Monday, January 20, 2014
The ‘No More Tears’ Shampoo, Now With No Formaldehyde
SKILLMAN, N.J. — The only hint that something is different inside millions of bottles of Johnson’s Baby Shampoo arriving on store shelves are two words: “Improved Formula.”
The shampoo has the same amber hue, the same sudsy lather and — perhaps most important — the same familiar smell that, for generations of Americans, still conjures memories of childhood bath time.
What’s different about the shampoo, and 100 other baby products sold by Johnson & Johnson, isn’t so much about what’s been added; it’s what’s missing. The products no longer contain two potentially harmful chemicals, formaldehyde and 1,4-dioxane, that have come under increasing scrutiny by consumers and environmental groups.
Revising a Formula for Baby Shampoo
Responding to pressure from consumers’ groups, Johnson & Johnson revised the ingredients in its baby shampoo to remove a formaldehyde-releasing preservative called quaternium-15.
Johnson’s No More Tears Baby Shampoo
OLD FORMULATION
Ingredients: Water, Cocamidopropyl Betaine, PEG-80 Sorbitan Laurate,
Sodium Trideceth Sulfate, PEG-150 Distearate, Fragrance, Tetrasodium EDTA,
Polyquaternium-10, Quaternium-15, Sodium Hydroxide, Citric Acid,
Yellow 10, Orange 4.
REMOVED:
Quaternium-15
a formaldehyde-releasing preservative
NEW FORMULATION
Ingredients: Water, PEG-80 Sorbitan Laurate, Cocamidopropyl Betaine,
Sodium Trideceth Sulfate, PEG-150 Distearate, Phenoxyethanol, Glycerin,
Citric Acid, Fragrance, Sodium Benzoate, Tetrasodium EDTA,
Polyquaternium-10, Ethylhexylglycerin, Sodium Hydroxide,
Potassium Acrylates Copolymer, Yellow 6, Yellow 10.
ADDED:
Potassium Acrylates
Copolymer
Phenoxyethanol, Sodium
Benzoate and Ethylhexylglycerin
Glycerin
helps with
moisturization
helps maintain proper
shampoo thickness
components of the new
preservative system
Even before their removal, customers would not have found formaldehyde or 1,4-dioxane listed on bottles because they aren’t technically ingredients.
Formaldehyde, which has been identified by government scientists as a carcinogen, is released over time by preservatives, like quaternium-15. And 1,4-dioxane, which has been linked to cancer in animal studies, is created during a process used to make other ingredients mild — important for a company that has sold billions of bottles of baby shampoo on its “No More Tears” claim.
Johnson & Johnson has removed the preservatives that release formaldehyde, and said it has reduced the levels of 1,4-dioxane to very limited trace amounts, from one to four parts per million.
Johnson & Johnson executives are quick to note that formaldehyde occurs naturally in many products — a person’s exposure to formaldehyde in an apple, they claim, is greater than it is in 15 bottles of baby shampoo. And 1,4-dioxane is found in their products at levels low enough to be safe.
But as the scientists set to work, they discovered that replacing the problem ingredients often led to a chain reaction of unintended consequences. One new preservative led to a snow-globe effect, with particles settling at the bottom of the bottle. But the fix for that turned the shampoo from a golden honey color to a dull brown. Another change turned the consistency to water.
Saturday, January 18, 2014
Three human H7N9 cases (Bird Flu) in Guangdong
GUANGZHOU, Jan. 18 (Xinhua) -- Three new cases of human H7N9 were reported Saturday in south China's Guangdong Province, bringing the total number of cases in the province to 21, provincial health authorities said.
One of the patients is a 5-year-old girl surnamed Pan, who is from provincial capital city of Guangzhou and in stable condition. She is receiving treatment in hospital, according to a statement from the provincial health and family planning commission.
Another patient is 83-year-old woman surnamed Yang, who is being treated at a local hospital and is in critical condition, it said.
