mcgyver5: Health

Thu, 06 May 2004 00:07:43 GMT

I find it strange how the medical advice changes so much in 5 years. When Maggie was born, they said cord care was very important. I swabbed that cord-scab with alchohol every 4 hours, imagining that I was killing all sorts of life threatening bugs. Now, in 2004 we get the instruction to just ignore the cord-scab.

In 1999 they didn't even bother testing for Strep-B before birth, now in 2004 it was enough to cause them to attatch an antibiotic I.V. during labor.

In 2001 they didn't even try to give Frank a bath after he was born. We liked the smell of a new baby so much that we didn't bathe him for two weeks. In 2004, we had to sign a release taking all responsibility if we didn't allow a bath for our newborn.

Mon, 03 May 2004 02:59:26 GMT

I'm so tired. I just brought the kids to the hospital to hang out and Frank threw up all over the place. Hilarity ensued. Next thing I knew we were back on the street.

Maureen had some baby jaundice so she went under the lights all day. Jaundice is caused by a build up of dead blood cells. One of the breakdown products of the blood cells is bilirubin. Babies recycle their red blood cells faster than adults, leaving a lot of waste for the baby's immature liver to clean up. The waste builds up everywhere including the skin and turns it yellow. 9 out of 10 babies have some jaundice. In a few babies the biliruben levels get alarmingly high and the jaundice is treated with phototherapy. So, Maureen is in a box with lights shining on her. The billy lights, as they are called, break down the biliruben. They did a second test at 7:00 and the numbers look good ( 12 being an example of good) Maggie had the same thing and she was up to 17 or so at one point. They should be home tomorrow. The nursing seems to be going well.

Sometimes baby jaundice can be caused by a mother-fetus incompatibility of blood types but we aren't sure if that is the case here.

When I told Maggie that the baby is in a box with lights because her skin turned a funny color, she looked at me with this look like, "you ain't foolin me with another crackpot story"

sweet potatoes

Fri, 16 Apr 2004 11:29:25 GMT

I decided to go public about my relationship with a very special vegetable.

The sweet potato is the most under-appreciated food in America. I have been used to seeing it (but not eating it) once a year at thanksgiving like most Americans, but that's all changed now. This change is mostly due to Sweet potato and peanut stew.

I didn't know this, but it is the sixth most important staple crop in the world.

I went to Cub to buy some last night. I wanted an example of an orange sweet potato (we call them yams) and a white one and a true yam. I couldn't convince the grocer that orange sweet potatoes were not really yams. He was depressingly uninterested in learning about true yams. He just kept pointing over to the orange sweet potatos. True yams are starchy tubers grown in Africa and Asia that can grow to 600 pounds. They are called 2-man yams, 4-man yams, or 6 man yams according to how many people it takes to carry them. The first steriods were made from yams.

In the southern united states, we feed sweet potatoes to livestock. Here in the north, we just eat them ourselves. People are beginning to realize that they make great potato chips, candy and cookies.

They are great nutritionally. Almost no fat, loads of vitamins. Medium glycemic index. (glycemic index measures how fast the carbohydrates in a food get converted to glucose) This puts it better carb-wise than white rice and regular potatoes but not as good as whole wheat pasta and black beans.

Sweet Potatoes have enemies. The sweet potato weevil can really wipe out a sweet potato crop if the conditions are right. The sweet potato has almost no resistance to these bugs.

However, the genetic engineers are working on pasting genes into sweet potatoes that make the plant resistant to the weevil and certain viruses that attack the plant.

In your developing relationship with this special vegetable, you will find yourself daydreaming about uses for sweet potatoes. Pancakes? Ice Cream? Hot Cereal? You may want to check out the tater day festival in Benton, Kentucky which is a three day homage to the sweet potato. I know I am.

The Point of Existence: Chapter 2

Sun, 11 Apr 2004 04:34:53 GMT

If I seem crabby lately, its because I'm reading a book full of sentences like this:

More concretely, we recognize in the experience of self-realization that to be ourselves is to be aware of ourselves as the presence of Being.

Yup. Any more concrete and you are talking about sidewalks. That sentence is right in the middle of a long section that uses the words "suchness" , "isness", and "thereness". I get the sense that the author knows he has 600 pages to fill and he's going to spread himself out and get comfortable. He also threw in the word "facticity".

