“I do not support the goals of Planned Parenthood. They believe in choice. So let’s just cut right through the fat and tell it like it is.” — Gov. Jan Brewer
READ MORE: http://blog.advocatesaz.org/2012/05/24/governor-brewer-is-imposing-her-beliefs-on-arizonans/
Recent challenges to contraceptive access make the scenario all too easy to imagine: A woman goes to her health care provider to get her annual check-up and to renew her prescription for birth-control pills. She’s been going to the same health center and using the same birth control pills for years, but this time a nurse practitioner refuses to renew her prescription.
The scenario is easy to imagine when we’ve seen the concept of religious liberty stretched beyond its limits. The concept has been used to trump other liberties, to excuse organizations from compliance with health care mandates that ensure access to the contraceptives that many struggle to afford. But, the scenario just described is exactly what happened to a woman in Iowa, whose clinic refused to renew her prescription for birth control pills, not because of bills passed by lawmakers, but because of her age, 42, and the fact she smoked. Those two factors made use of birth control pills risky for her — and a liability for her provider.
Today is World No Tobacco Day, so this installment of our “Over 90 Percent” series takes a look at the toll smoking takes on sexual health, and what Planned Parenthood health centers can do to help people quit. The World Health Organization launched World No Tobacco Day in the late 1980s to encourage tobacco users around the world to quit tobacco for at least 24 hours. It has also served as a day to promote other anti-tobacco initiatives and raise awareness about the effects of tobacco use.
Entamoeba histolytica cyst.
Drug Found for Parasite that is Major Cause of Death Worldwide
Research by a collaborative group of scientists from UC San Diego School of Medicine, UC San Francisco and Wake Forest School of Medicine has led to identification of an existing drug that is effective against Entamoeba histolytica. This parasite causes amebic dysentery and liver abscesses and results in the death of more than 70,000 people worldwide each year.
Using a high-throughput screen for drugs developed by the research team, they discovered that auranofin – a drug approved by the US Food and Drug Administration 25 years ago for rheumatoid arthritis – is very effective in targeting an enzyme that protects amebae from oxygen attack (thus enhancing sensitivity of the amebae to reactive oxygen-mediated killing).
The results of the work, led by Sharon L. Reed, MD, professor in the UCSD Departments of Pathology and Medicine and James McKerrow, MD, PhD, professor of Pathology in the UCSF Sandler Center for Drug Discovery, will be published in the May 20, 2012 issue of Nature Medicine.
Entamoeba histolytica is a protozoan intestinal parasite that causes human amebiasis, the world’s fourth leading cause of death from protozoan parasites. It is listed by the National Institutes of Health as a category B priority biodefense pathogen. Current treatment relies on metronidazole, which has adverse effects, and potential resistance to the drug is an increasing concern.
Hepatitis isn’t commonly thought of as a sexually transmitted infection (STI) — for most people, hepatitis conjures images of contaminated food or unsanitary restaurants. But hepatitis should be on the radar of anyone who is sexually active. There are several different viruses that cause hepatitis, and some can be sexually transmitted, including hepatitis A (HAV), hepatitis B (HBV), and, to a lesser extent, hepatitis C (HCV).
While HBV is most efficiently transmitted through blood, it can also easily hitch rides from person to person via sexual fluids. However, we covered HBV in depth last year in observance of World Hepatitis Day. As May is Hepatitis Awareness Month, we’ll turn the spotlight on HAV and HCV for this month’s installment of our STI Awareness series.
LEARN MORE: http://blog.advocatesaz.org/2012/05/22/sti-awareness-viral-hepatitis
Some of Arizona’s first Asian Americans were Chinese immigrants who arrived from California and Mexico in the late 1800s, often finding work in mining camps alongside Irish and Italian immigrants.
Today, Arizona’s Asians and Pacific Islanders, or APIs, represent nations throughout Asia and the Pacific, with Indians and Filipinos constituting the two largest API ethnic groups in Arizona. Although APIs are a small percentage of Arizona’s total population — 2.8 percent — their population is now the fastest-growing in Arizona, increasing by 85,000 in the last decade. In this respect, Arizona mirrors a larger trend; nationally, the Asian and Pacific Islander population grew by 43.3 percent between 2000 and 2010.