A 62-year-old man surnamed Zhou from Shenzhen is confirmed contracting the H7N9 bird flu virus. He is in stable condition, the statement said.
So far, Guangdong has confirmed 21 human H7N9 cases since August. Two of them have died.
Thursday, January 16, 2014
In Annual Speech, Vermont Governor Shifts Focus to Drug Abuse
MONTPELIER, Vt. — In a sign of how drastic the epidemic of drug addiction here has become, Gov. Peter Shumlin on Wednesday devoted his entire State of the State Message to what he said was “a full-blown heroin crisis” gripping Vermont.
“In every corner of our state, heroin and opiate drug addiction threatens us,” he said. He said he wanted to reframe the public debate to encourage officials to respond to addiction as a chronic disease, with treatment and support, rather than with only punishment and incarceration.
“The time has come for us to stop quietly averting our eyes from the growing heroin addiction in our front yards,” Governor Shumlin said, “while we fear and fight treatment facilities in our backyards.”
Last year, he said, nearly twice as many people here died from heroin overdoses as the year before. Since 2000, Vermont has seen an increase of more than 770 percent in treatment for opiate addictions, up to 4,300 people in 2012.
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Mexico: 3 Way Battle: Drug Gangs - Vigilantes - Army
Vigilantes vs Knights Templar
MEXICO CITY — The scenes are incongruous. Inside the heavily guarded colonial state government building in Michoacán on Monday, a solemn lineup of officials vowed that the federal government would restore authority to a region that has descended into lawlessness.
But a couple of hundred miles away, in Michoacán’s agricultural lowlands, pickup trucks filled with armed men calling themselves self-defense forces have been careening down country roads for the past week, advancing on towns encircling the region’s main city, Apatzingán. They have promised to seize the city, the stronghold of the Knights Templar, the state’s powerful drug gang.
Security analysts have said, however, that these self-defense forces themselves are murky and may even include members of other gangs.
“Tierra Caliente has become a no man’s land full of personal vendettas, serial kidnappings, forced disappearances, and murders that come and go unnoticed, every day,”.
“Tierra Caliente has become a no man’s land full of personal vendettas, serial kidnappings, forced disappearances, and murders that come and go unnoticed, every day,”.
Mr. Bagley said the vigilante groups had emerged to fill the “vacuum or void in which citizen security is so precarious” that any armed group can step in.
Army vs Vigilantes
MEXICO CITY — Mexican soldiers met fierce resistance on Tuesday as they began disarming vigilante groups that have been fighting drug gangs in the agricultural lowlands of the western state of Michoacán.
In a fluid conflict that is emerging as the first major security test of President Enrique Peña Nieto’s 13-month presidency, the government sent police and army convoys across the western state to restore order in the region, known as the Tierra Caliente, or the hot country.
But as tanks and trucks entered small towns where the vigilantes had taken control in the past few days, soldiers who tried to confiscate weapons found themselves surrounded by shouting townspeople rallying behind the self-defense forces.
Spokesmen for the groups said Tuesday that they would not give up their weapons until the government arrested the top leaders of the Knights Templar, the drug ring that controls parts of the state and that has branched out into extortion and kidnapping.
Self-defense groups said four civilians were killed in the village of Antúnez when soldiers were confronted by a large crowd.
ANTÚNEZ, Mexico — Word spread quickly: The army was coming to disarm the vigilante fighters whom residents viewed as conquering heroes after they swept in and drove out a drug gang that had stolen property, extorted money and threatened to kill them. They even had to leave flowers and other offerings at a shrine to the gang’s messianic leader.
Farmers locked arms with vigilantes to block the dusty two-lane road leading here. The soldiers demanded to be let in; people begged them to leave. Tempers flared, and rocks were thrown. The soldiers fired into the air, and then, residents said, into a crowd. At least two people were killed on Tuesday, officials and residents said.
