Take These Steps Today to Save Your Brain: Preventing Alzheimer’s

Take These Steps Today to Save Yourself From Brain Drain: Study Shows Preventing Alzheimer’s Is Possible

By Kurtis Bright

Five Easy Steps to Prevent Alzheimer’s

We’re all getting older, no two ways about it. But when it comes to aging, there’s good news, more good news, and then there’s bad news: for one thing, if you’re getting older, that means you’re still kicking. And especially in a time when there are seemingly new breakthrough medical discoveries every day, it is now more true than ever that where there’s life, there’s hope.

There's other good news too: prior to age 65, dementia strikes a mere 5 percent of people, only one in 20. Those are pretty good odds, right off the bat.

But as always, there’s bad news too: if and when you cross that 65 year threshold, your odds of getting dementia are going to double every five years.

But fret not; all is not lost. As we learn more about aging, scientists are finding out much more about not only Alzheimer’s and dementia in general, but also about the mechanisms behind it. We are better equipped than ever to not only identify the signs much sooner than ever before, we are also on the road to developing drugs that could treat it within the next few years.

Researchers have identified five specific ways seniors whom they have dubbed “super-agers”--people over 70 who show no sign of dementia and still have the mental vibrancy of people one-third their age--manage to avoid the worst ravages of mental decline. There is lots of excitement in the research community that perhaps they can teach the rest of us how to stave off dementia.

Here are some common factors of these super-agers that we can all adopt in an effort to prevent dementia as we age.

• Exercise isn’t just for your body - And not those useless “brain-stimulating” game apps. No, what researchers found useful for the super-agers was stimulating their brains through a variety of activities: socializing, learning a new language, taking up new hobbies, etc. It is believed that the key is to constantly challenge the three pounds of goo between our ears to achieve new things. Studies show that a bored brain is a deteriorating brain.
• Take a pill - Aspirin, that is. Clear this one with your doctor first, but studies have shown that an aspirin a day dramatically reduces the odds of developing Alzheimer’s, and even seems to help people maintain higher cognitive skills and brain function.
• Go fish - Or find other sources for Omega-3s like flax seed oil. A number of small-scale studies have convincingly illustrated that the omega-3s found in fish oil may retard the progression of Alzheimer’s.
• Keep the rest of you healthy - There are seven risk factors associated with developing Alzheimer’s: high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, smoking, lack of exercise, low level of education and depression. Notice that the majority, five of them in all, are related to exercising the body and maintaining a healthy heart. It’s all one machine, folks. You can’t keep a healthy brain without a healthy body to run it any more than you can keep your car running well if you only change the tires and ignore all other maintenance.
• Have a champagne jam - Sorry? That isn’t a typo: you heard it here first: a U.K. study--and let’s all raise a glass to the creative boozers/researchers at the University of Reading who procured funding for this study--found that in rats who consumed the human equivalent of one to three glasses of champagne a week, their spatial memory was improved. This is a huge finding, not only for those who love the bubbly: spatial memory is a key marker in preventing cognitive decline.

Alzheimer’s is by no means inevitable. Taking charge of our own health, life and destiny today is key.

Plus it’s a great excuse to keep a bottle of champagne in the fridge!

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Every Breath You Take: Air Pollution Unacceptably High for 90 Percent Of Humanity

Every Breath You Take: Air Pollution Unacceptably High for 90 Percent Of Humanity

By Kurtis Bright

Air Pollution Is Killing Us and It's Only Getting Worse

Environmental warnings become more and more dire every year, it seems. We have melting icecaps including a huge chunk of Antartica about to break away, to the ocean acidification and the death of the Great Barrier Reed, to near-constant mega-storms to new record temperature every month. The natural systems of the earth just can’t catch up with all the havoc we are wreaking.

However, despite the deniers’ refusal to accept responsibility for what we have wrought, we may be finally be seeing some undeniable human consequences of our environmental folly, in the form of deadly, pervasive air pollution.

