Your shampoo could be making you fat |  |
- Your shampoo could be making you fat
- Delhi to strengthen rules against female foeticide: Dikshit
- UNC tapped to lead national effort to find a cure for AIDS
- Data revealing migrations of larval reef fish vital for designing networks of marine protected areas
- Large human study links phthalates, BPA and thyroid hormone levels
| Your shampoo could be making you fat Posted: 12 Jul 2011 06:11 PM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Eating healthy and exercising regularly are good enough for sloughing off the pounds. But what if your body acts otherwise? Doctors have found that chemical compounds in cosmetics disrupt the body's natural weight control system. Emerging evidence suggests that a more sinister reason than food and activity could be behind obesity. They are the so-called 'chemical calories' lurking in beauty products, including innocuous looking shampoo, body lotions and soap. Doctors at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York claim that phthalates, chemical ingredients in 70 percent of cosmetics and household cleaning products, have been shown to disrupt the body's natural weight control system. Exposure to phthalates through daily use may be linked to childhood obesity and weight problems in adults, the scientists warned, reports the Daily Mail. In their long-term study on girls living in the inner city area of East Harlem, New York, Mount Sinai team measured exposure to phthalates by analysing the children's urine. 'The heaviest girls have the highest levels of phthalates in their urine,' says Prof Philip Landrigan, paediatrician and study author from Mount Sinai. 'It goes up as the children get heavier, but it's most evident in the heaviest kids.' Phthalates have been widely used as gelling agents in cosmetics, cleaning products and to make plastic bottles for more than half a century, but it has only just come to light that there may be possible health risks. Another substance, Bisphenol-A -, also present in containers and bottles, has also been found to be rich in 'chemical calories.' Billed as 'endocrine disruptors,' they are absorbed into the body affecting the glands and hormones that regulate numerous bodily functions. It's not just girls who seem susceptible to the phthalate effect. In 2007, researchers at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, US, found the same class of chemicals were contributing to abdominal... http://www.rxpgnews.com    |
| Delhi to strengthen rules against female foeticide: Dikshit Posted: 11 Jul 2011 09:55 PM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) New Delhi, July 11 - Expressing concern over the growing gender imbalance, Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit said Monday that her government will make the rules more stringent to punish those involved in female foetcide. Terming the skewed sex ratio an offshoot of female foeticide, Dikshit said: 'The government is planning to impose a heavy fine and strict punishment for such incidents. It is essential to save girl child at any cost. The society will have to intensify campaign so that the ratio of girls and boys could be made even.' Speaking on the occasion of World Population Day, Dikshit also announced the implementation of Janani Shishu Surkasha Yojna in August with the objective of minimizing maternal and child death rate. 'The government will provided ambulance service or may reimburse transport expenses for taking pregnant women to hospitals and back to their homes,' she said. State Health Minister A.K. Walia, who was also present on the occasion, said his department has organised a fortnight-long programme to provide information and facilities on small family. It will also encourage and educate families on spacing in child birth. http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| UNC tapped to lead national effort to find a cure for AIDS Posted: 11 Jul 2011 05:00 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have been awarded a $32 million, five-year federal grant to develop ways to cure people with HIV by purging the virus hiding in the immune systems of patients taking antiretroviral therapy. Tackling this latent virus is considered key to a cure for AIDS. This is the first major funding initiative ever to focus on HIV eradication, and we at UNC are excited to lead this collaboration of an incredible group of 19 investigators from across the country, said David Margolis, MD, professor of medicine and microbiology and immunology in the UNC School of Medicine and principal investigator of this effort. While previous HIV funding initiatives have focused on prevention and vaccine development, with this funding, the NIH and the scientific community are saying that finding a cure for AIDS is a realistic goal and should be part of our plan of attack against the epidemic, said Margolis, who is also professor of epidemiology in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. Although individuals infected with HIV may effectively control virus levels with antiretroviral drugs and maintain relatively good health, the virus is never fully eliminated from the cells and tissues it has infected. Researchers need to better understand where these reservoirs of HIV are located, how they are established and maintained, and how to eliminate them. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) grant will be administered by the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute at UNC and will be shared among researchers at nine U.S. universities, all of them pioneering researchers in HIV latency. Co-funding is also being provided by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). The UNC-led consortium will be one of three groups funded by NIAID under its Martin Delaney Collaboratory initiative. The UNC-led effort will... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| Data revealing migrations of larval reef fish vital for designing networks of marine protected areas Posted: 11 Jul 2011 05:00 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Networks of biologically-connected marine protected areas need to be carefully planned, taking into account the open ocean migrations of marine fish larvae that take them from one home to another sometimes hundreds of kilometers away. Research published today in the international journal Oecologia sheds new light on the dispersal of marine fish in their larval stages, important information for the effective design of marine protected areas (MPAs), a widely advocated conservation tool. Using a novel genetic analysis, researchers at the University of Windsor, Canada, and the United Nations University's Canadian-based Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) studied dispersal and connectivity among populations of the bicolor damselfish -- a species common to Caribbean coral reefs and a convenient proxy for many coral reef fish species with similar biology, including a typical 30-day larval stage. Using samples of newly settled juvenile fish from sites in Belize and Mexico, they traced the origins of hundreds of individual fish larvae back to putative source populations. This is the first time that genetic 'assignment tests' have been used to delineate the pattern of connectivity for a marine fish in a region of this size (approximately 6,000 square kilometers), says lead author Derek Hogan of the University of Windsor, now at University of Wisconsin. We found that larvae of this species, on average, traveled 77 km from home in the 30-day larval period, says Dr. Hogan. Although some fish remained close to home in the same period, some traveled almost 200 km - roughly the distance from New York City to Albany - an impressive feat for a larva about the size of a baby fingernail. The scientists were surprised to find that patterns of larval dispersal among reefs changed from year to year, driven perhaps by changes in oceanographic currents or meteorological events. These results show that it is possible to... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| Large human study links phthalates, BPA and thyroid hormone levels Posted: 11 Jul 2011 05:00 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) ANN ARBOR, Mich.---A link between chemicals called phthalates and thyroid hormone levels was confirmed by the University of Michigan in the first large-scale and nationally representative study of phthalates and BPA in relation to thyroid function in humans. The U-M School of Public Health study also reported suggestive findings consistent with a previously reported link between a chemical called bisphenol-A and thyroid hormone levels. BPA is best known for its use in certain plastic water bottles and in the linings of canned foods. Researchers used publicly available data from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to compare urine metabolites and serum thyroid measures from 1,346 adults and 329 adolescents. Generally speaking, greater concentrations of urinary phthalate metabolites and BPA were associated with greater impacts on serum thyroid measures, said John Meeker, assistant professor at U-M SPH and lead study author. Specifically, researchers found an inverse relationship between urinary markers of exposure and thyroid hormone levels, meaning as urinary metabolite concentrations increased, serum levels of certain thyroid hormone levels decreased. Phthalates and BPA are chemical compounds that appear in solvents, plasticizers and common household products. These latest results were consistent with findings from previous smaller studies by Meeker and others that suggested the relationship. The current study showed the strongest relationship between thyroid disruption and DEHP, a phthalate commonly used as a plasticizer. Research has shown that the primary exposure to DEHP is through diet. Urine samples in the highest 20 percent of exposure to DEHP were associated with as much as a 10 percent decrease in certain thyroid hormones compared to urine samples at the lowest 20 percent of exposure. This seems like a subtle difference, Meeker said, but if you think about the entire population being exposed... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
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