Placentophagia: Douglas Woelkers answers questions about the health benefits of ingesting human placenta
A recent paper by neuroscientists at the University of Buffalo and Buffalo State College asked why the practice of placentophagia – the ingestion of components of the placenta or afterbirth – was not more widely practiced among humans.
After all, it’s common practice among many other eutherian or placental mammals, where it’s believed to provide significant nutritional or health benefits to the mother. Why not human mothers too?
The scientists weren’t advocating the practice, only asking questions. Others, though, are already in the act. On the Internet, you can find businesses marketing human placentophagia for new mothers as a kind of post-natal health benefit. Typically, they offer to retrieve, process and encapsulate bits of the afterbirth – placenta-in-a-pill. Occasionally, the idea gets a boost from a celebrity endorser. In March, for example, the actress January Jones touted encapsulated placenta as her way to re-energize after giving birth.
Douglas Woelkers, MD, is an associate clinical professor in the Department of Reproductive Medicine at the UC San Diego School of Medicine and director of the UC San Diego Placenta Clinic, which assesses maternal and fetal health during pregnancy when there are risk factors for placental dysfunction. We asked him to assess placentophagia.
Question: First, the obvious biology question: What is the placenta? What does it do?
Answer: It’s a large, fast-growing, accessory organ that interfaces between the fetus and mother. It’s entirely derived from the conceptus, being genetically identical to the baby – not the mom. It has a short life-span, and naturally begins to regress by the end of pregnancy.
During pregnancy, it is connected to the baby by the umbilical cord and attaches loosely to the mother inside the uterus. Baby’s blood flows into the placenta through umbilical arteries, travels through a network of capillaries and returns, carrying back oxygen and nutrients delivered to the placenta by the mother’s blood.
The placenta is absolutely necessary for growth, development and birth of a healthy human baby. It’s sort of a life-support device that acts as the “lungs” for the baby. It delivers nutrients and removes wastes. It produces and regulates hormones involved in pregnancy and birth. It protects the baby from blood-borne pathogens. And it maintains an immunologically inactive interface with the mother to prevent rejection. In this way, the mother’s immune system becomes “tolerant” of the pregnancy.
Q: Why do many mammalian species practice placentophagy?A: Biologists have proposed several reasons: cleaning the nest, eliminating bait for predators, carnivorous behavior reinforcement, hunger. For humans, the concept of eating or otherwise ingesting placenta is relatively new. A recent study of 179 human cultures did not find a single instance of accepted, ritualized maternal ingestion of placenta. The only historical references seemed to rise in the context of extreme starvation and deprivation, and even then only rarely.
Q: So why the interest now?
A: The practice seems to have originated in the 1970s in the U.S. and Mexico, where it was promoted for maternal rejuvenation and offered a health benefit based on nutritive speculation.
The placenta is made of structural support cells called cytotrophoblasts, which organize into small cavities that accommodate the mother’s blood. Overlying the structural cells is a metabolically active tissue layer that makes the hormones and such. There are also fetal capillaries and blood cells in the placenta. So, at delivery, the placenta contains quite a large mix of cell types, especially trapped maternal and fetal red blood cells. I am sure it would be rich in iron, but not particularly enriched with any other specific nutrient.Q: What about those health claims, which range from boosting mother’s milk production to providing a psychological lift against postpartum depression?
A: There is no empirical evidence to support the claims of nutritional or psychological benefit. That’s not to say there can’t be some benefit, but to date, the data is sparse. I would argue that in a culture of sufficient nutrition such as ours, that there would be no benefit provided above and beyond that obtained by a normal balanced diet. It is improbable that women would gain any direct hormonal effect from placenta, as the protein hormones would be digested similarly to all other animal food products we consume. Eating chicken does not make you feel like a chicken.Q: What about health risks of placentophagy?
A: The placenta serves as an intrauterine barrier to infection, and so it can and does get colonized by several types of human infectious agents. HIV, Hepatitis B and C, syphilis, chlamydia, gonorrhea and other bacteria can be identified in the placentas of women with these infections. At UC San Diego, we recently finalized a policy to address these issues, which prohibits retrieval of placental specimens once they have been processed by the pathology laboratory, or if the patient has tested positive for the above infectious agents during pregnancy. There are no laws to regulate retrieval or consumption of placentas; our policies seek to balance patient autonomy with public health risks.
