papilloma viruses usually cause cancer slowly, causing pre-cancerous lesions that take many years to blossom into full-fledged malignant tumors. Papilloma viruses cause the horn-like growths in rabbits that probably gave rise to myths of “jackalopes” in the American West. In the cervix, early abnormal growths can be picked up with a diagnostic test, the Pap smear. Clinical trials of Gardasil and Cervarix took advantage of this, measuring the number of pre-cancerous growths prevented by the vaccines.

But there are no easy-to-detect pre-cancers in the throat. Adolescent boys would have to be followed for decades to to see if the vaccine prevented throat cancer, an unlikely scenario. Short of this, studies could only look at the prevention of HPV throat infections, not cancer or cancer precursors directly. Approving a vaccine for wide use based on this type of short-term data would require a leap of faith that the Food and Drug Administration might not be willing to take.

Top researchers say the federal government needs to step in and fund the long study if drug companies cannot be persuaded to do it themselves. “I’m sorry Merck decided not to do it,” says Posner. “But in the end, this is a federal responsibility. It’s a public health issue.”

For his part, Martin Duffy thinks that drug companies’ complacent attitude toward throat cancer would be different if more of their employees were in his situation. “It will change real fast,” he says, “if one of their executives comes down with this disease.”

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

SARS – THE VIRUS

You Need to Know

IT IS EXTREMELY DANGEROUS

SARS is one of the most dangerous viruses on the face of the earth. SARS stands for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome

It infects the lungs. It is one of the most dangerous and contagious diseases on the face of the earth because it is most often fatal.

The first appearance of SARS was discovered in China recently  in November of late 2002.

Within an extremely important period of time, only six weeks, the SARS virus had spread throughout the entire world. It was mainly spread by international travelers that did not know they had contracted the disease.

During that period of time the World Health Organization or WHO, said that close to 8,000 people were infected. Along with those infections a total of eight hundred people died of the SARS syndrome. During this initial outbreak the entire world was in a complete panic. The world was concerned over the fact that the virus could have turned into a global pandemic. The good thing is that this pandemic never occurred and there has not been an outbreak of SARS since 2004.

SARS has many signs and symptoms that are associated with it.

When someone first contracts SARS they have a low fever.

This symptom usually does not start until ten days after the virus is contracted. Some of the most obvious signs of contraction of the SARS disease is a headache and muscle soreness. Another symptom that some people get is chills or discomfort.

Many people develop a small, dry cough after approximately five days. Some cases of SARS can develop into bad cases of pneumonia resulting in depleted oxygen levels in the blood. If you do have SARS you should stay home because you don’t want to start a global pandemic! After symptoms go away, you should still stay home for approximately ten days to ensure that your illness is gone.

Knowing when to see a doctor can sometimes be difficult. If you have any of the signs or symptoms of SARS you should immediately seek medical assistance. Part of saving yourself from SARS is catching it early. If you let SARS go untreated for a long period of time then you may find that it becomes fatal. There is little chance that SARS will ever turn into another global pandemic. It is still important to monitor people for symptoms of SARS because there is always a possibility that the illness will resurface once again.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 24th August 2009