Some skin-lightening cosmetics contain dangerous amounts of mercury, the FDA warned consumers. Though illegal to sell in the U.S., the foreign-made products are popular in communities where fair skin is considered a mark of beauty.
from News
From Lifehacker: Make Sure You’re Actually Buying Beef When You’re Buying Beef
By now you may have heard of a problem where beef waste products—lovingly called “pink slime”—are being processed and, according to ABC News, sold as actual actual meat in most supermarkets. If this sounds gross and you don’t want it in your meat, here’s how you can avoid it. More »
from Lifehacker
From Discover Magazine: Defibrillators Malfunction at Shockingly High Rates | 80beats
Diagram for AED electrode placement.
Touted as life-saving devices, some 1.5 million automated external defibrillators (AEDs) are around the US. AEDs are designed to be used by anyone, regardless of training, to jumpstart the heart in a case of sudden cardiac arrest. And in this life-or-death situation, a surprisingly number of the devices fail.
Between 2005 and 2009, there were 28,000 reports of AED malfunction in the US, representing 1 out of 50 devices in the country. Mark Harris at IEEE Spectrum investigates the cause of these failures. Surprisingly basic engineering errors were responsible for some of the malfunctions, such as parts that are just too imprecise for a matter of life or death:
One AED, the brand name of which the FDA would not disclose, was found to occasionally misdiagnose the heart’s electrical rhythm. It delivered some shocks that weren’t needed and failed to deliver others that were. The culprit was a resistor that could vary in resistance by up to 10 percent of its stated value. “When our engineer looked at this design, it was an instant ‘uh‑oh,’ †says [Al Taylor of the FDA].
How could regulations on medical devices be so lax? …
from Discover Magazine
From Discover Magazine: Yes, Antibiotics Used on Livestock Do Breed Drug-Resistant Bacteria That Infect Humans | 80beats
The rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria has got many experts predicting a future in which currently tractable diseases, like tuberculosis, became untreatable again. The popularity of modern antibiotics, ironically, is what is leading to their downfall: antibiotics in consumer products, like soaps, as well as the excessive use of antibiotics by people who have no bacterial infections, help select for strains of bacteria that don’t respond to drugs. Factory-farmed livestock, which receive tremendous doses of antibiotics in their feed, are also a likely breeding ground for resistant bacteria that could potentially infect humans.
Proponents of factory farming have scoffed at such claims [pdf], but now, scientists have provided definitive evidence that this happens: through genetic analysis, they found that a strain of MRSA, already resistant to one family of drugs, had hopped from people to farmed pigs, acquired resistance to another antibiotic being fed to the pigs, and then leapt back into humans, taking its new resistance with it. That strain, called MRSA ST398 or CC398, is now causing 1 out of 4 cases of MRSA in some regions of the Netherlands [pdf], where it arose, and it has also been found across …
from Discover Magazine
From Wired Top Stories: Video: First Nanorockets Might Shuttle Drugs, Robo-Surgeons
In the movie Fantastic Voyage, a crack surgical team is miniaturized inside a ship. Their mission: to destroy a blood clot in the brain of a Soviet-era informant. Given the relatively vast distances covered inside the body, however, movie makers probably should have equipped vessel with rocket motors instead of propellers — and engineers have now designed nanorockets that would’ve fit the bill.
from Wired Top Stories
From Latest Items from TreeHugger: Arsenic In Baby Formula Related to Organic Sweetener
“Organic” means not full of chemicals; or does it?
From Engadget: MIT duo successfully tests wireless drug-delivery microchips, more consistent than injections
Despise those daily injections of essential medication? Well folks, relief could be on the way. Over a decade ago, two MIT professors, Robert Langer and Michael Cima, first considered developing a drug-delivery microchip that could be wirelessly controlled. This past week, researchers in Cambridge — alongside scientists from MicroCHIPS, Inc. — announced that they have successfully used the aforementioned chip to give osteoporosis patients their daily allotment of teriparatide. “You can do remote control delivery, you can do pulsatile drug delivery, and you can deliver multiple drugs,” Langer noted. Chips used in this particular study housed 20 doses each and results indicated that the delivery showed less variation than administered injections. In theory, microchips like these could be used alongside sensors that monitor glucose levels — creating tech that could adapt to changes in a patient’s condition. More info on the trial awaits in the source link below.
[Thanks, Lydia]
from Engadget