The alarm has been sounded in the form of a new study: at least 92 percent of the human population lives in areas where air pollution levels exceed those recommended. The study’s authors estimate that 6.2 million people die every year as a result.

The study comes not from some lone maniac posting on his weird blog but from as reliable a group as they come: the World Health Organization. In it the study authors detail an environment gone awry.

“Fast action to tackle air pollution can't come soon enough,” said the WHO’s top environmental official Maria Neira. “Solutions exist with sustainable transport in cities, solid waste management, access to clean household fuels and cook-stoves, as well as renewable energies and industrial emissions reductions.”

The WHO has published an interactive map of air quality that really brings home what many have suspected for some time: those countries hardest hit by poverty and other poor quality of life measures are the places where most deaths due to air pollution occur. Over 60 percent of deaths due to air pollution occur in low and middle-income countries, mostly centered in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific region.

“Air pollution continues to take a toll on the health of the most vulnerable populations -- women, children and the older adults,” added WHO's Assistant Director General Flavia Bustreo. “For people to be healthy, they must breathe clean air from their first breath to their last.”

The latest study and the air quality model represent WHO’s most extensive, deep and broad effort to date toward understanding and quantifying the effects of air pollution. Developed in conjunction with researchers at the University of Bath in the U.K., it employs satellite data, air transport models, and data culled from ground station monitors in over 3,000 locations in cities and in rural areas.

The researchers then use these data to map a comprehensive picture that illustrates the specific areas that are most affected by a variety of pollution types: vehicular, household fuel-burning pollution, coal-fired plant pollution and other industrial sources.

Officials and researchers at the WHO are hoping that the new map may offer guidance on how to best alleviate specific problems for the hardest-hit areas.

“This new model is a big step forward towards even more confident estimates of the huge global burden of more than six million deaths -- one in nine of total global deaths,” said Dr. Neira.

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Pesticide Manufacturers Knew All Along About Honeybee Harm

Recently Unearthed Documents Reveal Pesticide Manufacturers Knew All Along About Honeybee Harm

By Kurtis Bright

They’ve Known About Neonicotinoids’ Harmfulness to Bees for Years

When a person you have known to be a liar all along is finally revealed to all the world for what he or she really is, it is so very satisfying. However it often turns out to be something of a hollow victory: when a liar has already reaped the benefits of lying for so long, it almost doesn’t matter once they are finally caught. Extracting revenge is likely impossible as a practical matter--the damage lies and liars do goes far beyond that which can be repaired solely by public exposure.

That is the way many in the sustainable community are no doubt feeling in the wake of the revelation that newly released secret documents obtained from pesticide manufacturers shows their own tests revealed that they knew all along about the harm their neonicotinoids could do to honeybees.

Greenpeace conducted the investigation, using documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and it has revealed a trove of unpublished field trials that were conducted by pesticide manufacturers. These studies clearly demonstrated that manufacturers knew all along that their neonicotinoid products were indeed capable of causing serious harm to honeybees. 

The original studies were conducted by Syngenta and Bayer during the period when they were developing their neonicotinoid pesticides, and were submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency. Thus they are part of the public record, and subject to the scrutiny of anyone who wished to file an FOIA request.

We live in a very different world now: neonicotinoids are the world’s most heavily used pesticide, and have earned the aforementioned companies billions of dollars.

At the same time, they have decimated the global honeybee population, jeopardizing the future of food and our ability to feed ourselves outside the purview of agrichem companies’ control.

The data obtained in the recently released studies had to do with examining a couple of neonicotinoid chemicals: Bayer’s clothianidin and Syngenta’s thiamethoxam. The effects they had on honeybees when applied at varying concentrations were the focus of much of the work, and the tests showed conclusively that at high concentrations, both chemicals could cause serious harm to the pollinators.