I obviously still believe there is some insight to be gained here, or I would throw the book down the same crapper that I pitched my $20 into when I bought the thing. The insight in this chapter is the "fall into narcissism", restating once again the theory that our egos get in the way of enlightenment.

Two capacities of the self are particularly relevant to the development of narcissism as we understand it: The first is the capacity of the mind to form concepts and structures of concepts in response to experience. The second is the capicity of the self to identify with different asects of experience, particularly with images in the mind and with habitual emotinoal and physical states.

To me "forming concepts" means something like, when I see the color green, I don't really see it, I just have a concept in my mind of what green is. And "identify with different aspects of experience" is to hitch my wagon to a projected image : father, employee, patriot, swimmer, clown.

He goes on to say how healthy and normal it is to form these associations. However, at some point, something happens that calls it all into question or at least lets you view the self from a totally new perspective. My impression is that the book tries to teach you how to get there without having a near death experience.

Trapping Turtles

Sat, 03 Apr 2004 04:13:33 GMT

This is a turtle tag. If you are a turtle seller or recreational turtle trapper, all of your traps require one. The DNR sells about 50 turtle licenses each year. Three people here have told me they taste like chicken. If not prepared properly they can be very high in contaminants because their fatty tissues store contaminants from their scavenger diet.

To prepare a snapping turtle, you chop the head off and let it bleed out for 24 hours because the involuntary movements last that long. If you don't hang them up while they are bleeding, they can crawl away without a head and get lost. Turtle is a popular item on the menu of area restaurants west of St. Cloud. I want to find out where I can try some.

the bill is due

Thu, 01 Apr 2004 14:10:17 GMT

When the budget worry beads come out, it is usually about medicare and social security, but another 500 pound gorilla is infrastructure needs, few more pressing and costly than water treatment. It looks like Atlanta is going first:

A federal judge's ruling that Atlanta's sewer system violates the Federal Clean Water Act prompts the city to begin replacing thousands of miles of sewer pipes. Replacing the pipes, many of which are nearly 100 years old, is expected to cost over $3 billion -- a price to be absorbed primarily by local citizens and businesses.

Yow. Listen to the All Things Considered piece.

We want to preserve your dignity. Get the winch.

Wed, 31 Mar 2004 18:01:55 GMT

The Southwest EMS in Arizona has three bariatric ambulances with motorized pulleys "to preserve the dignity of obese patients" (from jwz)

For some reason, this reminds me of the time I toured historical ships in Boston Harbour. The beds and doorways were very small because people in the 1600's were much shorter on average than we are. I think this is partly due to nutrition.

In 100 years, todays furniture will be displayed in a museum with a sign saying, "of course, any modern adult would crush one of these to splinters because our nutrition today is so much better.

One of them is in Pima county, which reminds me of an article I read in the New Yorker about the Pima indians being genetically prone to obesity.

How not to play with your kids

Mon, 29 Mar 2004 02:06:44 GMT

Two weeks ago: I thought I'd be a good dad and skip the workout so I could go in the kids gym at the Y and play with my kids. Quotidian bad judgement found me trying a move that I saw once performed by a professional Chinese acrobats. I told Maggie to bend over, reach her hands between her legs past her ankles. With several parents and YMCA employees as witnesses, I grabbed her hands and tugged, expecting to pull off a marvelous flip and land her on her feet. Instead, I ended up causing her to do an accelerated face plant into the thin exercise mat. That precipitated a two hour crying jag in which she could not use her right arm. The crying subsided after some children's ibuprofen and after Maggie learned to dress herself with one hand, we forgot about it until last weekend when my mother-in-law showed up.

"Who fractured Maggie's clavicle?", she asked upon examining her. I got to do a rendition of the scene, and even bent over into the pose that Maggie was in, hoping Carol wouldn't grab my hands and pull to see if she could at least do some soft tissue damage.

She really wasn't mad at all. In fact, she is in a very accepting phase of her life right now, having just survived cancer. Besides, a fractured clavicle is very common for kids and her own son had one when he was 4. The treatment is that the kid wears a sling for the first 24 hours and gets some ibuprofen. Since we missed the time for the sling by about 2 weeks, there was no treatment at all for us. As long as you don't pull the same crap again, it heals by itself. It leaves a bump on the collar bone for a long while. If the kid's arm feels numb or tingly, all bets are off, however.

