Secrets to a Healthy Home

Many of us already know the secrets of keeping our homes safe. Check for radon, watch for lead poisoning, and beware of gas leaks. These tips can preserve the lives of your family. But as you keep your home free of toxins, be sure to keep an eye on what you bring into your house. What you and your children are wearing can actually be hazardous to your health.

Rayon is a fabric used in many styles of clothing. Rayon is used to make sweaters, skirts, dresses, Halloween costumes, pajamas, and robes. The fabric may seem harmless, but the truth is, wearing rayon can endanger the lives of you, your children, and your home. Rayon is actually extremely flammable. Reports claim that even when exposed to minimal heat, such as the burning of a cigarette, rayon textiles may and have burst into flame. Rayon’s burning rate is comparable to that of newspaper. An entire rayon skirt can burn in as little as 3 seconds. Protect your house from fire and your family from severe burns by monitoring the clothing that you buy.

Next is a toxin you may already be familiar with. Asbestos has been widely used in the United States and around the world in insulation, drywall, tiles, adhesives, car parts, and heating appliances because of its fire-retardant properties. When asbestos is disturbed, its fibers can be inhaled or ingested. These fibers can also collect on clothes, shoes, and hair. Inhaling or ingesting asbestos may lead to a deadly cancer, mesothelioma. Because symptoms are subtle and latent for 20-50 years after asbestos exposure, mesothelioma diagnosis is often delayed. If you or a family member works near asbestos, it is important to monitor clothing that enters the home. Be cautious of mesothelioma causes like asbestos.

Finally, make sure to wash new clothes before wearing them. A toxin known as formaldehyde is often used in the manufacturing of clothes. Formaldehyde is said to keep clothes stain and wrinkle free. Besides aggravating the skin of more sensitive buyers, formaldehyde is known as a carcinogen. Even if your skin is not sensitive enough for visible signs of aggravation to show, prolonged exposure to formaldehyde increases the risk of cancer. Unlike asbestos, which may remain on clothing after washing, traces of formaldehyde are generally removed after a good soak. Even if you’re excited about wearing your brand new outfit, be sure to reduce your risk of cancer by washing your clothing before wearing it.

Keeping your home free of toxins and health hazards includes keeping your clothes safe. Check labels for flammable rayon clothing, make sure that you or loved ones aren’t bringing asbestos fibers home on their clothes, and wash new outfits to be rid of cancer-causing formaldehyde. After all, a healthy home is a happy one.

Eric Bailey
Bailey@MesotheliomaDiagnosis.net
http://www.MesotheliomaDiagnosis.net

Poor AIr Quality and Heart Attacks

Dirty Air Triggers More Heart Attacks Than Cocaine, Scientists Say
Published February 24, 2011
Reuters
AP
Air pollution triggers more heart attacks than using cocaine and poses as high a risk of sparking a heart attack as alcohol, coffee and physical exertion, scientists said on Thursday.
Sex, anger, marijuana use and chest or respiratory infections and can also trigger heart attacks to different extents, the researchers said, but air pollution, particularly in heavy traffic, is the major culprit.
The findings, published in The Lancet journal, suggest population-wide factors like polluted air should be taken more seriously when looking at heart risks, and should be put into context beside higher but relatively rarer risks like drug use.
Tim Nawrot of Hasselt University in Belgium, who led the study, said he hoped his findings would also encourage doctors to think more often about population level risks.
"Physicians are always looking at individual patients, and low risk factors might not look important at an individual level, but if they are prevalent in the population then they have a greater public health relevance," he said in a telephone interview.