Now that it is known that honeybees are indeed being harmed by their products, senior researchers in government, universities, NGOs and in the private sector are calling for the companies to release all their data, and stop playing coy. They reason that, since the genie is already out of the bottle and we know the truth about neonicotinoids, the least these companies can do is assist researchers who are trying to understand the mechanisms of how the bee colonies are affected, and perhaps what can be done about it.

“Bayer and Syngenta’s commitment to pollinator health should include publishing these data or otherwise making them public,” said Christian Krupke, an entomologist at Purdue University. “This work presents a rich dataset that could greatly benefit the many publicly-funded scientists examining the issue worldwide, including avoiding costly and unnecessary duplication of research.”

Perhaps researchers like Krupke are more forgiving than some: there are also calls for severe penalties for Syngenta and Bayer for covering up the truth all these years.

Indeed it might be fair to say that their greed-based obfuscation was not only criminal, but genocidal, especially when you consider how reliant humankind is on pollinators being able to do their job.

We eagerly await the hammer of justice to be come down swinging from the EPA.

But don’t hold your breath; they've been working for Monsanto and Bayer et al for years now.

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Patients Diagnosed With Certain Types Of Cancer Living Longer Than Ever

Patients Diagnosed With Certain Types Of Cancer Living Longer Than Ever

By Kurtis Bright

 

Survival Rates Up To Ten Years After Diagnosis Are Now Common

There is just so much bad news out there--seemingly more every day. So every now and then it’s nice to come across something that is genuinely heartening, some nugget of news that is unequivocally positive.

Here goes: for people who develop a few common types of cancer, survival rates  are now routinely running to a decade or more following diagnosis.

There was a time when a diagnosis of cancer implied a rush to get one’s affairs in order; today the question is no longer “How long do I have, doc,” so much as “How long do you want?”

For those suffering skin cancer, breast cancer and prostate cancer, huge majorities can now expect to live for a minimum of ten years following their diagnosis, according to the latest government surveys.

The likeliest group to still be going strong a decade after diagnosis is those diagnosed with skin cancer, of whom a whopping 89 percent were able to live long enough to reach that milestone, according to figures provided by the U.S. government Office for National Statistics.

For women diagnosed with breast cancer, more than 80 percent of them now survive an additional ten years following their first diagnosis.

A man who suffers from prostate cancer has a ten-year survival rate nearly as high, with 79.9 percent coming in at the decade mark after being diagnosed.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are certain types of cancer diagnoses that still bring very bad news indeed, when it comes to the long-term survival rate of patients. For pancreatic cancer sufferers, only 5.7 percent of those diagnosed survive an additional ten years. And when it comes to lung cancer, the rate is slightly less dire, but still not very hopeful at 9.8 percent. Brain cancer patients only survive to ten years after diagnosis 11.9 percent of the time.

However, the overall improvement in the statistics suggest that ongoing research, treatment possibilities, and earlier diagnoses are all contributing factors resulting in an incremental increase in life expectancy after diagnosis for certain types of cancer but not others.

An example is that 96.4 percent of women diagnosed with breast cancer between 2009 and 2013 lived for at least a year after they were diagnosed, whereas 86.7 survived an additional five years. This constitutes the highest rate recorded to date.

It remains a fact that any kind of cancer is still very bad news, of course. However, at least we can take some small comfort in the demonstrable fact that it isn’t an immediate death sentence anymore.

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When Even Neoliberal Capitalists Sour On Factory Farming, You Know It’s Bad

When Even Neoliberal Capitalists Sour On Factory Farming, You Know It’s Bad

By Kurtis Bright

Investors Worth Trillions Call For Divestment From Factory Farms

A classic joke told by comedian and actor Larry Miller follows a guy as he progresses through “just having one quick drink with the boys” after work, through stages of just one more beer, to a quick shot, and finally to margaritas being mixed by a laughing Satan at a bar across the state line, asking a waitress with fresh stitches in her head to be his wife.