“He was just a farmer, and now he died for a cause,” one resident, Luis Sánchez, said of Mario Torres, 48, a lime picker who was not part of the vigilante group but was among the two buried on Wednesday as mourners cried out against the government and the soldiers.
As the Rev. Antonio Mendoza, the Roman Catholic priest who presided over the funeral of the two victims here on Wednesday, put it, “the solution is legality and rule-of-law reforms.”
“Until we have them,” he added, “people will take justice into their own hands.”
According to residents, the Knights Templar moved in a couple of years ago, erecting a shrine to its mysterious leader, Nazario Moreno González. The government says that he was killed three years ago and that his followers, who revere him with something approaching religious adoration, have forced people to leave offerings to him. Yet there have been many reports across Michoacán that Mr. Moreno González is still alive. (The Knights Templar are an offshoot of his old gang, La Familia Michoacana.)
Residents told of a long ordeal of terror and helplessness. A landowner was killed when he refused to surrender property. Trucks, money and other valuables ended up with gang leaders and their allies. And death threats became commonplace. The town police, residents said, were bought off or forced to work for the gang.
One of the first things the vigilantes did was destroy the image of Mr. Moreno González in the shrine’s doghouse-size chapel. Residents later replaced it with a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico.
More
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Coffee as a Memory Booster
In addition to its other well-known effects, a cup of coffee might improve your memory.
Researchers had 73 men and women volunteers who did not habitually consume caffeine study pictures of flowers, musical instruments and other objects. After they were done, they gave 35 of them a pill containing 200-milligrams of caffeine — the amount found in one to two cups of coffee — and the rest an identical looking placebo. Neither the subjects nor the researchers knew until the study ended who took caffeine and who took an inert pill.
The next day they showed the volunteers more pictures, asking them if they were the same, different, or different but similar to the pictures they had seen the previous day.
Those who had caffeine pills were significantly better at identifying pictures that were different but similar to the ones they had seen the previous day. In other tests, the researchers found that less than 200 milligrams had no effect, and more did not further improve the participants’ scores.
The senior author, Michael A. Yassa, formerly at Johns Hopkins and now an assistant professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine, said that the study, published online in Nature Neuroscience, does not prove that caffeine is a memory pill.
“We don’t even know what the exact effective dose would be,” he said. What will Dr. Yassa do himself? “I’m a regular coffee drinker, and nothing is going to change that.”
New York State Is Set to Loosen Marijuana Laws
Joining a growing group of states that have loosened restrictions on marijuana, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York plans this week to announce an executive action that would allow limited use of the drug by those with serious illnesses, state officials say.
The shift by Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat who had long resisted legalizing medical marijuana, comes as other states are taking increasingly liberal positions on it — most notably Colorado, where thousands have flocked to buy the drug for recreational use since it became legal on Jan. 1.
Mr. Cuomo’s plan will be far more restrictive than the laws in Colorado or California, where medical marijuana is available to people with conditions as mild as backaches. It will allow just 20 hospitals across the state to prescribe marijuana to patients with cancer, glaucoma or other diseases that meet standards to be set by the New York State Department of Health.
While Mr. Cuomo’s measure falls well short of full legalization, it nonetheless moves New York, long one of the nation’s most punitive states for those caught using or dealing drugs, a significant step closer to policies being embraced by marijuana advocates and lawmakers elsewhere.
Friday, December 13, 2013
F.D.A. Restricts Antibiotics Use for Livestock
WASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday put in place a major new policy to phase out the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in cows, pigs and chickens raised for meat, a practice that experts say has endangered human health by fueling the growing epidemic of antibiotic resistance.
Brian C. Frank for The New York Times
Pigs on a farm near Ralston, Iowa, where animals received antibiotics in their feed. Dark spots on their backs mean they are ready for market.
Readers’ Comments
Share your thoughts.
This is the agency’s first serious attempt in decades to curb what experts have long regarded as the systematic overuse of antibiotics in healthy farm animals, with the drugs typically added directly into their feed and water. The waning effectiveness of antibiotics — wonder drugs of the 20th century — has become a looming threat to public health. At least two million Americans fall sick every year and about 23,000 die from antibiotic-resistant infections.