Beacon Press, the nonprofit publishing company of the Unitarian Universalist Association, has a long history of publishing books that have informed and inspired civil rights and social justice movements, from James Baldwin‘s Notes of a Native Son to Tucson author Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land. In that tradition, Beacon has launched a new book series called ReVisioning American History. The first in that series is Michael Bronski‘s A Queer History of the United States, which was released in hardcover in May 2011 and will be released in trade paperback on May 15, 2012.
Bronski explains in the introduction to his book that he is interested in providing something more than a history of “who might have been ‘gay’ in the past or had sexual relations with their own sex.” In fact, his mention of individuals is often pared down to the sheerest character sketches and profiles. Far from a collective biography of LGBTQ Americans, Bronski’s interest in individuals is often limited to a person’s role as agents in a process of evolving gender expectations, agents who sometimes shape those expectations and other times act independently of them. He explains that he doesn’t want to reduce history to “names, dates, political actions, political ideas, laws passed and repealed.” Instead, borrowing the words of Shulamith Firestone, he wants to present history “as process, a natural flux of action and reaction.”
READ MORE: http://blog.advocatesaz.org/2012/05/09/book-club-a-queer-history-of-the-united-states
In pill health
Half of all American adults take one or more dietary supplements, mostly multivitamins. Selling these supplements is a $30 billion-a-year industry in the United States, comparable to the National Institutes of Health’s entire budget for all medical research.
Yet, with very few exceptions, nutritional deficiencies in the United States are rare. Americans might not necessarily eat right, but they are not nutritionally deprived.
So why do most people take them? Their answer: “They’re healthy. They can’t hurt.”
Most people are wrong.In a recent commentary in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Maria Elena Martinez, PhD, a professor in the department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the UC San Diego School of Medicine and Co-leader of the Reducing Cancer Disparities program at the Moores UCSD Cancer Center, and colleagues discuss the benefits and risks of dietary supplements, particularly when taken to “prevent cancer.”
Their conclusion, after reviewing existing scientific literature on the subject: There is little empirical evidence to support the widely held and widely advertised notion that popular supplements like beta-carotene, folic acid, vitamin D and calcium reduce cancer risk.Indeed, the opposite may be true.
That’s not what people want to hear, of course. Axioms like “an apple-a-day” and “we are what we eat” have a sort of enduring resonance. They may be true, write Martinez and colleagues in their JNCI paper, but the nutritional supplement industry exploits it to excess, suggesting in often misleading fashion that if a little bit of a nutrient is good, then a lot must be better.
This is not just another case of economic exploitation in the marketplace. While there is little compelling evidence that nutritional supplements significantly prevent cancer, there is growing proof that too much might cause it.
For example, some studies have found that exogenous or added antioxidants like beta-carotene might, in fact, promote oxidative stress linked to carcinogenesis. Other trials have found that long-term folic acid supplementation boosts the risk of colorectal tumor growths. Several observational studies support an association between higher calcium consumption and reduced breast cancer risk, but higher calcium intake also appears to increase the chances of contracting prostate cancer.
The situation is, in a word, confounding. The observational studies that nutritional supplement-makers most often cite as evidentiary proof (along with testimonials utterly bereft empirical value) are inherently limited. They lack the standardized treatment regimens and controls required to scientifically prove or disprove efficacy and safety. They have value in terms of involving large numbers of test participants – the proverbial big picture – but the devil is usually in the details: Cancer risk is different in different tissues. Personal characteristics, from genetics to behaviors, are massively influential. What is the effect, for example, of taking many supplements at once? How do they interact with each other? How well do they work if the person is a smoker, drinker, obese or all three?
These are factors that must be – and are – addressed in the gold standard of scientific experimentation: the randomized controlled trial (RCT), which is rigorously designed to produce precise data without bias. Unfortunately, RCTs of nutritional supplements are relatively few in number, and their conclusions thus far have been mixed.Cancer does not give up its secrets easily. RCTs are expensive. It often takes decades for cancer to manifest itself, much longer than most RCTs attempting to reveal the cancer prevention benefits or cancer-causing dangers in nutritional supplementation.
Nonetheless, Martinez and colleagues argue in their commentary that more, longer and better-designed RCTs are needed, indeed essential to determining the benefits and risks of supplements.In the meantime, they call for improved oversight of the manufacture and marketing of dietary supplements, which has a short and sketchy history of regulation. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration only began attempting to regulate these substances in the 1960s. Its efforts have been significantly and repeatedly constrained by a well-funded supplement industry and its political advocates.
