For the first time, the Surgeon General has issued a warning about skin cancers, calling it a major growing health problem. According to the American Cancer Society, nearly 5 million people are treated for some form of skin cancer each year, and there’s now more skin cancer diagnoses each year than breast cancer, lung cancer and prostate cancer and colon cancer diagnoses combined.
The Surgeon General has released a report that blames tanning for the $8 billion we spend each year treating skin cancer.
The warning covered both indoor tanning and outdoor tanning, but it singled out indoor tanning salons, calling them a big contributor to the growing skin cancer epidemic.
CNN reports:
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has set five goals for communities to decrease the risk of skin cancer, such as providing shade at parks, schools and other public spaces, and reducing indoor tanning.
The Food and Drug Administration has decided it will require warning labels for tanning beds.
The Caribbean virus Chikungunya has continued to spread in New Jersey, with 25 more new confirmed cases.
The virus is rarely fatal, but it can produce a fever, a rash and severe joint pain.
To date, there’s been 601 confirmed cases of Chikungunya in the U.S., 11 of which happened in Connecticut.
The government began tracking the virus when it first showed up in Florida back in February.
http://www.cdc.gov/chikungunya/geo/united-states.html & http://www.myfoxny.com/story/26141086/west-nile-found-in-new-jersey-mosquitoes
When you think of food poisoning, you probably think of undercooked meat as the culprit, as opposed to the salad bar.
However, a report from the Centers for Disease Control has shown how misleading those perceptions can be.
While 22 percent of all cases of food poisoning in the U.S. came from meat and poultry (a number that rises to over 41 percent if you add milk and dairy), a whopping 51.1 percent came from plants, a large majority of which (22.3 percent overall) came from leafy vegetables.
The CDC said that many cases of food poisoning associated with plants come from Norovirus, the bug that causes what we commonly, but incorrectly, call the “Stomach Flu.”
Yes, it may seem counter-intuitive that lettuce may be more dangerous than steak when it comes to food poisoning, but think about it. One of the two if often protected by thorough cooking to kill germs. The other is often protected by mothing more than a sneeze guard.
This CDC report was based on reports of food-borne from the United States over an eleven- year span from 1998 to 2008.