Wed, 24 Mar 2004 02:21:47 GMT

A visit to the emergency room in Fresno

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 16:13:04 GMT

Woe to the well-meaning person who brings home Clear Your Clutter With Feng Shui thinking that they are just going to be reading about sorting papers and tossing out extra clothes:

"It is likely that many of you reading this book have colons that are distorted and coated in stagnant, impacted feces."

NASA research scientists have discoved traces of mother's milk in adult colons, indicating that people carry impacted fecal matter in their colons all their lives"

NASA doesn't talk much about that mission.

Wed, 10 Mar 2004 13:25:05 GMT

"When an unclean spirit leaves a person it wanders through waterless places searching for a resting place. When it doesn't find one, it says, 'I will go back to the home I left'. It then returns, and finds it swept and refurbished. Next, it goes out and brings back seven other spirits more vile than itself, who enter and settle in there. So that person ends up worse off than when he or she started"

-Jesus Q11:24

According to: http://www.livius.org/q/q-source/q1.htm

Q is the name used by scholars to describe a lost source on Jesus' teachings. (The letter is randomly chosen.) It can be reconstructed from the gospels of Matthew and Luke, which are based on two earlier sources: the gospel of Mark and Q. Stated differently, Q is by definition the material that Luke and Matthew have in common that is not dependent on Mark.

Thu, 04 Mar 2004 19:33:05 GMT

Chloropicrin, a type of tear gas, was used as a chemical weapon during World War I. It was also used as an anti-theft device on safes starting in 1920 until the 1950's.

"The number of these devices sold or still in circulation is unknown".

Every so often someone discovers another one.... the hard way.

stamp out lice!

Wed, 03 Mar 2004 04:13:27 GMT

1947: DDT proves useful in keeping flies out of British grocery stores and getting rid of lice in displaced persons. U.S. Camera 1947 stuns and amazes me every time I open it. I scanned some of the pictures. They mostly deal with the turmoil following WWII. Get ready for an onslaught. The pictures are listed here. I will be using some of them for the paper I wish I wrote on demobilization.

Renounce and Enjoy

Tue, 02 Mar 2004 15:21:24 GMT

I went to the Common Ground meditation center again Sunday night. The lecture was on renunciation. The practice of renunciation starts with observing your craving. I crave donuts, sometimes to the exclusion of all other thought. I also crave that the other assholes on the road get out of my way. In this practice I would watch my craving for donuts or green lights and realize three things:

One is that the craving is a burning thing ( and it makes a fiery ring). This is suffering.
Another is that if you observe it for a while, the craving passes even if you don't meet it.
Third, fulfillment of desire does not bring lasting happiness. It is the promise that is never kept.

For me, the craving for donuts is easy to pick out as a problem. I am not saying it is easy to resist the craving for donuts or not feel the urge to jump out of my car and attack another driver. My problem with this practice comes when I crave a clean kitchen floor or I crave to be a better employee, father, citizen, steward. In strict Buddhism, that kind of craving is also a problem. Craving positive things also causes suffering brought on by the delusion that I will have lasting happiness if, for example, I lose 10 pounds. BUT... I am a householder and the best I can do is observe these cravings for things to be better while I act on them.

Mon, 23 Feb 2004 13:11:05 GMT

Tried out Common Ground Meditation Center last night. They have a Sunday night sitting group, which is a group meditation and a lecture. I got a lot out of it. I might have the difference between Christian meditation and Buddhist meditation:

During the meditation, I was kind of bothered that I might disturb the room if I sneezed. If I was going to be "successful" at this, I wouldn't give a crap. In the Buddhist approach, I would just sneeze and watch the guy in front of me wipe my snots off of the back of his neck, observing my embarrassment from a distance, detaching myself from it, keeping happy, saying, "This is how it is right now and I am happy about it. The focus is on staying "happy" always. The Christian approach to the sneeze problem would be similar in that I would watch my desire not to sneeze and watch my embarrassment about sneezing, but different in that I would accept the embarrassment while observing it, perhaps even going so far as to cover my mouth when I sneezed. The Buddhist goal is to live now and remain happy about it. The Christian goal is to live now and accept the emotion that comes out of the situation. Obviously, Buddhists get angry, but they would probably view experiencing anger as falling off the wagon in some way. Both philosophies warn not to waste your time and energy wishing things were different, but with Buddhism you are supposed to always be happy.