“This is the first significant step in dealing with this important public health concern in 20 years,” said David Kessler, a former F.D.A. commissioner who has been critical of the agency’s track record on antibiotics. “No one should underestimate how big a lift this has been in changing widespread and long entrenched industry practices.”
The change, which is to take effect over the next three years, will effectively make it illegal for farmers and ranchers to use antibiotics to make animals grow bigger. The producers had found that feeding low doses of antibiotics to animals throughout their lives led them to grow plumper and larger. Scientists still debate why. Food producers will also have to get a prescription from a veterinarian to use the drugs to prevent disease in their animals.
Federal officials said the new policy would improve health in the United States by tightening the use of classes of antibiotics that save human lives, including penicillin, azithromycin and tetracycline. Food producers said they would abide by the new rules, but some public health advocates voiced concerns that loopholes could render the new policy toothless.
Health officials have warned since the 1970s that overuse of antibiotics in animals was leading to the development of infections resistant to treatment in humans. For years, modest efforts by federal officials to reduce the use of antibiotics in animals were thwarted by the powerful food industry and its substantial lobbying power in Congress. Pressure for federal action has mounted as the effectiveness of drugs important for human health has declined, and deaths from bugs resistant to antibiotics have soared.
Under the new policy, the agency is asking drug makers to change the labels that detail how a drug can be used so they would bar farmers from using the medicines to promote growth.
. . .
“It’s a big shift from the current situation, in which animal producers can go to a local feed store and buy these medicines over the counter and there is no oversight at all,” said Michael Taylor, the F.D.A.’s deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine.
Some consumer health advocates were skeptical that the new rules would reduce the amount of antibiotics consumed by animals. They say that a loophole will allow animal producers to keep using the same low doses of antibiotics by contending they are needed to keep animals from getting sick, and evading the new ban on use for growth promotion.
Tobacco Firms’ Strategy Limits Poorer Nations’ Smoking Laws
Conor Ashleigh for The New York Times
A cigarette display in Australia, where the tobacco industry lost a case last year. Philip Morris International has filed suit under an investment treaty.
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: December 13, 2013 243 Comments
Tobacco companies are pushing back against a worldwide rise in antismoking laws, using a little-noticed legal strategy to delay or block regulation. The industry is warning countries that their tobacco laws violate an expanding web of trade and investment treaties, raising the prospect of costly, prolonged legal battles, health advocates and officials said.
Conor Ashleigh for The New York Times
A cigarette display and antismoking messages in Australia, where the tobacco industry lost a case last year. Philip Morris International has filed suit under an investment treaty.
The strategy has gained momentum in recent years as smoking rates in rich countries have fallen and tobacco companies have sought to maintain access to fast-growing markets in developing countries. Industry officials say that there are only a few cases of active litigation, and that giving a legal opinion to governments is routine for major players whose interests will be affected.
But tobacco opponents say the strategy is intimidating low- and middle-income countries from tackling one of the gravest health threats facing them: smoking. They also say the legal tactics are undermining the world’s largest global public health treaty, the W.H.O. Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which aims to reduce smoking by encouraging limits on advertising, packaging and sale of tobacco products. More than 170 countries have signed it since it took effect in 2005.
More than five million people die annually of smoking-related causes, more than from AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined, according to the World Health Organization.
Alarmed about rising smoking rates among young women, Namibia, in southern Africa, passed a tobacco control law in 2010 but quickly found itself bombarded with stern warnings from the tobacco industry that the new statute violated the country’s obligations under trade treaties.
“We have bundles and bundles of letters from them,” said Namibia’s health minister, Dr. Richard Kamwi.
Three years later, the government, fearful of a punishingly expensive legal battle, has yet to carry out a single major provision of the law, like limiting advertising or placing large health warnings on cigarette packaging
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)