Today, dietary supplements exist in a sort of legal limbo somewhere between foods and drugs. Manufacturers cannot make bold, direct assertions of cancer prevention benefits. The high-profile deaths from the supplement ephedra helped end that, but they can – and do – advertise the cancer prevention powers of supplements by implication.Take Pill X, which research has been found to reduce the growth of prostate cells in culture. Makers of Pill X advertise that it “supports prostate health.” They cite stories of real people who took Pill X and didn’t get prostate cancer. For the casual consumer, it’s easy to conclude that Pill X has anticancer properties, despite the lack of any real science to support that conclusion.
Of course, maybe Pill X does reduce cancer risk – and maybe it increases it. No one knows. The scientific data are lacking. Think about that next time you take a nutritional supplement you probably don’t need.
We never talk about people who need or want abortions as living things. All the focus goes on embryos, because for some reason, they’re more important than the people who are carrying them.
(Source: erosum, via fuckyeahplannedparenthood)
During the recent debates in Congress over federal funding for family planning services, Senator Jon Kyl told a bold faced lie when he claimed that abortion was 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does. Senator Kyl was called out by the media and Democratic members of the Senate, because most people know what Planned Parenthood actually “does”: Breast exams. Pap smears. Birth control.
READ MORE: http://blog.advocatesaz.org/2011/06/08/funding-cuts-will-hurt-women-like-me/
Planned Parenthood Arizona recently bid farewell to one of our most tireless leaders, Patti Caldwell, who served as the Executive Director of Planned Parenthood of Southern Arizona from 2000 – 2007. Patti left PPAZ this past Spring to become the Executive Director of New Beginnings for Women and Children. We honored Patti at this year’s Roe v. Wade Luncheon for her twenty-three years of service.
I took time to speak with Patti about her tenure at Planned Parenthood Arizona. And, I also asked others to speak about Patti’s contributions to the pro-choice movement. The responses were very inspiring.
READ MORE:
http://blog.advocatesaz.org/2011/09/19/a-tribute-to-an-amazing-leader-patti-caldwell/
Lambskin Condoms
When it comes to protecting against STIs, there really aren’t a lot of benefits to using a lambskin condom (also called a sheepskin condom). Some people use them because they think they are more “natural,” which may offer an appealing aesthetic.
It’s true that lambskin is natural — “skin” is a euphemism for intestines. Yup, this condom is made from the digestive tract of a sheep. The intestines are the site of the majority of digestion — it is here that foods are blasted with enzymes and broken down into small pieces. When the pieces are small enough, they are absorbed through tiny holes in the intestine’s porous membrane. Intestines, by their very nature, must be permeable — otherwise, malnutrition and starvation would result. So, yes, lambskin condoms are “natural” — and so are the holes through which viruses (also “natural”!) can pass.
According to the FDA, lambskin condoms have not been shown to protect against the passage of viruses, such as HIV, herpes, or human papillomavirus (HPV). In the early 1990s, Trojan-brand lambskin condoms were recalled en masse by the FDA because they didn’t contain adequate labeling. There were reports from customers who had used these condoms and, despite believing they were practicing safer sex, contracted HIV.
READ MORE: http://blog.advocatesaz.org/2012/05/02/allergic-to-latex-you-can-still-have-safer-sex/
More than six million Americans are infected with human papillomavirus (HPV) every year, making it one of the most common sexually transmitted infections. There are more than 100 different strains of the virus, some of which can cause genital warts and others of which can lead to cancer. In most cases, an HPV infection will clear up within eight to 13 months, but it can lurk undetected for years, which makes cancer screening very important for anyone who has been sexually active.
Most sexual activities – especially those involving genital-to-genital contact, i.e., vaginal and anal intercourse or simply rubbing genitals together, but also those involving oral and manual contact – can transmit HPV. Although HPV is best known for its connection to cervical cancer in women, it can affect either sex and cause cancers of the vulva, vagina, cervix, penis, anus, oral cavity, or pharynx.
READ MORE: http://blog.advocatesaz.org/2011/01/24/sti-awareness-human-papillomavirus-and-the-hpv-vaccine/
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