The World Health Organization (WHO) describes air pollution as "a major environmental risk to health" and estimates that it causes around 2 million premature deaths worldwide every year.Nawrot's team combined data from 36 separate studies and calculated the relative risk posed by a series of heart attack triggers and their population-attributable fraction (PAF), in other words the proportion of total heart attacks estimated to have been caused by each trigger.
The highest risk PAF was exposure to traffic, followed by physical exertion, alcohol, coffee, air pollution, and then things like anger, sex, cocaine use, smoking marijuana and respiratory infections.
"Of the triggers for heart attack studied, cocaine is the most likely to trigger an event in an individual, but traffic has the greatest population effect as more people are exposed to (it)," the researchers wrote. "PAFs give a measure of how much disease would be avoided if the risk was no longer present."
A report published late last year found that air pollution in many major cities in Asia exceeds the WHO's air quality guidelines and that toxic cocktails of pollutants results in more than 530,000 premature deaths a year.
While passive smoking was not included in this study, Nawrot said the effects of second-hand smoke were likely to be similar to that of outdoor air pollution, and noted previous research which found that bans on smoking in public places have significantly reduced heart attack rates.British researchers said last year that a ban on smoking in public places in England led to a swift and significant drop in the number of heart attacks, saving the health service 8.4 million pounds ($13 million) in the first year.
Tim Chico, a heart specialist at the University of Sheffield who was not involved in this research, said it would help health authorities focus on which are the most important triggers.
"However, what triggers the heart attack should be considered the "last straw." The foundations of heart disease that lead to a heart attack are laid down over many years," he said in an emailed comment. "If someone wants to avoid a heart attack they should focus on not smoking, exercising, eating a healthy diet and maintaining their ideal weight."

PCBs in New York School Ballasts

February 22, 2011, 1:52 pm — Updated: 2:28 pm -->
Striking PCB Levels Found at a New York School
By MIREYA NAVARRO

The federal Environmental Protection Agency has found the highest levels of leaking PCBs to date in its inspections of New York City schools, at Public School 45 in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Agency officials said that an inspection of lighting ballasts at the school on Feb. 12 revealed PCB levels of up to 660,000 parts per million, far beyond the regulatory limit of 50 parts per million.
Environmental Protection Agency A burnt lighting ballast.
Previous inspections at five other school buildings since January had found levels of up to 260,000 parts per million.
The likely cause was that capacitors in many of the lighting fixtures had “burned out and completely failed,” officials said. “This allowed the PCB-containing oil to seep through the potting material in almost pure form,” the agency said in a statement. “In most of the fixtures tested in this school the actual casing around the ballasts had also broken, allowing the high concentration of PCBs to contaminate the surface of the ballasts, the fixture housings, the wires and the diffusers that cover the lighting fixture.”The agency said that the higher the concentration in bulk material, the greater the potential for the PCBs’ entering the air, depending on variables like the amount spilled or released and the size of the room. E.P.A. inspectors found that in some cases that old leaking ballasts had been replaced but the new ones were installed in contaminated fixtures that had not been cleaned to remove the leaked material.
“The results give us a new sense of urgency — and certainly they, along with all of the results so far, point to a widespread problem that should and must be addressed by New York City in order to lower any potential risk of long-term exposure,” said Mary Mears, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A. in New York.
The E.P.A.. and community and elected leaders have been pressing the city to come up with a plan to assess and replace older fluorescent lighting fixtures in all schools because of the danger of leaks. But with about 800 school buildings involved, city officials have balked at the cost of such a wholesale approach to the problem.
The city, however, by law must remove any light fixtures found to be leaking PCBs at above a regulatory level of 50 parts per million. City officials say they have been doing so.
Health experts agree with the city that the health risks of PCB contamination are not immediate but say that the longer that such leaks persist, the higher the risk of illness. PCBs have been linked to cancer, impairment of immune and reproductive function, lower I.Q. and other problems.
A group of elected officials and schools advocates are calling on the New York City Department of Education to replace all toxic lighting ballasts within two to five years. A bill pending in the New York State Assembly would require the same in school buildings constructed between 1950 and 1978, before the use of PCBs was banned by the federal government.
The E.P.A.’s national recommendations on lighting ballasts are available here.