The final scene has the brutal sunlight of dawn streaming in “...like God’s own flashlight,” and Satan tells the hapless drunk, “Ooh, buddy you’re on your own. I gotta get some sleep before work.”

You can get something of the sense of that from a recent announcement issued by a group of 16 investment groups representing over $1.25 trillion in funds. Turns out they want to talk about divesting from the factory farm model of agriculture.

Which is something like Satan’s final parting shot to the drunk who has gone too far even for the Prince of Darkness: it’s like they’re saying, “Guys, this shit is just too evil, even for us.”

The group is organized under the name Farm Animal Investment Risk & Return and includes some 40 investors who are campaigning to raise awareness about the environmental and health risks that come with factory farming, especially animal agriculture.

Envisioned by Jeremy Coller, founder and chief investment officer of Coller Capital, the group was founded based on the fact that “...a worrying knowledge gap has emerged among investors in relation to the material investment risks and opportunities connected with intensive livestock farming and poor animal welfare standards,” according to the group’s website.

Coller has enlisted investors who collectively manage over $1.25 trillion in funds, so you can be certain that with that kind of money at stake, the rest of the investment world--as well as players in the world of agriculture--are sitting up and taking notice.

“Backed by a new briefing entitled The Future Of Food--The Investment Case For A Protein Shake Up, produced by the FAIRR Initiative and ShareAction, the investors warn of the risks associated with the growing global demand for protein and an over reliance on the unsustainable factory farming of livestock for its supply,” reads a press release from the group. “The briefing highlights the environmental, social and public health risks inherent in this model, which financial markets are not currently valuing appropriately.”

What FAIRR has accomplished as a first step toward initiating divestment in the factory model of agriculture is to contact 16 global-scale food producers, requesting that they acknowledge the risks of continuing on the current path, and calling on them to focus on investing in plant-based protein sources.

Some of the corporations they reached out to include General Mills, Nestlé, Sainsbury’s, Walmart, Kraft, Kroger, Costco, Whole Foods and Mondelez International (which is the parent company of Triscuit, Ritz, Cadbury and host of other foods).

According to the initiative’s site, “...factory farming is emerging as a high-risk production method linked with significant environmental damage and major public health issues, such as the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria and outbreaks of pandemics such as avian flu.”

If even the Devil thinks it’s getting late, maybe it’s time to pay the tab and cash out your chips.

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Mysterious Polio-Like Disease Striking Fear Across the U.S.

Mysterious Polio-Like Disease Striking Fear Across the U.S.

By Kurtis Bright

Acute Flaccid Myelitis Has Medical Staff Scrambling

Among the phrases you don’t want to hear are: “Your child has been stricken by a rare, polio-like disease. He can’t breathe on his own, so we’re going to put him on a ventilator. He has the use of one toe, and he can blink his left eye, but that’s about all.

“And we’re not sure what we can do about it.”

Hundreds of parents across the U.S. are coming to grips with just such a diagnosis right now. A terrifying emerging disease is striking fear into parents across the country, that results in symptoms like those described above and worse.

Called acute flaccid myelitis, the strange disease affected about 120 U.S. children in 2014 alone, many of whom have not recovered to this day. That may not sound like a lot of kids in a nation of 300 million, but consider the pain and frustration and helplessness of the families involved for a moment.

And then consider this fact: thus far in 2016 twice as many cases have been reported than there were at the same point in 2015--and researchers still have no idea what causes it. Neither can they say why affected children are subject to such tremendous weakness in their limbs during the disease.

What researchers do know is that AFM can be triggered by several things: enteroviruses (polio and non-polio), West Nile virus, and adenoviruses all have been shown to be associated with contracting the disease.

What they can’t tell parents and their near-paralyzed children is what to do about it, either to prevent or treat it. No treatment protocol exists for AFM; doctors are forced to work with each patient on a case-by-case basis in an attempt to recover the use of the patients’ limbs in physical therapy programs.