Tue, 03 Feb 2004 13:33:00 GMT

I asked a couple of questions of Fr. John Cowan, teacher of meditation and author of Taking Jesus Seriously: Buddhist Meditation for Christians:

My Question:

I sometimes meditate outside in the cold, in a hotel lobby, in the grocery store parking lot or walking to my car. I seem to be able to observe my automatic responses much better when I am surrounded by distractions. I go outside in cold weather and sit on a bench and just get fascinated with the difference between suffering and pain. (pain comes when your nose turns
black and falls off, but suffering comes when you prefer it stays on)

The trouble comes when I practice without distractions. In the
prescribed fashion, I have a spot I go to where I am uninterrupted and while I sometimes have good sessions there, I more often find myself literally floating around the room upside down with just static in my brain. Aside from he occasional nose itch, there is nothing to anchor me. Am I avoiding the hard work by seeking out distractions and working with them? I really have some interesting insights when sitting in a hotel lobby, watching myself worry if the bellhop is going to throw me out.

His Answer:

I sincerely hope you are not "literally" floating upside down.

You say there is nothing to anchor you? How about the breath? If you are like me I keep forgetting the importance of going back to it. If you can focus on the breath that may solve this. If not maybe sitting in a room without distraction is not your cup of tea. It's cold outside. In your experiments please do not freeze your nose off. Or get arrested. If you do, don't tell them you know me or that I told you to do that. However, the idea was to be able to watch the mind during ordinary life, so the sitting in the quiet room should be second to what you seem to be able to do.

My Question:

You refer twice in the book to meditation going awry. Towards the beginning: "If you have trouble in life, be careful that you are not setting yourself up to be a doormat.." (not exact words) and towards the end: "Delusions can be powerful and tricky...." How can I know the difference? Of course I have trouble with life. How can I tell if the "path" is leading me down a rathole of delusion? can you point me to something that defines these hazards a little more?

His Answer:

Are you able to live and enjoy ordinary life? If not that would be a hint that something is problematic. The point of the exercise is to become aware of thoughts and feelings and outside reality from a quiet place inside. If that is the direction it is going that is the direction I am pointing. One guy's definition of nirvana is loving awareness of samsara. The kingdom of heaven is loving awareness of the kingdom of this earth. I suppose there are all kinds of delusions but the delusion I most fear for others is that they are in some special place. The Buddha describes the good meditator as being aware of the breath and of the body as body and the mind as mind.

Samsara seems to be the hindu word for the broken and ever changing material world.

For me, the term "special place" is the feeling that you are escaping through meditation to somewhere where the air is thin and no evil dare encroach.

Fri, 30 Jan 2004 19:51:23 GMT

Before we get a national health plan, we as a society need to agree upon a cost per life saved figure which will determine which procedures will be paid for and which will be rationed. This means that we will be coming up with a dollar figure for the worth of a human life. A radio story last night set some pretty broad brackets around this number. A public health expert pondered meningitis outbreaks among college freshmen. Discussing a vaccine against bacterial meningitis, he said that a general vaccination for all college freshmen would run as high as $20 million per life saved, clearly not worth it, according to the official. On the other hand, giving medicine to those close to a case of meningitis would be about $65 per life saved, well worth it. So, we are looking for a number between $65 and $20 million per life saved. Clearly, we have to zero in a little more, but its a start. I don't think I have ever before heard a public official give a figure for acceptible cost-effectiveness of health care.

Thu, 29 Jan 2004 16:03:32 GMT

I got a checkup today. Everything was pretty normal. Got scheduled for another colonoscopy. The doctor felt he had to explain what it was and why they were doing it. I didn't have the energy to explain that I had been hearing about them since before I could read and that I had once colonoscoped a jacuzzi. And..... got a name of a physician to call to talk to about the Big V.

I also tried to make a case for a Modafinil prescription. I said that I had a swing shift situation and with kids and all, I sometimes experienced EXCESSIVE DAYTIME SLEEPINESS and probably was a danger to myself and others. I saw an article about something called Modafinil or Provigil. He cut me off and very gravely said, "that stuff is only for sick people. Its addictive and if you feel sleepy its up to you to modify your sleep schedule." I didn't push it. I didn't tell him that the FDA opened up the use for this to just about everyone who felt the least bit sleepy. I didn't insist he make a note of the conversation in case, god forbid, I should fall asleep while while operating a computer and hurt myself or someone else.

Sun, 25 Jan 2004 23:57:10 GMT

I am looking for web sites relating to wastewater and found this nugget, a blogger who is posting his Experiences as a water and sanitation engineer in Guatemala....

But I can't find anyone talking about what I think is a huge sleeping budget issue: At some point, we as a society are going to have to fork over huge amounts of money to address water issues. Two big areas are immediately apparent to me: Projects that get water to people that have used theirs up and upgrades to our wastewater treatment infrastructure.

Wastewater:

It was more than 30 years ago that huge amounts of money were ploughed into building municipal wastewater plants. I remember when one of these was built outside of Springfield Mass. Bondi's Island. It made some neighborhoods of Springfield unbearable for a while and we could smell it up on the hill in Longmeadow on summer nights. We used to call a guy Bondi's because he let out a vicous fart one day at lunch.

When the wind is right, I can smell the Pig's Eye treatment plant outside of the DNR. Security guards refer to it as the shit factory. One of the security guards at the DNR told me that she was stationed there for two days, but refused to go back because the smell made her sick. Another guard told me it is where they station you if you make too many mistakes at another place.

I work to keep the daylight world of work and family and recreation completely seperate from the subject of "what happens after I flush the toilet, but stories like "Minnehaha creek hit with 300,000 gallons of spilled sewage" remind me of the existence of an infrastructure that wisks away my defamation.

I am expecting this hidden world to inch its way into our attention. The decay is real. Pipes and pumps need replacing. Spills due to broken equipment are real. It will be interesting to see how communities, especially the ones who don't even want to pay for sidewalks, will deal with it. And it will be interesting to watch politicians, especially the ones who have bullshitted their way into office by promising lower taxes and smaller government avoid the issue.

The invisible hand of the marketplace gives us the finger

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 15:56:00 GMT

We suspect that Frank has pink-eye. Last time we suspected it, we went to the doctor, paid a $12 co-pay for the doctor to tell us that they didn't test for it but just gave out antibiotics (even though it could have been viral pink-eye). I think it was another $12 co-pay for the prescription. This time, instead of paying for a visit, we chose to wait and see if it went away by itself. We had some of the antibiotics left over from last year so we applied that in a haphazard way. In the meantime, we took Frank to all kinds of places where he could have transmitted pink-eye. It seems to have gone away, but it occured to me that these decisions are being made over and over again across the population. If the kid is sick, wait to see if he gets worse. Save $25 bucks or even $150 off of a doctors visit. Who cares if he might infect other people. Other people getting sick doesn't affect our bottom line, so why should it enter into the calculation?

If I get a staph infection, I'm not going to know what it is without a test. If that test is going to cost me $15 (which it will next year when our new contract goes into effect), I am going to wait and see if it goes away by itself. In the meantime, I will go to the YMCA and rub that staph infected leg all over some exercise mats. Then, with the $15 I saved, I will go to see Bad Santa and my leg will itch something fierce, so I will reach down under my sock and scratch. Ahhh. Then I will touch the arm on my chair. And I will visit the bathroom where my leg will touch the toilet seat. Then, two days later, when my leg is bright red and 6 degrees hotter than the rest of my body and there are red streaks going up towards my femoral artery, I will go to the emergency room, where there is also a $15 co-pay, but the visit will cost the medical system closer to $500 instead of the $150 office visit.

The thing we hear about health care in Canada and other places that are afflicted with health care programs that cover everyone at 1/3 of the cost of our system is that they have to wait a long time to get seen. Would this be true for a staph infection? Here, I had to wait a few months to get a colonoscopy, but can get seen the same day for something like pink-eye or a staph infection (not that I had one of those.) I can't imagine that Canada would make someone with an infectious disease wait a long time. Are there still SARS patients waiting to be seen?

pain

Sun, 30 Nov 2003 15:20:09 GMT

Owwwwww. I cheesed my back. Again. It has a lot to do with my weight, which has been trending upwards. I now weigh more than I ever have before in my life. Yesterday was the Dunkirk of my fight against obesity. Matt and Kara came over last night and brought these wonderful brownies. Picture logs being processed by a saw mill.

In meditation, the goal is to be aware. The first things you encounter as you practice this awareness are your own automatic responses. During dinner, I became briefly aware of myself smashing food into my face as fast as I could. There was little conscious thought involved and very little enjoyment, just automatic processing.

To paraphrase something that John Cowan wrote, the way we often try to experience food is to catapult ourselves into a hot fudge sundae. The alternative is to become very aware of every bite and sip while eating, so that a chocolate cookie and a cup of tea can be savored one carefully considered bite and sip at a time and make for a full experience.