What we do know is that the disease affects the nervous system, in particular the spinal cord, and that it early symptoms often can resemble a cold. However, despite such an inauspicious genesis, AFM rapidly escalates, leaving the child paralyzed in a matter of days.

Just between January and August alone, over 50 people living in 24 states have come down with the disease; last year at this time there had only been 21 victims.

It is heartbreaking to hear the stories of the parents of these afflicted children.

For example, six-year-old Mackenzie Andersen contracted AFM in 2014 and still suffers from symptoms to this day.

“Within 12 days she was paralyzed from the neck down, on a ventilator to breathe for her. She was left with her left hand and her feet and toes that move,” her mother said in  Washington Post interview. “How do you wrap your brain around the fact that she got a cold, and now she’s a quadriplegic on a ventilator?”

To put it simply, you don’t. We don’t know yet if the cases that emerged over the rest of the year continued the upward trend over previous years as the numbers haven’t been compiled yet.

But parents should take a moment to be aware of the possibility that even a simple childhood cold could lead to something much more serious.

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Vermont Passes Sweeping New Privacy Laws Designed To Thwart Warrantless Surveillance

Vermont Passes Sweeping New Privacy Laws Designed To Thwart Warrantless Surveillance

By Kurtis Bright

Green Mountain State Puts Feds, Local Cops On Notice: No Surveillance Without a Warrant

Lots of good things seem to start in Vermont.

You’ve got your Ben and Jerry of course. Then you’ve got Bernie--Sanders that is. And no matter where you reside on the political spectrum you have to admit that hearing a sitting senator calling out the incestuous, money-grubbing, one-percent-take-all corruption of our system as it is currently run was refreshing, if ultimately doomed by the machinations of those same fixers.

And don’t forget the genetically modified food labeling law Vermont passed, which sent big agri-business and food manufacturers into a tizzy early last year. That too was ultimately thwarted by the aforementioned corrupt pay-for-play federal government, deeply ensconced in the pockets of big agriculture. But at the very least the hard work in Vermont put the issue of GMOs and the dangerous pesticides they are doused with on the radar for a whole lot of people who may not have previously considered the issue.

Now a trio Vermont of state senators have hit a home run for state residents there in terms of privacy and countering police overreach.

Vermont Senators Tim Ashe, Joe Benning and Dick Sears have created legislation in that is being called Senate Bill 155, a law that would limit the types and scope of warrantless surveillance police are permitted to conduct. It is designed to help protect electronic privacy, and it might even throw a monkey wrench into a number of sketchy Federal surveillance programs that rely on the passive compliance and cooperation of local and state law enforcement.

At issue is what is known as the Stingray device, a new favorite surveillance tool of cops everywhere. This machinery/program is essentially a van that is equipped to spoof nearby cell phone towers and collect all data that passes through them in a given neighborhood. It is the undiscriminating backhoe of data collection, scooping up everything that passes through a nearby cell phone tower, with tremendous implications for privacy. Grabbing thousands of text messages and phone conversations sent by people who are not suspected of any crime--messages that are supposed to be protected by privacy laws--is troubling to say the least.

The new Vermont legislation, signed into law in June last year has not only shaken up this law enforcement free-for-all in Vermont by banning warrantless use of stingray devices to track the location of phones and sweep up electronic communications--it also restricts the ways police and use drones for surveillance. Additionally it forbids law enforcement officers from obtaining electronic data from service providers without a warrant or a judicially issued subpoena.

Ending the days of the New Wild West of law enforcement data collection for Vermont residents is a great first step, and people across the country are taking notice.

So here’s hoping the media also notices this grand rebellion on a state level from the new normal in which we are expected to flaccidly give up our rights in exchange for dubious alleged protections.

The nation and the world could do worse than follow the Green Mountain State’s example on any number of things, it seems.

Pass the ice cream and let’s see how this plays out.

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