Meditation and Mary Magdalen

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 02:08:00 GMT

Our instructor, Father John Cowan, has been teaching Buddhist Meditation for Christians for a while and searching for a Christian teaching that warns against giving undue importance to the physical world supports the Buddhist practice of observing "the wheel of life" and our reaction to it from a distance and he found it in the Gospel of Mary Magdalen:

Matter gave birth to a passion that has no equal, which proceeded from something contrary to nature.

There is an interesting lecture by Dr. Stephan Hoeller on the Gospel of Mary. (Beware: It is almost 1.5 hours and he takes about 20 minutes to begin, but he offers some good points that Father Cowan was hitting yesterday, that being born into this world is kind of a sacrifice of wholeness. And we spend our lives clinging to life, worshipping the flesh.

Even when we embrace practices that are supposed to give us a break from the focus on the flesh, we hope for the side effects of longer life, clarity of thought. We do yoga for improved muscle tone! We meditate for greater clarity of mind, so we can get ahead. Christians attend faith healings in hopes of seeing someone's goiter disappear. The point is detachment from the wheel of life, but we turn these things around so they focus us more on the wheel of life.

I have been aware of this as I meditate. The monkey wants results! Every two seconds, the monkey is saying. When can I use this power to subjugate my enemies?

One of the goals of meditation is freedom from automatic responses to the material world, and this is done by first becoming aware of your automatic responses and then realizing that the pain of the world is secondary to the spirit.

And the gospel of Mary seems to support this:

There is no sin, but it is you who make sin when you do the things that are like the nature of adultery, which is called 'sin.'

Somehow they got from this statement to the following statement:

the Savior argues, in effect, that sin is not a moral category, but a cosmological one; it is due to the improper mixing of the material and the spiritual.

and I am not clear exactly how, except that "adultry" here doesn't mean sleeping with someone's life, but the mixing of things that don't belong together, as in adulterated milk. I guess that makes sense. It is wrong to adulterate the spirit with considerations of the material world.

This problem is with us all, obviously, but it gets comical when when you are so consumed by the wheel of life that you think to pull off a really notable miracle, Jesus actually has to physically rise from the dead! ( ..and feed on the flesh of the living?) "

Meditation homework

Sun, 02 Nov 2003 19:34:19 GMT

Meditation class yesterday:

We are to sit and concentrate on the breath. While concentrating on the breath, things will slide into our attention. For example, our nose will begin to itch. We give attention to the itch. How does it feel? "It's moving! It's getting worse! Oh! It's unbearable now. What does unbearable feel like?" etc. Then, when we have given the itch enough attention, we move to scratching. What does it feel like to lift our arm to scratch? Ahh. how many scratches does it take. What is the relationship between itching and scratching?

Same deal with emotions. Fear, anger, sorrow, joy, stress. bring your attention to whatever slides into consciousness and observe the sensation. Experience the emotion. When it sucks you in completely and you are not merely observing it, but living it, then it is time to identify it with a concept; "fear". A concept is boring and identifying the thing as a concept will allow you to go back to focusing on the breath or giving attention to the next ball of hell that rolls out.

Do this for 20 minutes per day. That was the assignment. I completed today's homework in the basement just now. The thing that arrived at my attention was, "Wow. It smells like cat piss down here." So I meditated on cat piss for a while, cat piss and the weight of the glasses on my head.

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 17:36:54 GMT

gttim sez:

"Actually, I was watching 60 minutes a few months back, and the talk was on Canada's healthcare system. Turns out, auto manufacturers would rather build a plant in Canada than the US. In Canada they do not have to give workers health insurance. Saves them a ton of money, even if taxes are higher. You figure most big business would finally say screw the insurance companies, lets help ourselves."

Thank you! We need to say this over and over again until someone listens.

Sat, 11 Oct 2003 08:11:33 GMT

A reason to feel safe: Fire retardant chemicals are building up in humans, especially in women's breasts.

There was a great article about this in the Wall Street Journal this week. This article went on to explain how many chemicals, including the above mentioned retardants, were developed before a 1970's chemical safety rule went into effect and aren't subject to the same scrutiny as chemicals developed since then.

Now the EU is trying to pass laws saying, "Lets apply the same scrutiny to thousands more chemicals." and the Bush administration is trying hard to prevent this from passing out of fear that it could become a global standard and disrupt global trade.